One point of difference between the ghostly fiction of the past and of the present is in the matter of length. The Gothic novel was often a three- or four-decker affair in whose perusal the reader aged perceptibly before the ghost succeeded or was foiled in his haunting designs. There was obviously much more leisure on the part of spooks as well as mortals then than now. Consequently the ghost story of to-day is told in short-story form for the most part. Poe knew better than anybody before him what was necessary for the proper economy of thrills when he gave his dictum concerning the desirable length for a story, which rule applies more to the ghostly tale than to any other type, for surely there is needed the unity of impression, the definiteness of effect which only continuity in reading gives. The ghostly narrative that is too long loses in impressiveness, whether it is altogether supernatural or mixed with other elements. In either case, it is less successful than the shorter, more poignant treatment possible in the compressed form. The tabloid ghost can communicate more thrills than the one in diluted narration.
The apparitions in later English fiction fall naturally into several distinct classes with reference to the reality of their appearance. There are the mistaken apparitions, there are the purely subjective specters, evoked by the psychic state of the percipients, and there are the objective ghosts, independent of the mental state of the witnesses, appearing to persons who are not mentally prepared to see them.
The mistaken ghost is an old form, for most of Mrs. Radcliffe’s interesting apparitions belong to this class and others of the Gothic writers used subterfuge to cheat the reader. In the early romance there was frequently deliberate deception for a definite purpose, the ghosts with the histrionic temperament using a make-up of phosphorus, bones, and other contrivances to create the impression of unearthly visitation. Recent fiction is more cleverly managed than that. Rarely now does one find a story where the ghost-seer is deliberately imposed upon, for in most modern cases the mistake occurs by accident or misapprehension on the part of the percipient, for which nobody and nothing but his own agitation is responsible. Yet there are occasional hoax ghosts even yet, for example, The Ghost of Miser Brimpson,[74] where a specter is rigged up as the scheme of a clever girl to win over an obdurate lover, and The Spectre Bridegroom, which is a well-known example of the pseudo-spook whose object is matrimony. His Unquiet Ghost[75] is a delightful story of a fake burial to evade the revenue officials. Watt, the “corp,” says: “I was a powerful onchancy, onquiet ghost. I even did my courtin’ whilst in my reg’lar line o’ business a’harntin’ a graveyard!” His sweetheart sobs out her confession of love to “his pore ghost,” an avowal she has denied the living man. Examples of the apparitions that unwittingly deceive mortals are found in The Ghost at Point of Rock,[76] where the young telegraph operator, alone at night on a prairie, sees a beautiful girl who enters and announces that she is dead,—how is he to know that she is in a somnambulistic stupor, and has wandered from a train? Another is[77] a story where the young man falls in love with what he thinks is a wraith of the water luring him to his death, but learns that she is a perfectly proper damsel whose family he knows. The Night Call[78] is less simple than these, a problematic story that leaves one wondering as to just what is meant.[79]
The subjective ghosts are legion in modern fiction. They are those evoked by the mental state of the percipients so that they become realities to those beholding them. The mind rendered morbid by grief or remorse is readily prepared to see the spirits of the dead return in love or with reproach. The apparitions in animistic beliefs, as in classical stories and Gothic romance, were usually subjective, born of brooding love or remorse or fear of retribution, appearing to the persons who had cause to expect them and coming usually at night when the beholders would be alone and given over to melancholy thought or else to troubled sleep. Shakespeare’s ghosts were in large measure subjective, “selective apparitions.” When Brutus asked the specter what he was, the awful answer came, “Thy evil genius, Brutus!” Macbeth saw the witches who embodied for him his own secret ambitions, and he alone saw the ghost of Banquo, because he had the weight of murder on his heart.
The subjective ghost story is difficult to write, as the effect must be subtly managed yet inescapably impressive. If done well it is admirable, and there are some writers who, to use Henry James’s words concerning his own work, are “more interested in situations obscure and subject to interpretation than the gross rattle of the foreground.” The reader, as well as the writer, must put himself in the mental attitude of acceptance of the supernatural else the effect is lacking, for the ghostly thrill is incommunicable to those beyond the pale of at least temporary credulity.
Kipling’s They is an extraordinary ghost story of suggestion rather than of bald fact. It is like crushing the wings of a butterfly to analyze it, but it represents the story of a man whose love for his own dead child enabled him to see the spirits of other little children, because he loved. As the blind woman told him, only those who were spiritually prepared could see them, for “you must bear or lose!” before glimpsing them. Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s Miss Mehitabel’s Son is a humorously pathetic account of the subjective spirit of a child that was never born. Algernon Blackwood’s ghosts are to a great extent subjective. As John Silence, the psychic doctor, says to the shuddering man who has had a racking experience: “Your deeply introspective mood had already reconstructed the past so intensely that you were en rapport at once with any forces of those past days that chanced to be still lingering. And they swept you up all unresistingly.” In The Shell of Sense,[80] the woman who is about to accept her dead sister’s husband feels such a sense of disloyalty that she sees the sister’s spirit reproaching her. Her conscience has prepared her for the vision. Juliet Wilbur Tompkins shows us the spirit of a mother returning to comfort the daughter who has in life misunderstood and neglected her, but now, realizing the truth, is grieving her heart out for her.[81] Ambrose Bierce tells of a prisoner who murders his jailer to escape, but is arrested and brought back by the spirit of the dead man.[82] Any number of instances might be given of ghosts appearing to those who are mentally prepared to be receptive to supernatural visions, but these will serve to illustrate the type.
Objective ghosts are likewise very numerous in modern fiction. The objective spirits are those that, while they may be subjective on the part of the persons chiefly concerned, to begin with, are yet visible to others as well, appearing not only to those mentally prepared to see them but to others not thinking of such manifestations and even sceptical of their possibility. The objective ghosts have more definite visibility, more reality than the purely subjective spirits. They are more impressive as haunters. There is a plausibility, a corporeality about the later apparitions that shows their advance over the diaphanous phantoms of the past. Ghosts that eat and drink, play cards, dance, duel, and do anything they wish, that are so lifelike in their materialization that they would deceive even a medium, are more terrifying than the helpless specters of early times that could only give orders for the living to carry out. The modern ghost has lost none of his mortal powers but has gained additional supermortal abilities, which gives him an unsportsmanlike advantage over the mere human being he may take issue with.
Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw is a remarkable example of the objective ghost story. It is one of the best ghostly stories in English, because more philosophical, showing more knowledge of the psychology not only of the adult but of the child, not only of the human being but of the ghost, than most fiction of the type. Peter Quint and Miss Jessel with their diabolical conspiracy of evil against the two children are so real that they are seen not only by the children they hound but by the unsuspecting governess as well. She is able to describe them so accurately that those who knew them in life—as she did not at all—recognize them instantly. In The Four-fifteen Express,[83] John Derringer’s ghost is seen by a man that does not know he is dead, and who has not been thinking of him at all. The ghost reveals incontrovertible proof of his presence, even leaving his cigar-case behind him,—which raises the question as to whether ghosts smoke in the hereafter in more ways than one. The ghastly incident in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights where the agonized ghost comes to the window, gashing its wrist on the broken pane, is strikingly objectified, for she comes to a person who never knew her and is not thinking of any supernatural manifestation. Shadows on the Wall,[84] that story of surpassing power of suggestion, is objective in its method, for not only the man who has wronged his dead mother sees his spirit returning, not in the ordinary way but as an accusing shadow on the wall, but the sisters see it as well.
In John Inglesant,[85] the spirit of Lord Strafford is seen by the young lad in the vestibule as well as by the king whose conscience burns for having left him to die undefended. Frank R. Stockton’s transferred ghost is an objective apparition, for surely the guest in the upper chamber was not expecting to see the shade of a living man perch itself on the foot of his bed at midnight. The horrible specter in The Messenger,[86] is seen by various persons at different times, some of whom are totally unprepared for such exhibition. And many similar instances might be given.
Whether ghosts be mistaken, subjective or objective, their appearance has always elicited considerable interest on the part of humanity. Their substance of materialization, their bearing, dress, and general demeanor are matters of definite concern to those who expect shortly to become ghosts themselves. In some instances the modern ghost sticks pretty closely to the animistic idea of spirit material, which was that the shade was a sort of vapory projection of the body, intangible, impalpable, yet easily recognized with reference to previous personality. Chaucer describes some one as being “nat pale as a forpyned goost,” which illustrates the conception in his day, and the Gothic specimen was usually a pallid specter, though Walpole furnished one robust haunter of gigantic muscle. Yet for the most part the Gothic ghosts were misty wraiths, through which the sword could plunge without resistance. They were fragile and helpless as an eighteenth-century heroine when it came to a real emergency, and were useful chiefly for frightening the guilty and consoling the innocent. In some stories of the present we have a similar materialization. The spirit woman in Kipling’s Phantom Rickshaw is so ethereal that the horse and its rider plunge through her without resistance, and Dickens’s Mr. Marley is of such vapory substance that Scrooge can see clear through him to count the coat-tail buttons at his back. In a recent story, The Substitute,[87] the spirit is said to evade her friend like a mist.