The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction

by Dorothy Scarborough

At the end of the room where the windows seemed to have disappeared so that he could see the stars, there rose up into view, far against the sky, grand and terrible, the outline of a man. A kind of gray glory enveloped him so that it resembled a steel-cased statue, immense, imposing, horrific in its distant splendor. The gray radiance from its mightily broken visage, august and mournful, beat down upon his soul, pulsing like some dark star with the powers of spiritual evil.

Here, as in many instances elsewhere, the sadness of the diabolic character is emphasized, a definite human element. The Miltonic influence seems evident in such cases.

Kipling has a curious dæmonic study in Bubble Well Road, a story of a patch of ground filled with devils and ghosts controlled by an evil-minded native priest, while in Haunted Subalterns the imps terrorize young army officers by their malicious mischief.

The allegorical and symbolic studies of diabolism are among the more impressive creations in later fiction, as in Tolstoi’s Ivan, the Fool, where the demons are responsible for the marshaling of armies, the tyranny of money, and the inverted ideas of the value of service. The appearance of the devil in later stories is more terrible and effective in its variance of type and its secret symbolism than the crude enginery of diabolism in Gothic fiction, as the muscular fiend[145] that athletically hurls the man and woman from the mountain top, or the invisible physical strength manifested in Melmoth, the Wanderer. The crude violence of these novels is in keeping with the fiction of the time, yet modern stories show a distinct advance, as such instances as J. H. Shorthouse’s Countess Eve, where the devil appears differently to each tempted soul, embodying with hideous wisdom the form of the sin that that particular soul is most liable to commit. He bears the shape of committed sin, suggesting that evil is so powerful as to have an independent existence of its own, apart from the mind that gave it birth, as the devil appears as evil thought materialized in Fernac Molnar’s drama, The Devil. Fiona McLeod’s strange Gaelic tale, The Sin-Eater introduces demons symbolically. The sin-eater is a person that by an ancient formula can remove the sins from an unburied corpse and let them in turn be swept away from him by the action of the pure air. But if the sin-eater hates the dead man, he has the power to fling the transgressions into the sea, to turn them into demons that pursue and torment the flying soul till Judgment Day.

One aspect of the recent stories of diabolism is the subtleness by which the evil is suggested. The reader feels a miasmatic atmosphere of evil, a smear on the soul, and knows that certain incidents in the action can be accounted for on no other basis than that of dæmonic presence, as in Barry Pain’s Moon Madness, where the princess is moved by a strange irresistible lure to dance alone night after night in the heart of the secret labyrinth to mystic music that the white moon makes. But one night, after she is dizzy and exhausted but impelled to keep on, she feels a hot hand grasp hers; someone whirls her madly round and she knows that she is not dancing alone! She is seen no more of men, and searchers find only the prints of her little dancing slippers in the sand, with the mark of a cloven hoof beside them. The most revolting instances of suggestive diabolism are found in Arthur Machen’s stories, where supernatural science opens the way for the devil to enter the human soul, since the biologist by a cunning operation on the brain removes the moral sense, takes away the soul, and leaves a being absolutely diabolized. Worse still is the hideousness of Seeing the Great God Pan, where the dæmonic character is a composite of the loathsome aspects of Pan and the devil, from which horrible paternity is born a child that embodies all the unspeakable evil in the world.

In pleasant contrast to dreadful stories are the tales of the amusing devils that we find frequently. The comic devil is much older than the comic ghost, as authors showed a levity toward demons long before they treated the specter with disrespect,—one rather wonders why. Clownish devils that appeared in the miracle plays prepared the way for the humorous and satiric treatment of the Elizabethan drama and late fiction. The liturgical imps were usually funny whether their authors intended them as such or not, but the devils in fiction are quite conscious of their own wit, in fact, are rather conceited about it. Poe shows us several amusing demons who display his curious satiric humor,—for instance, the old gentleman in Never Bet the Devil your Head. When Toby Dammit makes his rash assertion, he beholds

the figure of a little lame old gentleman of venerable aspect. Nothing could be more reverend than his whole appearance; for he not only had on a full suit of black, but his shirt was perfectly clean and the collar turned down very neatly over a white cravat, while his hair was parted in front like a girl’s. His hands were clasped pensively over his stomach, and his two eyes were carefully rolled up into the top of his head.

This clerical personage who reminds us of the devil in Peer Gynt, who also appears as a parson, claims the better’s head and neatly carries it off. This is a modern version of an incident similar to Chaucer’s Friar’s Tale, where the devil claimed whatever was offered him in sincerity. The combination of humor and mystery in Washington Irving’s The Devil and Tom Walker shows the black woodsman in an amusing though terrifying aspect, as he claims the keeping of the contracts made with him by Tom and his miserly wife. When Tom goes to search for his spouse in the woods, he fails to find her.