The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction

by Dorothy Scarborough

The unquestioned witch, possessing indubitable powers of enchantment, occurs frequently and conveys a genuine thrill. Her attributes have been less conventionalized than those of her youthful companions who are merely under the imputation of black art, and she possesses a diabolic individuality. Though she may not remain long in view, she is an impressive figure not soon forgotten. The old crone in Scott’s The Two Drovers gives warning to Robin Oig, “walking the deasil,” as it is called, around him, tracing the propitiation which some think a reminiscence of Druidical mythology,—which is performed by walking three times round the one in danger, moving according to the course of the sun. In the midst of her incantation the hag exclaims, “Blood on your hand, and it is English blood!” True enough, before his journey’s end young Robin does murder his English companion. In the same story other evidences of witchcraft are shown, as the directions for keeping away the evil influence from cattle by tying St. Mungo’s knot on their tails.

The subject of witchcraft greatly interested Hawthorne, for he introduces it in a number of instances. Young Goodman Brown shows the aspects of the diabolic union between the devil and his earthly companions, their unholy congregations in the forest, reports their sardonic conversations and suggestions of evil in others, and pictures the witches riding on broomsticks high in the heavens and working their magic spells. The young husband sees in that convocation all the persons whom he has most revered—his minister, his Sabbath-school teacher, and even his young wife, so that all his after-life is saddened by the thought of it. Witchcraft enters into The Scarlet Letter, Main Street, and Feathertop, and is mentioned in other stories.

Old Mother Sheehy in Kipling’s The Courting of Dinah Shadd pronounces a malediction against Private Mulvany and the girl he loves, prophesying that he will be reduced in rank instead of being promoted, will be a slave to drink so that his young wife will take in washing for officers’ wives instead of herself being the wife of an officer, and that their only child will die,—every bitter word of which comes true in after years. The old witch mother in Howard Pyle’s The Evil Eye inspires her daughter to cast a spell over the man she loves but who does not think of her, causing him to leave his betrothed and wed the witch daughter. When understanding comes to him, and with it loathing, the girl seeks to regain his love by following the counsel of an old magician, who gives her an image to be burnt. But that burning of the image kills her and looses the man from her spell. That incident is similar to that in D’Annunzio’s Sogno d’un Tramonto d’Autunno where the Dogaressa seeks to slay her rival, both probably being based on the unforgettable employment of the theme in Rossetti’s Sister Helen, where the young girl causes the death of her betrayer by melting the image.

In Gordon Bottomley’s play, Riding to Lithend, three old women enter, who seem to partake of the nature of the Parcæ as well as of Shakespeare’s Weird Sisters. They have bat-webbed fingers, the hound bays uncannily at their approach, they show supernatural knowledge of events, and they chant a wild prophecy of doom, then mysteriously disappear. Fate marches swiftly on as they foretell.

The young and beautiful witch can work as much evil as the ancient crone, perhaps more, since her emotions are wilder and more unrestrained. She can project a curse that reaches its victim across the ocean, when the one who sent the curse is rotting in the tomb, as in The Curse of the Cashmere Shawl, where a betrayed and deserted woman in India sends a rare shawl to her rival, then drowns herself. Months after, when the husband, forgetful of the source, lays the shawl around his wife’s shoulders, the dead woman takes her place. After this gruesome transfer of personality, the wife, impelled by a terrible urge she cannot understand, drowns herself as the other has done months before. Oscar Wilde[151] shows a young and lovely witch with a human longing for the love of the young man who throws away his soul for love of a mermaid. Through life’s tragic satire, she is compelled, in spite of her entreaties, to show him how he may damn himself and win the other’s affection. The jealousy shown here and in other instances is an illustration of the human nature of the witch, who, like the devil, makes a strong appeal to our sympathy in spite of the undoubted iniquity.

The element of symbolism enters largely into the witch-creations, even from the time of Shakespeare’s Three in Macbeth, who are terrible symbolic figures of the evil in man’s soul. They appear as the visible embodiment of Macbeth’s thoughts, and by their mysterious suggestive utterances tempt him to put his unlawful dreams into action. They seem both cause and effect here, for though when they first appear to him his hands are innocent of blood, his heart is tainted with selfish ambition, and their whispers of promise hurry on the deed. In Ancient Sorceries, by Algernon Blackwood, the village is full of persons who at night by the power of an ancestral curse, a heritage of subliminal memory, become witches, horrible cat-creatures, unhuman, that dance the blasphemous dance of the Devil’s Sabbath. The story symbolizes the eternal curse that rests upon evil, the undying quality of thought and action that cannot cease when the body of the sinner has become dust, but reaches out into endless generations.

In Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts by A. T. Quiller-Couch, we see a witch, a young woman whose soul is under a spell from the devil. She gives rich gifts to the church, but her offerings turn into toads and vipers, defiling the sanctuary, and as she sings her wild songs the bodies of drowned men come floating to the surface of the water and join in the words of her song. Her beauty is supernatural and accursed, yet her soul is innocent of wish to do evil, though it leaves her body and goes like a cresseted flame at night to follow the devil, while the body is powerless in sleep. Finally the devil comes in the form of a Moor, possibly a suggestion from Zofloya, and summons her, when she dies, with a crucifix clasped over her heart.

W. B. Yeats has pictured several witches for us, as the crone of the gray hawk, in The Wisdom of the King, a woman tall with more than mortal height, with feathers of the gray hawk growing in her hair, who stoops over the royal cradle and whispers a strange thing to the child, as a result of which he grows up in a solitude of his own mystic thoughts with dreams that are like the marching and counter-marching of armies. When he realizes that the simple joys of life and love are not for him, he disappears, some say to make his home with the immortal demons, some say with the shadowy goddesses that haunt the midnight pools in the forest. In The Curse of the Fires and the Shadows, Yeats pictures another witch, tall and in a gray gown, who is standing in the river and washing, washing the dead body of a man. As the troopers who have murdered the friars and burned down the church ride past, each man recognizes in the dead face his own face,—just a moment before they all plunge over the abyss to death.

There are witches in most collections of English folk-tales, for the simpler people, the more elemental natures, have a strong feeling for the twilight of nature and of life. The weird woman has power over the forces of nature and can evoke the wrath of the elements as of unholy powers against her enemies. Stories of witches, as of sorcerers, occur in Indian folk-tales, as well as in those of the American Indian, differing in details in the tribal collections yet showing similar essential ideas. The Scotch show special predilection for the witch, since with their tense, stern natures, they stand in awe of the darker powers and of those that call them forth. They relate curious instances of the relations between the animal world and witchcraft, as in The Dark Nameless One, by Fiona McLeod, the story of a nun that falls in love with a seal and is forced to live forever in the sea, weaving her spells where the white foam froths, and knowing that her soul is lost. This is akin to the theme that Matthew Arnold uses,[152] though with a different treatment, showing similarity to Hans Christian Andersen’s tale of The Little Mermaid. The cailleachuisge, or the water-witch, and the maighdeanmhara, the mermaid, and the kelpie, the sea-beast, are cursed with dæmonic spells and live forever in their witchery. When mortals forsake the earth and follow them their children are beings that have no souls. The Irish folk-tales, on the other hand, while having their quota of witches, do not think so much about them or take them quite so seriously, inclining more to the faëry forms of supernaturalism suited to their poetic natures. The sense of beauty of the Irish is so vivid and their innate poetry so intense that they glimpse the loveliness of magic, and their enchanted beings are of beauty rather than of horror.