We even have the humorous and satiric witch, to correspond to similar representations of the ghost and the devil in modern fiction. The instance in Burns’s Tam O’Shanter needs only to be recalled, with the ludicrous description of the wild race at night to escape the dread powers. Bones, Sanders, and Another, by Edgar Wallace, introduces a witch with comic qualities, a woman whose husband has been a magician, and the reputed familiar of a devil. She cures people by laying her hands on them, once causing a bone that was choking a child to fly out with “a cry terrible to hear, such a cry as a leopard makes when pursued by ghosts.” When this witch with a sense of humor is arrested as a trouble-maker by an army officer, she “eradicates” her clothes, causing very comic complications. The best example of the satiric witch is Hawthorne’s Mother Rigby, in Feathertop, who constructs a man from a broomstick and other materials for a scarecrow. In this satiric sermon upon the shams and hypocrisies of life, Mother Rigby, with her sardonic humor, her cynical comments, parodies society, holds the mirror up to human life and shows more than one poor painted scarecrow, simulacrum of humanity, masquerading as a man. The figure that she creates, with his yearnings and his pride, his horror when he realizes his own falsity and emptiness, is more human, more a man, than many a being we meet in literature or in life.
Barry Pain has several witch stories that do not fall readily into any category, curious stories of scientific dream-supernaturalism, in the realm of the unreal. Exchange is the account of a supernatural woman, whether a witch or one of the Fates, one does not know, who comes, clad in scarlet rags, to show human souls their destinies. She permits an exchange of fate, if one is willing to pay her price, which is in each case terrible enough. One young girl gives up her pictured future of life and love, and surrenders her mind for the purpose of saving her baby brother from his destined fate of suicide in manhood. The crone appears to an old man that loves the child, who takes upon himself her fate of being turned into a bird to be tortured after human death, so that the young girl may have his future, to be turned into a white lamb that dies after an hour, then be a soul set free. The Glass of Supreme Moments is another story of prophetic witchery, of revealed fate seen in supernatural dreams. A young man in his college study sees the fireplace turn into a silver stairway down which a lovely gray-robed woman comes to him. She shows him a mirror, the glass of supreme moments, in which the highest instants of each man’s life are shown. She says of it, “All the ecstasy of the world lies there. The supreme moments of each man’s life, the scene, the spoken words—all lie there. Past and present and future—all are there.” She shows an emotion meter that measures the thrill of joy. After he has seen the climactic instants of his friends’ lives he asks to see his own, when she tells him his are here and now. She tells him that her name is Death and that he will die if he kisses her, but he cries out, “I will die kissing you!” And presently his mates return to find his body fallen dead across his table.
There is something infinitely appealing about the character of the witch. She seems a creature of tragic loneliness, conscious of her own dark powers, yet conscious also of her exile from the good, and knowing that all the evil she evokes will somehow come back to her, that her curses will come home, as in the case of Witch Hazel, where the witch, by making a cake of hair to overcome her rival in love, brings on a tempest that kills her lover and drives her mad. Each evil act, each dark imagining seems to create a demon and turn him loose to harry humanity with unceasing force, as Matthew Maule’s curse in The House of Seven Gables casts a spiritual shadow on the home. Yet the witch is sometimes a minister of good, as Mephistopheles says of himself, achieving the good where he meant evil; sometimes typifying the mysterious mother nature, as the old Wittikin in Hauptmann’s Sunken Bell, neither good nor evil, neither altogether human nor supernatural. Her strange symbolism is always impressive.
Dæmonic Spirits—Vampires.
Closely related to the devil are certain diabolic spirits that are given supernatural power by him and acknowledge his suzerainty. These include ghouls, vampires, werewolves, and other demoniac animals, as well as the human beings that through a compact with the fiend share in his dark force. Since such creatures possess dramatic possibilities, they have given interest to fiction and other literature from early times. This idea of an unholy alliance between earth and hell, has fascinated the human mind and been reflected astonishingly in literature. In studying the appearance of these beings in English fiction, we note, as in the case of the ghost, the witch, and the devil, a certain leveling influence, a tendency to humanize them and give them characteristics that appeal to our sympathy.
The vampire and the ghoul are closely related and by some authorities are considered the same, yet there is a distinction. The ghoul is a being, to quote Poe, “neither man nor woman, neither brute nor human” that feeds upon corpses, stealing out at midnight for loathsome banquets in graveyards. He devours the flesh of the dead, while the vampire drains the blood of the living. The ghoul is an Asiatic creature and has left but slight impress upon English literature, while the vampire has been a definite motif. The vampire superstition goes back to ancient times, being referred to on Chaldean and Assyrian tablets. William of Newbury, of the twelfth century in England, relates several stories of them; one vampire was burned in Melrose Abbey, and tourists in Ireland are still shown the grave of a vampire. Perhaps the vampire superstition goes back to the savagery of remote times, and is an animistic survival of human sacrifices, of cannibalism and the like. The vampire is thought of as an evil spirit issuing forth at night to attack the living in their sleep and drain the blood which is necessary to prolong its own revolting existence. Certain persons were thought to be especially liable to become vampires at death, such as suicides, witches, wizards, persons who in life had been attacked by vampires, outcasts of various kinds, as well as certain animals, werewolves, dead lizards, and others.
The vampire superstition was general in the East and extended to Europe, it is thought, by way of Greece. The Greeks thought of the vampire as a beautiful young woman, a lamia, who lured young men to their death. The belief was particularly strong in central Europe, but never seemed to gain the same foothold in England that it did on the continent, though it is evident here and has influenced literature. The vampire has been the inspiration for several operas, and has figured in the drama, in poetry, in the novel and short story, as well as in folk-tales and medieval legends. The stories show the various aspects of the belief and its ancient hold on the popular mind. The vampire, as well as the ghost, the devil, and the witch, has appeared on the English stage. The Vampire, an anonymous melodrama in two acts, The Vampire, a tragedy by St. John Dorset (1821), The Vampire Bride, a play, Le Vampire, by Alexander Dumas père, and The Vampire, or the Bride of the Isles, by J. R. Planche, were presented in the London theater. The latter which was published in 1820 is remarkably similar to The Vampyre, a novelette by Polidori, published in 1819,—the story written after the famous ghost session where Byron, the Shelleys, and Polidori agreed each to write a ghostly story, Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein.
Polidori’s story, like the play referred to, has for its principal character an Englishman, Lord Ruthven, the Earl of Marsden, who is the vampire. In each case there is a supposed death, where the dying man asks that his body be placed where the last rays of the moon can fall upon it. The corpse then mysteriously vanishes. In each story there is a complication of a rash pledge of silence made by a man that discovers the diabolical nature of the earl, who, having risen from the dead, is ravaging society as a vampire. In each case a peculiar turn of the story is that the masculine vampire requires for his subsistence the blood of young women, to whom he must be married. He demands a new victim, hence a hurried wedding is planned. In the play the ceremony is interrupted by the bride’s father, but in the novelette the plot is finished and the girl becomes the victim of the destroyer. It is a question which of these productions was written first, and which imitated the other, or if they had a common source. The author of the drama admits getting his material from a French play, but where did Polidori get his?
Byron seems to have been fascinated with the vampire theme, for in addition to his unsuccessful short story, he has used the theme in his poem, The Giaour. Here he brings in the idea that the vampire curse is a judgment from God for sin, and that the most terrible part of the punishment is the being forced to prey upon those who in life were dearest to him, which idea occurs in various stories.