Bram Stoker furnishes us with several interesting specimens of supernatural life, always tangled with other uncanny motives. The count, in Dracula, who has lived his vampire life for centuries, is said to be hale and fresh as if he were forty. Of course, all vampires live to a strange lease on life, but most of them are spirits rather than human beings as was Dracula. In The Lair of the White Worm, Stoker tells of a woman who was at once an alluring woman and a snake thousands of years old. The snake is so large that, when it goes out to walk, it looks like a high white tower, and can gaze over the tops of the trees.
Bulwer-Lytton’s The Haunters and the Haunted tells the story of a mysterious being who passes through untold years with a strange power over life and the personality of others. He appears, no man knows whence nor why, and disappears as strangely, while about his whole career is a shroud of mystery. Thackeray, in his Notch on the Axe, burlesques this and similar stories in playful satire, yet seems to enjoy his theme. It is not wholly a burlesque, we may suppose. He adds a touch of realism to his humorous description by the fact that, throughout his hero’s long-continued life, or series of lives—one doesn’t know which—he retains always his German-Jewish accent. Andrew Lang describes[165] the person who may have been the original of these stories in real life. Horace Walpole has mentioned him in his letters and he seems to have a teasing mystery about his life and career that makes him much talked-of.
Edwin Lester Arnold[166] tells a story of continued life with an Oriental setting and mystery. Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, by the introduction of a magic sleep makes a man live far beyond the natural span and be able to see into the distant future, while the youth in Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court has a magic length of life, living a dual existence, in Arthurian England and in present-day America. H. G. Wells[167] uses something of the same idea, in that he makes his hero live a very long time in a few hours, compressing time into minute tabules, as it were, as he does in another story of the magic accelerator that makes a man live fast and furiously with tenfold powers at crucial moments. The story of Peter Rugg, the Missing Man, is that of another immortal wanderer, whose story is told in Myths and Legends of Our Land, and utilized by Alfred Austin. He goes out into a storm, saying, “I will see home to-night or I will never see it!” He flies forever pursued by the storm, never resting, and never seeing his home. This is symbolic of the haunted soul pursued by its own destiny.
The theme of the elixir of life is one of the old motifs of supernaturalism retained in modern fiction. The conventional alchemist has given place to a more up-to-date investigator in the chemical laboratory, yet the same thrill of interest is imparted by the thought of a magic potion prepared by man that shall endow him with earthly immortality. The theme has changed less in its treatment and symbolism than most of the supernatural elements in fiction, for though we see the added elements of modern satire and symbolism, its essential aspects remain the same.
Metempsychosis.
The idea of metempsychosis, the thought that at death the soul of a human being may pass into another mortal body or into a lower stage, into an animal or even a plant, has been used considerably in English fiction. This Oriental belief has its basis in antiquity, in animistic ideas in primitive culture. One of the earliest appearances of the theme in English fiction is that middle-eighteenth-century story of Dr. John Hawkesworth’s,[168] an account of a soul that has not behaved itself seemly, so descends in the spiritual scale till it ends by being a flea. The German Hoffmann used the theme repeatedly, and Poe, who was to a certain extent influenced by his supernaturalism, employs it in several stories. In A Tale of the Ragged Mountains, the young man named Bedlo experiences, in dreams of extraordinary vividness, the life of battle, of confusion, ending in death, in a tropical city. He sees himself die, struck on the temple by a poisoned arrow. He is recognized by an elderly man as the exact counterpart of a Mr. Oldeb who perished in the manner dreamed of in a battle in Benares. Mr. Bedlo, while wandering in the mountains of Virginia, contracts a cold and fever, for the cure of which leeches are applied, but by mistake a poisonous sangsue is substituted for the leech, and the patient dies of a wound on the temple, similar to that caused by a poisoned arrow. Poe’s concept in other stories is not that of the conventionally easy passage of the soul into the body of a new-born babe that wouldn’t be expected to put up much of a fight, but he makes the psychic feature the central horror, saying in that connection that man is on the brink of tremendous psychical discoveries. In Morella the theme is used with telling power, where the wife, once greatly loved but now loathed, on her deathbed tells her husband that her child will live after her. The daughter grows up into supernatural likeness of her mother, but remains nameless, since her father, for a reason he cannot analyze, hesitates to give her any name. But at last, as she stands before the altar to be christened, some force outside the father causes him to call her Morella.
What more than fiend convulsed the features of my child, and overspread them with the hues of death, as, starting at that scarcely audible sound, she turned her glassy eyes from earth to heaven, and falling prostrate on the black slabs of our ancestral vault, responded, “I am here”!
The young girl is found to be dead and the father says: “With my own hands I bore her to the tomb; and I laughed, with a long and bitter laugh, as I found no traces of the first in the charnel where I laid the second Morella.”
An obvious imitation of Poe’s story is found in Bram Stoker’s novel, The Jewel of Seven Stars, where the soul of an Egyptian princess enters into the body of a baby born to one of the explorers who rifle her tomb. The child grows into the perfect duplicate of the princess, even showing on her wrists the marks of violence that cut off the mummy’s hand. The Egyptian’s familiar, a mummified cat, comes to life to revenge itself upon the archæologists who have disturbed the tomb. When by magic incantations and scientific experiments combined, the collectors try to revivify the mummy, the body mysteriously disappears, and the young girl is found dead, leading us to suppose that the reanimated princess has stolen the girl’s life for her own.