H. G. Wells in A Dream of Armageddon gives a curious story of the dream-future. A man in consecutive visions sees himself killed. He then dreams that he is another man, living in a different part of the world, far in the future, till he sees himself die in his second personality. He describes his experiences as given in “a dream so accurate that afterwards you remember little details you had forgotten.” He suffers tortures of love and grief, so that his dream-life of the future is infinitely more real to him than his actual existence of his own time. What was the real “him o’ him,” to quote Patience Worth, the man of the dream-future, or the business man of the present telling the story to his friend?
A different version of metempsychosis is shown in The Immortal Gymnasts, by Marie Cher, for here the beloved trio, Pantaloon, Harlequin and Columbine are embodied as human beings and come to live among men. Harlequin has the power of magic vision which enables him to see into the minds and hearts of mortals by means of “cloud-currents.” This question of—shall we say transmigration?—of fictive characters into actual life is found in various stories, such as Kipling’s The Last of the Stories, John Kendrick Bangs’ The Rebellious Heroine, and others. It illustrates the fantastic use to which every serious theme is sooner or later put. There is no motif in supernatural literature that is not parodied in some form or other, if only by suggestion.
The symbolic treatment of metempsychosis is strongly evident in recent fiction, as the theme lends itself particularly well to the allegoric and symbolic style. Barry Pain’s Exchange shows aspects of transmigration different from the conventional treatment, for he describes the soul of the old man as giving up its right to peace that it might purchase ease for a soul he loved. He passes into the body of a captive bird beating its hopeless wings against the bars and tortured with pain and thirst, as a mark of the witch woman’s wrath, while the soul of the young girl goes into the body of a snow-white lamb that lives a day then is set free. As she passes by, in the state of a freed soul, she sees the piteous bird, and says to herself, “I am glad I was never a bird.”
Algernon Blackwood, in The Return, gives a peculiar story of metempsychosis, where the selfish materialist finds himself suddenly reinforced with a new personality from without. His eyes are opened miraculously to the magic and beauty of the world, and he knows beyond doubt that his friend, the artist, who promised to come to him when he died, has died and that his soul has become a part of his own being. The most impressive example of this sudden merging of two natures, two souls into one, is found in Granville Barker’s Souls on Fifth. Here a man suddenly acquires, or recognizes, the power to see the souls that linger earth-bound around him, and comes to have a strange sympathy with that of a woman, whom he calls the “Little Soul.” When he speaks of going away, after a time, she begs him not to leave her since she is very lonely in this wilderness of unbodied souls. She asks that if he will not take her into his soul, he carry her to some wide prairie, and there in the unspaced expanse leave her,—but instead he gives a reluctant consent for her to enter into his life. He presses the little symbolic figure to his heart, then feels a new sense of being, of personality, and knows that her soul has become forever a part of his.
Lord Dunsany, who lends a strange, new beauty to every supernatural theme he touches, has a little prose-poem of symbolic metempsychosis, called Usury, where Yohu, one of the evil spirits, lures the shadows to work for him by giving them gleaming lives to polish.
And ever Yohu lures more shadows and sends them to brighten his Lives, sending the old Lives out again to make them brighter still; and sometimes he gives to a shadow a Life that was once a king’s and sendeth him with it down to the earth to play the part of a beggar, or sometimes he sendeth a beggar’s Life to play the part of a king. What careth Yohu?
Spiritualism and Psychical Research.
The influence of modern Spiritualism and Psychical Research on the literature of supernaturalism has been marked, especially of late years. It would be inevitable that movements which interest so many persons, among them many of more than ordinary intelligence, should be reflected in fiction. These two aspects of the subject will be treated together since they are closely allied. For though Spiritualism is a form of religion and Psychical Research a new science,—and so-called religion and so-called science are not always parallel—the lines of investigation here are similar. While Spiritualism endeavors to get in touch with the spirits of the dead that the living may be comforted and enlightened, and Psychical Research attempts to classify the supposedly authentic cases of such communication, and in so much their methods of approach are different,—yet the results may be discussed together.