Hawthorne was interested in Spiritualism as literary material, since a discussion of it is introduced in Blithedale Romance and various passages in his notebooks treat of the matter showing the fascination it had for him. Mrs. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward, in addition to her fictional treatises of heaven, takes up Spiritualism as well. In The Day of My Death she gives a satiric account of the return of a spirit who says he is a lost soul tortured in hell. He doubtless deserves it, for he sticks the baby full of pins and ties it to a tree, and folds the clothes from the wash in the shape of corpses. He is still interested in this life, however, since he requests a piece of squash pie. In Kentucky’s Ghost she depicts a spirit actuated by definite malice. In the previous story seven mediums tell a man that he will die at a certain day and hour, but he lives cheerfully on.
William Dean Howells has given a study in his usual kindly satire and sympathetic seriousness, of the phenomena of Spiritualism and mesmerism, in The Undiscovered Country. Dr. Boynton, a mistaken zealot, holds seances assisted by his daughter, a delicate, sensitive girl who is physically prostrated after each performance and begs her father to spare her. She acts as medium where the usual effects of rapping, table levitation, and so forth take place, where spirit hands wave in the air and messages, grave and jocular, are delivered. The characterization is handled with skill to bring out the sincerity of each person involved in the web of superstition and false belief, and Howells shows real sympathy with each, the scoffers as well as the misguided fanatics. It is only when the doctor looks death in the face that he realizes his error and seeks to know by faith in the Bible the truths of the far country of the soul.
Hamlin Garland has shown considerable interest in Spiritualism in his fiction. He refuses to commit himself as to his own opinion of the question, but he has written two novels dealing with it, The Tyranny of the Dark and The Shadow World. The former is considerably like Howells’s novel, for here also a young girl is made the innocent victim of fanatics, her mother and a preacher who has fallen in love with her. She is made to take part in spiritualistic manifestations, whether as a victim of fraud or as a genuine medium the author leaves in doubt. When the girl casts him off the preacher kills himself that he may come into closer communication with her after death than he has been able to do in life. Richard Harding Davis has contributed a volume with a similar plot, the exploitation of an innocent and, of course, beautiful girl by fanatics, in Vera the Medium. Here the girl is more than half aware that she is a fraud and in her last seance, at the conclusion of which she is to be carried triumphantly away by her lover, the New York district attorney, she dramatically confesses her deception. As a sympathy-getter, she pleads that she was very lonely, that because her grandmother and mother were mediums, she had been cut off from society. “I used to play round the kitchen stove with Pocahontas and Alexander the Great, and Martin Luther lived in our china closet.”
David Belasco’s The Return of Peter Grimm, drama and novel, is based upon spiritualistic manifestations. We are told that the “envelope” or shadow-self of a sleeper has been photographed by means of radio-photography. When a certain part of the shadow body is pricked with a pin, as the cheek, the corresponding portion of the sleeper’s body is seen to bleed. Peter Grimm comes back from the other world to direct the actions of the living, and though at first only a child sees him,—for children are the best sensitives save animals,—eventually the adults recognize him also and yield to his guidance. Spiritualism enters directly or indirectly into many works of fiction of late years. Whether people believe in it or not, they are thinking and writing about it. The subject receives its usual humorous turn in various stories, as Nelson Lloyd’s The Last Ghost in Harmony, the story of a specter who complains of the scientific unimaginativeness of his village, saying that though he had entreated the spooks to hold out for a little while as he had heard Spiritualism was headed that way and would bring about a revival of interest in ghosts, the spirits all got discouraged and quit the place. And we recall Sandy’s mournful comment to Mark Twain’s Captain Stormfield, that he wished there was something in that miserable Spiritualism, so he could send word back to the folks.
The Proceedings of the Psychical Research Society have a twofold association with literature, for not only have various modern novels and stories been inspired by such material, but the instances recorded are similar in many cases to the classical ghost stories. Lacy Collison-Morley in his Greek and Roman Ghost Stories says, “There are a number of stories of the passing of souls which are curiously like some of those collected by the Psychical Research Society, in the Fourth Book of Gregory the Great’s Dialogues.” The double source of many modern stories may be found by a comparative study of Collison-Morley’s book and Myers’s Human Personality, while G. H. Gerould’s volume, The Grateful Dead, introduces recent instances that are like classical stories. The inability of the soul to have rest in the other world if its body was unburied, as held by the ancients, is reflected in Gothic romance, Elizabethan drama as well as in the classics. The ghost of Jack, whom Peele tells us about, is a case of a ghost coming back to befriend his undertaker. From these comparisons it would appear that there is something inherently true to humanity in these beliefs, for the revenge ghost and the grateful dead have appeared all along the line. Perhaps human personality is largely the same in all lands and all times, and ghosts have the same elemental emotions however much they may have acquired a veneer of modernity.
There are many instances of the compact-ghost, the spirit who returns just after death in accordance with a promise made in life, to manifest himself to some friend or to some skeptic. Algernon Blackwood gives several stories based on that theme, one a curious case where the ghost is so lifelike his friend does not dream he is not the living man, and assigns him to a bedroom. Later he is invisible, yet undoubtedly present, for his heavy breathing, movements of the covers, and impress on the bed are beyond dispute. Afterwards, by Fred C. Smale, shows a ghost returning to attend a neighborhood club. When his name is called by mistake, he takes part on the program, speaking through the lips of a young man present, who goes off in a cataleptic trance. During this coma the youth, who is ignorant of music, gives a technical discussion of notation, analyzing diatonic semi-tones and discussing the note a nightingale trills on. When he wakes he says he has felt a chill and a touch. Alice Brown relates a story of a lover who promised to come to his sweetheart at the moment of death, but who, like Ahimeas in the Bible, runs before he is ready, and keeps his ghostly tryst while the rescuers bring him back to life. He hasn’t really been drowned at all.
A recent novelette by Frances Hodgson Burnett, called The White People, has psychical phenomena for its central interest. A little child, born after her father’s tragic death and when her dying mother is conscious of his spiritual presence, grows up with a strange sensitiveness to manifestations from the other world. Her home is on a lonely estate in Scotland, so that her chief companionship is with the “white people,” the spirits of the dead, though she does not so recognize them. Her playmate is Wee Brown Elsbeth, who has been murdered hundreds of years before, and she is able to see the dead hover near their loved ones wherever she goes. So when she comes to realize what a strange vision is hers, she has no horror of death, and when her lover dies she does not grieve, but waits to see him stand smiling beside her as in life. The theme of the story is the nearness of the dead to the living, the thin texture of the veil that separates the two worlds.
Basil King tells a poignant story of a soul trying vainly to return in body to right a wrong done in life but unable to accomplish her purpose by physical means. At last she effects it by impressing the mind of a living woman who carries out the suggestion psychically given. One of the most effective recent accounts of a spirit’s return to earth to influence the life of the living, to give messages or to control destiny, is in Ellen Glasgow’s The Shadowy Third. Here the ghost of a child, a little girl whom her stepfather has done to death for her money, returns to cause his death in an unusual way. She throws her little skipping-rope carelessly on the stairway where he must trip up in it when he sees her phantom figure in front of him in the gloom, so to fall headlong to his death. This is an impressive revenge ghost.
Henry James based his ghost story, The Turn of the Screw, on an incident reported to the Psychical Society, of a spectral old woman corrupting the mind of a child. The central character in Arnold Bennett’s novel, The Ghost, is a specter, one of the most rabid revenge ghosts in literature, who is eaten up with jealousy lest the woman he loved in life shall care for some one else. Algernon Blackwood uses much psychical material in his numberless stories of the supernatural, often mentioning the work of the Society, and Andrew Lang has contributed much to the subject. Arthur Machen has just published a collection of stories of war-apparitions that are interesting psychical specimens, called The Bowmen. In one story in the volume he shows us how a contemporary legend may be built up, since from a short piece of fiction written by him has evolved the mass of material relating to the angels at Mons. One tale is a story of the supernatural intervention of Saint George and his army to drive back the Germans and save the hour for the Allies, while another describes the vision of a soldier wounded in battle defending his comrades, who sees the long-dead heroes of England file past him to praise him for his valor. The minister gives him wine to drink and
His voice was hushed. For as he looked at the minister the fashion of his vesture was changed. He was all in armor, if armor be made of starlight, of the rose of dawn, and of sunset fires; and he lifted up a great sword of flame.