“Full in the midst, his Cross of Red
Triumphant Michael brandished
And trampled the Apostate’s pride.”
Another case of collective apparitions is the experience of a soldier, wounded in battle, who tells of strange fighters who have come in to aid the English. He thinks they are some of the tribesmen that Britain employs, but from his descriptions the minister knows that they are the long-dead Greeks who have arisen to take part in the struggle which their modern descendants are reluctant to share. These stories are only a few among the many instances of supernaturalism in fiction traceable to the influence of the war.
Certain volumes of ghost stories have appeared, claiming to be not fiction but fact, accounts of actual apparitions seen and snap-shotted. This sort of problematic fiction is not new, however, since Defoe long ago published one of the best of the kind, the story of Mrs. Veal, who appeared to her friend Mrs. Bargrave, and conversed with her, gravely telling her that heaven is much like the descriptions in a certain religious book written shortly before that. She seems very realistic, with her dress of newly scoured silk, which her friend rubs between her fingers, and her lifelike conversation. This story has usually been regarded as one of Defoe’s “lies like truth,” but recent evidence leads one to believe that it is a reportorial account of a ghost story current at the time, which missed being reported to the Society for Psychical Research merely because the organization did not exist then. The modern stories that stridently claim to be real lack the interest in many instances that Mrs. Veal is able to impart, and in most cases the reader loses his taste for that sort of fiction because it is rammed down his throat for fact. They don’t impress one, either as fact or as fiction.
One of the most interesting aspects of the literature relating to psychic matters in recent years is the number of books that claim to be spirit-inspired. These instances of psychography are not what we might expect immortals to indite, but it appears that there must be a marked decrease of intelligence when one reaches the other world. The messages sent back by dead genius lack the master style, even lacking that control over spelling and grammar which low, earth-bound editors consider necessary. But perhaps the spirits of the great grow tired of being made messenger boys, and show their resentment by literary strikes. Anita Silvani has published several volumes that she claims were written while she was in a semi-trance,—which statement no reader will doubt. Her accommodating dictator furnishes illustrations for her stuff, as well, for she says she would have inner visions of the scenes described, “as if a dioram passed” before her. These romances of three worlds are quite peculiar productions. The inner voices asked her in advance not to read any literature on theosophy or Spiritualism or the supernatural since they wished her mind to be free from any previous bias. Mrs. Elsa Barker is another of these literary mediums, for she has put out two volumes of letters in narrative form, which she makes affidavit were dictated to her by a disembodied spirit, the ghost of the late Judge Hatch, of California. She states that while she was sitting in her room in Paris one day, her hand was violently seized, a pencil thrust into it, and the automatic writing began. Mrs. Campbell-Praed is another of these feminine stenographers for spooks, but like the rest she has left nothing that could well be included in a literary anthology. These spirit-writers tell us of life after death, but nothing that is a contribution to existing ignorance on the subject. According to Judge Hatch, whose post-mortem pen-name is X, the present war has its parallel in a conflict of spirits, and the astral world is in dire confusion because of overcrowding, so that the souls of the slain must go through torments and struggle with demons.
The most recent instance of psychography comes to us by way of the ouija-board from St. Louis, the authenticity of which is vouched for by Mr. Casper Yost, of the editorial staff of the Globe-Democrat. But if the ouija-board dictated the stories and plays, giving the name of Patience Worth as the spirit author, and if Mrs. Curran took them down, why does Mr. Yost appear as the author? Patience Worth says that she lived a long time ago. Mr. Yost insists that her language is Elizabethan, but it seems rather a curious conglomeration, unlike any Elizabethan style I am familiar with. She has written stories, lyrics, a long drama, and other informal compositions, a marvelous output when one considers the slow movements of the ouija-board. The communications seem to have human interest and a certain literary value, though they bring us no messages from the Elizabethan section of eternity.[171]
Automatic writing appears in The Martian by Du Maurier, where the spirit from Mars causes Barty Joscelyn in his sleep to write books impossible to him in his waking hours. The type has been parodied by John Kendrick Bangs in his Enchanted Typewriter, which machine worked industriously recording telegraphic despatches from across the Styx. The invisible operator gives his name as Jim Boswell. The writer states:
The substance of the following pages has evolved itself between the hours of midnight and four o’clock, during a period of six months, from a type-writing machine standing in a corner of my library, manipulated by unseen hands.
It is astonishing how many ghosts are trying to break into print these days. And after all, what do the poor things get out of it? No royalties, scant praise, and much ridicule when their style fails to come up to specifications.