The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction

by Dorothy Scarborough

James Stephens in The Crock of Gold mingles delightfully fairy-lore with other elements of the supernatural, as talking beasts, and insects, the gods, a leprechaun, and Pan, combining with the droll philosophy of the bachelor man to make a charming social satire. The union of the world of reality with that of the wee people is seen in the sad little story of H. G. Wells, The Man Who Had Been in Fairyland. A crude, materialistic middle-class Englishman, in love with an ordinary young woman, falls asleep on a fairy knoll one night and is kidnapped by the Dim People who take him to their country, where their queen falls in love with him. She vainly woos him, but he is stolidly true to the thick-ankled girl of the town, until the fairies send him back in sleep to mortal life. But when he wakes on the knoll he is home-sick for fairyland, he cares no more for the village girl who seems coarse and repulsive compared with the elfin creature whose love he might have kept in the land of wonder, so he is wretched, unable to fit again into mortal life and unable to reopen the doors that closed inexorably upon him by his wish. This is a modern version of the motif of the mortal lover and the fairy bride that we find so often in mediæval ballads and romances, a survival of the Celtic wonder-lore. Arthur Lewis in London Fairy Tales writes philosophic human stories in the guise of fairy tales, attempting frankly to bring the impossible into contact with daily life. They are weird little symbolic stories with an earthly wisdom associated with unearthly beings. The Passionate Crime, by E. Temple Thurston, is a symbolic fairy novel, the fairies being figures of the man’s besetting sins, bodiless presences blown on the winds of feeling, as the woman he loves is lured by the fairy of her own beauty.

Whether fairyland be an actual place or a state of mind, it is a province still open to romancers, and folklorists have aroused a new interest in the Little People who may come nearer to us than before. The flood of volumes recounting Celtic folk-tales with their fairy-lore alone would make a long catalogue, and one can do no more than suggest the presence of the fairy in English fiction. Andrew Lang was a faithful lover of the Sidhe and made many collections of fairy stories, Eden Phillpotts has written much of them, and various writers have opened their magic to us. Some place the land of faerie under the ground, some in secret caves, some in the mind, and Lord Dunsany says that the Old Man Who Looks after Fairyland lives in a house whose parlor windows look away from the world, and “empties his slops sheer on to the Southern Cross.”

We find many stories of gods, demigods, and heroes tangled up together in folk-tales and in the literature they have influenced. It is sometimes difficult to distinguish between them, and again it is interesting to note how the hero-myth has been converted into the tale of a god. Celtic romances and folk-supernaturalism give many stories of gods, demigods, and heroes of superhuman force. It would be interesting if one could trace them to their ultimate sources and discover how much they have been suggested or influenced by classical mythology. In Fiction of the Irish Celts, by Patrick Kennedy, are numberless stories of the Fianna Eironn, or Heroes of Ireland, some of whom really flourished in the third century and whose adventures were the favorite stories of the kings and chiefs as sung by the ancient bards. Kennedy also retells many of the Ossianic legends. In Bardic Stories of Ireland he relates the exploits of personages dating back to druidic times and earlier, who reflect the remote stages of the legendary history of the people, such as the antique King Fergus, who was given supernatural power by the fairies and slew the sea-monster; Cormac, who did many doughty deeds assisted by the powers of the Immortals, and many others. W. B. Yeats, in his Stories of Red Ranrahan, gives us glimpses of an Irish François Villon, a man of wandering nature, of human frailties, yet with a divine gift of song.

Lady Gregory tells the wonderful saga of Cuchulain, the hero-god of Ireland, in Cuchulain of Muirthemne, which W. B. Yeats calls “perhaps the best book that has ever come out of Ireland.” It was his mother Dechtire that drank the soul of Lugh of the Strong Hand, as he flew into her wine-cup in the form of a Mayfly, so that she was bound by enchantment and carried away with her fifty maidens as a flock of lovely birds. When anger came upon him the hero light would shine about his head, he understood all the arts of the druids and had supernatural beauty and strength in battle. Cuchulain, the Hound of Ulster, and his Red Branch have filled the legendry of Ireland with wonder.

Lady Gregory tells of the high king of Ireland who married Etain of the Sidhe; of the nine pipers that came out of the hill of the Sidhe, whom to fight with was to fight with a shadow, for they could not be killed; of Conchobar, the king, that loved Deirdre of the burning beauty for whom many candles of the Gael were blown out; of Cruachan, who knew druid enchantments greater than the magic of the fairies so that he was able to fight with the Dim People and overcome them, and to cover the whole province with a deep snow so that they could not follow him. In Gods and Fighting Men Lady Gregory tells of ancient divinities that met men as equals. We come to know Oisin, son of Finn, who is king over a divine country; of the Men of Dea who fought against the misshapen Fomer. Men are called to the country of Under-Wave where the gods promise them all their desires, as the god Medhir tells Queen Etain that in his country one never grows old, that there is no sorrow, no care among invisible gods. She tells us of Finn, who fought with monsters, who killed many great serpents in Loch Cuilinn, and Shadow-shapes at Loch Lein, and fought with the three-headed hag, and nine headless bodies that raised harsh screeches. We meet Diarmuid, who married a daughter of King Under-Wave, who raised a house by enchantment, and whom Grania, of the fatal beauty, loved.

Jeremiah Curtin, Aldis Dunbar, and many another writer have told us of the wonderful legends of the Celtic gods and heroes, who somehow seem more human than Arthur and his Table Round or any of the English mythical heroes.

It is Lord Dunsany, however, who specializes in gods in recent times. He fairly revels in divinities and demons, in idols and out-of-the-world creatures. His dramas of this nature are mentioned in another connection, as A Night at an Inn, where a jade idol slays with silent horror the men who have stolen his emerald eye; The Gods of the Mountains, where seven beggars masquerade as the mountain gods come to life, and some of the people believe but some doubt. But at last the seven gods from the mountain come down, terrible figures of green stone, and with sinister menace point terrible fingers at the beggars, who stiffen as on pedestals, draw their feet under them like the cross-legged posture of the images, and turn to stone, so that the people coming say: “They were the true gods. They have turned to stone because we doubted them.” In The Gods of Pegana are many fantastic tales of divinities never heard of before, whom Dunsany calls to life with the lavish ease of genius and makes immortal. In Time and the Gods we see many gods, with their servant the swart, sinister Time who serves them, but maliciously. The gods dream marble dreams that have magic power, for “with domes and pinnacles the dreams arose and stood up proudly between the river and the sky, all shimmering white to the morning.” But Sardathrion, this city of visions, is overthrown by hateful Time, whereat the mighty gods weep grievous tears. He tells us of Slid, a new god that comes striding through the stars, past where the ancient divinities are seated on their thrones, as a million waves march behind him; of Inzana, the daughter of all the gods who plays with the sun as her golden ball and weeps when it falls into the sea, so that Umborodom with his thunder hound must seek it again and again for her. He whispers to us of the prophet who saw the gods one night as they strode knee-deep in stars, and above them a mighty hand, showing a higher power. The gods are jealous of him that he has seen, so they rob him of knowledge of the gods, of moon and sky, of butterflies and flowers, and all lovely things. And last they steal his soul away from him, from which they make the South Wind, forever to roam the waste spaces of the world, mournful, unremembering.

In The Book of Wonder are still other gods, as Hlo-Hlo, who wears the haloes of other gods on golden hooks along his hunting-belt; the Sphinx, who “remembers in her smitten mind at which little boys now leer, that she once knew well those things at which man stands aghast”; the certain disreputable god who knows nothing of etiquette and will grant prayers that no respectable god would ever consent to hear; Chu-chu and Sheemish, who become angry with each other and raise rival earthquakes that destroy their temple and them. We are told of the Gibbelins that eat men, whose home is beyond the known regions, and whose treasures many burglars try in vain to steal only to meet death instead. Alderic tries a crafty way to evade them but they are waiting for him. “And without saying a word or even smiling they neatly hang him on the outer wall,—and the tale is one of those that have not a happy ending.” But enough of gods!—though we should not forget the Aztec legend on which Lew Wallace’s novel, The Fair God, was founded, of the white divinity who was to come and rule the people.

There are many other elements of folkloristic supernaturalism that cannot be mentioned, as the banshee, the wailful creature that is a presager of death and the loss of the soul; the fetches, ghosts of the living, whom John and Michael Banim write much about; the pixies, as appearing in such works as S. Baring-Gould’s Eve, and Stephens’s The Crock of Gold; the mountain trolls that play pranks on Ibsen’s Peer Gynt and Irving’s Rip van Winkle; the “worrie-cow” that Scott tells about; the saints and miracles that abound in Celtic literature as in that of any Catholic country, and such as Thomas A. Janvier has told of so delightfully in his legends of the City of Mexico. The giant has almost faded from fiction, since, poor thing, he doesn’t fit in well with the modern scheme of housing. He came into the Gothic novel from the Oriental tale where he had his origin, but now he appears in our fiction only sporadically, as in Oscar Wilde’s The Selfish Giant, in a couple of stories by Blackwood, and a few others. We are glad to meet him occasionally in frank folk-tales since literature at large repudiates this favorite of our youth. He would not suit well on the stage, for obvious reasons, and realism rejects him.

Lord Dunsany tells of elves and gnomes, of the Moomoo, of the magic sword called Mouse, of the gnoles that caught Tonker, of the ancient Thuls, of the window that opened to the magic of the world, and of many other things which only the very young or the very wise care for.