One feature of the modern supernatural literature as distinguished from that of other periods, is in the matter of length. Of course, the ballad and the folk-tale expressed the ghostly in brief form, but the epic held the stage longer, while in Elizabethan times the drama was the preferred form as in the eighteenth century the Gothic novel. During the nineteenth century, particularly the latter half, the preference was decidedly for the short story, while more recently the one-act play has come into vogue. But in the last few years the supernatural novel seems to be returning to favor, though without displacing the shorter forms. Brevity has much to commend it as a vehicle for the uncanny. The effect of the ghostly may be attained with much more unity in a short story or playlet than in a novel or long drama, for in the more lengthy form much outside matter is necessarily included. The whole plot could scarcely be made up of the unearthly, for that would mean a weakening of power through exaggeration, though this is sometimes found to be the case, as in several of Bram Stoker’s novels. Recently the number of novels dealing with supernatural themes has noticeably increased, which leads one to believe that the occult is transcending even the limitations of length and claiming all forms for its own. Now no literary type bars the supernatural, which appears in the novel as in the story, in the drama as in the playlet, and in narrative, dramatic, and lyric poetry. Even the epic of the more than mortal has not entirely vanished, as the work of Dr. William Cleaver Wilkinson attests, but popular taste does not really run to epics nowadays. The ghostly is more often seen in the shorter forms, where brevity gives a chance for compression and intensity of force difficult in longer vehicles. The rise of the one-act play in popular favor is significant in this connection. The short dramas of Synge, Yeats, Lady Gregory, William Sharpe, Gordon Bottomley, and Theodore Dreiser show the possibilities of the playlet for weird effect. Maeterlinck’s plays for marionettes are especially powerful, but the work of Lord Dunsany furnishes more peculiar ghostliness than that of any other present dramatist. His jade idols, for instance, that wake to terrible life and revenge themselves on presumptuous mortals, are a new touch in dramatics. Algernon Blackwood is doing more significant work in psychic fiction than anyone else, his prose showing poetic beauty as well as eerie power.
Another significant fact to be noted in connection with the later ghostly stories as compared with the Gothic is in the greater number and variety of materials employed. The early religious plays had introduced devils, angels, and divinity to a considerable extent, while the Elizabethan drama relied for its thrills chiefly on the witch and the revenge-ghost. The Gothic romance was strong for the ghost, with one or two Wandering Jews, occasional werewolves and lycanthropes, and sporadic satanity, but made no use of angels or of divinity. The modern fiction, however, gathers up all of these personages and puts them into service freely. In addition to these old themes brought up to date and varied astonishingly, the new fiction has adapted other types. The scientific supernaturalism is practically new—save for the Gothic employment of alchemy and astrology—and now all the discoveries and investigations of the laboratory are utilized and embued with supernaturalism. Diabolic botany, psychological chemistry, and supermortal biology appear in recent fiction. The countless arts and sciences, acoustics, optics, dietetics, and what-not are levied on for plots, while astronomy shows us wonders the astrologer never dreamed of. The stars knew their place and kept it in early romance, but they are given to strange aberration and unaccountable conduct in late narration.
The futuristic fiction gives us return trips into time to come, while we may be transported into the far past, as with Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee that visits King Arthur’s Court. The extent to which a homespun realist like Mark Twain uses the supernatural is significant. No province or small corner of science has failed to furnish material for the new ghostly fiction, and even the Fourth and Fifth Dimensions are brought in as plot complications. Microscopes are bewitched, mirrors are enchanted, and science reverses its own laws at will to suit the weird demands.
Another modern material is the mechanistic. This is the age of machinery, and even engines are run by ghost-power. Examples of the mechanical spook are legion. There is the haunted automobile in Harriet Prescott Spofford’s story, The Mad Lady, that reproduces through its speaking tube the long-dead voice, that runs away with its occupants, reliving previous tragic experiences. A phantom Ford is an idea combining romanticism with realism surely! In connection with this extraordinary car is a house that erects itself out of dreams and is substantial enough for living purposes. Other specimens are John Kendrick Bangs’s enchanted typewriter that clicks off psychograms in the dark, between midnight and three o’clock in the morning; Frank R. Stockton’s machine for negativing gravity; Poe’s balloon in which Hans Pfaal makes his magic trip to the moon; Wells’s new accelerator that condenses and intensifies vital energy, enabling a man to crowd the forces of a week into an hour of emergency, as likewise his time machine that permits the inventor to project himself into the future or the past at will, to spend a week-end in any era. The butterfly in Hawthorne’s story shows the spiritualization of machinery as the poor artist of the beautiful conceived it, the delicate toy imbibing a magnetism, a spiritual essence that gives it life and beauty and power of voluntary motion. This etherealized machinery is manifest in modern fiction as well as the diabolic constructions that wreck and ruin.
Inanimate objects have a strange power in later fiction as Poe’s ship that is said in certain seas to increase in size, as the trees told of by Algernon Blackwood that grow in the picture. There are various haunted portraits, as the picture of Dorian Gray that bears on its face the lines of sin the living face does not show, and whose hands are bloodstained when Dorian commits murder; and the painting told of in De Morgan’s A Likely Story, that overhears a quarrel between an artist and his wife, the woman wrongly suspecting her husband and leaving him. The picture relates the story to a man who has the painting photographed and a copy sent to the wife. There is the haunted tapestry[215] that is curiously related to the living and to the long dead.
Another aspect of the later as distinguished from the earlier occult literature is the attention paid to ghostly children. Youngsters are coming to the front of the stage everywhere nowadays, particularly in America, so it is but natural that they should demand to be heard as well as seen, in supernatural fiction. In the Gothic ghosts I found no individualized children, and children in groups only twice. In one of James Hogg’s short novels a vicious man is haunted on his death-bed by the specters of little ones dead because of him, but they are nameless and indistinguishable. In Maturin’s The Albigenses a relentless persecutor, while passing through a lonely forest, sees the phantoms of those he has done to death, little children and babes at the breast, as well as men and women. But here again they are not given separable character, but are merely group figures, hence do not count.
There is a ghost-child mentioned in Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance, but it is not until more recent fiction that children’s ghosts enter personated and individualized. The exquisitely shy little ones in Kipling’s They are among the most wonderful of his child-creations, very human and lovable. In a war story,[216] he shows us the phantoms of several children whom the Germans have killed, natural youngsters with appealing childish attributes, especially the small boy with his pride in his first trousers. Arthur Machen[217] tells of a German soldier who has crucified a child against the church door and is driven to insanity by the baby spirit. Quiller-Couch[218] shows the specter of a little girl that returns at night to do housework for the living, visible only as two slender hands, who reminds us of the shepherd boy Richard Middleton tells of, who having died because of his drunken father’s neglect, comes back to help him tend the sheep. Algernon Blackwood relates the story of a little child who has been wont to pray for the unquiet ghost of Petavel, a wicked man who haunts his house. After the child is dead, the mother sees the little boy leading Petavel by the hand, and says, “He’s leading him into peace and safety. Perhaps that’s why God took him.”
Richard Middleton’s story of a little ghost-boy[219] is poignantly pathetic. The little chap comes back to play with his grieving sister, making his presence known by his gay feet dancing through the bracken, and his joyous imitations of an automobile’s chug-chug. Mary MacMillan speaks of the spirits of little children that are “out earlier at night than the older ghosts, you know, because they have to go to bed earlier, being so young.” Two very recent child ghosts are Wee Brown Elsbeth whom Frances Hodgson Burnett shows to us, the wraith of a little girl pitifully slain centuries ago by her father to save her from torture, who comes back to play with a living playmate; and the terrible revenge-ghost of the child slain by her stepfather, who comes back to cause his death, whom Ellen Glasgow describes.
The spirits of children that never were enter into the late stories, as in The Children, by Josephine Daskam Bacon, a story of confused paranoia and supernaturalism. A woman grieves over the children she never had till they assume personality and being for her. They become so real that they are finally seen by other children who wish to play with them. This reminds us of Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s imagined child, Miss Mehitabel’s son. Algernon Blackwood[220] shows us a multitude of baby spirits, with reaching arms, pattering steps, and lisping voices, spirits of the unborn that haunt childless women. The room which they enter seems sacred with the potentialities of motherhood, so that a man sleeping there sees his own dead mother return to him among the babes. These ghosts of little children that never were and never may be are like the spirits of the yet to be born children in Maeterlinck’s dream-drama,[221] where, in the Land of the Future, the child-souls wait for the angel to summon them to life. In these stories associating children with the ghostly there is always a tender pathos, a sad beauty that is appealing.