They actually die.
The one thing worth living for, in their estimation, is to gather a group of weeping relatives and the minister about their beds on a beautiful morning in June, and then pass serenely away, uttering sentiments of such lofty morality that even the minister feels abashed. The pet lamb, the hoop, the golden curls and the pantalettes, which had been their accessories during seven years in the mortal vale, are cheerfully left behind for the joy of this solemn moment.
There ought to be no dispute over the statement that one other old-fashioned fictitious character is badly missed.
This is the family ghost.
The modern substitute for the real thing is like offering a seat in a trolley car to someone who has been used to a sedan chair. The modern ghost is a ready-made product of a psychological laboratory, and you know that his Bertillon measurements are filed away in a card-catalogue somewhere.
The old ghost used to groan and clank chains, and leave gouts of blood (gouts always—never drops) all over the place.
Or, if it were a lady ghost, she sighed sweetly and slipped out of your bedroom window to the moonlit balcony.
You could get along with ghosts like either of them. You knew what they were up to.
But the ghost of contemporary fiction is as obscure as Henry James. He is a kind of disembodied idea; he never groans, nor clanks chains; and you cannot be sure whether he is a ghost, or a psychological suggestion, or a slight attack of malarial fever. In nothing is the degeneracy and effeminacy of our literature more apparent than in its anæmic ghosts. Hashimura Togo says that "when a Negro janitor sees a ghost, he are a superstition; but when a college professor sees one, he are a scientific phenomenon." When that point has been reached with real ghosts, what can be expected of the fictitious ones?