LETTER IV.
True Ghosts.—The apparitions themselves always sensorial illusions—The truth of their communications accounted for—Zschokke’s Seer-gift described, to show the possibility of direct mental communication—Second-sight—The true relation of the mind to the living body.
The worst of a true ghost is, that, to be sure of his genuineness—that is, of his veracity—one must wait the event. He is distinguished by no sensible and positive characteristics from the commoner herd. There is nothing in his outward appearance to raise him in your opinion above a fetch. But even this fact is not barren. His dress,—it is in the ordinary mode of the time, in nothing overdone. To be dressed thus does credit to his taste, as to be dressed at all evinces his sense of propriety; but alas! the same elements convict him of objective unreality. Whence come that aerial coat and waistcoat, whence those visionary trousers?—alas! they can only have issued from the wardrobe in the seer’s fancy. And, like his dress, the wearer is imaginary, a mere sensorial illusion, without a shadow of externality; he is not more substantial than a dream.
But dreams have differences of quality no less than ghosts. All do not come through the ivory gate. Some are true and significant enough. See, there glides one skulking assassin-like into the shade,—he not long since killed his man; “Hilloa, ill-favoured Dream! come hither and give an account of yourself.” (Enter Dream.)
A Scottish gentleman and his wife were travelling four or five years ago in Switzerland. There travelled with them a third party, an intimate friend, a lady, who some time before had been the object of a deep attachment on the part of a foreigner, a Frenchman. Well, she would have nothing to say to him on the topic uppermost in his mind, but she gave him a good deal of serious advice, which she probably thought he wanted; and she ultimately promoted, or was a cognizant party to, his union with a lady whom she likewise knew. The so-married couple were now in America; and the lady occasionally heard from them, and had every reason to believe they were both in perfect health. One morning, on their meeting at breakfast, she told her companions that she had had a very impressive dream the night before, which had recurred twice. The scene was a room in which lay a coffin; near to it stood her ex-lover in a luminous transfigured resplendent state; his wife was by, looking much as usual. The dream had caused the lady some misgivings, but her companions exhorted her to view it as a trick of her fancy, and she was half persuaded so to do. The dream, however, was right, notwithstanding. In process of time, letters arrived announcing the death, after a short illness, of the French gentleman, within the twenty-four hours in which the vision appeared. (Sensation—applause, followed by cries of Shame; the Dream, hurrying away, is hurt by the horn of the gate.)
It would be difficult to persuade the lady who dreamed this dream that there was no connexion between it and the event it foreshadowed in her mind beyond the accidental coincidence of time. Nevertheless, to this conclusion an indifferent auditor would probably come; and upon the following reasoning: We sometimes dream of the death of an absent friend when he is alive and in health, just as we sometimes dream that long-lost friends are alive. And it is quite possible—nay, likely to occur in the chapter of accidents—nay, certain to turn up now and then among the dreams of millions during centuries—that a fortuitous dream, seemingly referring to the fact, should be coincident in point of time with the death of a distant friend. To explain one such case, we need look no further than to the operation of chance. Why, then, ever seek another principle?
Let us examine a parallel ghost-story. A gentleman has a relative in India, healthy, of good constitution, in the civil service, prosperous: he has no cause for anxiety, and entertains none, respecting his relative. But one day he sees his ghost. In due course letters arrive mentioning the occurrence of his relative’s death on that day. The case is more remarkable than the last; for the ghost-seer never in his life but that once experienced a sensorial illusion. Still, it is evidently possible that the two events were, through chance alone, coincident in time. And if in this case, why not in another?
Then let me adduce a more remarkable instance: A late General Wynyard, and the late General Sir John Sherbroke, when young men, were serving in Canada. One day—it was daylight—Mr. Wynyard and Mr. Sherbroke both saw pass through the room where they sat a figure, which Mr. Wynyard recognised as a brother then far away. One of the two walked to the door, and looked out upon the landing-place, but the stranger was not there; and a servant who was on the stairs had seen nobody pass out. In time news arrived that Mr. Wynyard’s brother had died about the time of the visit of the apparition.
I have had opportunities of inquiring of two near relations of this General Wynyard upon what evidence the above story rests. They told me they had each heard it from his own mouth. More recently, a gentleman, whose accuracy of recollection exceeds that of most people, has told me that he had heard the late Sir John Sherbroke, the other party in the ghost-story, tell it much in the same way at a dinner-table.
One does not feel as comfortably satisfied that the complicated coincidences in this tale admit of being referred to chance. The odds are enormous against two persons—young men in perfect health, neither of whom before or after this event experienced a sensorial illusion—being the subjects at the same moment of one, their common and only one, which concurred in point of time with an event that it foreshadowed, unless there were some real connexion between the event and the double apparition. And we feel a nascent inclination to inquire whether—in case such instances as the present occasionally recur, and instances like the two before narrated become, when looked for, startlingly multiplied—there exists any known mental or physical principle, by the help of which they may be explained into natural phenomena.