The necessity that knows no law, is the only real slave driver, as the sojourner in Eastern exile knows full well. No fetters ever gall so much, as the knowledge that the chain is made fast at the other end.
Footnotes:
[8] Diam! = Be still!
THE WERE-TIGER
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Soul that is dead ere life be sped, Body that's body of Beast, With brain of a man to dare and to plan, So make I ready my Feast! |
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With tooth and claw and grip of jaw I rip and tear and slay, With senses that hear the winds ere they stir, I roam to the dawn of day. |
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Soul that must languish in endless anguish, Thy life is a little spell, So take thy fill, ere the Pow'rs of Ill Shall drag Thee, Soul, to Hell. |
The Song of the Loup Garou.
If you ask that excellent body of savants the Society for Psychical Research, for an opinion on the subject, they will tell you that the belief in ghosts, magic, witchcraft, and the like having existed in all ages, and in every land, is in itself a fact sufficient to warrant a faith in these things, and to establish a strong probability of their reality. It is not for me, or such as I am, to question the opinion of these wise men of the West, but if ghosts, and phantoms, and witchcraft and hag-ridings are to be accepted on such grounds, I must be allowed to put in a plea, for similar reasons, in favour of the Loup Garou, the Were-Tiger, and all their gruesome family. Wherever there are wild beasts to prey upon the sons of men, there also is found the belief that the worst and most rapacious of the man-eaters are themselves human beings, who have been driven to temporarily assume the form of an animal, by the aid of the Black Art, in order to satisfy their overpowering lust for blood. This belief, which seeks to account for the extraordinary rapacity of an animal by tracing its origin to a human being, would seem to be based upon an extremely cynical appreciation of the blood-thirsty character of our race. The white man and the brown, the yellow and the black, independently, and without receiving the idea from one another, have all found the same explanation for the like phenomena, all apparently recognising the truth of the Malay proverb, that we are like unto the tôman fish that preys upon its own kind. This general opinion, which seems the more worthy of acceptance in that it is the reverse of flattering to the very races that have formed this curious estimate of their own unlovely character, might by the ignorant and vulgar be supposed to be the real basis of the belief of which I speak, were it not for that dictum of the Society for Psychical Research to which I have above referred. But bowing to this authority, we must accept the Loup Garou and all its kith and kin as stern realities, and not attribute it, as we might perhaps have been inclined to do, to a deadly fear of wild beasts, coupled to a thorough knowledge of the unpleasant qualities of primitive human nature.
Educated Europeans, who live in a land where even Nature, when she can be seen for the houses, has had man's hall-mark scarred deep into her face, are apt to think that the Age of Superstition has gone to fill the lumber-room of the past. Occasionally they are awakened from this belief by the torturing of a witch in a cabin by an Irish-bog; but even an event so near home as that is powerless to altogether disabuse their minds of their preconceived opinion. The difficulty really is, that they cannot get completely rid of the notion that the world is peopled by educated Europeans like themselves, and by a few other unimportant persons, who do not matter. They know that, numerically, they are as but a drop in the ocean of mankind, but it is possible to know a thing very thoroughly and to realise it not at all. Thus they come by their false opinion; for, in truth, the Age of Superstition lives as lustily to-day, as when, in past years, witches blazed at Smithfield, or died with rending gulps and bursting lungs, lashed fast to an English ducking stool.