Note: The cover of this book was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain. A more extensive [transcriber’s note] can be found at the end of this book.

The
Supernatural in Modern
English Fiction

By
Dorothy Scarborough, Ph.D.
Instructor in English in Extension, Columbia University

G. P. Putnam’s Sons
New York and London
The Knickerbocker Press
1917

Copyright, 1917
by
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

The Knickerbocker Press, New York

To
GEORGE AND ANNE SCARBOROUGH

PREFACE

The subject of the supernatural in modern English fiction has been found difficult to deal with because of its wealth of material. While there has been no previous book on the topic, and none related to it, save Mr. C. E. Whitmore’s work on The Supernatural in Tragedy, the mass of fiction itself introducing ghostly or psychic motifs is simply enormous. It is manifestly impossible to discuss, or even to mention, all of it. Even in my bibliography which numbers over three thousand titles, I have made no effort to list all the available examples of the type. The bibliography, which I at first intended to publish in connection with this volume, is far too voluminous to be included here, so will probably be brought out later by itself.

It would have been impossible for me to prosecute the research work or to write the book save for the assistance generously given by many persons. I am indebted to the various officials of the libraries of Columbia University and of New York City, particularly to Miss Isadore Mudge, Reference Librarian of Columbia, and to the authorities of the New York Society Library for permission to use their priceless out-of-print novels in the Kennedy Collection. My interest in English fiction was increased during my attendance on some courses in the history of the English novel, given by Dr. A. J. Carlyle, in Oxford University, England, several years ago. I have received helpful bibliographical suggestions from Professor Blanche Colton Williams, Dr. Dorothy Brewster, Professor Nelson Glenn McCrea, Professor John Cunliffe, and Dean Talcott Williams, of Columbia, and Professor G. L. Kittredge, of Harvard. Professors William P. Trent, George Philip Krapp, and Ernest Hunter Wright very kindly read the book in manuscript and gave valuable advice concerning it, Professor Wright going over the material with me in detail. But my chief debt of gratitude is to Professor Ashley H. Thorndike, Head of the Department of English and Comparative Literature in Columbia, whose stimulating criticism and kindly encouragement have made the book possible. To all of these—and others—who have aided me, I am deeply grateful, and I only wish that the published volume were more worthy of their assistance.

D. S.

Columbia University,
April, 1917.

CONTENTS

The
Supernatural in Modern
English Fiction

INTRODUCTION

The supernatural is an ever-present force in literature. It colors our poetry, shapes our epics and dramas, and fashions our prose till we are so wonted to it that we lose sense of its wonder and magic. If all the elements of the unearthly were removed from our books, how shrunken in value would seem the residue, how forlorn our feelings! Lafcadio Hearn in the recently published volume, Interpretations of Literature, says:

There is scarcely any great author in European literature, old or new, who has not distinguished himself in his treatment of the supernatural. In English literature I believe there is no exception from the time of the Anglo-Saxon poets to Shakespeare, and from Shakespeare to our own day. And this introduces us to the consideration of a general and remarkable fact, a fact that I do not remember to have seen in any books, but which is of very great philosophical importance: there is something ghostly in all great art, whether of literature, music, sculpture, or architecture. It touches something within us that relates to infinity.[1]

This continuing presence of the weird in literature shows the popular demand for it and must have some basis in human psychosis. The night side of the soul attracts us all. The spirit feeds on mystery. It lives not by fact alone but by the unknowable, and there is no highest mystery without the supernatural. Man loves the frozen touch of fear, and realizes pure terror only when touched by the unmortal. The hint of spectral sounds or presences quickens the imagination as no other suggestion can do, and no human shapes of fear can awe the soul as those from beyond the grave. Man’s varying moods create heaven, hell, and faery wonder-lands for him, and people them with strange beings.

Man loves the supernatural elements in literature perhaps because they dignify him by giving his existence a feeling of infinity otherwise denied. They grant him a sense of being the center of powers more than earthly, of conflicts supermortal. His own material life may be however circumscribed and trivial yet he can loose his fancy and escape the petty tragedies of his days by flight beyond the stars. He can widen the tents of his mortal life, create a universe for his companionship, and marshal the forces of demons and unknown gods for his commands. To his narrow rut he can join the unspaced firmament; to his trivial hours add eternity; to his finite, infinity. He is so greedy of power, and has so piteously little that he must look for his larger life in dreams and in the literature of the supernatural.

But, whatever be the reasons, there has been a continuity of the ghostly in literature, with certain rise and fall of interest. There is in modern English fiction, as likewise in poetry and the drama, a great extent of the supernatural, with wide diversity of elements. Beginning with the Gothic romance, that curious architectural excrescence that yet has had enormous influence on our novel, the supernatural is found in every period and in every form of fiction. The unearthly beings meet us in all guises, and answer our every mood, whether it be serious or awed, satiric or humoresque.

Literature, always a little ahead of life, has formed our beliefs for us, made us free with spirits, and given us entrance to immortal countries. The sense of the unearthly is ever with us, even in the most commonplace situations,—and there is nothing so natural to us as the supernatural. Our imagination, colored by our reading, reveals and transforms the world we live in. We are aware of unbodied emotions about us, of discarnate moods that mock or invite us. We go a-ghosting now in public places, and a specter may glide up to give us an apologia pro vita sua any day in Grand Central or on Main Street of Our-Town. We chat with fetches across the garden fence and pass the time of day with demons by way of the dumb-waiter. That gray-furred creature that glooms suddenly before us in the winter street is not a chauffeur, but a were-wolf questing for his prey. Yon whirring thing in the far blue is not an aeroplane but a hippogriff that will presently alight on the pavement beside us with thundering golden hoofs to bear us away to distant lovely lands where we shall be untroubled by the price of butter or the articles lost in last week’s wash. That sedate middle-aged ferry that transports us from Staten Island is a magic Sending Boat if only we knew its potent runes! The old woman with the too-pink cheeks and glittering eye, that presses August bargains upon us with the argument that they will be in style for early fall wear, is a witch wishful to lure away our souls. We may pass at will by the guardian of the narrow gate and traverse the regions of the Under-world. True, the materialist may argue that the actual is more marvelous than the imagined, that the aeroplane is more a thing of wonder than was the hippogriff, that the ferry is really the enchanted boat, after all, and that Dante would write a new Inferno if he could see the subway at the rush hour, but that is another issue.

We might have more psychal experiences than we do if we would only keep our eyes open, but most of us do have more than we admit to the neighbors. We have an early-Victorian reticence concerning ghostly things as if it were scandalous to be associated with them. But that is all wrong. We should be proud of being singled out for spectral confidences and should report our ghost-guests to the society columns of the newspaper. It is hoped that this discussion of comparative ghost-lore may help to establish a better sense of values.

In this book I deal with ghosts and devils by and large, in an impressionistic way. I don’t know much about them; I have no learned theories of causation. I only love them. I only marvel at their infinite variety and am touched by their humanity, their likeness to mortals. I am fond of them all, even the dejected, dog-eared ghosts that look as if they were wraiths of poor relations left out in the rain all night, or devils whose own mothers wouldn’t care for them. It gives me no holier-than-thou feeling of horror to sit beside a vampire in the subway, no panic to hear a banshee shut up in a hurdy-gurdy box. I give a cordial how-do-you-do when a dragon glides up and puts his paw in mine, and in every stray dog I recognize a Gladsome Beast. Like us mortals, they all need sympathy, none more so than the poor wizards and bogles that are on their own, as the Scotch say.

While discussing the nineteenth century as a whole, I have devoted more attention to the fiction of the supernatural in the last thirty years or so, because there has been much more of it in that time than before. There is now more interest in the occult, more literature produced dealing with psychal powers than ever before in our history. It is apparent in poetry, in the drama, the novel, and the short story. I have not attempted, even in my bibliography, to include all the fiction of the type, since that would be manifestly impossible. I have, however, mentioned specimens of the various forms, and have listed the more important examples. The treatment here is meant to be suggestive rather than exhaustive and seeks to show that there is a genuine revival of wonder in our time, with certain changes in the characterization of supernatural beings. It includes not only the themes that are strictly supernatural, but also those which, formerly considered unearthly, carry on the traditions of the magical. Much of our material of the weird has been rationalized, yet without losing its effect of wonder for us in fact or in fiction. If now we study a science where once men believed blindly in a Black Art, is the result really less mysterious?

CHAPTER I
The Gothic Romance

The real precursor of supernaturalism in modern English literature was the Gothic novel. That odd form might be called a brief in behalf of banished romance, since it voiced a protest against the excess of rationalism and realism in the early eighteenth century. Too great correctness and restraint must always result in proportionate liberty. As the eternal swing of the pendulum of literary history, the ebb and flow of fiction inevitably bring a reaction against any extreme, so it was with the fiction of the period. The mysterious twilights of medievalism invited eyes tired of the noonday glare of Augustan formalism. The natural had become familiar to monotony, hence men craved the supernatural. And so the Gothic novel came into being. Gothic is here used to designate the eighteenth-century novel of terror dealing with medieval materials.

There had been some use of the weird in English fiction before Horace Walpole, but the terror novel proper is generally conceded to begin with his Romantic curiosity, The Castle of Otranto. The Gothic novel marks a distinct change in the form of literature in which supernaturalism manifests itself. Heretofore the supernatural elements have appeared in the drama, in the epic, in ballads and other poetry, and in folk-tales, but not noticeably in the novel. Now, however, for a considerable time the ghostly themes are most prominent in lengthy fiction, contrasted with the short story which later is to supersede it as a vehicle for the weird. This vacillation of form is a distinct and interesting aspect of the development of supernaturalism in literature and will be discussed later.

With this change in form comes a corresponding change in the materials of ghostly narration. Poetry in general in all times has freely used the various elements of supernaturalism. The epic has certain distinct themes, such as visits to the lower world, visions of heaven, and conflict between mortal and divine powers, and brings in mythological characters, gods, goddesses, demigods, and the like. Fate is a moving figure in the older dramas, while the liturgical plays introduced devils, angels, and even the Deity as characters in the action. In the classical and Elizabethan drama we see ghosts, witches, magicians, as dramatis personæ. Medieval romances, prose as well as metrical and alliterative, chansons de geste, lais, and so forth, drew considerably on the supernatural for complicating material in various forms, and undoubtedly much of our present element comes from medievalism. Tales of the Celtic Otherworld, of fairy-lore, of magic, so popular in early romance, show a strong revival to-day.

The Gothic novel is more closely related to the drama than to the epic or to such poetry as The Faerie Queene or Comus. On the other hand, the later novels and stories, while less influenced by the dramatic tradition, show more of the epic trace than does the Gothic romance. The epic tours through heaven and hell, the lavish use of angels, devils, and even of Deity, the introduction of mythological characters and figures which are not seen in Gothic fiction, appear to a considerable extent in the stories of recent times. In Gothicism we find that the Deity disappears though the devil remains. There are no vampires, so far as I have been able to find, though the were-wolf and the lycanthrope appear, which were absent from the drama (save in The Duchess of Malfi). Other elements are seen, such as the beginnings of the scientific supernaturalism which is to become so prominent in later times. The Wandering Jew comes in and the elixir of life and the philosopher’s stone achieve importance. Mechanical supernaturalism and the uncanny power given to inanimate objects seem to have their origins here, to be greatly developed further on. Supernaturalism associated with animals, related both to the mythological stories of the past and to the more horrific aspects of later fiction, are noted in the terror romance.

Allegory and symbolism are present in a slight degree, as in Melmoth and Vathek’s Hall of Eblis, though not emphasized as in more modern literature. Humor is largely lacking in the Gothic romance, save as the writers furnish it unintentionally. In Gothicism itself we have practically no satire, though Jane Austen and Barrett satirize the terror novel itself in delicious burlesques that laugh it out of court.

Elements of Gothicism.

In the terror tale the relationship between supernatural effect and Gothic architecture, scenery, and weather is strongly stressed. Everything is ordered to fit the Gothic plan, and the conformity becomes in time conventionally monotonous. Horace Walpole, the father of the terror novel, had a fad for medievalism, and he expressed his enthusiasm in that extraordinary building at Strawberry Hill, courteously called a Gothic castle. From a study of Gothic architecture was but a step to the writing of romance that should reproduce the mysteries of feudal times, for the shadows of ancient, gloomy castles and cloisters suggested the shades of ghost-haunted fiction, of morbid terrors. The Castle of Otranto was the outcome of a dream suggested by the author’s thinking about medieval structures.

The Gothic castle itself is represented as possessing all the antique glooms that increase the effect of mystery and awe, and its secret passage-ways, its underground vaults and dungeons, its trap-doors, its mouldy, spectral chapel, form a fit setting for the unearthly visitants that haunt it. A feudal hall is the suitable domicile for ghosts and other supernatural revenants, and the horrific romance throughout shows a close kinship with its architecture. The novels of the class invariably lay their scenes in medieval buildings, a castle, a convent, a monastery, a château or abbey, or an inquisitional prison. The harassed heroine is forever wandering through midnight corridors of Gothic structure. And indeed, the opportunity for unearthly phenomena is much more spacious in the vast piles of antiquity than in our bungalows or apartment-houses.

Mrs. Radcliffe erected many ruinous structures in fiction. Her Mysteries of Udolpho shows a castle, a convent, a château, all Gothic in terror and gloomy secrets, with rooms hung with rotting tapestry, or wainscoted with black larch-wood, with furniture dust-covered and dropping to pieces from age, with palls of black velvet waving in the ghostly winds. In other romances she depicts decaying castles with treacherous stairways leading to mysterious rooms, halls of black marble, and vaults whose great rusty keys groan in the locks. One heroine says:[2] “When I entered the portals of this Gothic structure a chill—surely prophetic—chilled my veins, pressed upon my heart, and scarcely allowed me to breathe.”

The Ancient Records of the Abbey of St. Oswyth[3] says of its setting: “The damp, cold, awe-inspiring hall seemed to conjure up ten thousand superstitious horrors and terrific imaginary apparitions.” In Maturin’s Albigenses the knights assemble round the great fire in the baronial hall and tell ghost tales while the storm rages outside. In Melmoth, the Wanderer the scene changes often, yet it is always Gothic and terrible,—the monastery with its diabolical punishments, the ancient castle, the ruined abbey by which the wanderer celebrates his marriage at midnight with a dead priest for the celebrant, the madhouse, the inquisition cells, which add gloom and horror to the supernatural incidents and characters. In Zofloya,[4] the maiden is imprisoned in an underground cave similar to that boasted by other castles. This novel is significant because of the freedom with which Shelley appropriated its material for his Zastrozzi, which likewise has the true Gothic setting. In Shelley’s other romance he erects the same structure and has the devil meet his victim by the desolate, dear old Gothic abbey.

Regina Maria Roche wrote a number of novels built up with crumbling castles, awesome abbeys, and donjon-keeps whose titles show the architectural fiction that dominates them. A list of the names of the Gothic novels will serve to show the general importance laid on antique setting. In fact, the castle, abbey, monastery, château, convent, or inquisition prison occupied such an important place in the story that it seemed the leading character. It dominated the events and was a malignant personality, that laid its spell upon those within its bounds. It shows something of the character that Hawthorne finally gives to his house of seven gables, or the brooding, relentless power of the sea in Synge’s drama.[5] The ancient castle becomes not merely haunted itself but is the haunter as well.

Not only is architecture made subservient to the needs of Gothic fiction, but the scenery likewise is adapted to fit it. Before Mrs. Radcliffe wrote her stories interlarded with nature descriptions, scant notice had been paid to scenery in the novel. But she set the style for morose landscapes as Walpole had for glooming castles, and the succeeding romances of the genre combined both features. Mrs. Radcliffe was not at all hampered by the fact that she had never laid eyes on the scenes she so vividly pictures. She painted the dread scenery of awesome mountains and forests, beetling crags and dizzy abysses with fluent and fervent adjectives, and her successors imitated her in sketching nature with dark impressionism.

The scenery in general in the Gothic novel is always subjectively represented. Nature in itself and of itself is not the important thing. What the writer seeks to do is by descriptions of the outer world to emphasize the mental states of man, to reflect the moods of the characters, and to show a fitting background for their crimes and unearthly experiences. There is little of the light of day, of the cheerfulness of ordinary nature, but only the scenes and phenomena that are in harmony with the glooms of crimes and sufferings.

Like the scenery, the weather in the Gothic novel is always subjectively treated. There is ever an artistic harmony between man’s moods and the atmospheric conditions. The play of lightning, supernatural thunders, roaring tempests announce the approach and operations of the devil, and ghosts walk to the accompaniment of presaging tempests. In The Albigenses the winds are diabolically possessed and laugh fiendishly instead of moaning as they do as seneschals in most romances of terror. The storms usually take place at midnight, and there is rarely a peaceful night in Gothic fiction. The stroke of twelve generally witnesses some uproar of nature as some appearance of restless spirit. Whenever the heroines in Mrs. Radcliffe’s tales start on their midnight ramble through subterranean passages and halls of horror, the barometer becomes agitated. And another[6] says: “The storm, that at that moment was tremendous, could not equal that tempest which passed in the thoughts of the unhappy captive.”

In Zofloya Victoria’s meetings in the forest with the Moor, who is really the devil in disguise, are accompanied by supernatural manifestations of nature. The weather is ordered to suit the dark, unholy plots they make, and they plan murders against a background of black clouds, hellish thunder, and lurid lightning. When at last the Moor announces himself as the devil and hurls Victoria from the mountain top, a sympathetic storm arises and a flood sweeps her body into the river. This scene is accusingly like the one in the last chapter of Lewis’s Monk, where the devil throws Ambrosio from the cliff to the river’s brink.

Instantly a violent storm arose; the winds in fury rent up rocks and forests; the sky was now black with clouds, now sheeted with fire; the rain fell in torrents; it swelled the stream, the waves over-flowed their banks; they reached the spot where Ambrosio lay, and, when they abated, carried with them into the river the corse of the despairing monk.

No Gothic writer shows more power of harmonizing the tempests of the soul with the outer storms than does Charles Robert Maturin.[7] As Melmoth, doomed to dreadful life till he can find some tortured soul willing to exchange destinies with him, traverses the earth in his search, the preternatural aspects of weather both reflect and mock his despair. As the young nephew alone at midnight after his uncle’s death reads the fated manuscript, “cloud after cloud comes sweeping on like the dark banners of an approaching host whose march is for destruction.” Other references may illustrate the motif. “Clouds go portentously off like ships of war ... to return with added strength and fury.” “The dark and heavy thunder-clouds that advance slowly seem like the shrouds of specters of departed greatness. Peals of thunder sounded, every peal like the exhausted murmurs of a spent heart.”

In general, in the Gothic novel there is a decided and definite attempt to use the terrible forces of nature to reflect the dark passions of man, with added suggestiveness where supernatural agencies are at work in the events. This becomes a distinct convention, used with varying effectiveness. Nowhere in the fiction of the period is there the power such as Shakespeare reveals, as where Lear wanders on the heath in the pitiless clutch of the storm, with a more tragic tempest in his soul. Yet, although the idea of the inter-relation of the passions of man and nature is not original with the Gothicists, and though they show little of the inevitability of genius, they add greatly to their supernatural effect by this method. Later fiction is less barometric as less architectural than the Gothic.

The Origin of Individual Gothic Tales.

The psychological origin of the individual Gothic romances is interesting to note. Supernaturalism was probably more generally believed in then than now, and people were more given to the telling of ghost stories and all the folk-tales of terror than at the present time. One reason for this may be that they had more leisure; and their great open fires were more conducive to the retailing of romances of shudders than our unsocial steam radiators. The eighteenth century seemed frankly to enjoy the pleasures of fear, and the rise of the Gothic novel gave rein to this natural love for the uncanny and the gruesome.

Dreams played an important part in the inspiration of the tales of terror. The initial romance was, as the author tells us, the result of an architectural nightmare. Walpole says in a letter:

Shall I even confess to you what was the origin of this romance? I waked one morning from a dream, of which all that I could recall was that I had thought myself in an ancient castle (a very natural dream for a head filled like mine with Gothic story) and that at the uppermost banister of a great staircase I saw a gigantic hand in armor. In the evening I sat down and began to write, without knowing in the least what I intended to say or relate. The work grew on my hands.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was likewise born of a dream. “Monk” Lewis had interested Byron, Polidori, and the Shelleys in supernatural tales so much so that after a fireside recital of German terror stories Byron proposed that each member of the group should write a ghostly romance to be compared with the compositions of the others. The results were negligible save Frankenstein, and it is said that Byron was much annoyed that a mere girl should excel him. At first Mrs. Shelley was unable to hit upon a plot, but one evening after hearing a discussion of Erasmus Darwin’s attempts to create life by laboratory experiments, she had an idea in a half waking dream. She says:

I saw—with shut eyes but acute mental vision—I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life.... The artist sleeps but he is awakened; and behold, the horrid thing stands at his bedside, looking on him with watery, yellow yet speculative eyes!

And from this she wrote her story of the man-monster.

The relation of dreams to the uncanny tale is interesting. Dreams and visions, revelatory of the past and prophetic of the future, played an important part in the drama (as they are now widely used in motion-picture scenarios) and the Gothic novel continues the tradition. It would be impossible to discover in how many instances the authors were subconsciously influenced in their choice of material by dreams. The presaging dreams and visions attributed to supernatural agency appear frequently in Gothic fiction. The close relation between dreams and second sight in the terror novel might form an interesting by-path for investigation. Dream-supernaturalism becomes even more prominent in later fiction and contributes passages of extraordinary power of which De Quincey’s Dream-Fugue may be mentioned as an example.

The germinal idea for Melmoth, the Wanderer was contained in a paragraph from one of the author’s own sermons, which suggested a theme for the story of a doomed, fate-pursued soul.

At this moment is there one of us present, however we may have departed from the Lord, disobeyed His will, and disregarded His word—is there one of us who would, at this moment, accept all that man could bestow or earth could afford, to resign the hope of his salvation? No, there is not one—not such a fool on earth were the enemy of mankind to traverse it with the offer!

True, the theme of such devil-pact had appeared in folk-tales and in the drama previously, notably in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, but Maturin here gives the idea a dramatic twist and psychologic poignancy by making a human being the one to seek to buy another’s soul to save his own. A mortal, cursed with physical immortality, ceaselessly harried across the world by the hounds of fate, forever forced by an irresistible urge to make his impitiable offer to tormented souls, and always meeting a tragic refusal, offers dramatic possibilities of a high order and Maturin’s story has a dreadful power.

Clara Reeve’s avowed purpose in writing The Old English Baron was to produce a ghost story that should be more probable and realistic than Walpole’s. She stated that her book was the literary offspring of the earlier romance, though Walpole disclaimed the paternity. She deplored the violence of the supernatural machinery that tended to defeat its own impressiveness and wished to avoid that danger in her work, though she announced: “We can conceive and allow for the appearance of a ghost.” Her prim recipe for Romantic fiction required, “a certain degree of the marvelous to excite the attention; enough of the manners of real life to give an air of probability to the work; and enough of the pathetic to engage the heart in its behalf.” But her ingredients did not mix well and the result was rather indigestible though devoured by hungry readers of her time.

Mrs. Anne Radcliffe, that energetic manipulator of Gothic enginery, wrote because she had time that was wasting on her hands,—which may be an explanation for other and later literary attempts. Her journalist husband was away till late at night, so while sitting up for him she wrote frightful stories to keep herself from being scared. During that waiting loneliness she doubtless experienced all those nervous terrors that she describes as being undergone by her palpitating maidens, whose emotional anguish is suffered in midnight wanderings through subterranean passages and ghosted apartments. There is one report that she went mad from over-much brooding on mormo, but that is generally discredited.

Matthew Gregory Lewis was impelled to write The Monk by reading the romances of Walpole and Mrs. Radcliffe, together with Schiller’s Robbers, which triple influence is discernible in his lurid tale. He defended the indecency of his book by asserting that he took the plot from a story in The Guardian,[8] ingeniously intimating that plagiarized immorality is less reprehensible than original material. Shelley, in his turn, was so strongly impressed by Lewis’s Monk, and Mrs. Dacre’s Zofloya in writing his Zastrozzi, and by William Godwin’s St. Leon in his St. Irvyne, or The Rosicrucian, that the adaptation amounts to actual plagiarism. Even the titles show imitation. In writing to Godwin, Shelley said he was “in a state of intellectual sickness” when he wrote these stories, and no one who is familiar with the productions will contradict him in the matter.

The influence of the crude scientific thought and investigation of the eighteenth century is apparent in the Gothic novels. Frankenstein, as we have seen, was the outcome of a Romantic, Darwinian dream, and novels by Godwin, Shelley, and Maturin deal with the theme of the elixir of life. William Beckford’s Vathek has to do with alchemy, sorcery, and other phases of supernatural science. Zofloya, Mrs. Dacre’s diabolical Moor, performs experiments in hypnotism, telepathy, sorcery, and satanic chemistry. And so in a number of the imitative and less known novels of the genre science plays a part in furnishing the material. There is much interest in the study of the relation of science to the literature of supernaturalism in the various periods and the discoveries of modern times as furnishing plot material. The Gothic contribution to this form of ghostly fiction is significant, though slight in comparison with later developments.

The Gothic Ghosts.

The Ghost is the real hero or heroine of the Gothic novel. The merely human characters become for the reader colorless and dull the moment a specter glides up and indicates a willingness to relate the story of his life. The continuing popularity of the shade in literature may be due to the fact that humanity finds fear one of the most pleasurable of emotions and truly enjoys vicarious horrors, or it may be due to a childish delight in the sensational. At all events, the ghost haunts the pages of terror fiction, and the trail of the supernatural is over them all. In addition to its association with ancient superstitions, survivals of animistic ideas in primitive culture, we may see the classical and Elizabethan influence in the Gothic specter. The prologue-ghost, naturally, is not needed in fiction, but the revenge-ghost is as prominent as ever. The ghost as a dramatic personage, his talkativeness, his share in the action, reflect the dramatic tradition, with a strong Senecan touch. The Gothic phantoms have not the power of Shakespeare’s apparitions, nothing approaching the psychologic subtlety of Hamlet or Julius Cæsar or the horrific suggestiveness of Macbeth, yet they are related to them and are not altogether poor. Though imitative of the dramatic ghosts they have certain characteristics peculiar to themselves and are greatly worth consideration in a study of literary supernaturalism.

There are several clearly marked classes of ghosts in Gothicism. There is the real ghost that anybody can pin faith to; there is the imagined apparition that is only a figment of hysterical fear or of a guilty conscience; and there is the deliberate hoax specter. There are ghosts that come only when called,—sometimes the castle dungeons have to be paged for retiring shades; others appear of their own free will. Some have a local habitation and a name and haunt only their own proper premises, while others have the wanderlust. There are innocent spirits returning to reveal the circumstances of their violent demise and to ask Christian burial; we meet guilty souls sent back to do penance for their sins in the place of their commission; and there are revenge ghosts of multiple variety. There are specters that yield to prayers and strong-minded shades that resist exorcism. It is difficult to classify them, for the lines cross inextricably.

The genealogical founder of the family of Gothic ghosts is the giant apparition in The Castle of Otranto. He heralds his coming by an enormous helmet, a hundred times larger than life size, which crashes into the hall, and a sword which requires a hundred men to bear it in. The ghost himself appears in sections. We first see a Brobdignagian foot and leg, with no body, then a few chapters later an enormous hand to match. In the last scene he assembles his parts, after the fashion of an automobile demonstration, supplies the limbs that are lacking and stands forth as an imposing and portentous shade. After receiving Alfonso’s specter—Alfonso will be remembered as the famous statue afflicted with the nose-bleed—he “is wrapt from mortal eyes in a blaze of glory.” That seems singular, considering the weighty material of which he and his armor are made. There is another interesting specter in the castle, the monk who is seen kneeling in prayer in the gloomy chapel and who, “turning slowly round discovers to Frederick the fleshless jaws and empty sockets of a skeleton wrapped in a hermit’s cowl.”

Clara Reeve’s young peasant in The Old English Baron, the unrecognized heir to the estate, who is spending a night in the haunted apartment, sees two apparitions, one a woman and the other a gentleman in armor though not of such appalling size as the revenant in Otranto. The two announce themselves as his long-lost parents and vanish after he is estated and suitably wed. Mrs. Radcliffe[9] introduces the shade of a murdered knight, a chatty personage who haunts a baronial hall full of men, and at another time engages in a tournament, slaying his opponent.

Mrs. Bonhote[10] shows us a migratory ghost of whom the old servant complains in vexation:

Only think, Miss, of a ghost that should be at home minding its own business at the Baron’s own castle, taking the trouble to follow him here on special business it has to communicate! However, travelling three or four hundred miles is nothing to a ghost that can, as I have heard, go at the rate of a thousand miles a minute on land or sea.

In this romance the baron goes to visit the vault and has curdling experiences.

“A deep groan issues from the coffin and a voice exclaims, ‘You hurt me! Forbear or you will crush my bones to powder!’” He knocks the coffin in pieces, whereupon the vocal bones demand decent burial and his departure from the castle. Later the baron sees the ghost of his first wife, who objects to his making a third matrimonial venture, though she has apparently conceded the second. In the same story a young woman’s spook pursues one Thomas, almost stamping on his heels, and finally vanishing like a sky-rocket, leaving an odor of brimstone behind. A specter rises from a well in The History of Jack Smith, or the Castle of Saint Donats,[11] and shakes its hoary head at a group of men who fire pistols at it.

The Castle of Caithness[12] shows a murdered father indicating his wounds to his son and demanding vengeance. An armored revenge ghost appears in Count Roderick’s Castle, or Gothic Times, an anonymous Philadelphia novel, telling his son the manner of his murder, and scaring the king, who has killed him, to madness. The revenge ghosts in the Gothic do not cry “Vindicta!” as frequently as in the early drama, but they are as relentless in their hate. In Ancient Records, or The Abbey of St. Oswyth,[13] the spirit of a nun who has been wronged and buried alive by the wicked baron returns with silent, tormenting reproach. She stands beside him at midnight, with her dead infant on her breast.

Suddenly the eyes of the specter become animated. Oh!—then what flashes of appalling anger dart from their hollow orbits on the horror-stricken Vortimer! Three dreadful shrieks ring pealing through the chamber now filled with a blaze of sulphurous light. The specter suddenly becomes invisible and the baron falls senseless on his couch.

Scant wonder! In the same story Rosaline, the distressed heroine, is about to wed against her will, when a specter appears and forbids the bans. Again, Gondemar has a dagger at her throat with wicked intent, when a spook “lifts up his hollow, sunken countenance and beckons with angry gestures for his departure.” Gondemar departs!

Another revenge ghost creates excitement in The Accusing Spirit. A murdered marquis appears repeatedly to interested parties and demands punishment on his brother who has slain him. Another inconsiderate specter in the same volume wakes a man from his sleep, and beckoning him to follow, leads him to a subterranean vault, stamps his foot on a certain stone, shows a ghastly wound in his throat and vanishes. On investigation, searchers find a corpse in a winding-sheet beneath the indicated spot. Another accusing spirit appears in the same story—that of Benedicta, a recreant nun, who glides as a headless and mutilated figure through the cloisters and hovers over the convent bed where she “breathed out her guilty soul.” The young heroine who has taken temporary refuge in the convent and has to share the cell with this disturbing room-mate, is informed by an old nun that, “Those damned spirits who for mysterious purposes receive permission to wander over the earth can possess no power to injure us but that which they may derive from the weakness of our imagination.” Nevertheless, the nervous girl insists on changing her room! Another famous cloistered ghost, one of the pioneer female apparitions of note, is the Bleeding Nun in Lewis’s The Monk, that hall of Gothic horrors. He provides an understudy for her, who impersonates the nun in times of emergency, providing complicating confusion for the other characters and for the reader.

Ghosts begin to crowd upon each others’ heels in later Gothic novels. No romance is so poor as not to have a retinue of specters, or at least, a ghost-of-all-work. Emboldened by their success as individuals, spooks appear in groups and mobs. William Beckford in his Vathek presents two thousand specters in one assembly. Beckford was no niggard! In Maturin’s The Albigenses, de Montfort, passing alone through a dark forest, meets the phantoms of countless victims of his religious persecution. Men, women, young maidens, babes at the breast, all move toward him with unspeakable reproach, with “clattering bones, eyeless sockets, bare and grinning jaws.” Aside from Dante the most impressive description of unhappy spirits in a large number is given in Vathek in that immortal picture of the Hall of Eblis. Beckford shows here a concourse of doomed souls, each with his hand forever pressed above his burning heart, each carrying his own hell within him, having lost heaven’s most precious boon, the soul’s hope! In the Hall of Eblis there are the still living corpses, “the fleshless forms of the pre-adamite kings, who still possess enough life to be conscious of their deplorable condition; they regard one another with looks of the deepest dejection, each holding his right hand motionless above his heart.” The prophet Soliman is there, from whose livid lips come tragic words of his sin and punishment. Through his breast, transparent as glass, the beholder can see his heart enveloped in flames.

In James Hogg’s The Wool-Gatherer, a man of very evil life is haunted by the wraiths of those he has wronged. As he lies on his death-bed, not only he, but those around him as well, hear the pleading voices of women, the pitiful cries of babes around his bed, though nothing is visible. We have here a suggestion of the invisible supernaturalism that becomes so frequent and effective a motif in later fiction. After the man is dead, the supernatural sounds become so dreadful that “the corpse sits up in the bed, pawls wi’ its hands and stares round wi’ its dead face!” When the watchers leave the room for a few moments, the body mysteriously disappears and is never found. A somewhat similar instance occurs in one of Ambrose Bierce’s modern stories of dead bodies.

There is some attempt to exorcise restless spirits in a number of Gothic novels. On various occasions the priests come forth with bell, book, and candle to pronounce anathema against the troublesome visitants. In one story a monk crosses his legs to scare away the specter, but forgets and presently tumbles over. In another,[14] the priest peremptorily bids the ghosts depart and breaks the news firmly to them that they cannot return for a thousand years. But one bogle, whether of feeble understanding or strong will, comes in to break up the ceremonies of incantation, and scares the priest into hysterics.

The imagined ghost appears in many of the Gothic tales, whose writers lack the courage of their supernaturalism. Mrs. Radcliffe, for instance, loves to build up a tissue of ghostly horrors, yet explains them away on natural grounds after the reader fancies he sees a spirit around every corner.

The ghosts that are deliberately got up for the purposes of deception form an interesting feature of Gothic methods. The reasons behind the spectral impersonations are various, to frighten criminals into restitution after confession, to further crime, or merely to enliven the otherwise lagging story. In The Spirit of Turrettville two youths follow the sounds of plaintive music till, in a deserted, spookish apartment, they see a woman playing at an old harp. As they draw near, they see only skeleton hands on the keys and the apparition turns toward them “a grinning, mouldering skull.” She waves her hands with haughty rebuke for their intrusion and “stalks” out of the oratory. She gives further performances, however, singing a song composed for the occasion. But the reader, after such thrills, resents finding out later that she is the living wife, attempting to frighten the villain into confession.

In The Accusing Spirit a bogus spook is constructed by means of phosphorus, aided by a strong resemblance between two men, to accuse an innocent man of murder. The apparition dramatically makes his charge, but is unmasked just in time to save the victim’s life. A tall, cadaverous young man makes up for a ghost in an anonymous novel,[15] while a mysterious woman in a black veil attends a midnight funeral in the castle, then unaccountably disappears.

In Melmoth the monks persecute a despised brother by impersonating spirits in his cell. They cover the walls with images of fiends, over which they smear phosphorus, and burn sulphur to assist the deception. They utter mocking cries as of demons, seeking to drive him mad. In Lewis’s Monk there is a false Bleeding Nun as well as the bona fide specter. In other Gothic novels there are various spectral frauds cleverly planned, and then revealed, but their explanation does not altogether dispel the uncanny impression they make.

The ghost that stays at home in a definite place, haunting its own demesne, is a familiar figure in the fiction of the period. Every castle has its haunted tower or dungeon or apartment with its shade that walks by night. Several appear carrying candles or lamps to light them through the blackness of architectural labyrinths. Several evince a fondness for bells and herald their coming by rings. In one romance,[16] the ghost takes the form of a white cow. (Doubtless many ghosts in real life have had a similar origin.) In another,[17] a specter in armor appears to terrify his murderer, and supernatural lightning aids in his revenge.

It would be impossible to designate all the ghosts in Gothic fiction for there is wholesale haunting. They appear in the plot to warn, to comfort or command, and seem to have very human characteristics on the whole. Yet they are not so definitely personated, not so individual and realistic as the spirits in later fiction, though they do achieve some creepy effects. It is not their brute force that impresses us. We are less moved by the armored knight and the titanic adversary in Otranto than by the phantoms in the Hall of Eblis. The vindictive ghosts, mouldy from the vault, are less appalling than the bodiless voices of wronged women and children that haunt the death-bed and bring a corpse back to dreadful life. The specters with flamboyant personality, that oppress us with their egotistic clamor, may be soon forgotten, but the ghostly suggestiveness of other spirits has a haunting power that is inescapable. Some of the Gothic ghosts have a strange vitality,—and, after all, where would be the phantoms of to-day but for their early services?

Witches and Warlocks.

While not at all equal in importance to the ghosts, witches and warlocks add to the excitement in Gothic fiction. There is but little change from the witch of dramatic tradition, for we have both the real and the reputed witch in the terror novel, the genuine antique hag who has powers given her from the devil, and the beautiful young girl who is wrongly suspected of an unholy alliance with the dark spirits.

In Melmoth, there is an old woman doctor who has uncanny ability. She tells fortunes, gives spells against the evil eye and produces weird results “by spells and such dandy as is beyond our element.” She turns the mystic yarn to be dropped into the pit, on the brink of which stands “the shivering inquirer into futurity, doubtful whether the answer to her question ‘Who holds?’ is to be uttered by the voice of a demon or lover.” In The Albigenses three Weird Sisters appear that are not altogether poor imitations of Shakespeare’s own. Matilda in The Monk possesses dæmonic power of enchantment and in the subterranean passages of the monastery she works her unhallowed arts. The hag Carathis, in Vathek, is a witch of rare skill, who concocts her magic potions and by supernatural means forces all things to her will. There are several witches and warlocks in James Hogg’s The Hunt of Eildon, who work much mischief but at last are captured and convicted. They have the choice of being burned alive or being baptized, but with wild cries they struggle against the holy water and face the flames.

In Hogg’s Brownie of Bodbeck, Marion Linton believes her own daughter is a witch and thinks she should be given the trial by fire or water. There is an innocent young reputed witch in The Hunt of Eildon, who is sentenced to death for her art.

The Devil.

The devil incarnate is one of the familiar figures in the terror novel. Here, as in the case of the ghost, we see the influence of the dramatic rather than of the epic tradition. He is akin to Calderon’s wonder-working magician and Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus rather than to the satanic creations of Dante and Milton. He is not a dread, awe-inspiring figure either physically or as a personality, though he does assume terrifying, almost epic proportions in the closing scenes of The Monk and Zofloya. Neither is he as human, as appealing to our sympathies as the lonely, misjudged, misunderstood devils in later fiction. We neither love nor greatly fear the Gothic demon. Yet he does appear in interesting variants and deserves our study.

In Hogg’s Hunt of Eildon the devil comes in as a strange old man who yet seems curiously familiar to the king and to everyone who sees him, though no one can remember just when he knew him. There is a clever psychologic suggestiveness here, which perhaps inspired a similar idea in a recent play, The Eternal Magdalen. Later he is recognized and holy water thrown on him.

The whole form and visage of the creature was changed in a moment to that of a furious fiend. He uttered a yell that made all the abbey shake to its foundations and forthwith darted away into the air, wrapt in flames. As he ascended, he waved his right hand and shook his fiery locks at his inquisitors.

There is nothing dubious about his personality here, certainly!

Satan appears dramatically in The Monk as well. His first visits are made in the form of attractive youth. Ambrosio, who has been led into sin by the dæmonic agent, Matilda, is awaiting death in the Inquisition cell, when she comes to see him to urge that he win release by selling his soul to the devil. But the repentant monk refuses her advice, so she departs in a temper of blue flame. Then he has a more dread visitant,—Lucifer himself, described as follows:

His blasted limbs still bore the marks of the Almighty’s thunders; a swarthy darkness spread itself over his gigantic form; his hands and feet were armed with long talons.... Over his huge shoulders waved two enormous sable wings; and his hair was supplied by living snakes which twined themselves with frightful hissings. In one hand he held a roll of parchment, and in the other an iron pen. Still the lightnings flashed around him and the thunder bursts seemed to announce the dissolution of nature.

Ambrosio is overawed into selling his soul and signs the compact with his blood, as per convention.

The devil doesn’t keep to his agreement to release him, however, for Lewis tells us that taking his victim to the top of a mountain and “darting his talons into the monk’s shaven crown, he sprang with him from the rock. The caves and mountains rang with Ambrosio’s shrieks. The demon continued to soar aloft till, reaching a dreadful height, he released the sufferer. Headlong fell the monk.” He plunges to the river’s brink, after which a storm is evoked by the devil and his body swept away in the flood.

A similar dæmonic manifestation occurs in Zofloya. Victoria has been induced to bind herself to the Evil One, who has appeared as a Moorish servant of impressive personality and special powers. He grants her wishes hostile to her enemies, holding many conferences with her in the dark forest where he is heralded by flute-like sounds. He appears sometimes like a flame, sometimes like a lightning flash. He comes with the swiftness of the wind and tells her that her thoughts summoned him. At last, he announces himself as Satan, and assumes his own hideous form of gigantism.

Behold me as I am, no longer that which I appeared to be, but the sworn enemy of all created nature, by men called Satan. Yes, it was I that under semblance of the Moor appeared to thee.

As he spoke, he grasped more firmly the neck of Victoria, with one push he whirled her headlong down the dreadful abyss!—as she fell his loud dæmonic laugh, his yells of triumph echoed in her ears; and a mangled corpse she fell, she was received into the foaming waters below.

The devil is seen in Vathek as a preternaturally ugly old man with strange powers. James Hogg has rather a penchant for the demon, for he uses him in The Wool-Gatherer, and in Confessions of a Justified Sinner, which is a story of religious superstition, of the use of diablerie and witchcraft, introducing a satanic tempter. On the whole, the appearances of the devil in Gothic fiction lack impressiveness, are weak in psychologic subtlety, and have not the force either of the epic or of the dramatic representations. Nor have they the human appeal that the incarnations of the devil in later fiction make to our sympathies.

In addition to the unholy powers possessed by the devil and given by him to his agents, the witches, warlocks and magicians, we see in Gothic fiction other aspects of dæmonology, such as that associated with animals and with inanimate objects. Supernaturalism in the horror novel is by no means confined to human beings, but extends to beasts as well. Animals are supposed to be peculiarly sensitive to ghostly impressions, more so than men, and the appearance of a specter is often first announced by the extreme terror of some household pet, or other animal. Gothic dogs have very keen noses for ghosts and howl lugubriously when an apparition approaches. Ravens are represented as showing the presence of evil powers, somewhat as the Southern darkey believes that the jay-bird is the ally of the devil and spends every Friday in torment. And one does not forget the snaky coiffure that writhed around the demon’s head in The Monk.

Maturin’s Albigenses introduces the story of a gruesome loup-garou, or werewolf, which figures extensively in folk-tales. In this case the husband of a beautiful young woman is a werewolf who during his savage metamorphosis tears her to pieces then disappears to return no more. This is suggestive—with a less satisfactory ending—of Marie de France’s charming little lai, Le Bisclavret. Professor Kittridge has shown the frequency of the werewolf motif in medieval story, by the variants he brings together in his Arthur and Gorlogon. In The Albigenses a lycanthrope also is described, a hideous human being that fancies himself a mad wolf.

There is much use of animal supernaturalism in James Hogg’s romances. In one,[18] Sandy is saved from going over a precipice by the warning of a hare that immediately after vanishes, having left no tracks in the snow. In another,[19] the two white beagles that the king uses in hunting are in reality maidens bound by enchantment, who are forced to slay human beings then transform them into deer for the king and his company to eat. The other dogs are aware of the unnatural state of affairs, while the men are too stupid to realize it. The clownish Croudy is changed into a hog, which brings amusing and almost tragic complications into his life. His old dog knows him and follows him pathetically, and a drove of cows go off in a stampede at his approach, for they, too, sense the supernatural spell. Croudy is put on the block to be killed for pork, when the fairy changes him back suddenly to the consternation of the butcher. But Croudy does not behave well after his transformation, so he is changed into a cat with endless life. He may resume mortal shape one night in the year and relate his feline experiences.

In the same story the king of Scotland is proposing a toast when his favorite dog dashes the cup from his hand. This is repeated several times, till the king learns that the drink is poisoned, and the dog has thus by supernatural knowledge saved his life. An innocent young girl, sentenced to death for witchcraft because a fairy has taken her form and worked enchantment, and her lover are transformed into white birds that fly out of the prison the night before the execution and live eternally on the shores of a far lake.

The ghostly power extends to inanimate objects as well as to human beings and animals. Armor and costumes seem to have a material immortality of their own, for it is quite common to recognize spectral visitants by their garments or accouterments. Armor clanks audibly in the terror scenes. In The Castle of Otranto, the giant ghost sends his immense helmet crashing into the hall to shatter the would-be-bridegroom and the hopes of his father. The head-gear has power of voluntary motion and moves around with agility, saves the heroine from danger by waving its plumes at the villain and generally adds excitement to the scenes. Later a titanic sword leaps into place of itself, after having been borne to the entrance by a hundred men fainting under the weight of it, while a statue of Alfonso sheds three drops of blood from its nose and a portrait turns round in its frame and strolls out into the open.

Pictures in general take a lively part in horrific fiction. The portrait of a murdered man in The Spirit of the Castle picks itself up from the lumber heap where it has been thrown, cleans itself and hangs itself back on the wall, while[20] a portrait in a deserted chamber wags its head at a servant who is making the bed. The portrait of Melmoth is endowed with supernatural power, for its eyes follow the beholder with awful meaning, and as the nephew in desperation tears it from its frame and burns it, the picture writhes in the flames, ironically, and mocks him. This might be compared with Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray and with other later stories.

The statue of Alfonso in Walpole’s Castle moves from its place with no visible means of support, and[21] a great effigy of black marble is said to “march all round and come back into its place again with a great groan.” In St. Oswyth the soil of the abbey grounds obtained by gross injustice is haunted by the ghost of the wronged nun who inflicts a curse upon it, rendering it “spell-blighted, unprolific, and impossible to till.” The key to the room in the old house in which Melmoth’s diabolic portrait is kept, turns in its lock with a sound like the cry of the dead.

Gothic romance contains magic mirrors wherein one can see any person he wishes no matter how distant he may be, and watch his movements after the fashion of a private moving-picture show,—such as that used by Ambrosio.[22] There are enchanted wands with power to transform men to beasts or vice versa, as in The Hunt of Eildon. There are crystal balls that reveal not only what is going on in distant parts, but show the future as well.[23] The same volume describes magic swords that bear changing hieroglyphics to be read only by enchantment and other uncanny objects. These will serve to illustrate the preternatural powers possessed by inanimate objects in the terror literature. In some instances the motif is used with effectiveness, definitely heightening the impression of the weird in a way that human supernaturalism could not accomplish. We do not see here the mechanistic supernaturalism, which is to become important in later tales, and the effects here are crude, yet of interest in themselves and as suggesting later uses of the idea.

Dæmonology manifests itself in the supernatural science in the Gothic novels as well as in the characterization of the devil and his confreres. We have diabolical chemistry besides alchemy, astrology, hypnotism, ventriloquism, search for the philosopher’s stone, infernal biology, and the other scientific twists of supernaturalism. In Vathek, where we have a regular array of ghostliness, we see a magic potion that instantly cures any disease however deadly,—the progenitor of the modern patent medicine. There is an Indian magician who writes his messages on the high heavens themselves. Vathek’s mother is an industrious alchemist strangling an assembly of prominent citizens in order to use their cadavers in her laboratory, where she stews them up with serpent’s oil, mummies, and skulls, concocting therefrom a powerful potion. Vathek has an uncurbed curiosity that leads him into various experiments, to peer into the secrets of astrology, alchemy, sorcery, and kindred sciences. He uses a magic drink that gives the semblance of death, like that used later in The Monk, as earlier, of course, in Romeo and Juliet, and elsewhere.

The Moor in Zofloya is well versed in dæmonic science. He tells of chemical experiments where he forces everyone to do his will or die. By his potions he can change hate into love or love into hate, and can give a drug which produces semi-insanity. Under the influence of this a man weds a dæmonic temptress thinking her the woman he loves, then commits suicide when he wakes to the truth. This reminds us of Sax Rohmer’s Fu-Manchu stories of diabolic hypodermics that produce insanity.

In Ankerwich Castle a woman lying at the point of death is miraculously cured by a drug whose prescription the author neglects to state. In the same story a child is branded in a peculiar fashion. A new-born babe whose birth must remain secret yet who must be recognizable in emergency, is marked on its side with letters burnt in with a strange chemical, which will remain invisible till rubbed with a certain liquid. Matilda in The Monk dabbles in satanic chemistry and compounds evil potions in her subterranean experiments.

Mary Shelley uses the idea of supernatural biology in her story of the man-monster, Frankenstein, the story of the young scientist who after morbid study and experiment, constructs a human frame of supernatural size and hideous grotesqueness and gives it life. But the thing created appalls its creator by its dreadful visage, its more than human size, its look of less than human intelligence, and the student flees in horror from the sight of it. Mrs. Shelley describes the emotions of the lonely, tragic thing thrust suddenly into a world that ever recoils shuddering from it. She reveals the slow hate distilled in its heart because of the harsh treatment it meets, till at last it takes diabolic revenge, not only on the man who has created it but on all held dear by him. The struggles that rend his soul between hate and remorse are impressive. The wretched being weeps in an agony of grief as it stands over the body of Frankenstein whom it has harried to death, then goes away to its own doom. The last sight of it, as the first, is effective, as, in tragic solitude, towering on the ice-floe, it moves toward the desolate North to its death.

In the characterization of this being, as in the unusual conception, Mrs. Shelley has introduced something poignantly new in fiction. It was a startling theme for the mind of a young girl, as were Vathek and The Monk for youths of twenty years, and only the abnormal psychological conditions she went through could have produced it. There is more curdling awfulness in Frankenstein’s monster than in the museum of armored ghosts, Bleeding Nuns, and accompanying horrors of the early Gothic novels. The employment of the Frankenstein motif in a play produced recently in New York,[24] illustrates anew the vitality of the idea.

The search for the philosopher’s stone appears in various novels of the period. St. Leon, by William Godwin, relates the story of a man who knew how to produce unlimited gold by a secret formula given him by a mysterious stranger who dies in his home. Shelley[25] brings in this power incidentally with the gift of endless life. There is an awe-inspiring use of ventriloquism in Charles Brockden Brown’s novel, Wieland, while Arthur Mervyn gives a study in somnambulism. Zofloya suggests hypnotism or mesmerism by saying that Victoria’s thought summoned the Moor to her,—that they could have brought him had he been “at the further extremity of this terrestrial globe.” This seems a faint foreshadowing of Ibsen’s idea in The Master Builder. These may illustrate the use of science in Gothicism.

The elixir of life is brewed in divers Gothic novels. Dramatic and intense as are the psychological experiences connected with the discovery of the magic potion, the effects of the success are more poignant still. The thought that endless mortality, life that may not be laid down, becomes a burden intolerable has appeared in fiction since Swift’s account of the Struldbrugs, and perhaps before. Godwin’s St. Leon is a story of the secret of perpetual life. The tiresome Godwinistic hero is visited by a decrepit old man who wishes to tell him on a pledge of incommunicability what will give him the power of endless life and boundless wealth. The impoverished nobleman accepts with consequences less enjoyable than he has anticipated.

Shelley’s hectic romance,[26] whose idea, as Shelley admitted to Stockdale, came from Godwin’s book, uses the same theme. The young student with burning eyes, who has discovered the elixir of life, may be compared with Mary Shelley’s later picture of Frankenstein. Events are rather confused here, as the villain falls dead in the presence of the devil but comes to life again as another character later in the story,—Shelley informing us of their identity but not troubling to explain it.

The most impressive instance of the theme of fleshly immortality in the early novels is found in Melmoth. Here the mysterious wanderer possesses the power of endless life, but not the right to lay it down when existence becomes a burden. Melmoth can win the boon of death only if he can find another mortal willing to change destinies with him at the price of his soul. He traverses the world in his search and offers the exchange to persons in direst need and suffering the extreme torments, offering to give them wealth as well as life eternal. Yet no man nor woman will buy life at the price of the soul.

Aids to Gothic Effect.

Certain themes appear recurringly as first aids to terror fiction. Some of them are found equally in later literature while others belong more particularly to the Gothic. An interesting aspect of the supernatural visitants is gigantism, or the superhuman size which they assume. In The Castle of Otranto, the sensational ghost is of enormous size, and his accouterments are colossal. In the last scene he is astounding:

A clap of thunder shook the castle to its foundations; the earth rocked and the clank of more than mortal armor was heard behind.... The walls of the castle behind Manfred were thrown down with a mighty force, and the form of Alfonso, dilated to an immense magnitude, appeared in the center of the ruins. “Behold the true heir of Alfonso!” said the vision.

This reminds one of an incident in F. Marion Crawford’s Mr. Isaacs, where the Indian magician expands to awful size, miraculously draws down a mist and wraps it round him as a cloak. Zofloya is frequently spoken of as immense, and it is said that “common objects seem to sink in his presence.” In the last scene the wicked Victoria sees the Moor change from a handsome youth to a fierce gigantic figure. A diabolic apparition eight or nine feet high pursues a monk,[27] and the knight[28] engages in combat with a dæmonic giant who slays him. The devil in The Monk is represented as being of enormous stature, and much of the horror excited by the man-monster that Frankenstein created arises from the creature’s superhuman size. In most cases gigantism connotes evil power and rouses a supernatural awe in the beholder. The giant is an Oriental figure and appears in Vathek, along with genii, dwarfs, and kindred personages, but the Gothic giant has more diabolism than the mere Oriental original. He seems to fade out from fiction, appearing only occasionally in later stories, while he has practically no place in the drama, owing doubtless to the difficulties of stage presentation.

Insanity as contributing to the effect of supernaturalism affords many gruesome studies in psychiatry. Madness seems a special curse of the gods or torment from the devil and various instances of its use occur in Gothic fiction. The devil in Zofloya, at Victoria’s request, gives Henrique an enchanted drug which renders him temporarily insane, during which time he marries Victoria, imagining her to be Lilla whom he loves. When he awakes to the realization of what he has done, real madness drives him to suicide. In The Castle of Caithness the wicked misanthrope goes mad from remorse. He imagines that the different ones he has murdered are hurling him into the pit of hell, until, in a maniac frenzy, he dashes his brains out against the prison walls. In Ethelwina the father who has sold his daughter to dishonor flies shrieking in madness through the corridors of the dungeon to escape the sight of his child’s accusing specter. Poor Nanny in Hogg’s Brownie of Bodbeck is described as having “a beam of wild delight in her eye, the joy of madness.” She sings wild, unearthly songs and talks deliriously of incomprehensible things, of devilish struggles.

Melmoth uses the idea with special effectiveness. The insanity of the young husband whose bride is mysteriously slain on their wedding day by the supernatural power accompanying Melmoth, may be compared with the madness of the wife in Scott’s Bride of Lammermoor. Maturin also shows us a scene in a mad-house, where a sane man, Stanton, is confined, whom Melmoth visits to offer exchange of destinies. Melmoth taunts him cruelly with his hopeless situation and prophecies that he, too, will go mad from despair. We hear Stanton’s wild cry, echoed by a hundred yells like those of demons, but the others are stilled when the mad mother begins her lamentation,—the mother who has lost husband, home, children, reason, all, in the great London fire. At her appalling shrieks all other voices are hushed. Another impressive figure in the mad-house is the preacher who thinks himself a demon and alternately prays and blasphemes the Lord.

Charles Brockden Brown rivals Maturin in his terrible use of insanity for supernatural effect. The demented murderer in Edgar Huntley gives an impression of mystery and awe that is unusual, while Wieland with its religious mania produced by diabolic ventriloquism is even more impressive. Brown knew the effect of mystery and dread on the human mind and by slow, cumulative suggestion he makes us feel a creeping awe that the unwieldy machinery of pure Gothicism never could achieve. In studies of the morbid mentality he has few equals. For psychologic subtlety, for haunting horror, what is a crashing helmet or a dismembered ghost compared with Brown’s Wieland? What are the rackings of monkish vindictiveness when set against the agonies of an unbalanced mind turned in upon itself? What exterior torture could so appeal to our sympathies as Wieland’s despair, when, racked with religious mania, he feels the overwhelming conviction that the voice of God—which is but the fiendish trick of a ventriloquist—is calling him to murder his wife and children as a sacrifice to Deity? Such a tragedy of dethroned reason is intolerably powerful; the dark labyrinths of insanity, the gloom-haunted passages of the human mind, are more terrible to traverse than the midnight windings of Gothic dungeons. We feel that here is a man who is real, who is human, and suffering the extremity of anguish.

Perhaps the most hideous aspect of insanity in the terror novel is that of the lycanthrope in The Albigenses. The tragic wolf-man imagines himself to be a mad wolf and cowers in his lair, glaring with gleaming, awful eyes at all who approach him, gnawing at a human head snatched from the graveyard. There are various other uses of insanity in the novel of the period, but these will serve to illustrate. The relation between insanity and the supernatural has been marked in later literature.

The use of portents is a distinct characteristic of the horror romance. Calamity is generally preceded by some sign of the supernatural influence at work, some presentment of dread. Crime and catastrophe are forefelt by premonition of woe and accompaniment of horror. In The Accusing Spirit supernatural thunder heralds the discovery of the corpse in its winding-sheet, and the monk says, “Yes, some dread discovery is at hand. These phenomena are miraculous; when the common laws of nature are violated, the awful portents are not sent in vain.” In The Romance of the Castle, an anonymous story, a woman hears the clock strike two and announces that she will be dead at three.

This night an awful messenger sent from that dread tribunal from whose power there is no appeal, by signs terrific foretold my fate approached—foretold my final moment. “Catherine, behold!” was all that issued from the specter’s lips, but in its hand it held a scroll which fixed my irrevocable doom, in letters which fascinated while they appalled my sight.

She keeps her appointment promptly. Her experience might be compared with the vision which revealed his date of death to Amos Judd in James Mitchell’s novel of that name, and to the foreknowledge in George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil.

In The Spirit of the Castle,[29] the ghost of the old marquis knocks three times on the door preceding the arrival of the heir, and a black raven flies away as he enters. At the approach of the true heir to the estate from which he has been kept by fraud in The Old English Baron, the doors of the ancient castle fly open, upon which the servants cry, “The doors open of themselves to receive their master!” When Walpole’s usurping Manfred sees the plumage on the miraculous casque shaken in concert with the brazen trumpet, he exclaims, “What mean these portents? If I have offended——” At this point the plumes are shaken still more strenuously, and the helmet is equally agitated when the great sword leaps in. Manfred cries to the apparition, “If thou art a true knight, thou wilt scorn to employ sorcery to carry thy power. If these omens be from heaven or hell, Manfred trusts to righteousness to protect his cause.” But the omens bring bad luck to Manfred.

There is much use of portent in Melmoth. The specter of the Wanderer appearing just before the old man’s death predicts the spiritual doom of the dying. As the old uncle is almost breathing his last, he cries out, “What the devil brings you here?” at which the servants cross themselves and cry, “The devil in his mouth!” Melmoth, the Wanderer, is a walking portent of evil, for the priest is unable to pray in his presence, the communion bread turns viperous when he is there and the priest falls dead in the attempt to exorcise the fiendish power. Mysterious strains of music sound as heralds of disaster in several Gothic novels, as[30] where the inexplicable strains are heard only by the bride and groom preceding the strange tragedy that befalls them.

At the approach of a supernatural visitant in the terror novel the fire always burns blue,—where there is a fire, and the great hearth usually affords ample opportunity for such portentous blaze. The thermometer itself tends to take a downward path when a ghost draws near. The three drops of blood shed from the statue’s nose in Otranto, while ridiculed by the critics, are meant simply as a portent of evil. Prof. William Lyon Phelps points out[31] that the idea did not originate with Walpole, but was familiar as a superstition regarding premonition of ill, as referred to in Dryden’s Amboyna, IV., 1. This instance may be compared with the much more skillfully handled omens in later drama, as Maeterlinck’s and Ibsen’s, particularly in The Emperor and Galilean. Various other portents of ill appear in Gothic fiction.[32]

The symbols of dread and the ghostly are used to good effect in the terror romance. The cumulative effects of supernatural awe are carefully built up by the use of gruesome accompaniments and suggestions. The triple veil of night, desolation, and silence usually hangs over the haunter and the haunted, predisposing to an uncanny psychosis. The Gothic ghost does not love the garish day, and the terror castle, gloomy even under the brightest sun, is of unimaginable darkness at night. Certain houses add especially to the impression of fear. At crucial moments the stroke of twelve or one o’clock is sure to be sounded appallingly by some abbey bell or castle clock or other rusty horologue. In addition to its services as time-keeper, the bell has a predisposition to toll.

Melancholy birds fly freely through these medieval tales, their dark wings adding to the general gloom. The principal specimens in the Gothic aviary are the common owl, the screech or “screeching” owl, the bat and the raven, while the flock is increased by anonymous “birds of prey,” “night birds,” “gloomy birds” and so forth. In St. Oswyth, as the murderer steals at midnight through the corridor toward his helpless victim, “the ill-boding bird of night that sat screeching on the battlement of the prison tower, whose harsh, discordant notes were echoed by the hoarse croaking of the ominous raven” terrifies but does not deter the villain.

The “moping, melancholy screech owl” is one of the prominent personages in The Accusing Spirit, emphasizing the moments of special suspense, as in St. Oswyth as the wicked baron lies quaking in remorse for having caused a nun to be buried alive, the condemning cry of the doleful birds increases his mental anguish. Similar instances, with or without special nomenclature, occur in countless Gothic novels. Much use is also made of the dark ivy in its clambering over medieval architecture, shutting out the light and adding to the general gloom. The effect of horror is increased frequently by the location of the scenes in vaults and graveyards with all their gruesome accessories, and skulls are used as mural ornaments elsewhere, or as library appointments by persons of morbid temperament. Enough skeletons are exhumed to furnish as large a pile of bones as may be seen in certain antique churches in Italy and Mexico.

The element of mystery and mystification is another family feature of the novel of suspense. There is no proper thrill without the suspense attained by supernatural mystery. Even the novels that in the end carefully explain away all the ghostly phenomena on a natural basis strive with care to build up plots which shall contain astounding discoveries. Mrs. Radcliffe and Regina Maria Roche are noted in this respect. They have not the courage of their ghosts as such but, after they have thrilled the reader to the desired extent, they tear down the fabric of mystification that they have constructed and meticulously explain everything.

The black veil constitutes a favorite method of suspense with Mrs. Radcliffe. On various occasions Emily pales and quivers before a dark velvet pall uncannily swaying in the midnight wind, and on one such ramble she draws aside the curtain and finds a hideous corpse, putrid and dropping to decay, lying on a couch behind the pall. Many chapters further on she learns that this is a wax figure made to serve as penance for an ancient sinner. Again she shivers in front of the inky curtain, watching its fold move unaccountably, when a repulsive face peers out at her. She shrieks and flees, thinking she has seen a ghost, but discovers later that it is only one of a company of bandits that have taken up their secret abode in the house. Black veils are in fashion in all of Mrs. Radcliffe’s romances and she drapes them very effectively, while the arras waves likewise in other tales as well.

Mysterious manuscripts are another means of mystification. Mrs. Radcliffe’s novels also abound in such scripts. In The Romance of the Forest Adeline discovers a decaying paper which reads, “Oh, ye, whoever ye are, that chance or misfortune may direct to this spot, to you I speak, to you reveal the story of my wrongs and ask you to avenge them.” This injunction to avenge wrongs is a frequent assignment, though rather much to ask in most cases. The Spirit of the Castle has its dusty document that starts off: “Already my hand brandishes the dagger that shall close my eyes forever. (Mysterious manuscripts are not strong on grammar and make slight attempt to avoid mixed figures.) I will expire by the side of the clay-cold corpse of my Antoinette.” In St. Oswyth the paper says, “Beneath the deep foundations of the ruin the recorded mystery of the house of Oswyth lies buried from all mortal discovery.” But the most impressive manuscript is the one in Melmoth that records the wanderings of the agonized fate-harried man and those whose tortures he witnesses. A codicil to the old uncle’s will advises his nephew against reading the document, but of course he does read it, since what are mouldy manuscripts in Gothic novels for, but to be deciphered by the hero or heroine?

Reference to dread secrets occur otherwise than in written form. In one favored tale,[33] we are told of “a mystery whose elucidation I now have a presentiment would fill me with horror!” In another,[34] Vincent on his death-bed speaks of “a horrid secret which labors at my breast,” and the Abate speaks to the marquis of “a secret which shall make your blood run cold!” In St. Oswyth we hear that “an impenetrable cloud of cureless sorrow hung over Sir Alfred and there was a dreadful mystery in his life destiny, unknown, as it should seem, to any one, and which he was unwilling should be questioned.” The dungeoned prisoner in Bungay Castle cries, “Were I at liberty to speak I could a tale unfold would tempt you to curse the world and even detest those claims which bind man to man. You would be ready to forego the ties of nature and shun society. Time must, it will develop the whole of this mystery!” And so on.

Inexplicable music forms one of the commonest elements of mystification in these romances. Its constant recurrence suggests that there must have been victrolas in medieval times. The music is chiefly instrumental, sometimes on a harp, sometimes on a violin, though occasionally it is vocal. Mrs. Radcliffe and Regina Maria Roche accompany the heroine’s musings at all hours with doleful strains suspected to be of supernatural performance. The appearance of the devil masquerading as the Moor[35] is heralded by flute-like sounds, and in The Spirit of Turrettville the specter plays on the harp and sings. The recurrence of the theme is so constant that it acquires the monotony of a tantalizing refrain.

Groans and wails of unexplained origin also aid in building up suspense. In fact, a chorus of lugubriousness arises so that the Gothic pages groan as they are turned. Mysterious disappearances likewise increase the tension. Lights appear and vanish with alarming volition, doors open and close with no visible human assistance, and various other supernatural phenomena aid in Gothic mystery and mystification.

Although the ghosts and devils occupy the center of interest in the horrific romance, the human characters must not be lightly passed over. There are terror temperaments as well as Gothic castles, tempests, and scenes. The interfering father or other relative, brutal in threats and breathing forth slaughter, comes in frequently to oppress the hero or heroine into a loathed marriage. The hero is of Radcliffian gloom, a person of vague past and saturnine temper, admired and imitated by Byron. Sir Walter Raleigh,[36] says, “The man that Byron tried to be was the invention of Mrs. Radcliffe.” The officials of the Inquisition and the dominant figures in convents and monasteries show fiendish cruelty toward helpless inmates, gloating in Gothic diabolism over their tortures. There are no restful human shades of gray, only unrelieved black and white characters. The Romantic heroine is a peculiar creature, much given to swooning and weeping, yet always impeccably clad in no matter what nocturnal emergency she is surprised. She tumbles into verse and sketching on slight provocation, but her worst vice is that of curiosity. In her search for supernatural horrors she wanders at midnight through apartments where she does not belong, breaks open boxes, desks, and secret hiding-places to read whatever letters or manuscripts she can lay her hands on, behaving generally like the yellow journalist of fiction.

The pages of the Gothic novel are smeared with gore and turn with ghostly flutter. The conversation is like nothing on land or sea or in the waters under the earth, for the tadpoles talk like Johnsonian whales and the reader grows restless under Godwinistic disquisitions. The authors are almost totally lacking in a sense of humor, yet the Gothic novel, taken as a whole, is one of the best specimens of unconscious humor known to English literature.

Conclusion.

Perhaps the most valuable contribution that the Gothic school made to English literature is Jane Austen’s inimitable satire of it, Northanger Abbey. Though written as her first novel and sold in 1797, it did not appear till after her death, in 1818. Its purpose is to ridicule the Romanticists and the book in itself would justify the terroristic school, but she was ahead of her times, so the editor feared to publish it. In the meantime she wrote her other satires on society and won immortality for her work which might never have been begun save for her satiety of medieval romances. The title of the story itself is imitative, and the well-known materials are all present, yet how differently employed! The setting is a Gothic abbey tempered to modern comfort; the interfering father is not vicious, merely ill-natured; the pursuing, repulsive lover is not a villain, only a silly bore. The heroine has no beauty, nor does she topple into sonnets nor snatch a pencil to sketch the scene, for we are told that she has no accomplishments. Yet she goes through palpitating adventures mostly modelled on Mrs. Radcliffe’s incidents. She is hampered in not being supplied with a lover who is the unrecognized heir to vast estates, since all the young men in the county are properly provided with parents.

The delicious persiflage in which Jane Austen hits off the fiction of the day may be illustrated by a bit of conversation between two young girls.

“My dearest Catherine, what have you been doing with yourself all the morning? Have you gone on with Udolpho?”

“Yes; I have been reading it ever since I woke, and I have got to the black veil.”

“Are you, indeed? How delightful! Oh, I would not tell you what is behind that black veil for the world! Are you not wild to know?”

“Oh, yes, quite! What can it be? But do not tell me—I would not be told on any account. I know it must be a skeleton; I am sure it is Laurentina’s skeleton. Oh, I am delighted with the book! I should like to spend my whole life reading it, I assure you. If it had not been to meet you, I would not have come away from it for the world.”

“Dear creature! How much obliged I am to you; and when you have finished Udolpho, we will read The Italian together; and I have made out a list of ten or twelve more of the same kind for you.”

“Have you, indeed? How glad I am! What are they all?”

“I will read you their names directly; here they are, in my pocket-book: Castle of Wolfenbach, Clermont, Mysterious Warnings, Necromancer of the Black Forest, Midnight Bell, Orphan of the Rhine, and Horrid Mysteries. These will last us some time.”

“Yes, pretty well; but are they all horrid? Are you sure they are all horrid?”

“Yes, quite sure; for a particular friend of mine, a Miss Andrews—a sweet girl, one of the sweetest creatures in the world—has read every one of them!”

Mr. George Saintsbury[37] expresses himself as sceptical of this list as a catalogue of actual romances, stating that he has never read one of them and should like some other authority than Miss Andrews for their existence. He is mistaken in his doubt, however, since during the progress of this investigation four out of the eight have been identified as to authorship, and doubtless the others are lurking in some antique library. Clermont is by Maria Regina Roche; Mysterious Warnings by Mrs. Parsons, in London, 1796; Midnight Bell by Francis Latham; and Horrid Mysteries by Marquis Grosse, London, 1796.

Jane Austen’s stupid bore, John Thorpe, and Mr. Tilney, the impeccable, pedantic hero, add their comment to Gothic fiction, one saying with a yawn that there hasn’t been a decent novel since Tom Jones, except The Monk, and the other that he read Udolpho in two days with his hair standing on end all the time.

But the real cleverness of the work consists in the burlesque of Gothic experiences that Catherine, because of the excited condition of her mind induced by excess of romantic fiction, goes through with on her visit to Northanger Abbey. She explores secret wings in a search for horrors, only to find sunny rooms, with no imprisoned wife, not a single maniac, and never skeleton of tortured nun. Mr. Tilney’s ironic jests satirize all the elements of Gothic romance. Opening a black chest at midnight, she finds a yellowed manuscript, but just as she is about to read it her candle flickers out. In the morning sunshine she finds that it is an old laundry list. The only result of her suspicious explorings is that she is caught in such prowlings by the young man whose esteem she wishes to win. He sarcastically assures her that his father is not a wife-murderer, that his mother is not immured in a dungeon, but died of a bilious attack. These delicately tipped shafts of ridicule riddle the armor of medievalism and give it at the same time a permanency of interest because of Jane Austen’s treatment of it. The Gothic novel will be remembered, if for nothing else, for her parody of it.

But Miss Austen is not the only satirist of the genre. In The Heroine, Eaton Stannard Barrett gives an amusing burlesque of it. It is interesting to note in this connection that while Northanger Abbey was written and sold in 1797 it was not published till 1818, and Barrett’s book, while written later, was published in 1813.

In the introduction, an epistle, supposed to be endited by one Cherubina, says:

Moon, May 1, 1813.

Know that the moment that a mortal manuscript is written in a legible hand and the word End or Finis attached thereto, whatever characters happen to be sketched therein acquire the quality of creating a soul or spirit which takes flight and ascends immediately through the regions of the air till it arrives at the moon, where it is embodied and becomes a living creature, the precise counterpart of the literary prototype.

Know farther that all the towns, villages, rivers, hills, and valleys of the moon also owe their origin to the descriptions which writers give of the landscapes of the earth.

By means of a book, The Heroine, I became a living inhabitant of the moon. I met with the Radclyffian and Rochian heroines, and others, but they tossed their heads and told me pertly that I was a slur on the sisterhood, and some went so far as to say that I had a design on their lives.

Cherry, an unsophisticated country girl, becomes Cherubina after reading romantic tales. She decides that she is an heiress kept in unwarranted seclusion, and tells her father that he cannot possibly be her father since he is “a fat, funny farmer.” She rummages in his desk for private papers, discovering a torn scrap that she interprets to her desires. She flies, leaving a note to tell the fleshy agriculturist that she is gone “to wander over the convex earth in search of her parents,” with what comic experiences one may imagine. There is much discussion of the Gothic heroine, particularly those from Mrs. Radcliffe’s and Regina Maria Roche’s pages. The girl sprinkles her letters with verse. She passes through storms, explores deserted houses, and comes to what she thinks is her ancestral castle in London, but is told that it is Covent Garden Theatre. She decides that she is Nell Gwynne’s niece and goes to that amiable person to demand all her property. She pokes around in the cellar to find her captive mother, and discovers an enormously fat woman playing with frogs, who drunkenly insists that she is her mother. Leaving that place in disgust she takes possession of somebody else’s castle and orders it furnished in Gothic style, according to romance. She has the fat farmer shut up in the madhouse.

The book is very amusing, and a more pronounced parody on Gothicism than Northanger Abbey because the whole story turns round that theme,—but, of course, it is not of so great literary value. It seems strange, however, that it is so little known. It burlesques every feature of terror fiction, the high-flown language, the excited oaths, the feudal furniture, the medieval architecture, the Gothic weather, the supernatural tempers, the spectral apparitions—one of which is so muscular that he struggles with the heroine as she locks him in a closet, after throwing rapee into his face, which makes him sputter in a mortal fashion. Cherubina finds a blade bone of mutton in some Gothic garbage and takes it for a bone of an ancestor. Radcliffian adjectives reel across the pages and the whole plays up in a delightful parody the ludicrous weaknesses and excesses of the terror fiction.

Likewise the Anti-Jacobin parodies the Gothic ghost and there is considerable satire directed at the whole Gothic genre in Thomas Love Peacock’s novel Nightmare Abbey.

In general, Gothicism had a tonic effect on English literature, and influenced the continental fiction to no small degree. By giving an interest and excitement gained from ghostly themes to fiction, the terror writers made romance popular as it had never been before and immensely extended the range of its readers. The novel has never lost the hold on popular fancy that the Gothic ghost gave to it. This interest has increased through the various aspects of Romanticism since then and in every period has found some form of supernaturalism on which to feed. True, the machinery of Gothicism creaks audibly at times, some of the specters move too mechanically, and there is a general air of unreality that detracts from the effect. The supernaturalism often lacks the naturalness which is necessary. Yet it is not fair to apply to these early efforts the same standards by which we judge the novels of to-day. While their range is narrow they do achieve certain impressive effects. Though the class became conventionalized to an absurd degree and the later examples are laughable, while a host of imitations made the type ridiculous, the Gothic novel has an undeniable force.

Besides the bringing of supernaturalism definitely into fiction, which is a distinct gain, we find other benefits as well. In Gothicism, if we examine closely, we find the beginnings of many forms of supernaturalism that are crude here, but that are to develop into special power in later novels and short stories. The terror novel excites our ridicule in some respects, yet, like other things that arouse a certain measure of laughter, it has great value. It seems a far cry from the perambulating statue in Otranto to Lord Dunsany’s jade gods that move with measured, stony steps to wreak a terrible vengeance on mortals who have defied them, but the connection may be clearly enough seen. The dreadful experiments by which Frankenstein’s monster is created are close akin to the revolting vivisections of Wells’s Dr. Moreau, or the operations described by Arthur Machen whereby human beings lose their souls and become diabolized, given over utterly to unspeakable evil. The psychic elements in Zofloya are crudely conceived, yet suggestive of the psychic horrors of the work of Blackwood, Barry Pain, and Theodore Dreiser, for example. The animal supernaturalism only lightly touched on in Gothic novels is to be elaborated in the stories of ghostly beasts like those by Edith Wharton, Kipling, Ambrose Bierce, and others. In fact, the greater number of the forms of the supernatural found in later fiction and the drama are discoverable, in germ at least, in Gothic romance. The work of this period gave a tremendous impetus to the uncanny elements of romanticism and the effect has been seen in the fiction and drama and poetry since that time. Its influence on the drama of its day may be seen in Walpole’s Mysterious Mother and Lewis’s Castle Specter. Thomas Lovell Beddoe’s extraordinary tragedy, Death’s Jest Book, while largely Elizabethan in materials and method, is closely related to the Gothic as well. It would be impossible to understand or appreciate the supernatural in the nineteenth-century literature and that of our own day without a knowledge of the Gothic to which most of it goes back. Like most beginnings, Gothicism is crude in its earlier forms, and conventional in the flood of imitations that followed the successful attempts. But it is really vital and most of the ghostly fiction since that time has lineally descended from it rather than from the supernaturalism of the epic or of the drama.

CHAPTER II
Later Influences

The Gothic period marked a change in the vehicle of supernaturalism. In ancient times the ghostly had been expressed in the epic or the drama, in medievalism in the romances, metrical and prose, as in Elizabethan literature the drama was the specific form. But Gothicism brought it over frankly into the novel, which was a new thing. That is noteworthy, since supernaturalism seems more closely related to poetry than to prose; and as the early dramas were for the most part poetic, it did not require such a stretch of the imagination to give credence to the unearthly. The ballad, the epic, the drama, had made the ghostly seem credible. But prose fiction is so much more materialistic that at first thought supernaturalism seems antagonistic to it. That this is not really the case is evidenced from the fact that fiction since the terror times has retained the elements of awe then introduced, has developed, and has greatly added to them.

With the dying out of the genre definitely known as the Gothic novel and the turning of Romanticism into various new channels, we might expect to see the disappearance of the ghostly element, since it had been overworked in terrorism. It is true that the prevailing type of fiction for the succeeding period was realism, but with a large admixture of the supernormal or supernatural. The supernatural machinery had become so well established in prose fiction that even realists were moved by it, some using the motifs with bantering apology—even Dickens and Thackeray, some with rationalistic explanation, but practically all using it. Man must and will have the supernatural in his fiction. The very elements that one might suppose would counteract it,—modern thought, invention, science,—serve as feeders to its force. In the inexplicable alchemy of literature almost everything turns to the unearthly in some form or other.

We have seen the various sources from which the Gothic novel drew its plots, its motifs for ghostly effect. The supernatural fiction following it still had the same sources on which to draw, and in addition had various other influences and veins of literary inspiration not open to Gothicism. Modern science, with the new miracles of its laboratories, proved suggestive of countless plots; the new study of folk-lore and the scholarly investigations in that field unearthed an unguessed wealth of supernatural material; Psychical Research societies with their patient and sympathetic records of the forces of the unseen; modern Spiritualism with its attempts to link this world to the next; the wizardry of dreams studied scientifically,—all suggested new themes, novel complications, hitherto unknown elements continuing the supernatural in fiction.

With the extension of general reading, and the greater range of translations from other languages, the writers of England and America were affected by new influences with respect to their use of the supernatural. Their work became less insular, wider in its range of subject-matter and of technical methods, and in our fiction we find the effect of certain definite outside forces.

The overlapping influences of the Romantic movement in England and America, France and Germany, form an interesting but intricate study. It is difficult to point out marked points of contact, though the general effect may be evident, for literary influences are usually very elusive. It is easy to cry, “Lo, here! lo, there!” with reference to the effect of certain writers on their contemporaries or successors, but it is not always easy to put the finger on anything very tangible. And even so, that would not explain literature. If one could point with absolute certainty to the source for every one of Shakespeare’s plots, would that explain his art? Poe wrote an elaborate essay to analyze his processes of composition for The Raven, but the poem remains as enigmatic as ever.

As German Romanticism had been considerably affected by the Gothic novel in England, it in turn showed an influence on later English and American ghostly fiction. Scott was much interested in the German literature treating of evil magic, apparitions, castles in ruins, and so forth, and one critic says of him that his dealings with subjects of this kind are midway between Meinhold and Tieck. He was fascinated with the German ballads of the supernatural, especially Burger’s ghostly Lenore, which he translated among others. De Quincey likewise was a student of German literature, though he was not so accurate in his scholarship as Scott. His horror tale, The Avengers, as well as Klosterheim, has a German setting and tone.

There has been some discussion over the question of Hawthorne’s relation to German Romanticism. Poe made the charge that Hawthorne drew his ideas and style from Ludwig Tieck, saying in a criticism:

The fact is, he is not original in any sense. Those who speak of him as original mean nothing more than that he differs in his manner or tone, and in his choice of subjects, from any author of their acquaintance—their acquaintance not extending to the German Tieck, whose manner in some of his works is absolutely identical with that habitual to Hawthorne.... The critic (unacquainted with Tieck) who reads a single tale by Hawthorne may be justified in thinking him original.

Various critics have discussed this matter with no very definite conclusions. It should be remembered that Poe was a famous plagiary-hunter, hence his comments may be discounted. Yet Poe knew German, it is thought, and in his writings often referred to German literature, while Hawthorne, according to his journal, read it with difficulty and spoke of his struggles with a volume of Tieck.

Hawthorne and Tieck do show certain similarities, as in the use of the dream element, the employment of the allegory as a medium for teaching moral truths, and the choice of the legend as a literary form. Both use somewhat the same dreamy supernaturalism, yet in style as in subject-matter Hawthorne is much the superior and improved whatever he may have borrowed from Tieck. Hawthorne’s vague mystery, cloudy symbolism, and deep spiritualism are individual in their effect and give to his supernaturalism an unearthly charm scarcely found elsewhere. Hawthorne’s theme in The Marble Faun, of the attaining to a soul by human suffering, is akin to the idea in Fouqué’s Undine. There the supernaturalism is franker, while that of Hawthorne’s novel is more evasive and delicate, yet the same suggestion is present in each case. Lowell in his Fable for Critics speaks of Hawthorne as “a John Bunyan Fouqué, a Puritan Tieck.”

There are still more striking similarities to be pointed out between the work of Poe and that of E. T. A. Hoffmann. As Hawthorne was, to a slight extent, at least, affected by German legends and wonder tales, Poe was influenced by Hoffmann’s horror stories. Poe has been called a Germanic dreamer, and various German and English critics mention the debt that he owes to Hoffmann. Mr. Palmer Cobb[38] brings out some interesting facts in connection with the two romanticists. He says:

The verification of Poe’s indebtedness to German is to be sought in the similarity of the treatment of the same motives in the work of both authors. The most convincing evidence is furnished by the way in which Poe has combined the themes of mesmerism, metempsychosis, dual existence, the dream element, and so forth, in exact agreement with the grouping employed by Hoffmann. Notable examples of this are the employment of the idea of double existence in conjunction with the struggle of good and evil forces in the soul of the individual, and the combination of mesmerism and metempsychosis as leading motives in one and the same story.

Mr. Cobb points out in detail the similarities between Poe’s stories of dual personality and the German use of the theme as found in Fouqué, Novalis, and Hoffmann, particularly the last. Hoffmann’s exaggerated use of this idea is to be explained on the ground that he was obsessed by the thought that his double was haunting him, and he, like Maupassant under similar conditions of mind, wrote of supernaturalism associated with madness. Hoffmann uses the theme of double personality.[39] In Poe’s William Wilson the other self is the embodiment of good, a sort of incarnate conscience, as in Stevenson’s Markheim, while Hoffmann’s Elixiere represents the evil. Poe has here reversed the idea. In Hoffmann’s Magnetiseur we find the treatment of hypnotism and metempsychosis and the dream-supernaturalism in the same combination that Poe uses.[40] Hoffmann[41] and Poe[42] relate the story of a supernatural portrait, where the wife-model dies as the sacrifice to the painting.

Both Hoffmann and Poe use the grotesquerie of supernaturalism, the fantastic element of horror that adds to the effect of the ghostly. Even the generic titles are almost identical.[43] But in spite of these similarities in theme and in grouping, there is no basis for a charge that Poe owes a stylistic debt to Hoffmann. In his manner he is original and individual. He uses his themes with much greater art, with more dramatic and powerful effect than his German contemporary. Though he employs fewer of the crude machineries of the supernatural, his ghostly tales are more unearthly than Hoffmann’s. His horrors have a more awful effect because he is an incomparably greater artist. He knows the economy of thrills as few have done. His is the genius of compression, of suggestion. His dream elements, for instance, though Hoffmann uses the dream to as great extent as Poe—are more poignant, more unbearable.

The cult of horror in German literature, as evidenced in the work of Hoffmann, Kleist, Tieck, Arnim, Fouqué, Chamisso, had an influence on English and American literature of supernaturalism in general. The grotesque diablerie, the use of dream elements, magnetism, metempsychosis, ghosts, the elixir of life—which theme appears to have a literary elixir of life—are reflected to a certain degree in the English ghostly tales of the generation following the Gothic romance.

A French influence is likewise manifest in the later English fiction. The Gothic novel had made itself felt in France as well as in Germany, a proof of which is the fact that Balzac was so impressed by Maturin’s novel that he wrote a sequel to it.[44] The interrelations of the English, French, and German supernatural literature are nowhere better illustrated than in the work of Balzac. He admits Hoffmann’s inspiration of his Elixir of Life, that horrible story of reanimation, where the head is restored to life and youth but the body remains that of an old man, dead and decaying, from which the head tears itself loose in the church and bites the abbot to the brain, shrieking out, “Idiot, tell me now if there is a God!” Balzac’s influence over Bulwer-Lytton is seen in such stories as The Haunters and the Haunted, or the House and the Brain, and A Strange Story, in each of which the theme of supernaturally continued life is used. Balzac’s Magic Skin is a symbolic story of supernaturalism that suggests Hawthorne’s allegoric symbolism and may have influenced it in part. It is a new application of the old theme, used often in the drama as in Gothic romance, of the pledge of a soul for earthly gratification. A magic skin gives the man his heart’s desires, yet each granted wish makes the talisman shrink perceptibly, with an inexorable decrease. This theme, symbolic of the truth of life, is such a spiritual idea used allegorically as Hawthorne chose frequently and doubtless influenced Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray. Balzac’s Unknown Masterpiece is another example of his supernaturalism that has had its suggestive effect on English ghostly fictions.

Guy de Maupassant has doubtless influenced English tales of horror more than any foreign writer since Hoffmann. As a stylist he exercised a definite and strong influence over the short-story form, condensing it, making it more economical, more like a fatal bullet that goes straight to the mark, and putting into a few hundred words a story of supernatural horror relentless in its effect. O. Henry’s delicately perfect ghost story, The Furnished Room, is reminiscent of Maupassant’s technique as seen in The Ghost. And surely F. Marion Crawford’s Screaming Skull and Ambrose Bierce’s Middle Toe of the Right Foot are from the same body as Maupassant’s Hand. What a terrible corpus it must be! There is the same gruesome mystery, the same implacable horror in each story of a mutilated ghost.

Maupassant’s stories of madness, akin to Poe’s analyses of mental decay, of the slow corruption of the brain, are among his most dreadful triumphs of style, and have influenced various English stories of insanity. In Maupassant’s own tottering reason we find the tragic explanation of his constant return to this type of story. Such tales as Mad, where a husband goes insane from doubt of his wife; Madness, where a man has a weird power over human beings, animals, and even inanimate objects, making them do his will, so that he is terrified of his own self, of what his horrible hands may do mechanically; Cocotte, where the drowned dog, following its master a hundred miles down the river, drives him insane; The Tress, a curdling story of the relation between insanity and the supernatural, so that one is unable to say which is cause and which effect, illustrate Maupassant’s unusual association between madness and uncanny fiction. Who but Maupassant could make a story of ghastly hideousness out of a parrot that swears? As Maupassant was influenced by Poe, in both subject matter and technique, so he has affected the English writers since his time in both plot material and treatment of the supernatural. And as his La Horla strongly reflects FitzJames O’Brien’s What Was It? A Mystery that anticipated it by a number of years, so it left its inevitable impress on Bierce’s The Damned Thing and succeeding stories of supernatural invisibility. A recent story by Katherine Fullerton Gerould, Louquier’s Third Act, seems clearly to indicate the De Maupassant influence, reflecting the method and motifs of La Horla and The Coward. Maupassant’s tales have a peculiar horror possessed by few, partly because of his undoubted genius and partly the result of his increasing madness.

Other French writers have also influenced the uncanny story in English. Théophile Gautier has undoubtedly inspired various tales, such as The Mummy’s Foot, by Jessie Adelaide Weston, which is the match, though not in beauty or form, to his little masterpiece of that title. A. Conan Doyle’s Lot No. 249, a horrible story of a reanimated mummy, bears an unquestionable resemblance to Gautier’s The Romance of the Mummy as well as The Mummy’s Foot, though Poe’s A Word with a Mummy, a fantastic story emphasizing the science of miraculous embalming of living persons so that they would wake to life after thousands of years, preceded it. Something of the same theme is also used by F. Marion Crawford,[45] where the bodies in the old studio awake to menacing life. This motif illustrates the prevalence of the Oriental material in recent English fiction. Gautier’s La Morte Amoureuse has exercised suggestive power over later tales, such as Crawford’s vampire story,[46] though it is significant to recall that Poe’s Berenice preceded Gautier’s story by a year, and the latter must have known Poe’s work.

The fiction of Erckmann-Chatrian appears to have suggested various English stories. The Owl’s Ear obviously inspired another,[47] both being records of supernatural acoustics the latter dealing with spiritual sounds. The Invisible Eye, a fearsome story of hypnotism, has an evident parental claim on Algernon Blackwood’s story,[48] though the latter is psychically more gruesome. The Waters of Death, an account of a loathsome, enchanted crab, suggests H. G. Wells’s story of the plant vampire.[49]

Likewise Anatole France’s Putois, the narrative of the man who came to have an actual existence because someone spoke of him as an imaginary person, is associated with the drolleries of supernaturalism, such as are used by Thomas Bailey Aldrich in the story of an imagined person, Miss Mehitabel’s Son, and by Frank R. Stockton.[50] Anatole France has several delicately wrought idylls of the supernatural, as The Mass of Shadows, where the ghosts of those who have sinned for love may meet once a year to be reunited with their loved ones, and in the church, with clasped hands, celebrate the spectral mass, or such tender miracles as The Juggler of Notre Dame, where the juggler throws his balls before the altar as an act of worship and is rewarded by a sight of the Virgin, or Scholasticus, a symbolic story much like one written years earlier by Thomas Bailey Aldrich,[51] where a plant miraculously springs from the heart of a dead woman. Amycus and Celestine, the story of the faun and the hermit, of whom he tells us that “the hermit is a faun borne down by the years” is suggestive of the wonderful little stories of Lord Dunsany. Lord Dunsany, while startlingly original in most respects, seems a bit influenced by Anatole France. His When the Gods Slept seems reminiscent of The Isle of the Penguins. In France’s satire the gods change penguins into men whose souls will be lost, because the priest has baptized them by mistake, while in Dunsany’s story the baboons pray to the Yogis, who promise to make them men in return for their devotion.

And the baboons arose from worshipping, smoother about the face and a little shorter in the arms, and went away and hid themselves in clothing and herded with men. And men could not discern what they were for their bodies were bodies of men though their souls were still the souls of beasts and the worship went to the Yogis, spirits of ill.

Maeterlinck, influenced by his fellow-Belgian, Charles Van Lerberghe, whose Flaireurs appeared before Maeterlinck’s plays of the uncanny and to whom he acknowledges his indebtedness, has strongly affected ghostly literature since his rise to recognition. In his plays we find an atmospheric supernaturalism. The settings are of earth, yet with an unearthly strangeness, with no impression of realism, of the familiar, the known. In Maeterlinck’s plays we never breathe the air of actuality, never feel the footing of solid earth, as we always do in Shakespeare, even in the presence of ghosts or witches. Shakespeare’s visitants are ghostly enough, certainly, but the scenes in which they appear are real, are normal, while in the Belgian’s work there is a fluidic supernaturalism that transforms everything to unreality. We feel the grip of fate, as in the ancient Greek tragedies, the inescapable calamity that approaches with swift, silent pace. Yet Maeterlinck’s is essentially static drama. There is very little action, among the human beings, at least, for Fate is the active agent. In The Blind, The Intruder, and Interior the elements are much the same, the effects wrought out with the same unearthly manner. But in Joyzelle, which shows a certain similarity to Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest, we have a different type of supernaturalism, the use of enchantment, of fairy magic that comes to a close happily. In the dream-drama[52] there is a mixture of realism and poetic symbolism, the use of the dream as a vehicle for the supernormal, and many aspects of the weird combined in a fairy play of exquisite symbolism.

The influence of Maeterlinck is apparent in the work of English writers, particularly of the Celtic school. W. B. Yeats’s fairy play, The Land of Heart’s Desire, with its pathetic beauty, Countess Cathleen, his tragedy of the countess who sells her soul to the devil that her people may be freed from his power, as well as his stories, show the traces of Maeterlinck’s methods. William Sharp, in his sketches and his brief plays in the volume called Vistas, reflects the Belgian’s technique slightly, though with his own individual power. Sharp’s other literary self, Fiona McLeod, likewise shows his influence, as does Synge in his Riders to the Sea, and Gordon Bottomley in his Crier by Night, that eerie tragedy of an unseen power. Maeterlinck’s supernaturalism seems to suggest the poetry of Coleridge, with its elusive, intangible ghostliness. The effect of naïveté observable in Coleridge’s work is in Maeterlinck produced by a child-like simplicity of style, a monosyllabic dialogue, and a monotonous, unreasoning repetition that is at once real and unreal. The dramatist has brought over from the poet the same suggestive use of portents and symbols for prefiguring death or disaster that lurks just outside. The ghostliness is subtle, rather than evident, the drama static rather than dynamic.

Ibsen, also, has strongly influenced the supernatural in both our drama and our fiction. His own work has a certain kinship with that of Hawthorne, showing a like symbolism and mysticism, a like transfusion of the unreal with the natural, so that one scarcely knows just how far he means our acceptance of the unearthly to extend. He leaves it in some cases an open question, while in others he frankly introduces the supernatural. The child’s vision of the dead heroes riding to Valhalla, with his own mother who has killed herself, leading them,[53] the ghost that tries to make an unholy pact with the king,[54] the apparition and the supernatural voice crying out “He is the God of Love!”[55] illustrate Ibsen’s earlier methods. The curious, almost inexplicable Peer Gynt, with its mixture of folk-lore and symbolism, its ironic laughter and satiric seriousness, seems to have had a suggestive influence on other works, such as Countess Eve,[56] where the personification of temptation in the form of committed sin reflects Ibsen’s idea of Peer Gynt’s imaginary children. The uncanny power of unspoken thought, the haunting force of ideas rather than the crude visible phantasms of the dead, as in the telepathy, or hypnotism, or what you will, in The Master Builder, the evasive, intangible haunting of the living by the dead as in Rosmersholm, the strange powers at work as in The Lady from the Sea, have had effect on the numerous psychic dramas and stories in English. The symbolic mysticism in Emperor and Galilean, showing the spirits of Cain and of Judas, with their sad ignorance of life’s riddles, the vision of Christ in person, with His unceasing power over men’s souls, foreshadowed the plays and stories bringing in the personality of Christ, as The Servant in the House, and The Passing of the Third Floor Back.

Modern Italian literature, as represented by Fogazzaro and D’Annunzio, introduces the ghostly in fiction and in the drama, and has had its effect on our literature. Fogazzaro’s novels are essentially realistic in pattern, yet he uses the supernatural in them, as in miraculous visions,[57] and metempsychosis and madness associated with the supernatural.[58] D’Annunzio’s handling of the unearthly is more repulsive, more psychically gruesome, as the malignant power of the ancient curse in La Città Morta, where the undying evil in an old tomb causes such revolting horror in the action of the play. This has a counterpart in a story,[59] by Josephine Daskam Bacon, where a packet of letters from two evil lovers lie buried in a hearth and by their subtle influence corrupt the soul of every woman who occupies the room. D’Annunzio uses the witch motive powerfully,[60] madness that borders on the supernatural,[61] and the idea of evil magic exorcised by melting an image of wax to cause an enemy’s death[62] which suggests Rossetti’s poem using that incident, the unforgettable Sister Helen.

Likewise a new force in the work of the Russian school has affected our fiction of the ghostly in recent years. Russian literature is a new field of thought for English people, since it is only of late years that translations have been easily accessible, and, because of the extreme difficulty of the language, very few outsiders read Russian. As German Romanticism began to have its definite power over English supernatural fiction in the early part of the nineteenth century by the extension of interest in and study of German literature, and the more frequent translation of German works, so in this generation Russian literature has been introduced to English people and is having its influence.

A primitive, still savage race like the Russians naturally shows a special fondness for the supernatural. Despite the fact that literature is written for the higher classes, a large peasant body, illiterate and superstitious, will influence the national fiction. In the Russian works best known to us there is a large element of the uncanny, of a type in some respects different from that of any other country. Like the Russian national character, it is harsh, brutal, violent, yet sentimental. One singular thing to be noted about it is the peculiar combination of supernaturalism with absolute realism. The revolting yet dreadfully effective realism of the Russian literature is never more impressive than in its union with ghostly horror, which makes the impossible appear indubitable. In Gogol’s The Cloak, for instance, the fidelity to homely details of life, the descriptions of pinching poverty, of tragic hopes that waited so long for fulfillment, are painful in themselves and give verisimilitude to the element of the unearthly that follows. You feel that a poor Russian clerk who had stinted himself from necessity all his life would come back from the dead to claim his stolen property and demand redress. The supernatural gains a new power, a more tremendous thrill when set off against the every-dayness of sordid life. We find something of the same effect in the stories of Algernon Blackwood and Ambrose Bierce and F. Marion Crawford.

Tolstoi’s symbolic story of Ivan the Fool is an impressive utterance of his views of life, expressed by the allegory of man’s folly and wisdom and the schemes of devils.

Turgeniev’s pronounced strain of the unearthly has had its influence on English fiction. He uses the dream elements to a marked degree, as in The Song of Love Triumphant, a story of Oriental magic employed through dreams and music, and The Dream, an account of a son’s revelatory visions of his unknown father. The dream element has been used considerably in our late fiction, some of which seems to reflect Turgeniev. Another motive that he uses effectively is that of suggested vampirism,[63] and of psychical vampirism,[64] where a young man is “set upon” by the spirit of a dead woman he has scarcely known, till he dies under the torment. This seems to have affected such stories as that of psychical vampirism in The Vampire, by Reginald Hodder. We find in much of Turgeniev’s prose the symbolic, mystical supernaturalism besides his use of dreams, visions, and a distinct Oriental element. In Knock! Knock! Knock! the treatment of whose spiritualism reminds one somewhat of Browning’s,[65] in its initial skepticism and later hesitation, the final effect of which is to impress one with a sense of supernaturalism working extraordinarily through natural means, so that it is more powerful than the mere conventional ghostly could be, we see what may have been the inspiration for certain spiritualistic novels and stories in English. The same tone is felt in Hamlin Garland’s treatment of the subject, for instance. The mystical romanticism of Turgeniev is less brutally Russian than that of most of his compeers.

Like Maupassant and Hoffman and Poe, the Russian writers use to a considerable extent the association between insanity and the supernatural to heighten the effect of both. They may have been influenced in this by Poe’s studies of madness, as by Maupassant’s, and they appear to have an influence over certain present-day writers. It would be difficult to say which is the stronger influence in the treatment of abnormal persons, Maupassant or the Russian writers. One wonders what type of mania obsesses certain of the Russian fictionists of to-day, for surely they cannot be normal persons. Examples of such fiction are: Alexander Pushkin’s story of mocking madness resulting from a passion for cards, whose ghostly motif has a sardonic diabolism,[66] Tchekhoff’s story of abnormal horror,[67] a racking account of insanity,[68] and The Black Monk, a weird story of insanity brought on by the vision of a supernatural being, a replicated mirage of a black monk a thousand years old. But it is in the work of Leonidas Andreyev that we get the ultimate anguish of madness. The Red Laugh, an analysis of the madness of war, of the insanity of nations as of individuals, seems to envelop the world in a sheet of flame. Its horrors go beyond words and the brain reels in reading. There are in English a number of stories of insanity associated with the supernatural which may have been influenced by the Russian method, though Ambrose Bierce’s studies in the abnormality of soldier life preceded Andreyev by years. F. Marion Crawford’s The Dead Smile and various stories of Arthur Machen have a Russian horror, and other instances might be mentioned.

The Russian fiction with its impersonality of pessimism, its racial gloom, its terrible sordid realism forming a basis for awesome supernaturalism, is of a type foreign to our thought, yet, as is not infrequently the case, the radically different has a strange appeal, and the effect of it on our stories of horror is undoubted. English and American readers are greatly interested in Russian literature just now and find a peculiar relish in its terrors, though the harsher elements are somewhat softened in transference to our language.

Other fields of thought have been opened to us within this generation by the widening of our knowledge of the literature of other European countries. Books are much more freely translated now than formerly and no person need be ignorant of the fiction of other lands. From the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Chinese, Japanese, and other tongues we are receiving stories of supernaturalism that give us new ideas, new points of view. The greater ease of travel, the opportunity to study once-distant lands and literatures have been reflected in our fiction. Some one should write a monograph on the literary influence of Cook’s tours! Our later work has a strong touch of the Oriental,—not an entirely new thing, since we find it in Beckford’s Vathek and the pre-Gothic tales of John Hawkesworth,—but more noticeable now. Examples are Stevenson’s New Arabian Nights, Bottle Imp, and others, F. Marion Crawford’s Khaled and Mr. Isaacs, Blackwood’s stories of Elementals, George Meredith’s fantasy, The Shaving of Shagpat, though many others might be named. The Oriental fiction permits the use of magic, sorcery, and various elements that seem out of place in ordinary fiction. The popularity of Kipling’s tales of Indian native life and character illustrates our fondness for this aspect of supernaturalism.

Apart from the foreign influences that affect it we notice a certain change in the materials and methods of ghostly fiction in English. New elements had entered into Gothic tales as an advance over the earlier forms, yet conventions had grown up so that even such evasive and elusive personalities as ghosts were hidebound by precedent. While the decline of the genre definitely known as the Gothic novel in no sense put an end to the supernatural in English fiction, it did mark a difference in manner. The Gothic ghosts were more elementary in their nature, more superficial, than those of later times. Life was, in the days of Walpole and Mrs. Radcliffe, more local because of the limitations of travel and communication, it being considered astounding in Gothic times that a ghost could travel a thousand miles with ease while mortals moved snail-like. Scientific investigation was crude compared with the present and had not greatly touched fiction. Scientific folk-lore investigations were as unknown as societies of psychical research, hence neither had aided in the writing of ghostly fiction.

The mass of ghostly stuff which has appeared in English since the Gothic period, and which will be classified and discussed under different motifs in succeeding chapters, shows many of the same characteristics of the earlier, yet exhibits also a decided development over primitive, classical and Gothic forms. The modern supernaturalism is more complex, more psychological than the terroristic, perhaps because nowadays man is more intellectual, his thought-processes more subtle. Humanity still wants ghosts, as ever, but they must be more cleverly presented to be convincing. The ghostly thrill is as ardently desired by the reading public, as eagerly striven for by the writers as ever, though it is more difficult of achievement now than formerly. Yet when it is attained it is more poignant and lasting in its effects because more subtle in its art. The apparition that eludes analysis haunts the memory more than do the comparatively simple forms of the past. Compare, for instance, the spirits evoked by Henry James and Katherine Fullerton Gerould with the crude clap-trap of cloistered spooks and armored knights of Gothic times. How cheap and melodramatic the earlier attempts seem!

The present-day ghost is at once less terrible and more terrible than those of the past. There is not so much a sense of physical fear now, as of psychic horror. The pallid specters that glide through antique castles are ineffectual compared with the maleficent psychic invasions of modernity. On the other hand, the recent ghostly story frequently shows a strong sense of humor unknown in Gothicism, and only suggested in earlier forms, as in the elder Pliny’s statement that ghosts would not visit a person afflicted with freckles, which shows at least a germinal joviality in classical spooks.

One feature that distinguishes the uncanny tales of to-day from the Gothic is their greater range of material. The early terror story had its source in popular superstition, classical literature, medieval legends, or the Elizabethan drama, while in the century that has elapsed since the decay of the Gothic novel as such, new fields of thought have been opened up, and new sources for ghostly plots have been discovered which the writers of modern stories are quick to utilize. Present-day science with its wonderful development has provided countless plots for supernatural stories. Comparative study of folk-lore, with the activities of the numerous associations, has brought to light fascinating material. Modern Spiritualism, with its seances, its mediumistic experiments, has inspired many novels and stories. The Psychical Research Society, with branches in various parts of the world and its earnest advocates and serious investigations, has collected suggestive stuff for many ghostly stories. The different sources for plot material and mechanics for awesome effect, added to these from which the terror novel drew its inspiration, have incalculably enriched the supernatural fiction and widened the limits far beyond the restrictions of the conventionalized Gothic.

Science has furnished themes for many modern stories of the supernatural. Modern science itself, under normal conditions, seems like necromancer’s magic, so its incursion into thrilling fiction is but natural. Every aspect of research and discovery has had its exponent in fictive form, and the skill with which the material is handled constitutes one point of difference between the present ghostly stories and the crude scientific supernaturalism of the early novels. The influence of Darwin, Spencer, Huxley, and other scientists of the last century did much to quicken fiction as well as thought, and the effects can be traced in the work of various authors.

The widespread interest in folk-lore in recent years has had an appreciable influence on the stories of the supernatural. While the methods of investigation followed by the serious students of folk-lore are scientific and the results are tabulated in an analytic rather than a literary style, yet the effect is helpful to fiction. Comparative studies in folk-lore, by the bringing together of a mass of material from diverse sources, establishes the fact of the universal acceptance of supernaturalism in some form. Ethnic superstitions vary, yet there is enough similarity between the ideas held by tribes and races so widely separated as to discredit any basis of imitation or conscious influence between them, to be of great interest to scientists. No tribe, however low in the social scale, has been found that has no belief in powers beyond the mortal.

Folk-lore associations are multiplying and the students of literature and anthropology are joining forces in the effort to discover and classify the variant superstitions and legends of the past and of the races and tribes still in their childhood. Such activities are bringing to light a fascinating wealth of material from which the writers of ghostly tales may find countless plots. Such studies show how close akin the world is after all. A large number of books relating stories of brownies, bogles, fairies, banshees, wraiths, hobgoblins, witches, vampires, ghouls, and other superhuman personages have appeared. I am not including in this list the fairy stories that are written for juvenile consumption, but merely the folk-loristic or literary versions for adults.

The most marked instance of the influence of folk-lore in supplying subject matter for literature is shown in the recent Celtic revival. The supernatural elements in the folk-tales of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales have been widely used in fiction, poetry, and the drama. In this connection one is reminded of Collins’s Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands Considered as the Subject for Poetry. The Irish National School, with W. B. Yeats, John Synge, and Lady Gregory as leaders, have made the folk-tales of Ireland live in literature and the ghostly thrill of the old legends comes down to us undiminished. Lord Dunsany’s work is particularly brilliant, going back to ancient times and re-creating the mythologic beings for us, making us friendly with the gods, the centaurs, the giants, and divers other long-forgotten characters. Kipling has made the lore of the Indian towns and jungles live for us, as Joel Chandler Harris has immortalized the legends of the southern negro. Thomas A. Janvier in his tales of old Mexico calls back the ghosts of Spanish conquerors and Aztec men and women, repeopling the ancient streets with courtly specters. The fondness for folk-loristic fiction is one of the marked aspects of Romanticism at the present time.

The activities of the Society for Psychical Research have had decided effect in stimulating ghostly stories. When so many intelligent persons turn their attention to finding and classifying supernatural phenomena the currents of thought thus set up will naturally influence fiction. Nowadays every interest known to man is reflected in literature. The proceedings of the association have been so widely advertised and so open to the public that persons who would not otherwise give thought to the supernatural have considered the matter. Such thinkers as W. T. Stead and Sir Oliver Lodge, to mention only two, would inevitably influence others. In this connection it is interesting to note the recent claims by Stead’s daughter that her father has communicated with the living, and Lodge’s book, just published, Raymond, or Life and Death, that gives proof of what he considers incontrovertible messages from his son killed in battle. The collection of thousands of affirmative answers to the question as to whether one had ever felt a ghostly presence not to be explained on natural grounds brought out a mass of material that might serve for plot-making. Haunted houses have been catalogued and the census of specters taken.

The investigations in modern Spiritualism have done much to affect ghostly literature. The terrors of the later apparitions are not physical, but psychical, and probably the stories of the future will be more and more allied to Spiritualism. Hamlin Garland, John Corbin, William Dean Howells, Algernon Blackwood, Arnold Bennett, and others have written novels and stories of this material, though scarcely the fringe of the garment of possibilities has yet been touched. If one but grant the hypothesis of Spiritualism, what vistas open up for the novelist! What thrilling complications might come from the skillful manipulation of astrals alone,—as aids in establishing alibis, for instance! Even the limitations that at present bind ghost stories would be abolished and the effects of the dramatic employment of spiritualistic faith would be highly sensational. If the will be all powerful, then not only tables but mountains may be moved. The laws of physics would be as nothing in the presence of such powers. A lovelorn youth bent on attaining the object of his desires could, by merely willing it so, sink ocean liners, demolish skyscrapers, call up tempests, and rival German secret agents in his havoc. Intensely dramatic psychological material might be produced by the conflict resulting from the double or multiple personalities in one’s own nature, according to spiritualistic ideas. There might be complicated crossings in love, wherein one would be jealous of his alter ego, and conflicting ambitions of exciting character. The struggle necessary for the model story might be intensely dramatic though altogether internal, between one’s own selves. One finds himself so much more interesting in the light of such research than one has ever dreamed. The distinctions between materializations and astralizations, etherealizations and plain apparitions might furnish good plot structure. The personality of the “sensitives” alone would be fascinating material and the cosmic clashes of will possible under these conceived conditions suggest thrilling stories.

Dreams constitute another definite source for ghostly plots in modern literature. While this was true to a certain extent in the Gothic novel, it is still more so in later fiction. Lafcadio Hearn[69] advances the theory that all the best plots for ghost stories in any language come from dreams. He advises the person who would write supernatural thrillers to study the phases of his own dream life. It would appear that all one needs to do is to look into his own nightmares and write. Hearn says: “All the great effects produced by poets and story writers and even by religious teachers, in the treatment of the supernatural fear or mystery, have been obtained directly or indirectly from dreams.” Though one may not literally accept the whole of that statement, one must feel that the relation between dreams and supernatural impressions is strikingly close. The feeling of supernatural presence comes almost always at night when one is or has been asleep. The guilty man, awaking from sleep, thinks that he sees the specters of those he has wronged—because his dreams have embodied them for him. The lover beholds the spirit of his dead love, because in dreams his soul has gone in search of her. Very young children are unable to distinguish between dreams and reality, as is the case of savages of a low order, believing in the actuality of what they experience in dreams. And who can say that our dream life is altogether baseless and unreal?

The different nightmare sensations, acute and vivid as they are, can be analyzed to find parallelisms between them and the ghostly plots. For example, take the sensation, common in nightmares, of feeling yourself falling from immeasurable height. The same thrill of suspense is communicated by the climax in Lewis’s and Mrs. Dacre’s Gothic novels, where the devil takes guilty mortals to the mountain top and hurls them down, down. The horrible potentialities of shadows suggested frequently in dreams is illustrated by Mary Wilkins Freeman’s story where the accusing spirit comes back as a haunting shadow on the wall, rather than as an ordinary ghost, tormenting the living brother till his shadow also appears, a portent of his death.[70] The awful grip of causeless horror, of nameless fear which assails one so often in nightmares is represented in The Red Room,[71] where black Fear, the Power of Darkness, haunts the room rather than any personal spirit. It is disembodied horror itself. Wilkie Collins illustrates the presaging vision of approaching disaster in The Dream Woman. The nightmare horror of supernaturalism is nowhere better shown than in Maupassant’s La Horla where the sleeper wakes with a sense of leaden weight upon his breast, and knows that night after night some dreadful presence is shut in with him, invisible yet crushing the life out of him and driving him mad.

The nightmare motifs are present to a remarkable degree in Bulwer-Lytton’s The Haunted and the Haunters, or the House and the Brain. There we have the gigantism of the menacing Thing, the supernatural power given to inanimate objects, the ghostly chill, the darkness, and the intolerable oppression of a nameless evil thing beside one. Vampirism might easily be an outcome of dreams, since based on a physical sensation of pricking at the throat, combined with debility caused by weakness, which could be attributed to loss of blood from the ravages of vampires. F. Marion Crawford’s story, For the Blood Is the Life, is more closely related to dreams than most of the type, though probably Bram Stoker’s Dracula is the most horrible.

The curious side of supernaturalism as related to dreams is illustrated by The Dream Gown of the Japanese Ambassador,[72] and the more beautiful by Simeon Solomon’s Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep. Mary Wilkins Freeman has a remarkable short story, The Hall Bedroom, which is one of the best illustrations of the use of dream imagery and impressions. Here the effects are alluring and beautiful, with the horror kept in the background, but perhaps the more effective because of the artistic restraint. Odors, sights, sounds, feelings, are all raised to an intensity of sensuous, slumbrous enjoyment, all subliminated above the mortal. The description of the river in the picture, on which the young man floats away to dreamy death, similar to the Japanese story referred to by Hearn, helps to give the impression of infinity that comes only in dreams. Algernon Blackwood in numerous stories not only uses the elements of dreams and nightmares but explicitly calls attention to the fact. Dream supernaturalism is employed in Barry Pain’s stories, in Arthur Machen’s volume,[73] and in many others. Freud’s theory of dreams as the invariable result of past experiences or unconscious desires has not been stressed in fiction, though doubtless it will have its inning presently. A. Conan Doyle’s The Secret of Goresthorpe Grange is an amusing story of the relation of definite wishes and dreams of the ghostly.

These are some of the sources from which the later writers of occultism have drawn their plots. They represent a distinct advance over the Gothic and earlier supernaturalism in materials, for the modern story has gained the new elements without loss of the old. The ghostly fiction of to-day has access to the animistic or classical or medieval themes, yet has the unlimited province of present thought to furnish additional inspiration. There never was a time when thinking along general lines was more spontaneously reflected in fiction than now, and supernatural literature claims all regions for its own. Like every other phase of man’s thought, ghostly fiction shows the increasing complexity of form and matter, the wealth of added material and abounding richness of style, the fine subtleties that only modernity can give.

CHAPTER III
MODERN GHOSTS

The ghost is the most enduring figure in supernatural fiction. He is absolutely indestructible. He glides from the freshly-cut pages of magazines and books bearing the date of the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and seventeen as from the parchment rolls of ancient manuscripts. He appears as unapologetically at home in twentieth century fiction as in classical mythology, Christian hagiology, medieval legend, or Gothic romance. He changes with the styles in fiction but he never goes out of fashion. He is the really permanent citizen of this earth, for mortals, at best, are but transients. Even the athlete and the Methusaleh must in the end give up the flesh, but the wraith goes on forever. In form, too, he wears well. Ghostly substance of materialization, ethereal and vaporous as it appears to be, is yet of an astonishing toughness. It seems to possess an obstinate vitality akin to that attributed to the boll weevil in a negro ballad, that went on undaunted by heat or cold, rain or drought, time or tide. The ghost, like death, has all seasons for its own and there is no closed season for spooks. It is much the case now as ever that all the world loves a ghost, yet we like to take our ghosts vicariously, preferably in fiction. We’d rather see than be one.

One point of difference between the ghostly fiction of the past and of the present is in the matter of length. The Gothic novel was often a three- or four-decker affair in whose perusal the reader aged perceptibly before the ghost succeeded or was foiled in his haunting designs. There was obviously much more leisure on the part of spooks as well as mortals then than now. Consequently the ghost story of to-day is told in short-story form for the most part. Poe knew better than anybody before him what was necessary for the proper economy of thrills when he gave his dictum concerning the desirable length for a story, which rule applies more to the ghostly tale than to any other type, for surely there is needed the unity of impression, the definiteness of effect which only continuity in reading gives. The ghostly narrative that is too long loses in impressiveness, whether it is altogether supernatural or mixed with other elements. In either case, it is less successful than the shorter, more poignant treatment possible in the compressed form. The tabloid ghost can communicate more thrills than the one in diluted narration.

The apparitions in later English fiction fall naturally into several distinct classes with reference to the reality of their appearance. There are the mistaken apparitions, there are the purely subjective specters, evoked by the psychic state of the percipients, and there are the objective ghosts, independent of the mental state of the witnesses, appearing to persons who are not mentally prepared to see them.

The mistaken ghost is an old form, for most of Mrs. Radcliffe’s interesting apparitions belong to this class and others of the Gothic writers used subterfuge to cheat the reader. In the early romance there was frequently deliberate deception for a definite purpose, the ghosts with the histrionic temperament using a make-up of phosphorus, bones, and other contrivances to create the impression of unearthly visitation. Recent fiction is more cleverly managed than that. Rarely now does one find a story where the ghost-seer is deliberately imposed upon, for in most modern cases the mistake occurs by accident or misapprehension on the part of the percipient, for which nobody and nothing but his own agitation is responsible. Yet there are occasional hoax ghosts even yet, for example, The Ghost of Miser Brimpson,[74] where a specter is rigged up as the scheme of a clever girl to win over an obdurate lover, and The Spectre Bridegroom, which is a well-known example of the pseudo-spook whose object is matrimony. His Unquiet Ghost[75] is a delightful story of a fake burial to evade the revenue officials. Watt, the “corp,” says: “I was a powerful onchancy, onquiet ghost. I even did my courtin’ whilst in my reg’lar line o’ business a’harntin’ a graveyard!” His sweetheart sobs out her confession of love to “his pore ghost,” an avowal she has denied the living man. Examples of the apparitions that unwittingly deceive mortals are found in The Ghost at Point of Rock,[76] where the young telegraph operator, alone at night on a prairie, sees a beautiful girl who enters and announces that she is dead,—how is he to know that she is in a somnambulistic stupor, and has wandered from a train? Another is[77] a story where the young man falls in love with what he thinks is a wraith of the water luring him to his death, but learns that she is a perfectly proper damsel whose family he knows. The Night Call[78] is less simple than these, a problematic story that leaves one wondering as to just what is meant.[79]

The subjective ghosts are legion in modern fiction. They are those evoked by the mental state of the percipients so that they become realities to those beholding them. The mind rendered morbid by grief or remorse is readily prepared to see the spirits of the dead return in love or with reproach. The apparitions in animistic beliefs, as in classical stories and Gothic romance, were usually subjective, born of brooding love or remorse or fear of retribution, appearing to the persons who had cause to expect them and coming usually at night when the beholders would be alone and given over to melancholy thought or else to troubled sleep. Shakespeare’s ghosts were in large measure subjective, “selective apparitions.” When Brutus asked the specter what he was, the awful answer came, “Thy evil genius, Brutus!” Macbeth saw the witches who embodied for him his own secret ambitions, and he alone saw the ghost of Banquo, because he had the weight of murder on his heart.

The subjective ghost story is difficult to write, as the effect must be subtly managed yet inescapably impressive. If done well it is admirable, and there are some writers who, to use Henry James’s words concerning his own work, are “more interested in situations obscure and subject to interpretation than the gross rattle of the foreground.” The reader, as well as the writer, must put himself in the mental attitude of acceptance of the supernatural else the effect is lacking, for the ghostly thrill is incommunicable to those beyond the pale of at least temporary credulity.

Kipling’s They is an extraordinary ghost story of suggestion rather than of bald fact. It is like crushing the wings of a butterfly to analyze it, but it represents the story of a man whose love for his own dead child enabled him to see the spirits of other little children, because he loved. As the blind woman told him, only those who were spiritually prepared could see them, for “you must bear or lose!” before glimpsing them. Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s Miss Mehitabel’s Son is a humorously pathetic account of the subjective spirit of a child that was never born. Algernon Blackwood’s ghosts are to a great extent subjective. As John Silence, the psychic doctor, says to the shuddering man who has had a racking experience: “Your deeply introspective mood had already reconstructed the past so intensely that you were en rapport at once with any forces of those past days that chanced to be still lingering. And they swept you up all unresistingly.” In The Shell of Sense,[80] the woman who is about to accept her dead sister’s husband feels such a sense of disloyalty that she sees the sister’s spirit reproaching her. Her conscience has prepared her for the vision. Juliet Wilbur Tompkins shows us the spirit of a mother returning to comfort the daughter who has in life misunderstood and neglected her, but now, realizing the truth, is grieving her heart out for her.[81] Ambrose Bierce tells of a prisoner who murders his jailer to escape, but is arrested and brought back by the spirit of the dead man.[82] Any number of instances might be given of ghosts appearing to those who are mentally prepared to be receptive to supernatural visions, but these will serve to illustrate the type.

Objective ghosts are likewise very numerous in modern fiction. The objective spirits are those that, while they may be subjective on the part of the persons chiefly concerned, to begin with, are yet visible to others as well, appearing not only to those mentally prepared to see them but to others not thinking of such manifestations and even sceptical of their possibility. The objective ghosts have more definite visibility, more reality than the purely subjective spirits. They are more impressive as haunters. There is a plausibility, a corporeality about the later apparitions that shows their advance over the diaphanous phantoms of the past. Ghosts that eat and drink, play cards, dance, duel, and do anything they wish, that are so lifelike in their materialization that they would deceive even a medium, are more terrifying than the helpless specters of early times that could only give orders for the living to carry out. The modern ghost has lost none of his mortal powers but has gained additional supermortal abilities, which gives him an unsportsmanlike advantage over the mere human being he may take issue with.

Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw is a remarkable example of the objective ghost story. It is one of the best ghostly stories in English, because more philosophical, showing more knowledge of the psychology not only of the adult but of the child, not only of the human being but of the ghost, than most fiction of the type. Peter Quint and Miss Jessel with their diabolical conspiracy of evil against the two children are so real that they are seen not only by the children they hound but by the unsuspecting governess as well. She is able to describe them so accurately that those who knew them in life—as she did not at all—recognize them instantly. In The Four-fifteen Express,[83] John Derringer’s ghost is seen by a man that does not know he is dead, and who has not been thinking of him at all. The ghost reveals incontrovertible proof of his presence, even leaving his cigar-case behind him,—which raises the question as to whether ghosts smoke in the hereafter in more ways than one. The ghastly incident in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights where the agonized ghost comes to the window, gashing its wrist on the broken pane, is strikingly objectified, for she comes to a person who never knew her and is not thinking of any supernatural manifestation. Shadows on the Wall,[84] that story of surpassing power of suggestion, is objective in its method, for not only the man who has wronged his dead mother sees his spirit returning, not in the ordinary way but as an accusing shadow on the wall, but the sisters see it as well.

In John Inglesant,[85] the spirit of Lord Strafford is seen by the young lad in the vestibule as well as by the king whose conscience burns for having left him to die undefended. Frank R. Stockton’s transferred ghost is an objective apparition, for surely the guest in the upper chamber was not expecting to see the shade of a living man perch itself on the foot of his bed at midnight. The horrible specter in The Messenger,[86] is seen by various persons at different times, some of whom are totally unprepared for such exhibition. And many similar instances might be given.

Whether ghosts be mistaken, subjective or objective, their appearance has always elicited considerable interest on the part of humanity. Their substance of materialization, their bearing, dress, and general demeanor are matters of definite concern to those who expect shortly to become ghosts themselves. In some instances the modern ghost sticks pretty closely to the animistic idea of spirit material, which was that the shade was a sort of vapory projection of the body, intangible, impalpable, yet easily recognized with reference to previous personality. Chaucer describes some one as being “nat pale as a forpyned goost,” which illustrates the conception in his day, and the Gothic specimen was usually a pallid specter, though Walpole furnished one robust haunter of gigantic muscle. Yet for the most part the Gothic ghosts were misty wraiths, through which the sword could plunge without resistance. They were fragile and helpless as an eighteenth-century heroine when it came to a real emergency, and were useful chiefly for frightening the guilty and consoling the innocent. In some stories of the present we have a similar materialization. The spirit woman in Kipling’s Phantom Rickshaw is so ethereal that the horse and its rider plunge through her without resistance, and Dickens’s Mr. Marley is of such vapory substance that Scrooge can see clear through him to count the coat-tail buttons at his back. In a recent story, The Substitute,[87] the spirit is said to evade her friend like a mist.

The Gothic ghost frequently walked forth as a skeleton, clad in nothing but his bones and a lurid scowl. Skeletons still perambulate among us, as in The Messenger, where the stripped-off mask shows a hideous skull.

The skeleton burst from out the rotting robes and collapsed on the ground before us. From between the staring ribs and the grinning teeth spurted a torrent of black blood, showering the shrinking grasses, and then the thing shuddered and fell over into the black ooze of the bog.

The ghost of Zuleika[88] is described as “a skeleton woman robed in the ragged remains of a black mantle. Near this crumbling earth body there lay the spirit of Zuleika attached to it by a fine thread of magnetic ether. Like the earthly body it was wrapped in a robe of black of which it seemed the counterpart.” Elliott O’Donnell has a story of a mummy that in a soldier’s tent at night sobs, breathes, moves, sits up, and with ghastly fingers unfolds its cere-cloth wrappings, appearing to him as the counterpart of his long-dead mother, looking at him with the eyes he had worshiped in his boyhood.

I fell on my knees before her and kissed—what? Not the feet of my mother but those of the long-buried dead! Sick with repulsion and fear I looked up and there bending over me and peering into my eyes was the face, the fleshless, mouldering face of the foul corpse!

But on the whole, though skeletons do appear in later fiction, the rattle of bones is not heard as often as in Gothic times.

Ghostly apparitions are more varied in form than in early times. The modern ghost does not require a whole skeleton for his purposes, but he can take a single bone and put the hardiest to flight with it. It is a dreadful thing to realize that a ghost can come in sections, which indefinitely multiplies its powers of haunting. F. Marion Crawford has a story of a diabolical skull, one of the most rabid revenge ghosts on record. A man has murdered his wife by pouring melted lead into her ear while she slept, in accordance with a suggestion from a casually told story of a guest. The dead woman’s skull—the husband cut the head off for fear people would hear the lead rattle, and buried it in the garden—comes back to haunt the husband, with that deadly rattle of the lump of lead inside. The teeth bite him, the skull rolls up a hill to follow him, and finally kills him, then sets in to haunt the visitor who told the suggestive story.[89] Elsewhere as well Crawford shows us skulls that have uncanny powers of motion and emotion. In Wilkie Collins’s Haunted Hotel the specter is seen as a bodiless head floating near the ceiling of the room where the man was murdered and his body concealed. Thackeray[90] describes a ghost with its head on its lap, and of course every one will remember the headless horseman with his head carried on the pommel of his saddle that frightened poor Ichabod Crane out of his wits.

We get a rabble of headless apparitions in Brissot’s Ghost, one of the Anti-Jacobin parodies (ridiculing Richard Glover’s ballad of Hosier’s Ghost):

Sudden up the staircase sounding
Hideous yells and shrieks were heard;
Then, each guest with fear confounding,
A grim train of ghosts appeared;
Each a head in anguish gasping
(Himself a trunk deformed with gore)
In his hand, terrific clasping,
Stalked across the wine-stained floor.

In Bulwer-Lytton’s The Haunters and the Haunted a woman’s hand without a body rises up to clutch the ancient letters, then withdraws, while in his Strange Story the supernatural manifestation comes as a vast Eye seen in the distance, moving nearer and nearer, “seeming to move from the ground at a height of some lofty giant.” Then other Eyes appear. “Those Eyes! Those terrible Eyes! Legions on legions! And that tramp of numberless feet! they are not seen, but the hollows of the earth echo to their tread!” The supernatural phenomena in Ambrose Bierce’s stories have an individual horror. In A Vine on the House he shows a hideous revenge ghost manifested in a peculiar form. A couple of men take refuge in a deserted house and note a strange vine covering the porch that shakes unaccountably and violently. In mystification they dig it up, to find the roots in the form of a woman’s body, lacking one foot, as had been the case with the woman who had lived there and whose husband had killed her secretly and buried her beside the porch.

The revenge ghost in modern fiction frequently manifests itself in this form, mutilated or dismembered, each disfigurement of the mortal body showing itself in a relentless immortality and adding to the horror of the haunting. There seems to be no seat of ghostly mind or soul, for the body can perform its function of haunting in whole or in part, unaided by the head or heart, like a section of a snake that has life apart from the main body. And this idea of detached part of the form acting as a determined agent for revenge adds a new horror to fiction. I haven’t as yet found an instance of a woman’s heart, bleeding and broken, coming up all by itself to haunt the deserting lover, but perhaps such stories will be written soon. And think what terrors would await the careless physician or surgeon if each outraged organ or dismembered limb came back to seek vengeance on him!

Ghosts of modern fiction are more convincing in their reality than the specters of early times. They are stronger, more vital; there seems to be a strengthening of ghostly tissue, a stiffening of supernatural muscle in these days. Ghosts are more healthy, more active, more alive than they used to be. There is now as before a strong resemblance to the personality before death, the same immortality of looks that is discouraging to the prospects of homely persons who have hoped to be more handsome in a future state. Fiction gives no basis for such hope. Peculiarities of appearance are carried over with distressing faithfulness to detail, each freckle, each wrinkle, each gray hair showing with the clearness of a photographic proof. Note the lifelikeness of the governess’s description of Peter Quint in The Turn of the Screw.

He has red hair, very red, very close-curling, and a pale face, long in shape, with straight, good features and little queer whiskers that are as red as his hair. His eyebrows are somehow darker and particularly arched as if they might move a good deal. His eyes are sharp, strange, awful. His mouth is wide, his lips thin.

This seems an unspectral description, for red hair is not wraith-like, yet a red-headed ghost that lifted its eyebrows unnaturally would be alarming. She says of him: “He was absolutely, on this occasion, a living, dangerous, detestable presence.”

Each minor disfigurement is retained, as the loss of the tooth in Crawford’s screaming skull, the missing toe in Bierce’s Middle Toe of the Right Foot, the lacking foot in the ghostly vine, and so forth. Nothing is neglected to make identification absolute in present tales of horror. The spirits described by Bram Stoker have red, voluptuous lips and pink cheeks, and the spirit of Sir Oliver’s mother, in De Morgan’s An Affair of Dishonor, that comes to meet him as he passes her mausoleum on his way to the shameful duel, limps as in life, so that he recognizes her, though the cloaked and hooded figure has its face turned from him. Jessie Adelaide Middleton shows us one ghost with half a face.

Ghostly apparel constitutes an interesting feature of supernaturalism in literature. There seem to be as definite conventions concerning spectral clothes as regarding the garb of the living fashionables. It is more difficult to understand the immortality of clothes than of humanity, for bodily tissue even of ghosts might quite conceivably renew itself, but not so with the ghostly garments. Of what stuff are ghost-clothes made? And why do they never wear out?

In olden times when people wore clothes of less radical styles than now and fewer of them, masculine spirits were in part identified by their familiar armor. Armor is so material and heavy that it seems incongruous to the ghostly function, yet shields and accouterments were necessary accompaniments of every knightly spook. He must be ever ready to tilt with rival ghost. The Gothic phantoms were well panoplied and one remembers particularly the giant armor in Walpole’s novel. Nowadays the law forbids the carrying of weapons, which restriction seems to have been extended to ghostdom as well. Specters are thus placed at a disadvantage, for one would scarcely expect to see even the wraith of a Texas cow-boy toting a pistol.

Specters usually appear in the garments in which the beholder saw them last in life. Styles seem petrified at death so that old-time ghosts now look like figures from the movies or guests at a masquerade ball. One other point to be noted is that women phantoms are frequently seen in black or in white. White seems reminiscent of the shroud, as well as of youth and innocence, so is appropriate, while black connotes gloom, so is suitable, yet the really favored color is gray. Most of the specters this season are dressed in gray. I scarcely know why this is affected by shades, yet the fact remains that many wraiths both men and women are thus attired. Gray is the tone that witches of modern tastes choose also, whereas their ancient forbears went in black and red. Modern ghosts are at a disadvantage in the matter of clothes compared with the earlier ones, since the styles now change so quickly and so decidedly that a ghost is hopelessly passé before he has time to materialize at all in most instances.

Examples of ghostly garments in later fiction evidence their variety. Katherine Fullerton Gerould[91] shows us three ghosts, one of a woman in a blue dress, one of a rattlesnake, and one of a Zulu warrior wearing only a loin-cloth, a nose-ring, and a scowl. (We do not often see the nude in ghosts, perhaps because they have a shade of modesty.) Co-operative Ghosts[92] depicts a man clad in the wraith of a tweed suit, mid-Victorian, “with those familiar Matthew Arnold side-whiskers.” In addition to Mr. Morley’s coat-tail buttons which we glanced through him to see, we observe that he wears ghostly spectacles, a pig-tail, tights and boots, and a prim waist-coat. In Kipling’s They we see the glint of a small boy’s blue blouse, while another Kipling youngster, a war-ghost,[93] struts around in his comical first trousers which he would not be robbed of even by the German soldiers that murdered him. Other children in the same story are said to have on “disgracefully dirty clothes.” I do not recall any soilure on Gothic garments, save spectral blood-stains and the mold of graves. Neither did I discover any child wraith in Gothicism save the pitiful spirits of baby victims in The Albigenses and the baby wraiths in Hogg’s The Wool-gatherer. The Englishman driven mad by the apparition of the woman he has wronged in Kipling’s story[94] is described by him as “wearing the dress in which I saw her last alive; she carried the same tiny handkerchief in her right hand and the same card-case in her left.” (A woman eight months dead with a card-case!) Blackwood shows us a ghost in purple knee-breeches and velvet coat; in The Gray Guest[95] the returning Napoleon wears a long military cloak of gray and military boots, while Crawford has one dreadful ghost coming back to wreak revenge in wet oil-skins. The eccentric spook in Josephine Daskam Bacon’s The Heritage is dressed in brown and sits stolidly and silently on the side of the bed with its back turned. Think of being haunted by an unbudging brown back! No wonder it drove the young husband to spend his wedding night huddled on the stairs. We have instances of a ghost in a red vest, a relentless revenge spirit that hounds from ocean to ocean his murderer and the betrayer of his daughter, and another of a ghost in a red shirt. There is on the whole as much variety and appropriateness of costume in modern ghost fiction as in Broadway melodrama.

Another point of difference between the specters of to-day and those of the past is in the extension of their avenues of approach to us. Ghostly appeal to the senses is more varied now than in earlier times. The classical as well as the Gothic ghosts appealed in general only to the sight and hearing, as well as, of course, to the sixth sense that realizes the presence of a supernatural being. Ghosts were seen and heard and were content with that. But nowadays more points of contact are open to them and they haunt us through the touch, the smell, as well as sight and hearing. The taste as a medium of impression has not yet been exploited by fiction writers though doubtless it will be worked out soon. There is a folk-tale of the Skibos that wolves eat ghosts and find them very appetizing and the devil in Poe’s Bon Bon says he eats the spirits of mortals. One might imagine what haunting dyspepsia could result if an ill-tempered spook were devoured against his will. It is conceivable, too, that gastronomic ghosts might haunt cannibals; and who knows that the dark brown taste in the mouths of riotous livers is not some specter striving to express itself through that medium instead of being merely riotous livers?

The appeal of ghosts to the sight has already been discussed so need not be mentioned here. But the element of invisibility enters in as a new and very terrible form of supernatural manifestation in later fiction. In spite of the general visibility, some of the most horrible tales turn on the fact that the haunter is unseen. H. G. Wells’s Invisible Man is a human being, not a ghost; yet the story has a curdling power that few straight ghost stories possess. Maupassant’s La Horla is a nightmare story of an invisible being that is terrific in its effect. The victim knows that an unseen yet definite and determined something is shut in his room with him night after night, eating, drinking, reading, sitting on his chest, driving him mad. Ambrose Bierce’s The Damned Thing is a gruesome story of invisibility, of a something that is abroad with unearthly power of evil, whose movements can be measured by the bending of the grasses, which shuts off the light from other objects as it passes, which struggles with the dogs and with men, till it finally kills and horribly mangles the man who has been studying it, but is never seen. Another[96] has for its central figure a being that violently attacks men and is overpowered and tied only by abnormal strength, that struggles on the bed, showing its imprint on the mattress, that is imprisoned in a plaster cast to have its mold taken, that is heard breathing loudly till it dies of starvation, yet is absolutely never visible. Blackwood’s Fire Elemental may be seen moving along only by the bending of the grass beneath it and by the trail it leaves behind, for though it is audible yet it is never seen. As a brave man said of it, “I am not afraid of anything that I can see!” so these stories of supernatural invisibility have a chilling horror more intense than that of most ghostly tales. The element of invisibility of unmistakably present spirits is shown in other stories.

One tender story of an invisible ghost is told in In No Strange Land,[97] of a man killed suddenly in a wreck while on his way home to the birthday dinner his wife is preparing for him. He does not know that he has been hurt; but while his dead body lies mangled under the wreckage his spirit hurries home. He swears whimsically under his breath at some interruption and thinks with joy of the happy little group he will meet. But when he enters his home he cannot make them see or hear him. They are vaguely aware of some strange influence, are awed by it, and the little son with the poet’s heart whispers that he hears something, but that is all. The man stands by, impotently stretching out his arms to them till he hears the messenger tell them that he is dead.

Ghosts are variable with respect to sounds as well as appearance. The early ghosts were for the most part silent, yet could talk on occasion, and classical apparitions were sometimes vocal and sometimes silent. The Gothic ghost sometimes had an impediment in his speech while at other times he could converse fluently. The Gothic specter, real as well as faked, frequently lifted voice in song and brought terror to the guilty bosom by such strains. Yet when he spoke he was usually brief in utterance. Perhaps the reason for that lay in the lack of surety on the part of the writers as to the proper ghostly diction. Gothic authors were not overstrong on technique and they may have hesitated to let their specters be too fluent lest they be guilty of dialectic errors. It would seem incongruous for even an illiterate ghost to murder the king’s English, which presents a difficulty in the matter of realism, so perchance the writers dodged the issue by giving their ghosts brevity of speech, or in some cases by letting them look volumes of threats but utter no word. This may explain the reason for the non-speaking ghosts in classical and Elizabethan drama. There is a similar variation in the later fiction, for many of the ghosts are eloquently silent, while other phantoms are terrifyingly fluent. All this goes to prove the freedom of the modern ghost for he does what he takes a notion to do. The invisible ghosts are as a rule voiceless as well.

The Gothic romance was fond of mysterious music as an accompaniment of supernatural visitation, but ghostly music is less common than it used to be. Yet it does come at times, as in A Far-away Melody,[98] where two spinster sisters living alone hear heavenly music as portent of their death. Ghostly song is heard in another case,[99] where a woman’s spirit comes back to sing in a duet at her funeral, and Crawford’s ghost[100] constantly whistles a tune he had been fond of during life. In Co-operative Ghosts the wraith of the young girl who in Cromwellian times betrayed her father’s cause to save her lover’s life sings sadly,

“I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not honor more!”

In Crawford’s A Doll’s Ghost, that peculiar example of preternatural fiction, not a children’s story as one might think, nor yet humorous, the mechanical voice of the doll and the click of its tiny pattering feet occur as strange sounds. Lord Strafford[101] walks with a firm, audible tread on his way to appall the king, and in Blackwood’s Empty House the ghosts move with sounds of heavy, rushing feet, followed by a noise of scuffling and smothered screams as the ancient murder is re-enacted, then the thud of a body thrown down the stairs,—after which is a terrible silence. The awful effect of a sudden silence after supernatural sounds is nowhere shown more tensely than in The Monkey’s Paw,[102] that story of superlative power of suggestion. When the ghostly visitant knocks loudly at the outer door, we feel the same thrill of chilling awe as in the knocking at the gate in Macbeth, and more, for the two who hear are sure that this is a presence come back from the dead. Then when the last magic wish has been breathed, utter silence comes, a silence more dreadful in its import than the clamor has been.

New sounds are introduced in modern ghostly tales, such as the peculiar hissing that is a manifestation of the presence of the ancient spirit[103] followed by the crackling and crashing of the enchanted flames. In Blackwood’s Keeping His Promise the heavy, stertorous breathing of the invisible Thing is heard, and the creaking of the bed weighted down by the body. Mary Wilkins Freeman brings in ghostly crying in a story, while Blackwood speaks of his Wendigo as having “a sort of windy, crying voice, as of something lonely and untamed, wild and of abominable power.” Kipling introduces novel and touching sounds in his stories of ghostly children. The child-wraiths are gay, yet sometimes near to tears. He speaks of “the utterly happy chuckle of a child absorbed in some light mischief,” “sudden, squeaking giggles of childhood,” “the rustle of a frock and the patter of feet in the room beyond,” “joyous chuckles of evasion,” and so forth. These essentially childlike and lifelike sounds are deeply pathetic as coming from the ghosts of little ones that hover, homesick, near the earth they dread to leave. The little ghost boy in Richard Middleton’s story,[104] manifests himself, invisibly, through the little prancing steps, the rustling of the leaves through which he runs, and the heart-breaking imitations of an automobile. Later ghostly fiction introduces few of the clankings of chains and lugubrious groans that made the Gothic romance mournful, and the modern specters are less wailful than the earlier, but more articulate in their expression. There are definite ghostly sounds that recur in various stories, such as the death-rap above the bed of the dying, the oft-mentioned mocking laughter in empty places, the cry of the banshee which is the presage of death not only of the body but of the soul, as well. On the whole, the sounds in modern supernatural stories are more varied in their types, more expressive of separate and individual horror, and with an intensified power of haunting suggestion than was the case with the earlier forms.

The sense of smell was not noticeably exploited in the ancient or Gothic ghost stories, though certain folk-tales, as Hawaiian stories of the lower world, speak of it. The devil was supposed to be in bad odor, for he was usually accompanied by sulphurous scents, as we notice in Calderon’s drama,[105] and some of the Gothic novels, but that seems to be about the extent of the matter. But moderns, while not so partial to brimstone, pay considerable attention to supernatural odors. The devil has been dry-cleaned, but the evil odors of later fiction are more objectionable than the fumes of the pit, are more variant, more individual and distinctive. Odors seem less subjective than sights or sounds, and are not so conventionalized in ghostly fiction, hence when they are cleverly evoked they are unusually effective. These supernatural scents have a very lasting quality too, for they linger on after the other manifestations of the preternatural are past. In The Haunted Hotel,[106] the ghost manifests itself through the nostrils. In room number thirteen there is an awful stench for which no one can account, and which cannot be removed by any disinfectants. Finally when a woman especially sympathetic to a man mysteriously dead is put in the room, the ghost appears as a decaying head, floating near the ceiling and emitting an intolerable odor. The Upper Berth[107] tells of a strange, foul sea odor that infests a certain stateroom and that no amount of fumigating or airing will remove. As the Thing comes out of the sea to carry its victim away with it, the man in the lower berth gets the full force of the unearthly smell. There are definite foul supernatural odors associated with supernatural animals in recent ghostly tales, as that “ghost of an unforgettable strange odor, of a queer, acrid, pungent smell like the odor of lions,” which announces the presence of the awful out-door something called by the Indians, the Wendigo. In Kipling’s story[108] of a man whose soul has been stolen by Indian magic through the curse of a leper priest and a beast’s soul put in its place,—his companions are sickened by an intolerable stench as of wild beasts, and when the curse is removed and he comes back to himself, he sniffs the air and asks what causes “such a horrid doggy smell in the air.”

Sometimes the ghastly presence comes as a whiff of perfume,[109] where the spirit of the dead woman brings with it flowers in masses, with a heavenly perfume which lingers after the spirit in visible form has departed. The subtlest and most delicately haunting story of this type is O. Henry’s,[110] where the loved, dead girl reveals herself to the man who is desperately hunting the big city over for her, merely as a whiff of mignonette, the flower she most loved.

But it is through the sense of touch that the worst form of haunting comes. Seeing a supernatural visitant is terrible, hearing him is direful, smelling him is loathsome, but having him touch you is the climax of horror. This element comes in much in recent stories. The earlier ghosts seemed to be more reserved, to know their spectral place better, were not so ready to presume on unwelcome familiarities as those in later fiction, but spooks have doubtless followed the fashion of mortals in this easy, relaxed age and have become a shade too free in their manners. Of course, one remembers the crushing specter in Otranto castle that flattened the hapless youth out so effectually, and there are other instances less striking. But as a general thing the Gothic ghost was content to stand at a distance and hurl curses. Fortunately for our ancestors’ nerves, he did not incline much to the laying on of hands. Modern ghosts, however, have not been taught to restrain their impulses and they venture on liberties that Radcliffian romance would have disapproved of.

The Damned Thing gives an example of muscular supernaturalism, for the mysterious being kills a dog in a stiff fight, then later slays the master after a terrible struggle in which the man is disfigured beyond words to describe. O’Brien shows a terrible being of abnormal power that is tied only after a tremendous effort, and which fights violently to free itself. And the Thing in the upper berth had an awesome strength.

It was something ghostly, horrible, beyond words, and it moved in my grasp. It was like the body of a man long dead and yet it moved, and had the strength of ten men living, but I gripped it with all my might, the slippery, oozy, horrible thing. I wrestled with the dead thing; it thrust itself upon me and nearly broke my arms; it wound its corpselike arms around my neck, the living death, and overpowered me, so that at the last I cried aloud and fell and left my hold.

As I fell the thing sprang across me and seemed to throw itself upon the captain. When I last saw him on his feet his face was white and his lips set. It seemed to me that he struck a violent blow at the dead being, and then, he, too, fell forward on his face.

The ghostly touch is frequently described, not only in fiction but in reports of the Psychical Society as well, as being of supernatural chill or of burning heat. Afterwards[111] brings in the icy touch of the spirit hand. In certain cases the ghost touch leaves a burn or mark that never goes away.

Yet the touch of horror is not the only one introduced in fiction of the supernatural. There are tender and loving touches as well, expressing yearning love and a longing to communicate with the living. What could be more beautiful than the incident in They? “I felt my relaxed hand taken and turned softly between the soft hands of a child. The little brushing kiss fell in the center of my palm—as gift on which the fingers were once expected to close—a fragment of a mute code devised very long ago.” And in a similar story,[112] the woman says, “I will swear to my dying day that two little hands stole and rested—for a moment only—in mine!” Wilkie Collins speaks of his story, The Ghost’s Touch, as follows:

The course of this narrative leads the reader on new and strange ground. It describes the return of a disembodied spirit to earth—not occurring in the obscurity of midnight but in the searching light of day; neither seen as a vision nor heard as a voice—revealing itself to mortal knowledge through the sense that is least easily self-deceived, the sense that feels.

The widow feels the clasp of her husband’s hands, not only psychically but physically, and when she asks for a further sign, the ghost kisses her unmistakably on the lips. Another widow[113] feels her hand clasped by the hand of her husband who has mysteriously disappeared after having presumably absconded with trust funds—and knows that he is dead and seeking to give her some message. His hand gently leads her to the edge of the cliff where he has fallen over and been killed, so that she may know the truth. The lover in Poe’s Eleonora feels a “spiritual kiss” from the lips of his beloved. The ghost touch is an impressive motif of strength in recent fiction and marks an advance over the earlier forms, showing an access of imaginative power and psychological analysis.

Another point of contrast between the modern and the older ghosts is in the greater freedom enjoyed by those of to-day. The ghosts of our ancestors were weak and helpless creatures in the main and the Gothic specter was tyrannized over to such an extent that he hardly dared call his shade his own. The spook of to-day has acquired a latchkey and asserted his independence. He may have a local habitation but he isn’t obliged to stay there. Now-a-days even the spectral women are setting up to be feminists and have privileges that would have caused the Gothic wraiths to swoon with horror. Ghosts are not so sensitive to the barometer now as they used to be, nor do they have such an active influence over the weather as did the Gothic phantoms. They do not need a tempest for their materialization nor a supernatural play of lightning for their wild threats, and comparatively few storms occur in later fiction. Yet there is certainly no lessening of the ghostly thrill in consequence.

Neither are the spirits of to-day limited to any set hours as was the rule in Gothicism. The tyranny of the dark, the autocratic rule of twelve or one o’clock as the arbitrary hour for apparitions, has been removed. Katherine Fullerton Gerould shows an interesting collection of ghosts that come at eleven o’clock in the morning, Georgia Wood Pangborn brings one out on the seashore in mid-afternoon, and Kipling has various ghosts that appear in daylight and in the open air.

Ghosts in modern fiction are not dependent upon a setting of sullen scenery as in Gothicism, but may choose any surroundings they like. Since modern household arrangements do not include family vaults as a general thing, and since cemeteries are inconveniently located, there is a tendency on the part of haunters to desert such quarters. Mary Wilkins Freeman and Charles Egbert Craddock each has one ghost story located in a graveyard, and The Last Ghost in Harmony[114] is set in a burying-ground, but the specter complains loudly of the unsentimental mind of the town which has lost interest in ghosts, and leaves in disgust. Likewise the domination of the Gothic castles, those “ghaist-alluring edifices,” has passed away and modern spooks are not confined to any one locality as in the past. They appear where they will, in the most prosaic places, in cheap lodging-houses, in hall bedrooms, in bungalows, in the staterooms of steamers, on tramp ships, and so forth. Algernon Blackwood has set a number of thrilling ghost stories out in the open, in the woods, in the desert sand wastes, and similar places. One effect of such realistic and unspectral setting is to give a greater verisimilitude to the events described, and the modern tale bears out Leigh Hunt’s suggestion that “a ghost story, to be a good one, should unite, as much as possible, objects as they are in life, with a preternatural spirit.” Yet here are ghosts that do haunt certain rooms as relentlessly as ever Gothic specter did.

The modern ghost has power over certain localities rather than mere houses or apartments. If the house he calls his own is torn down, he bides his time and haunts the new structure built on the same spot. Or if no new house goes up, he hangs around and haunts the vacant lot, which is a more reprehensible procedure than the ordinary habits of spooks. One story concerns a house so persistently ghosted that its owner took it down section by section, trying to arrive at the location of the curse, but to no avail. When the whole building had been razed and the site plowed over, the ghost undiscouraged haunted merrily on. Then the owner left in disgust. Algernon Blackwood is fond of situations where localities are haunted by evil spirits,[115] where a whole village is inhabited by the ghosts of long-dead witches, or Secret Worship that relates the experience of a man who wanders within the limits of a place made horrible by devil-worshipers, long-dead, but life-like, and inhabiting a house that has been torn down years before but appears as usual, where they entrap the souls of the living for their fiendish sacrifice. Another[116] is the record of a spirit of frightful evil that haunts a house built on the spot where an older house once stood, whose diabolism lingers on to curse the living. The spirit that haunts a locality rather than one room or house has a more malignant power than the more restricted ghost and this adds a new element of definite supernaturalism to modern fiction. But as houses are so much less permanent now than formerly, ghosts would be at a terrible disadvantage if they had to be evicted every time a building was torn down.

Ghostly psychology is a fascinating study. The development of spectral personality is one of the evident facts gained from a historical survey of supernatural fiction. The modern ghost has more individuality, more distinctiveness, in the main, than his forbears. The ghosts of medievalism, of ancient superstition, and the drama were for the most part pallid, colorless beings in character as in materialization. The ancient ghosts were more mournful than the moderns, since the state of the dead in early times was by no means enviable. The most one could hope for then was Hades, while the spirits who hadn’t been buried couldn’t find entrance even there but were forced by relentless spectral police to keep forever moving. The Christian religion furnishes a more cheerful outlook, so in later manifestations the gloom is considerably lightened. Yet even so the Gothic ghosts were morbid, low-minded specters not much happier than the unlucky wights they felt it their business to haunt. Their woe-begone visages, their clanking chains, and other accompaniments of woe betokened anything but cheer.

There are some unhappy spirits in recent fiction, but not such a large proportion as in the past. And there is usually some basis for their joylessness; they don’t have general melancholia with no grounds for it. The ghost of the dead wife in Readjustment[117] is miserable because she has never understood her husband, either in life or in death, and she comes back seeking an explanation. Another spectral woman[118] is wretched because she has the double crime of murder and suicide on her soul. Poor Marley grieves because he is doomed to see the opportunities that life has offered him to serve others and that he has neglected, being forced to see with the clear vision of the other world the evil results of his own neglect, which is enough to make any one wretched. A guilty conscience is like the burning heart that each spirit in the Hall of Eblis bore in his breast. In The Roll-call of the Reef,[119] the troop of drowned soldiers, infantry, and horsemen, come rising out of the surf to answer to their names. Each man is asked by name, “How is it with you?” and answers with the deadly sin that has damned him. In Wilkie Collins’s gruesome tale[120] there is one spirit that is unhappy because his body lies unburied, a recurrence of a theme frequent in classical stories and Gothic romance, but rare in later fiction. For the most part the later ghosts are something more than merely unhappy spirits. They are more positive, more active, more individualistic, too philosophical to waste time in useless grieving.

Nor are there many simply happy spirits, perhaps because the joyous souls are likely to seek their paradise and forget about the earth. Yet there are instances, such as the light-hearted spirits of children in various stories, that with the resilience of childhood shake off gloom and are gay; Rosamond,[121] that comes back to tell her friend how happy the other life is, the peacefully content mother,[122] and others.

The ghosts that are actively vicious are the most vivid and numerous in later fiction. The spirits of evil seem to have a terrible cumulative force, being far more maleficent than the earlier ones, and more powerful in carrying out their purposes. Every aspect of supernaturalism seems to be keyed up to a higher pitch of terror. Evil seems to have a strangely greater power of immortality over that of good, judging from the proportion employed in modern fiction. Has evil so much more strength of will, so much more permanence of power that it lives on through the years and centuries, while good deeds perish with the body? It would appear so from fiction. The ghosts of good actions do not linger round the abode of the living to any noticeable extent, but evil deeds are deathless. We have many stories of places and persons haunted by the embodied evil of the past, but few by the embodied good. The revenge ghosts outnumber the grateful dead by legions.

Modern specters have a more complex power than the old. They are more awful in their import, for they haunt not merely the body, but the soul. The wicked spirits will to work dreadful harm to the soul as well as the body, and drive the victim to spiritual insanity, seeking to damn him for the life everlasting, making him, not merely their victim, but through eternity their co-worker in awful evil. The victim of the vampire, for instance, who dies as a result of the attack, has to become in his turn a loathsome vampire to prey on other souls and bodies. Blackwood’s Devil-worshipers seek to kill the soul as well as the body of their victim. The deathlessness of evil is shown in Lytton’s[123] and in many of Blackwood’s stories, as where the psychic doctor says to a man, “You are now in touch with certain violent emotions, passions, purposes, still active in this house, that were produced in the past by some powerful and evil personality that lived here.”

Few writers have equaled F. Marion Crawford in the modern ghost story. His tales have a curdling intensity, a racking horror that set them far above the ordinary supernatural fiction. They linger in the mind long after one has tried in vain to forget them, if indeed one ever does forget their sense of evil power. There is in each of his stories an individual horror that marks it as distinct from its fellows, a power chiefly won by delineation of this immortality of evil, as in The Dead Smile, with its description of the hideous smile that pollutes the lips of the living and of the dead. “Nurse McDonald said that when Sir Hugh Ockram smiled, he saw the faces of two women in hell, two dead women he had betrayed.” His vicious impulses last after death and from his grave he reaches out to curse his own children, seeking to drive them to awful, though unconscious sin.