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CONTENTS
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BEING A COLLECTION OF STORIES
of
APPARITIONS, WITCHCRAFT, WEREWOLVES,
DIABOLISM, NECROMANCY, SATANISM,
DIVINATION, SORCERY, GOETY,
VOODOO, POSSESSION, OCCULT,
DOOM AND DESTINY
Edited, with an Introduction, by
MONTAGUE
SUMMERS
(Originally published 1931-jun)
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CONTENTS
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In the full flush of success during its first London run, Tom Sheridan, who was playing the hero of "wax-work" Brooke's The Earl of Essex, was wont to be loud up and down the Town in his praises of the poetry and exalted sentiments of this truly mediocre tragedy. In his fine stage voice ore rotundo he would declaim some half a dozen wilting lines and demand applause. On one occasion, in some crowded drawing-room, Sheridan spouts the conclusion of the first Act, ending up with a tremendous — Who rules other freemen should himself be free! O happy sentiment! Enraptured silence; and then enthusiastic applause. The company vastly commend and admire. After a moment or two, all eyes are turned towards where Dr. Johnson sits. They await a polished panegyric, a swelling eulogy. The great man opens his mouth and looks sternly enough at Sheridan from beneath his frowning brow. "Nay, sir," quoth he, "I cannot agree with you. It might as well be said: "Who drives fat oxen should himself be fat." Should the writer of the ghost story himself believe in ghosts? Dr. M.R. James, who is among the greatest — perhaps, indeed, if we except Vernon Lee, the greatest — of modern exponents of the supernatural in fiction, tells us that it is all a question of evidence. "Do I believe in ghosts?" he writes. "To which I answer that I am prepared to consider evidence and accept it if it satisfies me." This leaves us, I venture to think, very much in the same position as we were before the question was asked and the reply returned Can an author "call spirits from the vasty deep" if he is very well satisfied that there are, in fact, no spirits to obey his conjurations? I grant that by some literary tour de force he may succeed in duping his readers, but not for long. Presently his wand will snap short, his charms will lose their potency and mystic worth; he will soon have turned the last page of his grimoire; he steps all involuntarily out of the circle, the glamour dissipates, and the spell is broken! This has been the fate of more than one writer who began zestfully and fair, but whose muttered abracadabras have puled and thinned, who has clean forgot the word of power if, indeed, he ever knew it and not merely guessed at those occult syllables. Dr. James quite admirably lays down that the reader must be put "into the position of saying to himself, 'If I'm not very careful, something of this kind may happen to me!'" Surely to convey this impression the writer is at least bound to admit the possibility of such happenings. He should believe in a phantom world if he is convincingly, at any rate, to draw the denizens of that state, for let it be granted that locality in the sense we understand it may not have. Yet there will be some kind of laws; unknown to us and as yet unknowable, but such as should be in part surmised; such as are reasonable and fitting. A well-reputed writer, whose name I will by your favour omit, gave us some excellent stories at first, but in his eagerness to create horror, to thrill and curdle our blood, latterly he trowels on the paint so thick, he creates such fantastic figures, such outrageous run-riot incidents at noon and in the sunlight, that it is all as topsy-turvy as Munchausen. In contradiction to the postulate of Dr. James we say: "Nothing of this kind could ever happen to anyone!" There must be preserved a decorum. Even in imagination such wild flights only serve to defeat their own end. I conceive that in the ghost stories told by one who believes in and is assured of the reality of apparitions and hauntings, such incidents as do and may occur — all other things, by which I imply literary quality and skill, being equal — will be found to have a sap and savour that the narrative of the writer who is using the supernatural as a mere circumstance to garnish his fiction must inevitably lack and cannot attain, although, as I have pointed out, some extraordinary talent in spinning a yarn may go far to mask the deficiency. Thus, and for this very reason, it seems to me that there are few better stories of this kind than those the late Monsignor Benson has given us in The Mirror of Shalott and other of his work. Especially might one instance Father Meuron's Tale, Father Bianchi's Story and Father Madox's Tale. But indeed the whole symposium bears amplest evidence. Very fine tales have, no doubt, been written by authors who regarded the supernatural as just a fantasy and a flam. They topple, however, either on the one side into nightmare indigestion or on the other into vague aridities that are in fine meaningless. Were I not myself convinced of the sensible reality of apparitions, had I not myself seen a ghost, I could hardly have undertaken to collect and introduce The Supernatural Omnibus. A further important point is made by Dr. James. "Another requisite, in my opinion, is that the ghost should be malevolent or odious: amiable and helpful apparitions are all very well in fairy tales or in local legends, but I have no use for them in a fictitious ghost story." To this I would allow exceptions: I would add the unhappy ghost seeking rest who manifests itself for some purpose, generally that an old wrong may be righted at last, or else the ghost returns to discover a secret necessary for the happiness of descendants or others; I would include the spectre who is a messenger of calamity, a harbinger of ill. There are also the phantoms who seek a just retribution; and
In fiction I concede that the good and kindly ghost has little or no place. And this is because in real life, as it seems to me, we should hardly term such appearances ghosts. When I read that the "ghost" of Sir Thomas More appeared at Baynards, in Surrey, I know that there was a vision of the Beato vouchsafed. There is a striking instance in the life of the mystic Teresa Higginson, who died in 1905. When she was living at the little village of Neston, in Cheshire, the local priest was away and the keys of the church were in her charge. Early one morning a strange priest came to her, and, although he did not speak, intimated he wished to say Mass. She prepared the altar and lighted the candles, noting with some surprise that he seemed strangely familiar with the place. She answered his Mass and received Communion at his hands. When it was finished and she went into the sacristy shortly after him, the vestments were all neatly folded, but the visitant had gone. She made inquiries in the village, yet nobody appeared to have seen him. Upon his return, she reported the matter to the resident priest, who in due course informed the bishop. His Lordship remarked that the description of the stranger was exactly that of a priest who used to serve the church many years before and who lay buried in the graveyard. It is, if I mistake not, on this event that Miss Grace Christmas founded her story Faithful unto Death in What Father Cuthbert Knew. But this incident is not fiction, and it is with fiction that we are now concerned. I quote such an example to point out that the ghost story should follow upon the same lines as the veridical accounts. Of course, all kinds of trappings and cerements are not merely allowable, but much to be recommended. This sort of thing must not be overdone, however, and I fear that to-day there is a tendency to be too lavish with the pargeting, too curious with the inlay. The ghost story should be short, simple and direct. Who told the first ghost story? I do not know, but I am sure that it was simple enough and that it sufficiently thrilled the hearers. Some son of Adam, I suppose, far back in dimmest antiquity, housed in a cave, as he looked up at the vast endless spaces of heaven powdered with nightly stars, as he wondered at the mysterious darkness, the depths of shadow, the remoteness of shapes familiar by day but which took on strange forms at the approach of evening: marvelled and told his children how he seemed to see the shadow of their grandsire who had gone from them so short a while, who had lain stark and motionless and cold. The old hunter had returned, yet he brought terror in his train, for now he had something of the night and the wind, of the great untrammelled forces of Nature with which man contended daily for his right to live. And his brood listened with awe; they trembled, they scarce knew why, and were afraid. The Assyrians dreaded those ghosts who were unable to sleep in their graves, but who came forth and perpetually roamed up and down the face of the earth. Especially did these spectres lurk in remote and secret places. Elaborate rituals and magical incantations are preserved to guard the home from pale spectres who peer in through the windows, who mop and mow at the lattice, who lurk behind the lintel of the door. Egypt the ancient, the mysterious, the wonderful, is the very womb of wizardry, of ghost lore, of ensorcellment, of scarabed spells and runes which (as many believe) have not lost their fearful powers nor abated one jot of their doom and winged weird to-day, as witness the mummy of the Memphian priestess and the fate of those who rifle Royal tombs. Greek literature is shadowed by the supernatural; ever in the background man is conscious of those mighty forces who weave his destiny for weal and woe, who rend the veil and send him crazed with some glimpse of apparitions before whom reason reels and life is shaken in its inmost places. The Nekyuia, the ghost scenes, of Homer and the great tragedians are famous throughout the ages. The weary wanderer Odysseus has been counselled by Circe the witch-woman to evoke the shade of Tiresias, the seer of olden Thebes. He makes his way to the shores of eternal darkness, the home of the Cimmerii who dwell amid noisome fog and the dark scud of heavy cloud, and here he lands where the poplar groves hem the house of Hades. Betwixt earth and gloomy Acheron is a twilight land of ghosts, Erebus. In this haunted spot Odysseus digs deep his ditch wherein must flow the hot reeking blood of black rams whom he sacrifices to Dis and to mystic Proserpine. At the foul stench of the new stream pale shadows swarm forth, a silent company, athirst to quaff the gore; but with drawn sword he keeps at bay the gibbering crowd, for the prophet and none other must first drink if he is to tell sooth and rede the wanderer well. The phantoms cannot speak to the living man until they have tasted blood, and even then, when he talks with his mother's wraith and would clasp her in his arms, the empty air but mocks his grasp in vain. No ghost story has ever been better told than this. There are several first-rate stories of the supernatural in Latin prose writers, two at least of which are so curiously modern in their method that they may well be heard again. One was told at that splendid banquet to which — in spite of our host's plutocratic vulgarity — we have all so often wished we had been invited guests; the other is written by Pliny in a letter to Sura. At Trimalchio's table Niceros relates that one evening, planning to visit his mistress Melissa — "and a lovely bit to kiss she was! (pakherrimum bacciballum!)" — he persuades a young soldier who happens to be staying in the house to bear him company to the farm which lay some five miles out of town. Off they go, jogging along the country road merrily enough, for in the silver moonlight all is as clear as day. In highest fettle, thinking of his dear, Niceros, his head well thrown back, trolls lustily a snatch of comic song, and tries to count the host of stars above. Suddenly he notices his companion is no longer at his side. He looks back, and there, a few yards away by the hedgerow, is the lad stark naked in the moon, his clothes thrown in a muss. His lithe white limbs gleam ivory clear, but his teeth shine whiter than his limbs. There is a fierce, long-drawn howl, and a huge gaunt wolf leaps into the forest depths. Trembling and sweating with fear, Niceros somehow stumbles along until he reaches the lonely grange. Then Melissa greets him with a story of a wolf which had attacked the folds and bawns, broken through the wattles and killed several sheep; "but he did not get off scot free," she says, "for our man gave him a good jab with a pike to remember us by for a bit." At earliest dawn Niceros, faint and ill, hurries back home, and as he passes by the spot where the soldier had cast off his clothes he notices shudderingly a pool of fresh blood. On reaching the house, he finds the youth is abed sick, whilst the doctor is busy dressing a deep gash in his neck. This were-wolf story must necessarily lose not a little in the translation, since the Latin of Petronius, with its racy swing, is admirably adapted for a good yarn. Pliny's tale (Epistles, vii. 27) runs:
Pliny vouches for the truth of his narrative. Ludwig Lavater, at any rate, than whom there is no more serious-minded author, reproduced it entire in his De Spectris, lemuribus, et magnis atque insolitis fragoribus (Of Ghostes and Spirites Walking by Nyght), and the little duodecimo edition of Lavater, published at Gorkum in 1687, give us an illustration of the haggard spectre confronting the philosopher. In Latin literature the supernatural informs at least one masterpiece of the world's romance, the Metamorphoses of Apuleius, a book to which that sadly overworked word "decadent" may be most fittingly and justly applied. From the first sentences to the last these pages are heavy with the mystic and the macabre, as some ornate cortège is palled with velvet trappings and the pomp of solemn habiliments of sacred dignity and reverend awe. Lucius is travelling in Thessaly, earth's very caldron, where voodoo and unclean sciences seethe and stew amain. At the outset he falls in with Aristomenes, who tells how, as it seemed to him, his fellow-companion had been slain by foul hags in the midnight inn, and yet he counted it but some evil dream, and travelled through those early morning hours with a dead man at his side. But when they came to running water the spell was broken, the corpse fell rigid and stiffening fast upon the river's bank with staring eyes long glazed and slackened, gaping jaw. It may be that this suggested Richard Middleton's On the Brighton Road, where the tramp plods along and two miles beyond Reigate meets the boy who asks to walk with him a bit, who died in the Crawley hospital twelve hours before. It has not been possible to give any selection from Apuleius. It were difficult and it were profane to attempt any excerpt from his chapters, which must be read in the fullness of their beauty — a beauty which is that of some still night when the cypress point to heaven like burned-out torches against the dusky sky and the yews darkly splotch the landscape, when the sickle of the harvest moon rides high in heaven, and nightingales are singing amorously, and the owl hoots dully ever and anon to remind us that there is death as well as love. "Aut indicauit, aut finxit," wrote the supreme wisdom of S. Augustine as he pondered the tale that Apuleius told. Throughout the Middle Ages the supernatural played as large a part in literature as in life. Those were the days of the sabbat and the witch. The old chronicles narrate deeds more horrible and facts more grim than any writer of fiction could weave. In the sixteenth century, too, the ghost story had no place when the Malleus Maleficarum lay open upon every judge's bench, when Guazzo and later Sinistrari penned their narratives of demon lovers, and Remy wrote his Demonolatry "Drawn from the Capital Trials of 900 Persons" executed for sorcery within the space of fifteen years. There is a little interlude of sheer horror it may not be amiss to quote, The Three Queens and the Three Dead Men:
Boccaccio in the Decameron, giornata quinta, novella ottava, relates the story of Nastagio degli Onesti, who one day whilst walking lonely in a wood near Ravenna, sees flying down the glades a wretched woman,
Mounted on a black charger there follows a grisly knight, and he looes on the two swift hounds of hell. Nastagio already had his hand upon the pommel of his sword, when, as the rider faces him, he realises that he is gazing at a damned soul. The knight reveals that he is no distant ancestor of the Onesti line, who during his life loved, but loved in vain. In despair at the lady's wanton cruelty, he stabbed himself, and now, after death, for her pride she is condemned to be hunted down by her spectre lover,
The horrid details of the ghostly chase in the haunted forest are admirably related by Boccaccio, and are even better told by our great poet John Dryden in Theodore and Honoria (Fables, folio 1700), which he has taken from the Italian. In Chaucer the expression runs quite naturally:
and in the Nonne Preestes Tale Chanticleer most appositely relates an excellent ghost story of the two travellers. They sleep at separate inns, and during the night one vainly endeavours, as in a dream, twice to wake his friend and call him to his assistance. A third time he appears covered with wounds and bleeding sore, and reveals that his corpse will be conveyed out of the town gates that morning in a tumbril of filth. The second traveller early hurries to his comrade's hostelry, to learn he has left ere daybreak. Ill content, he makes his way to the western gates; a cart is jolting through; at his cries the people come running up; they search amid the manure, and there they find
At the Reformation, divines and common folk attempted to revise their ideas of the supernatural. And then it was, as Pierre Le Loyer says in his IIII Livres de Spectres (1586), which was translated into English by Z. Jones (1605):
Words that are as true to-day as they were when written three centuries and a half ago. Ludwig Lavater of Zurich, who has been already mentioned, published his treatise De Spectris, lemuribus, et magnis atque insolitis fragoribus at Geneva in 1570. This was translated into English in 1572 as Of Ghostes and Spirites Walking by Nyght and of strange Noyses, Crackes, and Sundry Forewarnyages, and a year before it had been turned into French as Trois livres des Apparitions des Spectres, Esprits, Fantasmes. Lavater, however, was unorthodox and often at fault, and so Pierre Le Loyer in 1586 issued a learned and, it must be confessed, salutary corrective in his Discours et Histoire des spectres, visions et apparitions des esprits . . . en VIII livres . . . esquels . . . est manifestee la certitude des spectres et visions des esprits. Le Loyer's book is far more important than that of Lavater, and equally valuable in ghost lore is the De Apparitionibus . . . et terrificationibus nocturnes (Of Ghosts and of Midnight Terrors), by Peter Thyræus, a famous Jesuit professor of Würzburg, which was first published in 1594 and several times reprinted, although it has now become an exceedingly scarce book, the more so inasmuch as it was never translated from the original. It is not out of place to devote a little attention to these serious and learned treatises of ghosts and apparitions, since they form the background, as it were, to the fiction of the subject, the ghost story. Indeed, a few more well-known English books of this kind may here be mentioned, although it must be always remembered that of very many it is possible only to name some half a dozen, which yet, at any rate, will serve to show how deeply the whole philosophy of ghosts was studied and treated in literature. The Terrors of the Night, or, A Discourse of Apparitions, 4to, 1594, by Thomas Nashe, is important as an indication of popular interest, for none so quick as Nashe to catch the topics of the hour. In itself this piece is of little value. In 1681 was published Joseph Glanvil's Saducismus Triumphatus, or, Full and Plain Evidence Concerning Witches and Apparitions, a work which caused no small sensation in its day. It is Glanvil who tells of the Drummer of Tedworth, of a Hollander who was strangely psychic, of the ghost of Major George Sydenham, and many more. It was long thought, and amongst others even Sir Walter Scott gave currency to the error, that Defoe's "A True Relation of the Apparition of one Mrs. Veal, the next day after her Death, to one Mrs. Bargrave, at Canterbury, the 8th of September, 1705," which was published for threepence by Bragg of Paternoster Row, and which is often printed with Charles Drelincourt's The Christian's Defence against the Fears of Death, translated into English by D'Assigny, was specifically written to help off a number of copies of the Huguenot pastor's treatise which lay heavy on the booksellers' hands. Such is far from the case. Recent research has shown that Mrs. Veal and Mrs. Bargrave were not fictitious characters, but real persons, well known in their proper circles. Mrs. Veal was buried at Canterbury on 10 September, 1705. Mrs. Bargrave was Barbara Smith, a widow, whom Mr. Richard Bargrave, a maltster, married at S. Alphege, Canterbury, on 11 January, 1700. The narrative relates facts, and Defoe is merely a reporter. It is true that in an interview, 21 May, 1714, Mrs. Bargrave stated that a few trifling details were not strictly accurate; "all things contained in it, however, were true as regards the event itself on matters of importance." Mrs. Bargrave told her story in 1705, and at the time it caused a tremendous sensation. It is possible but barely to mention Increase Mather's Remarkable Providences, and Cotton Mather's Wonders of the Invisible World. Andrew Moreton's The Secrets of the Invisible World Disclos'd: or, An Universal History of Apparitions, which had run to a third edition in 1738, is a useful and ably argued book. To come down to the nineteenth century, a very famous work is Mrs. Crowe's The Night Side of Nature, 1848, which has been called "one of the best collections of supernatural stories in the English language," and of which I cherish a real yellow-back copy of about 1885. In 1850 the Rev. Henry Christmas, Librarian of Sion College, issued a translation of Dom Augustine Calmet's great work under the title The Phantom World. Thomas Brevior, in The Two Worlds, has a chapter on apparitions which should not be neglected. That fine scholar and — may I say it? — romantic ritualist, Dr. F.G. Lee, sometime Vicar of All Saints', Lambeth, left a whole library of ghost lore: The Other World, or Glimpses of the Supernatural, 2 vols., 1875; More Glimpses of the World Unseen, 1878; Glimpses in the Twilight, 1885; and Sights and Shadows, 1894. The Christmas and New Year's Numbers of the Review of Reviews, 1891-2, supplied a large number of Real Ghost Stories, under which title, indeed, they were reprinted in October, 1897. Many of us will remember how people at the time spoke of the review with bated breath: how it was hurried out of the sight of children, and read almost in secret by their elders with blanching cheeks and tingling nerves. I fear we may have become very sophisticated since those happy days. In True Irish Ghost Stories (1926), by St. John D. Seymour and Harry L. Neligan, we have an admirable book. The tales are fascinating and most excellently told. From Ingram's Haunted Homes of Great Britain, third edition, 1886, I can always be sure of a shudder. True, the book has been largely superseded by Mr. Charles G. Harper's Haunted Houses, first published in 1907 and re-issued in 1924, with some first-rate drawings of haunted mansions by the author. It is a veritable encyclopædia, but I wish Mr. Harper would not try to strip us of our last vestige of Victorian romanticism. He does not succeed — at any rate, in my case — but the bad intent is there. None the less he has, and well deserves, my hearty thanks. In The White Ghost Book and The Grey Ghost Book, Miss Jessie Adelaide Middleton has given us a series of excellently told accounts of apparitions. Her reports of these hauntings are quite simple and sober; there is no bravura, there are no artificial situations and long planned climaxes. The result is that The House of Horror in The White Ghost Book is one of the most terrible, as it is one of the best authenticated, narratives I know. To go back a little, in 1859 that ardent "old Conservative" Edward Tracy Turnerelli (1813-1896) published A Night in a Haunted House, A Tale of Facts, describing his own experiences in an ancient mansion at Kilkenny. It is a narrative of extraordinary interest; and publicly related, as it originally was told, at a meeting in aid of various charities at Ryde, it created an immense sensation. Perhaps even more notice was attracted by the same author's Two Nights in a Haunted House in Russia, 1873, which ran through many editions, and was very widely discussed during the next decade and longer. Here should be mentioned News from the Invisible World, a little known and older collection, which was (I believe) first published in Manchester, 1835, as by John Tregortha. This name, however, is variously given, and the author is more usually called George Charlton, but of him nothing seems actually to be recorded. Whoever he may have been, he had a wide knowledge of his subject and, in addition to the more familiar, one might say the historical matter, he has drawn on a number of new sources. At least they are new to me, and I have not found them mentioned in similar repertories. Mr. Elliot O'Donnell has given us a long series of ghost tales and of studies in phantom lore which will be familiar to all who are interested in that misty borderland. Such are his Ghostly Phenomena; Ghostland; Twenty Years' Experiences as a Ghost Hunter (in which there is a most creepy chapter: "A Haunted Mine in Wales"); Animal Ghosts; Scottish Ghosts; Byways of Ghostland. Personally I am inclined to rate his Some Haunted Houses of England and Wales (1908); Haunted Houses of London; and More Haunted Houses of London as among the best of his work. This latter has a horrible tale, The Door that would never keep Shut; and the first relates some fully authenticated narratives of the West Country. The Ghost of Broughton Hall in Miss Violet Tweedale's Ghosts I Have Seen, second edition, 1920, is well within the good old-fashioned, but none the less matter-of-fact, tradition; whilst the account of the hideous satyr, Prince Valori's familiar, is so incontestably attested, that it should "furiously give to think" those, if any there be, who cling to what Stead justly termed the out-worn superstition of a denial of supernatural agencies. Very many more collections might be cited; many admirable, some few a little weak, perhaps; but it is high time we passed from fact to fiction. It must not be thought that this review "gat-tothed," insufficient and scanty to the last degree as it is, of books relating to the actuality of the supernatural, is in any way impertinent, since it is these veridical narratives which supply the background to romance and fiction self-confessed. Even although we are to be entirely concerned with prose fiction, the extraordinary popularity of the "Drama of Blood and Horror" evoking whole crowded cemeteries of ghosts upon the Elizabethan stage must not be passed over without a word. The earlier Elizabethan ghosts were copied from the formal phantoms of Seneca and his Italian imitators. The Umbra Tantali and the fury Megæra commence the Thyestes with a declamatory duologue of one hundred and twenty lines. Nor did these spectres lose one whit of their loquaciousness when they crossed to English shores. They are, one and all, extremely voluble. Thus Jonson's Catiline His Conspiracy, acted in 1611, opens with a monologue of over seventy lines delivered by Sylla's ghost. It must be acknowledged that this is a magnificent speech, but not all spectres in tragedy had such splendid periods. In fact, many of the phantoms were unmercifully parodied, and Kyd's Spanish Tragedy in particular (which, it is interesting to note, was attracting audiences as late as 1668) became a very nayword for mockery and burlesque. In that curious yet striking drama, A Warning for Faire Women, 4to, 1599, at the very outset are introduced Tragedy and Comedy, and the latter jeers her august sister in this wise:
It may be remarked that the ghost upon the Elizabethan stage was plainly visible to the audience. He presented himself very materially, all blotched with blood, with chalked face and linen shroud. When Kemble at Drury Lane in 1794 let Macbeth gaze upon an empty seat in the scene of royal revelry and apostrophise the vacant air, all this was absolutely alien to Shakespeare's intention and practice. The spectre of Banquo must be to vision clear, "with twenty trenched gashes on his head." Thus in Webster's great play The White Devil we see "Brachiano's Ghost in his leather cassock and breeches, boots; a cowl; a pot of lily-flowers, with a skull in't." The minute details of the stage direction, if nothing else, are proof that the ghost was no shadow seen in the mind's eye alone. Moreover, when Flaminio addresses it, "the Ghost throws earth upon him, and shows him the skull." It has been observed that "tragedy was the main channel of romanticism" in England during the seventeenth century and the earlier part of the eighteenth. Accordingly when Horace Walpole, who if not actually the very first was certainly the most important pioneer of prose romanticism, brought out in 1764 his Castle of Otranto, we are not surprised to find that the corridors and chambers of his Castle are haunted indeed, so much so in fact that eventually, like Manfred, we become "inured to the supernatural," and when we enter the chapel and see a figure "in a long woollen weed" are hardly the least surprised as it turns towards us to behold "the fleshless jaws and empty sockets of a skeleton, wrapt in a hermit's cowl." Nevertheless, with all its faults and furbelows, The Castle of Otranto is a romance of extraordinary fascination. It may seem to us nowadays that the raptures — they were no less — with which Walpole's rococo was received cannot have been other than monstrously unreal, a tribute to the author rather than to his work. Yet such assuredly was not the case. The Critical Review was certainly unfriendly at the time, and Hazlitt later damned Otranto as "dry, meagre, and without effect." But Byron, writing in 1820, spoke of Walpole as "the father of the first romance and of the last tragedy in our language, and surely worthy of a higher place than any living writer, be he who he may." Sir Walter Scott, too, was lavish in his eulogy of Otranto: "This romance has been justly considered not only as the original and model of a peculiar species of composition, attempted and successfully executed by a man of great genius, but as one of the standard works of our lighter literature." Otranto, at any rate, primarily inspired that notable revival — we might say creation — of romantic fiction which may conveniently be termed the Gothic Novel, and which drinks deep of two springs: the sentimental and the supernatural. The genius of Ann Radcliffe stands out pre-eminent far above all her contemporaries and disciples, but two at least, Matthew Gregory Lewis and Charles Maturin, had something of her quality, and were both writers of fearful if fantastic power. The villains may talk ever and anon in the richest vein of Surrey-side and Coburg melodrama; their heroines are all peerless, fleckless, graceful, lovelier than nymphs who trip the lawn; their dungeons may be murmurous with sepulchral groans; their corridors labyrinthing beyond aught that Dædalus could ever contrive, and a shudder at every turn; but in spite of crudities, of absurdities if you will, at the very moment when bathos seems irretrievably to have wrecked the situation, genius kindles to a flame and carries them through triumphant to the end. Lewis and Maturin never shrank before the supernatural. Ghosts, the grislier the better, throng their pages. Mrs. Radcliffe, however — and this is her one and only fault — could not bring herself frankly to engage the supernatural. At least, only her last and posthumous work, Gaston de Blondeville, admits the genuine supernatural, and even here the treatment is almost timid in its reticence. At the close of her romances it is explained that the marvels of the story are due to some natural agency, that we have shuddered all in vain and idly trembled in the shadowed halls of Udolpho, or amid the Black Penitents, what time we paced the cloisters of Paluzzi. This is a blemish, and the critic of the Quarterly Review for May, 1810, was just, if severe, when he wrote that he heartily disapproved "of the mode introduced by Mrs. Radcliffe, and followed by Mr. Murphy and her other imitators, of winding up their story with a solution, by which all the incidents appearing to partake of the mystic and marvellous are resolved by very simple and natural causes." So we find that even in an ultra-Gothic tale rejoicing in so delightful a title as The Phantom, or Mysteries of the Castle when Mowbray cries: "My Matilda, blest shade!" a moment later Mrs. Mathews dashes us with "Matilda was still mortal," and we have been duly awed by her ghost for a couple of hundred pages! In The Spirit of Turrettville two youths are attracted by the sound of mysterious music to a distant room, where they see a veiled figure softly touching the strings of a harp. As they advance, the apparition turns towards them "a grinning mouldering skull." Eventually it is discovered she is the living wife who thus endeavours to frighten the villain into a confession. Even in Vesuvia, where the mysterious incidents are puzzling but hardly supernatural, a very careful and rational explanation is provided. None the less, I would hasten to add that there are ghosts who haunt Gothic novels. T.J. Horsley-Curties scorned to tamper with the supernatural. Ancient Records, or, The Abbey of St. Oswyth, which is generally esteemed his best work, has spectres who shriek and moan and threaten the guilty to great effect. In the Preface to Ethelwina; or, The House of Fitz-Auburne he makes confession of his literary creed, and writes: "The Author of this Work . . . in one circumstance . . . has stepped beyond the modern writers of Romance, by introducing a Real Ghost — to many, such a circumstance will not appear unnatural or improbable; but he neither apologises, nor justifies on that ground — he only pleads the example of the immortal Bard of Avon, who found a spectre necessary for his purpose to heighten his story, or to 'harrow up the soul,' but never thought it necessary to account for the 'unreal mockery.'" In The Accusing Spirit a headless and mangled figure glides through the haunted convent, the tortured shade of the sinful Benedicta. The spirit of the old marquis appears in W.C. Proby's The Spirit of the Castle; in The Priory of St. Clair, or, The Spectre of the Murdered Nun, the dead Julietta is nightly seen. There are literally dozens of romances in which ghosts play a great part. Thus we have Phantoms of the Cloyster; The Vindictive Spirit; The Spectre of Lamnere Abbey; The Spectre Mother; Eleanor, or The Spectre of St. Michel's; The Haunted Tavern; The Haunted Palace; The Haunted Priory; The Haunted Tower; and very many more. In fact, Mrs. Rachel Hunter felt constrained to name one of her novels Letitia: A Castle Without a Spectre, whilst the author of The Ghost and More Ghosts merrily dubbed himself Felix Phantom. Again, we have such popular romances as The Midnight Groan; or, The Spectre of the Chapel (1808), which "presents to view . . . a man spectre" and "a perfect skeleton"; The Convent Spectre, published in the same year; The Forest Phantom, or, The Golden Crucifix, in which a ghost in armour stands "visible on the top of a coffin" and exhibits "features blanched by the hand of death"; and Isaac Crookenden's Spectre of the Turret; or, Guolto Castle. There is also an amazing collection, Tales of Terror! or More Ghosts. Forming a Complete Phantasmagoria, which has the appropriate motto:
There was even published in 1823 Ghost Stories, Collected with a Particular View to Counteract the Vulgar Belief in Ghost and Apparitions, and to Promote a Rational Estimate of the Nature of Phenomena commonly considered as Supernatural. The book, now very rare, was issued by Ackermann, and the six coloured engravings with which it is embellished possess the greatest charm. In fact, they are far too good for their setting, inasmuch as the stories themselves, The Green Mantle of Venice, The Ghost of Larneville, The Village Apparition, and the rest, are extremely tame. Nothing could be more disappointing, since the titles promise most palatable fare. What could be more tempting than the Haunted Castle, or, The Ghost of Count Walkenried, or The Haunted Inn? And it all fritters away into accounts of imposture, or somnambulism at the best. I protest this is not playing the game. In James Hogg's The Wool-Gatherer a man of vicious life is haunted by the wraiths of those whom he has wronged, and as he lies in the throes of death he hears the sad voices of women in torment and the pitiful wailing of infants. After he is dead, the cries become so insistent that "the corpse sits up in the bed, pawls wi' its hands and stares round wi' its dead face." Not dissimilar is the adventure of de Montfort in Maturin's The Albigenses. As he is passing through the depths of a gloomy wood, there presses round him a throng of those who have fallen in the religious wars, a hideous company with "clattering bones, eyeless sockets, and grinning jaws." Unfortunately, most novelists preferred to imitate Mrs. Radcliffe in her explanations, and even among her later followers the best are at some pains to throw down the whole edifice they have so adroitly constructed and with such toil. That fine romance of G.P.R. James, The Castle of Ehrenstein, Its Lords Spiritual and Temporal, its Inhabitants Earthly and Unearthly, is completely spoiled for me by the last chapter, and I reject the explanation "that the whole of this vast structure, solid as it seems, and solid as it indeed is, in reality is double," so that the phantoms were the Count and his faithful band who dwelt there secretly until such time as he should dispossess his usurping brother. It is they who appear as the Black Huntsman and his demon train. I am satisfied, none the less, that "The Ghost" and "The Black Huntsman" as depicted by Phiz when the first few chapters of Ehrenstein appeared in Ainsworth's Magazine, 1845, are supernatural. It is a fearsome phantom who terrifies Sickendorf and Bertha; it is the "wild Jager" himself who careers in awful chase. There was one professed disciple of that "great mistress of romance" who happily disdained these subterfuges, and he has reaped his reward in that his name is remembered, his works are read, when so many another is forgotten and scarcely to be traced, nay, not even in the pages of Shobert and Watkins, or Upcott, or Allibone. It may, I think, almost undeniably be granted that his sense of the supernatural, and the truly admirable way in which he utilised awe and mystery in his romances, have at least culled one and that not the least green, laurel in the stephane of immortality which crowns Ainsworth's brow. William Harrison Ainsworth proudly confessed in his earliest, and by no means his least successful romance, Rookwood (1834), that he was bold to tread in the footsteps of Ann Radcliffe — she had died but eleven years before, and actually her posthumous romance, Gaston de Blondeville, had only preceded Rookwood a twelvemonth in publication. I have not the opportunity here to appraise Ainsworth as he deserves; that has been excellently done by Mr. S.M. Ellis, who well writes that in The Lancashire Witches, for example, Ainsworth "achieved a masterpiece . . . for this . . . is the greatest of all romances dealing with the occult and the combined influences and 'atmosphere' of wild and suggestive scenery." I had wished to include some example of Ainsworth's work in this collection, and I had intended to give The Legend of Owlarton Grange, told by old Hazelrigge in Mervyn Clitheroe and The Haunted Room from Chetwynd Calverley, one of the later (1876) and lesser known novels. Both stories are related with singular power and effect, but upon consideration it was plain that in both cases the incidents were so bound up with the thread of the whole romance that they would essentially lose by being read in the form of separate chapters, and any such excerpts would be unfair to the merits of Ainsworth as a writer. Neither has it been possible to represent Mrs. Shelley, whom I omit with reluctance. Frankenstein is a classic of the occult, but it must be read entire. It seemed equally difficult to make any extract, which by itself would not appear inadequate, from her other work; although she was deeply versed in the art of shudders and fear. Fortunately Sir Walter Scott has left us stories which may stand apart from their setting. Wandering Willie's Tale in Red Gauntlet (1824) is of consummate artistry; as also is The Tapestried Chamber (1829), but both are too easily accessible to be given here. I have no defence save human limitations of space if I am told that both should be included. Few books have a greater reputation than the Ingoldsby Legends. There are — all power to them — Ingoldsby enthusiasts; but I question (I hope, sincerely hope, I may be wrong) whether outside this devoted band the Ingoldsby poems are appreciated and loved as they deserve. To the Ingoldsby Legends we may safely and literally apply the word "unique." There is nothing like them, not merely in degree but also in kind, in any literature I know. Perhaps the nearest rhymes are the maccaronics of Folengo, which again sui generis have never been excelled and hardly approached. Yet Ingoldsby is altogether different, and, when one seeks to compare any juxtaposition eludes and escapes. The witches of the Maccaronea are grotesque, evil, ridiculous, just as are old Goody Price and old Goody Jones; whilst Father Francis, Father Fothergill, Mess Michael, Roger the Monk, can be amply paralleled by Fra Jacopino, the village priest, "Master Adrianus, Constantius atque Jachettus." Curiously enough, even those who know the poems of the Ingoldsby Legends well are often somewhat indifferent to Barham's prose, which is, in my opinion at any rate, of a very high quality. Accordingly I have included two of his stories in this collection. I hesitated whether The Spectre of Tappington should not make a third, but it belongs to a species of ghost story of which I disapprove: the humorous; nor is it, indeed, strictly a ghost story; that is to say, it does not introduce the supernatural, and there are Radcliffian explanations to boot. However, The Spectre of Tappington is the exception that proves the rule. The genius of Barham has triumphed and given us a tale of the first order, although it belongs to an illegitimate genre. There is only one other humorous ghost story which justifies itself — Oscar Wilde's fantasy The Canterville Ghost. This ranks with The Spectre of Tappington among the foremost. Yet it will not escape attention that Wilde has mingled with his brilliant wit a touch of pathos, and more than a touch of beauty, that even in his liveliest passages he gives an undercurrent of something running much deeper and touching us more nearly than mere persiflage, however exquisitely wrought and pointed.
Hardly a disciple, but in his day certainly a rival, and a very formidable rival of Ainsworth, was G.W.M. Reynolds, whose output is equal to, even if it does not o'ertop, those of Defoe or the prolific water-poet himself. The lengthy novels of Reynolds teem with mystery and the supernatural. To name but a few of many, Faust, based upon the old legend but almost infinitely varied; Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf; The Necromancer; all have as their theme diabolic contracts and the fearful retribution that results therefrom. A contemporary of Reynolds, who was as prolific indeed as he, but who has been almost entirely forgotten, was Thomas Preskett Prest, the author of The Skeleton Clutch; or, The Goblet of Gore; The Black Monk, or, The Secret of the Grey Turret; The Rivals, or, The Spectre of the Hall; Varney the Vampire, or, The Feast of Blood, and many more. This latter, although of inordinate length, is powerfully told, and has hardly, I think, been excelled even by the famous Dracula. It is impossible to name a tithe of these writers who dealt with the supernatural in its most terrible manifestations. Lengthy bibliographies might be compiled of fiction alone which had the vampire and the werewolf as its themes. Of vampire tales we might instance Le Fanu's Carmilla; Bram Stoker's Dracula, mentioned above; E.F. Benson's The Room in the Tower; Mrs. Ammorth in Visible and Invisible; F.G. Loring's The Tomb of Sarah; F. Marion Crawford's For the Blood is the Life (Uncanny Tales); Conan Doyle's The Parasite; E. and H. Heron's The Story of Baelbrow; Victor Roman's Four Wooden Stakes; X.L.'s The Kiss of Judas; Eric Count Stenbock's The True Story of a Vampire; and a score beside. The werewolf boasts an almost richer library. There is Captain Marryat's fine tale from The Phantom Ship; Mrs. Crowe's A Story of a Weir-Wolf; H. Beaugrand's The Werwolves; Saki's Gabriel; Ainskallas' The Wolf's Bride; Fred Whishaw's The Were-wolf, Eric Count Stenbock's The Other Side; Charles Severn's Were Wolf; Ambrose Bierce's The Eyes of the Panther; "cum multis aliis quos nunc perscribere longum est," as the old Latin Grammar has it. Reynold's Miscellany contained not a few well-told tales of the supernatural, and this magazine gave rise to many more which flourished exceedingly for the last half of the nineteenth century. Edwin J. Brett was a wholesale purveyor of these ephemera, and one may remark that latterly he concentrated almost entirely upon boys' books. The history of boys' books, which is of extraordinary interest, has yet to be written. Thus running through Boys of the Empire, vol. ix., 1892, I find a really thrilling serial, Doctor or Demon?, a romance of the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde type. At the same time as Reynolds, Prest and others were writing, one of the supreme masters of English fiction, Charles Dickens, was showing his keen interest in the supernatural, which lurks in the background of, and sensibly informs, some among his finest works. Moreover, as Mr. S.M. Ellis has well said in his essay, The Ghost Story and its Exponents (Mainly Victorian):
I have not, of course, failed to include in this collection of tales by Amelia B. Edwards, Rosa Mulholland and Charles Collins, who were all contrihutors to these periodicals. It was for All the Year Round that Dickens asked Bulwer-Lytton to furnish a serial, and this resulted in A Strange Story (1861). Andrew Lang was of opinion that "There is no better romance of the supernatural than A Strange Story; and perhaps a kind of sketch for it, The Haunted and the Haunters, is at least as good." The only reason I have omitted to give this latter tale, which I immensely admire, is that it has been very frequently reprinted. It is said to be founded upon the succession of noises and apparitions that so disturbed the haunted mill at Willington when the Procter family, serious and devout members of the Society of Friends, resided there. This is one of the best known veridical histories in all psychic lore. There were legends of earlier troubles at Willington in 1806, and there were poltergeist vexations in 1823, but it was not until January, 1835, that the actual hauntings at the mill itself assumed serious proportions. In 1847 the Procters moved to Newcastle, but as late as 1867 and 1870 tenants who wished to reside at the mill were driven out by supernatural alarms. Bulwer-Lytton was a serious and discriminating student of the occult, and that is why he was able to write so well and so convincingly of the supernatural. Glenallan, an early work, gives evidence of this; and it is made even more clear by Zanoni, which he enlarged and completed from his Zicci, published in the Monthly Chronicle for 1838. When A Strange Story appeared, "He beats one on one's own ground!" cried Wilkie Collins, a generous apprisal, which perhaps must not be pressed to the letter, for there have been few, if any, writers to excel Collins at his best. A master of detective and "mystery" fiction — and one may draw attention to the close connexion between "mystery" fiction and the ghost story — Collins has also left some fine tales of the eerie and the weird. He was a past master of the art of creating an atmosphere of Suspense and loneliness, of awe and trembling fear. He even achieved that most difficult of feats, a full-length ghost story. It is, I think, well-nigh essential for success that the ghost story should be short. Only the adroitest skill and talent of no ordinary kind can avail to keep the reader in that state of expectancy bordering on the unpleasant yet never quite overstepping the line which is the true triumph of this genre. All too frequently a tale spun in many chapters is apt either, on the one hand, to fall slovenly flat, to become banal and to bore; or else on the other to swear into crude physical disgust and end as a mere mixen of horror. The Haunted Hotel, however, is wrought with consummate ability. In 1847 the famous military novelist James Grant published The Phantom Regiment, in which, although it be confessed that the main narrative runs rather thin, the episodes — from one of which the book takes its name — are splendidly done. The story tells of a phantom regiment, accursed and banned, doomed on each anniversary of that foul butchery to march from "hell to Culloden." Grant also has two short stories of the macabre, The Dead Tryst and A Haunted Life, which appeared in 1866. Other full-length ghost stories to be placed in the first class are Mrs. Riddell's The Haunted River, whose pages are dank with a mist that is not wholly material, with shadows and doom; Lanoe Falconer's Cecilia de Noel, a book of real genius, in which the effect of an apparition on varying individuals is shown; Lucas Malet's The Gateless Barrier and The Tall Villa; Mrs. Oliphant's The Beleaguered City; The White People by Francis Hodgson Burnett. All these are works of great beauty, and this they owe to their apprehension of the spiritual. In other phrase, to produce a flawless piece of work the writer must believe in the motive of the tale. This indeed I have emphasised before, and I will not enlarge upon the point now. I would merely add that if a ghost story has not the note of spirituality which may be beauty — a beauty not without awe — or may be horror, it will fail because of its insincerity and untruth. I do not know, and I do not care to know, how far Henry James believed in the possibility of The Turn of the Screw, but his genius succeeded in creating an atmosphere of spiritual dread because he realised that this was necessary to his art. I understand that actually The Turn of the Screw is a brilliant tour de force, but I am convinced that Henry James was less sceptic than appears. It seems to me that it is exactly this lack of spirituality which so fatally flaws the vast majority of the tales in a series generally known as "Not at Night," which has now attained six volumes of similar if slightly varying titles. If there is a note of spiritual horror, whether it be vampire horror, as in Four Wooden Stakes, or Satanism, as in The Devil's Martyr and The Witch-Baiter, the story is raised to another plane far higher than the rather nauseous sensationalism of fiendish serums, foul experiments of lunatic surgeons, half-human plants, monstrous insects and the like. Not forgetting the admirable work that has been done in the last thirty years, the nineteenth century may be acclaimed as the hey-day of the good old-fashioned ghost story, even if only in view of the fact that from 1838 to 1873 was writing one who has been justly termed "the Master of Horror and the Mysterious," Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, whose place in literature has been so precisely estimated by Mr. S.M. Ellis in a fine essay in Mainly Victorian. Dr. M.R. James, who is, with the exception of Vernon Lee, of all writers of ghost stories to-day facile princeps, has also declared his admiration for Le Fanu, and has collected with a valuable preface and bibliographical notes some dozen or more of Le Fanu's stories in Madam Crowl's Ghost. Both Mr. Ellis and Dr. James are agreed that Le Fanu was the supreme master of the supernatural, and I am glad to pay my own tribute also by writing that certainly in my opinion he has seldom, if ever, been approached, and most assuredly never excelled. It should be remarked that Le Fanu had the habit of refashioning his tales, and would often develop a short story until it was of considerable length. Finally it might even attain the dimensions of a three-volume novel. I mention this inasmuch as An Account of some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street (1853) is the first form of Mr. Justice Harbottle which appeared in the volume published in 1872 under the title In a Glass Darkly. These stories, once difficult to procure, have of late years been reissued, but I felt that, however accessible they may be, no collection of the supernatural could go forth without the seal of Le Fanu. It should be remarked, and I hardly think that the point has been noticed before in this connexion, what gloomy yet intensive delight the mid-Victorians took in funerals, interments, and all the trappings of mortuary woe. How raven-black was the velvet pall, how solemnly nodded the hearse-plumes, how awful stood the train of mutes, how long was the deep crape worn by relicts of the deceased, how fruity was the old port wine, how rich the slabs of cake! Their minds loved to dwell upon sepulture and the charnel. Dickens, in Martin Chuzzlewit and other of his novels, has shown how prominent a part was played by the undertakers, Mr. Mould, Mr. Sowerby, Mr. Joram, and the rest. What an event was a funeral from a house! The way to all these sadly sentimental lachrymals had been paved before by the lugubrious cortèges of the time of Anne, the funerals at night with a train of flambeaux, the mourning coaches, and all the rest of the lugubrious paraphernalia. We must not forget, too, those expressions of elegant piety such as Blair's The Grave, Young's The Last Day, Samuel Boyse's A Deity, and Death by Bishop Beilby Porteus, which for a century and a half exercised an almost universal influence in the spheres of such theology as loved to ponder upon the skull, the hour-glass, crossbones, hatchments, mournful and sorrowing cherubim. A typically Victorian writer was Mrs. Riddell, whose The Haunted River I have mentioned above, and who published in one volume half a dozen tales under the attractive title Weird Stories, 1885. Miss Braddon and Mrs. Henry Wood both wrote some first rate ghost stories. The Cold Embrace and Eveline's Visitant (which I have included here) by the former lady are particularly good, and, although it does not actually deal with the supernatural, I am constrained to mention as an example of her uncanny power The Mystery at Fernwood, where Laurence Wendale is horribly murdered apparently by himself, as through the door of the billiard-room is seen his exact image bending over and slashing at the corpse. The double suddenly mops and grins furiously. It is the dead man's twin brother, an idiot, whose brain was injured owing to an accident in earliest childhood. A large number of stories of the supernatural may be found in the magazines: in Tinsley's Magazine, Temple Bar, Belgravia, London Society, Blackwood's, the Argosy, the English Illustrated, as also in the forgotten Family Herald Supplement and Young Ladies' Journal. To come to a later date, there was no richer storehouse than the Pall Mall Magazine. In this last, in May, June and October, 1893, was published a study by James Mew, The Black Art, which is particularly interesting as a young and unknown artist, Aubrey Beardsley, contributed a full-page illustration (June, 1893, p. 177), "Of a Neophyte And How The Black Art Was Revealed Unto Him By The Fiend Asomuel." In July, 1893, of the Pall Mall Magazine appeared The Last of the Flying Dutchman, by W.L. Alden, which cleverly ended with a query; and A Kiss of Judas, a vampire story by X.L., the author of a tale of Satanism, Aut Diabolus aut Nihil, and who in the same magazine (September to December, 1898) published With All the Powders of the Merchant. In October, 1893, appeared The Luck of the Devil; in May, 1894, A Cry Across the Black Water, and in August of the same year Howard Pease's Mine Host the Cardinal, an excellent ghost story. In January, 1895, was given The Devil Stone, by Beatrice Heron Maxwell; in March, The Hands of Earl Rothes, by L. M. Hewitt, and also Huguenin's Wife, by M.P. Shiel. In December of that year we welcomed one of Dr. M.R. James's best stories, Lost Hearts. It is interesting to notice that some four years later, in April, 1899, another of our leading writers of ghost fiction, Algernon Blackwood, was represented by his The Haunted Island. June, 1896, has The Story of a Tusk, by H.A. Boyden, and The Stone Chamber of Taverndale Manor House, this latter a good spooky yarn of the real old Christmassy kind. In March, 1897, a horrible tale of psychic invasion, The Case of the Rev. Mr. Toomey, was given, as also Doctor Armstrong, which tells how to a leading surgeon was brought for a serious operation a man in feeblest health, who had suffered terribly all his life. In this invalid Doctor Armstrong, who has never known a day's illness, recognises by some uprush from a past life the Grand Inquisitor, who at Toledo centuries before had doomed him to the rack and the screw, to a death of agony by fire. In a moment of time, as it were, he passes through those days and months of excruciating anguish once more and is convulsed in throes of fiercest pain. Revenge, completest revenge, is in his grasp. He takes the steel instruments, and, administering no anæsthetic, in his turn becomes tormentor. He wrenches the muscles, tears the flesh and twists the nerves of the helpless writhing thing before him until the unhappy wretch draws his last moaning breath. But then a voice of infinite pity, yet infinitely just, sounds in the doctor's ear, telling him that by indulging his own bad passions and wreaking vengeance instead of showing mercy so has he forfeited his claim upon the mercy of Heaven. August and September of the Pall Mall Magazine, 1897, gave A Tribute of Souls, by Lord Frederic Hamilton and Robert Hichens, which was afterwards reprinted in the latter writer's Byways. October, 1900, had A Night on the Moor, by R. Murray Gilchrist, and one of the best vampire stories I know appropriately appeared in December of that year — The Tomb of Sarah, by F.G. Loring. Even just this hasty sketch — and I have omitted a large number of stories of great merit — will serve to show the interest taken in the supernatural by many of the writers prominent before the public in those years. Stories of the supernatural, many of a rare excellence, have been penned by R.L. Stevenson, W.W. Jacobs, Rudyard Kipling, H.G. Wells, Richard Middleton, Robert Hichens, Lord Dunsany, Walter de la Mare, Edith Wharton, Mrs. Molesworth, Fergus Hume, Barry Pain, John Buchan, Ambrose Bierce, Oliver Onions, Arthur Machen, Mary Heaton Vorse, Elliot O'Donnell, Bram Stoker, M.H. Austin, Hugh Conway, Fred G. Smale, Fitz-James O'Brien, Robert W. Chambers, Arthur Johnson, Clark Russell, Perceval Landon, Conan Doyle, Marjorie Bowen, Howard Pease, Ingulphus (Arthur Gray), Saki, Sir T.G. Jackson, Edward H. Cooper, A.M. Burrage, Grace V. Christmas, H.R. Wakefield, Mrs. Campbell Praed, Evelyn Nesbit, the Rev. E.G. Swain, L.P. Hartley, Mrs. Belloc Lowndes, Elizabeth Bowen, Baring Gould, Katherine Tynan, Vincent O'Sullivan, Vernon Lee, Amyas Northcote, E. and H. Heron, Roger Pater, John Guinan, W.J. Wintle, A.C. Benson, May Sinclair, and many others, the omission of whose names from this list, set down well-nigh at random as I glance at my shelves, must not be taken as any criticism of or judgement upon their quality, but rather because in making a terrier of ghost stories it is well-nigh impossible to aim at anything like a complete and exhaustive survey. Although his work is widely read, I have always felt that the ghost stories of the late Monsignor Hugh Benson never receive their just meed of appreciation. Yet it would not be easy to find a better symposium than The Mirror of Shalott, and there are few stories more horrible than My Own Tale, the house which had no soul. A fine story, too, is The Traveller, in The Light Invisible, and, in spite of the fact that Monsignor Benson himself declared that this book was written "in moods of great feverishness" and "largely insincere," frankly I would give twenty apocalyptic romances such as The Lord of the World and The Dawn of All, and fifty novels such as Initiation and Loneliness, both of which seem to me to trench far too nearly upon a calamitous pessimism, to call it nothing worse, for another Light Invisible; although I am very well aware that certain points, and these not the least important, are open to criticism. It is hardly necessary for me to speak of the most notable living exponents of the ghost story. Mr. E.F. Benson has shown himself a supremely accomplished artist in Spook Stories and The Room in the Tower. The Empty House, by Algernon Blackwood, is worthy of Le Fanu himself, and praise can reach no higher. Keeping his Promise and Smith are also of a rare quality, whilst there is nobody fascinated by the supernatural who does not wish for further experiences of John Silence. Dr. James uses his vast antiquarian and archæological erudition to create an appropriate atmosphere for his malignant ghosts, and no better setting could be devised. His care for detail is admirable, and tells immensely. In fact, I know only one living writer who can be compared with him in this point. I refer to Vernon Lee (Violet Paget), from whose Hauntings I am privileged to give two stories, Amour Dure and Oke of Okehurst. In the first the old Italian town among the hills, and in the other the English manor house, are drawn with marvellous felicity. No less cleverly done are Venice, Padua, and the Italian podere in That Wicked Voice. Hauntings is a masterpiece of literature, and even Le Fanu and M.R. James cannot be ranked above the genius of this lady. Unfortunately, Vernon Lee has given us no further ghost stories since 1890, save that she once refashioned a tale or so as was the wont of Sheridan Le Fanu. Particularly happy is Dr. James in his descriptions of those tall, red-brick houses, whose probable date is 1770 or thereabouts, in the eastern counties: such are Wilsthorpe, Castringham (although the Hall was mainly Elizabethan) in Suffolk, Aswarby Hall, Betton Court, Brockstone Court, and the Residence at Whitminster. I, too, like the pillared portico, the hall, the library, the pictures; and I, too, "wish to have one of these houses and enough money to keep it together and entertain my friends in it modestly." Dr. James tells us, as we might well guess, that for him places are prolific in suggestion.
It may be asked in what spirit should the stories in this collection be taken. With the exception of three (and these I will not specify), they are all ostensibly fiction, but I am sure that of the others, too, more than half a dozen could be very closely paralleled by real experience. I can hardly expect, although I might desire, that they should have the same effect upon the readers as The Castle of Otranto had upon Gray, who wrote: "It makes some of us cry a little, and all in general afraid to go to bed o' nights." The best way to appreciate a ghost story is to believe in ghosts. Yet if one cannot, at least imitate the wittily truthful Madame du Deffand, who, when asked, "Do you believe in ghosts?" replied: "No, but I am afraid of them." MONTAGUE SUMMERS. Note. — Many of the stories in this book are copyright, and may not be reprinted without the permission of the authors and publishers concerned. Whilst the utmost care and great diligence have been exercised to ascertain the owners of the rights so that the necessary permission to include the stories in the present collection should be secured, the editor and publishers desire to offer their apologies in any possible case of accidental infringement. My best thanks and all acknowledgements are particularly due to the following for generous permissions so courteously accorded: To Miss Violet Paget (Vernon Lee) and Messrs. John Lane for Amour Dure and Oke of Okehurst; Miss Rosalie Muspratt (Jasper John) and Messrs. Henry Walker for The Spirit of Stonehenge and The Seeker of Souls; Mr. John Guinan for The Watcher O' The Dead; Messrs. Routledge for The Judge's House; Messrs. Burns, Oates & Washbourne for De Profundis, The Astrologer's Legacy, and A Porta Inferi; Messrs. C. Arthur Pearson for The Story of The Spaniards, Hammersmith, The Story of Konnor Old House, The Story of Yand Manor House; Messrs. John Lane for Brickett Bottom; Messrs. William Heinemann for Thurnley Abbey; Messrs. George G. Harrap for Tousell's Pale Bride. I am further much indebted to Mr. H. Stuart-Forbes for his invaluable help in the collection of material, as also for his spirited and discerning criticisms of Ghost Stories, suggestions which have gone far to make my task easier and (if possible) more interesting. M.S. |
(End.)
Vincent O'Sullivan,