The Ghost in Fiction

SOMEWHERE, in what has been classified as the eighth period of English Literature, beginning about the year 1830, the ghost-story, all over the world, became very much the fashion. The perfection which this form of romantic narrative had reached through the art of Irving, Poe, and Hawthorne made dealings with the mystic, the weird, and the supernatural widely popular, and every new writer was moved to try his hand at it. The current of scientific investigation had not set in that way, time and space were not yet minimized by steam and electricity, and local tradition, with an archaic or feudal background, aided by that lurking dread of something after death which, according to Hamlet, we all inherit, combined to make the wildest freak of the clever writer’s imagination almost credible. He could sound what stop he pleased, when every respectable English neighborhood busily circled round the whispered word about its haunted chamber, when any sluggish, ill-tempered old Scotchman ran the risk of being avoided as a warlock, and even the virgin forest of North America was full of spells and warnings. In consequence, we were overwhelmed by a legion of purely fictitious phantoms, varying from the mute and dignified courtier-like type in old lace and high-heeled shoes, to the merry, whimsical intruder from the other world, with a good-humored twinkle in his eye, or the shrouded, shrieking raw-head-and-bloody-bones nuisance who drove his chance acquaintance mad at sight.

Many of us now find these monstrous attempts to shatter our peace of mind very dreary and childish; but that the world at large is neither entirely cured of its superstitious faith, nor even convalescent, must be clear to any traveler who penetrates to regions remote from great cities. Belief in the evil eye is uncomfortably prevalent throughout Italy, where charms are worn against it, and the sign to ward off its dire effects is still made by intelligent persons who ought to be above such nonsense. And after generations of enlightenment, Scotland would rather be haunted than not. The other day I talked with a very modern young woman who lives next door to Glamis Castle, and is akin to the heir, who is popularly supposed to be weighed down by tidings from the secret chamber, whenever he comes of age. She laughed at my reference to the story, and said: “ Oh, when I want to know about that, I always consult an American.” She then cheered me by reciting a legend of the castle touching a certain Lady Griselda, who, following her lord and master in the dead of night, was caught and punished for her curiosity by having her tongue torn out and her hands cut off; and at the present time wanders up and down stairs, waving her bleeding stumps wildly, to the terror of the servants.

“After all,” her relative continued, “it is n’t strange that any tale of horror should be believed about Glamis. For the house is low, dark, and peculiarly gloomy, carpeted everywhere with old India matting which deadens the sound of a footstep, so that even the living members of the family glide over it like spectres.”

“How about your house?” I asked. “Is n’t that haunted too ?”

“ Oh, we have n’t any ghost, — inside,” she said. “But in one of the park-alleys there is sometimes seen a sheep with a human head. Nobody ever goes there after dark.”

So outlandish a hobgoblin would hardly daunt a nursery-maid here, were she within reach of a telephone; but it was plain that the narrator had a certain respect for the fable, if she did not quite credit it. At any rate, it was not her habit to walk in the park at twilight.

Talk about this recalled an occurrence very near home. One of my friends hired for the summer Hawthorne’s Old Manse, at Concord. And, before moving into it, he lent one of the servants — a wideawake young woman — the Mosses from an Old Manse to read by way of preparation. Unfortunately, in the introduction Hawthorne makes a humorous reference to the minister, the first tenant of the house in provincial times, and to his silken gown which may still be heard rustling through the passages by discreet listeners of finer sense. The girl put her finger upon this, and declined service in summer quarters where such things were possible. Nothing could induce her to change her mind. There it was, printed in the book, — and she ended by resigning her place.

To return to the unauthentic bogie of pure fiction: when Bulwer came along, he rang some splendid changes upon the familiar theme, juggling with occult science, and working in natural phenomena, by the way, most artfully. The caldron, refreshed with new ingredients, bubbled up again, and the mystical tale was given another lease of life, — but with a difference, which was really an immense gain. The reader no longer was asked to believe in a ghostly visitant stepping directly from the other world with the habit of this one, as he lived, fresh, unwrinkled, and complete to the last button. This manifest absurdity was done away with, and the far more subtle trick was to get the gentle reader off his guard in lonely places, to chill him with damp and mould, and cloud his brain with vaporous association; then, all conditions being favorable, to leave him in doubt as to the conjuror’s own state of mind regarding the manifestation or apparition; this, with consummate charm of style, and a strict attention to business in the setting of the scene, where all must be conceivable, nothing exaggerated.

Execution, perhaps, has greater value in this form of fiction than in any other. The Russians have never been beaten at this, and there are certain ghostly tales of Pouchkine and Tourguéneff which may be read over and over again with pleasure, merely for the excellence of their preparatory, descriptive passages. Such is that remarkable story, Tourguéneff’s Apparitions, to which even the most hardheaded old skeptic that ever lived must pay the tribute of a second reading, — if only to assure himself that there is nothing in it. And, of course, there is no impossibility in momentary hallucination, of which all humanity, at times, is susceptible. Witness, that unaccountable case from the note-book of Lord Brougham, to whom a friend of early life appeared, or seemed to appear, at the moment of death, after a separation of twenty years, in fulfillment of a jesting compact, written in blood during their college days.

By these concessions in the literary attitude the visions, so-called, were brought much nearer to life, and shorn to a great extent of their incredibility. The story of The Signal-Man, so realistically told by Dickens as to justify that “slow touch of a frozen finger tracing out the spine” which the Ego of the tale describes in it, is a perfect example of this method, where skepticism is frankly met half-way. The victim passes his monotonous existence at the mouth of a tunnel in a deep gully of the railway line, which reeks with moisture, from which the light of day is almost wholly cut off. His duties consist in recording telegraphic signals, in responding to them, and in displaying a flag when the train approaches. The gloom of his life there is so well suggested that the effect of it upon his mind at which the writer hints is hardly a matter of surprise. Gradually the man becomes convinced that he has been warned by supernatural means of some impending catastrophe. He starts when no bell rings, imagines that he hears voices, that he sees beckoning shapes at the tunnel’s mouth. The coming disaster proves to be his own death. Finally, unnerved by these cumulative experiences, he makes a false step in front of one of his passing trains. That is all. But the thing is done so simply and so reasonably as to carry conviction with it. The reader feels at the end that Dickens must have known that man, and has related in a perfectly straightforward way a real incident.

Imaginative work of that sort naturally prepared the way for scientific research. The gauntlet was thrown down, and before long it was taken up. The Psychical Society ran a good many disreputable old ghosts to earth and laid them. Those that still walked were chiefly of the milder sort, and seemed to flourish in outlying districts of the British Islands, largely on hearsay. When your cousin’s cousin, living two hundred miles off, has a friend (represented by an initial letter) who thinks he saw a ghost thirty years ago, accuracy becomes expensive, and such distant prosecution of it is scarcely worth while. About this time, as the almanacs say, Andrew Lang saw his opportunity, and came to the front with his treatment of the question in a brief extravaganza, called In Castle Perilous, which ought to be read at least once a week by any writer who purposes to make a living out of the supernatural. His spectre is “up-to-date” indeed, discussing the phenomenon of his own appearance in modern scientific terminology. From that he passes lightly to criticism of Shakespeare’s use of that ancient superstition, the cock-crow, and his introduction of the glow-worm on a midwinter night in the ghost-scenes of Hamlet. Furthermore, he asks if a real cock and real glow-worm are employed to heighten the stage effect, nowadays, in the best theatres. Finally, with a quotation from the London Spectator, he vanishes, after imploring the narrator not to think in the morning that he was “all a dream,”

Shakespeare, himself, might have called Mr. Lang’s work “ admirable fooling.” “When I read it for the first time, it seemed to me a knock-down blow. I felt as if the old-fashioned, or, indeed, any-fashioned ghost business were done for. But the next time I saw the Royal Dane, he was, for once, impersonated by a great actor. His magnificent lines were as impressive as ever. How could finical witticism over cocks and glowworms affect that gracious figure ? And what were any details of stage-management in comparison with the immortal visitation to whet the almost blunted purpose ? The scenic appliances faded into insignificance, and the impression would have been equally fine with no canvas or calcium at all. Then, in the face and eyes of Mr. Lang, and the whole Psychical Society to boot, there started up a modern master, Stevenson, who struck a new note upon the old chord, and made it vibrate in a way that no one could resist. And I began to see that its vibrations must go on eternally, — at least, so long as our great mystery of the unknowable remains without solution. The essential thing, be the performer ancient or modern, is to strike the chord in the right way, — to know the touch of it! That is all.

One night, a little later, I took up Shakespeare again, and read the closing scene of the fourth act in Julius Cœsar, where the boy plays the harp to Brutus and falls asleep over it.

Brutus says: —

There is the eternal touch, — given with that prophetic conformity to modern conditions of thought which often recurs so curiously in Shakespeare. “Art thou anything?” It is as if the poet had just been reading Clark on Visions. And the Ghost speaks just two lines; but such lines! They have passed into the language, and can never grow obsolete.

When we are endowed with ghosts like this, why should the authenticity of a few old nursery scarecrows in the crumbling walls of English country houses vex us ? We can let them pass. Especially, since we have to consider puzzling manifestations, equally authentic, much nearer home. A little while ago a well-known man hired for a year a colonial house within five miles of Boston. And, before long, he was oppressed by a mysterious, disturbing, yet invisible presence in one of its upper rooms. He kept the matter to himself, at first. But, one by one, each member of the family in turn obtained from it the same discomfort, until, finally, the room was closed, locked, and left unused. Doubtless “it is in ourselves that we are thus or thus; ” and the Society for Psychical Research perhaps would find nothing in that room from one week’s end to the other. The incident only goes to prove that we are still susceptible of treatment, and that a writer, even in the present hour of negation, may make the hair to stare without much difficulty, if he sets to work in the proper way.

It happened once, when I was a very small boy on a visit to some relatives in the country, that I was left alone one evening with the servants, the elders of the family having gone out for an hour or two. The cook and the housemaids offered me the hospitality of the kitchen, and we sat there together through the twilight in a small group around an open window. It was a warm summer night, — too warm for lamps; outside, there was a grass-plot, with some low shrubs through which the fireflies glanced. The crickets were crying, but there was no wind, the room was remote from the road , and otherwise all was absolutely still. While I sat by, trying to be interested in the talk though somewhat bored in the process, the maids gossiped in a subdued undertone, appropriate to the hour. Undoubtedly, our condition was finely receptive. In thinking of the scene, I am always reminded of the story about a twilight group in a French country house where the man turned to the woman in white, sitting next him, and asked if she believed in ghosts. “ Je le crois, je le suis,” she said, and vanished! Well, we sat there in the stillness and the dark, until suddenly on the outer wall of the house, as it seemed, close to the window, a little way above our heads, there came a sharp knock, two or three times repeated. The group scattered instantly. There was a great craning of necks into the open air, where, of course, nothing was to be seen; and nothing more occurred outside. The conversation, indoors, became exceedingly lively for a few minutes. Everybody had heard the noise, and everybody wished to describe at once the impression it produced. The cook, who had a vivid, but limited imagination, said it sounded to her like the handle of a carving-knife; while one of the maids was sure that it must have been a broom-handle. The source of the noise was never determined, and the appalling mystery knocked out the talking-party forever. For my own part, I discovered very promptly that it was bedtime, and went away to uneasy slumber with a bright light burning close by my pillow. And, never, during my childhood, was I quite comfortable again in that house.

This unimportant circumstance merely illustrates further the disadvantage under which we all labor in conflicting with those impenetrable mysteries that science has thus far failed to overcome, that surround us all from the cradle to the grave. So far as they go, we are still children, — at a disadvantage, as aforesaid. And this may serve as text for a conclusion. So long as the disadvantage exists, a skillful literary craftsman may still avail himself of it effectively in more ways than one. The wise reader has no real confidence in ghosts; he scoffs at the old wives’ tales of haunted houses, very properly; when strange footsteps scuffle about in the night, where he knows that no human feet may fall, he whispers to himself “Rats!” and goes to sleep again. But by and by there turns up some fellow like Stevenson or Tourguéneff to take his step just over the line into the borderland. He has the skill to give the knock! Then, in the startled scoffer’s mind the unexpected happens; something, that he was quite unaware of before, stirs there, inducing him to listen. Half unconsciously, he applauds the masterstroke, and is forced, against his will, into tolerance, if not into approval and admiration.