THE SUPERNATURAL OMNIBUS (2 page)

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

"There are spirits that are created for vengeance, and in their fury they lay on grievous torments."
— Ecclesiasticus xxxix. 33. 

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:

"There was formerly at Athens a large and handsome house which none the less had acquired the reputation of being badly haunted. The folk told how at the dead of night horrid noises were heard: the clanking of chains which grew louder and louder until there suddenly appeared the hideous phantom of an old, old man, who seemed the very picture of abject filth and misery. His beard was long and matted, his white hairs dishevelled and unkempt. His thin legs were loaded with a weight of galling fetters that he dragged wearily along with a painful moaning; his wrists were shackled by long cruel links, whilst ever and anon he raised his arms and shook his gyves amain in a kind of impotent fury. Some few mocking sceptics, who once were bold enough to watch all night in the house, had been well-nigh scared from their senses at a sight of the apparition; and, what was worse, disease and even death itself proved the fate of those who after dusk had ventured within those accursed walls. The place was shunned. A placard 'To Let' was posted, but year succeeded year and the house fell almost to ruin and decay. It so happened that the philosopher Athenodorus, whilst on a visit to Athens, passed by the deserted overgrown garden, and seeing the bill, inquired the rent of the house, which was just such as he was seeking. Being not a little surprised at the low figure asked, he put more questions, and then there came out the whole story. None the less, he signed the lease and ordered that one room should be furnished for him with a bed, chairs and a table. At night he took his writing-tablet, style, books and a good lamp and set himself, as his wont, to study in the quiet hours. He had determined to concentrate upon some difficult problems lest if he sat idle and expectant his imagination should play tricks, and he might see what was in reality not there. He was soon absorbed in philosophical calculations, but presently the noise of a rattling chain, at first distant and then growing nearer, broke on his ear. However, Athenodorus, being particularly occupied with his notes, was too intent to interrupt his writing until, as the clanking became more and more continuous, he looked up, and there before him stood the phantom exactly as had been described. The ghastly figure seemed to beckon with its finger, but the philosopher signed with his hand that he was busy, and again bent to his writing. The chains were shaken angrily and with persistence, upon which Athenodorus quietly arose from his seat, and, taking the lamp, motioned the spectre to lead before. With low groans the figure passed heavily through the spacious corridors and empty rooms until they came out into the garden, when it led the philosopher to a distant shrubbery and, with a deep sigh, mingled with the night. Athenodorus, having marked the spot with stones and a broken bough, returned to the house, where he slept soundly until morning. He then repaired to the nearest magistrates, related what he had seen, and advised that the spot where the ghost disappeared should be investigated. This was done, and in digging they found a few feet below the surface a human skeleton, carious, enchained and fettered in gyves of a pattern many centuries old — now rusty and eroded, so that they fell asunder in flakes of desquamating verdigris. The mouldering bones were collected with reverend care and given a decent and seemly burial. The house was purged and cleansed with ritual lustrations, and never afterwards was it troubled by spectre or ill luck."