The Ghost in Fiction

From the Atlantic Monthly, 1905 month not easily traceable. Nor is
the paragraphing to be considered accurate, since the file got loused
up. Thomas Russell Sullivan (1849-1916) wrote some ghost stories
himself.

THE GHOST IN FICTION
BY T. R. SULLIVAN

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, accord ing 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 wide-awake 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 Tourgueneff which may be read
over and over again with pleasure, merely for the excellence of their
preparatory, descriptive passages. Such is that remarkable story,
Tourgueneff' s Apparitions, to which even the most hard- headed 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 straight- forward 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 glow- worms 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 Caesar, where the boy
plays the harp to Brutus and falls asleep over it. Brutus says:

murderous slumber!
Lay'st thou thy leaden mace upon my boy
That plays thee music? Gentle knave, good night:
I will not do thee so much wrong to wake thee.
If thou dost nod, thou break'st thy instru ment;
I '11 take it from thee ; and, good boy, good night.
Let me see, let me see: is not the leaf turn'd down
Where I left reading ? Here it is, I think.
(Enter the Ghost of Caesar.)
How ill this taper burns ! Ha ! Who comes here?
I think it is the weakness of mine eyes
That shapes this monstrous apparition.
It comes upon me ! Art thou anything ?
Art thou some god, some angel, or some devil,
That mak'st my blood cold and my hair to stare ?
Speak to me what thou art.

Ghost. Thy eviljspirit, Brutus.

Brutus. Why com'st thou ?

Ghost. To tell thee, thou shalt see me at Philippi.

Brutus. Well : then I shall see thee again?

Ghost. Ay, at Philippi.

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 Tourgueneff
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.