THE SUPERNATURAL OMNIBUS.
MONTAGUE SUMMERS.
Montague Summers.
Augustus Montague Summers (10 April 1880 10 August 1948) was an English author and clergyman. He is known primarily for his scholarly work on the English drama of the 17th century, as well as for his idiosyncratic studies on witches, vampires, and werewolves, in all of which he professed to believe. He was responsible for the first English translation, published in 1928, of the notorious 15th-century witch hunter"s manual, the Malleus Maleficarum.
Early life.
Montague Summers was the youngest of the seven children of Augustus William Summers, a rich banker and justice of the peace in Clifton, Bristol. Summers was educated at Clifton College before studying theology at Trinity College, Oxford with the intention of becoming a priest in the Church of England. In 1905 he received a fourth-cla.s.s Bachelor of Arts degree. He then continued his religious training at the Lichfield Theological College.
Summers was ordained as deacon in 1908 and worked as a curate in Bath and Bitton, in Greater Bristol. He never proceeded to higher orders, however, probably because of rumours of his interest in Satanism and accusations of s.e.xual impropriety with young boys, for which he was tried and acquitted. Summers" first book, Antinous and Other Poems, published in 1907, was dedicated to the subject of pederasty.
Summers also joined the growing ranks of English men of letters interested in medievalism, Catholicism, and the occult. In 1909 he converted to Catholicism and shortly thereafter he began pa.s.sing himself off as a Catholic priest and styling himself the "Reverend Alphonsus Joseph-Mary Augustus Montague Summers", even though he was never a member of any Catholic order or diocese. Whether he was ever actually ordained as a priest is a matter of dispute.
Literary scholarship.
Summers worked for several years as an English and Latin teacher at various schools, including Brockley County School in south-east London, before adopting writing as his full-time employment. He was interested in the theater of the seventeenth century, particularly that of the English Restoration, and edited the plays of Aphra Behn, John Dryden, William Congreve, among others. He was one of the founder members of The Phoenix, a society that performed those neglected works, and was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1916.
Montague Summers also produced important studies of the Gothic fiction genre and edited two collections of Gothic horror short stories, as well as an incomplete edition of two of the seven obscure Gothic novels, known as the Northanger Horrid Novels, mentioned by Jane Austen in her Gothic parody Northanger Abbey. He was instrumental in rediscovering those lost works, which some had supposed were an invention of Jane Austen herself. He also published biographies of writers Jane Austen and Ann Radcliffe.
The occult.
Summers" career as an ostensibly Catholic clergyman was highly unusual. He wrote works of hagiography on Saint Catherine of Siena and Saint Anthony Maria Zaccaria, but his primary religious interest was in the subject of the occult. While Aleister Crowley, with whom he was acquainted, adopted the persona of a modern-day witch, Summers played the part of the learned Catholic witch-hunter. In the introduction to his book on The History of Witchcraft and Demonology (1926) he writes: In the following pages I have endeavoured to show the witch as she really was an evil liver: a social pest and parasite: the devotee of a loathly and obscene creed: an adept at poisoning, blackmail, and other creeping crimes: a member of a powerful secret organisation inimical to Church and State: a blasphemer in word and deed, swaying the villagers by terror and superst.i.tion: a charlatan and a quack sometimes: a bawd: an abortionist: the dark counsellor of lewd court ladies and adulterous gallants: a minister to vice and inconceivable corruption, battening upon the filth and foulest pa.s.sions of the age.
In 1928, he published the first English translation of Heinrich Kramer"s and James Sprenger"s Malleus Maleficarum ("The Hammer of Witches"), a 15th century Latin text on the hunting of witches. In his introduction, Summers insists that the reality of witchcraft is an essential part of Catholic doctrine, and declares the Malleus to be an admirable and correct account of witchcraft and of the methods necessary to combat it. This should be contrasted with the vastly more skeptical and critical att.i.tude of mainstream Catholic scholars, reflected for instance in the Rev. Herbert Thurston"s article on "Witchcraft" for the Catholic Encyclopaedia of 1912, which labels the publication of the Malleus a "disastrous episode."
Montague Summers then turned to vampires, producing The Vampire: His Kith and Kin (1928) and The Vampire in Europe (1929), and later to werewolves with The Werewolf (1933). Summers" work on the occult is notorious for his unusual and old-fashioned writing style, his display of erudition, and his purported belief in the reality of the subjects he treats.
Other pursuits.
Summers cultivated his reputation for eccentricity. The Times of London wrote he was "in every way a "character" and in some sort a throwback to the Middle Ages." His biographer, Brocard Sewell (writing under the pseudonym "Joseph Jerome"), paints the following portrait of Summers: During the year 1927, the striking and somber figure of the Reverend Montague Summers in black soutane and cloak, with buckled shoes--a la Louis Quatorze--and shovel hat could often have been seen entering or leaving the reading room of the British Museum, carrying a large black portfolio bearing on its side a white label, showing in blood-red capitals, the legend "VAMPIRES".
Despite his conservative religiosity, Summers was an active member of both the British Society for the Study of s.e.x Psychology, to which he contributed an essay on the Marquis de Sade, and of the Order of Chaeronea, a secret society which cultivated a pederastic h.o.m.os.e.xual ethos. Summers" interests also show in his edition of the poems of the sixteenth century poet Richard Barnfield, which partly are openly h.o.m.os.e.xual.
Death.
Montague Summers died at his home in Richmond, Surrey in August 1948. An autobiography The Galanty Show was published posthumously in 1980, though much is left unrevealed about his life.
INTRODUCTION.
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 Ess.e.x, 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 a.s.sured 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 circ.u.mstance 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 fict.i.tious 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 x.x.xix. 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 Ma.s.s. She prepared the altar and lighted the candles, noting with some surprise that he seemed strangely familiar with the place. She answered his Ma.s.s 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 n.o.body 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 s.p.a.ces 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 a.s.syrians 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 sh.o.r.es 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 l.u.s.tily a s.n.a.t.c.h 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 pa.s.ses 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, pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed heavily through the s.p.a.cious 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 l.u.s.trations, and never afterwards was it troubled by spectre or ill luck."
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 Gork.u.m in 1687, give us an ill.u.s.tration 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 cortege 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 s.p.a.ce 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: 1st Queen: I am afeard.
2nd Queen: Lo! what I see?
3rd Queen: Me thinketh it be devils three!
1st Dead Body: I was well fair.
2nd Dead Body: Such shalt thou be.
3rd Dead Body: For G.o.de"s love, beware by me!
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, Her Face, her Hands, her naked Limbs were torn, With pa.s.sing through the Brakes, and p.r.i.c.kly Thorn; Two Mastiffs, gaunt and grim, her Flight pursu"d, And oft their fasten"d Fangs in Blood embru"d.
Mounted on a black charger there follows a grisly knight, and he looes on the two swift hounds of h.e.l.l. 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 d.a.m.ned 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, Renew"d to Life, that she might daily die, I daily doom"d to follow, she to fly; No more a Lover but a mortal Foe, I seek her Life (for Love is none below:) As often as my Dogs with better speed Arrest her Flight, is she to Death decreed: Then with this fatal Sword on which I dy"d, I pierce her open"d Back or tender Side, And tear that harden"d Heart from out her Breast, Which, with her Entrails, makes my hungry Hounds a Feast.
Nor lies she long, but as her Fates ordain, Springs up to Life, and fresh to second Pain, Is sav"d to Day, to Morrow to be slain.
This, vers"d in Death, th" infernal Knight relates, And then for Proof fulfill"d their common Fates; Her Heart and Bowels through her Back he drew, And fed the Hounds that help"d him to pursue.
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: He was not pale as a for-pyned goost; 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 a.s.sistance. 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 The dede man, that mordred was al newe.
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): "Of all the common and familiar subjects of conversation that are entered upon in company of things remote from Nature and cut off from the senses, there is none so ready to hand, none so usual, as that of visions of Spirits, and whether that said of them is true. It is the topic that people most readily discuss and on which they linger the longest because of the abundance of examples, the subject being fine and pleasing and the discussion the least tedious that can be found."
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 cert.i.tude 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 Thyraeus, a famous Jesuit professor of Wurzburg, 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"a.s.signy, 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 fict.i.tious 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 t.i.tle 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 t.i.tle, 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 encyclopaedia, 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 superst.i.tion 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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 Megaera 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 sh.o.r.es. 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: A Chorus too comes howling in, And tels us of the worrying of a cat, Then of a filthie whining ghost, Lapt in some fowle sheete, or a leather perch, Comes shreaming like a pigge halfe sticks, And cries Vindicta, revenge, revenge: With that a little Rosenflasheth forth, Like smoke out of a Tabacco pipe, or a boyes squib.
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 ca.s.sock 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 a.s.suredly was not the case. The Critical Review was certainly unfriendly at the time, and Hazlitt later d.a.m.ned 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 Daedalus 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 t.i.tle 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 circ.u.mstance . . . has stepped beyond the modern writers of Romance, by introducing a Real Ghost - to many, such a circ.u.mstance 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 Let.i.tia: 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: Twelve o"clock"s the Time of Night That the Graves, all gaping wide, Quick send forth the airy Sprite In the Churchway Path to glide.
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 t.i.tles 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 pa.s.sing 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 c.l.i.theroe 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. Sh.e.l.ley, whom I omit with reluctance. Frankenstein is a cla.s.sic 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 s.p.a.ce 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 Adria.n.u.s, 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 pa.s.sages he gives an undercurrent of something running much deeper and touching us more nearly than mere persiflage, however exquisitely wrought and pointed.
"Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the gra.s.ses waving above one"s head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no to-morrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace."
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.