The Devil and His Allies
"Ghosts are few but devils are plenty," said Cotton Mather, but his
saying would need to be inverted to fit present-day English fiction.
Now we have ghosts in abundance but devils are scarce. In fact, they
bid fair to become extinct in our romances, at least in the form that
is easily recognizable. Satan will probably soon be in solution,
identified merely as a state of mind. He has been so Burbanked of
late, with his dæmonic characteristics removed and humanities added
that, save for sporadic reversion to type, the old familiar demon is
almost a vanished form. The modern mind seems to cling with a new
fondness to the ghost but has turned the cold shoulder to the devil,
perhaps because many modernists believe more in the human and less
in the supernatural--and after all, ghosts are human and devils are
not. The demon has disported himself in various forms in literature,
from the scarlet fiend of monkish legend, the nimble imp and titanic
nature-devil of folk-lore to Milton's epic, majestic Satan, and
Goethe's mocking Mephistopheles, passing into allegoric, symbolic, and
satiric figures in later fiction. He has been an impressive character
in the drama, the epic, the novel, in poetry, and the short story. We
have seen him as a loathly, brutish demon in Dante, as a superman,
as an intellectual satirist, and as a human being appealing to our
sympathy. He has gradually lost his epic qualities and become human.
He is not present in literature now to the extent to which he was known
in the past, is not so impressive a figure as heretofore, and at times
when he does appear his personality is so ambiguously set forth that it
requires close literary analysis to prove his presence.
In this chapter the devil will be discussed with reference to his
appearances on earth, while in a later division he will be seen in
his own home. It would be hard to say with certainty when and where
the devil originated, yet he undoubtedly belongs to one of our first
families and is said to have been born theologically in Persia about
the year 900 B.C. He has appeared under various aliases, as Ahriman of
the Zoroastrian system, Pluto in classical mythology, Satan, Beelzebub,
Prince of Darkness, and by many other titles. In his _Address to the
De'il_ Burns invokes him thus:
"Oh, Thou! whatever title suit thee,--
Auld Hornie, Satan, Nick or Cloutie!"
He has manifested himself in fiction under diverse names, as Demon,
Lucifer, Satan, Mephistopheles, Prince Lucio, The Man in Black, and so
forth, but whatever the name he answers to, he is known in every land
and has with astonishing adaptability made himself at home in every
literature.
The devil has so changed his form and his manner of appearance in later
literature that it is hard to identify him as his ancient self. In
early stories he was heralded by supernatural thunder and lightning
and accompanied by a strong smell of sulphur. He dressed in character
costume, sometimes in red, sometimes in black, but always indubitably
diabolic. He wore horns, a forked tail, and cloven hoofs and was a
generally unprepossessing creature whom anyone could know for a devil.
Now his rôle is not so typical and his garb not so declarative. He
wears an evening suit, a scholar's gown, a parson's robe, a hunting
coat, with equal ease, and it is sometimes difficult to tell the devil
from the hero of a modern story. He has been deodorized and no longer
reeks warningly of the Pit.
The mediæval mind conceived of the devil as a sort of combination
of mythologic satyr and religious dragon. It is interesting to note
how the pagan devil-myths have been engrafted upon the ideas of
Christianity, to fade out very slowly and by degrees. In monkish
legends the devil was an energetic person who would hang round a likely
soul for years, if need be, on the chance of nabbing him. Many monkish
legends have come down to us.
The diabolic element in English folk-lore shows a rich field for study.
The devil here as in the monkish legendry appears as an enemy of souls,
a tireless tempter. He lies in wait for any unwary utterance, and the
least mention of his name, any thoughtless expletive, such as "The
devil take me if--" brings instant response from him to clinch the
bargain. Yet the devil of rustic folk-lore is of a bucolic dullness,
less clever than in any phase of literature, more gullible, more easily
imposed on. English folk-lore, especially the Celtic branches, shows
the devil as very closely related to nature. He was wont to work off
his surplus energy or his wrath by disturbing the landscape, and many
stories of his prankish pique have come down to us. If anything vexed
him he might stamp so hard upon a plain that the print of his cloven
hoof would be imprinted permanently. He was fond of drinking out of
pure springs and leaving them cursed with sulphur, and he sometimes
showed annoyance by biting a section out of a mountain, Devil's Bit
Mountain in Ireland being one of the instances. In general, any
peculiarity of nature might be attributed to the activities of Auld
Hornie.
The devil has always been a pushing, forward sort of person, so he
was not content with being handed round by word of mouth in monkish
legend or rustic folk-lore, but must worm his way into literature in
general. Since then many ink-pots have been emptied upon him besides
the one that Luther hurled against his cloister wall. The devil is seen
frequently in the miracle plays, showing grotesquerie, the beginnings
of that sardonic humor he is to display in more important works later.
In his appearance in literature the devil is largely anthropomorphic.
Man creates the devil in his own image, one who is not merely personal
but racial as well, reflecting his creator. In monkish tradition
an adversary in wait for souls, in rustic folk-lore a rollicking
buffoon with waggish pranks, in miracle plays reflecting the mingled
seriousness and comic elements of popular beliefs, he mirrors his
maker. But it is in the great poems and dramas and stories that we find
the more personal aspects of devil-production, and it is these epic
and dramatic concepts of the devil that have greatly influenced modern
fiction. While the Gothic romance was but lightly touched by the epic
supernaturalism, the literature since that time has reflected it more,
and the Satanic characters of Dante, Milton, Calderon, Marlowe, and
Goethe have cast long shadows over modern fiction. The recent revival
of interest in Dante has doubtless had its effect here.
Burns in his _Address to the De'il_ shows his own kindly heart and
honest though ofttimes misdirected impulses by suggesting that there
is still hope for the devil to repent and trusting that he may do so
yet. Mrs. Browning, in her _Drama of Exile_, likewise shows in Lucifer
some appeal to our sympathies, reflecting the pitying heart of the
writer,--showing a certain kinship to Milton's Satan yet with weakened
intellectual power. She makes Gabriel say to him:
"Angel of the sin,
Such as thou standest,--pale in the drear light
Which rounds the rebel's work with Maker's wrath--
Thou shalt be an Idea to all souls,
A monumental, melancholy gloom,
Seen down all ages whence to mark despair
And measure out the distances from good."
Byron's devil in _A Vision of Judgment_ is, like Caliban's ideas of
Setebos, "altogether such an one" as Byron conceived himself to be. He
is a terrible figure, whose
"Fierce and unfathomable thoughts engraved
Eternal wrath on his immortal face."
He shows diabolical sarcasm when he says, "I've kings enough below,
God knows!" And how like Oscar Wilde is the devil he pictures to us
in his symbolic story, _The Fisherman and his Soul_. The prince of
darkness who appears to the young fisherman that wishes to sell his
soul to the devil is "a man dressed in a suit of black velvet cut in
Spanish fashion. His proud face was strangely pale, but his lips were
like a proud red flower. He seemed weary and was leaning back toying in
a listless manner with the pommel of his saddle." When the fisherman
unthoughtedly utters a prayer that baffles the fiend for the time,
the demon mounts his jennet with the silver harness and rides away,
still with the proud, disdainful face, sad with a _blasé_ weariness
unlike the usual alertness of the devil. He has a sort of Blessed
Damozel droop to his figure, and the bored patience of a lone man at an
afternoon tea. Wilde shows us some little mocking red devils in another
of his stories,[143] and _The Picture of Dorian Gray_ is a concept of
diabolism.
[143] _A Legend of Sharp._
Scott in _The Talisman_ puts a story of descent from the Evil One in
the mouth of the Saracen, the legend of the spirits of evil who formed
a league with the cruel Zohauk, by which he gained a daily sacrifice of
blood to feed two hideous serpents that had become a part of himself.
One day seven sisters of wonderful beauty are brought, whose loveliness
appeals to the immortals. In the midst of supernatural manifestations
the earth is rent and seven young men appear. The leader says to the
eldest sister:
I am Cothreb, king of the subterranean world. I and my brethren are
of those who, created out of elementary fire, disdained even at the
command of Omnipotence, to do homage to a clod of earth because it
is called man. Thou mayest have heard of us as cruel, unrelenting,
and persecuting. It is false. We are by nature kind and generous,
vengeful only when insulted, cruel only when affronted. We are true
to those that trust us; and we have heard the invocations of thy
father the sage Mithrasp, who wisely worships not only the Origin
of Good, but that which is called the Source of Evil. You and
your sisters are on the eve of death; but let each give to us one
hair from your fair tresses in token of fealty, and we will carry
you many miles to a place of safety where you may bid defiance to
Zohauk and his ministers.
The maidens accept the offer and become the brides of the spirits of
evil.
The devil in Scott's _Wandering Willie's Tale_,[144] also speaks a good
word for himself. When the gudesire meets in the woods the stranger
who sympathizes with his obvious distress, the unknown offers to help
him, saying, "If you will tell me your grief, I am one that, though I
have been sair miscaa'd in the world, am the only hand for helping my
freends." The gudesire tells his woes and says that he would go to the
gates of hell, and farther, to get the receipt due him, upon which the
hospitable stranger conducts him to the place mentioned. The canny
Scot obtains the document, outwits the devil, and wins his way back to
earth unscathed.
[144] In _Red Gauntlet_.
One marked aspect of recent devil-fiction is the tendency to gloze over
his sins and to humanize him. This is shown to a marked degree in Marie
Corelli's sentimental novel, _The Sorrows of Satan_, where she expends
much anxious sympathy over the fiend. To Miss Corelli's agitated
mind Satan is a much maligned martyr who regretfully tempts mortals
and is grieved when they yield to his beguilements. Her perfervid
rhetoric pictures him as a charming prince, handsome, wealthy, yet very
lonesome, who warns persons in advance that he is not what he seems
and that they would do well to avoid him. But the fools rush in crowds
to be damned. According to her theory, the devil is attempting to work
out his own salvation and could do so save for the weakness of man. He
is able to get a notch nearer heaven for every soul that resists his
wiles, though in London circles his progress is backward rather than
forward. How is Lucifer fallen! To be made a hero of by Marie Corelli
must seem to Mephisto life's final indignity! Her characterization of
the fiend shows some reminiscence of a hasty reading of Milton, Goethe,
and the Byronic Cain.
The devil has a human as well as dæmonic spirit in Israel Zangwill's
_They that Walk in Darkness_, where he appears as Satan Maketrig, a
red-haired hunchback, with "gigantic marble brow, cold, keen, steely
eyes, and handsome, clean-shaven lips." He seems a normal human being
in this realistic Ghetto setting, though he bears a nameless sense
of evil about with him. In his presence, or as he passes by, all the
latent evil in men's souls comes to the surface. He lures the rabbi
away from his wife, from God, and from all virtue, yet to see him at
the end turn away again in spirit to the good, spurning the tempter
whom he recognizes at last as dæmonic. There is a human anguish in the
eyes of Satan Maketrig, that shows him to be not altogether diabolic,
and he seems mournful and appealing in his wild loneliness. His nature
is in contrast to that of the fiend in Stanley J. Weyman's _The Man
in Black_. Here his cold, sardonic jesting that causes him to play
with life and death, so lightly, his diabolic cunning, his knowledge
of the human heart and how to torture it, remind us of Iago. The dark
shade extends to the skin as well as to the heart in the man in black
in Stevenson's _Thrawn Janet_, for he exercises a weird power over his
vassal, the old servant, and terrifies even the minister. And _War
Letters from a Living Dead Man_, written by Elsa Parker but said to be
dictated by a correspondent presumably from somewhere in hell, shows us
His Satanic Majesty with grim realism up to date.
The devil appears with mournful, human dignity, yet with superhuman
gigantism in Algernon Blackwood's _Secret Worship_, where the lost
souls enter into a riot of devil-worship, into which they seek to draw
living victims, to damn them body and soul. One victim sees the devil
thus:
At the end of the room where the windows seemed to have disappeared
so that he could see the stars, there rose up into view, far
against the sky, grand and terrible, the outline of a man. A kind
of gray glory enveloped him so that it resembled a steel-cased
statue, immense, imposing, horrific in its distant splendor. The
gray radiance from its mightily broken visage, august and mournful,
beat down upon his soul, pulsing like some dark star with the
powers of spiritual evil.
Here, as in many instances elsewhere, the sadness of the diabolic
character is emphasized, a definite human element. The Miltonic
influence seems evident in such cases.
Kipling has a curious dæmonic study in _Bubble Well Road_, a story
of a patch of ground filled with devils and ghosts controlled by an
evil-minded native priest, while in _Haunted Subalterns_ the imps
terrorize young army officers by their malicious mischief.
The allegorical and symbolic studies of diabolism are among the
more impressive creations in later fiction, as in Tolstoi's _Ivan,
the Fool_, where the demons are responsible for the marshaling of
armies, the tyranny of money, and the inverted ideas of the value of
service. The appearance of the devil in later stories is more terrible
and effective in its variance of type and its secret symbolism than
the crude enginery of diabolism in Gothic fiction, as the muscular
fiend[145] that athletically hurls the man and woman from the mountain
top, or the invisible physical strength manifested in _Melmoth, the
Wanderer_. The crude violence of these novels is in keeping with the
fiction of the time, yet modern stories show a distinct advance, as
such instances as J. H. Shorthouse's _Countess Eve_, where the devil
appears differently to each tempted soul, embodying with hideous
wisdom the form of the sin that that particular soul is most liable
to commit. He bears the shape of committed sin, suggesting that evil
is so powerful as to have an independent existence of its own, apart
from the mind that gave it birth, as the devil appears as evil thought
materialized in Fernac Molnar's drama, _The Devil_. Fiona McLeod's
strange Gaelic tale, _The Sin-Eater_ introduces demons symbolically.
The sin-eater is a person that by an ancient formula can remove the
sins from an unburied corpse and let them in turn be swept away from
him by the action of the pure air. But if the sin-eater hates the dead
man, he has the power to fling the transgressions into the sea, to turn
them into demons that pursue and torment the flying soul till Judgment
Day.
[145] In _The Monk_ or _Zofloya_.
One aspect of the recent stories of diabolism is the subtleness by
which the evil is suggested. The reader feels a miasmatic atmosphere
of evil, a smear on the soul, and knows that certain incidents in the
action can be accounted for on no other basis than that of dæmonic
presence, as in Barry Pain's _Moon Madness_, where the princess is
moved by a strange irresistible lure to dance alone night after night
in the heart of the secret labyrinth to mystic music that the white
moon makes. But one night, after she is dizzy and exhausted but
impelled to keep on, she feels a hot hand grasp hers; someone whirls
her madly round and she knows that _she is not dancing alone_! She
is seen no more of men, and searchers find only the prints of her
little dancing slippers in the sand, with the mark of a cloven hoof
beside them. The most revolting instances of suggestive diabolism are
found in Arthur Machen's stories, where supernatural science opens
the way for the devil to enter the human soul, since the biologist
by a cunning operation on the brain removes the moral sense, takes
away the soul, and leaves a being absolutely diabolized. Worse still
is the hideousness of _Seeing the Great God Pan_, where the dæmonic
character is a composite of the loathsome aspects of Pan and the devil,
from which horrible paternity is born a child that embodies all the
unspeakable evil in the world.
In pleasant contrast to dreadful stories are the tales of the amusing
devils that we find frequently. The comic devil is much older than
the comic ghost, as authors showed a levity toward demons long before
they treated the specter with disrespect,--one rather wonders why.
Clownish devils that appeared in the miracle plays prepared the way for
the humorous and satiric treatment of the Elizabethan drama and late
fiction. The liturgical imps were usually funny whether their authors
intended them as such or not, but the devils in fiction are quite
conscious of their own wit, in fact, are rather conceited about it.
Poe shows us several amusing demons who display his curious satiric
humor,--for instance, the old gentleman in _Never Bet the Devil your
Head_. When Toby Dammit makes his rash assertion, he beholds
the figure of a little lame old gentleman of venerable aspect.
Nothing could be more reverend than his whole appearance; for he
not only had on a full suit of black, but his shirt was perfectly
clean and the collar turned down very neatly over a white cravat,
while his hair was parted in front like a girl's. His hands were
clasped pensively over his stomach, and his two eyes were carefully
rolled up into the top of his head.
This clerical personage who reminds us of the devil in _Peer Gynt_, who
also appears as a parson, claims the better's head and neatly carries
it off. This is a modern version of an incident similar to Chaucer's
_Friar's Tale_, where the devil claimed whatever was offered him in
sincerity. The combination of humor and mystery in Washington Irving's
_The Devil and Tom Walker_ shows the black woodsman in an amusing
though terrifying aspect, as he claims the keeping of the contracts
made with him by Tom and his miserly wife. When Tom goes to search for
his spouse in the woods, he fails to find her.
She had probably attempted to deal with the black man as she had
been accustomed to deal with her husband; but though the female
scold is generally considered a match for the devil, yet in this
instance she appears to have had the worst of it. She must have
died game, however, for it is said Tom noticed many prints of
cloven feet deeply stamped about the tree, and found handsful of
hair that looked as if they had been plucked from the coarse shock
of the black woodsman. Tom knew his wife's prowess by experience.
He shrugged his shoulders as he looked at the fierce signs of
clapper-clawing. "Egad!" he said to himself, "Old Scratch must have
had a tough time of it!"
The devil amuses himself in various ways, as is seen by the antics of
the mysterious stranger in Poe's _The Devil in the Belfry_, who comes
curvetting into the old Dutch village with his audacious and sinister
face and curious costume, to upset the sacred time of the place. The
visitant in _Bon Bon_ is likewise queer as to dress and habits. He
wears garments in the style of a century before, having a queue but
no shirt, a cravat with an ecclesiastic suggestion, also a stylus
and black book. His facial expression is such as would have struck
Uriah Heap dumb with envy, and the hint of hoofs and a forked tail is
cleverly given though not obtruded. The most remarkable feature of his
appearance, however, is that he has no eyes, simply a dead level of
flesh. He declares that he eats souls and prefers to buy them alive to
insure freshness. He has a taste for philosophers, when they are not
too tough.
The satiric devil, like the satiric ghost, is seen in modern fiction.
Eugene Field has a story of a demon who seems sympathetic, weeping
large, gummy tears at hearing a mortal's woes, and signing the
conventional contract on a piece of asbestos paper. He agrees to do
everything the man wishes, for a certain term of years, in return for
which he is to get the soul. If the devil forfeits the contract, he
loses not only that victim but the souls of two thousand already in his
clutches. The man shrewdly demands trying things of him, but the demon
is game, building and endowing churches, carrying on philanthropic and
reform work without complaint, but balking when the man asks him to
close the saloons on Sunday. Rather than do that, he releases the two
thousand and one souls and flies away twitching his tail in wrath.[146]
[146] _Daniel and the Devil._
The most recent, as perhaps the most striking, instance of the satiric
devil is in Mark Twain's posthumous novel, _The Mysterious Stranger_. A
youth, charming, courtly, and handsome appears in a medieval village,
confessing to two boys that he is Satan, though not the original of
that name, but his nephew and namesake. He insists that he is an
unfallen angel, since his uncle is the only member of his family that
has sinned. Satan reads the thoughts of mortals, kindles fire in his
pipe by breathing on it, supplies money and other desirable things by
mere suggestion, is invisible when he wills it so, and is generally
a gifted being. This perennial boy--only sixteen thousand years
old--makes a charming companion. He says to Marget that his papa is in
shattered health and has no property to speak of,--in fact, none of any
earthly value,--but he has an uncle in business down in the tropics,
who is very well off, and has a monopoly, and it is from this uncle
that he drew his support. Marget expresses the hope that her uncle and
his would meet some day, and Satan says he hoped so, too. "May be they
will," says Marget. "Does your uncle travel much?"
"Oh, yes, he goes all about,--he has business everywhere."
The book is full of this oblique humor, satirizing earth, heaven, and
hell. The stranger by his comments on theological creeds satirizes
religion, and Satan is an intended parody of God. He sneers at man's
"mongrel moral sense," which tells him the distinction between good and
evil, insisting that he should have no choice, that the right to choose
makes him inevitably choose the wrong. He makes little figures out of
clay and gives them life, only to destroy them with casual ruthlessness
a little later and send them to hell. In answer to the old servant's
faith in God, when she says that He will care for her and her mistress,
since "not a sparrow falleth to the ground without His Knowledge,"
he sneers, "But it falls, just the same! What's the good of seeing it
fall?" He is a new diabolic figure, yet showing the composite traits of
the old, the dæmonic wisdom and sarcasm, the superhuman magnetism to
draw men to him, and the human qualities of geniality, sympathy, and
boyish charm.
One of the most significant and frequent motifs of the diabolic in
literature is that of the barter of the human soul for the devil's
gift of some earthly boon, long life or wealth or power, or wisdom,
or gratification of the senses. It is a theme of unusual power,--what
could be greater than the struggle over one's own immortal soul?--and
well might the great minds of the world engage themselves with it.
Yet that theme is but little apparent in later stories. We have no
such character in recent literature that can compare with Marlowe's
Dr. Faustus or Goethe's Mephistopheles or Calderon's wonder-working
magician. Hawthorne's Septimius Felton makes a bargain with the devil
to secure the elixir of life, there is a legend in Hardy's _Tess of the
D' Urbervilles_ of a man that sold himself to the minister of evil,
and the incident occurs in various stories of witchcraft, yet with
waning power and less frequence. The most significant recent use of it
is in W. B. Yeats's drama.[147] This is a drama of Ireland, where the
peasants have been driven by famine to barter their souls to the devil
to buy their children food, but their Countess sells her own soul to
the demon that they may save theirs. This vicarious sacrifice adds a
new poignancy to the situation and Yeats has treated it with power.
This is the only recent appearance of the devil on the stage for he
has practically disappeared from English drama, where he was once so
prominent. The demon was a familiar and leading figure on the miracle
and Elizabethan stage, but, like the ghost, he shows more vitality now
in fiction. The devil is an older figure in English drama than is the
ghost, but he seems to have played out.
[147] _Countess Cathleen._
The analysis and representation of the devil as a character in
literature have covered a great range, from the bestiality of Dante's
Demon in the _Inferno_ to Milton's mighty angel in ruins, with all
sorts of variations between, from the sneering cynicism of Goethe's
Mephisto to the pinchbeck diabolism of Marie Corelli's sorrowful Satan,
and the merry humor and blasphemous satire of Mark Twain's mysterious
stranger. We note an especial influence of Goethe's Mephistopheles
in the satiric studies of the demon, an echo of his diabolic climax
when in answer to Faust's outcry over Margaret's downfall and death,
he says, "_She is not the first_!" One hears echoing through all
literature Man Friday's unanswerable question, "Why not God kill
debbil?" The uses of evil in God's eternal scheme, the soul's free
choice yet pitiful weakness, are sounded again and again. The great
diabolic figures, in their essential humanity, their intellectual
dignity, their sad introspection, their pitiless testing of the human
soul to its predestined fall, are terrible allegorical images of the
evil in man himself, or concepts of social sins, as in _Ivan, the
Fool_. The devils of the great writers, reflecting the time, the racial
characteristics, the personal natures of their creators, are deeply
symbolic. Each man creates the devil that he can understand, that
represents him, for, as Amiel says, we can comprehend nothing of which
we have not the beginnings in ourselves. As each man sees a different
Hamlet, so each one has his own devil, or _is_ his own devil. This is
illustrated by the figure in Julian Hawthorne's _Lovers in Heaven_,
where the dead man's spirit meets the devil in the after life,--who is
his own image, his dæmonic double. Some have one great fiend, while
others keep packs of little, snarling imps of darkness. A study of
comparative diabolics is illuminating and might be useful to us all.
=The Wizard and the Witch.= The demon has his earthly partners in evil
members of the firm of Devil and Company. Certain persons that have
made a pact with him are given a share in his power, and a portion of
his dark mantle falls upon them. The sorcerer and the witch are ancient
figures in literature, and like others of the supernatural kingdom,
notably the devil, they have their origin in the East, the cuneiform
writings of the Chaldeans showing belief in witchcraft. And the Witch
of Endor, summoning the spirit of Samuel to confront Saul, is a very
real figure in the Old Testament. The Greeks believed in witches, as
did the Romans. Meroe, a witch, is described in the _Metamorphoses_ of
Lucius Appuleius, from whom perhaps the witch Meroe in Peele's _Old
Wives' Tale_ gets her name and character. In classical times witches
were thought to have power to turn men into beasts, tigers, monkeys, or
asses--some persons still believe that women have that power and might
give authenticated instances.
The sorcerer, or wizard, or warlock, or magician, as he is variously
called, was a more common figure in early literature than in later,
perhaps because, as in so many other cases, his profession has suffered
a feminine invasion. The Anglo-Saxon word _wicca_, meaning "witch," is
masculine, which may or may not mean that witchcraft was a manly art in
those days, and the most famous medieval enchanter, Merlin, was a man,
it should be noted. The sorcerer of primitive times has been gradually
reduced in power, changing through the astrologer and alchemist of
medieval and Gothic romance into the bacteriologist and biologist of
recent fiction, where he works other wonders. In general, warlocks
and wizards, while frequent enough in early literature and in modern
folk-tales, have become less numerous in later fiction. Scott[148]
has a medical magician with supernatural power of healing by means of
an amulet, which, put to the nostrils of a person practically dead,
revives him at once, but which loses its efficacy if given in exchange
for money. Hawthorne has an old Indian sachem with wizard power,[149]
who has concocted the elixir of life. We see the passing of the ancient
sorcerer into the scientific wonder-worker in such fiction as Sax
Rohmer's Fu-Manchu stories that depict a Chinese terror, or in H. G.
Wells's supernatural investigators in his various stories of science.
The magician is not really dead in fiction but has passed over into
another form, for the most part.
[148] In _The Talisman_.
[149] In his _Septimius Felton_.
We still have the hoodoo man of colored persuasion, and the redskin
medicine-man, together with Oriental sorcerers from Kipling and
others. Examples are: _In the House of Suddoo_, by Kipling, where the
wonder-worker unites a canny knowledge of the telephone and telegraph
along with his unholy art; _Red Debts_, by Lumley Deakin, where the
Indian magician exacts a terrible penalty for the wrong done him, and
where his diabolic appearance to claim his victim leaves one in doubt
as to whether he has not sent his chief in his place; _The Monkey's
Paw_, by W. W. Jacobs, a curdling story of a magic curse given by an
Oriental sorcerer, by which the paw of a dead monkey grants three
wishes that have a dreadful boomerang power; _Black Magic_, by Jessie
Adelaide Weston,--who claims that all her supernatural stories are
strictly true--the narrative of an old Indian sorcerer that changes
himself into a hair mat and is shot for his pains. He has obtained
power over the house by being given a hair from the mat by the
uninitiated mistress. Hair, you must know, has great power of evil in
the hands of witches and sorcerers, as in the case of the evil ones in
_The Talisman_, who received their thrall over the maidens by one hair
from each head. F. Marion Crawford's _Khaled_ is a story of magic art.
Khaled is one of the genii converted by reading the Koran, who wishes
to be a mortal man with a soul. He is given the right to do so if he
can win the love of a certain woman. Hence he is born into the world,
like Adam, a full-grown man, to be magically clothed and equipped, by
the transformation of leaves and twigs into garments and armor, and the
changing of a locust into an Arabian steed. After many supernatural
adventures, he receives his soul from an angel. The soul, at first a
crescent flame,
immediately took shape and became the brighter image of Khaled
himself. And when he had looked at it fixedly for a few
minutes--the vision of himself had disappeared and before he was
aware it had entered his own body and taken up its life with him.
This is a parallel to the cases of ghostly doubles discussed in the
previous chapter.
The magician shows a disposition to adapt himself to contemporary
conditions and to change his personality with the times. Not so the
witch. She is a permanent figure. She has appeared in the various
forms of literature, in Elizabethan drama, in Gothic romance, in
modern poetry, the novel and the short story, and is very much alive
to-day. We have witches young and old. We have the fake witch, like the
hoax ghost; the imputed witch and the genuine article. We have witch
stories melodramatic, romantic, tragic, comic, and satiric, showing
the influence of the great creations of past literature with modern
adaptations and additions. English poetry is full of witchery, perhaps
largely the result of the Celtic influence on our literature. The
poetic type of witchcraft is brought out in such poems as Coleridge's
_Christabel_, where the beauty and suggestiveness veil the sense of
unearthly evil; or in Shelley's _Witch of Atlas_, where the woman
appears as a symbol of alluring loveliness possessing none of the
hideous aspects seen in other weird women. The water enchantress in
Shelley's fragment of an unfinished drama might be mentioned as another
example while Keats's _La Belle Dame sans Merci_ has a magical charm
all her own. Christina Rossetti's _Goblin Market_ shows a peculiar
aspect of magic, as also Mrs. Browning's _The Lay of the Brown Rosary_.
On the contrary, Milton's _Comus_, Robert Herrick's _The Hag_, and
James Hogg's _The Witch of Fife_ illustrate the uglier aspects of
enchantment.
There are two definite types of witches seen in English fiction, the
first being merely the reputed witch, the woman who is falsely accused
or suspected of black arts, and who either is persecuted, or else gains
what she wishes by hints of her traffic in evil, like the Old Granny
Young in _Mine Host and the Witch_, by James Blythe, who chants as a
charm-rune,
"A curse shall lay on water and land
For the thing denied the witch's hand,"
so that everybody is afraid to refuse her whatever she demands. This
is a highly conventionalized type of the motif and, though it is found
in great numbers in modern fiction, is not particularly important. The
principal complications of the plot are usually the same, the character
known as the witch being either an appealing figure winning sympathy
because of her beauty and youth, or else touching to pity because of
her age and infirmities. No person of average age or pulchritude is
ever accused of witchcraft in English fiction. She is always very
old and poor or young and lovely. Item also, she invariably has two
lovers, in the latter case. She is merely a romantic peg on which to
hang a story, not always real as a human being and not a real witch.
In these stories the only magic used is love, the fair maid having
unintentionally charmed the heart of a villain, who, failing to win
her, accuses her of witchcraft in order to frighten her into love.
In some of the novels and stories the victim is actually executed,
while in others she is rescued by her noble lover at the fifty-ninth
second. We have the pursuing villain, the distressed innocence, the
chivalric lover disporting themselves in late Gothic fashion over
many romances. Even Mary Johnston with her knowledge of Colonial
times and her power to give atmosphere to the past does not succeed
in imparting the breath of life to her late novel of witchcraft,
_The Witch_. These pink-and-white beauties who speak in Euphuistic
sentences, who show a lamblike defiance toward the dark tempters,
who breathe prayers to heaven for protection and forgiveness to
their enemies in one breath, who die or are rescued with equal grace
and propriety,--one is carried away from the scaffold by Kidd, the
pirate, thus delaying for several chapters her rescue by her faithful
lover--do not really touch the heart any more than they interest the
intellect. Yet there are occasional instances of the imputed witch
who seems real despite her handicap of beauty and youth, as Iseult le
Desireuse, in Maurice Hewlett's _Forest Lovers_, whom Prosper le Gai
weds to save from the hangman. The young woman in F. Marion Crawford's
_Witch of Prague_ might be called a problematic witch, for while she
does undoubtedly work magic, it is for the most part attributed to her
powers of hypnotism rather than to the black art itself. We find an
excellent example of the reputed witch who is a woman of real charm
and individuality, in D'Annunzio's _The Daughter of Jorio_, where the
young girl is beset by cruel dangers because of her charm and her
lonely condition, and who rises to tragic heights of sacrifice to save
her lover from death, choosing to be burned to death as a witch to save
him from paying the penalty of murder. She actually convinces him, as
well as the others, that she has bewitched him by unholy powers, that
she has slain his father and made him believe that he himself did it
to save her honor, and she goes to her death with a white fervor of
courage, with no word of complaint, save one gentle rebuke to him that
_he_ should not revile her.
The aged pseudo-witch is in the main more appealing than the young
one, because more realistic. Yet there is no modern instance that is
so touching as the poor old crone in _The Witch of Edmonton_, who is
persecuted for being a witch and who turns upon her tormentors with a
speech that reminds us of Shylock's famous outcry, showing clearly how
their suspicion and accusation have made her what she is. We see here
a witch in the making, an innocent old woman who is harried by human
beings till she makes a compact with the devil. Meg Merrilies[150] is
a problematic witch, a majestic, sibylline figure, very individual
and human, yet with more than a suggestion of superhuman wisdom and
power. Scott limned her with a loving hand, and Keats was so impressed
with her personality that he wrote a poem concerning her. Elizabeth
Enderfield, in Hardy's _Under the Greenwood Tree_, is a reputed witch
and witch-pricking is also tried in his _Return of the Native_. Various
experiments with magic are used in Hardy's work, as the instance of
the woman's touching her withered arm to the neck of a man that had
been hanged, consulting the conjurer concerning butter that won't come,
and so forth. Old Aunt Keziah in Hawthorne's _Septimius Felton_ might
be called a problematic witch, as the woman in _The Witch_ by Eden
Phillpotts. She has a great number of cats, and something dreadful
happens to anyone who injures one of them; she calls the three black
toads her servants and goes through incantations over a snake skeleton,
the carcass of a toad, and the mummy of a cat. Mother Tab may or may
not be a _bona fide_ witch, but she causes much trouble to those
associated with her.
[150] Of Scott's _Guy Mannering_.
The unquestioned witch, possessing indubitable powers of enchantment,
occurs frequently and conveys a genuine thrill. Her attributes have
been less conventionalized than those of her youthful companions who
are merely under the imputation of black art, and she possesses a
diabolic individuality. Though she may not remain long in view, she
is an impressive figure not soon forgotten. The old crone in Scott's
_The Two Drovers_ gives warning to Robin Oig, "walking the deasil," as
it is called, around him, tracing the propitiation which some think a
reminiscence of Druidical mythology,--which is performed by walking
three times round the one in danger, moving according to the course of
the sun. In the midst of her incantation the hag exclaims, "Blood on
your hand, and it is English blood!" True enough, before his journey's
end young Robin does murder his English companion. In the same story
other evidences of witchcraft are shown, as the directions for keeping
away the evil influence from cattle by tying St. Mungo's knot on their
tails.
The subject of witchcraft greatly interested Hawthorne, for he
introduces it in a number of instances. _Young Goodman Brown_ shows
the aspects of the diabolic union between the devil and his earthly
companions, their unholy congregations in the forest, reports their
sardonic conversations and suggestions of evil in others, and pictures
the witches riding on broomsticks high in the heavens and working
their magic spells. The young husband sees in that convocation all
the persons whom he has most revered--his minister, his Sabbath-school
teacher, and even his young wife, so that all his after-life is
saddened by the thought of it. Witchcraft enters into _The Scarlet
Letter_, _Main Street_, and _Feathertop_, and is mentioned in other
stories.
Old Mother Sheehy in Kipling's _The Courting of Dinah Shadd_
pronounces a malediction against Private Mulvany and the girl he
loves, prophesying that he will be reduced in rank instead of being
promoted, will be a slave to drink so that his young wife will take
in washing for officers' wives instead of herself being the wife of
an officer, and that their only child will die,--every bitter word
of which comes true in after years. The old witch mother in Howard
Pyle's _The Evil Eye_ inspires her daughter to cast a spell over the
man she loves but who does not think of her, causing him to leave his
betrothed and wed the witch daughter. When understanding comes to him,
and with it loathing, the girl seeks to regain his love by following
the counsel of an old magician, who gives her an image to be burnt. But
that burning of the image kills her and looses the man from her spell.
That incident is similar to that in D'Annunzio's _Sogno d'un Tramonto
d'Autunno_ where the Dogaressa seeks to slay her rival, both probably
being based on the unforgettable employment of the theme in Rossetti's
_Sister Helen_, where the young girl causes the death of her betrayer
by melting the image.
In Gordon Bottomley's play, _Riding to Lithend_, three old women
enter, who seem to partake of the nature of the Parcæ as well as of
Shakespeare's Weird Sisters. They have bat-webbed fingers, the hound
bays uncannily at their approach, they show supernatural knowledge
of events, and they chant a wild prophecy of doom, then mysteriously
disappear. Fate marches swiftly on as they foretell.
The young and beautiful witch can work as much evil as the ancient
crone, perhaps more, since her emotions are wilder and more
unrestrained. She can project a curse that reaches its victim across
the ocean, when the one who sent the curse is rotting in the tomb, as
in _The Curse of the Cashmere Shawl_, where a betrayed and deserted
woman in India sends a rare shawl to her rival, then drowns herself.
Months after, when the husband, forgetful of the source, lays the shawl
around his wife's shoulders, the dead woman takes her place. After this
gruesome transfer of personality, the wife, impelled by a terrible urge
she cannot understand, drowns herself as the other has done months
before. Oscar Wilde[151] shows a young and lovely witch with a human
longing for the love of the young man who throws away his soul for
love of a mermaid. Through life's tragic satire, she is compelled, in
spite of her entreaties, to show him how he may damn himself and win
the other's affection. The jealousy shown here and in other instances
is an illustration of the human nature of the witch, who, like the
devil, makes a strong appeal to our sympathy in spite of the undoubted
iniquity.
[151] In _The Fisherman and his Soul_.
The element of symbolism enters largely into the witch-creations, even
from the time of Shakespeare's Three in _Macbeth_, who are terrible
symbolic figures of the evil in man's soul. They appear as the visible
embodiment of Macbeth's thoughts, and by their mysterious suggestive
utterances tempt him to put his unlawful dreams into action. They seem
both cause and effect here, for though when they first appear to him
his hands are innocent of blood, his heart is tainted with selfish
ambition, and their whispers of promise hurry on the deed. In _Ancient
Sorceries_, by Algernon Blackwood, the village is full of persons who
at night by the power of an ancestral curse, a heritage of subliminal
memory, become witches, horrible cat-creatures, unhuman, that dance
the blasphemous dance of the Devil's Sabbath. The story symbolizes the
eternal curse that rests upon evil, the undying quality of thought and
action that cannot cease when the body of the sinner has become dust,
but reaches out into endless generations.
In _Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts_ by A. T. Quiller-Couch, we see a
witch, a young woman whose soul is under a spell from the devil. She
gives rich gifts to the church, but her offerings turn into toads and
vipers, defiling the sanctuary, and as she sings her wild songs the
bodies of drowned men come floating to the surface of the water and
join in the words of her song. Her beauty is supernatural and accursed,
yet her soul is innocent of wish to do evil, though it leaves her body
and goes like a cresseted flame at night to follow the devil, while the
body is powerless in sleep. Finally the devil comes in the form of a
Moor, possibly a suggestion from _Zofloya_, and summons her, when she
dies, with a crucifix clasped over her heart.
W. B. Yeats has pictured several witches for us, as the crone of the
gray hawk, in _The Wisdom of the King_, a woman tall with more than
mortal height, with feathers of the gray hawk growing in her hair,
who stoops over the royal cradle and whispers a strange thing to the
child, as a result of which he grows up in a solitude of his own mystic
thoughts with dreams that are like the marching and counter-marching
of armies. When he realizes that the simple joys of life and love are
not for him, he disappears, some say to make his home with the immortal
demons, some say with the shadowy goddesses that haunt the midnight
pools in the forest. In _The Curse of the Fires and the Shadows_, Yeats
pictures another witch, tall and in a gray gown, who is standing in the
river and washing, washing the dead body of a man. As the troopers who
have murdered the friars and burned down the church ride past, each man
recognizes in the dead face his own face,--just a moment before they
all plunge over the abyss to death.
There are witches in most collections of English folk-tales, for the
simpler people, the more elemental natures, have a strong feeling for
the twilight of nature and of life. The weird woman has power over the
forces of nature and can evoke the wrath of the elements as of unholy
powers against her enemies. Stories of witches, as of sorcerers, occur
in Indian folk-tales, as well as in those of the American Indian,
differing in details in the tribal collections yet showing similar
essential ideas. The Scotch show special predilection for the witch,
since with their tense, stern natures, they stand in awe of the darker
powers and of those that call them forth. They relate curious instances
of the relations between the animal world and witchcraft, as in _The
Dark Nameless One_, by Fiona McLeod, the story of a nun that falls in
love with a seal and is forced to live forever in the sea, weaving her
spells where the white foam froths, and knowing that her soul is lost.
This is akin to the theme that Matthew Arnold uses,[152] though with a
different treatment, showing similarity to Hans Christian Andersen's
tale of _The Little Mermaid_. The cailleachuisge, or the water-witch,
and the maighdeanmhara, the mermaid, and the kelpie, the sea-beast,
are cursed with dæmonic spells and live forever in their witchery.
When mortals forsake the earth and follow them their children are
beings that have no souls. The Irish folk-tales, on the other hand,
while having their quota of witches, do not think so much about them
or take them quite so seriously, inclining more to the faëry forms of
supernaturalism suited to their poetic natures. The sense of beauty
of the Irish is so vivid and their innate poetry so intense that they
glimpse the loveliness of magic, and their enchanted beings are of
beauty rather than of horror.
[152] In his _Forsaken Merman_ and _The Neckan_.
We even have the humorous and satiric witch, to correspond to similar
representations of the ghost and the devil in modern fiction. The
instance in Burns's _Tam O'Shanter_ needs only to be recalled, with the
ludicrous description of the wild race at night to escape the dread
powers. _Bones, Sanders, and Another_, by Edgar Wallace, introduces a
witch with comic qualities, a woman whose husband has been a magician,
and the reputed familiar of a devil. She cures people by laying her
hands on them, once causing a bone that was choking a child to fly
out with "a cry terrible to hear, such a cry as a leopard makes when
pursued by ghosts." When this witch with a sense of humor is arrested
as a trouble-maker by an army officer, she "eradicates" her clothes,
causing very comic complications. The best example of the satiric witch
is Hawthorne's Mother Rigby, in _Feathertop_, who constructs a man
from a broomstick and other materials for a scarecrow. In this satiric
sermon upon the shams and hypocrisies of life, Mother Rigby, with her
sardonic humor, her cynical comments, parodies society, holds the
mirror up to human life and shows more than one poor painted scarecrow,
simulacrum of humanity, masquerading as a man. The figure that she
creates, with his yearnings and his pride, his horror when he realizes
his own falsity and emptiness, is more human, more a man, than many a
being we meet in literature or in life.
Barry Pain has several witch stories that do not fall readily into any
category, curious stories of scientific dream-supernaturalism, in the
realm of the unreal. _Exchange_ is the account of a supernatural woman,
whether a witch or one of the Fates, one does not know, who comes,
clad in scarlet rags, to show human souls their destinies. She permits
an exchange of fate, if one is willing to pay her price, which is in
each case terrible enough. One young girl gives up her pictured future
of life and love, and surrenders her mind for the purpose of saving her
baby brother from his destined fate of suicide in manhood. The crone
appears to an old man that loves the child, who takes upon himself her
fate of being turned into a bird to be tortured after human death, so
that the young girl may have his future, to be turned into a white lamb
that dies after an hour, then be a soul set free. _The Glass of Supreme
Moments_ is another story of prophetic witchery, of revealed fate seen
in supernatural dreams. A young man in his college study sees the
fireplace turn into a silver stairway down which a lovely gray-robed
woman comes to him. She shows him a mirror, the glass of supreme
moments, in which the highest instants of each man's life are shown.
She says of it, "All the ecstasy of the world lies there. The supreme
moments of each man's life, the scene, the spoken words--all lie there.
Past and present and future--all are there." She shows an emotion
meter that measures the thrill of joy. After he has seen the climactic
instants of his friends' lives he asks to see his own, when she tells
him his are here and now. She tells him that her name is Death and that
he will die if he kisses her, but he cries out, "I will die kissing
you!" And presently his mates return to find his body fallen dead
across his table.
There is something infinitely appealing about the character of the
witch. She seems a creature of tragic loneliness, conscious of her
own dark powers, yet conscious also of her exile from the good, and
knowing that all the evil she evokes will somehow come back to her,
that her curses will come home, as in the case of _Witch Hazel_, where
the witch, by making a cake of hair to overcome her rival in love,
brings on a tempest that kills her lover and drives her mad. Each evil
act, each dark imagining seems to create a demon and turn him loose
to harry humanity with unceasing force, as Matthew Maule's curse in
_The House of Seven Gables_ casts a spiritual shadow on the home. Yet
the witch is sometimes a minister of good, as Mephistopheles says of
himself, achieving the good where he meant evil; sometimes typifying
the mysterious mother nature, as the old Wittikin in Hauptmann's
_Sunken Bell_, neither good nor evil, neither altogether human nor
supernatural. Her strange symbolism is always impressive.
=Dæmonic Spirits--Vampires.= Closely related to the devil are certain
diabolic spirits that are given supernatural power by him and
acknowledge his suzerainty. These include ghouls, vampires, werewolves,
and other demoniac animals, as well as the human beings that through a
compact with the fiend share in his dark force. Since such creatures
possess dramatic possibilities, they have given interest to fiction
and other literature from early times. This idea of an unholy alliance
between earth and hell, has fascinated the human mind and been
reflected astonishingly in literature. In studying the appearance of
these beings in English fiction, we note, as in the case of the ghost,
the witch, and the devil, a certain leveling influence, a tendency to
humanize them and give them characteristics that appeal to our sympathy.
The vampire and the ghoul are closely related and by some authorities
are considered the same, yet there is a distinction. The ghoul is a
being, to quote Poe, "neither man nor woman, neither brute nor human"
that feeds upon corpses, stealing out at midnight for loathsome
banquets in graveyards. He devours the flesh of the dead, while the
vampire drains the blood of the living. The ghoul is an Asiatic
creature and has left but slight impress upon English literature,
while the vampire has been a definite motif. The vampire superstition
goes back to ancient times, being referred to on Chaldean and Assyrian
tablets. William of Newbury, of the twelfth century in England, relates
several stories of them; one vampire was burned in Melrose Abbey, and
tourists in Ireland are still shown the grave of a vampire. Perhaps the
vampire superstition goes back to the savagery of remote times, and is
an animistic survival of human sacrifices, of cannibalism and the like.
The vampire is thought of as an evil spirit issuing forth at night to
attack the living in their sleep and drain the blood which is necessary
to prolong its own revolting existence. Certain persons were thought
to be especially liable to become vampires at death, such as suicides,
witches, wizards, persons who in life had been attacked by vampires,
outcasts of various kinds, as well as certain animals, werewolves, dead
lizards, and others.
The vampire superstition was general in the East and extended to
Europe, it is thought, by way of Greece. The Greeks thought of the
vampire as a beautiful young woman, a lamia, who lured young men to
their death. The belief was particularly strong in central Europe, but
never seemed to gain the same foothold in England that it did on the
continent, though it is evident here and has influenced literature. The
vampire has been the inspiration for several operas, and has figured
in the drama, in poetry, in the novel and short story, as well as in
folk-tales and medieval legends. The stories show the various aspects
of the belief and its ancient hold on the popular mind. The vampire,
as well as the ghost, the devil, and the witch, has appeared on the
English stage. _The Vampire_, an anonymous melodrama in two acts, _The
Vampire_, a tragedy by St. John Dorset (1821), _The Vampire Bride_, a
play, _Le Vampire_, by Alexander Dumas _père_, and _The Vampire, or the
Bride of the Isles_, by J. R. Planche, were presented in the London
theater. The latter which was published in 1820 is remarkably similar
to _The Vampyre_, a novelette by Polidori, published in 1819,--the
story written after the famous ghost session where Byron, the Shelleys,
and Polidori agreed each to write a ghostly story, Mary Shelley writing
_Frankenstein_.
Polidori's story, like the play referred to, has for its principal
character an Englishman, Lord Ruthven, the Earl of Marsden, who is the
vampire. In each case there is a supposed death, where the dying man
asks that his body be placed where the last rays of the moon can fall
upon it. The corpse then mysteriously vanishes. In each story there is
a complication of a rash pledge of silence made by a man that discovers
the diabolical nature of the earl, who, having risen from the dead,
is ravaging society as a vampire. In each case a peculiar turn of the
story is that the masculine vampire requires for his subsistence the
blood of young women, to whom he must be married. He demands a new
victim, hence a hurried wedding is planned. In the play the ceremony
is interrupted by the bride's father, but in the novelette the plot
is finished and the girl becomes the victim of the destroyer. It is
a question which of these productions was written first, and which
imitated the other, or if they had a common source. The author of the
drama admits getting his material from a French play, but where did
Polidori get his?
Byron seems to have been fascinated with the vampire theme, for in
addition to his unsuccessful short story, he has used the theme in his
poem, _The Giaour_. Here he brings in the idea that the vampire curse
is a judgment from God for sin, and that the most terrible part of the
punishment is the being forced to prey upon those who in life were
dearest to him, which idea occurs in various stories.
"But first on earth as Vampyre sent
Thy corse shall from its tomb be rent;
Then ghastly haunt thy native place
And suck the blood of all thy race;
There from thy _daughter_, _sister_, _wife_,
At midnight drain the stream of life;
Yet loathe the banquet which perforce
Must feed thy livid, living corse.
Thy victims, ere they yet expire
Shall know the demon for their sire;
As, cursing thee, thou cursing them,
Thy flowers are withered on the stem.
But one, that for thy crime must fall,
The youngest, best-beloved of all,
Shall bless thee with a _father's_ name--
That word shall wrap thy heart in flame!
Yet must thou end the task and mark
Her cheek's last tinge, her eye's last spark,
And the last glassy glance must view
Which freezes o'er its lifeless blue;
Then with unhallowed hand shall tear
The tresses of her yellow hair,
Of which, in life, a lock when shorn
Affection's fondest pledge was worn,--
But now is borne away by thee
Memorial of thine agony!
Yet with thine own best blood shall drip
Thy gnashing teeth and haggard lip;
Then stalking to thy sullen grave
Go--and with ghouls and Afrits rave,
Till these in horror shrink away
From specter more accursed than they!"
Southey in his _Thalaba_ shows us a vampire, a young girl in this case,
who has been torn away from her husband on their wedding day. The curse
impels her to attack him, to seek to drain his lifeblood. He becomes
aware of the truth and takes her father with him to the tomb, to await
her coming forth at midnight, which is the striking hour for vampires.
When she appears, "in her eyes a brightness more terrible than all the
loathsomeness of death," her father has the courage to strike a lance
through her heart to dispel the demon and let her soul be at peace.
"Then howling with the wound
The fiendish tenant fled....
And garmented with glory in their sight
Oneiza's spirit stood."
Keats uses the Greek idea of the vampire as a lamia or beautiful young
woman luring young men to death,--the same theme employed by Goethe in
his _Die Braut von Corinth_. In _Lamia_, when the evil spirit in the
form of a lovely, alluring woman, is accused by the old philosopher,
she gives a terrible scream and vanishes. This vanishing business is a
favorite trick with vampires--they leave suddenly when circumstances
crowd them.
F. Marion Crawford, in _For the Blood Is the Life_, has given us a
terrible vampire story, in which the dream element is present to a
marked degree. The young man, who has been vainly loved by a young
girl, is after her death vampirized by her, something after the fashion
of Turgeniev's Clara Militch, and when his friends get an inkling of
the truth, and go to rescue him, they find him on her grave, a thin red
line of blood trickling from his throat.
And the flickering light of the lantern played upon another face
that looked up from the feast,--upon two deep, dead eyes that saw
in spite of death--upon parted lips redder than life itself--upon
gleaming teeth on which glistened a rosy drop.
The hawthorne stake is driven through her heart and the vampire expires
after a terrific struggle, uttering diabolic, human shrieks. There is
a certain similarity between this and Gautier's _La Morte Amoreuse_,
where the truth is concealed till the last of the story and only
the initiated would perhaps know that the reincarnated woman was a
vampire. It is also a bit like Turgeniev's _Phantoms_, where a subtle
suggestion at the last gives the reader the clue to vampirism, though
the author really asks the question at the close, Was she a vampire?
The character of the woman is problematic here, as in Gautier's story,
less pronounced than in Crawford's.
The idea of occult vampirism used by Turgeniev is also employed by
Reginald Hodder in his work, _The Vampire_. Here peculiar power is
possessed by a woman leader of an occult band, who vampirizes by
means of a talisman. Her ravages are psychic rather than physical.
Theosophists, according to the _Occult Magazine_, believe in vampires
even in the present. According to their theory, one who has been very
wicked in life is in death so inextricably entangled with his evil
motives and acts that he is hopelessly lost and knows it, yet seeks to
delay for a time his final damnation. He can ward off spiritual death
so long as he can keep alive by means of blood his physical corpse. The
_Occult Review_ believes that probably only those acquainted with black
magic in their lifetime can become vampires,--a thought comforting to
some of us.
It is in Bram Stoker's _Dracula_ that one finds the tensest, most
dreadful modern story of vampirism. This novel seems to omit no detail
of terror, for every aspect of vampire horror is touched upon with
brutal and ghastly effect. The combination of ghouls, vampires, ghosts,
werewolves, and other awful elements is almost unendurable, yet the
book loses in effect toward the last, for the mind cannot endure four
hundred pages of vampiric outrage and respond to fresh impressions
of horror. The initial vampire here is a Hungarian count, who, after
terrorizing his own country for years, transports himself to England
to start his ravages there. Each victim in turn becomes a vampire. The
combination of modern science with medieval superstition to fight the
scourge, using garlic and sprigs of the wild rose together with blood
transfusion, is interesting. All the resources of modern science are
pitted against the infection and the complications are dramatically
thrilling. The book is not advised as suitable reading for one sitting
alone at night.
There are other types of vampirism in addition to the conventional
theme and the occult vampirism. H. G. Wells gives his customary twist
of novelty to supernaturalism by the introduction of a botanical
vampire in his _The Flowering of the Strange Orchid_. An orchid
collector is found unaccountably dead in a jungle in the Andaman
Islands, with a strange bulb lying under him, which bulb is brought
to England and watched carefully by a botanist there till it comes to
flower. When at last its blossoms burst open, great tentacles reach out
to grasp the man, sucking his blood and strangling him. The tentacles
dripping blood have to be torn away and the man snatched violently from
the plant just in time to save his life.
Algernon Blackwood, who has touched upon every terrible aspect of
supernaturalism, gives us two types of vampires in his story, _The
Transfer_. The one is a psychic vampire, stealing the vital power from
others, a human sponge, absorbing the strength, the ideas, the soul, of
others. The governess describes him: "I watched his hard, bleak face;
I noticed how thin he was, and the curious, oily brightness of his
steady eyes. And everything he said or did announced what I may dare
to call the _suction_ of his presence." This human vampire comes in
contact with one of another sort, a soil vampire, the Forbidden Corner,
a bald, sore place in the rose garden, like a dangerous bog. The woman
and a little child know the truth of this spot so barren in the midst
of luxurious growth, so sinister in its look and implication. The child
says of it, "It's bad. It's hungry. It's dying because it can't get the
food it wants. But I know what would make it feel right." The earth
vampire stretches out silent feelers from its secret strength when the
man comes near the evil spot; the empty, yawning spot gives out audible
cries, then laughs hideously as the man falls forward into the middle
of the patch. "His eyes, as he dropped, faded shockingly, and across
the countenance was written plainly what I can only call an expression
of destruction." The man lives on physically, yet without vitality,
without real life. But it was otherwise with the Forbidden Corner, for
soon "it lay untouched, full of great, luscious, driving weeds and
creepers, very strong, full-fed and bursting thick with life."
And so the vampire stories vary in theme and in treatment. Indian
folk-tales appearing in English show that the Jigar-Khor, or
Liver-eater of India is a cousin to the vampire, for he can steal your
liver by just looking at you. (It has long been known that hearts can
be filched in this way, but the liver wrinkle is a new one.) There are
several points to be noted in connection with these stories of the
Un-dead, the incorruptible corpses, the loathsome spirits that haunt
the living. Many of the stories have a setting in the countries where
the vampire superstition has been most common, though there are English
settings as well. Continental countries are richer in vampire lore than
England, which explains the location of the incidents even in many
English stories and poems. Another point to be noted is the agreement
of the stories in the essential features. While there are numerous
variants, of course, there is less divergence than in the case of
ghosts, for instance. The description of the dæmonic spirit tenanting
the body of a dead person, driving him by a dreadful urge to attack the
living, especially those dear to him in life, is much the same. The
personality of the vampire may vary, in one line of stories being a
young woman who lures men to death, in the other a man who must quench
his thirst with the blood of brides. These are the usual types, though
there are other variants.
=The Werewolf and Others.= Another dæmonic figure popular in fiction
is the werewolf. The idea is a very old one, having been mentioned
by various classical writers, it is said, including Pomponius Mela,
Herodotus, and Ovid. The legend of the werewolf is found in practically
all European countries, especially those where the wolf is common. In
France many stories of the loup-garou are current. The werewolf is a
human being cursed with the power or the obligation to be transformed
into an animal who goes forth to slay and devour. Like a vampire, he
might become such as a curse from God, or he might be an innocent
victim, or might suffer from an atavistic tendency, a cannibalistic
craving for blood. Distinction is to be made between the real werewolf
and the lycanthrope,--the latter a human being who, on account of
some peculiar twist of insanity, fancies himself a wolf and acts
accordingly. There is such a character in _The Duchess of Malfi_, a
maniac who thinks himself a mad wolf, and another in _The Albigenses_,
a creature that crouches in a corner of its lair, gnawing at a skull
snatched from the graveyard, uttering bestial growls. Algernon
Blackwood has a curdling story of lycanthropy, where the insane man
will eat nothing but raw meat and devours everything living that he
can get hold of. He confesses to a visitor that he used to bite his old
servant, but that he gave it up, since the old Jew tasted bitter. The
servant also is mad, and "hides in a vacuum" when his master goes on a
rampage. Stories of lycanthropy illustrate an interesting aspect of the
association between insanity and the supernatural in fiction.
The most revolting story of lycanthropy is in Frank Norris's posthumous
novel, _Vandover and the Brute_. This is a study in soul degeneration,
akin to the moral decay that George Eliot has shown in the character of
Tito Melema, but grosser and utterly lacking in artistic restraint. We
see a young man, at first sensitive, delicate, and with high ideals,
gradually through love of ease and self-indulgence, through taking
always the line of least resistance, becoming a moral outcast. The
brute that ever strains at the leash in man gains the mastery and the
artist soul ends in a bestial creature. Dissipation brings on madness,
called by the doctors "lycanthropy-mathesis." In his paroxysms of
insanity the wretch thinks that his body is turned into the beast that
his soul symbolizes, and runs about his room, naked, four-footed,
growling like a jungle animal and uttering harsh, raucous cries of
_Wolf-wolf!_
Kipling's _The Mark of the Beast_ is midway between a lycanthrope and
a werewolf story, for while the soul of the beast--or whatever passes
for the brutish soul--enters into the man and drives out his spirit,
and while many bestial characteristics result, including the revolting
odor, the man does not change his human form.
While lycanthropy has never been a frequent theme in fiction, the
werewolf is a common figure, appearing in various forms of literature,
from medieval ballads and legends to modern short stories. Marie de
France, the Anglo-Norman writer,[153] tells of a werewolf that is
by day a gallant knight and kindly gentleman, yet goes on nocturnal
marauding expeditions. When his wife shows curiosity concerning his
absences and presses him for an explanation, he reluctantly tells her
that he is a werewolf, hiding his clothes in a hollow tree, and that
if they were removed he would have to remain a wolf. She has her lover
steal his clothes, then marries the lover. One day long afterward the
king's attention is called to a wolf that runs up to him and acts
strangely. It is a tame and well-mannered beast till the false knight
and his wife appear, when he tries to tear their throats. Investigation
reveals the truth, the clothes are fetched, and the curse removed.
Arthur O'Shaughnessy's modern version of this, as of others of Marie's
_lais_, is charming.
[153] In her lay of _Bisclavret_.
Like the vampire, the werewolf is under a curse that impels him to prey
upon those dearest to him. Controlled by a dæmonic spirit, the human
being, that in his normal personality is kindly and gentle, becomes a
jungle beast with ravening instincts. The motif is obviously tangled
up with the vampire superstition here, and it would be interesting,
if possible, to trace out the two to a point of combination. This
irresistible impulse to slay his dear ones introduces a dramatic
element into the plot, here as in the vampire stories. The wolf is not
the only animal around whom such plots center, but being most common
he has given his name to the type. _The Albigenses_ tell of a young
husband who, as a werewolf, slays his bride, then vanishes to be seen
no more.
There are interesting variants of the werewolf story, introducing other
elements of supernaturalism. In _A Vendetta of the Jungle_,[154] we
have the idea of successive infection of the moral curse, similar to
the continuation of vampirism. Mrs. Crump, a lady in India, is eaten
by a tiger, who has a good digestion for he assimilates not only her
body but her soul. So that now it is Mrs. Crump-Tiger, we might say,
that goes about the jungle eating persons. In time she devours her
successor in her husband's affection. The man is aware that it is his
first wife who has eaten his second, so he starts out to kill the
animal to clear off the score. But by the time he reaches the jungle
the beast has had time to digest his meal and when the husband levels
his gun to fire, the eyes that look out at him from the brutish face
are his beloved's eyes. What could he do?
[154] By Arthur Applier and H. Sidney Warwick.
Eugene Field gives a new turn to the idea by representing the werewolf
curse as a definite atavistic throw-back. His wolf-man is an innocent
marauder, the reincarnation of a wicked grandfather, yet a gentle,
chivalrous soul very different from his grandparent. The old gentleman
has left him heir to nothing but the curse and a magic spear given
him by the witch Brunhilde. The werewolf bears a charmed life against
which no weapon of man can avail, and the country is panic-stricken
over his ravages. The legend is that the beast's fury cannot be stopped
till some man offers himself as a voluntary sacrifice to the wolf. The
youth does not know that he is the guilty one until his reprehensible
grandfather appears to him in a vision, demanding his soul. He hears
that there is to be a meeting in the sacred grove on a certain day
and begs his beloved to remain away, lest the werewolf come. But when
she insists that she will go, he gives her his magic spear, telling
her to strike the wolf through the heart if he approaches her. True
to his accursed destiny the wolf does come to the grove and lunges at
the girl. All the men flee but one, and his weapons fail,--then the
terrified girl hurls the spear, striking the beast to the heart. But
when he falls, it is young Harold who is dying, who has given himself
a voluntary sacrifice to save others. The curse is lifted but he is
dead.
In _The Camp of the Dog_, by Algernon Blackwood, we have another
unconscious werewolf, a gentle, modest, manly young fellow madly
in love with a girl who doesn't care for him. In his sleep he goes
questing for her. While his body lies shrunken on a cot in his tent,
his soul takes the form of a wolf and goes to the hilltop, uttering
unearthly howls. By an equally strong psychic disturbance the girl is
impelled to go in a somnambulistic state to the hilltop. Each is in
waking hours utterly unaware of their strange jaunts, till the father
shoots the wolf. The young man in this case suffers only curious
psychic wounds, from which he recovers when the girl promises to marry
him, and the wolf is seen no more.
The panther plays his part in this were-menagerie. Ambrose Bierce, in
_The Eyes of the Panther_, tells of a young girl who, because of a
prenatal curse similar to that affecting Elsie Venner, is not wholly
human. She is conscious of her dual nature and tells the man she loves
that she cannot marry him since she is a panther by night. He thinks
her mildly insane till one night a settler sees a beast's eyes glaring
into his window and fires. When they follow the blood-tracks, they find
the girl dying. This is one of the conventions of the werewolf story,
the wounding of an animal that escapes and the blood-trail that leads
to a human being wounded just as the beast was.
Elliott O'Donnell, in a volume called _Werewolves_ published in London
in 1912, gives serious credence to the existence of werewolves not only
in the past but also in the present. He tells a number of stories of
what he claims are authenticated instances of such beings in actual
life. He relates the experience of a man who told him that he had
himself seen a youth turn himself into a tiger after preparatory
passes of enchantment. The watcher made haste to climb a sacred Vishnu
tree when the transformation was complete. O'Donnell tells a tale of a
widow with three children that married a Russian nobleman. She saw him
and his servant change into werewolves, at least partially, remaining
in a half state, devouring her children whom she left behind in her
escape.
O'Donnell relates several stories of authentic (according to him)
werewolf stories of England in recent times, giving the dates and
places and names of the persons who saw the beasts. The incidents may
be similar to those spoken of in Dickens's _Haunted House_, where
the famous "'ooded woman with the howl" was seen,--or at least, many
persons saw the owl and knew that the woman must be near by. These
witnesses of werewolves may have seen animals, all right enough.
Modernity is combined with medieval superstition here, and it seems
uncanny, for instance, to identify a werewolf by means of an electric
pocket flashlight.
In collections of folk-tales, the tribal legends of the American
redmen as well as of Kipling's India and of England, there are various
stories of werewolves. Among primitive peoples there is a close
relation between the brute and the human and the attributing of human
characteristics and powers to the beast and _vice versa_ is common, so
that this supernatural transfer of personality is natural enough. A
madwolf might suggest the idea for a werewolf.
Algernon Blackwood advances the theory that the werewolf is a true
psychical fact of profound importance, however it may have been garbled
by superstition. He thinks that the werewolf is the projection of the
untamed slumbering sanguinary instincts of man, "scouring the world
in his fluidic body, the body of desire." As the mind wanders free
from the conscious control of the will in sleep, so the body may free
itself from the fetters of mind or of custom and go forth in elemental
form to satisfy its craving to slay, to slake its wild thirst for
blood. O'Donnell says that werewolves may be phantasms of the dead that
cannot be at peace, or a certain kind of Elementals. He also thinks
that they may be the projection of one phase of man's nature, of the
cruelty latent in mankind that seeks expression in this way. According
to that theory, a chap might have a whole menagerie inside him, to
turn loose at intervals, which would be exciting but rather risky
for society. It was doubtless a nature such as this that Maupassant
attempts to describe in his story _The Wolf_, where the man has all the
instincts of the wolf yet never changes his human form.
The werewolf in fiction has suffered the same leveling influence
that we have observed in the case of the ghost, the devil, the
witch, and the vampire. He is becoming a more psychical creature, a
romantic figure to be sympathized with, rather than a beast to be
utterly condemned. In recent fiction the werewolf is represented
as an involuntary and even unconscious departure from the human,
who is shocked when he learns the truth about himself. Whether he
be the victim of a divine curse, an agent of atavistic tendencies,
or a being who thus gives vent to his real and brutish instincts,
we feel a sympathy with him. We analyze his motives--at a safe
distance--seek to understand his vagaries and to estimate his kinship
with us. We think of him now as a noble figure in fiction, a lupine
Galahad like Blackwood's, a renunciatory hero like Eugene Field's
or what not. Or we reflect that he may be a case of metempsychosis
and treat him courteously, for who knows what we may be ourselves
some day? The werewolf has not figured in poetry or in the drama as
have other supernatural beings, as the ghost, the devil, the witch,
the vampire,--one wonders why. He is a dramatic figure and his
character-analysis might well furnish themes for poetry though stage
presentation would have its difficulties.
* * * * *
Perhaps the revival of interest in Elizabethan literature has had a
good deal to do with the use of supernatural beings in literature
of recent times. The devil and the dæmonic spirits he controls, the
witches and wizards, the vampires, the enchanted animals, to whom he
delegates a part of his infernal power, appear as impressive moral
allegories, mystical stories of life, symbols of truths. As literature
is a reflection of life, the evil as well as the good enters in. But
since the things of the spirit are intangible they must be represented
in concrete form, as definite beings whom our minds can apprehend. Thus
the poets and dramatists and story-makers must show us images to shadow
forth spiritual things. As with a shudder we close the books that tell
us horrifying tales of satanic spirits, of accursed beings that are
neither wholly animal nor human, of mortals with diabolic powers, we
shrink from the evils of the soul that they represent, and recognize
their essential truth in the guise of fiction.