Supernatural Life
The fiction dealing with immortal life shows, more than any other
aspect of the subject, humanity's deep hunger for the supernatural.
Whether it be stories of continuance of earthly existence without death
as in the legends of the undying persons like the Wandering Jew; or of
supernaturally renewed or preserved youth as described in the tales of
the elixir of life; or of the transference of the soul after death into
another body; or of life continued in the spirit in other worlds than
this after the body's death,--all show our craving for something above
and beyond what we know here and now. Conscious of our own helplessness
we long to feel ourselves leagued with immortal powers; shrinking
affrighted from the grave's near brink we yearn for that which would
spare us death's sting and victory. Sadly knowing with what swift,
relentless pace old age is overtaking us we would fain find something
to give us eternal youth. But since we cannot have these gifts in our
own persons we seek them vicariously in fiction, and for a few hours'
leisured forgetfulness we are endowed with immortal youth and joy. Or,
looking past death, we can feel ourselves more than conquerors in a
life beyond.
"Oh world unknowable, we touch thee!
Inapprehensible, we clutch thee!"
We somehow snatch a strange comfort from these stories of a life beyond
our own. We are comforted for our mortality when we see the tragedy
that dogs the steps of those who may not die, whether Swift's loathsome
Struldbrugs or the Wandering Jew. Our own ignorance of the future
makes us credulous of any man's dream of heaven and at the same time
sceptical of anybody else's hell. We are such indestructible optimists
that we can take any sort of raw material of fiction and transmute it
into stuff that hope is made of.
=The Wandering Jew.= There is no legend more impressive than that of
the Wandering Jew, and none save the Faust theme that has so influenced
literature. The story is as deathless as the person it portrays and
has wandered into as many lands, though it is impossible to trace with
certainty its origin or first migrations. There is an Arabian legend of
one Samiri who forever wanders, crying, "Touch me not!" as there is a
Buddhist account of a man cursed for working miracles for show, to whom
Buddha said, "Thou shalt not attain Nirvana while my religion lasts."
There are similar Chinese and Indian versions and the idea occurs in
English folk-tales, where the plovers are thought to be the souls of
those that crucified Christ, condemned to fly forever over the world,
uttering their plaintive cry.
The first appearance of the Wandering Jew in English literature is in
the Chronicles of Roger of Wendover, who reports the legend as being
told at the monastery of St. Albans by an Armenian bishop, in 1228, but
to hearers already familiar with it. There are two distinct versions
of the story appearing in English literature. One relates that the
wanderer is a certain Cartapholus, a servant in Pilate's palace, who
struck Jesus a brutal blow as He was led forth to death, and to whom He
said, "Thou shalt wander till I come!" The other is of German origin
giving the personality of Ahasuerus, a shoemaker of Jerusalem, who
mocked the Savior as He passed to Golgotha. Bowed under the weight of
the cross, Christ leaned for a moment's rest against the door of the
little shop, but Ahasuerus said scornfully, "Go faster, Jew!" With one
look of deep reproach, Christ answered, "I go, but tarry thou till I
come!"
The Wandering Jew story is cosmopolitan, used in the literature of many
lands. In Germany it has engaged the attention of Berthold Auerbach,
Kingemann, Schlegel, Julius Mosen, and Chamisso, in France that of
Edgar Quinet and Eugene Sue. Hans Christian Andersen has used it while
Heijermans has written a Dutch play on it and Carmen Sylva, late Queen
of Roumania, made it the basis for a long dramatic poem.
The theme has appeared in various forms in English literature, besides
in fiction where it has been most prominent. A comedy[155] was
published in 1797, by Andrew Franklin, though the wanderer is here
used only as a hoax. Wordsworth has a poem entitled The _Song of the
Wandering Jew_, and Shelley was fascinated by the legend, as we see
from the fact that he used it three times. One of his first poems, a
long dramatic attempt, written at eighteen, is _The Wandering Jew_,
a fevered poem showing the same weaknesses that his Gothic romances
reveal, yet with a hint of his later power. The Wandering Jew appears
as a definite character in both _Queen Mab_ and _Hellas_, in the first
Ahasuerus being summoned to testify concerning God, while he appears in
the latter to give supernatural vision of events. In both poems he is
very old, for in the first it is said:
[155] _The Wandering Jew_, or _Love's Masquerade_.
"His port and mien bore marks of many years....
"Yet his cheek bore the mark of youth," while in the latter he is
described as being "so old he seems to have outlived a world's decay."
Shelley follows the German version, as used in a fragment he picked up
torn and soiled in Lincoln's Inn Fields, whose author he did not know.
Mr. Eubule-Evans, in a long dramatic poem of considerable power,[156]
tells the story of Theudas, who could be released from his doom of
immortality if only he would repent, but he will not. He renews his
youth every forty years, growing suddenly from a decrepit man to a
handsome, gifted youth, which naturally suggests complications of human
love-affairs. Other elements of supernaturalism are used, as angels,
demons, and so forth while the Æons and the Intermedii (whoever they
are!) appear as chorus.
[156] _The Curse of the Wandering Jew._
_The Wandering Jew, a Christmas Carol_,[157] retells the story with
variations and with some power. The Jew here is shown to be very old
and feeble, clad in antique raiment, with stigmata of the wounds on
hands and feet. He is symbolic of the Christ, of His failure to win men.
"For lo, at last I knew
The lineaments of that diviner Jew,
That like a Phantom passeth everywhere,
The world's last hope and bitterest despair,
Deathless, yet dead!
And lo! while all men come and pass away
That phantom of the Christ, forlorn and gray,
Haunteth the earth, with desolate footfall."
[157] By Robert Buchanan.
The Wandering Jew is seen definitely once in Gothic fiction, in Lewis's
_The Monk_, where a mysterious stranger, bearing on his forehead a
burning cross imprinted, appears and is spoken of as the Wandering
Jew. He is unable to stay more than fourteen days in any one place but
must forever hurry on. Rev. T. Clark[158] gives a bird's-eye view of
history such as a person of the long life and extensive migrations of
the wanderer would see it.
[158] In _The Wandering Jew_, or the _Travels and Observations
of Bareach the Prolonged_.
The idea of a deathless man appealed strongly to Hawthorne, who plays
with the theme in various passages in his works and notebooks. In
_A Virtuoso's Collection_, where Peter Rugg, the Missing Man, is
door-keeper and where the collection includes a letter from the Flying
Dutchman to his wife, together with a flask of the elixir of life, the
virtuoso himself is none other than the Wandering Jew. He speaks of
his destiny and says that human prayers will not avail to aid him. The
touch of his hand is like ice, conveying a sense of spiritual as well
as physical chill. The character appears also as one of the guests in
_A Select Party_, of whom the author remarks: "This personage, however,
had latterly grown so common by mingling in all sorts of society and
appearing at the beck of every entertainer that he could hardly be
deemed a proper guest in an exclusive circle." This bit of satire
illustrates how common the theme had become at that time in fiction.
There are various threads of narration tangled up with the Wandering
Jew motif. He is said by some writers to have supernatural power to
heal disease, while by others he is thought to be the helpless bearer
of evil and death. Eugène Sue in his novel represents him as carrying
the plague, knowing his awful destiny, yet, while wildly regretting it,
powerless in the clutch of fate. Here he appears as a voluntary agent
of good toward the Rennepont family and an involuntary minister of evil
in other ways. An anonymous story[159] uses the same idea of the plague
association but carries it further, for here the wanderer is not a
personality but the plague itself, passing like a doom over the world,
which shows how far that phase of the legend has gone.
[159] _In the Track of the Wandering Jew._
The legend has been utilized variously to impress religious truths.
Charles Granville[160] writes a symbolic story with a definite
religious message. The idea of the immortal wanderer is represented as
the concept of a part of humanity urged by an earnest longing which
dominates their whole life and thought, the desire that a new kingdom
of God might come. The book is a social satire, an appeal for the
coming of a real democracy, real justice and genuine spirituality.
George Croly[161] has for his purpose the proving that Christ's second
coming is near at hand. Lew Wallace, who himself uses the theme of
the Wanderer, thought this book one of the half dozen volumes which
taken alone would constitute a British literature. We are likely to
find ourselves questioning Wallace's judgment in the matter, for
while the novel is interesting and has a sermon impressed with some
interest, it is by no means a great piece of literature. Salathiel is
pictured as a young, enthusiastic, passionate Jew striving to defend
his country against the woes that threaten her. His life is given in
detail immediately following his unpardonable sin, and his definite
career ends with the destruction of Jerusalem, though his immortality
is suggested at the close. The book describes many supernatural
happenings, the miraculous phenomena accompanying the death of Christ
and manifestations following the fate of the city.
[160] In _The Plaint of the Wandering Jew_.
[161] In _Salathiel the Immortal_, or _Tarry Thou Till I Come_.
In Lew Wallace's _The Prince of India_ the deathless man appears
again. In the beginning of the story he enters a vault from which he
removes the treasure from mummy cases, remarking that the place has
not been visited since he was there a thousand years before. He has
numerous impressive experiences, such as seeing a monk that seems the
reincarnation of Jesus, and hearing again the centurion's call to
him. Wallace pictures the Jew as old, a philosopher, in contrast to
Salathiel's impetuous youth. He is striving to bring the sons of men
into closer spiritual truth with each other and with God, as Salathiel
tries to prevent the material destruction of the city. The sense of
responsibility, the feeling of a mission toward others, expressed in
this novel, may be compared with that of Eugène Sue's Wandering Jew who
acts as a friend to the Rennepont family, protecting their interests
against the wily Jesuits.
The Wandering Jew has been represented in many ways, with stress
placed on various aspects of his life and character. He has been
depicted psychologically, as a suffering human being, mythologically to
illustrate the growth and change in life, religiously to preach certain
tenets and beliefs, and symbolically to show forth the soul of man. He
appears symbolically as the creature accursed of God, driven forever
in the face of doom. Shelley and others show him as vainly attempting
suicide, but living on, anguished yet deathless, in the face of every
effort to take his own life as in the teeth of torture from others. He
stands at once for the undying power of God's plan, and, as in Robert
Buchanan's version, for the typified failure of Christ's mission. He is
used to prove that Christ's second coming is near, and to prove also
that He will never come. To the Christian he stands for the evidence
of Christ's power of divinity, while to the Jew he is a symbol of that
unhappy race that wanders ever, with no home in any land.
Besides those mentioned, other English and American writers who have
made use of the legend are Kipling; Bram Stoker, who discusses him
in his assembly of Famous Impostors; M. D. Conway, who gives various
versions of the story; David Hoffman, Henry Seton Merriman, S.
Baring-Gould, W. H. Ainsworth, and others.
A legend closely associated with this and yet separate, is that of
a woman who bore the curse of eternal wandering. One version brings
in Herodias as the doomed woman, while the character of Kundry in
_Parsifal_ represents another feminine wanderer. William Sharp, in his
_Gypsy Christ_, gives the story differently still, saying that it is
not correctly told in _Parsifal_. As Sharp tells it, it is a piece of
tragic symbolism. Kundry, a gypsy woman of evil life, mocks Christ on
Golgotha and demands of Him a sign, to whom He says, "To thee and thine
I bequeath the signs of my Passion to be a shame and horror among thy
people forevermore!" Upon her hands and feet appear the stigmata of His
wounds, never to fade away, and to be borne by her descendants in every
third generation. Various ones of her descendants are crucified, and
wherever the wanderers go on earth they bear the marks of horror. The
curse would be lifted from them only when a Gypsy Christ should be born
of a virgin; but then the Children of the Wind should be dispersed and
vanish from among men. In the last chapter Naomi prophesies that she is
to give birth to the Gypsy Christ.
The theme of the Wandering Jew, while rivalling the Faust legend in
impressiveness and in the frequence with which it has been used in
literature, yet is different in having had no adequate representation.
No truly great poem or drama or novel has been written concerning
this tragic, deathless character. Perhaps it may come yet. Only
hints of his personality have appeared in very recent fiction,
such as the reincarnation in the character of the young Jew in
A. T. Quiller-Couch's story, _The Mystery of Joseph Laquedem_, or the
humorous reference to him in Brander Matthews's _Primer of Imaginary
Geography_, or _The Holy Cross_ by Eugene Field, where the wanderer is
pitied by a Spanish priest in Cortez's train in Mexico. His prayers win
forgiveness and the tortured Jew dies. After his death an earthquake
supernaturally splits a gulf on each side of the grave and a cross of
snow appears there, to remain forever. Perhaps the theme is fading out
now in fiction and drama, to disappear completely, or perhaps it is
lying forgotten for a while, waiting the master hand that shall give it
adequate treatment.
=Elixir of Life.= Immortality that proves such a curse in the case
of the Wandering Jew forms the basis for various other stories.
The elixir of life was a favorite theme with the Gothicists, being
used by Maturin, Godwin, and Shelley, and has continued to furnish
complication for fiction since that time. The theme has been popular on
the continent as well as in England, Balzac and Hoffman being the most
impressive users of it.
Bulwer-Lytton, in _A Strange Story_, introduces the elixir of life
together with other forms of supernaturalism, such as mesmerism, magic,
spectral apparitions, invisible manifestations, awful bodiless Eyes, a
gigantic Foot, and so forth. Margrave attempts to concoct the potion
that shall give him endless life, but after mysterious preparations,
incantations, and supernatural manifestations, at the crucial moment a
stampede of maddened beasts, urged forward by the dreadful Foot, dashes
the beaker from his lips. The irreplaceable liquid wastes its force on
the desert sands, where a magic richness of herbage instantly springs
up in contrast to the barrenness around it. Flowers bloom, myriads
of insects hover round them, and all is life, but the man who sought
the elixir with such pains lies dead. The author suggests a symbolic
meaning for his story, hinting that the scientist's laboratory holds
many elixirs of life, that all growth and life are magical, that all
being is miraculous.
Rider Haggard, in _She_ and _Ayesha_, its sequel, describes a
wonderful woman who possesses the secret of eternal life and has lived
for thousands of years, ever young and beautiful, supernaturally
enchanting. Her magic potion not only gives her length of days but
protection against danger as well, for her rival's dagger glances
harmlessly away from her, and she is proof against chance and fate.
She gains her immortal life partly by bathing in a secret essence or
vapor whose emanations give her mystic force and immortal beauty.
There are many other elements of supernaturalism in association with
the not impossible She,--magic vision, reincarnation, a mystic light
that envelops her body, the power to call up the dead, to reanimate
the skeletons in the desert and raise them to dreadful life. She is an
interesting but fearsome personality.
In _Ahrinziman_, by Anita Silvani, we have magic chemistry yielding up
the elixir of life. Jelul-uh-din has lived for five hundred years and
looks forward to a still more protracted existence. His magic drug not
only gives him prolonged life but will do anything he wishes besides,
since he has hypnotized it. Yet he is found dead. "On his wrists were
marks of giant fingers, scorched and burnt into the flesh like marks
of hot iron. And on his throat were marks of a similar hand which had
evidently strangled him." It is apparent that his master, the De'il,
got impatient and cut short the leisurely existence that he felt
belonged to him.
Hawthorne was greatly interested in the theme of the elixir of life. He
gives us two brews of it in _Septimius Felton_, one an Indian potion
concocted by an old sachem. The red man gets so old that his tribe
find him a great nuisance and obstacle to progress so they gravely
request permission to kill him. But his skull is so hard that the stone
hammers are smashed when they try to brain him, his skin so tough
that no arrows will pierce it, and nothing seems to avail. Finally
they fill his mouth and nostrils with clay and put him in the sun to
bake, till presently his heart bursts with a loud explosion, tearing
his body to fragments. This brew of his is matched by one made by an
European scientist after long endeavors. Here the ultimate ingredient
is supposed to be a strange herb that grows from a mysterious grave.
At last, just when the youth thinks he has the right combination, the
woman who has lured him on to destruction dashes the cup from his lips,
saving him from the poison he would have drunk. The flower has grown
from the grave of her lover, whom the young scientist has murdered.
In _The Dolliver Romance_, that pathetic fragment Hawthorne left
unfinished at his death, we find another treatment of the theme. It
seems symbolic that in his old age and failing powers, he should
have been thinking of immortal youth, of deathless life. In this
story various magical elements are introduced. The herbs grown in old
Grandsir Dolliver's garden have a strange power, for when a woman lays
a flower from one on her breast, it glows like a gem and lends a bloom
of youth to her cheeks. The old man seeks the one unknown essence, the
incalculable element necessary to make up the elixir of life, as did
the youth in _Septimius Felton_. He drinks occasional mouthfuls of a
strange cordial that he finds in an old bottle on the shelf, and seems
to grow younger and stronger. He, too, like Septimius, has a visitor;
a man that demands the cordial as belonging to him by ancestral right,
snatches it from the aged hands, drinks it down at a draught and grows
violently young, but dies in convulsions.
In _Dr. Heidigger's Experiment_ Hawthorne gives us another sad symbolic
story of the quest of the elixir of youth. The old physician invites
four aged friends to make an experiment, to drink of a cordial which
shall restore youth, but which he himself is too wise to share. The
strange potion proves its power by restoring to beauty and perfume a
rose that has been dead for over fifty years. When the old persons
drink they become young and happy and beautiful once more. Age drops
from them like a mantle discarded and the world glows again with
passion and color and joy. But alas! it is only ephemeral, for the
effects soon pass away and senility is doubly tragic after one snatched
hour of joy and youth. There is a sad philosophy of life expressed in
these symbolic allegories such as Hawthorne alone knows how to tell.
Elsewhere Hawthorne shows his deep interest in the theme. In _The
Birthmark_ the scientist intimates that he could brew the life elixir
if he would, but that it would produce a discord in nature such as
all the world, and chiefly he that drank it, would curse at last.
The subject is referred to in other places,[162] and a flask of the
precious, dreadful elixir is one of the treasures in the Virtuoso's
collection. In a note concerning his use of the theme in _The Dolliver
Romance_ Hawthorne states that he has been accused of plagiarizing from
Dumas, but that in reality Dumas plagiarized from him, since his book
was many years the earlier.
[162] In _Dr. Bullivant_.
H. G. Wells[163] uses this theme combined with the transfer of
personality. An aged man bargains with a youth to make him his heir on
certain conditions. The purpose, unknown to the young fellow, is to
rob him of his youth to reanimate the old man. A magic drink transfers
the personality of the octogenarian to the body of youth and leaves
the young man's soul cabined in the worn-out frame. But the drug is
more powerful than Mr. Elvesham supposed, for it brings death to both
who drink it and the bargain has a ghastly climax. Barry Pain has a
somewhat similar situation of the tragic miscalculation, in _The Wrong
Elixir_, the story of an alchemist who brews the life-giving potion but
means to keep it all to himself. On a certain night he will drink it
and become immortally young, in a world of dying men. While he waits,
a gypsy girl asks him to give her a poison to kill a man she hates.
He prepares the potion for her and sets it aside. He drinks at the
time he planned, but instead of eternal life, the draught brings him
swift-footed death. Does he drink the wrong elixir, or have all his
calculations been wrong?
[163] In _The Story of the Late Mr. Elvesham_.
An example of the way in which the magic of the old fiction of
supernaturalism has been transferred into the scientific in modern
times, is seen in _The Elixir of Youth_, by Albert Bigelow Paine. A
man in an upper room alone is wishing that he had the gift of immortal
youth, when a stranger in black enters and answers his thought. He
tells him that to read the mind is not black magic, but science; that
he is not a magician, but a scientist, and as such he has compounded
the elixir of youth, which he will give to him. This drug will enable
a man to halt his age at any year he chooses and to make it permanent,
as Peter Ibbetson and the Duchess of Towers did in their dream-life.
The stranger leaves the flask with the man and goes away. But the one
who wished for immortal life decides that after all God must know best,
and, though his decision not to drink has not crystalized, he is not
greatly sorry when the flask is shattered and the liquid spilled. This
is symbolic of the real wisdom of life.
The frequent use of the theme of the elixir of life, of deathless
youth, illustrates how humanity clutches at youth with pathos and
shrinks from age. Red Ranrahan, the loved singer of Ireland, whom W. B.
Yeats creates for us with unforgettable words, makes a curse against
old age when he feels it creeping on him.
Various other stories of supernatural length of years appear in English
fiction, besides those based on the definite use of the life elixir.
_The Woman from Yonder_, by Stephen French Whitman, shows us the
revived, reanimated body of a woman who has been buried in a glacier
since Hannibal crossed the Alps, till she is dug out and miraculously
restored, by blood-transfusion, by an interfering scientist. The
writer queries, "If the soul exists, where had that soul been? What
regions did it relinquish at the command of the reviving body?" A
humorous application of the idea of the deathless man is seen in A.
Conan Doyle's _The Los Amigos Fiasco_, where the citizens of a frontier
town, wishing to kill a criminal by some other method than the trite
rope, try to kill him by putting him in connection with a big dynamo.
But their amateur efforts have a peculiar effect. They succeed only
in so magnetizing his body that it is impossible for him to die. They
try shooting, hanging, and so forth, but he has gained such an access
of vitality from electricity that he comes out unscathed through
everything, resembling the ancient sachem in Hawthorne's novel.
The Flying Dutchman forms the theme for stories in folklore, of a
wanderer of the seas condemned to touch shore only once in seven years,
because he swore he would round Cape Horn in spite of heaven and hell.
Hawthorne has preserved a letter from the Dutchman to his wife, in
the Virtuoso's collection, and John Kendrick Bangs has furnished the
inevitable parody in his _Pursuit of the Houseboat_. _The Dead Ship_
of Harpwell is another story of a wandering, accursed ship. There is a
similar legend told by C. M. Skinner,[164] of a man, who, for a cruel
murder of a servant, was condemned to wear always a halter round his
neck and was unable to die.
[164] In _Myths and Legends of Our Land_.
Bram Stoker furnishes us with several interesting specimens of
supernatural life, always tangled with other uncanny motives. The
count, in _Dracula_, who has lived his vampire life for centuries, is
said to be hale and fresh as if he were forty. Of course, all vampires
live to a strange lease on life, but most of them are spirits rather
than human beings as was Dracula. In _The Lair of the White Worm_,
Stoker tells of a woman who was at once an alluring woman and a snake
thousands of years old. The snake is so large that, when it goes out to
walk, it looks like a high white tower, and can gaze over the tops of
the trees.
Bulwer-Lytton's _The Haunters and the Haunted_ tells the story of a
mysterious being who passes through untold years with a strange power
over life and the personality of others. He appears, no man knows
whence nor why, and disappears as strangely, while about his whole
career is a shroud of mystery. Thackeray, in his _Notch on the Axe_,
burlesques this and similar stories in playful satire, yet seems to
enjoy his theme. It is not wholly a burlesque, we may suppose. He
adds a touch of realism to his humorous description by the fact that,
throughout his hero's long-continued life, or series of lives--one
doesn't know which--he retains always his German-Jewish accent. Andrew
Lang describes[165] the person who may have been the original of these
stories in real life. Horace Walpole has mentioned him in his letters
and he seems to have a teasing mystery about his life and career that
makes him much talked-of.
[165] In _St. Germain the Deathless_.
Edwin Lester Arnold[166] tells a story of continued life with an
Oriental setting and mystery. Edward Bellamy's _Looking Backward_,
by the introduction of a magic sleep makes a man live far beyond the
natural span and be able to see into the distant future, while the
youth in Mark Twain's _A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court_ has
a magic length of life, living a dual existence, in Arthurian England
and in present-day America. H. G. Wells[167] uses something of the same
idea, in that he makes his hero live a very long time in a few hours,
compressing time into minute tabules, as it were, as he does in another
story of the magic accelerator that makes a man live fast and furiously
with tenfold powers at crucial moments. The story of Peter Rugg, the
Missing Man, is that of another immortal wanderer, whose story is told
in _Myths and Legends of Our Land_, and utilized by Alfred Austin. He
goes out into a storm, saying, "I will see home to-night or I will
never see it!" He flies forever pursued by the storm, never resting,
and never seeing his home. This is symbolic of the haunted soul pursued
by its own destiny.
[166] In _The Strange Adventures of Phra the Phoenician_.
[167] In his _Time Machine_.
The theme of the elixir of life is one of the old motifs of
supernaturalism retained in modern fiction. The conventional alchemist
has given place to a more up-to-date investigator in the chemical
laboratory, yet the same thrill of interest is imparted by the thought
of a magic potion prepared by man that shall endow him with earthly
immortality. The theme has changed less in its treatment and symbolism
than most of the supernatural elements in fiction, for though we see
the added elements of modern satire and symbolism, its essential
aspects remain the same.
=Metempsychosis.= The idea of metempsychosis, the thought that at
death the soul of a human being may pass into another mortal body
or into a lower stage, into an animal or even a plant, has been
used considerably in English fiction. This Oriental belief has its
basis in antiquity, in animistic ideas in primitive culture. One
of the earliest appearances of the theme in English fiction is that
middle-eighteenth-century story of Dr. John Hawkesworth's,[168] an
account of a soul that has not behaved itself seemly, so descends in
the spiritual scale till it ends by being a flea. The German Hoffmann
used the theme repeatedly, and Poe, who was to a certain extent
influenced by his supernaturalism, employs it in several stories. In _A
Tale of the Ragged Mountains_, the young man named Bedlo experiences,
in dreams of extraordinary vividness, the life of battle, of confusion,
ending in death, in a tropical city. He sees himself die, struck on the
temple by a poisoned arrow. He is recognized by an elderly man as the
exact counterpart of a Mr. Oldeb who perished in the manner dreamed of
in a battle in Benares. Mr. Bedlo, while wandering in the mountains of
Virginia, contracts a cold and fever, for the cure of which leeches
are applied, but by mistake a poisonous sangsue is substituted for
the leech, and the patient dies of a wound on the temple, similar
to that caused by a poisoned arrow. Poe's concept in other stories
is not that of the conventionally easy passage of the soul into the
body of a new-born babe that wouldn't be expected to put up much of
a fight, but he makes the psychic feature the central horror, saying
in that connection that man is on the brink of tremendous psychical
discoveries. In _Morella_ the theme is used with telling power, where
the wife, once greatly loved but now loathed, on her deathbed tells her
husband that her child will live after her. The daughter grows up into
supernatural likeness of her mother, but remains nameless, since her
father, for a reason he cannot analyze, hesitates to give her any name.
But at last, as she stands before the altar to be christened, some
force outside the father causes him to call her Morella.
What more than fiend convulsed the features of my child, and
overspread them with the hues of death, as, starting at that
scarcely audible sound, she turned her glassy eyes from earth to
heaven, and falling prostrate on the black slabs of our ancestral
vault, responded, "I am here"!
[168] _The Transmigration of a Soul._
The young girl is found to be dead and the father says: "With my own
hands I bore her to the tomb; and I laughed, with a long and bitter
laugh, as I found no traces of the first in the charnel where I laid
the second Morella."
An obvious imitation of Poe's story is found in Bram Stoker's novel,
_The Jewel of Seven Stars_, where the soul of an Egyptian princess
enters into the body of a baby born to one of the explorers who rifle
her tomb. The child grows into the perfect duplicate of the princess,
even showing on her wrists the marks of violence that cut off the
mummy's hand. The Egyptian's familiar, a mummified cat, comes to life
to revenge itself upon the archæologists who have disturbed the tomb.
When by magic incantations and scientific experiments combined, the
collectors try to revivify the mummy, the body mysteriously disappears,
and the young girl is found dead, leading us to suppose that the
reanimated princess has stolen the girl's life for her own.
In _Ligeia_, another of Poe's morbid studies of metempsychosis, the
theme is clearly announced, as quoted from Joseph Glanville: "Man
doth not yield himself to the angels nor unto death utterly save only
through the weakness of his own feeble will." The worshipped Ligeia
dies, and in an hour of madness her husband marries the Lady Rowena.
The bride soon sickens and as the husband watches alone by her bed
at midnight, he sees drops of ruby liquid fall from some mysterious
source, into the wine he is offering her. When the Lady Rowena
presently dies, the husband, again alone with her, sees the corpse
undergo an awful transformation. It is reanimated, but the body that
lives is not that of Rowena, but of Ligeia, who has come back to life
again by exerting her deathless will over the physical being of her
rival. The climax with which the story closes has perhaps no parallel
in fiction. As for the ruby drops, are we to think of them as an elixir
of life for the dead Ligeia struggling back to being, or as poison to
slay the living Rowena?
Ligeia's story is reflected, or at least shows an evident influence, in
_The Second Wife_, by Mary Heaton Vorse. Here again the dead wife comes
to oust her supplanter, but in this instance the interloper does not
die, but without dying merely _becomes_ the person and the personality
of the first wife. The change is gradual but incontrovertible, felt by
the woman herself before it is complete, and noticed by the husband
and the mother-in-law. Here the human will, indestructible by death,
asserts itself over mortal flesh and effects a transfer of personality.
But where did the second wife's soul go, pray,--the "she o' the she" as
Patience Worth would say?
A similar transfer of soul, effected while both persons are living
but caused by the malignance of an evil dead spirit, is found in
Blackwood's _The Terror of the Twins_. A father, who resents the fact
that instead of a single heir twins are born to him, swears in his
madness before he dies, that before their majority he will bring it to
pass that there shall be only _one_. By the help of powers from the
Pit he filches from the younger his vitality, his strength of mind and
soul and body, his personality, and gives this access of power to the
elder. The younger dies a hopeless idiot and the elder lives on with
a double dower of being. Ambrose Bierce carries this idea to a climax
of horror,[169] when he makes an evil spirit take possession of a dead
mother's body and slay her son, who recognizes his loved mother's
face, knows that it is her eyes that glare fiend-like at him, her hands
that are strangling him,--yet cannot know that it is a hideous fiend in
her corpse.
[169] In _The Death of Halpin Frazer_.
The theme of metempsychosis is found tangled up with various other
motives in fiction, the use of the elixir of life, hypnotism,
dream-supernaturalism, witchcraft and so forth. Rider Haggard has
given a curious combination of metempsychosis, and the supernatural
continuance of life by means of the elixir, in _She_ and its sequel,
_Ayesha_. The wonderful woman, the dread She-who-must-be-obeyed who
keeps her youth and beauty by means of bathing in the magic fluid,
recognizes in various stages of her existence the lover whom she has
known thousands of years before. Not having the advantage of the
Turkish bath or patent medicine, he dies periodically and has to be
born all over again in some other century. This is agitating to the
lady, so she determines to inoculate him with immortality so that
they can reign together without those troublesome interruptions of
mortality. But the impatient lover insists on kissing her, which proves
too much for him, since her divinity is fatal to mere mankind, so he
dies again.
The close relation between metempsychosis and hypnotism is shown in
various stories. Several cases of troublesome atavistic personality or
reincarnation are cured by psychotherapy. Theodora, a young woman in a
novel by Frances Fenwick Williams, bearing that title-name, realizes
herself to be the reincarnation of a remote ancestress, an Orientalist,
a witch, who has terrorized the country with her sorceries. She is
cured of her mental hauntings by means of hypnotism. Another novel by
the same author,[170] gives also the reincarnation of a witch character
in modern life, with a cure effected by psycho-analysis. The young
woman discovers herself to be the heiress of a curse, which is removed
only after study of pre-natal influences and investigations concerning
the subconscious self.
[170] _A Soul on Fire._
As is seen by these examples, the relation between witchcraft
and metempsychosis is very close, since in recent fiction the
witch characters have unusual powers of returning to life in some
other form. In Algernon Blackwood's _Ancient Sorceries_, we have
witch-metempsychosis on a large scale, the population of a whole
village being but the reanimations of long-dead witches and wizards
who once lived there. I know of no other case of mob-metempsychosis
in English fiction, but the instances where several are reincarnated
at once are numerous. Algernon Blackwood's recent novel, _Jules Le
Vallon_, is based on a story of collective reincarnation, the chief
characters in the dramatic action realizing that they have lived
and been associated with each other before, and feeling that they
must expiate a sin of a previous existence. Another recent novel by
Blackwood, _The Wave_, has for its theme the reincarnation of the
principal characters, realized by them. Blackwood has been much drawn
to psychic subjects in general and metempsychosis in particular, for
it enters into many of his stories. In _Old Clothes_ he gives us an
instance of a child who knows herself to be the reborn personality of
some one else and suffers poignantly in reliving the experiences of
that long-dead ancestress, while those around her are recognized as
the companions of her life of the far past, though they are unaware of
it. The fatuous remark of lovers in fiction, that they feel that they
have lived and loved each other in a previous existence, is a literary
bromide now, but has its basis in a recurrence in fiction. Antonio
Fogazzaro's novel, _The Woman_, is a good example in Italian,--for the
woman feels that she and her lover are reincarnations of long-dead
selves who have suffered tragic experiences together, which morbid idea
culminates in tragic madness.
_The Mystery of Joseph Laquedem_, by A. T. Quiller-Couch, is a
striking story of dual reincarnation. A young Jew in England and a
half-witted girl, a farmer's daughter, recognize in each other and
in themselves, the personalities of a young Jew led to the lions
for becoming a Christian, and a Roman princess who loved him. They
recall their successive lives wherein they have known and loved each
other, to be separated by cruel destiny each time, but at last they
die a tragic death together. The character of the man here is given
additional interest for us in that he is said to be a reincarnation of
Cartapholus, Pilate's porter, who struck Jesus, bidding Him go faster,
and who is immortalized as the Wandering Jew. Here he lives successive
lives rather than a continuous existence. Somewhat similar to this
is another combination of hypnotism and metempsychosis in _The Witch
of Prague_, by F. Marion Crawford, where Uorna makes Israel Kafka go
through the physical and psychical tortures of Simon Abeles, a young
Jew killed by his people for becoming a Christian. By hypnotism the
young man is made to pass through the experiences of a dead youth of
whom he has never heard, and to die his death anew.
There is a close relation between dreams and metempsychosis, as is seen
in certain stories. Kipling's charming prose idyll, _The Brushwood
Boy_, may be called a piece of dream-metempsychosis, for the youth and
girl when they first meet in real life recognize in each other the
companions of their childhood and adolescent dream-life, and complete
their dual memories. They have dreamed the same dreams even to minute
details of conversation, and familiar names. Du Maurier combines the
two motives very skillfully in his novels, for it is in successive
dreams that the Martian reveals herself to Barty Joscelyn telling him
of her life on another planet, and inspiring him to write--or writing
for him--books of genius, before she takes up earthly life in one
of his children. She tells him that she will come to him no more in
dreams, but that she will live in the child that is to be born. And in
dual dreams Peter Ibbetson and the Duchess of Towers live over again
their childhood life together, are able to find at will their golden
yesterdays, and know in happy reality the joys of the past, while the
present keeps them cruelly apart. They are able to call back to shadowy
life their common ancestors, to see and hear the joys, the work, the
griefs they knew so long ago. They plumb their sub-consciousness, dream
over again their sub-dreams, until they at last not only see these
long-dead men and women, but _become_ them.
We could each be Gatienne for a space (though not both of us
together) and when we resumed our own personality again we carried
back with it a portion of hers, never to be lost again--strange
phenomenon if the reader will but think of it, and constituting the
germ of a comparative personal immortality on earth.
Not only does Peter live in the past, but he has the power to transport
these dead ancestors of his to his present and let them share in his
life, so that Gatienne, a French woman dead for generations, lives
over again in an English prison as Peter Ibbetson, or travels as Mary
Towers, seeing things she never had dreamed of in her own life.
H. G. Wells in _A Dream of Armageddon_ gives a curious story of the
dream-future. A man in consecutive visions sees himself killed. He then
dreams that he is another man, living in a different part of the world,
far in the future, till he sees himself die in his second personality.
He describes his experiences as given in "a dream so accurate that
afterwards you remember little details you had forgotten." He suffers
tortures of love and grief, so that his dream-life of the future is
infinitely more real to him than his actual existence of his own time.
What was the real "him o' him," to quote Patience Worth, the man of the
dream-future, or the business man of the present telling the story to
his friend?
A different version of metempsychosis is shown in _The Immortal
Gymnasts_, by Marie Cher, for here the beloved trio, Pantaloon,
Harlequin and Columbine are embodied as human beings and come to live
among men. Harlequin has the power of magic vision which enables him to
see into the minds and hearts of mortals by means of "cloud-currents."
This question of--shall we say transmigration?--of fictive characters
into actual life is found in various stories, such as Kipling's _The
Last of the Stories_, John Kendrick Bangs' _The Rebellious Heroine_,
and others. It illustrates the fantastic use to which every serious
theme is sooner or later put. There is no motif in supernatural
literature that is not parodied in some form or other, if only by
suggestion.
The symbolic treatment of metempsychosis is strongly evident in
recent fiction, as the theme lends itself particularly well to the
allegoric and symbolic style. Barry Pain's _Exchange_ shows aspects
of transmigration different from the conventional treatment, for he
describes the soul of the old man as giving up its right to peace that
it might purchase ease for a soul he loved. He passes into the body of
a captive bird beating its hopeless wings against the bars and tortured
with pain and thirst, as a mark of the witch woman's wrath, while the
soul of the young girl goes into the body of a snow-white lamb that
lives a day then is set free. As she passes by, in the state of a freed
soul, she sees the piteous bird, and says to herself, "I am glad I was
never a bird."
Algernon Blackwood, in _The Return_, gives a peculiar story of
metempsychosis, where the selfish materialist finds himself suddenly
reinforced with a new personality from without. His eyes are opened
miraculously to the magic and beauty of the world, and he knows beyond
doubt that his friend, the artist, who promised to come to him when he
died, has died and that his soul has become a part of his own being.
The most impressive example of this sudden merging of two natures, two
souls into one, is found in Granville Barker's _Souls on Fifth_. Here a
man suddenly acquires, or recognizes, the power to see the souls that
linger earth-bound around him, and comes to have a strange sympathy
with that of a woman, whom he calls the "Little Soul." When he speaks
of going away, after a time, she begs him not to leave her since she
is very lonely in this wilderness of unbodied souls. She asks that if
he will not take her into his soul, he carry her to some wide prairie,
and there in the unspaced expanse leave her,--but instead he gives a
reluctant consent for her to enter into his life. He presses the little
symbolic figure to his heart, then feels a new sense of being, of
personality, and knows that her soul has become forever a part of his.
Lord Dunsany, who lends a strange, new beauty to every supernatural
theme he touches, has a little prose-poem of symbolic metempsychosis,
called _Usury_, where Yohu, one of the evil spirits, lures the shadows
to work for him by giving them gleaming lives to polish.
And ever Yohu lures more shadows and sends them to brighten his
Lives, sending the old Lives out again to make them brighter still;
and sometimes he gives to a shadow a Life that was once a king's
and sendeth him with it down to the earth to play the part of a
beggar, or sometimes he sendeth a beggar's Life to play the part of
a king. What careth Yohu?
=Spiritualism and Psychical Research.= The influence of modern
Spiritualism and Psychical Research on the literature of supernaturalism
has been marked, especially of late years. It would be inevitable that
movements which interest so many persons, among them many of more
than ordinary intelligence, should be reflected in fiction. These two
aspects of the subject will be treated together since they are closely
allied. For though Spiritualism is a form of religion and Psychical
Research a new science,--and so-called religion and so-called science
are not always parallel--the lines of investigation here are similar.
While Spiritualism endeavors to get in touch with the spirits of the
dead that the living may be comforted and enlightened, and Psychical
Research attempts to classify the supposedly authentic cases of
such communication, and in so much their methods of approach are
different,--yet the results may be discussed together.
Hawthorne was interested in Spiritualism as literary material, since
a discussion of it is introduced in _Blithedale Romance_ and various
passages in his notebooks treat of the matter showing the fascination
it had for him. Mrs. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward, in addition to her
fictional treatises of heaven, takes up Spiritualism as well. In _The
Day of My Death_ she gives a satiric account of the return of a spirit
who says he is a lost soul tortured in hell. He doubtless deserves
it, for he sticks the baby full of pins and ties it to a tree, and
folds the clothes from the wash in the shape of corpses. He is still
interested in this life, however, since he requests a piece of squash
pie. In _Kentucky's Ghost_ she depicts a spirit actuated by definite
malice. In the previous story seven mediums tell a man that he will die
at a certain day and hour, but he lives cheerfully on.
William Dean Howells has given a study in his usual kindly satire
and sympathetic seriousness, of the phenomena of Spiritualism and
mesmerism, in _The Undiscovered Country_. Dr. Boynton, a mistaken
zealot, holds seances assisted by his daughter, a delicate, sensitive
girl who is physically prostrated after each performance and begs her
father to spare her. She acts as medium where the usual effects of
rapping, table levitation, and so forth take place, where spirit hands
wave in the air and messages, grave and jocular, are delivered. The
characterization is handled with skill to bring out the sincerity of
each person involved in the web of superstition and false belief, and
Howells shows real sympathy with each, the scoffers as well as the
misguided fanatics. It is only when the doctor looks death in the face
that he realizes his error and seeks to know by faith in the Bible the
truths of the far country of the soul.
Hamlin Garland has shown considerable interest in Spiritualism in his
fiction. He refuses to commit himself as to his own opinion of the
question, but he has written two novels dealing with it, _The Tyranny
of the Dark_ and _The Shadow World_. The former is considerably like
Howells's novel, for here also a young girl is made the innocent victim
of fanatics, her mother and a preacher who has fallen in love with her.
She is made to take part in spiritualistic manifestations, whether as
a victim of fraud or as a genuine medium the author leaves in doubt.
When the girl casts him off the preacher kills himself that he may come
into closer communication with her after death than he has been able
to do in life. Richard Harding Davis has contributed a volume with a
similar plot, the exploitation of an innocent and, of course, beautiful
girl by fanatics, in _Vera the Medium_. Here the girl is more than half
aware that she is a fraud and in her last seance, at the conclusion
of which she is to be carried triumphantly away by her lover, the New
York district attorney, she dramatically confesses her deception. As a
sympathy-getter, she pleads that she was very lonely, that because her
grandmother and mother were mediums, she had been cut off from society.
"I used to play round the kitchen stove with Pocahontas and Alexander
the Great, and Martin Luther lived in our china closet."
David Belasco's _The Return of Peter Grimm_, drama and novel, is based
upon spiritualistic manifestations. We are told that the "envelope"
or shadow-self of a sleeper has been photographed by means of
radio-photography. When a certain part of the shadow body is pricked
with a pin, as the cheek, the corresponding portion of the sleeper's
body is seen to bleed. Peter Grimm comes back from the other world to
direct the actions of the living, and though at first only a child sees
him,--for children are the best sensitives save animals,--eventually
the adults recognize him also and yield to his guidance. Spiritualism
enters directly or indirectly into many works of fiction of late years.
Whether people believe in it or not, they are thinking and writing
about it. The subject receives its usual humorous turn in various
stories, as Nelson Lloyd's _The Last Ghost in Harmony_, the story of
a specter who complains of the scientific unimaginativeness of his
village, saying that though he had entreated the spooks to hold out for
a little while as he had heard Spiritualism was headed that way and
would bring about a revival of interest in ghosts, the spirits all got
discouraged and quit the place. And we recall Sandy's mournful comment
to Mark Twain's Captain Stormfield, that he wished there was something
_in_ that miserable Spiritualism, so he could send word back to the
folks.
The Proceedings of the Psychical Research Society have a twofold
association with literature, for not only have various modern novels
and stories been inspired by such material, but the instances recorded
are similar in many cases to the classical ghost stories. Lacy
Collison-Morley in his _Greek and Roman Ghost Stories_ says, "There
are a number of stories of the passing of souls which are curiously
like some of those collected by the Psychical Research Society, in
the Fourth Book of Gregory the Great's _Dialogues_." The double
source of many modern stories may be found by a comparative study of
Collison-Morley's book and Myers's _Human Personality_, while G. H.
Gerould's volume, _The Grateful Dead_, introduces recent instances that
are like classical stories. The inability of the soul to have rest in
the other world if its body was unburied, as held by the ancients,
is reflected in Gothic romance, Elizabethan drama as well as in the
classics. The ghost of Jack, whom Peele tells us about, is a case of a
ghost coming back to befriend his undertaker. From these comparisons
it would appear that there is something inherently true to humanity
in these beliefs, for the revenge ghost and the grateful dead have
appeared all along the line. Perhaps human personality is largely the
same in all lands and all times, and ghosts have the same elemental
emotions however much they may have acquired a veneer of modernity.
There are many instances of the compact-ghost, the spirit who returns
just after death in accordance with a promise made in life, to manifest
himself to some friend or to some skeptic. Algernon Blackwood gives
several stories based on that theme, one a curious case where the ghost
is so lifelike his friend does not dream he is not the living man,
and assigns him to a bedroom. Later he is invisible, yet undoubtedly
present, for his heavy breathing, movements of the covers, and impress
on the bed are beyond dispute. _Afterwards_, by Fred C. Smale, shows a
ghost returning to attend a neighborhood club. When his name is called
by mistake, he takes part on the program, speaking through the lips of
a young man present, who goes off in a cataleptic trance. During this
coma the youth, who is ignorant of music, gives a technical discussion
of notation, analyzing diatonic semi-tones and discussing the note a
nightingale trills on. When he wakes he says he has felt a chill and
a touch. Alice Brown relates a story of a lover who promised to come
to his sweetheart at the moment of death, but who, like Ahimeas in the
Bible, runs before he is ready, and keeps his ghostly tryst while the
rescuers bring him back to life. He hasn't really been drowned at all.
A recent novelette by Frances Hodgson Burnett, called _The White
People_, has psychical phenomena for its central interest. A little
child, born after her father's tragic death and when her dying mother
is conscious of his spiritual presence, grows up with a strange
sensitiveness to manifestations from the other world. Her home is
on a lonely estate in Scotland, so that her chief companionship is
with the "white people," the spirits of the dead, though she does not
so recognize them. Her playmate is Wee Brown Elsbeth, who has been
murdered hundreds of years before, and she is able to see the dead
hover near their loved ones wherever she goes. So when she comes to
realize what a strange vision is hers, she has no horror of death, and
when her lover dies she does not grieve, but waits to see him stand
smiling beside her as in life. The theme of the story is the nearness
of the dead to the living, the thin texture of the veil that separates
the two worlds.
Basil King tells a poignant story of a soul trying vainly to return in
body to right a wrong done in life but unable to accomplish her purpose
by physical means. At last she effects it by impressing the mind of
a living woman who carries out the suggestion psychically given. One
of the most effective recent accounts of a spirit's return to earth
to influence the life of the living, to give messages or to control
destiny, is in Ellen Glasgow's _The Shadowy Third_. Here the ghost of
a child, a little girl whom her stepfather has done to death for her
money, returns to cause his death in an unusual way. She throws her
little skipping-rope carelessly on the stairway where he must trip up
in it when he sees her phantom figure in front of him in the gloom, so
to fall headlong to his death. This is an impressive revenge ghost.
Henry James based his ghost story, _The Turn of the Screw_, on an
incident reported to the Psychical Society, of a spectral old woman
corrupting the mind of a child. The central character in Arnold
Bennett's novel, _The Ghost_, is a specter, one of the most rabid
revenge ghosts in literature, who is eaten up with jealousy lest
the woman he loved in life shall care for some one else. Algernon
Blackwood uses much psychical material in his numberless stories of the
supernatural, often mentioning the work of the Society, and Andrew Lang
has contributed much to the subject. Arthur Machen has just published a
collection of stories of war-apparitions that are interesting psychical
specimens, called _The Bowmen_. In one story in the volume he shows us
how a contemporary legend may be built up, since from a short piece of
fiction written by him has evolved the mass of material relating to the
angels at Mons. One tale is a story of the supernatural intervention of
Saint George and his army to drive back the Germans and save the hour
for the Allies, while another describes the vision of a soldier wounded
in battle defending his comrades, who sees the long-dead heroes of
England file past him to praise him for his valor. The minister gives
him wine to drink and
His voice was hushed. For as he looked at the minister the fashion
of his vesture was changed. He was all in armor, if armor be made
of starlight, of the rose of dawn, and of sunset fires; and he
lifted up a great sword of flame.
"Full in the midst, his Cross of Red
Triumphant Michael brandished
And trampled the Apostate's pride."
Another case of collective apparitions is the experience of a soldier,
wounded in battle, who tells of strange fighters who have come in to
aid the English. He thinks they are some of the tribesmen that Britain
employs, but from his descriptions the minister knows that they are the
long-dead Greeks who have arisen to take part in the struggle which
their modern descendants are reluctant to share. These stories are only
a few among the many instances of supernaturalism in fiction traceable
to the influence of the war.
Certain volumes of ghost stories have appeared, claiming to be not
fiction but fact, accounts of actual apparitions seen and snap-shotted.
This sort of problematic fiction is not new, however, since Defoe long
ago published one of the best of the kind, the story of Mrs. Veal, who
appeared to her friend Mrs. Bargrave, and conversed with her, gravely
telling her that heaven is much like the descriptions in a certain
religious book written shortly before that. She seems very realistic,
with her dress of newly scoured silk, which her friend rubs between
her fingers, and her lifelike conversation. This story has usually
been regarded as one of Defoe's "lies like truth," but recent evidence
leads one to believe that it is a reportorial account of a ghost story
current at the time, which missed being reported to the Society for
Psychical Research merely because the organization did not exist then.
The modern stories that stridently claim to be real lack the interest
in many instances that Mrs. Veal is able to impart, and in most cases
the reader loses his taste for that sort of fiction because it is
rammed down his throat for fact. They don't impress one, either as fact
or as fiction.
One of the most interesting aspects of the literature relating to
psychic matters in recent years is the number of books that claim to
be spirit-inspired. These instances of psychography are not what we
might expect immortals to indite, but it appears that there must be a
marked decrease of intelligence when one reaches the other world. The
messages sent back by dead genius lack the master style, even lacking
that control over spelling and grammar which low, earth-bound editors
consider necessary. But perhaps the spirits of the great grow tired
of being made messenger boys, and show their resentment by literary
strikes. Anita Silvani has published several volumes that she claims
were written while she was in a semi-trance,--which statement no reader
will doubt. Her accommodating dictator furnishes illustrations for
her stuff, as well, for she says she would have inner visions of the
scenes described, "as if a dioram passed" before her. These romances
of three worlds are quite peculiar productions. The inner voices asked
her in advance not to read any literature on theosophy or Spiritualism
or the supernatural since they wished her mind to be free from any
previous bias. Mrs. Elsa Barker is another of these literary mediums,
for she has put out two volumes of letters in narrative form, which
she makes affidavit were dictated to her by a disembodied spirit, the
ghost of the late Judge Hatch, of California. She states that while
she was sitting in her room in Paris one day, her hand was violently
seized, a pencil thrust into it, and the automatic writing began. Mrs.
Campbell-Praed is another of these feminine stenographers for spooks,
but like the rest she has left nothing that could well be included
in a literary anthology. These spirit-writers tell us of life after
death, but nothing that is a contribution to existing ignorance on the
subject. According to Judge Hatch, whose post-mortem pen-name is X, the
present war has its parallel in a conflict of spirits, and the astral
world is in dire confusion because of overcrowding, so that the souls
of the slain must go through torments and struggle with demons.
The most recent instance of psychography comes to us by way of the
ouija-board from St. Louis, the authenticity of which is vouched for
by Mr. Casper Yost, of the editorial staff of the _Globe-Democrat_.
But if the ouija-board dictated the stories and plays, giving the name
of Patience Worth as the spirit author, and if Mrs. Curran took them
down, why does Mr. Yost appear as the author? Patience Worth says
that she lived a long time ago. Mr. Yost insists that her language is
Elizabethan, but it seems rather a curious conglomeration, unlike any
Elizabethan style I am familiar with. She has written stories, lyrics,
a long drama, and other informal compositions, a marvelous output when
one considers the slow movements of the ouija-board. The communications
seem to have human interest and a certain literary value, though they
bring us no messages from the Elizabethan section of eternity.[171]
[171] Other examples of the books that claim to be inspired
by spirits are: _An Angel Message_, Being a Series of Angelic
and Holy Communications Received by a Lady; _Nyria_, by Mrs.
Campbell-Praed; _Letters from a Living Dead Man_, by Elsa
Barker, and _War Letters from a Living Dead Man_; _Stranger
than Fiction_, by Mary L. Lewis; _The Soul of the Moor_, by
Stratford Jolly; _Ida Lymond and Her Hour of Vision_, by Hope
Crawford; _The Life Elysian_; _The Car of Phoebus_; _The
Heretic_; _An Astral Bridegroom_; _Through the Mists_, _The
Vagrom Spirit_, and _Leaves from the Autobiography of a Soul in
Paradise_, by Robert James Lee. This last-named gentleman seems
to be in touch with spirits as rapid in composition as Robert
W. Chambers.
Automatic writing appears in _The Martian_ by Du Maurier, where the
spirit from Mars causes Barty Joscelyn in his sleep to write books
impossible to him in his waking hours. The type has been parodied by
John Kendrick Bangs in his _Enchanted Typewriter_, which machine worked
industriously recording telegraphic despatches from across the Styx.
The invisible operator gives his name as Jim Boswell. The writer states:
The substance of the following pages has evolved itself between the
hours of midnight and four o'clock, during a period of six months,
from a type-writing machine standing in a corner of my library,
manipulated by unseen hands.
It is astonishing how many ghosts are trying to break into print
these days. And after all, what do the poor things get out of it? No
royalties, scant praise, and much ridicule when their style fails to
come up to specifications.
Interesting psychical material is found in a new volume of plays by
Theodore Dreiser.[172] He gives curious twists to the unearthly, as
in _The Blue Sphere_, where a shadow and a fast mail are among the
_dramatis personæ_, typifying the fate idea of the old drama. The
shadow lures a child monstrosity out on to the railway track, after
he has caused the elders to leave the gate open, and the train, made
very human, kills the child. The psychic effects in _In the Dark_
are even more peculiar, the characters including various spirits, a
wraith, and a ghost with red eyes, who circle round the human beings
and force them to discover a murder that has been committed. The effect
of supernatural manifestation on animals is brought out here, in the
bellowing of the bull and the howling of the dogs as the ghosts pass
by. In _A Spring Recital_ troops of nymphs and hamadryads, fauns,
clouds of loathsome spirits of hags and wastrels, "persistences" of
fish, birds, and animals, "various living and newly dead spirits
wandering in from the street," the ghost of an English minister of St.
Giles, who died in 1631, a monk of the Thebaid, of date 300 and three
priests of Isis of 2840 B.C. enter to hear the organist play. He is
unaware that anybody is hearing his music save the four human beings
who have happened in. These dramas of course are purely literary
plays, impossible of presentation on the stage, and in their curious
character show a likeness to some of the late German supernaturalism,
such as the plays of August Stramm. They show in an extreme form the
tendency toward psychic material that the American and English drama
has evidenced lately.
[172] _Plays of the Natural and the Supernatural._
=Life after Death.= Mankind is immensely interested in heaven and
hell, though he knows but little concerning these places. But man is
a born traveler and gives much thought to distant countries, whether
he definitely expects to go there or not. This interest is no new
thing, for classical mythology is full of doleful accounts of the
after life. The early English stage represented heaven and hell in
addition to the earth, and Elizabethan drama shows many references to
the underworld, with a strong Senecan influence. There are especially
frequent allusions to certain famous sufferers in Hades, as Ixion,
Tantalus, Sisyphus, and Tityus. Modern English fiction has likewise
been influenced by the epic supernaturalism, reflecting the heaven and
hell of Dante and Milton. Yet as in his own thinking each person lays
out a Celestial City for himself and pictures his own inferno to fit
his ideas of mercy and justice, peopling them with appropriate beings,
changing and coloring the conceptions of Bunyan, for instance, to suit
his own desires, so it is in fiction. Some think of heaven and hell as
definite places, while to others they are states of mind. To some the
devil is as real as in the darkey folk-song, where,
"Up stepped de debbil
Wid his iron wooden shubbil,
Tearin' up de yearth wid his big-toe nail!"
while to others he is an iconoclastic new thought. Heaven and
hell have been treated in every conceivable way in English
fiction--conventionally, symbolically, humorously, and satirically, so
that one may choose the type he prefers. There are enough kinds to go
around.
Among the portrayers of the traditional heaven and hell Mrs. Elizabeth
Stuart Phelps Ward is prominent. Her works on contemporary immortality
are said to have had a tremendous vogue in the period following
the Civil War, when death had claimed so many that the living were
thinking of the other world more than of this. Her pictures of heaven
in _Gates Ajar_ are comforting, for she assures to each person his own
dearest wish in fulfillment, to the ambitious youth his books, to the
young girl her piano, and to the small child her ginger-snaps instead
of earthly bread and butter. In _The Gates Between_ the physician,
suddenly killed, finds himself embarrassed by immortality. He doesn't
know how to adjust himself to eternity and at first brings many of
earth's problems with him. In the third of the series, _The Gates
Beyond_, she describes a very material yet spiritual heaven. Bodies are
much like those on earth, not vaporous projections; there are museums,
hospitals, universities, telephones, concerts and all up-to-date
improvements and conveniences. The dead woman discovers that she
remembers what she read on earth, takes pleasure in simple things such
as the smell of mignonette, hears the birds sing a Te Deum, while a
brook and a bird sing a duet, and the leaves are also vocal. There is a
Universal Language which must be learned by each soul, and heaven holds
all sorts of occupations, material, mental, and spiritual. She says
that near earth are many earth-bound spirits occupied in low and coarse
and selfish ways, who lack "spiritual momentum to get away." "They
loved nothing, lived for nothing, believed in nothing, they cultivated
themselves for nothing but the earth,"--which may be compared with the
state of the souls on Fifth Avenue, described by Granville Barker.
Mrs. Ward's pictures of heaven may seem sentimental and conventional to
us to-day, yet to be appreciated they must be considered in relation to
the religious thought of her time. She represented a reaction against
the rigid theology, the stern concepts of an older generation than
her own, and she wished to make heaven more homelike. She did have an
influence in her day, as may be illustrated by a remark from a sermon
recently delivered by a New York pastor, that the reading of her books
had exerted a great influence over him, that they made heaven over for
him.
Mrs. Oliphant is another of the conductors of fictive Cook's tours
through heaven and hell, after the fashion started by Dante and Milton,
and modernized by Mrs. Ward. She devotes volumes to describing the
future worlds in their relation to mortal destiny. One story[173]
tells of a soul that comes back from purgatory to be comforted by the
old minister and sent away happy; another[174] is the account of a
spirit returning from heaven to right a wrong that her husband is doing
another. Still another[175] gives the experiences of a woman who is
distressed when she finds herself in heaven, because she has hidden her
will and her young niece is thereby left penniless, but she asks advice
of various celestial authorities and finally succeeds in returning to
earth and righting matters. _A Beleaguered City_ is a peculiar story
of a French town besieged by the dead, who drive out the inhabitants
because of their cruelty toward some nuns. A strange gloom pervades
the place, the cathedral bells ring of themselves, and flaming signs
appear on the church doors, till after much penance the citizens are
allowed to return and the invading hosts from eternity withdraw. In
one story,[176] Mrs. Oliphant gives her ideas of heaven, as a place of
light, of rest, of joy, of service, where the great angel Pain helps
the souls to wisdom. In a counter-picture,[177] she shows hell, the
world of the unhappy dead, where are cruelty, selfishness, suffering,
a world filled with tears that drip from earth. Yet it is a hell as
well-regulated, as thoroughly disciplined as a German municipality,
with various punishments,--the most terrible being a lecture platform
from which are delivered eternal addresses.
[173] _The Open Door._
[174] _The Portrait._
[175] _Old Lady Mary._
[176] _The Little Pilgrim in the Unseen._
[177] _The Land of Darkness._
These would-be-realistic stories of heaven and hell somehow leave the
reader cold, after Dante and Milton, however much one may feel the
sincerity of the authors. Heaven and hell are such vast provinces that
one cannot chart them in imagination sufficiently to grasp somebody
else's concept in story.
Other stories of life after death, given from the spirit-angle rather
than from the mortal point of view as in most ghost stories, are among
the recent types of supernaturalism. Alice Brown has several stories of
the kind, in one showing a woman who comes to tell her friend not to be
afraid of dying, because There is much like Here, and another symbolic
of the power of love to come back even from the pit of blackness after
death. Olivia Howard Dunbar's _The Shell of Sense_ gives the psychosis
of a woman who cannot go to heaven because she is jealous of her
husband. She _sees_ the form of the wind, _hears_ the roses open in the
garden, and senses many things unknown to human beings, yet is actuated
by very human motives. Katherine Butler[178] suggests that death must
be a painless process and the after life much like mortality, since
the man doesn't realize that he is dead but attempts to go about his
affairs as usual.
[178] In _In No Strange Land._
The symbolic treatment of the theme of life after death is more
effective and shows more literary art than the conventional pictures
of Mrs. Ward's and Mrs. Oliphant's. No human vocabulary is able to
describe immortality of glory or despair, hence it is more effective
merely to suggest the thought by allegory or symbolism. Hawthorne
gives us a symbolic morality in _The Celestial Railroad_, where he
pictures the road between heaven and hell, drawing on Bunyan's imagery
to describe the landscape and characters. Apollyon is engineer and
emits realistic blasts of smoke. Eugene Field[179] tells of a mother
just entering heaven who asks an angel where she may find her little
baby, dead long ago, to whom the angel whispers that she is the babe,
grown to maturity in Paradise. Julian Hawthorne's _Lovers in Heaven_
is a symbolic picture of the after life, where a man just dead goes
in search of the beloved he lost long before. He sees her on the far
slope of a heavenly hill, but before he can reach her the devil appears
to him in his own double, "the Satan of mine own self, the part of me
wherein God had no share." This is a quite modern concept of diabolism.
But love struggles to save him, and he resists his evil self.
[179] In _The Mother in Paradise_.
_Ahrinziman_, by Anita Silvani, shows lurid pictures of the world to
come. In the Inferno of the Dark Star the soul sees the attendant genii
of his life, each symbolizing some passion of his nature. There are
horrible astral birds and beasts and combinations unknown to mortal
biology, while vultures hover overhead and a foul astral odor fills
the air. The spirits are of peculiar substance, for they fight and
slay each other, some being torn to pieces. The soul is supposed to
progress toward the Silver and later the Golden Star. Marie Corelli's
_Romance of Two Worlds_ is a queer production, preaching the doctrine
of psychical electricity, which is to be a sort of wonder-working
magician, and in other novels she gives theories of radio-activity, a
theosophical cure-all for this world and the next.
_A Vision of Judgment_, by H. G. Wells, is a satire on man's judgment
of sin and character and of destiny after death, showing the pettiness
and folly of Ahab, proud of his sins, and the hypocrisy of a so-called
saint, conceited over his self-torture. "At last the two sat side
by side, stark of all illusions, in the shadow of the robe of God's
charity, like brothers." The picture of God and the throne vanish
and they behold a land austere and beautiful, with the enlightened
souls of men in clean bodies all about him. This symbolic allegory
setting forth the shallowness of human judgment as set against God's
clarity of vision and charity of wisdom is like Oscar Wilde's _The
House of Judgment_, a terrible piece of symbolism expressed in a few
words. A soul who has been altogether evil comes at last before God
to be judged. God speaks to him of his vileness, his cruelty, his
selfishness, to all of which the soul makes confession of guilt.
And God, closing the book of the man's Life, said, "Surely I will
send thee into Hell. Even unto Hell will I send thee."
And the man cried out, "Thou canst not!"
And God said to the man, "Wherefore can I not send thee to Hell,
and for what reason?"
"Because in Hell I have always lived," answered the man.
And there was silence in the house of judgment.
And after a space God spake and said to the man, "Seeing that I may
not send thee into Hell, I will send thee into Heaven. Surely unto
Heaven I will send thee."
And the man cried out, "Thou canst not!"
And God said to the man, "Wherefore can I not send thee unto
Heaven, and for what reason?"
"Because, never, and in no place, have I been able to imagine it!"
answered the man.
And there was silence in the house of judgment.
The fact that a man's thoughts make his heaven or his hell is brought
out in a recent book, _The Case of John Smith_, by Elizabeth Bisland,
where the central character receives a revelation while working at his
typewriter one day. The message says, "Oh, Peevish and Perverse! How
know you that you have not died elsewhere and that this is not the
Heaven which there you dreamed? How know you that your Hell may not lie
only in not recognizing this as Heaven?"
In many recent examples of allegory and symbolism we get suggestive
impressions of the other life, of the soul's realities. Some of these
have the inevitable words, the fatal phrases that seem to penetrate
into the real heaven and hell for us. The most remarkable instance
of symbolic treatment of the after-life is in _Souls on Fifth_, by
Granville Barker, where the spirits of the dead are represented as
unable to rise above the level of the ideals they had held in life, and
drift endlessly up and down the Avenue, some in the form of tarnished
gilt, some with white plague spots of cowardice, or blisters of
slanderous thoughts, some horny with selfishness, some with lines of
secret cruelty. There are few squares but mostly irregular shapes of
sin.
The purely humorous treatment of life after death, the comic pictures
of heaven and hell, are of a piece with the humorous treatment of other
phases of supernaturalism, and are distinctly modern. The flippant way
in which sacred subjects are handled is a far cry from the heaven and
hell of Dante and Milton. Modern writers slap the devil on the back,
make fun of the archangels and appeal to the ridiculous in one-time
sacred situations, with a freedom that would have made the Puritans
gasp. For instance, St. Peter has been the butt of so many jokes that
he is really hackneyed.
The Flying Dutchman, whom Brander Matthews introduces in his _Primer of
Imaginary Geography_, and who says that the Wandering Jew is the only
person he can have any satisfactory chats with now, speaks of knowing
Charon, "who keeps the ferry across the Styx. I met him last month and
he was very proud of his new electric launch with its storage battery."
He says that hell is now lighted by electricity and that Pluto has put
in all the modern improvements. John Kendrick Bangs, in his _House-boat
on the Styx_, brings together the shades of many illustrious persons;
Queen Elizabeth, Walter Raleigh, Socrates, Xantippe, Captain Kidd, and
many others. From them we get pictures of the life after death and of
their characteristic attitudes toward it and each other. He continues
the situation in _The Pursuit of the House-boat_, as the redoubtable
Captain Kidd makes off with the ship and the ladies, leaving all the
men behind. But they follow the bold buccaneer and after exciting
adventures reaching from the Styx to Paris, they recapture the fair.
Carolyn Wells has recently given us a Styx River Anthology. In modern
stories we visit the comic devil on his native heath, see him in
his own home town, as in previous chapters we discussed him in his
appearances on earth. Kipling's _The Last of the Stories_ shows us the
Hades of literary endeavor, the limbo of lost characters, presided over
by a large and luminous devil of fluent tongue. Kipling recognizes many
persons from fiction, and sees various tortures in process. All do
obeisance to the shade of Rabelais, the Master. Kipling is terrified by
the characters he himself has brought into being and begs to hide his
face from them. F. Marion Crawford gives us another glimpse of literary
eternity,[180] where the spirits of learned personages meet and
discuss life. A recent poem describes a meeting and dialogue in Hades
between Chaucer and Cressida.
[180] In _Among the Immortals_.
It is possibly Bernard Shaw who would be most liable to prosecution by
the devil for lèse-majesté, for in _Man and Superman_, Mine Host of
the Pit is represented as an affable gentleman who tries to make hell
attractive to his guests, and exercises not the least constraint on
their movements. They are free to leave him and go to heaven if they
like,--he only warns them that they will find it tiresome. He converses
with Don Juan and a couple of other blasé mortals, uttering Shavian
iconoclasms with an air of courteous boredom. He is very different from
the sinister personage of conventional fiction.
Mark Twain has given humorous views of heaven in his _Extract from
Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven_. A bluff, hearty old salt finds
the celestial regions very different from the traditional descriptions
of them. The heavenly citizens are a polite set, wishful for him to do
what he likes, yet he tires of the things he thought paradise consisted
of, lays aside his harp and crown, and takes his wings off for greater
ease. He finds his pleasures in the meeting of an occasional patriarch,
or prophet, and the excitement of the entry of a converted bartender
from Jersey City. He changes his views on many points, saying for
instance, "I begin to see a man's got to be in his own heaven to be
happy," and again, "Happiness ain't a thing in itself,--it's only a
contrast with something that ain't pleasant." Again Sandy, his friend,
says, "I wish there was something _in_ that miserable Spiritualism so
we could send the folks word about it."
Something of the same combination of humor and earnestness is found in
Nicholas Vachell Lindsay's poem, _General William Booth Enters into
Heaven_.
"Booth led boldly with his big bass drum,
_Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?_
The saints smiled gravely as they said, 'He's come.'
_Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?_
(Bass drums)
Walking lepers followed, rank on rank,
Lurching bravos from the ditches dank,
Drabs from the alley-ways and drug-fiends pale
Minds still passion-ridden, soul-power frail!
Vermin-eaten saints with mouldy breath,
Unwashed legions with the ways of death,--
_Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?_
(Reverently sung--no instruments)
And while Booth halted by the curb for prayer
He saw his Master through the flag-filled air.
Christ came gently with a robe and crown
For Booth the soldier, while the crowd knelt down.
He saw King Jesus--they were face to face--
And he knelt a-weeping in that holy place.
_Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?_"
This combination of realism with idealism, of homely details with
celestial symbolism, is also seen in another recent poem, _The Man with
the Pigeons_, by William Rose Benet, who shows us two pictures, the
first of a tramp in Madison Square Garden, who loves the pigeons and
has them ever clustering around him in devotion. The next is of heaven,
with the celestial gardens, where among the goldhaired angels the old
tramp stands at home, still wearing his rusty shoes and battered derby
hat. The quaint commingling of fancy and fact reminds us of Hannele's
dreams of heaven, in Hauptmann's _Hannele_, where the schoolmaster is
confused with the angels, and heaven and the sordid little room are
somehow united.
H. G. Wells, in _A Wonderful Visit_ shows us another side of the
picture, for he draws an angel down and lets him tell the citizens
of the earth of the land he comes from. I make no attempt in this
discussion to decide concerning the personality of angels, whether
they are the spirits of the just made perfect or pre-Adamite creatures
that never were and never could be man. For the present purpose, they
are simply angels. This book of Wells's is an example of the satiric
treatment of heaven and earth that constitutes a special point of
importance in the modern supernaturalism. It is a social satire, and
a burlesque on the formal and insincere manifestations of religion.
A vicar takes a pot shot at what he supposes is a rare bird, seeing
a rainbow flash in the sky,--but instead, an angel comes tumbling
down with a broken wing. This thrusts him upon the vicar as a guest
for some time, and introduces complications in the village life. The
parishioners do not believe in angels save in stained glass windows
or in church on Sunday, and they make life difficult for the vicar
and his guest. The angel shows a human sense of humor, that quaint
philosophy of the incongruous which is the basis of all true humor,
and his naïve comments on earthly conventions, his smiling wonder at
the popular misconceptions in regard to his heaven--to which he is
surprised to learn that mortals are thought to go, since he says he has
never seen any there--make him a lovable character. But village custom
compels him to fold his shining wings under a coat till he looks like a
hunch-back, put boots on so that he "has hoofs like a hippogrif," as he
plaintively says to the vicar, and he finds conformity to convention a
painful process. The novel ends sadly, symbolizing the world's stupid
harshness, for the angel is sent away from the village as unworthy to
live among the people, and his heart is almost broken.
The same type of humor and satire may be found in James Stephens's
_The Demi-Gods_, and in Anatole France's, _The Revolt of the Angels_.
Stephens's novel contains an insert of a short story of heaven
previously published, which depicts a preliminary skirmish in heaven
over a coin a corpse has had left in his hand and has taken to eternity
with him. In each novel several angels come tumbling down from
heaven and take up earthly life as they find it, engaging in affairs
not considered angelic. Stephens, in addition to the two fighting
celestials, gives us an archangel, a seraph, and a cherub. There is
in both stories a certain embarrassment over clothes, the fallen ones
arriving in a state of nudity. The necessity for donning earthly
garments, the removal of the wings, and the adaptation to human life
furnish complication and interest, with the added feminine element,
though Stephens's novel is not marred by the unclean imaginings of
Anatole France.
The revolters in the French novel take up Parisian life, while
Stephens's angelic trio join an itinerant tinker and his daughter
who are journeying aimlessly about, accompanied by a cart and a
sad-eyed philosopher, an ass. They engage in activities and joys not
conventionally archangelic, such as smoking corn-cob pipes, eating cold
potatoes, and, when necessary, stealing the potatoes. The contrasts
between heavenly ideas and Irish tramp life are inimitable. At last
when the three, having decided to go back to heaven, don their wings
and crowns and say good-bye, the cherub turns back for one more word
of farewell with Mary. Seeing her tears over his going, he tears his
shining wings to shreds and casts them from him, electing to stay on
earth with the tinker's cart, for the sake of love. It is really quite
a demi-god-like thing to do.
Unlike France's book, which is a blasting satire on religion, these
two English novels are amusing, with a certain measure of satire, yet
with a whimsicality that does not antagonize. France's angels remain on
earth and become more corrupt than men, and Wells's wonderful visitor
is banished from the village as an undesirable alien. Stephens's
archangel and seraph go back to heaven after their vacation, while
the cherub turns his back on immortal glory rather than break a
woman's heart. In all three of these books we notice the same leveling
tendency shown in characterization of the angels that we have observed
heretofore in the case of ghosts and devils, werewolves, and witches.
The angels are human, with charming personality and a piquant sense
of humor, whose attempts to understand mortal conventions reveal the
essential absurdity of earthly ideas in many instances. The three
taken together constitute an interesting case of literary parallelism
and it would be gratifying to discover whether France was influenced
by Wells and Stephens, or Stephens by Wells and France,--but in any
event Wells can prove a clear alibi as to imitation, since his novel
appeared a number of years before the others. The possible inspiration
for all of these in Byron's _Heaven and Earth_ suggests an interesting
investigation. A more recent story, _The Ticket-of-Leave Angel_,
brings an angel down to a New York apartment, where he has peculiar
experiences and illustrates a new type of angelic psychology. The
tendency to satirize immortality has crept even into poetry, for in a
recent volume by Rupert Brooke there are several satiric studies. One,
entitled _On Certain Proceedings of the Psychical Research Society_,
ridicules the idea that spirits would return to earth to deliver the
trivial messages attributed to them, and another, _Heaven_, is a
vitriolic thrust at the hope of a better life after death, sneering at
it with unpleasant imagery.
One of the recent instances of satiric pictures of the hereafter is
Lord Dunsany's _The Glittering Gate_, a one-act drama, where Bill
and Jim, two burglars, crack the gate of heaven to get in. Sardonic
laughter sounds while they are engaged in the effort to effect an
entrance, and wondering what heaven will be like. Bill thinks that his
mother will be there.
"I don't know if they want a good mother in there who would be kind
to the angels and sit and smile at them when they sing, and soothe
them if they were cross. (Suddenly) Jim, they won't have brought me
up against her, will they?"
Jim: "It would be just like them to. Very like them."
When the glittering gate of heaven swings open and the two toughs enter
eagerly, they find nothing--absolutely nothing but empty space, and the
sardonic laughter sounds in their ears. Bill cries out, "It is just
like them! Very like them"!
Was not this suggested by Rupert Brooke's poem, _Failure_?
In the stories treating satirically or humorously of the future life we
find the purpose in reality to be to image this life by illustration
of the other. Eternity is described in order that we may understand
time a little better. Angels and devils are made like men, to show
mortal potentialities either way. The absurdities of mankind are
illustrated as seen by angel eyes, the follies as satirized by devils.
The tendency now is to treat supernatural life humorously, satirically
or symbolically, rather than with the conventional methods of the past.
Commonplace treatment of great subjects is liable to be unsatisfactory,
and any serious treatment, other than symbolically simple, of heaven or
hell seems flat after Dante and Milton.
In considering these various types of stories dealing with supernatural
life, whether continued beyond the mortal span on earth, renewed by
reincarnation, or taken up in another world after death, we find that
several facts seem to appear with reference to the type chosen for
treatment by men as distinct from women, and _vice versa_. So far as my
search has gone, I have found no instance in English literature where a
woman has used either the motif of the Wandering Jew or the Elixir of
Life. I do not say that no such instances exist, but I have not found
them. Carmen Sylva is the only woman I know of at all who has taken up
the characterization of the Wandering Jew. On the other hand, women
write often of heaven, most of the stories of conventional ideas of
heaven being by women. Where men have pictured heaven or hell they have
done it for the most part humorously, satirically or symbolically. They
seem to curve round the subject rather than to approach it directly.
Yet where it is a question of continuing life here in this world, by
means of an elixir or other method, or as an ever-living being like the
Jew, men have used the theme frequently. Since fiction does reflect
our thought-life and our individual as well as racial preferences, the
conclusions that might be drawn, if one were sure of their basis, would
be interesting. Can it be that men are more deeply interested in this
life on earth and cling to it in thought more tenaciously than women,
and that women are more truly citizens of the other world? Are men
skeptical of the existence of any but a satiric or symbolic heaven, or
merely doubtful of reaching there?