Supernatural Science
The application of modern science to supernaturalism, or of the
supernatural to modern science, is one of the distinctive features
of recent literature. Ghostly fiction took a new and definite turn
with the rapid advance in scientific knowledge and investigation in
the latter part of the nineteenth century, for the work of Darwin,
Spencer, Huxley, and their co-laborers did as much to quicken thought
in romance as in other lines. Previous literature had made but scant
effort to reflect even the crude science of the times, and what
was written was so unconvincing that it made comparatively little
impress. Almost the only science that Gothic fiction dealt with, to
any noticeable extent, was associated with alchemy and astrology. The
alchemist sought the philosopher's stone and the elixir of life while
the astrologer tried to divine human destiny by the stars. Zofloya
dabbled in diabolic chemistry, and Frankenstein created a man-monster
that was noteworthy as an incursion into supernatural biology, yet
they are almost isolated instances. Now each advance in science has
had its reflection in supernatural fiction and each phase of research
contributes plot material, while some of the elements once considered
wholly of the devil are now scientific. The sorcerer has given place
to the bacteriologist and the botanist, the marvels of discovery have
displaced miracles as basis for unearthly plot material, and it is
from the laboratory that the ghostly stories are now evolved, rather
than from the vault and charnel-room as in the past. Science not only
furnishes extraordinary situations for curdling tales, but it is an
excellent hook to hang supernatural tales upon, for it gives an excuse
for believing anything, however incredible. Man is willing to accept
the impossible, if he be but given a modern excuse for it. He will
swallow the wildest improbability if the bait be labeled science or
psychical research. No supernaturalism is incredible if it is expressed
in technical terminology, and no miracle will be rejected if its
setting be in a laboratory. One peculiar thing about modern scientific
thought in its reaction upon fiction is that it is equally effective in
realism, such as shown in the naturalistic novels of Zola, the plays
of Brieux and others, and in supernaturalism, as in the work of H. G.
Wells, for instance, where the ghostly is grafted on to cold realism.
The transition from the sorcerer, the wizard, the warlock of older
fiction to the scientist in the present has been gradual. The sorcerer
relied wholly upon supernatural, chiefly diabolic, agencies for his
power, while the wizard of the modern laboratory applies his knowledge
of molecules and gases to aid his supermortal forces. Modern science
itself seems miraculous, so its employment in ghostly stories is
but natural. The _Arabian Nights' Tales_ seem not more marvelous
than the stories of modern investigations. Hawthorne's narratives
stand between the old and the new types of science, his Rappaccini,
Dr. Heidigger, Gaffer Dolliver, Septimius Felton and his rivals in
search for the elixir of youth, as well as the husband who sought to
efface the birthmark from his young wife's cheek, being related in
theme to the older conventional type and in treatment to the new.
Poe's scientific stories are more modern in method and material, and
in fact he made claim of originality of invention for the idea of
making fiction plausible by the use of scientific laws. His _Descent
into the Maelstrom_, _MS. Found in a Bottle_, and other stories were
novel in the manner in which they united the scientifically real and
the supernatural. _The Pit and the Pendulum_, with its diabolical
machinery, is akin to the modern mechanistic stories rather than to
anything that had preceded it. Poe paved the way for H. G. Wells's use
of the ghostly mechanical and scientific narratives, as his stories
of hypnotism with its hideous aftermath of horror must have given
suggestion for Arthur Machen's revolting stories of physical operations
with unearthly consequences. An example of the later manifestations of
supernaturalism in connection with science is in Sax Rohmer's tales
of Fu-Manchu, the Chinese terror, the embodied spirit of an ancient
evil that entered into him at his birth, because of his nearness to an
old burying-ground, and who, to his unholy alliance unites a wizard
knowledge of modern science in its various aspects. With every power of
cunning and intellect intensified, with a technical knowledge of all
means with which to fight his enemies, he ravages society as no mere
sorcerer of early fiction could do.
The modern stories of magic have a skillful power of suggestiveness,
being so cunningly contrived that on the surface they seem plausible
and natural, with nothing supernatural about them. Yet behind this
seeming simplicity lurks a mystery, an unanswered question, an unsolved
problem. W. W. Jacobs's _The Monkey's Paw_, for instance, is one of
the most effectively terrible stories of magic that one could conceive
of. The shriveled paw of a dead monkey, that is believed by some to
give its possessor the right to have three wishes granted, becomes the
symbol of inescapable destiny, the Weird, or Fate of the old tragedy,
though the horrors that follow upon the wishes' rash utterance _may_
be explained on natural grounds. The insidious enigma is what makes the
story unforgettable. Barry Pain's _Exchange_ might be given as another
example of problematic magic that owes its power to elusive mystery.
The witch-woman, the solitary Fate, who appears to persons offering
them such dreadful alternatives, might be conceived of as the figment
of sick brains, yet the reader knows that she is not.
Richard Middleton's _The Coffin Merchant_ seems simple enough on the
surface, and the literal-minded could explain the occurrence on normal
grounds, yet the story has a peculiar haunting supernaturalism. A
coffin merchant claims to be able to know who among passers-by will die
soon, and hands a man an advertisement for a coffin, asserting that he
will need it. The man later goes to the shop to rebuke the merchant
for his methods but ends by signing a contract for his own funeral. On
leaving, he shakes hands with the dealer, after which he unconsciously
puts his hand to his lips, feeling a slight sting. He dies that
night,--of what? Of poison, of fear, of supernatural suggestion, or in
the natural course of events? The series called _The Strange Cases of
Dr. Stanchion_, by Josephine Daskam Bacon, shows instances occurring
among the clientele of a famous brain specialist, where the materialist
might put aside the explanation of the supernatural, only to be
confronted by still greater problems. The relation between insanity and
ghostliness in recent fiction is significant and forms the crux of many
a story since Poe. Mrs. Bacon's _The Miracle_, for instance, has its
setting in an insane asylum, but the uncanny happenings almost convince
us of the sanity of the patients and the paranoia of the outsiders. We
come to agree with the specialist that every person is more or less a
paranoiac, and none more so than he who scoffs at the supernatural.
Another aspect of the transfer of magic in modern fiction to a
scientific basis is that of second sight or supernatural vision. This
motif still retains all its former effect of the unearthly, perhaps
gaining more, since the scientific twist seems to give the idea that
the ghostly power resides in the atoms and molecules and gases and
machines themselves, rather than in the person who manipulates them,
which is more subtly haunting in its impression. Second sight has been
used as a means for producing uncanny effects all along the line of
fiction. Defoe even used it in a number of his hoax pamphlets, as well
as in his _History of Duncan Campbell_, and folk-lore is full of such
stories, especially in the Highlands.
The modern use of supernatural vision is based apparently on natural
science, which makes the weird power more striking. _The Black Patch_,
by Randolph Hartley, tells of an experiment in optics that produces a
strange result. Two students exchange left eyeballs for the purpose
of studying the effects of the operation, leaving the right eye in
each case unimpaired. When the young men recover from the operation
and the bandages are removed, they discover that an extraordinary
thing has taken place. The first, while seeing with his right eye
his own surroundings as usual, sees also with his left--which is his
friend's left, that is--what that friend is looking at with his right
eye, thousands of miles away. The severing of the optic nerve has not
disturbed the sympathetic vision between the companion eyes, so this
curious double sight results. In a quarrel arising from this peculiar
situation, the first man kills the second, and sees on his left eye the
hideous image of his own face distorted with murderous rage, as his
friend saw it, which is never to be effaced, because the companion eye
is dead and will see no more.
Another instance of farsightedness is told in John Kendrick Bangs's
_The Speck on the Lens_, where a man has such an extraordinary left
eye that when he looks through a lens he sees round the world, and gets
a glimpse of the back of his own head which he thinks is a speck on the
lens. Only two men in the world are supposed to have that power.
_The Remarkable Case of Davidson's Eyes_, by H. G. Wells, is an
interesting example of this new scientific transference of magic
vision. Davidson is working in a laboratory which is struck by
lightning, and after the shock he finds himself unable to visualize
his surroundings, but instead sees the other side of the world, ships,
a sea, sands. The explanation given by a professor turns on learned
theories of space and the Fourth Dimension. He thinks that Davidson,
in stooping between the poles of the electro-magnet, experienced a
queer twist in his mental retinal elements through the sudden force
of the lightning. As the author says: "It sets one dreaming of the
oddest possibilities of intercommunication in the future, of spending
an intercalary five minutes on the other side of the world, of being
watched in our most secret operations by unexpected eyes." Davidson's
vision comes back queerly, for he begins to see the things around him
by piecemeal, as apparently the two fields of vision overlap for a time.
Brander Matthews in _The Kinetoscope of Time_ introduces an instrument
with eyepieces that show magic vision. The beholder sees scenes from
the past, from literature as well as from life, has glimpses of Salome
dancing, of Esmerelda, witnesses the combat between Achilles and
Hector, the tourney between Saladin and the Knight of the Leopard. The
magician offers to show him his future--for a price--but he is wise
enough to refuse.
Magic views of the future constitute an interesting aspect of the
supernatural vision in modern stories. _The Lifted Veil_, by George
Eliot, is an account of a man who has prophetic glimpses of his fate,
which seem powerless to warn him, since he marries the woman who
he knows will be his doom, and he is aware that he will die alone,
deserted even by his servants, yet cannot help it. He sees himself
dying, with the attendants off on their own concerns, knows every
detail beforehand, but unavailingly. This suggests _Amos Judd_, by
J. A. Mitchell, which is a curious instance of the transition stage of
second sight, related both to the old sorcerer type and to the new
scientific ideas. Amos Judd, so called, is the son of an Indian rajah,
sent out of his country because of a revolution, and brought up in
ignorance of his birth in a New England farmhouse. Vishnu, in the far
past, has laid his finger on the brow of one of the rajah's ancestors,
thereby endowing him with the gift of magic vision, which descends
once in a hundred years to some one of his line. Amos Judd therefore,
can see the future by pictures, beholding clearly everything that will
happen to him. He sees himself lying dead at a desk, on which stands a
calendar marking the date, November 4th. His friends persuade him to
live past the date, and they think all is well, till one day while he
is on a visit to a strange house he is killed by an assassin. They find
him lying at a desk, with an out-of-date calendar beside him, marking
November 4th.
Barry Pain endows a bulldog with the power to foretell the future, to
reveal disaster and oppose it. Zero, in the story by that name, is a
common bulldog greatly valued because he has a supernatural knowledge
of any evil that threatens those he loves, and by his canine sagacity
he forestalls fate. In the end, in protecting his master's little
child, he is bitten by a mad dog, whose coming he has supernaturally
foreseen, and he commits suicide as the only way out of the difficulty.
Arthur Machen, in _The Bowmen and Others_, tells varied stories of
supernatural vision associated with the war.
_The Door in the Wall_, by H. G. Wells, depicts a man who in his
dreamy childhood wanders into a secret garden where he is shown the
book of his past and future, but who afterwards is unable to find the
door by which he enters, though he seeks it often. Later in life,
at several times when he is in a special haste to reach some place
for an important appointment, he sees the door, but does not enter.
Finally he goes in to his death. This is an instance of the suggestive
supernaturalism associated with dreams and visions.
The use of mirrors in supernatural vision is significant and appears
in a number of ways in modern fiction. Scott's _My Aunt Margaret's
Mirror_ is an early instance, where the magician shows the seeker
a glass wherein she sees what is taking place in another country,
sees her husband on his way to the altar with another woman, sees a
stranger stop the marriage, and witnesses the fatal duel. Hawthorne
has used mirrors extensively as symbolic of an inner vision, of a look
into the realities of the soul. For instance, when poor Feathertop,
the make-believe man, the animated scarecrow, looks into the mirror
he sees not the brave figure the world beholds in him, but the thing
of sticks and straw, the sham that he is, as the minister shrinks
from the mirrored reflection of the black veil, symbol of mystery
that he wears. Hawthorne elsewhere speaks of Echo as the voice of the
reflection in a mirror, and says that our reflections are ghosts of
ourselves. Mr. Titbottom, in George William Curtis's _Prue and I_,
who has the power of seeing into the souls of human beings by means
of his magic spectacles and catching symbolic glimpses of what they
are instead of what they appear to be, beholds himself in a mirror
and shrinks back aghast from the revelation of his own nature. Barry
Pain's story, referred to in another connection, shows a mirror wherein
a supernatural visitant reveals to a young man the supreme moments of
life, his own and those of others, pictures of the highest moments of
ecstasy or despair, of fulfillment of dear dreams.
_The Silver Mirror_, by A. Conan Doyle, represents a man alone night
after night, working with overstrained nerves on a set of books, who
sees in an antique mirror a strange scene re-enacted and finds later
that the glass has once belonged to Mary, Queen of Scots, and that
he has seen the murder of Rizzio. Brander Matthews also has a story
concerned with re-created images in an old mirror. The looking-glass
in fiction seems to be not only a sort of hand conscience, as Markheim
calls it, but a betrayer of secrets, a revealer of the forgotten past,
a prophet of the future as well. It is also a strange symbol to show
hearts as they are in reality, reflecting the soul rather than the
body. It is employed in diverse ways and is an effective means of
supernatural suggestion, of ghostly power.
The Fourth Dimension is another motif that seems to interest the
writers of recent ghostly tales. They make use of it in various
ways and seem to have different ideas concerning it, but they like
to play with the thought and twist it to their whim. Ambrose Bierce
has a collection of stories dealing with mysterious disappearances,
in which he tells of persons who are transferred from the known,
calculable space to some "non-Euclidean space" where they are lost.
In some strange pockets of nowhere they fall, unable to see or to be
seen, to hear or to be heard, neither living nor dying, since "in that
space is no power of life or of death." It is all very mysterious and
uncanny. He uses the theme as the basis for a number of short stories
of ghostly power, which offer no solution but leave the mystery in the
air. In some of these stories Bierce represents the person as crying
out, and being heard, but no help can go, because he is invisible and
intangible, not knowing where he is nor what has happened to him. H. G.
Wells, in _The Plattner Case_, which shows an obvious influence of
Bierce, gives a similar case. He explains the extraordinary happenings
by advancing the theory that Plattner has changed sides. According to
mathematics, he says, we are told that the only way in which the right
and left sides of a solid body can be changed is by taking that body
clean out of space as we know it, out of ordinary existence, that is,
and turning it somewhere outside space. Plattner has been moved out
into the Fourth Dimension and been returned to the world with a curious
inversion of body. He is absent from the world for nine days and has
extraordinary experiences in the Other-World. This happens through an
explosion in the laboratory where he is working, similarly to Wells's
story of Davidson, where the infringement on the Fourth Dimension is
the result of a lightning stroke.
Mary Wilkins Freeman deals with the Fourth Dimension in _The Hall
Bedroom_, where the boarder drifts off into unknown space, never to
return, from gazing at a picture on the wall, as has happened in the
case of previous occupants of the room. Richard Middleton employs
the same idea in a story of a conjurer who nightly plays a trick in
public, causing his wife to seem to disappear into space. One night she
actually does so vanish, never to be seen again. Other instances of the
form may be found in recent fiction. H. G. Wells uses the theme with
a different twist in his _Time Machine_. Here the scientist insists
that time is the Fourth Dimension, that persons who talk of the matter
ordinarily have no idea of what it is, but that he has solved it. He
constructs a machine which enables him to project himself into the
future or into the past, and sees what will happen or what has happened
in other centuries. He lives years in the space of a few moments
and has amazing adventures on his temporal expeditions. But finally
the Fourth Dimension, which may be thought of as a terrible Fate or
inescapable destiny awaiting all who dally with it, gets him too, for
he fails to return from one of his trips. Another story tells of a man
who by drinking quantities of green tea could project himself into the
Fourth Dimension.
A number of stories of scientific supernaturalism are concerned with
glimpses into the future. _The Time Machine_, just mentioned, with
its invasions of the unknown space and time, its trips into eternity
by the agency of a miraculous vehicle, illustrates the method. The
scientist finds that he can travel backwards or forwards, accelerating
or retarding his speed as he will, and get a section of life in any age
he wishes. He discovers that in the future which he visits many reforms
have been inaugurated, preventive medicine established, noxious weeds
eradicated, and yet strange conditions exist. Mankind has undergone
a two-fold involution, the soft conditions of life having caused the
higher classes to degenerate into flabby beings of no strength, while
an underground race has grown up of horrible depraved nature, blind
from living in subterranean passages, cannibalistic while the others
are vegetarian. The lower classes are like hideous apes, while the
higher are effeminate, relaxed. The traveler escapes a dire fate only
by rushing to his machine and returning to his own time. Samuel Butler
suggests that machines will be the real rulers in the coming ages, that
man will be preserved only to feed and care for the machines which
will have attained supernatural sensibility and power. He says that
mechanisms will acquire feelings and tastes and culture, and that man
will be the servant of steel and steam in the future, instead of master
as now; that engines will wed and rear families which men, as slaves,
must wait upon.
Frank R. Stockton[197] gives another supernatural scientific glimpse
into the future, showing as impossibilities certain things that have
since come to pass, while some of the changes prophesied as imminent
are yet unrealized and apparently far from actualities. Jack London's
_Scarlet Plague_ pictures the earth returned to barbarism, since most
of the inhabitants have been swept away by a scourge and the others
have failed to carry on the torch of civilization. H. G. Wells[198]
gives account of a tour into futurity, wherein the miracles of modern
science work revolutions in human life, and[199] he satirizes society,
showing a topsy-turvy state of affairs in A.D. 2100. His _Dream of
Armageddon_ is a story of futurity wherein a man has continuous
visions of what his experiences will be in another life far in the
future. That life becomes more real to him than his actual existence,
and he grows indifferent to events taking place around him while
rent with emotion over the griefs to come in another age. Of course,
Edward Bellamy's _Looking Backward_, with its social and mechanistic
miracles that now seem flat and tame to us, might be said to be the
father of most of these modern prophecies of scientific futurity.
Samuel Butler's _Erewhon_ contains many elements of impossibility in
relation to life, and is a satire on society, though perhaps not,
strictly speaking, supernatural. These prophecies of the time to come
are in the main intended as social satires, as symbolic analyses of
the weaknesses of present life. They evince vivid imagination and much
ingenuity in contriving the mechanisms that are to transform life, yet
they are not examples of great fiction. Mark Twain reverses the type
in his _Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court_, for he shows a
man of the present taking part in the life of the far past, managing
to parody both mediævalism and the Yankee character at once. H. G.
Wells is particularly interested in studying the unused forces of the
world and fancying what would happen under other conditions. His play
of scientific speculation has produced many stories that he does not
greatly value now himself, but which are of interest as showing certain
tendencies of fiction.
[197] In _The Great Stone of Sardis_.
[198] In _A Story of Days to Come_.
[199] In _When the Sleeper Wakes_.
* * * * *
Views of other planets form a feature of modern supernaturalism, for
the writer now sets his stories not only on earth, in heaven, and in
hell but on other worlds besides. The astrologer of ancient fiction,
with his eye fixed ever on the stars, seeking to discern their
influence on human destiny, appears no more among us. He has been
replaced by the astronomer who scans the stars yet with a different
purpose in fiction. He wishes to find out the life of citizens of
other planets rather than to figure out the fate of mortals on the
earth. Many stories of modern times cause new planets to swim into our
literary ken and describe their citizens with ease. H. G. Wells stars
here as elsewhere. In his _War of the Worlds_ he depicts a struggle
between the earth people and the Martians, in which many supernatural
elements enter. The people of Mars are a repulsive horde of creatures,
yet they have wonderful organization and command of resources, and
they conquer the earth to prey upon it. This book has suffered the
inevitable parody.[200] In _The Crystal Egg_, Wells describes a curious
globe in which the gazer can see scenes reflected from Mars. The author
suggests two theories as to the possibility of this,--either that
the crystal is in both worlds at once, remaining stationary in one
and moving in the other, and that it reflects scenes in Mars so that
they are visible on earth, or else that by a peculiar sympathy with
a companion globe on the other planet it shows on its surface what
happens in the other world. It is hinted that the Martians have sent
the crystal to the earth in order that they might catch glimpses of our
life.
[200] In _The War of the Wenuses_, by C. L. Graves and E. V.
Lucas.
In _The Star_, Wells gives yet another story of the future, of other
planetary influences. By the passing of a strange star, life on earth
is convulsed and conditions radically changed. These conditions are
observed by the astronomers on Mars, who are beings different from
men, yet very intelligent. They draw conclusions as to the amount of
damage done to the earth, satirizing human theories as to Mars. _The
Days of the Comet_ shows earthly life changed by the passing of a
comet, but instead of the destruction described in the other story, the
social conditions are vastly improved and a millennium is ushered in.
Wells[201] makes a voyage to the moon possible by the discovery of a
substance which resists gravity. Other instances might be given, for
there has been no lack of lunar literature, but they are not usually
worth much.
[201] In _The First Men in the Moon_.
Du Maurier's _The Martian_, which combines the elements of
metempsychosis, automatic writing, and dream-supernaturalism, with the
idea of ghostly astronomy, tells of a supernatural visitant from Mars.
The Martian is a young woman whose spirit comes to inhabit a young
man to whom she dictates wonderful books in his dreams. She writes
letters to him in a sort of private code, in which she tells of her
previous incarnations on Mars, of the Martians who are extraordinary
amphibious beings, descended from a small sea animal. They have unusual
acuteness of senses with an added sixth sense, a sort of orientation,
a feeling of a magnetic current, which she imparts to her protégé,
Barty Joscelyn. Jack London[202] tells a story of interplanetary
metempsychosis, where the central character, a prisoner in San Quentin,
finds himself able to will his body to die at times, thus releasing
his spirit to fly through space and relive its experiences in previous
incarnations.
[202] In _The Star Rover_.
Barry Pain's _The Celestial Grocery_ is a phantasy of insanity and the
supernatural, with its setting on two planets. It contains a cab horse
that talks and laughs, and other inversions of the natural. A man is
taken on a journey to another world, sees the stars and the earth in
space beneath him, and finds everything different from what he has
known before. People there have two bodies and send them alternately
to the wash, though they seldom wear them. The celestial shop sells
nothing concrete, only abstractions, emotions, experiences. One may
buy measures of love, requited or unselfishly hopeless, of political
success, of literary fame, or of power or what-not. Happiness is a
blend, however, for which one must mix the ingredients for himself. The
story is symbolic of the ideals of earth, with a sad, effective satire.
The end is insanity, leaving one wondering how much of it is pure
phantasy of a mad man's brain or how much actuality. It is reminiscent
of Hawthorne's Intelligence Office with its symbolic supernaturalism.
* * * * *
Hypnotism enters largely into the fiction of modern times. Hypnotism
may or may not be considered as supernatural, yet it borders so closely
on to the realm of the uncanny, and is so related to science of to-day
as well as to the sorcery of the past, that it should be considered in
this connection for it carries on the traditions of the supernatural.
In its earlier stages hypnotism was considered as distinctly diabolic,
used only for unlawful purposes, being associated with witchcraft. It
is only in more recent times that it has been rehabilitated in the
public mind and thought of as a science which may be used for helpful
ends. It is so mysterious in its power that it affords complications
in plenty for the novelist and has been utilized in various ways.
In some cases, as F. Marion Crawford's _The Witch of Prague_, it is
associated still with evil power and held as a black art. Unorna has an
unearthly power gained through hypnotism which is more than hypnotic,
and which she uses to further her own ends. Strange scientific ideas of
life and of death are seen here, and someone says of her: "You would
make a living mummy of a man. I should expect to find him with his
head cut off and living by means of a glass heart and thinking through
a rabbit's brain." She embalms an old man in a continuous hypnotic
lethargy, recalling him only at intervals to do mechanically the things
necessary to prolong life. She is trying to see if she can cause human
tissue to live forever in this embalmed state, hoping to learn through
it the secret of eternal life. This, of course, suggests Poe's stories
of the subject, _Mesmeric Revelations_ and _The Facts in the Case of
M. Waldemar_. The latter is one of the most revolting instances of
scientific supernaturalism, for the dying man is mesmerized in the
moment of death and remains in that condition, dead, yet undecaying,
and speaking, repeating with his horrible tongue the statement, "I am
dead." After seven months, further experiments break the spell, and
he, pleading to be allowed to be at peace in death, falls suddenly
away into a loathsome, liquid putrescence before the eyes of the
experimenters.
_The Portent_, by George MacDonald, is a curious study of hypnotic
influence, of a woman who is her true self only when in a
somnambulistic state. A supernatural connection of soul exists between
her and a youth born on the same day, and it is only through his
hypnotic aid that she gains her personality and sanity. James L. Ford
plays with the subject by having a group of persons in an evening party
submit themselves to be hypnotized in turn, each telling a true story
of his life while in that condition. W. D. Howells combines mesmerism
with spiritualism in his novel,[203] where the séances are really the
result of hypnotism rather than supernatural revelation as the medium
thinks. H. G. Wells has used this theme, as almost every other form of
scientific ghostliness, though without marked success. The prize story
of hypnotism, however, still remains Du Maurier's _Trilby_, for no
mesmerist in this fiction has been able to outdo Svengali.
[203] _The Undiscovered Country._
* * * * *
Uncanny chemistry forms the ingredient for many a modern story. The
alchemist was the favored feature of the older supernatural fiction of
science, and his efforts to discover the philosopher's stone and to
brew the magic elixir have furnished plots for divers stories. He does
not often waste his time in these vain endeavors in recent stories,
though his efforts have not altogether ceased, as we have seen in a
previous chapter. A. Conan Doyle[204] is among the last to treat the
theme, and makes the scientist find his efforts worse than useless,
for the research student finds that his discovery of the art of making
gold is disturbing the nice balance of nature and bringing injury to
those he meant to help, so he destroys his secret formula and dies.
_The Elixir of Youth_ illustrates the transference of power from the
sorcerer to the scientist, for the magician that gives the stranger a
potion to restore his youth tells him that he is not a sorcerer, not a
diabolic agent, but a scientist learning to utilize the forces that are
at the command of any intelligence.
[204] In _The Doings of Raffles Haw_.
Barry Pain's _The Love Philter_ is related both to the old and the new
types of supernatural chemistry. A man loves a woman who doesn't care,
so he asks aid of a wise woman, who gives him a potion that will surely
win the stubborn heart. As he lies asleep in the desert, on his way
back, he dreams that his love says to him that love gained by such
means is not love, so he pours the liquid on the sand. When he returns,
the woman tells him that she has been with him in his dreams and loves
him because he would not claim her wrongly. _Blue Roses_ is another of
his stories of magic that bring love to the indifferent. _Twilight_,
by Frank Danby, is a novel based on the relation between morphia and
the supernatural. A woman ill of nervous trouble, under the influence
of opiates, continually sees the spirit of a woman dead for years,
who relives her story before her eyes, so that the personalities are
curiously merged. This inevitably suggests De Quincey's _Confessions of
an English Opium-Eater_ with its dream-wonders, yet it has a power of
its own and the skillful blending of reality with dream-supernaturalism
and insanity has an uncanny distinction.
Fu-Manchu, the Chinese wonder-worker in Sax Rohmer's series of
stories bearing that name, is a representative example of the modern
use of chemistry for supernormal effect. He employs all the forces
of up-to-the-minute science to compass his diabolic ends and works
miracles of chemistry by seemingly natural methods. By a hypodermic
injection he can instantly drive a man to acute insanity incurable save
by a counter-injection which only Fu-Manchu can give, but which as
instantly restores the reason. By another needle he can cause a person
to die--to all intents and purposes, at least,--and after the body has
been buried for days he can restore it to life by another prick of the
needle. He terrorizes England by his infernal powers, killing off or
converting to slavery the leading intelligences that oppose him.
Stevenson's _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_ is perhaps the best-known
instance of chemical supernaturalism. Here the magic drug not only
changes the body, evolving from the respectable Dr. Jekyll his baser
self in the form of Mr. Hyde, enabling him to give rein to his criminal
instincts without bringing reproach on his reputation, but has the
subtle power to fix the personality of evil, so that each time the drug
is used Hyde is given a stronger force and Jekyll is weakened. This
fictive sermon on dual nature, the ascendence of evil over the nobler
soul if it be indulged, seems yet an appallingly real story of human
life. In a similar fashion Arthur Machen uses supernatural chemistry
most hideously in _The Three Impostors_, where a certain powder
perverts the soul, making man a sharer in the unspeakable orgies of
ancient evil forces.
_The Invisible Man_, by H. G. Wells, shows an unusual application of
chemistry to ghostly fiction that gives a peculiar effect of reality
because its style is that of scientific realism. By experimentation
with drugs a man finds a combination that will render living tissue
absolutely invisible. When he swallows a portion of it, he cannot be
seen. His clothes appear to be walking around by themselves and the
complications are uncanny. As one may see, the comic possibilities
are prominent and for a time we laugh over the mystification of the
persons with whom he comes in contact, but soon stark tragedy results.
During the man-chase, as the hunted creature seeks to escape, the
people hear the thud-thud of running steps, watch bloody footprints
form before their eyes, yet see nothing else. Here is a genuine thrill
that is new in fiction. The man gradually becomes visible, but only in
death is his dreadful figure seen completely again. This modern method
of transferring to science the idea of invisibility so prominent in
connection with ghosts, showing the invisibility as the result of a
chemical compound, not of supernatural intervention, affecting a living
man not a spirit, makes the effect of supernaturalism more vivid even
than in the case of ghosts.
These are only suggestions of the varied uses to which chemistry has
been put in producing ghostly plots and utilizing in novel ways the
conventional motifs of older stories. These themes are more popular now
than they would have been half a century ago because now the average
reader knows more about scientific facts and is better prepared to
appreciate them. A man ignorant of chemistry would care nothing for the
throes of Dr. Jekyll or the complicating experiences of the invisible
man, because he would have slight basis for his imagination to build
upon. Each widening of the popular intelligence and each branch of
science added to the mental store of the ordinary reader is a distinct
gain to fiction.
* * * * *
Supernatural biology looms large in modern fiction, though it is not
always easy to differentiate between the predominance of chemical and
biological motifs. In many cases the two are tangled up together, and
as, in the stories of dual personality and invisibility just mentioned,
one may not readily say which is uppermost, the biological or the
chemical side, for the experiments are of the effects of certain drugs
upon living human tissue. There are various similar instances in the
fiction of scientific supernaturalism. Hawthorne's _The Birthmark_ is
a case of chemical biology, where the husband seeking to remove by
powerful drugs the mark from his wife's cheek succeeds in doing so
but causes her death. Here the supernaturalism is symbolic, suggested
rather than boldly stated, as is usually the case with Hawthorne's work.
A. Conan Doyle in _The Los Amigos Fiasco_ shows supernaturalism based
on the effect of electricity on the body, for the lynchers in trying to
kill a man by connecting him with a dynamo succeed in so magnetizing
him that he can't be killed in any way. Sax Rohmer tells one Fu-Manchu
story of a mysterious murder committed by means of an imprisoned gas
that escapes from a mummy case and poisons those exposed to it, and, in
another, he introduces a diabolic red insect attracted by the scent of
a poisonous orchid, that bites the marked victim.
Wells's _The Island of Dr. Moreau_ is a ghastly study in vivisection.
Two scientists on a remote island with no other human inhabitants try
unspeakable experiments on animals, trying by pruning and grafting and
training the living tissue to make them human. They do succeed in a
measure, for they teach the beasts to talk and to observe a sort of
jungle law laid down by man, yet the effect is sickening. The animals
are not human and never can be, and these revolting experiments deprive
them of all animal dignity without adding any of the human. In the end
they revert to savagery, becoming even more bestial than before. The
most dreadful biological experiments in recent fiction are described in
Arthur Machen's volume of short stories, _The House of Souls_. In one
story an operation on the brain enables a victim to "see the great god
Pan," to have revelations of ancient supernaturalism wherein Pan and
the devil are united in one character. In another, a delicate cutting
of the brain removes the soul,--which takes the form of a wonderful
jewel,--and utterly diabolizes the character. These curious and
revolting stories are advanced instances of scientific diabolism and
leave a smear on the mind. They are more horrible than the creation of
Frankenstein's man-monster, for here moral monsters are evolved.
Medicated supernaturalism associated with prenatal influence occurs
in various stories where a supernormal twist is given because of some
event out of the ordinary. Ambrose Bierce's _The Eyes of the Panther_,
a story of a young woman who is a panther for part of the time as a
result of a shock, is associated with the snake nature of Elsie Venner.
Barry Pain's _The Undying Thing_ is one of the most horrible of such
complications, for because of a mother's fright over a pack of wolves
a monster is born, neither wolf nor human, neither animal nor man,
neither mortal nor immortal. It is hidden in a secret cave to die,
yet lives on, though not living, to fulfil a curse upon the ancient
house. A. Conan Doyle's _The Terror of Blue John Gap_ is a story of a
monstrous animal, like a bear yet bigger than an elephant, that ravages
the countryside. The theory for its being is that it is a survival, in
a subterranean cave, of a long-extinct type, from prehistoric times,
that comes out in its blindness to destroy. There are other examples of
supernormal animals in modern fiction, yet these suffice to illustrate
the _genre_.
* * * * *
Botany furnishes its ghostly plots in fiction as well as other branches
of science, for we have plant vampires and witches and devils. Trees
and flowers are highly psychic and run a gamut of emotions. Hawthorne
shows us supernatural plants in several of his novels and stories,
such as the mysterious plant growing from a secret grave, which has a
strange poisonous power, or the flowers from Gaffer Dolliver's garden
that shine like jewels and lend a glow to the living face near them,
when worn on a woman's breast. In _Rappaccini's Daughter_ the garden
is full of flowers of subtle poison, so insidious that their venom
has entered into the life of the young girl, rendering her a living
menace to those around her. She is the victim of her father's dæmonic
experiments in the effects of poison on the human body, and her kiss
means death. Algernon Blackwood[205] tells of the uncanny power of
motion and emotion possessed by the trees, where the forest exercises a
magnetic force upon human beings sympathetic to them, going out after
men and luring them to their fate. He describes the cedar as friendly
to man and attempting but in vain to protect him from the creeping
malignant power of the forest.
[205] In _The Man whom the Trees Loved_.
Fu-Manchu, Sax Rohmer's Chinese horror, performs various experiments
in botany to further his dreadful ends. He develops a species of
poisonous fungi till they become giant in size and acquire certain
powers through being kept in the darkness. When a light is turned on
them, the fungi explode, turning loose, on the men he would murder,
fumes that drive them mad. From the ceiling above are released ripe
spores of the giant Empusa, for the air in the second cellar, being
surcharged with oxygen, makes them germinate instantly. They fall like
powdered snow upon the victims and the horrible fungi grow magically,
spreading over the writhing bodies of the mad-men and wrapping them
in ghostly shrouds. In _The Flower of Silence_ he describes a strange
orchid that has the uncanny habit of stinging or biting when it is
broken or roughly handled, sending forth a poison that first makes a
man deaf then kills him. Fu-Manchu introduces this flower into the
sleeping-rooms of those he wishes to put out of the way, and sends them
into eternal silence. _The Flowering of the Strange Orchid_, by H. G.
Wells, is the story of a murderous plant, a vampire that kills men in
the jungle, and in a greenhouse in England sends out its tentacles
that grip the botanist, drinking his blood and seeking to slay him.
This orchid has the power to project its vampiric attacks when it
is a shriveled bulb or in the flower. This reminds us of Algernon
Blackwood's story of the vampire soil, which after its psychic orgy
burst into loathsome luxuriant bloom where before it had been barren.
It is a curious heightening of supernatural effect to give to beautiful
flowers diabolical cunning and murderous motives, to endow them with
human psychology and devilish designs. The magic associated with botany
is usually black instead of white. One wonders if transmigration of
soul does not enter subconsciously into these plots, and if a vampire
orchid is not a trailing off of a human soul, the murderous blossom
a revenge ghost expressing himself in that way. The plots in this
type of fiction are wrought with much imagination and the scientific
exactness combined with the supernatural gives a peculiar effect of
reality.
* * * * *
There are varied forms of supernatural science that do not come under
any of the heads discussed. The applications of research to weird
fiction are as diverse as the phases of investigation and only a few
may be mentioned to suggest the variety of themes employed. Inversion
of natural laws furnishes plots,--as in Frank R. Stockton's _Tale of
Negative Gravity_ with its discovery of a substance that enables a man
to save himself all fatigue by means of a something that inverts the
law of gravity. With a little package in his pocket a man can climb
mountains without effort, but the discoverer miscalculates the amount
of energy required to move and finally rises instead of staying on the
earth, till his wife has to fish him into the second-story window.
Poe's _Loss of Breath_ illustrates another infringement of a natural
law, as do several stories where a human being loses his shadow.
In _The Diamond Lens_, Fitz-James O'Brien tells of a man who looking
at a drop of water through a giant microscope sees in the drop a
lovely woman with whom he falls madly in love, only to watch her fade
away under the lens as his despairing eyes see the water evaporate.
Supernatural acoustics enters[206] in the story of a man who discovers
the sound-center in an opera house and reads the unspoken thoughts
of those around him. He applies the laws of acoustics to mentality
and spirituality, making astounding discoveries. Bram Stoker combines
superstition with modern science in his books, as[207] where Oriental
magic is used to fight the encroachments of an evil force emanating
from a mummy, as also to bring the mummy to life, while a respirator is
employed to keep away the subtle odor. He brings in blood transfusion
together with superstitious symbols, to combat the ravages of
vampires.[208] Blood transfusion also enters into supernaturalism in
Stephen French Whitney's story, where a woman who has been buried in a
glacier for two thousand years is recalled to life.
[206] In _The Spider's Eye_, by Lucretia P. Hale.
[207] In _The Jewel of Seven Stars_.
[208] In _Dracula_.
_The Human Chord_, by Algernon Blackwood, is a novel based on the
psychic values of sounds, which claims that sounds are all powerful,
are everything,--for forms, shapes, bodies are but vibratory activities
of sound made visible. The research worker here believes that he who
has the power to call a thing by its proper name is master of that
thing, or of that person, and that to be able to call the name of Deity
would be to enable one to become as God. He seeks to bring together
a human chord, four persons in harmony as to voice and soul, who can
pronounce the awful name and become divine with him. He can change
the form or the nature of anything by calling its name, as a woman is
deformed by mispronunciation, and the walls of a room expanded by his
voice. He can make of himself a dwarf or a giant at will, by different
methods of speaking his own name. He says that sound could re-create
or destroy the universe. He has captured sounds that strain at their
leashes in his secret rooms, gigantic, wonderful. But in the effort
to call upon the mighty Name he mispronounces it, bringing a terrible
convulsion of nature which destroys him. The beholders see an awful
fire in which Letters escape back to heaven in chariots of flame.
Psychology furnishes some interesting contributions to recent fiction
along the line of what might be called momentary or instantaneous
plots. Ambrose Bierce's _The Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge_ is a good
example,--where a man is being hanged and in the instant between the
drop from the bridge and the breaking of the neck he lives through
long and dramatic adventures, escaping his pursuers by falling into
the river and swimming ashore, reaching home at last to greet his
wife and children. Yet in a second his lifeless body swings from the
bridge. _The Warning_, by Josephine Daskam Bacon, shows the case of a
man who lives years in another country during a few moments of acute
mental strain carried to the point of paranoia. Barry Pain has a story
where in the time in which a man drives home from the theater he visits
another planet and changes the current of his life, while Algernon
Blackwood compresses a great experience into a few minutes of dreaming.
One noteworthy point in connection with the scientific supernaturalism
is that these themes appear only in novels and short stories. They do
not cross over into poetry as do most of the other forms of the ghostly
art. Perhaps this is because the situations are intellectual rather
than emotional, brain-problems or studies in mechanisms rather than in
feelings or emotions. The province of science is removed from that of
poetry because the methods and purposes are altogether different. The
scientific methods are clear-cut, coldly intellectual. Science demands
an exactness, a meticulous accuracy hostile to poetry which requires
suggestion, vagueness, veiled mystery for its greatest effect. _The
Flower of Silence_, for instance, would be a fitting title for a poem,
but the poetic effect would be destroyed by the need for stating the
genus and species of the orchid and analyzing its destruction of human
tissue. Nature's mysterious forces and elements in general and vaguely
considered, veiled in mists of imagination and with a sense of vastness
and beauty, are extremely poetic. But the notebook and laboratory
methods of pure science are antagonistic to poetry, though they fit
admirably into the requirements of fiction, whose purpose is to give an
impression of actuality.
Another reason why these scientific themes do not pass over into poetry
may be that scientific methods as we know them are new, and poetry
clings to the old and established conventions and emotions. There
is amazing human interest in these experiments, a veritable wealth
of romance, with dramatic possibilities tragic and comic, yet they
are more suited to prose fiction than to poetry. We have adapted our
brain-cells to their concepts in prose, yet we have not thus molded our
poetic ideas. It gives us a shock to have new concepts introduced into
poetry. An instance of this clash of realism with sentiment is shown in
a recent poem where the setting is a physics laboratory. Yet in a few
more decades we may find the poets eagerly converting the raw materials
of science into the essence of poetry itself, and by a mystic alchemy
more wonderful than any yet known, transmuting intellectual problems of
science into magic verse. _Creation_, by Alfred Noyes, is an impressive
discussion of evolution as related to God.
Perhaps another reason why these themes have not been utilized in
poetry is because they are too fantastic, too bizarre. They lack
the proportion and sense of artistic harmony that poetry requires.
Strangeness and wonder are true elements of poetry, and magic is
an element of the greatest art, but in solution as it were, not in
the form observed in science. The miracles of the laboratory are
too abrupt, too inconceivable save by intellectual analysis, and
present too great a strain upon the powers of the imagination. They
are fantastic, while true poetry is concerned with the fancy. Magic
and wonder in verse must come from concepts that steal upon the
imagination and make appeal through the emotions. Thus some forms of
supernaturalism are admirably adapted to the province of poetry,
such as the presence of spirits, visitations of angels or demons,
ancient witchcraft, and so forth. The elements that have universal
appeal through the sense of the supernatural move us in poetry, but
the isolated instances, the peculiar problems that occur in scientific
research if transferred to poetry would leave us cold. Yet they may
come to be used in the next _vers libre_.
Nor do these situations come over into the drama save in rare
instances. Theodore Dreiser, in a recent volume, _Plays of the Natural
and the Supernatural_, makes use of certain motifs that are striking
and modern, as[209] where a physician goes on the operating-table,
the _dramatis personæ_ including Demyaphon (Nitrous Acid), and
Alcepheron (a Power of Physics), as well as several Shadows, mysterious
personages of vagueness. These Shadows here, as in _The Blue Sphere_,
are not altogether clear as to motivation, yet they seem to stand for
Fate interference in human destiny. In the latter play Fate is also
represented by a Fast Mail which is one of the active characters,
menacing and destroying a child.
[209] In _Laughing Gas_.
One reason why these motifs of science are not used in drama to any
extent is that they are impossible of representation on the stage.
Even the wizardry of modern producers would be unable to show a Power
of Physics, or Nitrous Acid, save as they might be embodied, as were
the symbolic characters in Maeterlinck's _Blue Bird_, which would mean
that they would lose their effect. And what would a stage manager do
with the rhythm of the universe, which enters into Dreiser's play? Many
sounds can be managed off stage, but hardly that, one fancies. These
themes are not even found in closet drama, where many other elements of
supernaturalism which would be difficult or impossible of presentation
on the stage trail off. William Sharp's _Vistas_, for instance, could
not be shown on the stage, yet the little plays in that volume are
of wonderful dramatic power. The drama can stand a good deal of
supernaturalism of various kinds, from the visible ghosts and devils
of the Elizabethans to the atmospheric supernaturalism of Maeterlinck,
but it could scarcely support the presentations of chemicals and gases
and supernatural botany and biology that fiction handles with ease. The
miraculous machinery would balk at stage action. Fancy the Time Machine
staged, for instance!
We notice in these scientific stories a widening of the sphere of
supernatural fiction. It is extended to include more of the normal
interests and activities of man than has formerly been the case. Here
we notice a spirit similar to that of the leveling influence seen
in the case of the ghosts, devils, witches, angels, and so forth,
who have been made more human not only in appearance but in emotions
and activities as well. Likewise these scientific elements have been
elevated to the human. Supernatural as well as human attributes have
been extended to material things, as animals are given supernormal
powers in a sense different from and yet similar to those possessed by
the enchanted animals in folk-lore. Science has its physical as well as
psychic horrors which the scientific ghostly tales bring in.
Not only are animals gifted with supernatural powers but plants as
well are humanized, diabolized. We have strange murderous trees,
vampire orchids, flowers that slay men in secret ways with all the
smiling loveliness of a treacherous woman. The dæmonics of modern
botany form an interesting phase of ghostly fiction and give a new
thrill to supernaturalism. Inanimate, concrete things are endowed with
unearthly cunning and strength, as well as animals and plants. The new
type of fiction gives to chemicals and gases a hellish intelligence, a
diabolic force of minds. It creates machinery and gives it an excess
of force, a supernatural, more than human cunning, sometimes helpful,
sometimes dæmonic. Machines have been spiritualized and some engines
are philanthropic while some are like damned souls.
This scientific supernaturalism concerns itself with mortal life, not
with immortality as do some of the other aspects of the _genre_. It is
concrete in its effects, not spiritual. Its incursions into futurity
are earthly, not of heaven or hell, and its problems are of time, not
of eternity. The form shows how clear, cold intelligence plays with
miracles and applies the supernatural to daily life. The enthusiasm,
wild and exaggerated in some ways, that sprang up over the prospects
of what modern science and investigation would almost immediately do
for the world in the latter half of the nineteenth century, had no
more interesting effect than in the stimulating of scientific fictive
supernaturalism. And though mankind has learned that science will not
immediately bring the millennium, science still exercises a strong
power over fiction. This type shows a strange effect of realism in
supernaturalism, because of the scientific methods, for supernaturalism
imposed on material things produces an effect of verisimilitude not
gained in the realm of pure spirit. Too intellectually cold for the
purposes of poetry, too abstract and elusive for presentation in
drama, and too removed by its association with the fantastic aspects
of investigation and the curiosities of science to be very appropriate
for tragedy, which has hitherto been the chief medium of expressing
the dramatic supernatural, science finds its fitting expression in
prose fiction. It is an illustration of the widening range of the
supernatural in fiction and as such is significant.