“This is the very coinage of your brain:
This bodiless creation, ecstacy
Is very cunning in.”
HAMLET.
CAST. How delightful to wander thus among the reliques of that age, when
her citizens, the colonists of Britain, migrated from imperial Rome, and
built their Venta Silurum, or Caerwent, from the ruins of which these
now mouldering walls were formed. As we trod those pictured pavements of
Caerwent beneath the blue sky of yesternoon, I felt all the inspiration
of Astrophel, and a pageantry of Roman patricians seemed to sweep along
the fragments of those painted tesselæ.
“Lulled in the countless chambers of the brain,
Our thoughts are link’d by many a hidden chain;
Awake but one, and lo! what myriads rise,
Each stamps his image as the other flies.”
There is a happy combination of antiquity and simplicity in this land of
Gwent. Almost within the shadow of the Roman Caerleon, the Monmouthshire
peasants, at Easter and Whitsuntide, assemble to plant fresh flowers on
the graves of their relatives. How I love these old customs! the
chanting of the carol at Christmas; its very homeliness so redolent of
love and friendship: and that quaint old Moresco dance which was
introduced to England by the noble Katherine of Arragon. Then the
pastimes of Halloween and Hogmanay in Scotland, and the Walpurgis night
of Germany, and the May-day in Ireland, the festival of their patron
saint, and the Midsummer night when the bealfires cast an universal
lumination over the fells of the green isle, and the still more sacred
fire, lighted up in November in worship of their social deity, Samhuin,
whose potent influence charms the warm hearts of all the maids of Erin
around the winter hearth of their homes. I listen unto these pleasures
as if they were mine own: as children associate all the legends of their
school histories with themselves and their own time.
In every spot of this land of Wales the very names of the olden time are
before us: the romaunt of Prince Arthur and his knights is ever present
to our fancy, for he hath, as on the crag that towers over Edinburgh, a
seat on many a mountain rock in Wales; as the Cadair Arthur over
Crickhowel, and the semicircle on Little Doward, and Maen Arthur on the
moors of Cardigan.
ASTR. I never look on scenes like this without the echo of that
beautiful apostrophe of Johnson, among the ruins of Iona, whispering in
my ear.
Inspired by such an influence, I have roamed over the Isle of Elephanta,
and gazed on its gorgeous pagoda hewn from the rock, and adorned by
gigantic statues and mysterious symbols of the same eternal granite: on
the beauteous excavations of Salsette: on the wonders of Elora, and on
the classic reliques of Persepolis: on the beautiful columns of Palmyra,
the Tadmor in the wilderness, where Solomon built his “fenced city;” as
well as those arabesque and gothic temples, the abbeys and cathedrals of
our own island. I too have almost dared to think that superstition and
idolatry might be forgiven for the splendours of its architecture, even
for the elevation of those giant blocks of Stonehenge and Avebury, the
mouldering altars of the druidical priesthood, in the city consecrated
to their god.
So do I feel in this court-yard of Chepstow Castle, whilom the
Est-brig-hoel of Doomsdaye Booke, and in later times so blended with
English history. See you not the Conqueror and his knights in panoply on
prancing steeds before you? See you not Fitz Osborne and Warren, its
former lords, loom out upon your sight? And, lo! the portal opens, and
the dungeon of Henry Martin, the regicide, yawns like a bottomless pit
before us. The shade of Charles Stewart rises; and again the phantom of
Cromwell, uttering his epithets of scorn, as if the wanton puritan were
about to dash the ink in the face of his colleague as he signed the
death-warrant of the king. And now the scene changes, and behold the
doomed one is chained to those massive rings of iron, and there with
groaning dies.
EV. I am most willing that you should thus indulge in your wild
rhapsody, Astrophel, for it is the happy illustration of one potent
cause of spectral illusion—_association_. There are few whose minds are
not excited in some degree when they tread the localities of interesting
events. By memory and its combinations something like an inspired vision
may often seem to come over us—a day-dream. Or, if we have been
brooding over a subject or gazing on the relics of departed or absent
love and friendship: or while we stand on a spot consecrated by genius,
or when we have passed the scene of a murder, still will association
fling around us its visionary shadows.
Shortly after the death of Maupertuis, the president of the Academy of
Berlin, Mr. Gleditsch, the curator of natural history, was traversing
the hall in solitude, when he saw the phantom of the president standing
in an angle of the room with his eyes intensely fixed on him: an effect
perfectly explicable by the association of intense impression of memory
in the very arena of the president’s former dignity.
You will remember the story of a rich libertine, told by Sir Walter
Scott. Whenever he was alone in his drawing-room, he was so haunted by a
spectral _corps de ballet_, that the very furniture was, as it were,
converted into phantoms. To release himself from this unwelcome
intrusion he retired to his country house, and here, for a while, he
obtained the quiet which he sought. But it chanced that the furniture of
his town house was sent to him in the country, and on the instant that
his eyes fell on his drawing-room chairs and tables, the illusion came
afresh on his mind. By the influence of association the green figurantes
came frisking and capering into his room, shouting in his unwilling
ears, “Here we are! here we are!”
It is not, however, essential that there be substance at all to excite
these spectres. _Idea_ alone is sufficient.
Do you think it strange that a ghost should appear fleshless and shadowy
without some supernatural influence? Be assured that the only influence
exists in the sublime and intricate workings of that mind which in its
pure state was itself an emanation from the Deity; which is only
shadowed by illusion while in its earthly union with the brain, and
which, on the dissolution of that brain, will again live uncombined, a
changeless and eternal spirit.
It is as easy to believe the power of mind in conjuring up a spectre as
in entertaining a simple thought: it is not strange that this thought
may appear _embodied_, especially if the external senses be shut: if we
think of a distant friend, do we not _see_ a form in our mind’s eye, and
if this idea be intensely defined, does it not become a phantom?
“Phantasma est sentiendi actus, neque differt a sensione aliter quam
fieri differt a factum esse.”
“A phantom is an act of thinking,” &c.
You have dipped deeply into Hobbes, Astrophel, and will correct me if I
misquote this philosopher of Malmsbury.
It was in Paris, at the soirée of Mons. Bellart, and a few days after
the death of Marshal Ney, the servant, ushering in the Mareschal _Aîné_,
announced Mons. Le Mareschal _Ney_. We were startled; and may I confess
to you, that the _eidōlon_ of the Prince of Moskwa was for a moment as
perfect to my sight as reality?
Now it is as easy to imagine a fairy infinitely small as a giant
infinitely large. Between an idea and a phantom, then, there is only a
difference in degree; their essence is the same as between the simple
and transient thought of a child, and the intense and beautiful ideas of
a Shakspere, a Milton, or a Dante.
“Consider your own conceptions,” said Imlac, “you will find substance
without extension. An ideal form is no less _real_ than material, but
yet it has no extension.”
You hear I adopt the word _idea_, as referring to the organ of _vision_,
but sight is not the only sense subject to illusion. Hearing, taste,
smell, touch, may be thus perverted, because the original impression was
on the focus of all the senses, _the brain_.
Indeed, two of these illusions are often _synchronous_: as when a deep
sepulchral voice is uttered by a thin filmy spectre, like the ghosts of
Ossian, through which the moonbeams and the stars were seen to glimmer.
But the illusion of the eye _is_ by far the most common, and hence our
adopted terms refer chiefly to the sight: as spectre, phantom, phantasm,
apparition, _eidōlon_, ghost, shadow, shade.
The ghost then is nothing more than an _intense idea_. And as I have
caught the mood of story-telling, listen to some analogies of those deep
impressions on the mind which are the spring of all this phantasy.
That destructive brainworm, Demonomania, is often excited in the mind of
a proselyte by designing religious fanatics. Let the life of the
selected person be ever so virtuous and exemplary, she (for it is
usually on the softer sex that these impostures are practised) becomes
convinced of the influence of the demon over her, and she is thus
criminally taught the necessity of conversion—is won over to the
erroneous doctrine of capricious and unqualified election.
These miseries do not always spring from self-interested impostors. The
parent and the nurse, in addition to the nursery tales of fairies and of
genii, too often inspire the minds of children with these diabolical
phantoms. The effect is always detrimental,—too often permanently
destructive. I will quote one case from the fourth volume of the
Psychological Magazine, related by a student of the university of
Jena.—“A young girl, about nine or ten years old, had spent her
birth-day with several companions of her own age, in all the gaiety of
youthful amusement. Her parents were of a rigorous devout sect, and had
filled the child’s head with a number of strange and horrid notions
about the devil, hell, and eternal damnation. In the evening, as she was
retiring to rest, the devil appeared to her, and threatened to devour
her. She gave a loud shriek, fled to the apartment where her parents
were, and fell down apparently dead at their feet. A physician was
called in, and she began to recover herself in a few hours. She then
related what had happened, adding, that she was sure she was to be
damned. This accident was immediately followed by a severe and tedious
nervous complaint.”
The ghost will not appear to tell us what _will_ happen, but it _may_
rise, and with awful solemnity too, to tell us that which _has_
happened. Such is the phantom of remorse,—the shadow of
conscience,—which is indeed a natural penalty: a crime that carries
with it its own consecutive punishment. Were the lattice of Momus fixed
in the bosom, that window through which the springs of passion could be
seen, there would be, I fear, a dark spot on almost every heart,—as
there is, to quote the Italian proverb, “a skeleton in every house.” Of
these pangs of memory, the pages both of history and fiction are
teeming. Not in the visions of sleep alone, but in the glare of noonday,
the apparition of a victim comes upon the guilty mind,—
“As when a gryphon through the wilderness,
With winged course, o’er hill and moory dale,
Pursues the Arimaspian, who, by stealth,
Had from his wakeful custody purloined
The guarded gold.”
Brutus, and Richard Plantagenet, and Clarence, and Macbeth, and Manfred,
and Lorenzo, and Wallace, and Marmion, are but the archetypes of a very
numerous family in real life,—for Shakspere, and Byron, and Schiller,
and Scott, have painted in high relief these portraits _from_ the life.
Many a real Manfred has trembled as he called up the phantom of Astarte;
many a modern Brutus has gazed at midnight on the evil spirit of his
Cæsar; many a modern Macbeth points to the vacant chair of his Banquo,
the ghost in his seat, and he mentally exclaims,—“Hence, horrible
shadow! unreal mockery, hence!”
IDA. Aye, and many a false heart, like Marmion, hears, as his life ebbs
on the battle-field, the phantom voice of Constance Beverly:
“The monk, with unavailing cares,
Exhausted all the church’s prayers.
Ever he said, that, close and near,
A lady’s voice was in his ear,
And that the priest he could not hear,
For that she ever sung:
‘In the lost battle, borne down by the flying,
Where mingles war’s rattle with groans of the dying’—
So the notes rung.”
We read in Moreton an exquisite story of the trial of a murderer, who
had with firmness pleaded—“not guilty.” On a sudden, casting his eyes
on the witness-box, he exclaimed, “This is not fair; no one is allowed
to be witness in his own case.” The box was empty, as you may suppose;
but the eye of his conscience saw his bleeding victim glaring on him,
and ready to swear to his murder. He felt that his fate was sealed, and
pleaded guilty to the crime.
“——Deeds are done on earth,
Which have their punishment ere the earth closes
Upon the perpetrators. Be it the working
Of the remorse-stained fancy, or the vision
Distinct and real of unearthly being:
All ages witness that, beside the couch
Of the fell homicide, oft stalks the ghost
Of him he slew, or shows his shadowy wound.”
It is this utter humiliation of the spirit, and the conviction of our
polluted nature, that rankle so intensely in the wounded heart; and
thence the repentant sinner feels so deeply that awful truth, that there
is a Being infinitely more pure and godlike than himself.
EV. A very fertile source of spectral illusion is the devotion to
peculiar studies and deep reflection on interesting subjects. Mons.
Esquirol records the hallucination of a lady, who had been reading a
terrific account of the execution of a criminal. Ever after, in all her
waking hours, and in every place, she saw above her left eye the phantom
of a bloody head, wrapped in black crape,—a thing so horrible to her,
that she repeatedly attempted the commission of suicide. And of another
lady, who had dipped so deeply into a history of witches, that she
became convinced of her having, like Tam O’Shanter’s lady of the “cutty
sark,” been initiated into their mysteries, and officiated at their
“sabbath” ceremonies.
Monsieur Andral, in his youth, saw in La Pitié the putrid body of a
child covered with _larvæ_, and during the next morning, the spectre of
this corpse lying on his table was as perfect as reality.
We have known mathematicians whose ghosts even appeared in the shape of
coloured circles and squares, and Justus Martyr was haunted by the
phantoms of flowers. Nay, our own Sir Joshua, after he had been painting
portraits, sometimes believed the trees, and flowers, and posts to be
men and women.
I knew myself a bombardier, whose brain had been wounded in a battle. To
this man a post was an enemy, and he would, when a sudden frenzy came on
him, attack it in the street with his cane, and not leave it until he
believed that his foeman was beaten or lay prostrate at his feet.
Intense feeling, especially if combined with apprehension, often raises
a phantom. The unhappy Sir R—— C——, on being summoned to attend the
Princess Charlotte of Wales, saw her form robed in white distinctly
glide along before him as he sat in his carriage: a parallel, nay, an
_explanation_, to the interesting stories of Astrophel.
Then the sting of conscience may warp a _common_ object thus. Theodric,
the Gothic king, unjustly condemned and put to death Boëthius and
Symmachus. It chanced at that time, that a large fish was served to him
at dinner, when his imagination directly changed the fish’s head into
the ghastly face of Symmachus, upbraiding him with the murder of
innocence; and such was the effect of the phantom, that in a few days he
died. But these spectral forms were seen, like the dagger of Macbeth,
and the hand-writing on the wall, by none but the _conscience-stricken_,
a proof of their being ideal and not real.
Not long after the death of Byron, Sir Walter Scott was engaged in his
study during the darkening twilight of an autumnal evening, in reading a
sketch of his form and habits, his manners and opinions. On a sudden he
saw as he laid down his book, and passed into his hall, the _eidōlon_ of
his departed friend before him. He remained for some time impressed by
the intensity of the illusion, which had thus created a phantom out of
skins, and scarfs, and plaids, hanging on a screen in the gothic hall of
Abbotsford.
I learn from Doctor T. that a certain lady was on the eve of her
marriage, but her lover was killed as he was on his way to join her. An
acute fever immediately followed this impression; and on each subsequent
day, when the same hour struck on the clock, she fell into a state of
ecstacy, and believed that the phantom of her lover wafted her to the
skies; then followed a swoon of two or three hours’ duration, and her
diurnal recovery ensued.
CAST. I know not if it will make me happier, Evelyn, but I have learned
from your lips to believe that many of those legends which I held as
poetic fictions, may be the stories of minds, in which, under the
influence of devoted affection, the slightest semblance to an object so
beloved may work up the phantom of far distant or departed forms. You
may have read the romantic devotion of Henry Howard to the fair
Geraldine, the flower of England’s court, and the chivalrous challenge
of her beauty to the knights of France. During his travels on the
continent, he fell in with the alchymist Cornelius Agrippa, who by his
sleight cunning showed in a magic mirror (as he said) to the doting mind
of the earl, his absent beauty reclining on a couch, and reading by the
light of a waxen taper the homage of his pen to her exquisite beauty.
Then there was an archbishop of the Euchaites, a professor of magic in
the ninth century. The Emperor Basil besought this pseudo-magus
Santabaran, for a sight of his long lost and beloved son. He appeared
before the emperor in a costume of splendour and mounted on a charger,
and sinking into his arms, instantly vanished. This phantasy, and the
glamourie of the witch of Falsehope over Michael Scott, and the vision
of the wondrous tale of Vatheck, and the legend of the Duke of Anjou in
Froissart, might be the rude shadows of some slight phantasmagoria
working on a sensitive or impassioned mind; may they not?
EV. I am proud of my proselyte, lady.
IDA. I presume these illusions may be wrought without the outlines of
_distinct shapes_. I have ever thought the vision of Eliphaz the
Temanite more solemn, because an _undefined_ shadow: “A vision is before
our face, but we cannot discern the form thereof.” And where the
_profane_ poets have written thus mystically, they have risen in
sublimity. Such is Milton’s portraiture of death:
“——the other shape,
If shape it could be called, which shape had none
Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb;
Or substance might be called that shadow seemed,
For each seemed neither.”
And in the splendid vision of Manfred, whose thoughts were, alas! so
polluted by passion—
“I see
The steady aspect of a clear large star,
But nothing more.
SPIRIT. We have _no form_ beyond the elements,
Of which we are the mind and principle.”
And the idolaters profanely adopted this mystic metaphor when they
inscribed their Temple of Isis, at Sais—
“I am whatever has been, is, and shall be, and no one hath taken
off my veil.”
EV. The phantom is often described as destitute of form. When Johnson
was asked to define the ghost which appeared to old Cave, he answered:
“Why, sir, something of a _shadowy_ being.” And there is a sublimity and
a mystery in that which is indefinite. Two very deep philosophers have
however differed in opinion regarding the effect of darkness and
obscurity on the mind. Burke alludes to darkness as a cause of the
sublime and terrific: (and he is supported by Tacitus—“Omne ignotum pro
magnifico est:”) Locke, as not naturally a cause of terror, but as it is
associated by nurses and old crones with ghosts and goblins.
I will not split this difference, but I believe Burke is in the right.
Obscurity is doubtless deeply influential in raising phantoms; that
which is indefinable becomes almost of necessity a ghost. If the ghosts
of Shakspere did not appear, the illusion would be more impressive. In
darkness and night, therefore, the ghosts burst their cerements, the
spirits walk abroad, and the ghost seers revel in all their
superstitious glory. The druids, those arch impostors, acted their
mysteries in the depth of shadowy groves: and the heathen idols are half
hidden both in the hut of the American Indian and the temples of
Indostan. It is true children shut their eyes when frightened, but this
is _instinctive_, and because they think it real; but, in truth, they
ever dread the notion of darkness. By the fancy of a timid mind, in the
deepening gloom of twilight, a withered oak has been fashioned into a
living monster; and I might occupy our evening in recounting the tales
of terror to which a decayed trunk once gave birth, among some village
gossips in the weald of Sussex.
There are few who “revisit the glimpses of the moon,” whose romantic
humour leads them abroad about nightfall, who have not sometimes been
influenced by feeling somewhat like phantasy, during the indistinct
vision of twilight; the dim emanations of the crescent, or the more
deceptive illusion of an artificial luminous point irradiating a
circumambient vapour. Through the magnifying power of this floating
medium, the image may be fashioned into all the fancied forms of
poetical creation.
At the midnight hour, by a blue taper light, and in a ruined castle, a
simple tale will become a romance of terror.
I have spoken thus, to introduce an incident which occurred years ago,
and yet my mind’s eye shows it to me as if it were of yesterday.
It was in the year ——, on the eve of my presenting myself at the
college for my diploma. I had been deeply engaged during the day, in
tracing, with some fellow students, the distribution of the _nervous
ganglia_. The shades of evening had closed over us as our studies were
nearly completed, and one by one my companions gave me good night,
until, about ten o’clock, I was left alone, still poring over the
subject of my study, by the dim light of a solitary taper. On a sudden I
was startled by the loud pealing of a clock, which, striking twelve,
warned me most unexpectedly of the solemn hour of midnight; for I was
not otherwise conscious of this lapse of time. For a moment I seemed in
utter darkness, until straining my eyes, a blue and lurid glimmer
floated around me. A chilliness crept over me, and I had a strange
indefinable consciousness of utter desolation—of being immured in some
Tartarean cavern, or pent among icy rocks, for the cold night-wind was
sweeping in hollow murmurs through the vaults. In the blue half-twilight
I was at length sensible that I was not alone, but in the presence of
indistinct shadowy forms, silent and motionless as the grave; and by
that awful sensation of the sublime which springs from obscurity, I
conceived that I had suffered transmigration, or had glided
unconsciously through the gates of Hades, and that these were the
embodied spirits—the manes of the departed, in sleep; and then I
thought the sounds were not those of the wind, but the hollow moaning of
those restless spirits that could _not_ sleep. By some species of
glamourie which I could not comprehend, the gloom appeared to brighten
by slow degrees, and the forms became more distinct. When we are
involved in mystery, the sense of touch is instinctively brought to its
analysis. I put forth my hand, and found that my eyes were not mocked
with a mere vision; for it came in contact with something icy cold and
death-like—it was an arm clammy and cadaverous that fell across my own;
and as the smell of death came over me, a corpse rolled into my lap.
The moaning of the breeze increased, and the screech-owl shrieked as she
flitted unseen around me. At this moment a scream of agony was heard in
the distance, as of some mortal frame writhing in indescribable anguish,
while a hoarse and wizard voice cried, “Endure! endure!” It ceased; and
then I heard a pattering and flutter, and then a shrill squeaking, as of
some tiny creatures that were playing their gambols in the darkness
which again came around me. On a sudden all was hushed, and there was a
glimmer of cold twilight, as when a horn of the moon, as Astrophel would
say, comes out from an eclipse; and then a brighter gleam of bluer light
burst through the gloom, at which I confess I started, and my hand
dropped into a pool of blood. Like the astonished Tam O’Shanter, it
seemed that I was alone in the chamber of death, or the solitary
spectator of some demon incantation or of some wholesale murder. There
were some forms blue and livid, some cadaverous, of “span-long, wee,
unchristened bairns,” and others deluged in blood and impurity lay
around me: one pale and attenuated form, that more than mocked the
delicate beauty of the Medicean Venus, lay naked on the ground. On the
athletic form of another the moonbeam fell in a glory, as if the fabled
legend of Endymion was realized before my eyes.