Most people accept it as a fact that superstition went out with the
advent of steam, the telegraph, and the penny-post. A little honest
observation, however, will assure us that there still exist a number
of pitiable though petty superstitions. Among certain classes there
are lucky and unlucky days in their calendar. They will not attempt an
important task on Friday. The horseshoe still hangs behind or over the
door in the Highlands, and in some places much less removed from the
centres of civilisation. East-coast fishermen will yet occasionally
burn or otherwise destroy a boat from which the lives of any of the
crew have been lost, no matter how seaworthy or valuable the boat may
be. A hare crossing the path of one of these hardy sons of the sea
will cause him to forego an intended journey or voyage. To rustic
and fisherman alike a concourse of magpies is an evil omen. As for
dreams, the belief that they are the forecasts of events is perhaps the
strongest of all the forms of their superstition. We might multiply
examples, but have said enough to suggest that the follies of their
great-grandfathers have still no slight fascination for the ignorant,
in spite of the strides which intelligence has made.
But have superstitious beliefs quite left the more intelligent ranks
of society? On the very subject of dreams itself is there not a
sneaking credulity which goes far to prove the contrary? True, any
one of us is quite able to account in a natural way for the character
of his or her dreams. Nevertheless, the lady who chides her children
for repeating the interpretation which the housemaid has put upon
their sleeping vagaries, and sagely instructs them on the subject of
imperfect digestion and its effects upon the brain during sleep, is
not ashamed to impart to her husband any morning the particulars of
her own shocking dreams, or to piously express the hope that something
untoward is not about to happen. Her better-half pooh-poohs the matter
doubtless, as becomes his superior dignity, but is visited none the
less with a vague sense of uneasiness when he remembers that he himself
had a vision of losing a tooth or seeing a house on fire. Having
courageously quizzed his wife at the breakfast-table on the folly of
_her_ augury, and bade her and the children good-bye for the day, he
inwardly deplores the unlucky omen of having to turn back for his
forgotten umbrella or pocket-book!
How many curious but innocent little customs too are still current,
and with the sanction of the wisest. An old slipper is still cast
after a bride: it is considered necessary to christen a new ship with
a bottle of wine: a fine day is still royal weather; and so on. These
and many others most of us would indeed be sorry to see extinct. They
are not only harmless, but in their very departure from strait-laced
common-sense, give an agreeable and perhaps even healthful relief to
the prosiness of ordinary life. To sacrifice them to the strict letter
of reason, would be to sacrifice much of the sentiment of life, to
banish imagery from poetry, to take the perfume from the rose, to guide
into a Dutch canal the current of human affections, which left free
will gush and eddy, prattle and murmur by rock and meadow, carrying
music and health throughout its living course.
Would that modern superstitions never took less innocent shapes! Having
discarded the ghostology of olden times, many people, and among these
some men and women of considerable culture, have set up for themselves
a novel system of intercourse with the unknown world. Brownies and
fairies, with all the fine romance that surrounds the history of their
doings among human folks, are dismissed with contempt. Spiritualism
has swept all these ethereal puppets off the boards of ordinary life.
To substitute what? We might at least look for an improved exhibition
and more interesting 'characters;' but the truth is that nothing
could be less satisfactory than the modern attempt at demon-craft.
There is something so clumsy and inartistic in the whole get-up of the
'spiritual' drama, that it is less surprising to find it very generally
scouted than to see it obtain even a partial notoriety.
Ignorance is the parent of superstition, without a doubt; and the one
never exists apart from the other. There is, however, a second wise saw
that tells a great deal of the truth about the origin of that world-old
bugbear of the human mind, namely, 'The wish is father to the thought.'
What we strongly desire to be, we are next door to believing to be. The
appetite of man's vanity is unappeasable, and in catering for it his
fancy plays tricks with his reason. He longs for intercommunion with
the unknown, and indulges the wish by creating fictitious agents for
that purpose. Tokens, signs, omens, and auguries are also outgrowths
of the various forms of desire and vanity. We believe we shall have
luck if we turn the money in our pocket when looking at new moon. Men
have _waited_ in all ages for the appearance of some favourable sign
before beginning any enterprise of importance. If the sun shines on our
wedding-day, how auspicious! Palpably in each case because we desire
these things to be! But having set up omens with such an object, we,
in the cleft-stick of our own superstition, are bound to believe their
absence or converse, the foreshadowers of evil.
In many ways modern credulity frees itself from such mechanical
trammels as those we have mentioned, to take a form and complexion
from the age, losing meanwhile not one jot of its vigour. To dream
three times of a hidden treasure and set about, Whang-the-Miller-like,
to lay bare the foundations of one's house, is an exploit not to be
thought of by the veriest wiseacre of our day; but the desire to
obtain wealth easily and rapidly being, if anything, more active and
rampant, the belief in some magical means for attaining it is the
most natural thing in the world. An Eldorado is required, and lo! an
Eldorado is implicitly thought to exist. The projectors of a bogus
company for 'utilising the clippings of old moons' or 'extracting
starch from granite chips' are the good fairies whom by propitiating
with a portion of our substance we hope to enlist in our behalf, and
obtain a thousand-fold return. Where such a superstition exists, and
it is broadcast, any scheme however absurd, any swindle no matter how
transparent, will serve for a bait to catch the unwary and over-eager
fish. Nothing is so purblind as undue acquisitiveness. The ancient
Highlander with his keen eye to the main chance and happy facility for
'attaching' whatever came in his way, found a beautiful horse in rich
trappings, browsing ownerless in his path, and following the instinct
of his desire rather than the prudence which tradition should have
taught him, rashly mounted. In an instant he was borne aloft, then
plunged for ever beneath the dark waters of a tarn on the back of the
wily and terrible water-kelpie. We too have our illusory steeds in this
so vaunted age, and neither the teachings of history nor the bitterest
experience seems able to prevent the speculator from vaulting into the
saddle, and forthwith launching into perdition.
Charms are things of the past, or believed in merely by the vulgar;
that is to say, those pretty and fanciful conceits which led our
ancestors to attach a healing or sanitary virtue to certain objects and
ceremonies are now almost extinct. A spray from the rowan-tree is no
longer a safeguard against an epidemic, nor the hand of majesty a cure
for scrofula. Ladies do not now believe that the presence of a piece of
cold iron on their couch, '_while uneasy in their circumstances_,' will
secure a happy consummation; nor is a child's caul in much request in
these days as a protection against fire and drowning. True, we have got
over these beliefs pretty thoroughly. But is the desire for infallible
remedies and potent protectives done away with also? Not in the least;
and though science is doing its best to provide honest substitutes
in a natural measure, the public is not satisfied with its efforts.
Quacks are the modern magicians, and quack medicines the charms of
latter days. Those who are bald, for instance, will not accept their
fate while a single well-puffed elixir with a Greek name remains
untried. There is something saddening if not sickening in the evident
success which attends the pretences to cure chronic and irremediable
diseases, to effect miracles in short with the most trumpery of means
and execrably silly devices. Our forefathers were imposed upon no
doubt, but there was method in their madness. The 'simples' with which
spae-wives and charlatans professed to cure ailments were in many cases
effective and now recognised drugs, and were at the worst perfectly
harmless; while the rites with which they were administered, if quite
apart from the purpose, yet appealed gracefully to the imagination.
Nowadays, however, the 'simples' are the patients and not the
medicines! The old story. Child-like, the age cries for something that
it cannot get, rejecting the good that is within reach.
In a recent number of this _Journal_ we had occasion to refer to
the amazing credulity of Americans on the subject of professional
'mediums.' The worst of it is that the extent to which this has been
laid bare is insignificant compared with that which really remains
unexposed. The desire to work with supernatural tools in effecting the
paltriest and meanest of human ends would seem to have divided a people
of accredited shrewdness into the two classes of rogues and dupes. But
as we have seen, we too have been singed at the same fire. There are,
moreover, other, if minor superstitions in our midst that suggest the
propriety of beginning the task of reformation at home. An occasional
glance, for instance, at the stock advertisements of leading journals
will convince any one how widespread is the infatuation that believes
in spurious offers of advantageous employment. Some of these have,
under our own observation, been repeated with little variation for more
than twenty years; and we have no doubt that the wily advertisers are
able to calculate to a fraction the number and gullibility of their
dupes. We have from time to time drawn attention to swindles of this
class, as well as to those tempting offers of 'Money to Lend,' which
appear with equal regularity in newspaper columns. We are afraid,
however, that friendly warning and experience are alike unavailing to
stem the mischief. The spread of education itself would appear unable
to outstrip the spread of imposture or the eager credulity that
supports it; for superstition merely shifts its ground from time to
time, without losing appreciably its original dominion over the human
mind.