CHAPTER IV
The Devil and His Allies
"Ghosts are few but devils are plenty," said Cotton Mather, but hissaying would need to be inverted to fit present-day English fiction.Now we have ghosts in abundance but devils are scarce. In fact, theybid fair to become extinct in our romances, at least in the form thatis easily recognizable. Satan will probably soon be in solution,identified merely as a state of mind. He has been so Burbanked oflate, with his daemonic characteristics removed and humanities addedthat, save for sporadic reversion to type, the old familiar demon isalmost a vanished form. The modern mind seems to cling with a newfondness to the ghost but has turned the cold shoulder to the devil,perhaps because many modernists believe more in the human and lessin the supernatural--and after all, ghosts are human and devils arenot. The demon has disported himself in various forms in literature,from the scarlet fiend of monkish legend, the nimble imp and titanicnature-devil of folk-lore to Milton's epic, majestic Satan, andGoethe's mocking Mephistopheles, passing into allegoric, symbolic, andsatiric figures in later fiction. He has been an impressive characterin the drama, the epic, the novel, in poetry, and the short story. Wehave seen him as a loathly, brutish demon in Dante, as a superman,as an intellectual satirist, and as a human being appealing to oursympathy. He has gradually lost his epic qualities and become human.He is not present in literature now to the extent to which he was knownin the past, is not so impressive a figure as heretofore, and at timeswhen he does appear his personality is so ambiguously set forth that itrequires close literary analysis to prove his presence.
In this chapter the devil will be discussed with reference to hisappearances on earth, while in a later division he will be seen inhis own home. It would be hard to say with certainty when and wherethe devil originated, yet he undoubtedly belongs to one of our firstfamilies and is said to have been born theologically in Persia aboutthe year 900 B.C. He has appeared under various aliases, as Ahriman ofthe Zoroastrian system, Pluto in classical mythology, Satan, Beelzebub,Prince of Darkness, and by many other titles. In his _Address to theDe'il_ Burns invokes him thus:
"Oh, Thou! whatever title suit thee,-- Auld Hornie, Satan, Nick or Cloutie!"
He has manifested himself in fiction under diverse names, as Demon,Lucifer, Satan, Mephistopheles, Prince Lucio, The Man in Black, and soforth, but whatever the name he answers to, he is known in every landand has with astonishing adaptability made himself at home in everyliterature.
The devil has so changed his form and his manner of appearance in laterliterature that it is hard to identify him as his ancient self. Inearly stories he was heralded by supernatural thunder and lightningand accompanied by a strong smell of sulphur. He dressed in charactercostume, sometimes in red, sometimes in black, but always indubitablydiabolic. He wore horns, a forked tail, and cloven hoofs and was agenerally unprepossessing creature whom anyone could know for a devil.Now his role is not so typical and his garb not so declarative. Hewears an evening suit, a scholar's gown, a parson's robe, a huntingcoat, with equal ease, and it is sometimes difficult to tell the devilfrom the hero of a modern story. He has been deodorized and no longerreeks warningly of the Pit.
The mediaeval mind conceived of the devil as a sort of combinationof mythologic satyr and religious dragon. It is interesting to notehow the pagan devil-myths have been engrafted upon the ideas ofChristianity, to fade out very slowly and by degrees. In monkishlegends the devil was an energetic person who would hang round a likelysoul for years, if need be, on the chance of nabbing him. Many monkishlegends have come down to us.
The diabolic element in English folk-lore shows a rich field for study.The devil here as in the monkish legendry appears as an enemy of souls,a tireless tempter. He lies in wait for any unwary utterance, and theleast mention of his name, any thoughtless expletive, such as "Thedevil take me if--" brings instant response from him to clinch thebargain. Yet the devil of rustic folk-lore is of a bucolic dullness,less clever than in any phase of literature, more gullible, more easilyimposed on. English folk-lore, especially the Celtic branches, showsthe devil as very closely related to nature. He was wont to work offhis surplus energy or his wrath by disturbing the landscape, and manystories of his prankish pique have come down to us. If anything vexedhim he might stamp so hard upon a plain that the print of his clovenhoof would be imprinted permanently. He was fond of drinking out ofpure springs and leaving them cursed with sulphur, and he sometimesshowed annoyance by biting a section out of a mountain, Devil's BitMountain in Ireland being one of the instances. In general, anypeculiarity of nature might be attributed to the activities of AuldHornie.
The devil has always been a pushing, forward sort of person, so hewas not content with being handed round by word of mouth in monkishlegend or rustic folk-lore, but must worm his way into literature ingeneral. Since then many ink-pots have been emptied upon him besidesthe one that Luther hurled against his cloister wall. The devil is seenfrequently in the miracle plays, showing grotesquerie, the beginningsof that sardonic humor he is to display in more important works later.In his appearance in literature the devil is largely anthropomorphic.Man creates the devil in his own image, one who is not merely personalbut racial as well, reflecting his creator. In monkish traditionan adversary in wait for souls, in rustic folk-lore a rollickingbuffoon with waggish pranks, in miracle plays reflecting the mingledseriousness and comic elements of popular beliefs, he mirrors hismaker. But it is in the great poems and dramas and stories that we findthe more personal aspects of devil-production, and it is these epicand dramatic concepts of the devil that have greatly influenced modernfiction. While the Gothic romance was but lightly touched by the epicsupernaturalism, the literature since that time has reflected it more,and the Satanic characters of Dante, Milton, Calderon, Marlowe, andGoethe have cast long shadows over modern fiction. The recent revivalof interest in Dante has doubtless had its effect here.
Burns in his _Address to the De'il_ shows his own kindly heart andhonest though ofttimes misdirected impulses by suggesting that thereis still hope for the devil to repent and trusting that he may do soyet. Mrs. Browning, in her _Drama of Exile_, likewise shows in Lucifersome appeal to our sympathies, reflecting the pitying heart of thewriter,--showing a certain kinship to Milton's Satan yet with weakenedintellectual power. She makes Gabriel say to him:
"Angel of the sin, Such as thou standest,--pale in the drear light Which rounds the rebel's work with Maker's wrath-- Thou shalt be an Idea to all souls, A monumental, melancholy gloom, Seen down all ages whence to mark despair And measure out the distances from good."
Byron's devil in _A Vision of Judgment_ is, like Caliban's ideas ofSetebos, "altogether such an one" as Byron conceived himself to be. Heis a terrible figure, whose
"Fierce and unfathomable thoughts engraved Eternal wrath on his immortal face."
He shows diabolical sarcasm when he says, "I've kings enough below,God knows!" And how like Oscar Wilde is the devil he pictures to usin his symbolic story, _The Fisherman and his Soul_. The prince ofdarkness who appears to the young fisherman that wishes to sell hissoul to the devil is "a man dressed in a suit of black velvet cut inSpanish fashion. His proud face was strangely pale, but his lips werelike a proud red flower. He seemed weary and was leaning back toying ina listless manner with the pommel of his saddle." When the fishermanunthoughtedly utters a prayer that baffles the fiend for the time,the demon mounts his jennet with the silver harness and rides away,still with the proud, disdainful face, sad with a _blase_ wearinessunlike the usual alertness of the devil. He has a sort of BlessedDamozel droop to his figure, and the bored patience of a lone man at anafternoon tea. Wilde shows us some little mocking red devils in anotherof his stories,[143] and _The Picture of Dorian Gray_ is a concept ofdiabolism.
[143] _A Legend of Sharp._
Scott in _The Talisman_ puts a story of descent from the Evil One inthe mouth of the Saracen, the legend of the spirits of evil who fo
rmeda league with the cruel Zohauk, by which he gained a daily sacrifice ofblood to feed two hideous serpents that had become a part of himself.One day seven sisters of wonderful beauty are brought, whose lovelinessappeals to the immortals. In the midst of supernatural manifestationsthe earth is rent and seven young men appear. The leader says to theeldest sister:
I am Cothreb, king of the subterranean world. I and my brethren are of those who, created out of elementary fire, disdained even at the command of Omnipotence, to do homage to a clod of earth because it is called man. Thou mayest have heard of us as cruel, unrelenting, and persecuting. It is false. We are by nature kind and generous, vengeful only when insulted, cruel only when affronted. We are true to those that trust us; and we have heard the invocations of thy father the sage Mithrasp, who wisely worships not only the Origin of Good, but that which is called the Source of Evil. You and your sisters are on the eve of death; but let each give to us one hair from your fair tresses in token of fealty, and we will carry you many miles to a place of safety where you may bid defiance to Zohauk and his ministers.
The maidens accept the offer and become the brides of the spirits ofevil.
The devil in Scott's _Wandering Willie's Tale_,[144] also speaks a goodword for himself. When the gudesire meets in the woods the strangerwho sympathizes with his obvious distress, the unknown offers to helphim, saying, "If you will tell me your grief, I am one that, though Ihave been sair miscaa'd in the world, am the only hand for helping myfreends." The gudesire tells his woes and says that he would go to thegates of hell, and farther, to get the receipt due him, upon which thehospitable stranger conducts him to the place mentioned. The cannyScot obtains the document, outwits the devil, and wins his way back toearth unscathed.
[144] In _Red Gauntlet_.
One marked aspect of recent devil-fiction is the tendency to gloze overhis sins and to humanize him. This is shown to a marked degree in MarieCorelli's sentimental novel, _The Sorrows of Satan_, where she expendsmuch anxious sympathy over the fiend. To Miss Corelli's agitatedmind Satan is a much maligned martyr who regretfully tempts mortalsand is grieved when they yield to his beguilements. Her perfervidrhetoric pictures him as a charming prince, handsome, wealthy, yet verylonesome, who warns persons in advance that he is not what he seemsand that they would do well to avoid him. But the fools rush in crowdsto be damned. According to her theory, the devil is attempting to workout his own salvation and could do so save for the weakness of man. Heis able to get a notch nearer heaven for every soul that resists hiswiles, though in London circles his progress is backward rather thanforward. How is Lucifer fallen! To be made a hero of by Marie Corellimust seem to Mephisto life's final indignity! Her characterization ofthe fiend shows some reminiscence of a hasty reading of Milton, Goethe,and the Byronic Cain.
The devil has a human as well as daemonic spirit in Israel Zangwill's_They that Walk in Darkness_, where he appears as Satan Maketrig, ared-haired hunchback, with "gigantic marble brow, cold, keen, steelyeyes, and handsome, clean-shaven lips." He seems a normal human beingin this realistic Ghetto setting, though he bears a nameless senseof evil about with him. In his presence, or as he passes by, all thelatent evil in men's souls comes to the surface. He lures the rabbiaway from his wife, from God, and from all virtue, yet to see him atthe end turn away again in spirit to the good, spurning the tempterwhom he recognizes at last as daemonic. There is a human anguish in theeyes of Satan Maketrig, that shows him to be not altogether diabolic,and he seems mournful and appealing in his wild loneliness. His natureis in contrast to that of the fiend in Stanley J. Weyman's _The Manin Black_. Here his cold, sardonic jesting that causes him to playwith life and death, so lightly, his diabolic cunning, his knowledgeof the human heart and how to torture it, remind us of Iago. The darkshade extends to the skin as well as to the heart in the man in blackin Stevenson's _Thrawn Janet_, for he exercises a weird power over hisvassal, the old servant, and terrifies even the minister. And _WarLetters from a Living Dead Man_, written by Elsa Parker but said to bedictated by a correspondent presumably from somewhere in hell, shows usHis Satanic Majesty with grim realism up to date.
The devil appears with mournful, human dignity, yet with superhumangigantism in Algernon Blackwood's _Secret Worship_, where the lostsouls enter into a riot of devil-worship, into which they seek to drawliving victims, to damn them body and soul. One victim sees the devilthus:
At the end of the room where the windows seemed to have disappeared so that he could see the stars, there rose up into view, far against the sky, grand and terrible, the outline of a man. A kind of gray glory enveloped him so that it resembled a steel-cased statue, immense, imposing, horrific in its distant splendor. The gray radiance from its mightily broken visage, august and mournful, beat down upon his soul, pulsing like some dark star with the powers of spiritual evil.
Here, as in many instances elsewhere, the sadness of the diaboliccharacter is emphasized, a definite human element. The Miltonicinfluence seems evident in such cases.
Kipling has a curious daemonic study in _Bubble Well Road_, a storyof a patch of ground filled with devils and ghosts controlled by anevil-minded native priest, while in _Haunted Subalterns_ the impsterrorize young army officers by their malicious mischief.
The allegorical and symbolic studies of diabolism are among themore impressive creations in later fiction, as in Tolstoi's _Ivan,the Fool_, where the demons are responsible for the marshaling ofarmies, the tyranny of money, and the inverted ideas of the value ofservice. The appearance of the devil in later stories is more terribleand effective in its variance of type and its secret symbolism thanthe crude enginery of diabolism in Gothic fiction, as the muscularfiend[145] that athletically hurls the man and woman from the mountaintop, or the invisible physical strength manifested in _Melmoth, theWanderer_. The crude violence of these novels is in keeping with thefiction of the time, yet modern stories show a distinct advance, assuch instances as J. H. Shorthouse's _Countess Eve_, where the devilappears differently to each tempted soul, embodying with hideouswisdom the form of the sin that that particular soul is most liableto commit. He bears the shape of committed sin, suggesting that evilis so powerful as to have an independent existence of its own, apartfrom the mind that gave it birth, as the devil appears as evil thoughtmaterialized in Fernac Molnar's drama, _The Devil_. Fiona McLeod'sstrange Gaelic tale, _The Sin-Eater_ introduces demons symbolically.The sin-eater is a person that by an ancient formula can remove thesins from an unburied corpse and let them in turn be swept away fromhim by the action of the pure air. But if the sin-eater hates the deadman, he has the power to fling the transgressions into the sea, to turnthem into demons that pursue and torment the flying soul till JudgmentDay.
[145] In _The Monk_ or _Zofloya_.
One aspect of the recent stories of diabolism is the subtleness bywhich the evil is suggested. The reader feels a miasmatic atmosphereof evil, a smear on the soul, and knows that certain incidents in theaction can be accounted for on no other basis than that of daemonicpresence, as in Barry Pain's _Moon Madness_, where the princess ismoved by a strange irresistible lure to dance alone night after nightin the heart of the secret labyrinth to mystic music that the whitemoon makes. But one night, after she is dizzy and exhausted butimpelled to keep on, she feels a hot hand grasp hers; someone whirlsher madly round and she knows that _she is not dancing alone_! Sheis seen no more of men, and searchers find only the prints of herlittle dancing slippers in the sand, with the mark of a cloven hoofbeside them. The most revolting instances of suggestive diabolism arefound in Arthur Machen's stories, where supernatural science opensthe way for the devil to enter the human soul, since the biologistby a cunning operation on the brain removes the moral sense, takesaway the soul, and leaves a being absolutely diabolized. Worse stillis the hideousness of _Seeing the Great God Pan_, where the daemoniccharacter is a composite of the loathsome aspects of Pan and the devil,from which horrible paternity is born a child that embodies all the
unspeakable evil in the world.
In pleasant contrast to dreadful stories are the tales of the amusingdevils that we find frequently. The comic devil is much older thanthe comic ghost, as authors showed a levity toward demons long beforethey treated the specter with disrespect,--one rather wonders why.Clownish devils that appeared in the miracle plays prepared the way forthe humorous and satiric treatment of the Elizabethan drama and latefiction. The liturgical imps were usually funny whether their authorsintended them as such or not, but the devils in fiction are quiteconscious of their own wit, in fact, are rather conceited about it.Poe shows us several amusing demons who display his curious satirichumor,--for instance, the old gentleman in _Never Bet the Devil yourHead_. When Toby Dammit makes his rash assertion, he beholds
the figure of a little lame old gentleman of venerable aspect. Nothing could be more reverend than his whole appearance; for he not only had on a full suit of black, but his shirt was perfectly clean and the collar turned down very neatly over a white cravat, while his hair was parted in front like a girl's. His hands were clasped pensively over his stomach, and his two eyes were carefully rolled up into the top of his head.
This clerical personage who reminds us of the devil in _Peer Gynt_, whoalso appears as a parson, claims the better's head and neatly carriesit off. This is a modern version of an incident similar to Chaucer's_Friar's Tale_, where the devil claimed whatever was offered him insincerity. The combination of humor and mystery in Washington Irving's_The Devil and Tom Walker_ shows the black woodsman in an amusingthough terrifying aspect, as he claims the keeping of the contractsmade with him by Tom and his miserly wife. When Tom goes to search forhis spouse in the woods, he fails to find her.
She had probably attempted to deal with the black man as she had been accustomed to deal with her husband; but though the female scold is generally considered a match for the devil, yet in this instance she appears to have had the worst of it. She must have died game, however, for it is said Tom noticed many prints of cloven feet deeply stamped about the tree, and found handsful of hair that looked as if they had been plucked from the coarse shock of the black woodsman. Tom knew his wife's prowess by experience. He shrugged his shoulders as he looked at the fierce signs of clapper-clawing. "Egad!" he said to himself, "Old Scratch must have had a tough time of it!"
The devil amuses himself in various ways, as is seen by the antics ofthe mysterious stranger in Poe's _The Devil in the Belfry_, who comescurvetting into the old Dutch village with his audacious and sinisterface and curious costume, to upset the sacred time of the place. Thevisitant in _Bon Bon_ is likewise queer as to dress and habits. Hewears garments in the style of a century before, having a queue butno shirt, a cravat with an ecclesiastic suggestion, also a stylusand black book. His facial expression is such as would have struckUriah Heap dumb with envy, and the hint of hoofs and a forked tail iscleverly given though not obtruded. The most remarkable feature of hisappearance, however, is that he has no eyes, simply a dead level offlesh. He declares that he eats souls and prefers to buy them alive toinsure freshness. He has a taste for philosophers, when they are nottoo tough.
The satiric devil, like the satiric ghost, is seen in modern fiction.Eugene Field has a story of a demon who seems sympathetic, weepinglarge, gummy tears at hearing a mortal's woes, and signing theconventional contract on a piece of asbestos paper. He agrees to doeverything the man wishes, for a certain term of years, in return forwhich he is to get the soul. If the devil forfeits the contract, heloses not only that victim but the souls of two thousand already in hisclutches. The man shrewdly demands trying things of him, but the demonis game, building and endowing churches, carrying on philanthropic andreform work without complaint, but balking when the man asks him toclose the saloons on Sunday. Rather than do that, he releases the twothousand and one souls and flies away twitching his tail in wrath.[146]
[146] _Daniel and the Devil._
The most recent, as perhaps the most striking, instance of the satiricdevil is in Mark Twain's posthumous novel, _The Mysterious Stranger_. Ayouth, charming, courtly, and handsome appears in a medieval village,confessing to two boys that he is Satan, though not the original ofthat name, but his nephew and namesake. He insists that he is anunfallen angel, since his uncle is the only member of his family thathas sinned. Satan reads the thoughts of mortals, kindles fire in hispipe by breathing on it, supplies money and other desirable things bymere suggestion, is invisible when he wills it so, and is generallya gifted being. This perennial boy--only sixteen thousand yearsold--makes a charming companion. He says to Marget that his papa is inshattered health and has no property to speak of,--in fact, none of anyearthly value,--but he has an uncle in business down in the tropics,who is very well off, and has a monopoly, and it is from this unclethat he drew his support. Marget expresses the hope that her uncle andhis would meet some day, and Satan says he hoped so, too. "May be theywill," says Marget. "Does your uncle travel much?"
"Oh, yes, he goes all about,--he has business everywhere."
The book is full of this oblique humor, satirizing earth, heaven, andhell. The stranger by his comments on theological creeds satirizesreligion, and Satan is an intended parody of God. He sneers at man's"mongrel moral sense," which tells him the distinction between good andevil, insisting that he should have no choice, that the right to choosemakes him inevitably choose the wrong. He makes little figures out ofclay and gives them life, only to destroy them with casual ruthlessnessa little later and send them to hell. In answer to the old servant'sfaith in God, when she says that He will care for her and her mistress,since "not a sparrow falleth to the ground without His Knowledge,"he sneers, "But it falls, just the same! What's the good of seeing itfall?" He is a new diabolic figure, yet showing the composite traits ofthe old, the daemonic wisdom and sarcasm, the superhuman magnetism todraw men to him, and the human qualities of geniality, sympathy, andboyish charm.
One of the most significant and frequent motifs of the diabolic inliterature is that of the barter of the human soul for the devil'sgift of some earthly boon, long life or wealth or power, or wisdom,or gratification of the senses. It is a theme of unusual power,--whatcould be greater than the struggle over one's own immortal soul?--andwell might the great minds of the world engage themselves with it.Yet that theme is but little apparent in later stories. We have nosuch character in recent literature that can compare with Marlowe'sDr. Faustus or Goethe's Mephistopheles or Calderon's wonder-workingmagician. Hawthorne's Septimius Felton makes a bargain with the devilto secure the elixir of life, there is a legend in Hardy's _Tess of theD' Urbervilles_ of a man that sold himself to the minister of evil,and the incident occurs in various stories of witchcraft, yet withwaning power and less frequence. The most significant recent use of itis in W. B. Yeats's drama.[147] This is a drama of Ireland, where thepeasants have been driven by famine to barter their souls to the devilto buy their children food, but their Countess sells her own soul tothe demon that they may save theirs. This vicarious sacrifice adds anew poignancy to the situation and Yeats has treated it with power.This is the only recent appearance of the devil on the stage for hehas practically disappeared from English drama, where he was once soprominent. The demon was a familiar and leading figure on the miracleand Elizabethan stage, but, like the ghost, he shows more vitality nowin fiction. The devil is an older figure in English drama than is theghost, but he seems to have played out.
[147] _Countess Cathleen._
The analysis and representation of the devil as a character inliterature have covered a great range, from the bestiality of Dante'sDemon in the _Inferno_ to Milton's mighty angel in ruins, with allsorts of variations between, from the sneering cynicism of Goethe'sMephisto to the pinchbeck diabolism of Marie Corelli's sorrowful Satan,and the merry humor and blasphemous satire of Mark Twain's mysteriousstranger. We note an especial influence of Goethe's Mephistophelesin the satiric studies of the demon, an echo of his diabolic climaxwhen in answer to Faust's
outcry over Margaret's downfall and death,he says, "_She is not the first_!" One hears echoing through allliterature Man Friday's unanswerable question, "Why not God killdebbil?" The uses of evil in God's eternal scheme, the soul's freechoice yet pitiful weakness, are sounded again and again. The greatdiabolic figures, in their essential humanity, their intellectualdignity, their sad introspection, their pitiless testing of the humansoul to its predestined fall, are terrible allegorical images of theevil in man himself, or concepts of social sins, as in _Ivan, theFool_. The devils of the great writers, reflecting the time, the racialcharacteristics, the personal natures of their creators, are deeplysymbolic. Each man creates the devil that he can understand, thatrepresents him, for, as Amiel says, we can comprehend nothing of whichwe have not the beginnings in ourselves. As each man sees a differentHamlet, so each one has his own devil, or _is_ his own devil. This isillustrated by the figure in Julian Hawthorne's _Lovers in Heaven_,where the dead man's spirit meets the devil in the after life,--who ishis own image, his daemonic double. Some have one great fiend, whileothers keep packs of little, snarling imps of darkness. A study ofcomparative diabolics is illuminating and might be useful to us all.
=The Wizard and the Witch.= The demon has his earthly partners in evilmembers of the firm of Devil and Company. Certain persons that havemade a pact with him are given a share in his power, and a portion ofhis dark mantle falls upon them. The sorcerer and the witch are ancientfigures in literature, and like others of the supernatural kingdom,notably the devil, they have their origin in the East, the cuneiformwritings of the Chaldeans showing belief in witchcraft. And the Witchof Endor, summoning the spirit of Samuel to confront Saul, is a veryreal figure in the Old Testament. The Greeks believed in witches, asdid the Romans. Meroe, a witch, is described in the _Metamorphoses_ ofLucius Appuleius, from whom perhaps the witch Meroe in Peele's _OldWives' Tale_ gets her name and character. In classical times witcheswere thought to have power to turn men into beasts, tigers, monkeys, orasses--some persons still believe that women have that power and mightgive authenticated instances.
The sorcerer, or wizard, or warlock, or magician, as he is variouslycalled, was a more common figure in early literature than in later,perhaps because, as in so many other cases, his profession has suffereda feminine invasion. The Anglo-Saxon word _wicca_, meaning "witch," ismasculine, which may or may not mean that witchcraft was a manly art inthose days, and the most famous medieval enchanter, Merlin, was a man,it should be noted. The sorcerer of primitive times has been graduallyreduced in power, changing through the astrologer and alchemist ofmedieval and Gothic romance into the bacteriologist and biologist ofrecent fiction, where he works other wonders. In general, warlocksand wizards, while frequent enough in early literature and in modernfolk-tales, have become less numerous in later fiction. Scott[148]has a medical magician with supernatural power of healing by means ofan amulet, which, put to the nostrils of a person practically dead,revives him at once, but which loses its efficacy if given in exchangefor money. Hawthorne has an old Indian sachem with wizard power,[149]who has concocted the elixir of life. We see the passing of the ancientsorcerer into the scientific wonder-worker in such fiction as SaxRohmer's Fu-Manchu stories that depict a Chinese terror, or in H. G.Wells's supernatural investigators in his various stories of science.The magician is not really dead in fiction but has passed over intoanother form, for the most part.
[148] In _The Talisman_.
[149] In his _Septimius Felton_.
We still have the hoodoo man of colored persuasion, and the redskinmedicine-man, together with Oriental sorcerers from Kipling andothers. Examples are: _In the House of Suddoo_, by Kipling, where thewonder-worker unites a canny knowledge of the telephone and telegraphalong with his unholy art; _Red Debts_, by Lumley Deakin, where theIndian magician exacts a terrible penalty for the wrong done him, andwhere his diabolic appearance to claim his victim leaves one in doubtas to whether he has not sent his chief in his place; _The Monkey'sPaw_, by W. W. Jacobs, a curdling story of a magic curse given by anOriental sorcerer, by which the paw of a dead monkey grants threewishes that have a dreadful boomerang power; _Black Magic_, by JessieAdelaide Weston,--who claims that all her supernatural stories arestrictly true--the narrative of an old Indian sorcerer that changeshimself into a hair mat and is shot for his pains. He has obtainedpower over the house by being given a hair from the mat by theuninitiated mistress. Hair, you must know, has great power of evil inthe hands of witches and sorcerers, as in the case of the evil ones in_The Talisman_, who received their thrall over the maidens by one hairfrom each head. F. Marion Crawford's _Khaled_ is a story of magic art.Khaled is one of the genii converted by reading the Koran, who wishesto be a mortal man with a soul. He is given the right to do so if hecan win the love of a certain woman. Hence he is born into the world,like Adam, a full-grown man, to be magically clothed and equipped, bythe transformation of leaves and twigs into garments and armor, and thechanging of a locust into an Arabian steed. After many supernaturaladventures, he receives his soul from an angel. The soul, at first acrescent flame,
immediately took shape and became the brighter image of Khaled himself. And when he had looked at it fixedly for a few minutes--the vision of himself had disappeared and before he was aware it had entered his own body and taken up its life with him.
This is a parallel to the cases of ghostly doubles discussed in theprevious chapter.
The magician shows a disposition to adapt himself to contemporaryconditions and to change his personality with the times. Not so thewitch. She is a permanent figure. She has appeared in the variousforms of literature, in Elizabethan drama, in Gothic romance, inmodern poetry, the novel and the short story, and is very much aliveto-day. We have witches young and old. We have the fake witch, like thehoax ghost; the imputed witch and the genuine article. We have witchstories melodramatic, romantic, tragic, comic, and satiric, showingthe influence of the great creations of past literature with modernadaptations and additions. English poetry is full of witchery, perhapslargely the result of the Celtic influence on our literature. Thepoetic type of witchcraft is brought out in such poems as Coleridge's_Christabel_, where the beauty and suggestiveness veil the sense ofunearthly evil; or in Shelley's _Witch of Atlas_, where the womanappears as a symbol of alluring loveliness possessing none of thehideous aspects seen in other weird women. The water enchantress inShelley's fragment of an unfinished drama might be mentioned as anotherexample while Keats's _La Belle Dame sans Merci_ has a magical charmall her own. Christina Rossetti's _Goblin Market_ shows a peculiaraspect of magic, as also Mrs. Browning's _The Lay of the Brown Rosary_.On the contrary, Milton's _Comus_, Robert Herrick's _The Hag_, andJames Hogg's _The Witch of Fife_ illustrate the uglier aspects ofenchantment.
There are two definite types of witches seen in English fiction, thefirst being merely the reputed witch, the woman who is falsely accusedor suspected of black arts, and who either is persecuted, or else gainswhat she wishes by hints of her traffic in evil, like the Old GrannyYoung in _Mine Host and the Witch_, by James Blythe, who chants as acharm-rune,
"A curse shall lay on water and land For the thing denied the witch's hand,"
so that everybody is afraid to refuse her whatever she demands. Thisis a highly conventionalized type of the motif and, though it is foundin great numbers in modern fiction, is not particularly important. Theprincipal complications of the plot are usually the same, the characterknown as the witch being either an appealing figure winning sympathybecause of her beauty and youth, or else touching to pity because ofher age and infirmities. No person of average age or pulchritude isever accused of witchcraft in English fiction. She is always veryold and poor or young and lovely. Item also, she invariably has twolovers, in the latter case. She is merely a romantic peg on which tohang a story, not always real as a human being and not a real witch.In these stories the only magic used is love, the fair maid havingunintentionally charmed the heart of a villain, who, failing to winher, a
ccuses her of witchcraft in order to frighten her into love.In some of the novels and stories the victim is actually executed,while in others she is rescued by her noble lover at the fifty-ninthsecond. We have the pursuing villain, the distressed innocence, thechivalric lover disporting themselves in late Gothic fashion overmany romances. Even Mary Johnston with her knowledge of Colonialtimes and her power to give atmosphere to the past does not succeedin imparting the breath of life to her late novel of witchcraft,_The Witch_. These pink-and-white beauties who speak in Euphuisticsentences, who show a lamblike defiance toward the dark tempters,who breathe prayers to heaven for protection and forgiveness totheir enemies in one breath, who die or are rescued with equal graceand propriety,--one is carried away from the scaffold by Kidd, thepirate, thus delaying for several chapters her rescue by her faithfullover--do not really touch the heart any more than they interest theintellect. Yet there are occasional instances of the imputed witchwho seems real despite her handicap of beauty and youth, as Iseult leDesireuse, in Maurice Hewlett's _Forest Lovers_, whom Prosper le Gaiweds to save from the hangman. The young woman in F. Marion Crawford's_Witch of Prague_ might be called a problematic witch, for while shedoes undoubtedly work magic, it is for the most part attributed to herpowers of hypnotism rather than to the black art itself. We find anexcellent example of the reputed witch who is a woman of real charmand individuality, in D'Annunzio's _The Daughter of Jorio_, where theyoung girl is beset by cruel dangers because of her charm and herlonely condition, and who rises to tragic heights of sacrifice to saveher lover from death, choosing to be burned to death as a witch to savehim from paying the penalty of murder. She actually convinces him, aswell as the others, that she has bewitched him by unholy powers, thatshe has slain his father and made him believe that he himself did itto save her honor, and she goes to her death with a white fervor ofcourage, with no word of complaint, save one gentle rebuke to him that_he_ should not revile her.
The aged pseudo-witch is in the main more appealing than the youngone, because more realistic. Yet there is no modern instance that isso touching as the poor old crone in _The Witch of Edmonton_, who ispersecuted for being a witch and who turns upon her tormentors with aspeech that reminds us of Shylock's famous outcry, showing clearly howtheir suspicion and accusation have made her what she is. We see herea witch in the making, an innocent old woman who is harried by humanbeings till she makes a compact with the devil. Meg Merrilies[150] isa problematic witch, a majestic, sibylline figure, very individualand human, yet with more than a suggestion of superhuman wisdom andpower. Scott limned her with a loving hand, and Keats was so impressedwith her personality that he wrote a poem concerning her. ElizabethEnderfield, in Hardy's _Under the Greenwood Tree_, is a reputed witchand witch-pricking is also tried in his _Return of the Native_. Variousexperiments with magic are used in Hardy's work, as the instance ofthe woman's touching her withered arm to the neck of a man that hadbeen hanged, consulting the conjurer concerning butter that won't come,and so forth. Old Aunt Keziah in Hawthorne's _Septimius Felton_ mightbe called a problematic witch, as the woman in _The Witch_ by EdenPhillpotts. She has a great number of cats, and something dreadfulhappens to anyone who injures one of them; she calls the three blacktoads her servants and goes through incantations over a snake skeleton,the carcass of a toad, and the mummy of a cat. Mother Tab may or maynot be a _bona fide_ witch, but she causes much trouble to thoseassociated with her.
[150] Of Scott's _Guy Mannering_.
The unquestioned witch, possessing indubitable powers of enchantment,occurs frequently and conveys a genuine thrill. Her attributes havebeen less conventionalized than those of her youthful companions whoare merely under the imputation of black art, and she possesses adiabolic individuality. Though she may not remain long in view, sheis an impressive figure not soon forgotten. The old crone in Scott's_The Two Drovers_ gives warning to Robin Oig, "walking the deasil," asit is called, around him, tracing the propitiation which some think areminiscence of Druidical mythology,--which is performed by walkingthree times round the one in danger, moving according to the course ofthe sun. In the midst of her incantation the hag exclaims, "Blood onyour hand, and it is English blood!" True enough, before his journey'send young Robin does murder his English companion. In the same storyother evidences of witchcraft are shown, as the directions for keepingaway the evil influence from cattle by tying St. Mungo's knot on theirtails.
The subject of witchcraft greatly interested Hawthorne, for heintroduces it in a number of instances. _Young Goodman Brown_ showsthe aspects of the diabolic union between the devil and his earthlycompanions, their unholy congregations in the forest, reports theirsardonic conversations and suggestions of evil in others, and picturesthe witches riding on broomsticks high in the heavens and workingtheir magic spells. The young husband sees in that convocation allthe persons whom he has most revered--his minister, his Sabbath-schoolteacher, and even his young wife, so that all his after-life issaddened by the thought of it. Witchcraft enters into _The ScarletLetter_, _Main Street_, and _Feathertop_, and is mentioned in otherstories.
Old Mother Sheehy in Kipling's _The Courting of Dinah Shadd_pronounces a malediction against Private Mulvany and the girl heloves, prophesying that he will be reduced in rank instead of beingpromoted, will be a slave to drink so that his young wife will takein washing for officers' wives instead of herself being the wife ofan officer, and that their only child will die,--every bitter wordof which comes true in after years. The old witch mother in HowardPyle's _The Evil Eye_ inspires her daughter to cast a spell over theman she loves but who does not think of her, causing him to leave hisbetrothed and wed the witch daughter. When understanding comes to him,and with it loathing, the girl seeks to regain his love by followingthe counsel of an old magician, who gives her an image to be burnt. Butthat burning of the image kills her and looses the man from her spell.That incident is similar to that in D'Annunzio's _Sogno d'un Tramontod'Autunno_ where the Dogaressa seeks to slay her rival, both probablybeing based on the unforgettable employment of the theme in Rossetti's_Sister Helen_, where the young girl causes the death of her betrayerby melting the image.
In Gordon Bottomley's play, _Riding to Lithend_, three old womenenter, who seem to partake of the nature of the Parcae as well as ofShakespeare's Weird Sisters. They have bat-webbed fingers, the houndbays uncannily at their approach, they show supernatural knowledgeof events, and they chant a wild prophecy of doom, then mysteriouslydisappear. Fate marches swiftly on as they foretell.
The young and beautiful witch can work as much evil as the ancientcrone, perhaps more, since her emotions are wilder and moreunrestrained. She can project a curse that reaches its victim acrossthe ocean, when the one who sent the curse is rotting in the tomb, asin _The Curse of the Cashmere Shawl_, where a betrayed and desertedwoman in India sends a rare shawl to her rival, then drowns herself.Months after, when the husband, forgetful of the source, lays the shawlaround his wife's shoulders, the dead woman takes her place. After thisgruesome transfer of personality, the wife, impelled by a terrible urgeshe cannot understand, drowns herself as the other has done monthsbefore. Oscar Wilde[151] shows a young and lovely witch with a humanlonging for the love of the young man who throws away his soul forlove of a mermaid. Through life's tragic satire, she is compelled, inspite of her entreaties, to show him how he may damn himself and winthe other's affection. The jealousy shown here and in other instancesis an illustration of the human nature of the witch, who, like thedevil, makes a strong appeal to our sympathy in spite of the undoubtediniquity.
[151] In _The Fisherman and his Soul_.
The element of symbolism enters largely into the witch-creations, evenfrom the time of Shakespeare's Three in _Macbeth_, who are terriblesymbolic figures of the evil in man's soul. They appear as the visibleembodiment of Macbeth's thoughts, and by their mysterious suggestiveutterances tempt him to put his unlawful dreams into action. They seemboth cause and effect here, for though when they first appear to himhis ha
nds are innocent of blood, his heart is tainted with selfishambition, and their whispers of promise hurry on the deed. In _AncientSorceries_, by Algernon Blackwood, the village is full of persons whoat night by the power of an ancestral curse, a heritage of subliminalmemory, become witches, horrible cat-creatures, unhuman, that dancethe blasphemous dance of the Devil's Sabbath. The story symbolizes theeternal curse that rests upon evil, the undying quality of thought andaction that cannot cease when the body of the sinner has become dust,but reaches out into endless generations.
In _Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts_ by A. T. Quiller-Couch, we see awitch, a young woman whose soul is under a spell from the devil. Shegives rich gifts to the church, but her offerings turn into toads andvipers, defiling the sanctuary, and as she sings her wild songs thebodies of drowned men come floating to the surface of the water andjoin in the words of her song. Her beauty is supernatural and accursed,yet her soul is innocent of wish to do evil, though it leaves her bodyand goes like a cresseted flame at night to follow the devil, while thebody is powerless in sleep. Finally the devil comes in the form of aMoor, possibly a suggestion from _Zofloya_, and summons her, when shedies, with a crucifix clasped over her heart.
W. B. Yeats has pictured several witches for us, as the crone of thegray hawk, in _The Wisdom of the King_, a woman tall with more thanmortal height, with feathers of the gray hawk growing in her hair,who stoops over the royal cradle and whispers a strange thing to thechild, as a result of which he grows up in a solitude of his own mysticthoughts with dreams that are like the marching and counter-marchingof armies. When he realizes that the simple joys of life and love arenot for him, he disappears, some say to make his home with the immortaldemons, some say with the shadowy goddesses that haunt the midnightpools in the forest. In _The Curse of the Fires and the Shadows_, Yeatspictures another witch, tall and in a gray gown, who is standing in theriver and washing, washing the dead body of a man. As the troopers whohave murdered the friars and burned down the church ride past, each manrecognizes in the dead face his own face,--just a moment before theyall plunge over the abyss to death.
There are witches in most collections of English folk-tales, for thesimpler people, the more elemental natures, have a strong feeling forthe twilight of nature and of life. The weird woman has power over theforces of nature and can evoke the wrath of the elements as of unholypowers against her enemies. Stories of witches, as of sorcerers, occurin Indian folk-tales, as well as in those of the American Indian,differing in details in the tribal collections yet showing similaressential ideas. The Scotch show special predilection for the witch,since with their tense, stern natures, they stand in awe of the darkerpowers and of those that call them forth. They relate curious instancesof the relations between the animal world and witchcraft, as in _TheDark Nameless One_, by Fiona McLeod, the story of a nun that falls inlove with a seal and is forced to live forever in the sea, weaving herspells where the white foam froths, and knowing that her soul is lost.This is akin to the theme that Matthew Arnold uses,[152] though with adifferent treatment, showing similarity to Hans Christian Andersen'stale of _The Little Mermaid_. The cailleachuisge, or the water-witch,and the maighdeanmhara, the mermaid, and the kelpie, the sea-beast,are cursed with daemonic spells and live forever in their witchery.When mortals forsake the earth and follow them their children arebeings that have no souls. The Irish folk-tales, on the other hand,while having their quota of witches, do not think so much about themor take them quite so seriously, inclining more to the faery forms ofsupernaturalism suited to their poetic natures. The sense of beautyof the Irish is so vivid and their innate poetry so intense that theyglimpse the loveliness of magic, and their enchanted beings are ofbeauty rather than of horror.
[152] In his _Forsaken Merman_ and _The Neckan_.
We even have the humorous and satiric witch, to correspond to similarrepresentations of the ghost and the devil in modern fiction. Theinstance in Burns's _Tam O'Shanter_ needs only to be recalled, with theludicrous description of the wild race at night to escape the dreadpowers. _Bones, Sanders, and Another_, by Edgar Wallace, introduces awitch with comic qualities, a woman whose husband has been a magician,and the reputed familiar of a devil. She cures people by laying herhands on them, once causing a bone that was choking a child to flyout with "a cry terrible to hear, such a cry as a leopard makes whenpursued by ghosts." When this witch with a sense of humor is arrestedas a trouble-maker by an army officer, she "eradicates" her clothes,causing very comic complications. The best example of the satiric witchis Hawthorne's Mother Rigby, in _Feathertop_, who constructs a manfrom a broomstick and other materials for a scarecrow. In this satiricsermon upon the shams and hypocrisies of life, Mother Rigby, with hersardonic humor, her cynical comments, parodies society, holds themirror up to human life and shows more than one poor painted scarecrow,simulacrum of humanity, masquerading as a man. The figure that shecreates, with his yearnings and his pride, his horror when he realizeshis own falsity and emptiness, is more human, more a man, than many abeing we meet in literature or in life.
Barry Pain has several witch stories that do not fall readily into anycategory, curious stories of scientific dream-supernaturalism, in therealm of the unreal. _Exchange_ is the account of a supernatural woman,whether a witch or one of the Fates, one does not know, who comes,clad in scarlet rags, to show human souls their destinies. She permitsan exchange of fate, if one is willing to pay her price, which is ineach case terrible enough. One young girl gives up her pictured futureof life and love, and surrenders her mind for the purpose of saving herbaby brother from his destined fate of suicide in manhood. The croneappears to an old man that loves the child, who takes upon himself herfate of being turned into a bird to be tortured after human death, sothat the young girl may have his future, to be turned into a white lambthat dies after an hour, then be a soul set free. _The Glass of SupremeMoments_ is another story of prophetic witchery, of revealed fate seenin supernatural dreams. A young man in his college study sees thefireplace turn into a silver stairway down which a lovely gray-robedwoman comes to him. She shows him a mirror, the glass of suprememoments, in which the highest instants of each man's life are shown.She says of it, "All the ecstasy of the world lies there. The suprememoments of each man's life, the scene, the spoken words--all lie there.Past and present and future--all are there." She shows an emotionmeter that measures the thrill of joy. After he has seen the climacticinstants of his friends' lives he asks to see his own, when she tellshim his are here and now. She tells him that her name is Death and thathe will die if he kisses her, but he cries out, "I will die kissingyou!" And presently his mates return to find his body fallen deadacross his table.
There is something infinitely appealing about the character of thewitch. She seems a creature of tragic loneliness, conscious of herown dark powers, yet conscious also of her exile from the good, andknowing that all the evil she evokes will somehow come back to her,that her curses will come home, as in the case of _Witch Hazel_, wherethe witch, by making a cake of hair to overcome her rival in love,brings on a tempest that kills her lover and drives her mad. Each evilact, each dark imagining seems to create a demon and turn him looseto harry humanity with unceasing force, as Matthew Maule's curse in_The House of Seven Gables_ casts a spiritual shadow on the home. Yetthe witch is sometimes a minister of good, as Mephistopheles says ofhimself, achieving the good where he meant evil; sometimes typifyingthe mysterious mother nature, as the old Wittikin in Hauptmann's_Sunken Bell_, neither good nor evil, neither altogether human norsupernatural. Her strange symbolism is always impressive.
=Daemonic Spirits--Vampires.= Closely related to the devil are certaindiabolic spirits that are given supernatural power by him andacknowledge his suzerainty. These include ghouls, vampires, werewolves,and other demoniac animals, as well as the human beings that through acompact with the fiend share in his dark force. Since such creaturespossess dramatic possibilities, they have given interest to fictionand other literature from early times. This idea
of an unholy alliancebetween earth and hell, has fascinated the human mind and beenreflected astonishingly in literature. In studying the appearance ofthese beings in English fiction, we note, as in the case of the ghost,the witch, and the devil, a certain leveling influence, a tendency tohumanize them and give them characteristics that appeal to our sympathy.
The vampire and the ghoul are closely related and by some authoritiesare considered the same, yet there is a distinction. The ghoul is abeing, to quote Poe, "neither man nor woman, neither brute nor human"that feeds upon corpses, stealing out at midnight for loathsomebanquets in graveyards. He devours the flesh of the dead, while thevampire drains the blood of the living. The ghoul is an Asiaticcreature and has left but slight impress upon English literature,while the vampire has been a definite motif. The vampire superstitiongoes back to ancient times, being referred to on Chaldean and Assyriantablets. William of Newbury, of the twelfth century in England, relatesseveral stories of them; one vampire was burned in Melrose Abbey, andtourists in Ireland are still shown the grave of a vampire. Perhaps thevampire superstition goes back to the savagery of remote times, and isan animistic survival of human sacrifices, of cannibalism and the like.The vampire is thought of as an evil spirit issuing forth at night toattack the living in their sleep and drain the blood which is necessaryto prolong its own revolting existence. Certain persons were thoughtto be especially liable to become vampires at death, such as suicides,witches, wizards, persons who in life had been attacked by vampires,outcasts of various kinds, as well as certain animals, werewolves, deadlizards, and others.
The vampire superstition was general in the East and extended toEurope, it is thought, by way of Greece. The Greeks thought of thevampire as a beautiful young woman, a lamia, who lured young men totheir death. The belief was particularly strong in central Europe, butnever seemed to gain the same foothold in England that it did on thecontinent, though it is evident here and has influenced literature. Thevampire has been the inspiration for several operas, and has figuredin the drama, in poetry, in the novel and short story, as well as infolk-tales and medieval legends. The stories show the various aspectsof the belief and its ancient hold on the popular mind. The vampire,as well as the ghost, the devil, and the witch, has appeared on theEnglish stage. _The Vampire_, an anonymous melodrama in two acts, _TheVampire_, a tragedy by St. John Dorset (1821), _The Vampire Bride_, aplay, _Le Vampire_, by Alexander Dumas _pere_, and _The Vampire, or theBride of the Isles_, by J. R. Planche, were presented in the Londontheater. The latter which was published in 1820 is remarkably similarto _The Vampyre_, a novelette by Polidori, published in 1819,--thestory written after the famous ghost session where Byron, the Shelleys,and Polidori agreed each to write a ghostly story, Mary Shelley writing_Frankenstein_.
Polidori's story, like the play referred to, has for its principalcharacter an Englishman, Lord Ruthven, the Earl of Marsden, who is thevampire. In each case there is a supposed death, where the dying manasks that his body be placed where the last rays of the moon can fallupon it. The corpse then mysteriously vanishes. In each story there isa complication of a rash pledge of silence made by a man that discoversthe diabolical nature of the earl, who, having risen from the dead,is ravaging society as a vampire. In each case a peculiar turn of thestory is that the masculine vampire requires for his subsistence theblood of young women, to whom he must be married. He demands a newvictim, hence a hurried wedding is planned. In the play the ceremonyis interrupted by the bride's father, but in the novelette the plotis finished and the girl becomes the victim of the destroyer. It isa question which of these productions was written first, and whichimitated the other, or if they had a common source. The author of thedrama admits getting his material from a French play, but where didPolidori get his?
Byron seems to have been fascinated with the vampire theme, for inaddition to his unsuccessful short story, he has used the theme in hispoem, _The Giaour_. Here he brings in the idea that the vampire curseis a judgment from God for sin, and that the most terrible part of thepunishment is the being forced to prey upon those who in life weredearest to him, which idea occurs in various stories.
"But first on earth as Vampyre sent Thy corse shall from its tomb be rent; Then ghastly haunt thy native place And suck the blood of all thy race; There from thy _daughter_, _sister_, _wife_, At midnight drain the stream of life; Yet loathe the banquet which perforce Must feed thy livid, living corse. Thy victims, ere they yet expire Shall know the demon for their sire; As, cursing thee, thou cursing them, Thy flowers are withered on the stem. But one, that for thy crime must fall, The youngest, best-beloved of all, Shall bless thee with a _father's_ name-- That word shall wrap thy heart in flame! Yet must thou end the task and mark Her cheek's last tinge, her eye's last spark, And the last glassy glance must view Which freezes o'er its lifeless blue; Then with unhallowed hand shall tear The tresses of her yellow hair, Of which, in life, a lock when shorn Affection's fondest pledge was worn,-- But now is borne away by thee Memorial of thine agony! Yet with thine own best blood shall drip Thy gnashing teeth and haggard lip; Then stalking to thy sullen grave Go--and with ghouls and Afrits rave, Till these in horror shrink away From specter more accursed than they!"
Southey in his _Thalaba_ shows us a vampire, a young girl in this case,who has been torn away from her husband on their wedding day. The curseimpels her to attack him, to seek to drain his lifeblood. He becomesaware of the truth and takes her father with him to the tomb, to awaither coming forth at midnight, which is the striking hour for vampires.When she appears, "in her eyes a brightness more terrible than all theloathsomeness of death," her father has the courage to strike a lancethrough her heart to dispel the demon and let her soul be at peace.
"Then howling with the wound The fiendish tenant fled.... And garmented with glory in their sight Oneiza's spirit stood."
Keats uses the Greek idea of the vampire as a lamia or beautiful youngwoman luring young men to death,--the same theme employed by Goethe inhis _Die Braut von Corinth_. In _Lamia_, when the evil spirit in theform of a lovely, alluring woman, is accused by the old philosopher,she gives a terrible scream and vanishes. This vanishing business is afavorite trick with vampires--they leave suddenly when circumstancescrowd them.
F. Marion Crawford, in _For the Blood Is the Life_, has given us aterrible vampire story, in which the dream element is present to amarked degree. The young man, who has been vainly loved by a younggirl, is after her death vampirized by her, something after the fashionof Turgeniev's Clara Militch, and when his friends get an inkling ofthe truth, and go to rescue him, they find him on her grave, a thin redline of blood trickling from his throat.
And the flickering light of the lantern played upon another face that looked up from the feast,--upon two deep, dead eyes that saw in spite of death--upon parted lips redder than life itself--upon gleaming teeth on which glistened a rosy drop.
The hawthorne stake is driven through her heart and the vampire expiresafter a terrific struggle, uttering diabolic, human shrieks. There isa certain similarity between this and Gautier's _La Morte Amoreuse_,where the truth is concealed till the last of the story and onlythe initiated would perhaps know that the reincarnated woman was avampire. It is also a bit like Turgeniev's _Phantoms_, where a subtlesuggestion at the last gives the reader the clue to vampirism, thoughthe author really asks the question at the close, Was she a vampire?The character of the woman is problematic here, as in Gautier's story,less pronounced than in Crawford's.
The idea of occult vampirism used by Turgeniev is also employed byReginald Hodder in his work, _The Vampire_. Here peculiar power ispossessed by a woman leader of an occult band, who vampirizes bymeans of a talisman. Her ravages are psychic rather than physical.Theosophists, according to the _Occult Magazine_, believe in vampireseven in the present. According to their theory, one who has been verywicked in life is in death so inextricably entangled with
his evilmotives and acts that he is hopelessly lost and knows it, yet seeks todelay for a time his final damnation. He can ward off spiritual deathso long as he can keep alive by means of blood his physical corpse. The_Occult Review_ believes that probably only those acquainted with blackmagic in their lifetime can become vampires,--a thought comforting tosome of us.
It is in Bram Stoker's _Dracula_ that one finds the tensest, mostdreadful modern story of vampirism. This novel seems to omit no detailof terror, for every aspect of vampire horror is touched upon withbrutal and ghastly effect. The combination of ghouls, vampires, ghosts,werewolves, and other awful elements is almost unendurable, yet thebook loses in effect toward the last, for the mind cannot endure fourhundred pages of vampiric outrage and respond to fresh impressionsof horror. The initial vampire here is a Hungarian count, who, afterterrorizing his own country for years, transports himself to Englandto start his ravages there. Each victim in turn becomes a vampire. Thecombination of modern science with medieval superstition to fight thescourge, using garlic and sprigs of the wild rose together with bloodtransfusion, is interesting. All the resources of modern science arepitted against the infection and the complications are dramaticallythrilling. The book is not advised as suitable reading for one sittingalone at night.
There are other types of vampirism in addition to the conventionaltheme and the occult vampirism. H. G. Wells gives his customary twistof novelty to supernaturalism by the introduction of a botanicalvampire in his _The Flowering of the Strange Orchid_. An orchidcollector is found unaccountably dead in a jungle in the AndamanIslands, with a strange bulb lying under him, which bulb is broughtto England and watched carefully by a botanist there till it comes toflower. When at last its blossoms burst open, great tentacles reach outto grasp the man, sucking his blood and strangling him. The tentaclesdripping blood have to be torn away and the man snatched violently fromthe plant just in time to save his life.
Algernon Blackwood, who has touched upon every terrible aspect ofsupernaturalism, gives us two types of vampires in his story, _TheTransfer_. The one is a psychic vampire, stealing the vital power fromothers, a human sponge, absorbing the strength, the ideas, the soul, ofothers. The governess describes him: "I watched his hard, bleak face;I noticed how thin he was, and the curious, oily brightness of hissteady eyes. And everything he said or did announced what I may dareto call the _suction_ of his presence." This human vampire comes incontact with one of another sort, a soil vampire, the Forbidden Corner,a bald, sore place in the rose garden, like a dangerous bog. The womanand a little child know the truth of this spot so barren in the midstof luxurious growth, so sinister in its look and implication. The childsays of it, "It's bad. It's hungry. It's dying because it can't get thefood it wants. But I know what would make it feel right." The earthvampire stretches out silent feelers from its secret strength when theman comes near the evil spot; the empty, yawning spot gives out audiblecries, then laughs hideously as the man falls forward into the middleof the patch. "His eyes, as he dropped, faded shockingly, and acrossthe countenance was written plainly what I can only call an expressionof destruction." The man lives on physically, yet without vitality,without real life. But it was otherwise with the Forbidden Corner, forsoon "it lay untouched, full of great, luscious, driving weeds andcreepers, very strong, full-fed and bursting thick with life."
And so the vampire stories vary in theme and in treatment. Indianfolk-tales appearing in English show that the Jigar-Khor, orLiver-eater of India is a cousin to the vampire, for he can steal yourliver by just looking at you. (It has long been known that hearts canbe filched in this way, but the liver wrinkle is a new one.) There areseveral points to be noted in connection with these stories of theUn-dead, the incorruptible corpses, the loathsome spirits that hauntthe living. Many of the stories have a setting in the countries wherethe vampire superstition has been most common, though there are Englishsettings as well. Continental countries are richer in vampire lore thanEngland, which explains the location of the incidents even in manyEnglish stories and poems. Another point to be noted is the agreementof the stories in the essential features. While there are numerousvariants, of course, there is less divergence than in the case ofghosts, for instance. The description of the daemonic spirit tenantingthe body of a dead person, driving him by a dreadful urge to attack theliving, especially those dear to him in life, is much the same. Thepersonality of the vampire may vary, in one line of stories being ayoung woman who lures men to death, in the other a man who must quenchhis thirst with the blood of brides. These are the usual types, thoughthere are other variants.
=The Werewolf and Others.= Another daemonic figure popular in fictionis the werewolf. The idea is a very old one, having been mentionedby various classical writers, it is said, including Pomponius Mela,Herodotus, and Ovid. The legend of the werewolf is found in practicallyall European countries, especially those where the wolf is common. InFrance many stories of the loup-garou are current. The werewolf is ahuman being cursed with the power or the obligation to be transformedinto an animal who goes forth to slay and devour. Like a vampire, hemight become such as a curse from God, or he might be an innocentvictim, or might suffer from an atavistic tendency, a cannibalisticcraving for blood. Distinction is to be made between the real werewolfand the lycanthrope,--the latter a human being who, on account ofsome peculiar twist of insanity, fancies himself a wolf and actsaccordingly. There is such a character in _The Duchess of Malfi_, amaniac who thinks himself a mad wolf, and another in _The Albigenses_,a creature that crouches in a corner of its lair, gnawing at a skullsnatched from the graveyard, uttering bestial growls. AlgernonBlackwood has a curdling story of lycanthropy, where the insane manwill eat nothing but raw meat and devours everything living that hecan get hold of. He confesses to a visitor that he used to bite his oldservant, but that he gave it up, since the old Jew tasted bitter. Theservant also is mad, and "hides in a vacuum" when his master goes on arampage. Stories of lycanthropy illustrate an interesting aspect of theassociation between insanity and the supernatural in fiction.
The most revolting story of lycanthropy is in Frank Norris's posthumousnovel, _Vandover and the Brute_. This is a study in soul degeneration,akin to the moral decay that George Eliot has shown in the character ofTito Melema, but grosser and utterly lacking in artistic restraint. Wesee a young man, at first sensitive, delicate, and with high ideals,gradually through love of ease and self-indulgence, through takingalways the line of least resistance, becoming a moral outcast. Thebrute that ever strains at the leash in man gains the mastery and theartist soul ends in a bestial creature. Dissipation brings on madness,called by the doctors "lycanthropy-mathesis." In his paroxysms ofinsanity the wretch thinks that his body is turned into the beast thathis soul symbolizes, and runs about his room, naked, four-footed,growling like a jungle animal and uttering harsh, raucous cries of_Wolf-wolf!_
Kipling's _The Mark of the Beast_ is midway between a lycanthrope anda werewolf story, for while the soul of the beast--or whatever passesfor the brutish soul--enters into the man and drives out his spirit,and while many bestial characteristics result, including the revoltingodor, the man does not change his human form.
While lycanthropy has never been a frequent theme in fiction, thewerewolf is a common figure, appearing in various forms of literature,from medieval ballads and legends to modern short stories. Marie deFrance, the Anglo-Norman writer,[153] tells of a werewolf that isby day a gallant knight and kindly gentleman, yet goes on nocturnalmarauding expeditions. When his wife shows curiosity concerning hisabsences and presses him for an explanation, he reluctantly tells herthat he is a werewolf, hiding his clothes in a hollow tree, and thatif they were removed he would have to remain a wolf. She has her loversteal his clothes, then marries the lover. One day long afterward theking's attention is called to a wolf that runs up to him and actsstrangely. It is a tame and well-mannered beast till the false knightand his wife appear, when he tries to tear their throats. Investigationreveals the truth, the clothes are fe
tched, and the curse removed.Arthur O'Shaughnessy's modern version of this, as of others of Marie's_lais_, is charming.
[153] In her lay of _Bisclavret_.
Like the vampire, the werewolf is under a curse that impels him to preyupon those dearest to him. Controlled by a daemonic spirit, the humanbeing, that in his normal personality is kindly and gentle, becomes ajungle beast with ravening instincts. The motif is obviously tangledup with the vampire superstition here, and it would be interesting,if possible, to trace out the two to a point of combination. Thisirresistible impulse to slay his dear ones introduces a dramaticelement into the plot, here as in the vampire stories. The wolf is notthe only animal around whom such plots center, but being most commonhe has given his name to the type. _The Albigenses_ tell of a younghusband who, as a werewolf, slays his bride, then vanishes to be seenno more.
There are interesting variants of the werewolf story, introducing otherelements of supernaturalism. In _A Vendetta of the Jungle_,[154] wehave the idea of successive infection of the moral curse, similar tothe continuation of vampirism. Mrs. Crump, a lady in India, is eatenby a tiger, who has a good digestion for he assimilates not only herbody but her soul. So that now it is Mrs. Crump-Tiger, we might say,that goes about the jungle eating persons. In time she devours hersuccessor in her husband's affection. The man is aware that it is hisfirst wife who has eaten his second, so he starts out to kill theanimal to clear off the score. But by the time he reaches the junglethe beast has had time to digest his meal and when the husband levelshis gun to fire, the eyes that look out at him from the brutish faceare his beloved's eyes. What could he do?
[154] By Arthur Applier and H. Sidney Warwick.
Eugene Field gives a new turn to the idea by representing the werewolfcurse as a definite atavistic throw-back. His wolf-man is an innocentmarauder, the reincarnation of a wicked grandfather, yet a gentle,chivalrous soul very different from his grandparent. The old gentlemanhas left him heir to nothing but the curse and a magic spear givenhim by the witch Brunhilde. The werewolf bears a charmed life againstwhich no weapon of man can avail, and the country is panic-strickenover his ravages. The legend is that the beast's fury cannot be stoppedtill some man offers himself as a voluntary sacrifice to the wolf. Theyouth does not know that he is the guilty one until his reprehensiblegrandfather appears to him in a vision, demanding his soul. He hearsthat there is to be a meeting in the sacred grove on a certain dayand begs his beloved to remain away, lest the werewolf come. But whenshe insists that she will go, he gives her his magic spear, tellingher to strike the wolf through the heart if he approaches her. Trueto his accursed destiny the wolf does come to the grove and lunges atthe girl. All the men flee but one, and his weapons fail,--then theterrified girl hurls the spear, striking the beast to the heart. Butwhen he falls, it is young Harold who is dying, who has given himselfa voluntary sacrifice to save others. The curse is lifted but he isdead.
In _The Camp of the Dog_, by Algernon Blackwood, we have anotherunconscious werewolf, a gentle, modest, manly young fellow madlyin love with a girl who doesn't care for him. In his sleep he goesquesting for her. While his body lies shrunken on a cot in his tent,his soul takes the form of a wolf and goes to the hilltop, utteringunearthly howls. By an equally strong psychic disturbance the girl isimpelled to go in a somnambulistic state to the hilltop. Each is inwaking hours utterly unaware of their strange jaunts, till the fathershoots the wolf. The young man in this case suffers only curiouspsychic wounds, from which he recovers when the girl promises to marryhim, and the wolf is seen no more.
The panther plays his part in this were-menagerie. Ambrose Bierce, in_The Eyes of the Panther_, tells of a young girl who, because of aprenatal curse similar to that affecting Elsie Venner, is not whollyhuman. She is conscious of her dual nature and tells the man she lovesthat she cannot marry him since she is a panther by night. He thinksher mildly insane till one night a settler sees a beast's eyes glaringinto his window and fires. When they follow the blood-tracks, they findthe girl dying. This is one of the conventions of the werewolf story,the wounding of an animal that escapes and the blood-trail that leadsto a human being wounded just as the beast was.
Elliott O'Donnell, in a volume called _Werewolves_ published in Londonin 1912, gives serious credence to the existence of werewolves not onlyin the past but also in the present. He tells a number of stories ofwhat he claims are authenticated instances of such beings in actuallife. He relates the experience of a man who told him that he hadhimself seen a youth turn himself into a tiger after preparatorypasses of enchantment. The watcher made haste to climb a sacred Vishnutree when the transformation was complete. O'Donnell tells a tale of awidow with three children that married a Russian nobleman. She saw himand his servant change into werewolves, at least partially, remainingin a half state, devouring her children whom she left behind in herescape.
O'Donnell relates several stories of authentic (according to him)werewolf stories of England in recent times, giving the dates andplaces and names of the persons who saw the beasts. The incidents maybe similar to those spoken of in Dickens's _Haunted House_, wherethe famous "'ooded woman with the howl" was seen,--or at least, manypersons saw the owl and knew that the woman must be near by. Thesewitnesses of werewolves may have seen animals, all right enough.Modernity is combined with medieval superstition here, and it seemsuncanny, for instance, to identify a werewolf by means of an electricpocket flashlight.
In collections of folk-tales, the tribal legends of the Americanredmen as well as of Kipling's India and of England, there are variousstories of werewolves. Among primitive peoples there is a closerelation between the brute and the human and the attributing of humancharacteristics and powers to the beast and _vice versa_ is common, sothat this supernatural transfer of personality is natural enough. Amadwolf might suggest the idea for a werewolf.
Algernon Blackwood advances the theory that the werewolf is a truepsychical fact of profound importance, however it may have been garbledby superstition. He thinks that the werewolf is the projection of theuntamed slumbering sanguinary instincts of man, "scouring the worldin his fluidic body, the body of desire." As the mind wanders freefrom the conscious control of the will in sleep, so the body may freeitself from the fetters of mind or of custom and go forth in elementalform to satisfy its craving to slay, to slake its wild thirst forblood. O'Donnell says that werewolves may be phantasms of the dead thatcannot be at peace, or a certain kind of Elementals. He also thinksthat they may be the projection of one phase of man's nature, of thecruelty latent in mankind that seeks expression in this way. Accordingto that theory, a chap might have a whole menagerie inside him, toturn loose at intervals, which would be exciting but rather riskyfor society. It was doubtless a nature such as this that Maupassantattempts to describe in his story _The Wolf_, where the man has all theinstincts of the wolf yet never changes his human form.
The werewolf in fiction has suffered the same leveling influencethat we have observed in the case of the ghost, the devil, thewitch, and the vampire. He is becoming a more psychical creature, aromantic figure to be sympathized with, rather than a beast to beutterly condemned. In recent fiction the werewolf is representedas an involuntary and even unconscious departure from the human,who is shocked when he learns the truth about himself. Whether hebe the victim of a divine curse, an agent of atavistic tendencies,or a being who thus gives vent to his real and brutish instincts,we feel a sympathy with him. We analyze his motives--at a safedistance--seek to understand his vagaries and to estimate his kinshipwith us. We think of him now as a noble figure in fiction, a lupineGalahad like Blackwood's, a renunciatory hero like Eugene Field'sor what not. Or we reflect that he may be a case of metempsychosisand treat him courteously, for who knows what we may be ourselvessome day? The werewolf has not figured in poetry or in the drama ashave other supernatural beings, as the ghost, the devil, the witch,the vampire,--one wonders why. He is a dramatic figure and hischaracter-analysis might well furnish themes for poetry though
stagepresentation would have its difficulties.
* * * * *
Perhaps the revival of interest in Elizabethan literature has had agood deal to do with the use of supernatural beings in literatureof recent times. The devil and the daemonic spirits he controls, thewitches and wizards, the vampires, the enchanted animals, to whom hedelegates a part of his infernal power, appear as impressive moralallegories, mystical stories of life, symbols of truths. As literatureis a reflection of life, the evil as well as the good enters in. Butsince the things of the spirit are intangible they must be representedin concrete form, as definite beings whom our minds can apprehend. Thusthe poets and dramatists and story-makers must show us images to shadowforth spiritual things. As with a shudder we close the books that tellus horrifying tales of satanic spirits, of accursed beings that areneither wholly animal nor human, of mortals with diabolic powers, weshrink from the evils of the soul that they represent, and recognizetheir essential truth in the guise of fiction.
The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction Page 5
