EERINESS.
EERINESS we take to be the name for the shiver which runs through us when the veil of the physical seems to be thinned away or lifted without the unveiling of any of those spiritual qualities which fill us with love and trust towards the spiritual world. Thus, the most ordinary tales of Highland second-sight have always seemed to us very eerie, such as the story of the seer who, being disturbed by a frequent vision of his own figure, put on straw-rope garters instead of those which he had been accustomed to, in order to see whether the fetch would alter its costume in like fashion, whereupon the figure of himself appeared to him in straw-rope garters also. There is nothing really terrible in this at all,—if we remember rightly, the seer in Scott's "Legend of Montrose" adopts just such a device to discover whether the figure of the murderer is his own or another's,—but it conveys such a sense of the thinness of the film which separates the physical from the spiritual, and yet, at the same time, of the arbitrariness—the non-spiritual character—of some of the connections between the two, that it sends a shiver through the heart, and brings home the spectral character of existence more than stories of a much more sensational character. What suggested, however, the subject of eeriness to us was a thin volume of ghost-stories by Miss Theo Gift. Never having read "Pretty Miss Bellew" or "A Matter-of-Pact Girl," or any other of the works ascribed to this lady,—we assume Theo Gift to be a lady's name,—we do not know anything of her except these stories ; but she certainly has a very good idea of an eerie situation, in the sense in which we have defined "eerie." Her stories send the shiver of the unspiritual side of the spiritual world through us as ghost-stories very seldom do. It is not easy to write original ghost-stories ; but we think this lady has succeeded, in the little volume "Not for the Night- Time," which Messrs. Roper and Drowley have just published, in making the world of phantoms decidedly uncanny. Per- haps the first of the four stories is a little too extravagant in conception for its purpose,—reincarnations of mortal evil may be believable in the East, but in the West are hardly even so far believed as to answer the purposes of a good marvel,—but the remaining three, "Not Explained," "Dog or Demon P" and "No. 2 Melrose Square," are very effective ghost-stories indeed ; the last of the three being as good as anything of Edgar Poe's, without that disposition to excess which makes his stories rather ghastly than ghostly, and produces upon us the feeling that he loved to grovel in ghastly and revolting detail, thereby diverting the imagination from the eerie situation itself, to the drunkard of ghastly conceptions who is indulging him- self in our presence. The writer of whom we are now speaking has a very good notion of that which makes the preternatural shiver most thrilling. Especially she has formed for herself a very vivid sense of the gradations of the preternatural. Thus, in one story she makes the ghost of a murderer audible but not visible, while the ghost of his victim is both audible and visible ; and this has a very eerie effect, by its suggestion of a certain law of perspective even in the region of the preter- natural, where furtiveness and secrecy seem to have had their influence in making even the ghost of the furtive and secret man more difficult to discern than the ghost of his victim. The same skilful use of what we may call the shading of the preternatural world,—the degrees of ghostliness in ghostly beings.—is shown in the way in which this writer makes the demon dog seize his opportunity to catch his victims alone, as if, ghost though he was, he had retained after death some of the cowardice of physical life, and was scared at the idea of encountering, even though he was not liable to physical chas- tisement, one from whom he would have fled when in the flesh. When the ghostly dog is heard (though not seen) running away with soft pit-a-pat from a real man, though he is not afraid of a woman or a baby, he becomes much more formidable, instead of less formidable to the reader, than if he had availed himself of his impalpability to ignore the man's presence. We suppose that we are so much accustomed to gradations of power in the corporeal world, that the mere recognition of this perspective, of these gradations, as applying also to the world of phantoms, adds to the vividness with which we imagine the world in question. Indeed, the feeling of eeriness, we take it, arises almost entirely in conceiving the suspension of some of the laws which govern our bodily existence, without the compensating assertion of any of the laws which we call definitely spiritual, such as the law of remorse and retribution. It is so much easier to imagine the suspension of some of the laws which govern corporeal life than the suspension of all of them, that a story in which arbitrary gradations of the preternatural are insisted upon, is much more effective than a story in which all the physical limitations of the bodily life seem to disappear at once.
We suppose the explanation of this special eeriness of the non-spiritual aspects of the spiritual world to be this, that our only hearty convictions of the existence of another life are founded in our moral nature, so that if the vision of this other life comes upon us without being closely related to our love of the divine righteousness, we are made con- scious of that startling nakedness of the unfleshly when it is divorced from all the higher moral attributes of God, from which our nature specially recoils. Yet, of course, there must be in beings of another world many of the quasi-physical qualities,— for example, they must have some relation to space ; they cannot be in all space at the same time ; they must have a present and a past and a future ; they must be able to do one thing and unable to do another ; and so forth. All these are qualities which may be called non-spiritual qualities, though they belong to spiritual beings. And if we are made to realise these non-spiritual qualities of spiritual beings without realising at the same time their spiritual qualities,—their progress or regress in the moral life, their purification or their retributive sufferings,—we have a sense of the uncanny, which bears the strongest possible testimony to the incapacity of man to realise his immortality on any but its moral side. Now and then we have had a great poet who could realise the immor- tality of his pure intellect, and even of something behind his senses which was more spiritual than sense, without being exactly steeped in conscience. We suppose that Wordsworth realised what we may call the spirituality of his mere intellect and perceptions,—as distinguished from his conscience,—in the passage which has been so often quoted from the great ode on "The Intimations of Immortality," the passage in which he paints the unreality of material things, and speaks of— those obstinate questionings Of sense and outward things, Fallings from us, vanishing,s."
Wordsworth suggests there, that, after all, to him, the mind, the intellect, the perceiving power, was more of a reality than the external world itself. Yet even here, where he seems on the track of an almost intellectual immortality, as dis- tinguished from a spiritual and moral immortality, he finds himself compelled to pass on into the moral region, and to describe those— "Blank misgivings of a creature
Moving about in worlds not realised, High instincts before which our mortal nature Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised."
Yet these high instincts before which our mortal natures feel themselves as it were guilty, are not those which produce in us the sense of the eerie. On the contrary, we recognise the full right of these high instincts over us, and though we tremble at them, we do not shiver, as we shiver at all traces of mere disembodied wills and intelligence, which seem to owe no allegiance to the moral law. Bring in the conscience, and then the consciousness of the invisible world becomes a part of that divine order to which we seem to have a key. But any manifestation of the world of spirits that is distinctly unspiritual,—by which, of course, we mean un- spiritual in the higher sense, unconnected with the power of a divine righteousness,—sends through us those chill vibrations of terror which animals themselves are popularly supposed to undergo when they recognise a presence not manifested through the ordinary bodily organs. It is, indeed, a very curious fact that our only distinctive adjective for unembodied mind, "spiritual," should be one which is used nine times out of ten to express something closely related to the divine life as well as something unembodied. The "spiritual world" almost always means the world which is above us, as well as the world which is not manifested to the senses. And yet, of course, there are plenty of aspects of invisible intelligence in which
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laws other than moral laws might be brought to light. Yet man is prepared for the invisible life so almost exclusively by the moral discipline of his earthly career, that all those aspects of the future life which are independent of his conscience, serve to chill and overawe him, like the gleam of a sort of naked sword of the spirit, or the evidence of something home- less and vagrant in a finite nature which is so organised as to recognise its only home and rest in a supreme righteousness.
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