Ghosts Ancient and IVIodern .
BY E. M. FORsTER.
Now in the past St. Blaise was haunted by an appalling apparition. What forms it took, what havoc it wrought, I have not been able to discover, but it made life within those walls a living hell. In the early years of the nineteenth century the occupants of the castle could bear their fate no longer, and they summoned an exorcist to deliver them. The exorcist laid the ghost successfully. But his victory was imperfect : he had only been able to lay it for a hundred years, and he warned the occupants that somewhere about 1930 it would break his spell and reappear. They were content with an arrangement which -would outlast them, they settled down and died happy. Civilization then developed. Queen Victoria came to her throne, Charles DirWin came to his, the Great War followed, and the ghost at St. Blaise still lay bound, biding its hour. I would have given much to be in the castle a year or so ago, when the hour struck. The inmates must have been half timorous, half humorous. They must have discussed, in a joking manner, whether unmentionable horrors would recur, or whether nothing Would happen. The hour struck. Nothing had happened. The jokes turned out to be real jokes. Nothing—or practically nothing. Life went on normally, except perhaps that—well, the change was so slight that they were slow to notice it, and then they only noticed it in one another . the change . . . I am not going to reveal it yet. I am telling a Christmas ghost story, and suspense is an important weapon. Let us therefore leave the haunted castle of St. Blaise for a moment, and come back to the two books awaiting review.
Neither of them seems quite satisfactory.
Mr. Montague Summers has certainly included some readable ghost stories among the thirty-eight that make up his anthology. Here are Dickens and Lefanu, and here is a writer named Vincent O'Sullivan, who does excellent work. But the volume as a whole suffers, I think, from two defects ; dogmatism and capricious- ness. In his introduction Mr. Summers tells us that he " believes " in ghosts, otherwise he would not collect them, and he holds, furthermore,' that ghost stories can only be written or read properly by believers. The willing suspension of disbelief which contented Coleridge would not satisfy him. He must have active *The Supernatural °Imams. Edited with • an introduction by Montague Summers. (Gollancz.. as.) Witchcraft, Magic and Alchemy. By Grillot de Givri. Translated from the French by 3. Courtenay Locke. (Harrap. 42s.) faith, and relying on its co-operation he .has included, some very silly stuff'; there are, for example, no fewer than three stories from the pen of an obscure writer of ritualistic tendency who is completely incompetent, but who endorses a view of the unseen evidently congenial to Mr. Summers himself. Satanism, to speak more plainly, presides over too much of this anthology, and Satanism, like everything else, must be presented forcibly, or it becomes owlish. Not all who say " abracadabra'-' shall enter the kingdom of darkness, not all unfrocked priests and pagan emblems can lead us into paths of unrighteous- ness. When Lady Macbeth sinned it was through the depths of her own soul, she never saw the Weird Sisters, nor did she need to see them, and Mr. Summers is too apt to identify the spiritual element in ghost stories (which he rightly values) with the external accidents of a cult. He is at the same time too serious and not serious enough.
. But it is, of course, very easy to complain of an anthology ; everyone has his own theOry. About half Mr. Summers' selection is worth reading, and his erudite introduction and bibliography are interesting.
The second book, 1Vitchcraft, Magic and Alchemy, is translation from the French. . It is magnificently illus- trated, and an hour may be pleasantly spent in looking at the pictures, and in reading the passages in the text that describe them. The author, M. Grillot de Givry, seems to be a collector rather than a scholar ; he does not present any consistent view of the occult, be strays from point to point, . and he reproduces indifferently pictures that are psychologically interesting (such as the apparition of the Devil in a piece of Calabrian sacristy furniture), and commercial nineteenth-century woodcuts of Goethe's Faust. Astrology, demoniacal. possession, metaposcopy, cheiromancy, and the Tarot pack are among the subjects touched on. What a muddle That is the feeling one brings away. What ingenuity the human race has shown in frightening itself, and in trying to reassure itself when frightened, in invoking ghosts and in laying them, in foretelling the future and in trying to avoid it when foretold !
So it is time now to get back to the castle of St. Blaise, and to find out what happened when the evil spirit broke the exorcist's spell. Only this : the inmates of the castle got peevish. They do not quarrel violently, there is no danger of mediaeval crime, but they bicker, and the unrest spreads into the garage and over the garden. Nor does it stop there ; presently the ghost overflows the moat and the villagers start bickering, too, and then, having saturated the village, it drifts down the hillside to the Wye, infecting in its course many a rosy-checked farm. The infection is quite slight—nothing notifiable. People are not quite as pleasant as they were, and a similar change occurs in the valley of-the Severn. Nor is it stopped by the Cotswolds. Civilization dilutes the supernatural but She also diffuses it, and before long- a consignment of bail temper arrives at Paddington. Perhaps I brought it myself. Arid perhaps that is why I have not reviewed these two books as enthusiastically as I should have done. But St. Blaise, to mind, has really succeeded in producing a modern apparition ; here is a legend with a slight but - authentic " thrill, which causes One for an instant to think -and to feel, and to turn one's back on the Monotonous gibberings of the graveyard. • -
Previous page
