WEIRDNESS.
A FEW days ago, the Times described the scene in the underground vaults of the Victoria Embankment, where the police were engaged by the dim light of candles in putting a bloodhound on the scent of the human remains recently found there, as very "weird." This was using the word " weird " in the same popular sense as that in which, we suppose, the publisher of three little volumes of "Weird Tales," * English, Scotch, and Irish, uses it when he in- cludes among his "Weird Tales" all sorts of stories which
• London and Edinburgh: William Paterson.
excite dread of any kind, whether by the crimes they de- scribe, by the blending of the supernatural or preternatural in their narratives, or, indeed, by the mere anguish of a piteous tale. Such a story as "The Highland Snowstorm," for instance, in the Scotch volume, has no more right to be called " weird " than it has to be called wearisome ; and "A Night with a Madman," in the English volume, might be easily paralleled by any doctor who has seen much of delirium tremens, and is no more weird than any other tale of danger due to a frenzied brain. " Weird " properly contains the notion of evil predestination, predestination fixed by some power which appears, at all events, to be more or less malignant. It is an Anglo-Saxon word connected with the root of the German word werden, "to become ;" but besides including the notion of what is about to become, what is fated, it is almost always used in a heathen sense, of that which is fated by some grim unspiritual power against which the healthy mind rebels. The story of "Wandering Willie" in Sir Walter Scott's " Redgauntlet,"—which is included in the volume of Scotch weird tales,—is almost as perfect an embodiment of true weirdness as anything in our literature ; and it is told with every touch which could enhance the weirdness of the effect. The picture of Sir Robert Redgauntlet, passed from earth, yet swathed in his flannels, as if still suffering from gout, his pistols and broad- sword beside him, entertaining a great crew of evil guests, and trying to entrap his old piper into some fatal participation in the ghastly festivity, overflows with weird effects. The account of those present is striking enough,—the "fierce Middleton, and the dissolute Rothes, and the crafty Lauderdale; and Dalyell, with his bald head and a beard to his girdle ; and Earlshall, with Cameron's blude on his hand; and wild Bonshaw, that tied blessed Mr. Cargill's limbs till the blade sprung; and Dumbarton Douglas, the twice-turned traitor both to country and King ;" and "the bluidy advocate McKenyie, who for his worldly wit and wisdom had been to the rest as a god ;" and " Claverhouse, as beautiful as when he lived, with his long, dark, curled locks streaming down over his laced buff-coat, and his left hand always on his right spule-blade, to hide the wound that the silver bullet had made," sitting apart from them all, "with a melancholy, haughty countenance;" all surrounded by the host of violent serving-men who had been foremost in every bloody fray to which their master had led them. But perhaps the weirdest touch of all is the mention of the vacant cushion where the mischievous Jacka- napes who was Sir Robert Redgauntlet's only pet, was not as yet to be seen, being yet in the land of the living, though the retainers whispered that he would be "here betimes the morn," when the cunning creature actually met his death. This touch of caprice which assigned a place in hell to a mere monkey because he had taken a strong hold on the bad Redgauntlet's favour,—the wild and miserable party actually anticipating that poor animal's death as an event that would restore him to them,— seems to us greatly to enhance the weirdness of the effect. For in what is truly weird there should be not only the apparent evidence of a malignant destiny, but a certain malicious arbitrariness or caprice which is undoubtedly con- nected in our minds with the scoffing essence of spiritual malevolence. That a number of guilty beings, sitting in a dreadful simulation of uproarious festivity, should be counting on the death of a mischievous monkey and his consequent accession to their society, just adds that touch of cruel caprice to the situation which is necessary to make one shudder at the arbitrariness no less than at the malice of those evil beings who seem to twist some of the threads in human destiny. For the same reason, the story is a very weird one which relates the vision granted to a drunkard who, after apparently dying in a fit of drunkenness, returns to life to narrate that he had found himself sitting at an endless table in a vault lighted by rushing balls of blood-coloured fire, and that when he cried out, "In the name of God, let me out of this bad place!" he was addressed by a mighty form, whose countenance was proud and terrible, before whom all bowed down with a sighing sound, in the words, "If you promise to return, you may depart for a season ;" whereupon he gave the promise and departed, to find himself recovering from what the doctor had pronounced to be absolute death. He is assured that his promise to return to the evil place will not bind him if he leads a re- formed life, and so escapes the powers of evil ; and he actually becomes quite a different man, until, beguiled by a friend whom he had not seen for years into a public-house, he is once more brought home drunk. Then at midnight his wife wakes up to see him called out on to the staircase by some mysterious being, who has entered the room like a noiseless shadow. And falling headlong, he is taken up dead. Here the weirdness is produced not merely by the impressive descrip- tion of the evil place from which he escapes under a promise of return, but by the awful stringency with which that promise is apparently allowed to be enforced after a real interval of genuine repentance and amendment,—by the liberty given to the spirit of evil to entice him to his final doom after a single relapse. The notion of conferring upon an evil being power to impose a condition which practically renders abortive the new opportunity of repentance which the drunkard receives, is so repugnant to all Christian ideas of Providence, that it suggests the grafting on Christian faith of conceptions of destiny which are both malignant and capricious. And it is this mingling of threads of wilful and overmastering malice with higher conceptions of man's duty and destiny, which makes so manymodernlegends, especially those of Celtic origin, weird. We do not wonder at the malignity of many of the old heathen legends, like that of the Greek Furies or that of the cruel destiny of (Edipus. But it is when predominant malice is permitted to blend with and permeate a higher class of conceptions, that the weirdness of the effect is most remark- able. What, for instance, is there more truly weird in modern literature than Tennyson's delineation of the despair with which Tithonus regards the gift of immortality, conferred without the gift by virtue of which alone immortality could be regarded as a blessing,—immortality of strength and of the power to love ?—
" I asked thee, Give me immortality.'
Then didst thou grant mine asking with a smile, Like wealthy men who care not how they give. But thy strong Hours indignant worked their wills, And beat me down and marr'd and wasted me, And though they could not end me, left me raaim'd To dwell in presence of immortal youth.
Immortal age beside immortal youth, And all I was in ashes."
There you have the blending and the contrast between a malicious destiny, and one of the greatest gifts which a spiritual faith has conceived and promised us. But the weird- ness there is faint compared with the weirdness in the central conception of Nathaniel Havrthorne's romance, "Transforma- tion," where, out of the guilt of a murder conceived and executed together by a young man and a young woman,
a tie of love is supposed to spring. "Surely," says the more guilty of the two, though not the doer of the physical deed of crime," surely it is no crime that we have committed. One wretched and worthless life has been sacrificed to cement two other lives for evermore.' 'For evermore, Miriam,' said Dona- tello, cemented with his blood.' The young man started at the word which he had himself spoken ; it may be that it brought home to the simplicity of his imagination what he had not before dreamed of,—the ever-increasing loathsomeness of a union that consists in guilt. Cemented with blood which would corrupt and grow more noisome for ever and for ever, but bind them not the less strictly for that." There you have an essentially weird conception,—a conception of destiny in which some malign influence predominates,—wrought out with all the power of a writer whose whole imagination was curdled by the spell of a frigid and vigilant curiosity, that peered, not without a sense of doing what was forbidden, into the secret springs of enthusiasm, faith, and love.
But the most interesting question connected with the idea of the weird, is this,—whether there is really anything in the actual world that corresponds to it, or whether the weird springs from the activity of the fancy alone, —from the combining power of a fertile literary imagina- tion. It is easy to see that "Wandering Willie's" tale, and probably the weird conception of the drunkard's warning and doom, had their origin in the imagination; and it is obvious that conceptions like that of the dreary immor- tality of Tithonus, and such a welding of two human hearts in guilt as Hawthorne describes, are products of poetic imagin- ings and not of actual fact. And, of course, the Greek Furies and the Greek legends of malign destiny, whether they corre- sponded or not to real elements in human life, received their claaracteristic shape from the imagination of the Hellenic race.
But is there no aspect of history that seems to reveal weird
effects produced in subservience to cynical powers higher than those of men? What shall we say of such a triumph as that of Joan of Arc, with such a tragedy following that triumph ? Is there no semblance of a malign thread woven into such a martyrdom as hers? Is there nothing weird in such a career as Mary Tudor's,—the career of a monarch of great natural capacity and great religious earnestness, who, after undoing so far as she could all the work of her father, prepared the way, both by what was good in her and what was evil, for her sister to undo all that she herself had painfully done? But why go to mere secular history ? What can look more like weird elements in human destiny than the fates of Jerusalem and of Judaism, nay, of Our Lord's own life in one respect,—we refer to his selection of Apostles of whom he himself says, "Thine they were, and thou gayest them me, and not one of them is lost save the son of perdition, that the Scripture might be fulfilled" P What an irony in destiny this seems to be, that the Saviour of the world should choose deliberately amongst those twelve who were to spread his gospel to the nations, one whose example was to be solely one of dread! Surely that which is weird, and which may seem to us to have in it malign threads capriciously interwoven with the brighter threads of human fate, must be, in some deeper sense that we cannot understand, beneficent, in spite of this appearance of malign purpose. The exiles in Babylon asked, "How can we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?" Yet we may naturally ask now, how they could have sung it as they did in any but a strange land. Probably human nature being what it is, the darker elements in human fate are needed to throw out the brighter in their true colours. Probably the New Jerusalem could never have arisen in the Apostle's vision in its true glory, had not the old Jerusalem been so often reduced to that desolate heap of stones which filled with passionate lamentation and yearning the heart of every true son of Israel.
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