THE LURE OF THE SUPERNATURAL.

... For there is no doubt at all that the lure of the supernatural—despite a widely-prevalent materialism—is a potent and apparently growing factor to be reckoned with in human affairs. It is difficult to estimate, with any real hope of accuracy, the profound influence this same spirit of mysticism has exercised over the world in time past. Even to-day much of our literature has about it a strong flavour of the occult: only yesterday (as time goes) it was fully charged with the problems of those mysterious arcana which have set humanity speculating ever since mankind became endowed with the reasoning faculty. Not every writer of the thousands who have endeavoured—with more or less of an air of verisimilitude—to deal with other worlds and other forms of existence than ours, has been in any marked degree successful in his or her vague transcendentalism. In this respect the astounding mendacities of the learned Jew, Josephus, and the Platonic Constantinopolitan (as Coleridge called him). Michael Paellus, may perhaps be placed on a par with the amazing inexactitudes of the ingenuous Munchausen. The matter-of-fact Dr. Johnson, who of all men, one would suppose, was the least given to flights of fancy, was gravely informative upon the subject of the supernatural. That notorious fraud, the "Cock Lane Ghost," with its wood-pecker-like tappings, claimed him as a believer if not as an adherent. In conversation with the inevitable Boswell he went even a step further by admitting that he had actually seen an apparition, although his impressions of the ghostly visitant seemed to be of the vaguest description: "Sir, it was something of a shadowy being," was the burly doctor's impressionist summing up of the case. Everybody knows that as a child light-hearted gentle Charles Lamb suffered indescribable torments from witches and other night fears. "I was dreadfully alive to nervous terrors. The night time, solitude and the dark were my hell. The sufferings I endured in this nature would justify the expression. I never laid my head upon my pillow I suppose, from the fourth to the seventh or eighth year of my life—so far as memory serves in things so long ago— without an assurance, which realised its own prophecy, of seeing some frightful spectre." So he wrote in one of the best known of his essays. Coleridge—like a modern St. Anthony—saw spectres at will. His heavy, opium-drugged slumbers were disturbed by weird flitting shapes, which afterwards flitted just as eerily through the pages of his incomparable, if fragmentary, verse. While the patriarchal, much-enduring Job, in a memorable and haunting passage, records how "a spirit passed before my face; the hair of my flesh stood up." The universal Shakespeare was, of course, a past master of the supernatural. Hamlet, urged on to filial vengeance by the rest less spirit of his murdered sire; Macbeth, the rude warfarer, who full oft had met and conquered in fair fight, bespattered now by the innocent blood he had shed, cringed like the veriest coward before the reproachful shade of beckoning Banquo: "It will have blood; they say blood will have blood." Richard, the crook-backed king, a prey to crowding terrors on the night of Bosworth's fatal field; and Casca, the secret conspirator against proud Imperial Caesar, saw prodigies "against the capitol," and feared exceedingly. Coming down to comparatively recent days, Scott, for example, was not invariably successful when he essayed the supernatural. The "White Lady of Avenel" cuts a singularly unimpressive, albeit a ghostly, figure in what is other wise a very effective romance. On the other hand, Wandering Willie's tale, in "Redgauntlet,"is admittedly one of the most weirdly powerful ghost stories in the English language. Dickens' dealings with the occult are like his sentimentalism, decidedly banal: his apparitions are the apparitions of the nursery rhyme book, as much like the real genuine article as is the shell of a turnip, shaped into the semblance of a skull by a mischievous urchin, and a lighted candle set inside it. Lytton was better; in his "Strange Story," and in "Night and Morning," he makes use of the supernatural with the unerring touch of a master hand. Lovers of the grisly in literature can hardly fail to recall Mrs. Crowe's "Nightside of Nature," and Mrs. Shelley's "Frankenstein," two books not much in vogue nowadays, which, however, made a considerable sensation at the time of their first appearance, many years ago, about the middle of last century. The American poet and short-story writer, Poe, owing to temperament and other contributory causes, seldom contrived to dissever himself completely from an association with the weird and uncanny. His verses and his tales reek noisomely of the grave and the charnel-house. He is, without doubt, grim enough, but most lamentably deficient in the saving sense of humour, lacking which attribute no writer can be justly allotted a place among the immortals. Light and shadow must be happily alternated, or the result will be either a glaring hardness of atmosphere almost intolerable or an irritating half-light in which the bewildered reader gropes and stumbles blindly to the detriment of his mental shins. Among the poets Blake stands out pre-eminently as the master-mystic. With Blake, as with Poe (descending the scale rather abruptly) it was the strange touch of diseased mentality—so near akin to genius that the borderland is difficult to define—combined with an imaginative faculty abnormally developed, which gave him the position he holds by right of might in the foremost rank of the poets. Rossetti had something of Blake's sudden illuminating flashes of spiritual insight, and this is perhaps even more noticeable in much of the earlier work of the leading Celtic poet of to-day, Mr. W. B. Yeats. The saintly John Wesley has left upon record how he once saw a ghost; and in our own generation such accredited giants of the world of science as Sir William Crookes and Sir Oliver Lodge seem to incline, not unfavourably (as earnest inquirers after truth) to the probability, rather than the possibility, of those striking manifestations of psychic phenomena, those telepathic communications of man's subliminal consciousness, that were —not so very many years ago—laughed loudly to scorn as the mere stock-in-trade of the impudent charlatan, and the arch-delusion of his too credulous following. Maurice Maeterlinck, the Belgian poet, in an interesting article on "Life After Death," which appeared in a recent issue of the "Century Magazine," touches on this momentous question in a sympathetic, if cautious, spirit of inquiry and qualified belief. Of contemporary prose writers who have ventured a little distance into the shadowy, twilight realm of the super natural, Kipling, in too brief intervals of imperialist cymbal-clashing fervour, scored at least one supreme success in his unforgettable short story, "The Mark of the Beast," a tale best left severely alone by readers who are subject to that troublesome modern-day malady of nerves. Then there is Mr. W. Hope Hodgson, a rising star in the literary firmament, who has come meteorically to the front with his remarkably imaginative, if somewhat cryptic book, "The Night Land"; his most recent effort, "Carnachi, the Ghost finder," is not quite so convincing: while Mr. Maurice Hewlett, forsaking the flowery fields of mediaeval romance, and the "open country" of the simple-lifer, has lately rather nonplussed the discerning critic with his fascinating, semi-autobiographical incursion into mysticism, delivered under the title of "Love of Proserpine." Then, of course, there is that old friend of our boyhood, the late Jules Verne, some of whose captivating romances have in the light of subsequent events assumed almost the dignity of prophecy, while to-day his mantle—it may yet once again prove to be a prophet's mantle—has fallen on the shoulders of that very ingenious writer, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Stevenson, who when not engaged upon romance, or belles-lettres, was more inclined towards the homely and instructive fable than any indulgence in an orgy of occultism, was yet able to touch the rustling fringe of the uncanny in his gruesome story of "Jekyll and Hyde." in "Markheim," too, and not least in "Thrawn Janet." "Will o' the Mill" is perhaps more in the nature of a fable— very beautiful example indeed of the matured craftsman's art. Another of the most promising present day writers, Mr. Algernon Blackwood, has given us of his best when dealing with the mysticism inherent in all nature. "The Centaur" and "Pan's Garden" are striking instances of the singularly effective essays in this direction by one who has without doubt fallen under the haunting spell of the supernatural.

 The West Australian 25 October 1913,