TALES OF TERROR AND SUPERNATURAL

Ghosts and Goose Flesh

By R. G. HOWARTH

HALF-LIGHT lends itself to the apparition or imagination of wraiths, and so does half-enlightenment. Most ghost stories have, as their setting, places which cannot be fully illuminated, and the greater part of the matter for ghost stories derives from the Dark Ages, when superstition flourished and knowledge languished.

These facts are strikingly borne out in a collection of "Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural," just issued by Random House, of New York.

The writer of one of the stories goes to the shameless length of having the electricity cut off and candles substituted, for the time being, in the London house chosen as the scene of unearthly events. All through the book there is not one instance of a materialisation in electric light. The illumination preferred is candle-shine, or gloomy daylight. And that means, of course, that very few of the tales can belong to our own time.

Rather, their themes come out of the past. Black magic is the commonest of these, and it seems extraordinary to find one H. P. Lovecraft writing of conjurations and pacts with the Devil in contemporary New England—machinations which were to re-people the earth with an ancient evil race of monsters that first possessed it. But Lovecraft is here following Arthur Machen, whose "Great God Pan" develops the same idea. Machen, curiously enough, uses modern medical science as the means of working a spell.

Werewolves, vampires, witches, sorcerers, monsters both visible and invisible, abound. Recently, such stories as "Dracula" have given a fresh fillip to these picturesquely horrible old legends of strange creatures and changings of shape, all belonging to the Middle Ages and earlier. If we were to believe in them again, the world would become an unspeakably dreadful place—slightly more dreadful than it is—but, enlightened as we are, we are never likely to believe in them again. If we did, of course, we could not enjoy such stories. We should be terrified out of our lives. It is only because we know that those wicked things cannot come and get us that we lend them a certain amount of imaginative credence—"a willing suspension of disbelief," Coleridge called it. Yet every now and then, as one reads such a hair-raising collection as "Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural," the eye is apt to catch half-glimpses of appearances that might or might not be . . . and the ear involuntarily misinterprets— for the worse—unexpected sounds. The first step to seeing things is certainly reading about them.

The Ideal Story

What are the requirements for the ideal supernatural story? One thing at least seems clear : that the modern reader will no longer be satisfied with the hoax type. When it is revealed that there never was a ghost, but only some imposition or mechanical trick, he feels cheated. Perhaps, he likes best to be left in doubt. Did it, or did it not, happen? Was there a supernatural manifestation, or did the subject merely imagine it? In other words, does the thing come from outside or inside the seer's mind?

That is why Henry James's "The Turn of the Screw" is so highly regarded. At the end of this we are left wondering, is it all purely psychological? Were there any apparitions except in the mental orbit of the governess and her pupils? So, too, after reading, in the present collection. Oliver Onions's "The Beckoning Fair One," which, equally with James's, has been called the best ghost-story ever written, what can we do but ask questions? Here a novelist, and therefore an imaginative man, comes under the spell of an old house in which he lives alone. He sees, or seems to see, a female presence. To please it, as he thinks, he sacrifices his friendship with a girl, and the half-written novel in which she figures. When at last the police break in they find him wandering-witted and the girl there, murdered. Who did it? He or the ghost? Retracing the way, we may find that everything comes from him. And yet—did he merely imagine that he heard someone in the room brushing her long hair?

Dr. James's Jumbles

A story that snaps shut at the end, like Algernon Blackwood's "Ancient Sorceries," in which the explanation is the simple but dubious one of ancestral memory, does not leave us so satisfied. On the other hand, Dr. M. R. James, whose "Ghost Stories of an Antiquary" have won a popularity out of all proportion to their merits, makes the mistake of requiring the reader to draw his own inferences. As these inferences can only be what Dr. James should have drawn for him, he feels that the story is unfinished and gets irritated with the lazy writer. Again and again Dr. James breaks off where he should sum up. And yet he has perhaps already crowded and confused the story with irrelevant detail. "Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad," which has one of the best titles possible (but at the same time one not justified by the inscription on the whistle) is ruined by the introduction at two points of a seemingly human pursuer or watcher, when the whole effect depended on the bodilessness of the genie of the whistle. Dr. James always gives more than is asked for. And, of course, as the title of his book indicates, he leans very heavily on mediaeval clap-trap.

One of the most delicate and the least terrifying of all ghost-stories is Kipling's "They"—an account of a blind spinster who kept house in a wood for the spirits of children. Here, too, Kipling does gracefully what per-haps only one other, Henry James, has succeeded in doing—he produces wraiths in open daylight. With James the effect is doubly terrifying; with Kipling it simply adds to the conviction.

A man was once crossing a dark field when he was joined by what was palpably a ghost. He was a brave man. He kept on. They went some distance and then the man bethought him of his pipe. He took it out, filled it, and prepared to light it. At the flare of the match, "Hell!" cried the ghost, and ran for his life.

Sydney Morning Herald (NSW : 1842 - 1954), Saturday 26 August 1944, page 6