INTRODUCTION.

In the first paper of the Sketch-Book, which describes the Atlantic voyage, Irving says when the weather, which had been fair, changed to a wild and threatening aspect, the passengers gathered towards evening in the cabin, where the gloom was made ghastlier by the dull light of a lamp, and every one told his tale of shipwreck and disaster. On the longer voyage, on which we are embarked, when our thoughts are turned to the night side of nature, as Robert Dale Owen called it, we likewise are all apt to tall to telling the grewsome tales which are known as ghost stories. They have a strange and subtle fascination. The imagination, quickened by suggestions of mysterious sounds and supernatural presences, fills the young listener with horror, and his older companions with a sense of mystery and awe. For the child the upward path to bed through darkened passages and solitary halls is peo­pled with terrors worse than dragons and visible monsters, for they are phantoms of dread against whose malign power there is no sovereign amulet.

   The sufferings of the child sent severely to encounter all alone such fears and fig­ments of the fancy are indescribable. They are recalled through the actual trials of later years as more grievous and appalling than they, and many a man and woman pities the forlorn little figures that once they were, cow­ering and shivering in that early purgatory of terror which the ghost story created. Later they begin to ask whether those har­rowing apprehensions, that inexplicable awe, were, after all, only fanciful. The man, of whom the child is father, as he grows wiser comes to learn that all he knows is that he knows little. He sees the succession of the seasons, the systole and disastole of the visible heart of beauty, but the secret of its life still hides from his gaze. If one enlight­enment conceives the tortoise on which the elephant stands, another advances to proto­plasm, but no further.

   “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.” The most refined psychological speculation may extend the range of observation. But the “mocking laughter” of desert places, the cry of the banshee, the sudden impres­sion of a presence, the strange and fanciful popular superstitions, as they are called, in same way that unapprehended physical conditions are sagely called nervous prostra­tion—what is the key to them all? What is hallucination? Who shall say conclusively that it is the thing that is not? And if it be, whence is it, and why?

   The literature of ghosts is very ancient. In visions of the night, and in the lurid vapo­rs of mystic incantations, figures rise and smile, or frown and disappear. The Witch of Endor murmurs her spell, and “an old man cometh up, and he is covered with a mantle.” Macbeth takes a bond of fate, and from Hecate’s caldron, after the appa­rition of an armed head and that of a bloody child, “an apparition of a child crowned, with a tree in his hand, rises.” The wiz­ard recounts to Lochiel his warning vision, and Lochiel departs to his doom. There are stories of the Castle of Otranto and of the Three Spaniards, and the infinite detail of “singular experiences,” which make our conscious daily life the frontier and border-land of an impinging world of mystery.

   But these stories have no conscious law. They are like fantastic or horrible dreams. Did the writer suffer from nightmare? Or are they but fairy tales reversed? For airy Titania has some evil fate given us the Tall Woman, and tricksy Ariel have we exchanged for Caliban? There is indeed a record of similar recurring phenomena that may seem to imply some law. There is the persistent story of the friend who suddenly appears in the room or at the door, or whom, awaking, you see by your bedside, only to learn after­wards that at the same moment in a distant land he died. There is the family spectre, whose appearance foretells death to the luckless member of the family who sees it. Does some sudden physical pang, some mor­tal premonition, recall the legend, and in­stantly he believes that he sees the messen­ger of doom?

   The fascination of this realm of experi­ence, which is traditional from age to age, yet always elusive, is undeniable. Few men have seen ghosts, or will confess that they have seen them. But almost everybody knows some one of the few. Haunted houses are familiar in all neighborhoods, with the same story of the roistering sceptic who will gladly pass the night alone in the haunted chamber, and give monsieur the ghost a welcome, but who, if not found dead in the morning, emerges pale and haggard, with a settled terror in his look, and his lips sealed forever upon the awful story of the night.

   Mansions in country places are advertised for sale or hire, with the attraction of a well­-regulated ghost, who contents himself with driving up at midnight with a great clatter of outriders, and rumble of wheels, and brisk letting down of steps, and a bustling entrance into the house, and then no more. Staid gentlemen remember in their youth awaking in a friend’s house in the summer night just in time to see the vanishing through the long window of a draped figure; a momentary pausing on the balcony outside; the sense of a penetrating, mournful look; then a van­ishing; and at breakfast the cheery question of the host, “Did you see the lovely Lady Rosamond?” and a following tale of hapless love and woe.

   The delirium of fever, if only we knew what it is, and an unbalanced mind, and an imagination, are all devices more or unsatisfactory, and as mysterious as the ghosts themselves, to explain the realm of ghost or fairy. Where these cannot be as­sumed, dyspepsia may be invoked as the witch who mingles and stirs the caldron. But science loves to speculate upon so an­cient and strange a system of phenomena, or statements of alleged phenomena, and to try to reduce to order and marshal in well-disciplined ranks these coy and evanescent hints of something that eludes exactness of observation and defies acute analysis. The meritorious effort recalls the line of Shelley describing the clouds as

   “Shepherded by the slow unwilling wind.”

   Science, indeed, is not unwilling. Her ministers are ready to try the haunted cham­ber, and to bring the Lady Rosamond to the most rigid investigation. But will she smile upon the philosophers and surrender, who has only looked sadly upon the poets and disappeared? The Society for Psychical Research, however, is not daunted, and does not despair of helping the sun to rise upon the night side of nature. Several years since it began to collect a census of hallucinations, of which the responsibility was as­sumed last summer by the International Congress of Experimental Psychology at Paris. The object is twofold—to obtain a mass of facts about hallucination which may serve as a basis for scientific study of such phe­nomena, and also to ascertain the number of persons who have had experience of them. The question of the census sheet is very simple: “Have you ever, when completely awake, had a vivid impression of seeing or being touched by a living being or an inan­imate object, or hearing a voice, which im­pression, so far as you could discover, was not due to any external physical cause?” Some eight thousand persons in England, France, and the United States have already responded, and the congress hopes that at its next meeting in England, in 1892, there may have been not less than fifty thousand answers collected. Professor William James, of Harvard University, has been selected to superintend the American branch of the census.

   No more timely, striking, and interesting illustration of these phenomena, the intima­tions, impressions, apparitions, which are familiarly described as supernatural, can be found than the collection of little tales in this volume. It is the most modern and con­temporary contribution to the literature of ghosts, selected from authors in various parts of Europe—Norway, France, Spain, Austria, Italy—all of them masters in their way, and of that sympathetic and delicate lightness of touch which is indispensable to the happiest treatment of such themes. One of the writers, Guy de Maupassant, is already well known in this country from the little col­lection of tales, The Odd Number, and from Mr. Henry James’s charming essay of in­troduction. Another name which will have great interest for many readers is that of Becquer, a Spaniard, who died in 1870, only thirty-four years old, whose tales are full of the sentiment and legend of his country, and some of whose verses, especially the “Swallows,” a tenderly passionate love-song, breathing the sadness of the poet’s life and temperament, have been very felicitously translated into English. Another of our authors, an Italian, Giovanni Magherini-Graziani, is still a young man, living pleasantly at a villa near Florence. In 1871 he published his most important work, a life of Michael Angelo. He has published, also, two or three small volumes of tales and es­says, and is actively engaged in literary work.

   The tales that compose this volume show how universally the old spell of “the supernatural” still lingers. The fair Lady Rosa­mond, vanishing in the summer moonlight on the balcony of a New England country-house, she or some loathlier denizen of the same uncomprehended sphere, appears on a river in France or in a street in Spain. The old man covered with a mantle still cometh up. The child crowned, with a tree in his hand, still rises. And still we gaze entranced, and like the child shuddering through weird­ly peopled shadows to his solitary chamber, we are conscious of the uncanny spell, and of the spectral realm in which we move.

   These little tales, like instant photographs, bring us nearer to the life of other lands, and apprise us that, in an unexpected sense, we are all of one blood—a blood which is chilled by an influence that we cannot com­prehend, and at a contact of which we are conscious by an apprehension beyond that of the senses.

GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS.

September,1890.

   
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