WE ARE in the midst of a revival of the supernatural in literature. While it is true that the ghostly has always been present in man's poetry and prose, both oral and written, from the earliest recorded time, there are periods when it seems to occupy more of his attention than at others. Man loves the weird. He is easily intoxicated with spirits. He longs to feel vicariously the thrills that more than one world offer. He craves more than human knowledge, hence he writes and reads of magic vision, of second sight, of wisdom's wizardry. Discontent with petty poverty, he dreams of a philosopher's stone. Rebelling against the impending prison of the grave, he loves to read of those who have snatched victory from it or who have escaped it, so he broods over the Wandering Jew, or the Elixir of Life. Craving immortality, he is comforted at reading of man's indestructible self, the all-conquering Ego that transcends death and lives on eternally, "content to be anything in the ecstasy of being ever." Hedged in by life's ironic circumstance of law and order, fettered in flesh by

Vol. XVII, No. 2

a

multiple conventions, he seeks magical chance of escape through the realms of spirit, and while his sober feet tread trivial rounds he revels in bacchantic fears, in dissipations of the intellect.

The more man learns of the natural laws the more he seems to believe in the supernatural. Witchcraft and alchemy he has put aside, only to turn to psychical research. Astrology he has reluctantly yielded up, yet the stars in their courses still pester him. He must be peopling them, accounting for their aberrations, staging cosmic comedies. He has given up ancient magic, but he dallies with the ouija board. He loves to traffic with the other world, even though he does not know the customs of the country. It appears that the proper study of man is ghosts.

This love for the supernatural, manifest in literature as in life, though never absent, is more marked in the literature of the past twenty or thirty years than ever before. And since we have turned the corner of the twentieth century, we have seen more unearthly beings than ever

in the past. One can scarcely fathom why. Perhaps the pendulum is swinging violently back to faith after a period of scientific scepticism. Perhaps man is merely shaking off the shackles of the past conventions and asserting his right to believe in what he will. Who knows? Possibly it is that man loves the thrill of fear, and since pure terror exists only in association with the supermortal, he yearns after the ghostly. Perhaps the secret of the power that the ghost story has over us lies in the fact of our pathetic ignorance of spiritual things, of the mysteries that lie before us. We'd like to speak some friendly wraith to tell us news of the far land to which we hasten.

This advance of ghosts in the twentieth century has shown a marked increase since the Great War began. We may go a-ghosting on all pages now, and devilled fiction is much the vogue. The flutter of in

Man

numerable new-cut leaves echoes the rustle of angel wings, and the curtains of our dramas rise as smoothly on heaven or hell as on earth. is not content with one little world to write about, but claims the right of eminent domain over all. All sorts of picaresque immortals furnish the complicating struggle for fiction now, and myriads of kindly spirits rise or descend to give aid in time of human need.

Perhaps the reasons are not far to seek. This war has belittled ordinary thinking for us, so that we need superlative symbols, more than mortal images, to match the mighty swing of events. One does not go on merely thinking afternoon tea thoughts when a world is aflame, when the sword-point is at humanity's throat. "Our blind conceiving "Our blind conceiving

soars," yes, and the clay-shuttered casements seem less obstinate than of old. One might apply to this world condition the words of SainteBeuve, written of the events of 1815, a period so like our own a century later: "At these moments of universal rending, it happens, I imagine, that the ideal which lies behind the terrestrial world is revealed, made suddenly visible to certain eyes."

One feature of this revival of interest in the supernatural is found in the books and articles that claim to be communications from the dead. It appears that nowadays many ghosts have itching pens, and others desire to speak vicariously through the lips of mortals, though royalties do not carry beyond the Styx, and the fame (such as it is!) must be shared with one or more grasping mortals in each case. But there is no accounting for ghostly tastes. Why the spirits choose such limited and slow media as the pen and the human voice for transmitting their utterances I do not know. Patience Worth, for instance, could write a deal faster if she used a typewriter instead of a ouija board, though, patience knows, she writes enough as it is!

War Letters from a Living Dead Man, written by Elsa Barker, but dictated (she claims) by the late Judge Hatch, constitutes a series of extraordinary communications from the dead to the living. Mrs. Barker asserts that she has been seized by an overwhelming impulse to write, unaccompanied by any inspiration as to subject. That is not uncommon! But it appears that when she grasps a pencil, ideas flow from a source which she identifies (to her satisfaction) as Judge Hatch, formerly of California, now apparently

a citizen of worlds at large. She says that the judge tells her thrilling facts concerning the other cosmos, especially of conditions since the war began. He informs her that the war was planned in hell,-which sounds more sensible than most postmortem statements. He is in a position, it would seem, to judge the comparative merits of the case, and does not side with Germany.

The author entertains the Maeterlinckian theory that the war is a manifestation of a cosmic conflict, a struggle between the forces of evil and of good, of which the fight on earth is but an infinitesimal part. Her space correspondent gives lurid accounts of the astral world, and says that the spirits of the slain go through torments since the ghostly world is overcrowded now and in dire confusion on account of the war. He describes an interview that he has had with the devil, who is keeping bad company, it seems, having been seen with the Kaiser. in spite of a promise to tell Mrs. Barker the secrets of the war as seen from the other side, the astral journalist fails to reveal what would be of most interest to readers on this planet, when and on what terms the war will end.

But

Another spirit communicant said to be recently interviewed concerning the war as seen from the far side of death, is Hugo Münsterburg. The late Harvard professor, who before his death showed interest in psychical phenomena chiefly by his catching Eusapia Palladino by the heel and showing up her trickery in a séance, has apparently changed sides on that as on other questions. The October issue of the Journal of the American Society of Psychical Research publishes an account of

conversations believed to have been held with Professor Münsterburg, which might be considered genuine, since on these occasions nobody caught anybody's heel. Münsterburg is quoted as asserting that he does not want to see the war, that it makes him sick. He is not by himself in that! He speaks of the “arrogant ignorance" of the German people, whose downfall he prophesies. It certainly is a gentlemanly thing for Münsterburg to admit himself wrong on such an important question as Kaiserism.

Among those publications describing what are claimed to be actual communications of the dead with the living, Mr. Warr's collection of stories under the title of The Unseen Host is interesting. Mr. Warr

gives a number of scenes from the battle-field, in which the dead are represented as revealing themselves to the living. He says of an experience of his own in the Service of Intercession in St. Paul's, on the first anniversary of the war, "That dear friend of mine whose earthly body sleeps in Flanders, but whose spirit is with the winged hosts in heaven, was very near to me then, and spoke and told me . . of a meeting which awaits us beyond the shadows and tears of this dying world." Mr. Warr is a Highlander and, like the true Celt, believes in the unearthly.

to me

True Ghost Stories is another collection of assumed veridical apparitions on the battle-field, believed in by the writers. There are many other examples of war psychics in our literature claiming to be real.

The most appealing book among those purporting to be inspired by revelations from the dead is Sir Oliver Lodge's Raymond, written to