第 5 页

The next world, among the Chinese, seems to be a paradise ofbureaucracy, patent places, jobs, mandarins' buttons and tails, and,in short, the heaven of officialism. All civilised readers areacquainted with Mr. Stockton's humorous story of 'The TransferredGhost.' In Mr. Stockton's view a man does not always get his ownghostship; there is a vigorous competition among spirits for goodghostships, and a great deal of intrigue and party feeling. It maybe long before a disembodied spectre gets any ghostship at all, andthen, if he has little influence, he may be glad to take a chance ofhaunting the Board of Trade, or the Post Office, instead of"walking" in the Foreign Office. One spirit may win a post as WhiteLady in the imperial palace, while another is put off with aposition in an old college library, or perhaps has to follow thefortunes of some seedy "medium" through boarding-houses and third-rate hotels. Now this is precisely the Chinese view of the fatesand fortunes of ghosts. Quisque suos patimur manes.

In China, to be brief, and to quote a ghost (who ought to know whathe was speaking about), "supernaturals are to be found everywhere."This is the fact that makes life so puzzling and terrible to a childof a believing and trustful character. These Oriental bogies do notappear in the dark alone, or only in haunted houses, or at cross-roads, or in gloomy woods. They are everywhere: every man has hisown ghost, every place has its peculiar haunting fiend, everynatural phenomenon has its informing spirit; every quality, ashunger, greed, envy, malice, has an embodied visible shape prowlingabout seeking what it may devour. Where our science, for example,sees (or rather smells) sewer gas, the Japanese behold a slimy,meagre, insatiate wraith, crawling to devour the lives of men.Where we see a storm of snow, their livelier fancy beholds a comicsnow-ghost, a queer, grinning old man under a vast umbrella.

The illustrations in this paper are only a few specimens chosen outof many volumes of Japanese bogies. We have not ventured to copythe very most awful spectres, nor dared to be as horrid as we can.These native drawings, too, are generally coloured regardless ofexpense, and the colouring is often horribly lurid and satisfactory.This embellishment, fortunately perhaps, we cannot reproduce.Meanwhile, if any child looks into this essay, let him (or her) notbe alarmed by the pictures he beholds. Japanese ghosts do not livein this country; there are none of them even at the JapaneseLegation. Just as bears, lions, and rattlesnakes are not to beseriously dreaded in our woods and commons, so the Japanese ghostcannot breathe (any more than a slave can) in the air of England orAmerica. We do not yet even keep any ghostly zoological garden inwhich the bogies of Japanese, Australians, Red Indians, and otherdistant peoples may be accommodated. Such an establishment isperhaps to be desired in the interests of psychical research, butthat form of research has not yet been endowed by a cultivated andprogressive government.

The first to attract our attention represents, as I understand, thecommon ghost, or simulacrum vulgare of psychical science. To thiscomplexion must we all come, according to the best Japanese opinion.Each of us contains within him "somewhat of a shadowy being," likethe spectre described by Dr. Johnson: something like the Egyptian"Ka," for which the curious may consult the works of Miss Amelia B.Edwards and other learned Orientalists. The most recent Frenchstudent of these matters, the author of 'L'Homme Posthume,' is ofopinion that we do not all possess this double, with its power ofsurviving our bodily death. He thinks, too, that our ghost, when itdoes survive, has but rarely the energy and enterprise to makeitself visible to or audible by "shadow-casting men." In someextreme cases the ghost (according to our French authority, that ofa disciple of M. Comte) feeds fearsomely on the bodies of theliving. In no event does he believe that a ghost lasts much longerthan a hundred years. After that it mizzles into spectre, and isresolved into its elements, whatever they may be.

A somewhat similar and (to my own mind) probably sound theory ofghosts prevails among savage tribes, and among such peoples as theancient Greeks, the modern Hindoos, and other ancestor worshippers.When feeding, as they all do, or used to do, the ghosts of theancestral dead, they gave special attention to the claims of thedead of the last three generations, leaving ghosts older than thecentury to look after their own supplies of meat and drink. Thenegligence testifies to a notion that very old ghosts are of littleaccount, for good or evil. On the other hand, as regards thelongevity of spectres, we must not shut our eyes to the example ofthe bogie in ancient armour which appears in Glamis Castle, or tothe Jesuit of Queen Elizabeth's date that haunts the library (and avery nice place to haunt: I ask no better, as a ghost in thePavilion at Lord's might cause a scandal) of an English nobleman.With these instantiae contradictoriae, as Bacon calls them, presentto our minds, we must not (in the present condition of psychicalresearch) dogmatise too hastily about the span of life allotted tothe simulacrum vulgare. Very probably his chances of a prolongedexistence are in inverse ratio to the square of the distance of timewhich severs him from our modern days. No one has ever evenpretended to see the ghost of an ancient Roman buried in theseislands, still less of a Pict or Scot, or a Palaeolithic man,welcome as such an apparition would be to many of us. Thus theevidence does certainly look as if there were a kind of statute oflimitations among ghosts, which, from many points of view, is not anarrangement at which we should repine.

The Japanese artist expresses his own sense of the casual andfluctuating nature of ghosts by drawing his spectre in shaky lines,as if the model had given the artist the horrors. This simulacrumrises out of the earth like an exhalation, and groups itself intoshape above the spade with which all that is corporeal of its lateowner has been interred. Please remark the uncomforted and dismalexpression of the simulacrum. We must remember that the ghost or"Ka" is not the "soul," which has other destinies in the futureworld, good or evil, but is only a shadowy resemblance, condemned,as in the Egyptian creed, to dwell in the tomb and hover near it.The Chinese and Japanese have their own definite theory of the nextworld, and we must by no means confuse the eternal fortunes of thepermanent, conscious, and responsible self, already inhabiting otherworlds than ours, with the eccentric vagaries of the semi-materialtomb-haunting larva, which so often develops a noisy and bear-fighting disposition quite unlike the character of its proprietor inlife.

The next bogie, so limp and washed-out as he seems, with his white,drooping, dripping arms and hands, reminds us of that horrid Frenchspecies of apparition, "la lavandiere de la nuit," who washes deadmen's linen in the moonlit pools and rivers. Whether thissimulacrum be meant for the spirit of the well (for everything hasits spirit in Japan), or whether it be the ghost of some mortaldrowned in the well, I cannot say with absolute certainty; but theopinion of the learned tends to the former conclusion. Naturally aJapanese child, when sent in the dusk to draw water, will do so withfear and trembling, for this limp, floppy apparition might scare theboldest. Another bogie, a terrible creation of fancy, I take to bea vampire, about which the curious can read in Dom Calmet, who willtell them how whole villages in Hungary have been depopulated byvampires; or he may study in Fauriel's 'Chansons de la GreceModerne' the vampires of modern Hellas.

Another plan, and perhaps even more satisfactory to a timid orsuperstitious mind, is to read in a lonely house at midnight a storynamed 'Carmilla,' printed in Mr. Sheridan Le Fanu's 'In a GlassDarkly.' That work will give you the peculiar sentiment ofvampirism, will produce a gelid perspiration, and reduce the patientto a condition in which he will be afraid to look round the room.If, while in this mood, some one tells him Mr. Augustus Hare's storyof Crooglin Grange, his education in the practice and theory ofvampires will be complete, and he will be a very proper and well-qualified inmate of Earlswood Asylum. The most awful Japanesevampire, caught red-handed in the act, a hideous, bestialincarnation of ghoulishness, we have carefully refrained fromreproducing.

Scarcely more agreeable is the bogie, or witch, blowing from hermouth a malevolent exhalation, an embodiment of malignant andmaleficent sorcery. The vapour which flies and curls from the mouthconstitutes "a sending," in the technical language of Icelandicwizards, and is capable (in Iceland, at all events) of assuming theform of some detestable supernatural animal, to destroy the life ofa hated rival. In the case of our last example it is very hardindeed to make head or tail of the spectre represented. Chinks andcrannies are his domain; through these he drops upon you. He is amerry but not an attractive or genial ghost. Where there are such"visions about" it may be admitted that children, apt to believe inall such fancies, have a youth of variegated and intense misery,recurring with special vigour at bed-time. But we look again at ourfirst picture, and hope and trust that Japanese boys and girls areas happy as these jolly little creatures appear.

GHOSTS IN THE LIBRARY

Suppose, when now the house is dumb,When lights are out, and ashes fall -Suppose their ancient owners comeTo claim our spoils of shop and stall,Ah me! within the narrow hallHow strange a mob would meet and go,What famous folk would haunt them all,Octavo, quarto, folio!

The great Napoleon lays his handUpon this eagle-headed N,That marks for his a pamphlet bannedBy all but scandal-loving men, -A libel from some nameless denOf Frankfort,--Arnaud a la Sphere,Wherein one spilt, with venal pen,Lies o'er the loves of Moliere. {3}

Another shade--he does not see"Boney," the foeman of his race -The great Sir Walter, this is heWith that grave homely Border face.He claims his poem of the chaseThat rang Benvoirlich's valley through;And THIS, that doth the lineage traceAnd fortunes of the bold Buccleuch; {4}

For these were his, and these he gaveTo one who dwelt beside the Peel,That murmurs with its tiny waveTo join the Tweed at Ashestiel.Now thick as motes the shadows wheel,And find their own, and claim a shareOf books wherein Ribou did deal,Or Roulland sold to wise Colbert. {5}

What famous folk of old are here!A royal duke comes down to us,And greatly wants his Elzevir,His Pagan tutor, Lucius. {6}And Beckford claims an amorousOld heathen in morocco blue; {7}And who demands EobanusBut stately Jacques Auguste de Thou! {8}

They come, the wise, the great, the true,They jostle on the narrow stair,The frolic Countess de Verrue,Lamoignon, ay, and Longepierre,The new and elder dead are there -The lords of speech, and song, and pen,Gambetta, {9} Schlegel {10} and the rareDrummond of haunted Hawthornden. {11}

Ah, and with those, a hundred more,Whose names, whose deeds, are quite forgot:Brave "Smiths" and "Thompsons" by the score,Scrawled upon many a shabby "lot."This playbook was the joy of Pott {12} -Pott, for whom now no mortal grieves.Our names, like his, remembered not,Like his, shall flutter on fly-leaves!

At least in pleasant companyWe bookish ghosts, perchance, may flit;A man may turn a page, and sigh,Seeing one's name, to think of it.Beauty, or Poet, Sage, or Wit,May ope our book, and muse awhile,And fall into a dreaming fit,As now we dream, and wake, and smile!

LITERARY FORGERIES

In the whole amusing history of impostures, there is no morediverting chapter than that which deals with literary frauds. Nonecontains a more grotesque revelation of the smallness and thecomplexity of human nature, and none--not even the records of theTichborne trial, nor of general elections--displays more pleasantlythe depths of mortal credulity. The literary forger is usually aclever man, and it is necessary for him to be at least on a levelwith the literary knowledge and critical science of his time. Buthow low that level commonly appears to be! Think of the success ofIreland, a boy of eighteen; think of Chatterton; think of Surtees ofMainsforth, who took in the great Sir Walter himself, the father ofall them that are skilled in ballad lore. How simple were theartifices of these ingenious impostors, their resources how scanty;how hand-to-mouth and improvised was their whole procedure! Timeshave altered a little. Jo Smith's revelation and famed 'GoldenBible' only carried captive the polygamous populus qui vult decipi,reasoners a little lower than even the believers in Anglo-Israel.The Moabite Ireland, who once gave Mr. Shapira the famous MS. ofDeuteronomy, but did not delude M. Clermont-Ganneau, was doubtless asmart man; he was, however, a little too indolent, a little tooeasily satisfied. He might have procured better and lessrecognisable materials than his old "synagogue rolls;" in short, hetook rather too little trouble, and came to the wrong market. Aliterary forgery ought first, perhaps, to appeal to the credulous,and only slowly should it come, with the prestige of having alreadywon many believers, before the learned world. The inscriber of thePhoenician inscriptions in Brazil (of all places) was a clever man.His account of the voyage of Hiram to South America probably gainedsome credence in Brazil, while in England it only carried captiveMr. Day, author of 'The Prehistoric Use of Iron and Steel.' But theBrazilians, from lack of energy, have dropped the subject, and thePhoenician inscriptions of Brazil are less successful, after all,than the Moabite stone, about which one begins to entertaindisagreeable doubts.

The motives of the literary forger are curiously mixed; but theymay, perhaps, be analysed roughly into piety, greed, "push," andlove of fun. Many literary forgeries have been pious frauds,perpetrated in the interests of a church, a priesthood, or a dogma.Then we have frauds of greed, as if, for example, a forger shouldoffer his wares for a million of money to the British Museum; orwhen he tries to palm off his Samaritan Gospel on the "BadSamaritan" of the Bodleian. Next we come to playful frauds, orfrauds in their origin playful, like (perhaps) the Shakespearianforgeries of Ireland, the supercheries of Prosper Merimee, the shamantique ballads (very spirited poems in their way) of Surtees, andmany other examples. Occasionally it has happened that forgeries,begun for the mere sake of exerting the imitative faculty, and ofraising a laugh against the learned, have been persevered with inearnest. The humorous deceits are, of course, the most pardonable,though it is difficult to forgive the young archaeologist who tookin his own father with false Greek inscriptions. But this story maybe a mere fable amongst archaeologists, who are constantly accusingeach other of all manner of crimes. Then there are forgeries by"pushing" men, who hope to get a reading for poems which, if putforth as new, would be neglected. There remain forgeries of whichthe motives are so complex as to remain for ever obscure. We maygenerally ascribe them to love of notoriety in the forger; suchnotoriety as Macpherson won by his dubious pinchbeck Ossian. Moredifficult still to understand are the forgeries which real scholarshave committed or connived at for the purpose of supporting someopinion which they held with earnestness. There is a vein ofmadness and self-deceit in the character of the man who half-persuades himself that his own false facts are true. The PayneCollier case is thus one of the most difficult in the world toexplain, for it is equally hard to suppose that Mr. Payne Collierwas taken in by the notes on the folio he gave the world, and tohold that he was himself guilty of forgery to support his ownopinions.