Probably they smiled at the imperial spectre. There is more discretion in Caesar's ghost -"I think it is the weakness of mine eyes That shapes this monstrous apparition,"says Brutus, and he lays no very great stress on the brief visit of the appearance. For want of this discretion, Alexandre Dumas's ghosts, as in "The Corsican Brothers," are failures. They make themselves too common and too cheap, like the spectre in Mrs.
Oliphant's novel, "The Wizard's Son." This, indeed, is the crux of the whole adventure. If you paint your ghost with too heavy a hand, you raise laughter, not fear. If you touch him too lightly, you raise unsatisfied curiosity, not fear. It may be easy to shudder, but it is difficult to teach shuddering.
In prose, a good example of the over vague is Miriam's mysterious visitor--the shadow of the catacombs--in "Transformation; or, The Marble Faun." Hawthorne should have told us more or less; to be sure his contemporaries knew what he meant, knew who Miriam and the Spectre were. The dweller in the catacombs now powerfully excites curiosity, and when that curiosity is unsatisfied, we feel aggrieved, vexed, and suspect that Hawthorne himself was puzzled, and knew no more than his readers. He has not--as in other tales he has--managed to throw the right atmosphere about this being. He is vague in the wrong way, whereas George Sand, in Les Dames Vertes, is vague in the right way. We are left in Les Dames Vertes with that kind of curiosity which persons really engaged in the adventure might have felt, not with the irritation of having a secret kept from us, as in "Transformation."In "Wandering Willie's Tale" (in "Redgauntlet"), the right atmosphere is found, the right note is struck. All is vividly real, and yet, if you close the book, all melts into a dream again.
Scott was almost equally successful with a described horror in "The Tapestried Chamber." The idea is the commonplace of haunted houses, the apparition is described as minutely as a burglar might have been; and yet we do not mock, but shudder as we read. Then, on the other side--the side of anticipation--take the scene outside the closed door of the vanished Dr. Jekyll, in Mr. Stevenson's well-known apologue:
They are waiting on the threshold of the chamber whence the doctor has disappeared--the chamber tenanted by what? A voice comes from the room. "Sir," said Poole, looking Mr. Utterson in the eyes, "was that my master's voice?"A friend, a man of affairs, and a person never accused of being fanciful, told me that he read through the book to that point in a lonely Highland chateau, at night, and that he did not think it well to finish the story till next morning, but rushed to bed. So the passage seems "well-found" and successful by dint of suggestion. On the other side, perhaps, only Scotsmen brought up in country places, familiar from childhood with the terrors of Cameronian myth, and from childhood apt to haunt the lonely churchyards, never stirred since the year of the great Plague choked the soil with the dead, perhaps THEY only know how much shudder may be found in Mr. Stevenson's "Thrawn Janet." The black smouldering heat in the hills and glens that are commonly so fresh, the aspect of the Man, the Tempter of the Brethren, we know them, and we have enough of the old blood in us to be thrilled by that masterpiece of the described supernatural. It may be only a local success, it may not much affect the English reader, but it is of sure appeal to the lowland Scot. The ancestral Covenanter within us awakens, and is terrified by his ancient fears.
Perhaps it may die out in a positive age--this power of learning to shudder. To us it descends from very long ago, from the far-off forefathers who dreaded the dark, and who, half starved and all untaught, saw spirits everywhere, and scarce discerned waking experience from dreams. When we are all perfect positivist philosophers, when a thousand generations of nurses that never heard of ghosts have educated the thousand and first generation of children, then the supernatural may fade out of fiction. But has it not grown and increased since Wordsworth wanted the "Ancient Mariner" to have "a profession and a character," since Southey called that poem a Dutch piece of work, since Lamb had to pretend to dislike its "miracles"? Why, as science becomes more cock-sure, have men and women become more and more fond of old follies, and more pleased with the stirring of ancient dread within their veins?
As the visible world is measured, mapped, tested, weighed, we seem to hope more and more that a world of invisible romance may not be far from us, or, at least, we care more and more to follow fancy into these airy regions, et inania regna. The supernatural has not ceased to tempt romancers, like Alexandre Dumas, usually to their destruction; more rarely, as in Mrs. Oliphant's "Beleaguered City,"to such success as they do not find in the world of daily occupation. The ordinary shilling tales of "hypnotism" and mesmerism are vulgar trash enough, and yet I can believe that an impossible romance, if the right man wrote it in the right mood, might still win us from the newspapers, and the stories of shabby love, and cheap remorses, and commonplace failures.
"But it needs Heaven-sent moments for this skill."