The Haunters The Haunted | Page 2

might efface the lying legends inscribed on their tombs, and replace them with the actual truth. Villiers de l'Isle Adam has in his _Contes Cruels_ given us the strange story of V��ra, which may be read as a companion study to La Morte, with another recall from the dead to end a lover's obsession. Nature and supernature cross in de l'Isle Adam's mystical drama Ax?l a play which will never hold the stage, masterly attempt as it is to dramatise the inexplainable mystery.
Among later tales ought to be reckoned Edith Wharton's _Tales of Men and Ghosts, and Henry James's The Two Magics_, whose "Turn of the Screw" gives us new instances of the evil genii that haunt mortals, in this case two innocent children. One remembers sundry folk-tales with the same motive--of children bewitched or forespoken--inspiring them. And an old charm in Orkney which used to run:
"Father, Son, Holy Ghost! Bitten sall they be, Bairn, wha have bitten thee! Care to their black vein, Till thou hast thy health again! Mend thou in God's name!"
John Aubrey in his Miscellanies has many na?ve evidences of the twilight region of consciousness, like that between wake and sleep, which tends to fade when we are wideawake; so much so, that we call it visionary. Yet it is very real to the haunted folk, to Aubrey's correspondent, the Rector of Chedzoy, or to the false love of the Demon Lover, or that Mr Bourne of whom Glanvil tells in _The Iron Chest of Durley_, or the Bishop Evodius who was St Augustine's friend, or for that matter the son of Monica himself. The reality of these visitations may seem dim, but the most sceptical of us cannot doubt that, whether from some quickened fear of death or impending disaster, from evil conscience or swift intensification of vision; whether in the forms of beloved sons lost at sea or of other revenants who were held indispensably dear in life, the haunters have appeared, to the absolute belief of those who saw them or their simulacra.
"It poseth me," said Richard Baxter, "to think of what kind these visitants are. Do good spirits dwell then so near us, or are they sent on such messages?" The question, indeed, poseth most of us, but we cannot leave the inquiry alone. M. Larigot, realising this preoccupation, has in the course of his investigations, during many years, arrived at the conclusion that there is an Art of the Supernatural, apart from the difficult science of psychical research, worth cultivating for its own sake. So he has gone to Glanvil and Arise Evans and the credulous old books--to Edgar Poe and Lord Lytton and the modern writers who tell supernatural tales. He gives us their material without positing its unquestionable effect as police-court evidence, and if we recognise its artistic interest, he does not mind much if we say at last with one great visionary, "Hoc est illusionum." But into those realms of illusion we ought not, if he is right, to enter lightly. Those who do enter there are warned that, having done so, they will not remain the same; they become aware of what Eugenius meant, who said:
"I am unbody'd by thy Books, and Thee, And in thy papers find my Extasie; Or if I please but to descend a strain, Thy Elements do screen my Soul again.
I can undress myself by thy bright Glass, And then resume th' Inclosure, as I was. Now I am Earth, and now a Star, and then A Spirit: now a Star, and earth again ..."
We see that there is another aspect to the occultation of Orion, and a very ominous one. Aurelius appeared to St. Augustine and made clear a dark passage to him in his reading, and that great Divine and Father of the Church knew it to be an enlightenment from above. But what of the other visitants from regions that are unblessed? Paracelsus has taught us to be careful in our dealings with the realities and the phantasies, as he would conceive them, of the other world; for "under the Earth do wander half-men." And there are other and worse manifestations due to Black Magic or Nigromancy, and to the black witches and white and the false sorcerers who have violently intruded into the true mystery--"like swine broken into a delicate Garden." Against these subtle and powerful magicians no weapons, coats of mail, or brigandines will help, no shutting of doors or locks; for they penetrate through all things, and all things are open to them.
Writing as a physician, Paracelsus sought to anticipate by his Celestial Medicine and his Twelve Signs the whole mystery of healing, and the cure of the troubled souls and bodies of men and women, which are not accorded but at odds with nature and