HAUNTINGS
FANTASTIC STORIES
VERNON LEE
1890
To _FLORA PRIESTLEY_ and _ARTHUR LEMON_
_Are Dedicated_
DIONEA, AMOUR DURE,
_and_ THESE PAGES OF INTRODUCTION AND APOLOGY.
_Preface_
We were talking last evening--as the blue moon-mist poured in throughthe old-fashioned grated window, and mingled with our yellowlamplight at table--we were talking of a certain castle whoseheir is initiated (as folk tell) on his twenty-first birthday to theknowledge of a secret so terrible as to overshadow his subsequent life.It struck us, discussing idly the various mysteries and terrors thatmay lie behind this fact or this fable, that no doom or horrorconceivable and to be defined in words could ever adequately solve thisriddle; that no reality of dreadfulness could seem caught but paltry,bearable, and easy to face in comparison with this vague we know notwhat.
And this leads me to say, that it seems to me that the supernatural, inorder to call forth those sensations, terrible to our ancestors andterrible but delicious to ourselves, skeptical posterity, mustnecessarily, and with but a few exceptions, remain enwrapped inmystery. Indeed, 'tis the mystery that touches us, the vague shroud ofmoonbeams that hangs about the haunting lady, the glint on thewarrior's breastplate, the click of his unseen spurs, while the figureitself wanders forth, scarcely outlined, scarcely separated from thesurrounding trees; or walks, and sucked back, ever and anon, into theflickering shadows.
A number of ingenious persons of our day, desirous of apocket-superstition, as men of yore were greedy of a pocket-saint tocarry about in gold and enamel, a number of highly reasoning men ofsemi-science have returned to the notion of our fathers, that ghostshave an existence outside our own fancy and emotion; and have culledfrom the experience of some Jemima Jackson, who fifty years ago, beingnine years of age, saw her maiden aunt appear six months after decease,abundant proof of this fact. One feels glad to think the maiden auntshould have walked about after death, if it afforded her anysatisfaction, poor soul! but one is struck by the extremeuninterestingness of this lady's appearance in the spirit,corresponding perhaps to her want of charm while in the flesh.Altogether one quite agrees, having duly perused the collection ofevidence on the subject, with the wisdom of these modern ghost-experts,when they affirm that you can always tell a genuine ghost-story by thecircumstance of its being about a nobody, its having no point orpicturesqueness, and being, generally speaking, flat, stale, andunprofitable.
A genuine ghost-story! But then they are not genuine ghost-stories,those tales that tingle through our additional sense, the sense of thesupernatural, and fill places, nay whole epochs, with their strangeperfume of witchgarden flowers.
No, alas! neither the story of the murdered King of Denmark (murderedpeople, I am told, usually stay quiet, as a scientific fact), nor ofthat weird woman who saw King James the Poet three times with hisshroud wrapped ever higher; nor the tale of the finger of the bronzeVenus closing over the wedding-ring, whether told by Morris in versepatterned like some tapestry, or by Merimee in terror of cynicalreality, or droned by the original mediaeval professional story-teller,none of these are genuine ghost-stories. They exist, these ghosts, onlyin our minds, in the minds of those dead folk; they have never stumbledand fumbled about, with Jemima Jackson's maiden aunt, among thearmchairs and rep sofas of reality.
They are things of the imagination, born there, bred there, sprung fromthe strange confused heaps, half-rubbish, half-treasure, which lie inour fancy, heaps of half-faded recollections, of fragmentary vividimpressions, litter of multi-colored tatters, and faded herbs andflowers, whence arises that odor (we all know it), musty and damp, butpenetratingly sweet and intoxicatingly heady, which hangs in the airwhen the ghost has swept through the unopened door, and the flickeringflames of candle and fire start up once more after waning.
The genuine ghost? And is not this he, or she, this one born ofourselves, of the weird places we have seen, the strange stories wehave heard--this one, and not the aunt of Miss Jemima Jackson? For whatuse, I entreat you to tell me, is that respectable spinster's vision?Was she worth seeing, that aunt of hers, or would she, if followed,have led the way to any interesting brimstone or any endurablebeatitude?
The supernatural can open the caves of Jamschid and scale the ladder ofJacob: what use has it got if it land us in Islington or Shepherd'sBush? It is well known that Dr. Faustus, having been offered any ghosthe chose, boldly selected, for Mephistopheles to convey, no less aperson than Helena of Troy. Imagine if the familiar fiend had summonedup some Miss Jemima Jackson's Aunt of Antiquity!
That is the thing--the Past, the more or less remote Past, of which theprose is clean obliterated by distance--that is the place to get ourghosts from. Indeed we live ourselves, we educated folk of moderntimes, on the borderland of the Past, in houses looking down on itstroubadours' orchards and Greek folks' pillared courtyards; and alegion of ghosts, very vague and changeful, are perpetually to and fro,fetching and carrying for us between it and the Present.
Hence, my four little tales are of no genuine ghosts in the scientificsense; they tell of no hauntings such as could be contributed by theSociety for Psychical Research, of no specters that can be caught indefinite places and made to dictate judicial evidence. My ghosts arewhat you call spurious ghosts (according to me the only genuine ones),of whom I can affirm only one thing, that they haunted certain brains,and have haunted, among others, my own and my friends'--yours, dearArthur Lemon, along the dim twilit tracks, among the high growingbracken and the spectral pines, of the south country; and yours, amidstthe mist of moonbeams and olive-branches, dear Flora Priestley, whilethe moonlit sea moaned and rattled against the moldering walls of thehouse whence Shelley set sail for eternity.
VERNON LEE
_MAIANO, near FLORENCE, June 1889._
_Amour Dure:_
PASSAGES FROM THE DIARY OF SPIRIDION TREPKA.