THE SUPERNATURAL OMNIBUS by Montague Summers Read Free Book Online

also left some fine tales of the eerie and the weird. He was a past master of the art of creating an atmosphere of Suspense and loneliness, of awe and trembling fear. He even achieved that most difficult of feats, a full-length ghost story. It is, I think, well-nigh essential for success that the ghost story should be short. Only the adroitest skill and talent of no ordinary kind can avail to keep the reader in that state of expectancy bordering on the unpleasant yet never quite overstepping the line which is the true triumph of this genre. All too frequently a tale spun in many chapters is apt either, on the one hand, to fall slovenly flat, to become banal and to bore; or else on the other to swear into crude physical disgust and end as a mere mixen of horror. The Haunted Hotel , however, is wrought with consummate ability.
    In 1847 the famous military novelist James Grant published The Phantom Regiment , in which, although it be confessed that the main narrative runs rather thin, the episodes — from one of which the book takes its name — are splendidly done. The story tells of a phantom regiment, accursed and banned, doomed on each anniversary of that foul butchery to march from "hell to Culloden." Grant also has two short stories of the macabre, The Dead Tryst and A Haunted Life , which appeared in 1866.
    Other full-length ghost stories to be placed in the first class are Mrs. Riddell's The Haunted River , whose pages are dank with a mist that is not wholly material, with shadows and doom; Lanoe Falconer's Cecilia de Noel , a book of real genius, in which the effect of an apparition on varying individuals is shown; Lucas Malet's The Gateless Barrier and The Tall Villa ; Mrs. Oliphant's The Beleaguered City; The White People by Francis Hodgson Burnett.
    All these are works of great beauty, and this they owe to their apprehension of the spiritual. In other phrase, to produce a flawless piece of work the writer must believe in the motive of the tale. This indeed I have emphasised before, and I will not enlarge upon the point now. I would merely add that if a ghost story has not the note of spirituality which may be beauty — a beauty not without awe — or may be horror, it will fail because of its insincerity and untruth. I do not know, and I do not care to know, how far Henry James believed in the possibility of The Turn of the Screw , but his genius succeeded in creating an atmosphere of spiritual dread because he realised that this was necessary to his art. I understand that actually The Turn of the Screw is a brilliant tour de force, but I am convinced that Henry James was less sceptic than appears.
    It seems to me that it is exactly this lack of spirituality which so fatally flaws the vast majority of the tales in a series generally known as "Not at Night," which has now attained six volumes of similar if slightly varying titles. If there is a note of spiritual horror, whether it be vampire horror, as in Four Wooden Stakes , or Satanism, as in The Devil's Martyr and The Witch-Baiter , the story is raised to another plane far higher than the rather nauseous sensationalism of fiendish serums, foul experiments of lunatic surgeons, half-human plants, monstrous insects and the like.
    Not forgetting the admirable work that has been done in the last thirty years, the nineteenth century may be acclaimed as the hey-day of the good old-fashioned ghost story, even if only in view of the fact that from 1838 to 1873 was writing one who has been justly termed "the Master of Horror and the Mysterious," Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, whose place in literature has been so precisely estimated by Mr. S.M. Ellis in a fine essay in Mainly Victorian . Dr. M.R. James, who is, with the exception of Vernon Lee, of all writers of ghost stories to-day facile princeps, has also declared his admiration for Le Fanu, and has collected with a valuable preface and bibliographical notes some dozen or more of Le Fanu's stories in Madam Crowl's Ghost . Both