The Decay of the British Ghost.

by F Anstey
[pseud for Thomas Anstey Guthrie, 1856-1934]

TO the present writer at least it is a painful reflection that the British Ghost is fast becoming as extinct as the Great Bustard. It is not quite gone, for, as we are periodically informed, some of the leading letters of our alphabet still believe in spirits, and have relatives (amongst the asterisks) who have once actually beheld one. But in spite of this distinguished support, our ghosts are palpably drooping; one by one they are fading away. If any one doubts this, and would convince himself of the sad truth, he has simply to refer to that excellent work, published some time since, Mrs. Crowe's 'Night Side of Nature,' which he will find positively swarming with spectres; spectres to suit all tastes; spectres ugly and comely, opaque and transparent, full dress and undress, plain and coloured, and all on such unimpeachable testimony that unbelief is rendered impossible. It is only reasonable to suppose that the majority of them were in full activity at the period at which the book was compiled, or they would not have been there; but where are all those spectres now? Where, for instance, is the 'whiskered gentleman in an antique dress and creaking boots' who once forgot himself so far as to 'go the length of shaking a maid-servant's bed'? — we have lost him, his boots are heard no more.

       Where, too, is that 'dark-complexioned ghost' who wore a 'fustian jacket and a red comforter'? He seems to have been a handy and a useful spirit, invaluable to housekeepers with short memories, for we read that on one occasion he actually took the trouble to 'call at the greengrocer's and order a small quantity of coals which had been forgotten.' But he is gone now; we still, it is true, find puzzling items in our monthly bills — but these are explainable without any reference to the supernatural.

       And, not to multiply instances, where, finally, is a highly interesting appearance which was 'frequently heard to crackle,' had a 'faintly luminous hue,' and 'brought with him one night a large dog,' which he stated (but perhaps untruthfully) 'was his father'? None of these could well go about without attracting a certain amount of attention; we never hear of them now, and the inference is only too obvious.

       If further proof of this decline were needed, there are few observant persons who cannot recall some fine specimen, ranging perhaps as far back as the Early English or Decorated periods, architecturally speaking, which was intact in their youthful days, but has since been suffered to fall into decay without an attempt at restoration, while others have vanished prematurely in the very prime of spectrehood.

       That we are threatened at present with an imminent dearth of apparitions is an absolute fact which no thinking man will attempt to gainsay; it is the object of this paper to inquire into the causes which have contributed to such a result, and to consider seriously the remedy which (if we care at all to preserve the few phantoms that remain to us) will have to be applied.

       The chief of these causes seem to be found in certain well-known characteristics of the British Ghosts; an almost excessive self-respect and a shrinking susceptibility to public opinion, which render it hardly surprising if the treatment they have encountered of late has (as it is to be feared is the case) decided them to withdraw from an age incapable of appreciating them.

       For since the days of Dickens (probably one of the first to offend in this respect) a constant stream of ridicule has been directed against the Ghost; and ridicule, be it remembered, is a force which has proved fatal to far more substantial institutions.

       Even worse than ridicule, however, is the tremendous competition with which they have had to contend; science having, possibly out of pique at finding no means of utilising these supernatural but slightly shiftless beings, revenged itself by inventing a cheap and spurious imitation, so that in an age of shams we cannot be certain that all the few ghosts we yet possess are wholly genuine, and the humblest public entertainer can now supply, without the expense or risk of any preliminary sacrifice of human life, an apparition which is as satisfactory to the idle and unthinking as the best-pedigreed shade.

       Thus it is that so many of our oldest established ghosts have found themselves unable to hold their own, and have been reluctantly forced to retire from the unequal contest — a proud triumph, truly, for our vaunted civilisation!

       But another cause has been at work with a more insidious but even deadlier method; until quite recently, if the practice does not still survive in a modified form, it was customary to commission a band of ingenious littérateurs to turn out batches of ready-made spectres for the Christmas annuals.

       It must be candidly admitted that some of these were by no means devoid of merit of a certain kind; they have been known to send readers, and especially child-readers, scuttling up to bed with as strong a disinclination to look behind them as the most conscientious apparition could desire to induce. And they were always strictly seasonable; a quality that deserves recognition now that some Christmas annuals rest their claims upon the scrupulous delicacy with which they avoid as far as possible all allusion to the very month of December and its associations.

       There was something thoroughly Christmassy, for example, about the witchlike old lady, with a horrible dead rouged face, who looked out of a tarnished mirror and gibbered malevolently at somebody, for the excellent reason that he chanced to be her descendant; nor could the pale gentlemanly man — who took the thirteenth chair at a Swiss table d'hôte in winter and conversed intelligently (for an apparition) on the subjects of the weather and the hotel charges, until he melted away mysteriously with the salad — be called absolutely unfestive.

       And the female figure — supple and graceful, gliding lightly clad and bareheaded through a copse on a bitterly cold morning and followed eagerly by the narrator of the adventure till she turned her head and showed him a pale mask, without eyes — that female figure possessed a charm in that simple, unadorned eyelessness of hers that was well worth the entire shilling charged for the magazine, which contained at least two other ghosts quite as horrible between its covers.

       The skeleton fisherman who landed a skeleton pike in a snow-storm, the ghost of an entire railway train and the spectral bank clerk that cashed a dead man's cheque — all these were, in their way, pleasing and original productions, while the most imposing of all perhaps was one to which the shuddering reader was introduced something after this fashion (the writer is unfortunately reduced to quote from memory):

       'I was sitting,' said the contributor, 'in my snug little lodging-house parlour, with my back towards the door which led to my bedroom, and my feet on the fender, enjoying my tea by the side of a blazing fire whereon a kettle was singing merrily. I had just taken another piece of muffin, when I was suddenly struck by an icy blast, which, in spite of the fire, seemed to sweep my legs below the knee, and happening to raise my eyes to the glass above my chimney-piece, I saw the door behind me slowly, stealthily opening! I looked round with a vague indefinable uneasiness, and saw — merciful Heaven! how shall I describe the frightful thing that presented itself to my horror-stricken gaze? I saw a dank discoloured loathsome shape, the fish-like eyes in whose mildewed countenance shone with a dull greenish glitter . . .'(and so on for some lines of rather unpleasant and charnel-house detail). . . 'drag its decomposing form painfully into my sitting-room, and fall with a hideous soft thud into the empty coalscuttle!'

       A real ghost with half these personal advantages would most certainly have had a career before it — but these artfully manufactured imitations succeeded in time in dealing a fatal blow at the legitimate originals on which they were founded, and they did so in this way — they gradually undermined the public confidence in spectres.

       For years people placed implicit faith in these annuals, but at length they began to ask themselves the inevitable question whether it was upon the whole probable that quite so many denizens of the unseen world should combine to reveal themselves about Christmas-time and exclusively to persons connected to some extent with literature.

       They decided eventually in the negative, and their belief in the Magazine Ghost was shaken to its foundations. Had this been all, little harm would have been done, but from such a frame of mind it was but a step — though a glaringly illogical one — to a scepticism concerning all spectral appearances whatever; and how disastrous this must have proved to ghosts (which depend as much as a prime minister, a public company, or a tragedian upon retaining the confidence of the public) can be readily imagined.

       And so most of the more sensitive, many of them of long standing and a respectability untarnished by any appearance in print, have already faded away from disgust or inanition, and those who still linger on are reduced to a condition but little removed from utter destitution; while, sad as this is, there is something still more shocking in the apathy with which the British public permits these once familiar objects to moulder away unregretted, almost forgotten.

       There are persons, otherwise enlightened and liberal thinkers, who do not even affect to deplore them; 'These ghosts,' they tell us in their hard practical way, 'are no longer of the least use — the greater part of them never did much beyond keeping alive some ancient scandal which would have been better forgotten, and the few which acted as a kind of primitive telegraphic service for the conveyance of bad news performed their errand in so tactless a manner as frequently to render the recipient of their information more or less of an idiot for the rest of his or her life. In no single instance, too, owing to their unbusinesslike vagueness, could the intelligence they brought be relied upon without confirmation. If the ghost is really going,' say they, 'so much the better — we can do very well without it!'

       But is not this, after all, a narrow and prejudiced mode of treating the question? have not our spectres some claim to our protection and even to our esteem? To the lover of the past what link is more direct and more suggestive, what study more fraught with instruction than an old-established and well-authenticated Ghost? — and should it be objected that the results of this branch of study have hitherto been but meagre, the answer is that this must be set down to an inveterate tendency on the part of most persons favoured with opportunities for nocturnal research to veil their heads beneath the bedclothes at the first alarm — a practice which, though admirably adapted for concentrating the mind, is not so well suited to minute and careful observation.

       And then the mere fact of having so picturesque an object as a phantom about the house confers a reflected lustre on the owner; it costs little or nothing to keep, and, with ordinary care, will last for an indefinite period; although of course those individuals who will throw things at an apparition, as a sort of rough test of its genuineness, cannot fairly complain of a little shabbiness, a certain darned and mended aspect, which will probably be observable in time. It is no secret that a certain well-known peer has completely spoiled the family ghost by thoughtlessly hurling his slipper and bootjack at its head, which ever after, to the great detriment of its expression, preserved the faint outlines of the homely missiles which had passed through it; indeed, the spirit, in consequence of its damaged condition, seldom ventures now to appear at all.

       The estimation which this now-despised class formerly enjoyed, even in the eyes of the law, is strikingly shown by the well-known case of Chanticlere v. Tawrus, which may be found by the curious in the reports of one of the Veseys. There, as some readers outside the legal profession may perhaps remember, the Defendant attempted to avoid a contract to purchase a family mansion by the plea that it contained an ancestral apparition, which he did not require but which the vendor refused to take off his bands. But the subject of dispute, being actually produced in open court, conducted itself with such extreme propriety that the Court at once held that it was a positive acquisition to any residence, and not only enforced the purchase but awarded the vendor an additional sum as compensation for the increased value. It is only too much to be feared that no judge in the modern Chancery Division would have the courage to follow this precedent, wise and enlightened as it was.

       Much could be said in proof of the gratitude shown by Ghosts, and their appreciation of any kindness which may be shown to them, but space will not permit of any illustration of these virtues beyond a single incident from the life of the late Professor Moon. This distinguished man was passing by a piece of waste ground near Shepherd's Bush late one evening, when he observed a stray and apparently ownerless spirit, which for some inscrutable reason chose to attach itself to him.

       Being a humane person, he could not bring himself to drive it away, so that for years, as soon as night drew on, it would follow him about like a dog-a proceeding which, though occasionally inconvenient, was at least well meant. Nor was this all, for when the Professor died, the apparition hovered gratuitously for some weeks above his grave; and though, as it was strikingly unlike him in personal appearance, this attention was a little misleading, there is something extremely touching in such disinterested devotion. It must not be forgotten, either, that one famous apparition has rendered Shakespearian commentators an invaluable service by doing more to set the vexed question of Hamlet's insanity at rest than Goethe and all the other eminent critics in combination. The human stage ghost of Hamlet's father having accidentally failed to appear at a performance of the tragedy in the provinces, an unknown but unmistakable phantom ambitiously stepped in to fill the gap — with such effect that it sent Hamlet, Horatio, Marcellus, two stage carpenters, and the prompter all raving mad together.

       These, then, are a few of the recommendations which these so-called useless and effete beings unquestionably possess; and now that they have been brought prominently before the public, the question can hardly fail to be asked, and with some anxiety, 'Can nothing be done to preserve so deserving a class from this impending extinction?' To this inquiry very little encouragement can be given, until the lower and middle classes are brought to take a more intelligent interest in the question than they do at present.

       It is difficult to say how many apparitions have not been lost to us through the irreverent Vandalism which is so widely prevalent. Conceive, for instance, the indignation of a real ghost at finding itself, as happened the other day, hideously travestied by a vulgar youth in a nightshirt and a tall white hat!

       And want of thought and consideration is no less prejudicial. Not long ago a female apparition was discovered somewhere in the mining districts near a disused shaft, the exact place where a woman had been last seen long years before. It was recognised at once, and was producing an excellent impression in the locality — it might have been, with a little caution, permanently secured for the purposes of scientific observation — when the original woman was ungenerous enough to reappear in a living condition, after which, naturally, no more was seen of the phantom.

       How can we hope to retain our apparitions amongst us if we allow them to be rendered ridiculous by such means as these?

       From one quarter alone can the necessary aid be looked for with any hopefulness; all who have the welfare of ghosts at heart are now anxiously following the proceedings of the well-known Society for Psychical Research.

       Yet even here, without some radical alteration in the course pursued, there seems but slight probability that these researches will prove really beneficial, although the Society is universally given credit, if not for being absolutely in favour of the perpetuation of phantoms, at least for maintaining a benevolent neutrality in the matter.

       But their method is, the present writer ventures in all humility to suggest, a grave mistake, and calculated to defeat the very ends they presumably have in view. For, unless he is greatly misinformed, the Society, in pursuing their inquiries into this branch of the supernatural, aim at establishing such a complete investigation into the claims of an alleged apparition that the result, if satisfactory, will go far to give it, as it were, a registered title for ever. Unhappily, to attain this, they have thought it requisite to impose so severe a process of evidence-sifting and cross-examination, that the most straight-walking spectre can hardly be expected to emerge from it without a stain.

       Now, one cannot expect to prove a phantom like a proposition; phantoms are not to be dealt with as an Old Bailey barrister treats a hostile witness — they have never been used to it. They require more delicate, more sympathetic handling; till now they have been accepted for what they represented themselves to be, and it is idle to suppose that a supernatural being with any self-respect whatever will consent to submit itself to a test compared with which the examination for the Indian Civil Service is the merest form — a test, too, for which they are allowed no time to prepare themselves!

       And for what object should they do this? Scarcely for a diploma which, to a shade of ordinary respectability, will be one of two things — a superfluity or an insult.

       It would not be surprising if a persistence in this treatment were to hasten the end; and certainly, if the few decayed phantoms and reduced spectres yet in existence are to be preserved at all, if their ranks are to be recruited and set on a proper footing once more, the task must be approached in a spirit at once more conciliatory and more enterprising.

       Suppose, for example, the Society were to employ some of the funds at their disposal in offering a handsome premium to any person discovering a genuine ghost in good or even fair condition — can there be any doubt that we should be gratified by an instant increase in the number of our nocturnal visitants?

       Or they might import a selection of foreign varieties from the Continent, where they are understood to be more flourishing; and though the difficulties of acclimatisation, expense, and national prejudice are of course serious objections to this scheme, they are by no means insurmountable.

       But, should the Society refuse to entertain these suggestions, they might, at least, when the next apparition is brought before them in imminent danger of having to retire for want of credit, refrain from insulting it in its extremity by a cold and cruel suspicion, and in common humanity assist it rather to recover something of its former position.

       A timely grant of new properties and effects — if only a few lengths of chain and a pound or two of blue fire — would frequently be more than enough to awaken popular interest once more, and set many a distressed spectre going again.

       The Society may, of course, in the pardonable pride of their experience in these matters, wholly disregard this humble remonstrance; but at least it will be impossible hereafter, when the last British Ghost has flickered out, and the nation is bewailing its forlornly phantomless condition — it will be impossible for the public in general, and the Society in particular, to deny that they have been respectfully warned in these pages of the disaster which awaited them.

F. ANSTEY.       

(THE END)