HEREDITARY GHOSTS.
What ivy is to the ruin, what a fine beeswing is to
port, that a ghost is to a country house. An old country
house without a ghost is a very serious matter —
suspicious in itself, suggestive of parvenu-ism, utterly
fatal to the claims of any family to antiquity. "Thank
heaven, it takes three generations to grow an avenue of
oaks!" said a poor aristocratic friend of Erskine's when
they had cleared the grounds of a man with whom they
had just dined, and who had every thing but antiquity
on his side. It takes much longer than that to
produce a respectable ghost; it cannot be done under six
or seven generations. I know two houses certainly where
a very modern family seemed to be blessed with the
genuine thing, but I have reason to believe that it is a
second-hand one. Ghosts — and this is very important —
may be divided into three distinct classes, which must not
be confounded. There is that vulgar and detestable
class typified by the Cock-lane affair; old men condemned
to be perpetually repeating the Bible backwards, peculiar,
I believe, to Tooting; cattle without heads, and aimless
noises. The second class consists of well-defined
apparitions, generally of men or animals, which appear
ten or twelve times perhaps in a lifetime, usually after supper,
whose Ariel takes the shape of salmon with cucumber
or Welsh rabbit, and whose Prospero is the doctor.
The third class
comprises the real thing — the true,
unmistakable hereditary ghost, constantly associated by
sceptics with its inferior and spurious brethren, but
utterly distinct in its origin, its appearance, and its
habits. Its origin is invariably lost in the twilight of
fable. Some of these ghosts came over with the Conqueror;
many date from the Wars of the Roses, particularly
those venerable parties which haunt the old manor
houses in Yorkshire. Others, more than one would
suppose, date from the Civil Wars, and some are even
as late as the Restoration; but any apparitions later
than that are to be regarded with distrust. These
ghosts are essentially aristocratic; they seem to wax
and wane, as certain trees are said to do, with the
fortune of the house to which they are attached; they
never pass from one family to another. You may come
into the mansion, but you can not come into the ghost,
of an old family. In the grave of the last hereditary
possessor are buried also the hereditary ghosts.
These ghosts, like good servants, are seen and
not heard. No objectless clanking of chains, rattling
of bones, rumbling of barrels, and the like ever accompany
them; they are much too respectable for that. They
rarely make their appearance, and when they do it is only
a glimpse that can be caught of them. The breath of
their life is tradition; grey-haired butlers and
superannuated nurses are their chroniclers, and over the
winter's fire you may hear their story told. Generation
after generation their legend is handed down with a
weird accuracy and a strange uniformity of detail;
nothing is exaggerated, nothing lost. The pale-faced
lady flitting by the window or gliding
down the stairs with the speck of blood on her
wrist, the beautiful child with the golden hair and the
dead robin in her breast, or the shadowy, shrouded
figure and the beckoning hand — whatever form the legend
takes, so it remains, the same to-day as 300 years ago. It
is curious to see how these traditions have penetrated
into literature. To say nothing of the poets, who
would naturally lean toward them, the grave
historian Clarendon does not hesitate to cite them with
perhaps more awe than he would care to confess.
Charming Lady Fanshawe, in her delightful
Memoirs, trembles as she talks of them, and the
philosophic Joseph Glanville has dedicated near half a volume
to them. Old Dr. Johnson, though he would grudge his
company a word on any other topic, became at once a
patient listener if any one could talk about these, and
we all know how on visiting an old family in the country,
after surveying the ancient gabled house, he at once
asked with an eager curiosity if there was any ghost.
Ghosts are gradually leaving us; the atmosphere of
common life is too much for them; our grand old
family mansions, their chosen homes, are changing
hands, passing into the possession of strangers. The
introduction of gunpowder is said to have given the
finishing stroke to chivalry, and what we are so fond of
dubbing common sense has given the finishing stroke to
better things than superstition. When old Troy had
fallen, and the light of day was poured into the recesses
of Priam's palaces, Virgil is careful to tell us that the gods
of the city had deserted her — had flown away never to
return. And last week, when I was wandering over one of
England's oldest mansions which had passed into the
hands of a stranger of yesterday, and talked with the plain
matter-of-fact man who had taken the place of the
good old family butler, I thought with a sigh of old
times, and realised more than ever that grotesque discrepancy
which deforms so many of these places where the
ancient and modern elements are so ridiculously
combined. I looked on the old pictures darkening in their
frames — on the old swords and firelocks out on to the
grim melancholy yew walks, where the light of the setting
sun, splintered into emeralds, was dying; and as I
walked away, wondered what would be the effect on the
spruce, enlightened menial before me, if, like Dr. Johnson,
I ventured to ask whether there was any ghost. — Globe.
