Corpus of Modern Scottish Writing (CMSW) - www.scottishcorpus.ac.uk/cmsw/ Document : 539 Title: The Decadence of the Spook Author(s): J, M B The Decadence of the Spook Spook, I need heardly state, is modern psychical research slang for all manner of spectral apparitions. It is the telegraphic address, so to speak, of the great ghost family; a very old family indeed, having a "grey pre-eminence" to all ancient annals. Primitive man encountered the spook by flood and field, heard him wail in the night black, and caught glimpses of his shadowy form in the glades of the forest. Our Viking forefathers had their spooks - of an efficiently grim and sturdy kind. Homer, Vergil, Dante, [¿], Shakespeare, Milton, [¿] Burns, and many another, here sang the song of the spook. In our own Highlands, the ghost ever was a person of much importance, down to the verge of the present century, at least. But the old order changeth, giving place to new: arraigned as the heir of eighteenth century scepticism, it [¿] not Dr Johnsons adventure in Cock Lane, to bring spooks into discredit. Even the well authenticated ghost of the [wicked] Lord Lyttleton was hardly heard for the defence. Once upon a time, no fine old family mansion was complete without its ghost; no family of any gentility but had its special apparition. Scarce a village, moor, or lake, but had an attendant spirit, ghost, kelpie, or hellhound, to "trace its bounds." Our old ballad writers know them all, in their infinite veracity, from the gentle Swanmaiden, who sorrowfully quits her human mate, when he neglects the necessary precautions against such [a sort], to the wicked nymph of wood or glen, whose sole effect in waylaying the traveller is to feast in his mangled remains. Those well remembered spooks of childhood, who used to walk along old corridors with clanking chains, those headless riders, those bleeding nuns, in reading of whom we "snatched a [¿] joy", are they all, all gone, the old familiar faces? Hood wrote a plea for the Midsummer fairies, will no man put in a good word for the ghosts? Soem of them, perchance, one would willingly let die. That hideous corpse, for instance, that slowly drags itself along the floor of a certain house in London, grimly phosphorescent, or that helpless infant, which haunts many an ancient dwelling, to one in its spectral matters [worn]. One frets that the career of this Infant Phenomenon is unsatisfactory, and that they need the Factory act in Ghostland. On the whole, spooks have not been fairly treated. No compensation is awarded, no outcry raised [to our]societies, when their dwellingplaces are pulled down. They have no acknowledged legal rights. Their parliamentary claims as the real and original [obstructions] have [now] been properly considerd. They cannot accomodate themselves to now environments, and electric light and sanitary sciences together, prove too much for them. The scream of the locomotive is as abhorrent to them, as to Mr. Ruskin among his hills. We live too much in a crowd, nowadays. As Lamb says "The solitary taper & the book, generate a faith in these terrors. A ghost by [chandelier] light and in good company deceieves no spectators." "Give us, oh give us, but yesterday," in the matter of spooks. The modern psychological [pigs-in-clock], the Jekyll-Hydes, the "Masters of Fate" are unsatisfactory mortals [¿] for him who would [cup] full of horrors. One must admit, certainly, that many of R. L. Stevensons tales are "creepy," to a degree! After a perusal of [threats] instances, one asks, in Coleridge's words; "Like one that on a lonesome road "Walks on, in fear and dread, "And having once turned round, walks on, "And turns no more his head; "Because he knows a frightful fiend "Doth close behind him tread. " I, myself, may claim to be some what of a connoisseur in ghosts, and may boast no small acquaintances with the world of spirits, as revealed in books - Spenser's Faerie Queene was one of my earliest treasures and I am one of the very few, who, in [Macaulay's] words, have been in at the deaths of the [ ]. Shakespeare's fairly world was a revelation. Titania, Puck, the ghost of Banquo, the shade of Caesar, aye, [¿] himself, were all real to me. The old ballads [¿] up their contributions. [¿] deliverance was [an word] to be rejoiced over; and the Fiendish Lover, recently celebrated in an [¿] ballad by Mr [¿], was only a specimen of many of my spectral acquaintances and not by any means the worst, either. What night terrors has [¿] Mrs Crowe caused, and most fascinating though, as some mysteriousness, most horrible of all, Grimms goblins, with coloured plates, in which a certain yellow dwarf was a redoubtable foe! Later, the White Lady of [¿] was my favourite character in Scott, though [¿], might e said, in [facing] phraseology, to "pass here close." The spooks of Homer and Vergil were too high and [¿] "for common nature's daily food," ut a delightful [balance] of tales from Greek mythology made the Harpies, Medusa, and the Shades of Tartarus familiar. So a varied collection of all ages and nations hobnobbed in my childish brain, from "Gorgons, hydras, and Chimaeras [alive]," "creatures of the elements, these play in the blighted clouds." Away, then, with your psychical studies, your "[¿] spirits," your "[¿] again" in ninteenth century [alembics]. No doubt the spook is an anachronism, a surfival of the kind unfittest for this matter-of-fact century. The press of [¿]has laughed them to scorn, and reduced them, by analysis, to optical illusions, trickery, and heated imagination as their component aspects. The ghosts have slunk into corners, hardly [bothering] to display the corner of a shroud, or the point of a skeleton finger. Truly i could feel moved like Hamilton "to make a ghost of him that [¿] me" from believing in the whole of Satans Invisible [¿]displayed. For real, frank, unquestioning faith in spooks, give me the Puritans. Luther, to the death, was a famous man for them, and that mischieval monk was well accustomed of them, awho could thus write of an apparition: "Yesterday, appeared a Spectre to me in my cell, which, on being solemnly adjured, disappeared, with a faint perfume, and a melodious twang." But, though this monk may surpass Cotton Mather in coolness, he barely equals him in credulity. That [¿] pilgrim had an insatiable maw for the marvellous. He was clearly born before his time. Had he lived in these later days, what a valued contributor to Christmas annuals would he have proved, what a prolific author of shilling shockers! Whithin recent years, there seemed some hope that [¿] in spooks was about to be reestablished on a [¿] basis. The Psychical Society arose. It showed itself the champion of the spook. It sent forth ambassadors, to treat with the despised ones, to seek them in their [¿]granges and mouldering abbeys, to reveal their woes, and to give those [¿] in addition to the local habitation which they already possessed, the name, which in many cases was wanting. What a fluttering of ghostly dovecots must there have been! What a [¿]to unfold their tales to these self-appointed ghostly counsellors! The research may be read each year in the repose of the Psychical Society. But alas! alas! for the degeneracy of man! These new advocates have betrayed their trust, and falsified the hopes of Ghostland, by publishing an article in this years Report, in which ghosts are stated to be simply dead mens' dreams. In the words of [¿] they represent, as a rule, more automatic projections from consciousness, which have their [¿] elsewhere." "A dead man broods over his death, and his dream passes into the mind of a living person, occuping the same room." Poor ghosts, what chance is left them after this, to pursue their vocations with zeal and enthusiasm? Reduced to "mere automatic projections from consciousness" how can they inspire respect and fear? The most chicken hearted rustic, the most ingorant village lass will hold them in derision. Their monotonous existence will be bereft of its sole excitement. Alas poor spirits. They who for many a year "have heard the chimes at midnight" must they pass away, unwept, unacknowledged, and unsung, as "telepathic laws," or, at best, "manifestations of persistent personal energy"? Was Shakespeare foreshadowing this theory, when he makes Hamlet exclaim, "In that sleep of death what dreams may come," or where he puts into Prospero's mouth the exclamation, that we, ourselves, "are such stuff as dreams are made on"? Our civilisation is certainly a failure as regards the persistence of the spook. The Psyhical Society is a [broken reed]. It has betrayed its faith by thus twice slaying the slain and reducing its helpless and confiding clients to the shadow of a shade. But the whirligig of Time brings [ ]. The spooks are not always to be trifled with. Some day, like Mark Twain's pilot, they will "feel all the majesty of this great position and let all the world feel it too." Mean while, lighten the lamp, and stir the fire, and hand me over "The Night Side of Nature," and Scott's "Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft." M. B. J.