Chapter 3
And so the registers run on. Sometimes they tell of the death of a glutton, sometimes of a _Grace wyfe_ (grosse femme). Now the bell tolls for the decease of a duke, now of a “dog-whipper.” “Lutenists” and “Saltpetremen”—the skeleton of the old German allegory whispers to each and twitches him by the sleeve. “Ellis Thompson, _insipiens_,” leaves Chester-le-Street, where he had gabbled and scrabbled on the doors, and follows “William, foole to my Lady Jerningham,” and “Edward Errington, the Towne’s Fooll” (Newcastle-on-Tyne) down the way to dusty death. Edward Errington died “of the pest,” and another idiot took his place and office, for Newcastle had her regular town fools before she acquired her singularly advanced modern representatives. The “aquavity man” dies (in Cripplegate), and the “dumb-man who was a fortune-teller” (Stepney, 1628), and the “King’s Falkner,” and Mr. Gregory Isham, who combined the professions, not frequently united, of “attorney and husbandman,” in Barwell, Leicestershire (1655). “The lame chimney-sweeper,” and the “King of the gypsies,” and Alexander Willis, “qui calographiam docuit,” the linguist, and the Tom o’ Bedlam, the comfit-maker, and the panyer-man, and the tack-maker, and the suicide, they all found death; or, if they sought him, the churchyard where they were “hurled into a grave” was interdicted, and purified, after a fortnight, with “frankincense and sweet perfumes, and herbs.”
Sometimes people died wholesale of pestilence, and the Longborough register mentions a fresh way of death, “the swat called New Acquaintance, alias Stoupe Knave, and know thy master.” Another malady was ‘the posting swet, that posted from towne to towne through England.’ The plague of 1591 was imported in bales of cloth from the Levant, just as British commerce still patriotically tries to introduce cholera in cargoes of Egyptian rags. The register of Malpas, in Cheshire (Aug. 24, 1625), has this strange story of the plague:—
“Richard Dawson being sicke of the plague, and perceiving he must die at yt time, arose out of his bed, and made his grave, and caused his nefew, John Dawson, to cast strawe into the grave which was not farre from the house, and went and lay’d him down in the say’d grave, and caused clothes to be lay’d uppon and so dep’ted out of this world; this he did because he was a strong man, and heavier than his said nefew and another wench were able to bury.”
And John Dawson died, and Rose Smyth, the “wench” already spoken of, died, the last of the household.
Old customs survive in the parish registers. Scolding wives were ducked, and in Kingston-on-Thames, 1572, the register tells how the sexton’s wife “was sett on a new cukking-stoole, and brought to Temes brydge, and there had three duckings over head and eres, because she was a common scold and fighter.” The cucking-stool, a very elaborate engine of the law, cost 1_l_. 3_s_. 4_d_. Men were ducked for beating their wives, and if that custom were revived the profession of cucking-stool maker would become busy and lucrative. Penances of a graver sort are on record in the registers. Margaret Sherioux, in Croydon (1597), was ordered to stand three market days in the town, and three Sundays in the church, in a white sheet. The sin imputed to her was a dreadful one. “She stood one Saturday, and one Sunday, and died the next.” Innocent or guilty, this world was no longer a fit abiding-place for Margaret Sherioux. Occasionally the keeper of the register entered any event which seemed out of the common. Thus the register of St. Nicholas, Durham (1568), has this contribution to natural history:—
“A certaine Italian brought into the cittie of Durham a very greate strange and monstrous serpent, in length sixteen feet, in quantitie and dimentions greater than a greate horse, which was taken and killed by special policie, in Ethiopia within the Turkas dominions. But before it was killed, it had devoured (as is credibly thought) more than 1,000 persons, and destroyed a great country.”
This must have been a descendant of the monster that would have eaten Andromeda, and was slain by Perseus in the country of the blameless Ethiopians. Collections of money are recorded occasionally, as in 1680, when no less than one pound eight shillings was contributed “for redemption of Christians (taken by ye Turkish pyrates) out of Turkish slavery.” Two hundred years ago the Turk was pretty “unspeakable” still. Of all blundering Dogberries, the most confused kept (in 1670) the parish register at Melton Mowbray:—
“Here [he writes] is a bill of Burton Lazareth’s people, which was buried, and which was and maried above 10 years old, for because the clarke was dead, and therefore they was not set down according as they was, but they all set down sure enough one among another here in this place.”
“They all set down sure enough,” nor does it matter much now to know whom they married, and how long they lived in Melton Mowbray. The following entry sufficed for the great Villiers that expired “in the worst inn’s worst room,”—“Kirkby Moorside, Yorkshire, 1687. Georges vilaris Lord dooke of Bookingham, bur. 17. April.”
“So much for Buckingham!”
_THE ROWFANT BOOKS_. BALLADE EN GUISE DE RONDEAU.
THE Rowfant books, how fair they shew, The Quarto quaint, the Aldine tall, Print, autograph, portfolio! Back from the outer air they call, The athletes from the Tennis ball, This Rhymer from his rod and hooks, Would I could sing them one and all, The Rowfant books!
The Rowfant books! In sun and snow They’re dear, but most when tempests fall; The folio towers above the row As once, o’er minor prophets,—Saul! What jolly jest books and what small “Dear dumpy Twelves” to fill the nooks. You do not find on every stall The Rowfant books!
The Rowfant books! These long ago Were chained within some College hall; These manuscripts retain the glow Of many a coloured capital While yet the Satires keep their gall, While the Pastissier puzzles cooks, Theirs is a joy that does not pall, The Rowfant books!
ENVOI.
The Rowfant books,—ah magical As famed Armida’s “golden looks,” They hold the rhymer for their thrall, The Rowfant books.
_TO F. L._
I MIND that Forest Shepherd’s saw, For, when men preached of Heaven, quoth he, “It’s a’ that’s bricht, and a’ that’s braw, But Bourhope’s guid eneuch for me!”
Beneath the green deep-bosomed hills That guard Saint Mary’s Loch it lies, The silence of the pasture fills That shepherd’s homely paradise.
Enough for him his mountain lake, His glen the burn went singing through, And Rowfant, when the thrushes wake, May well seem good enough for you.
For all is old, and tried, and dear, And all is fair, and round about The brook that murmurs from the mere Is dimpled with the rising trout.
But when the skies of shorter days Are dark and all the ways are mire, How bright upon your books the blaze Gleams from the cheerful study fire,
On quartos where our fathers read, Enthralled, the book of Shakespeare’s play, On all that Poe could dream of dread, And all that Herrick sang of gay!
Fair first editions, duly prized, Above them all, methinks, I rate The tome where Walton’s hand revised His wonderful receipts for bait!
Happy, who rich in toys like these Forgets a weary nation’s ills, Who from his study window sees The circle of the Sussex hills!
_SOME JAPANESE BOGIE-BOOKS_.
THERE is or used to be a poem for infant minds of a rather Pharisaical character, which was popular in the nursery when I was a youngster. It ran something like this:—
I thank my stars that I was born A little British child.
Perhaps these were not the very words, but that was decidedly the sentiment. Look at the Japanese infants, from the pencil of the famous Hokusai. Though they are not British, were there ever two jollier, happier small creatures? Did Leech, or Mr. Du Maurier, or Andrea della Robbia ever present a more delightful view of innocent, well-pleased childhood? Well, these Japanese children, if they are in the least inclined to be timid or nervous, must have an awful time of it at night in the dark, and when they make that eerie “northwest passage” bedwards through the darkling house of which Mr. Stevenson sings the perils and the emotions. All of us who did not suffer under parents brought up on the views of Mr. Herbert Spencer have endured, in childhood, a good deal from ghosts. But it is nothing to what Japanese children bear, for our ghosts are to the spectres of Japan as moonlight is to sunlight, or as water unto whisky. Personally I may say that few people have been plagued by the terror that walketh in darkness more than myself. At the early age of ten I had the tales of the ingenious Mr. Edgar Poe and of Charlotte Brontë “put into my hands” by a cousin who had served as a Bashi Bazouk, and knew not the meaning of fear. But I _did_, and perhaps even Nelson would have found out “what fear was,” or the boy in the Norse tale would have “learned to shiver,” if he had been left alone to peruse ‘Jane Eyre,’ and the ‘Black Cat,’ and the ‘Fall of the House of Usher,’ as I was. Every night I expected to wake up in my coffin, having been prematurely buried; or to hear sighs in the area, followed by light, unsteady footsteps on the stairs, and then to see a lady all in a white shroud stained with blood and clay stagger into my room, the victim of too rapid interment. As to the notion that my respected kinsman had a mad wife concealed on the premises, and that a lunatic aunt, black in the face with suppressed mania, would burst into my chamber, it was comparatively a harmless fancy, and not particularly disturbing. Between these and the ‘Yellow Dwarf,’ who (though only the invention of the Countess D’Aulnoy) might frighten a nervous infant into hysterics, I personally had as bad a time of it in the night watches as any happy British child has survived. But our ogres are nothing to the bogies which make not only night but day terrible to the studious infants of Japan and China.
[Picture: Japanese Children. Drawn by Hokusai]
Chinese ghosts are probably much the same as Japanese ghosts. The Japanese have borrowed most things, including apparitions and awesome sprites and grisly fiends, from the Chinese, and then have improved on the original model. Now we have a very full, complete, and horror-striking account of Chinese _harnts_ (as the country people in Tennessee call them) from Mr. Herbert Giles, who has translated scores of Chinese ghost stories in his ‘Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio’ (De la Rue, 1880). Mr. Giles’s volumes prove that China is the place for Messrs. Gurney and Myers, the secretaries of the Psychical Society.
Ghosts do not live a hole-and-corner life in China, but boldly come out and take their part in the pleasures and business of life. It has always been a question with me whether ghosts, in a haunted house, appear when there is no audience. What does the spectre in the tapestried chamber do when the house is _not_ full, and no guest is put in the room to bury strangers in, the haunted room? Does the ghost sulk and complain that there is “no house,” and refuse to rehearse his little performance, in a conscientious and disinterestedly artistic spirit, when deprived of the artist’s true pleasure, the awakening of sympathetic emotion in the mind of the spectator? We give too little thought and sympathy to ghosts, who in our old castles and country houses often find no one to appear to from year’s end to year’s-end. Only now and then is a guest placed in the “haunted room.” Then I like to fancy the glee of the lady in green or the radiant boy, or the headless man, or the old gentleman in snuff-coloured clothes, as he, or she, recognises the presence of a spectator, and prepares to give his or her best effects in the familiar style.
Now in China and Japan certainly a ghost does not wait till people enter the haunted room: a ghost, like a person of fashion, “goes everywhere.” Moreover, he has this artistic excellence, that very often you don’t know him from an embodied person. He counterfeits mortality so cleverly that he (the ghost) has been known to personate a candidate for honours, and pass an examination for him. A pleasing example of this kind, illustrating the limitations of ghosts, is told in Mr. Giles’s book. A gentleman of Huai Shang named Chou-t‘ien-i had arrived at the age of fifty, but his family consisted of but one son, a fine boy, “strangely averse from study,” as if there were anything strange in _that_. One day the son disappeared mysteriously, as people do from West Ham. In a year he came back, said he had been detained in a Taoist monastery, and, to all men’s amazement, took to his books. Next year he obtained is B.A. degree, a First Class. All the neighbourhood was overjoyed, for Huai Shang was like Pembroke College (Oxford), where, according to the poet, “First Class men are few and far between.” It was who should have the honour of giving his daughter as bride to this intellectual marvel. A very nice girl was selected, but most unexpectedly the B.A. would not marry. This nearly broke his father’s heart. The old gentleman knew, according to Chinese belief, that if he had no grandchild there would be no one in the next generation to feed his own ghost and pay it all the little needful attentions. “Picture then the father naming and insisting on the day;” till K‘o-ch‘ang, B.A., got up and ran away. His mother tried to detain him, when his clothes “came off in her hand,” and the bachelor vanished! Next day appeared the real flesh and blood son, who had been kidnapped and enslaved. The genuine K‘o-ch‘ang was overjoyed to hear of his approaching nuptials. The rites were duly celebrated, and in less than a year the old gentleman welcomed his much-longed-for grand child. But, oddly enough, K‘o-ch‘ang, though very jolly and universally beloved, was as stupid as ever, and read nothing but the sporting intelligence in the newspapers. It was now universally admitted that the learned K‘o-ch‘ang had been an impostor, a clever ghost. It follows that ghosts can take a very good degree; but ladies need not be afraid of marrying ghosts, owing to the inveterate shyness of these learned spectres.
[Picture: A Storm-fiend]
The Chinese ghost is by no means always a malevolent person, as, indeed, has already been made clear from the affecting narrative of the ghost who passed an examination. Even the spectre which answers in China to the statue in ‘Don Juan,’ the statue which accepts invitations to dinner, is anything but a malevolent guest. So much may be gathered from the story of Chu and Lu. Chu was an undergraduate of great courage and bodily vigour, but dull of wit. He was a married man, and his children (as in the old Oxford legend) often rushed into their mother’s presence, shouting, “Mamma! mammal papa’s been plucked again!” Once it chanced that Chu was at a wine party, and the negus (a favourite beverage of the Celestials) had done its work. His young friends betted Chu a bird’s-nest dinner that he would not go to the nearest temple, enter the room devoted to coloured sculptures representing the torments of Purgatory, and carry off the image of the Chinese judge of the dead, their Osiris or Rhadamanthus. Off went old Chu, and soon returned with the august effigy (which wore “a green face, a red beard, and a hideous expression”) in his arms. The other men were frightened, and begged Chu to restore his worship to his place on the infernal bench. Before carrying back the worthy magistrate, Chu poured a libation on the ground and said, “Whenever your excellency feels so disposed, I shall be glad to take a cup of wine with you in a friendly way.” That very night, as Chu was taking a stirrup cup before going to bed, the ghost of the awful judge came to the door and entered. Chu promptly put the kettle on, mixed the negus, and made a night of it with the festive fiend. Their friendship was never interrupted from that moment. The judge even gave Chu a new heart (literally) whereby he was enabled to pass examinations; for the heart, in China, is the seat of all the intellectual faculties. For Mrs. Chu, a plain woman with a fine figure, the ghost provided a new head, of a handsome girl recently slain by a robber. Even after Chu’s death the genial spectre did not neglect him, but obtained for him an appointment as registrar in the next world, with a certain rank attached.
The next world, among the Chinese, seems to be a paradise of bureaucracy, patent places, jobs, mandarins’ buttons and tails, and, in short, the heaven of officialism. All civilised readers are acquainted with Mr. Stockton’s humorous story of ‘The Transferred Ghost.’ In Mr. Stockton’s view a man does not always get his own ghostship; there is a vigorous competition among spirits for good ghostships, and a great deal of intrigue and party feeling. It may be long before a disembodied spectre gets any ghostship at all, and then, if he has little influence, he may be glad to take a chance of haunting the Board of Trade, or the Post Office, instead of “walking” in the Foreign Office. One spirit may win a post as White Lady in the imperial palace, while another is put off with a position in an old college library, or perhaps has to follow the fortunes of some seedy “medium” through boarding-houses and third-rate hotels. Now this is precisely the Chinese view of the fates and fortunes of ghosts. _Quisque suos patimur manes_.
In China, to be brief, and to quote a ghost (who ought to know what he was speaking about), “supernaturals are to be found everywhere.” This is the fact that makes life so puzzling and terrible to a child of a believing and trustful character. These Oriental bogies do not appear in the dark alone, or only in haunted houses, or at cross-roads, or in gloomy woods. They are everywhere: every man has his own ghost, every place has its peculiar haunting fiend, every natural phenomenon has its informing spirit; every quality, as hunger, greed, envy, malice, has an embodied visible shape prowling about seeking what it may devour. Where our science, for example, sees (or rather smells) sewer gas, the Japanese behold a slimy, meagre, insatiate wraith, crawling to devour the lives of men. Where we see a storm of snow, their livelier fancy beholds a comic snow-ghost, a queer, grinning old man under a vast umbrella.
[Picture: A Snow-bogie]
The illustrations in this paper are only a few specimens chosen out of many volumes of Japanese bogies. We have not ventured to copy the very most awful spectres, nor dared to be as horrid as we can. These native drawings, too, are generally coloured regardless of expense, and the colouring is often horribly lurid and satisfactory. This embellishment, fortunately perhaps, we cannot reproduce. Meanwhile, if any child looks into this essay, let him (or her) not be alarmed by the pictures he beholds. Japanese ghosts do not live in this country; there are none of them even at the Japanese Legation. Just as bears, lions, and rattlesnakes are not to be seriously dreaded in our woods and commons, so the Japanese ghost cannot breathe (any more than a slave can) in the air of England or America. We do not yet even keep any ghostly zoological garden in which the bogies of Japanese, Australians, Red Indians, and other distant peoples may be accommodated. Such an establishment is perhaps to be desired in the interests of psychical research, but that form of research has not yet been endowed by a cultivated and progressive government.
The first to attract our attention represents, as I understand, the common ghost, or _simulacrum vulgare_ of psychical science. To this complexion must we all come, according to the best Japanese opinion. Each of us contains within him “somewhat of a shadowy being,” like the spectre described by Dr. Johnson: something like the Egyptian “Ka,” for which the curious may consult the works of Miss Amelia B. Edwards and other learned Orientalists. The most recent French student of these matters, the author of ‘L’Homme Posthume,’ is of opinion that we do not all possess this double, with its power of surviving our bodily death. He thinks, too, that our ghost, when it does survive, has but rarely the energy and enterprise to make itself visible to or audible by “shadow-casting men.” In some extreme cases the ghost (according to our French authority, that of a disciple of M. Comte) feeds fearsomely on the bodies of the living. In no event does he believe that a ghost lasts much longer than a hundred years. After that it mizzles into spectre, and is resolved into its elements, whatever they may be.
A somewhat similar and (to my own mind) probably sound theory of ghosts prevails among savage tribes, and among such peoples as the ancient Greeks, the modern Hindoos, and other ancestor worshippers. When feeding, as they all do, or used to do, the ghosts of the ancestral dead, they gave special attention to the claims of the dead of the last three generations, leaving ghosts older than the century to look after their own supplies of meat and drink. The negligence testifies to a notion that very old ghosts are of little account, for good or evil. On the other hand, as regards the longevity of spectres, we must not shut our eyes to the example of the bogie in ancient armour which appears in Glamis Castle, or to the Jesuit of Queen Elizabeth’s date that haunts the library (and a very nice place to haunt: I ask no better, as a ghost in the Pavilion at Lord’s might cause a scandal) of an English nobleman. With these _instantiæ contradictoriæ_, as Bacon calls them, present to our minds, we must not (in the present condition of psychical research) dogmatise too hastily about the span of life allotted to the _simulacrum vulgare_. Very probably his chances of a prolonged existence are in inverse ratio to the square of the distance of time which severs him from our modern days. No one has ever even pretended to see the ghost of an ancient Roman buried in these islands, still less of a Pict or Scot, or a Palæolithic man, welcome as such an apparition would be to many of us. Thus the evidence does certainly look as if there were a kind of statute of limitations among ghosts, which, from many points of view, is not an arrangement at which we should repine.
[Picture: The Simulacrum Vulgare]
The Japanese artist expresses his own sense of the casual and fluctuating nature of ghosts by drawing his spectre in shaky lines, as if the model had given the artist the horrors. This _simulacrum_ rises out of the earth like an exhalation, and groups itself into shape above the spade with which all that is corporeal of its late owner has been interred. Please remark the uncomforted and dismal expression of the _simulacrum_. We must remember that the ghost or “Ka” is not the “soul,” which has other destinies in the future world, good or evil, but is only a shadowy resemblance, condemned, as in the Egyptian creed, to dwell in the tomb and hover near it. The Chinese and Japanese have their own definite theory of the next world, and we must by no means confuse the eternal fortunes of the permanent, conscious, and responsible self, already inhabiting other worlds than ours, with the eccentric vagaries of the semi-material tomb-haunting larva, which so often develops a noisy and bear-fighting disposition quite unlike the character of its proprietor in life.
[Picture: A Well and Water bogie]