Part 17

The curious coincidences between savage and civilised “spiritualism” have still to be explained. Mr. Tylor says that “the ethnographic view” finds “modern spiritualism to be in great measure a direct revival from the regions of savage philosophy and peasant folk-lore.” But in a really comparative study of the topic, this theory would need to be proved by historical facts. Let us grant that Eskimo and Australian spiritualism are a savage imposture. Let us grant that peasants, little advanced from the savage intellectual condition, retained a good deal of savage spiritualism. To complete the proof it would be necessary to adduce many examples of peasant _séances_, to show that these were nearly identical with savage _séances_, and then to demonstrate that the introducers of the civilised modern _séance_ had been in touch with the savage or peasant performances. For the better explanation of the facts, the Psychical Society might send missionaries to investigate and test the exhibitions of Australian Birraarks, and Maori Tohungas, and Eskimo Angekoks. Mr. Im Thurm, in Guiana, has made experiments in Peayism, or local magic, but felt no more than a drowsy mesmeric sensation, and a headache, after the treatment. While those things are neglected, psychical research is remiss in attention to her elevating task.

In the third class of ghosts we propose to place those which are independent of the invocations of the sorcerer, which come and go, or stay, at their own will. As to “haunted houses,” savages, who have no houses, are naturally not much troubled by them. It is easy to leave one _gungeh_ or bark shelter for another; and this is generally done after a death among the Australians. Races with more permanent habitations have other ways of exorcising the haunters—by feeding the ghosts, for example, at their graves, so that they are comfortable there, and do not wish to emerge. Two curious instances of haunted forests may be given here. To one I have already referred in a little volume, _Custom and Myth_, recently published. Mrs. Edwards, in _Macmillan’s Magazine_, printed a paper called “The Mystery of the Pezazi.” To be brief, the mystery lay in the constant disturbing sounds of nocturnal tree-felling near a bungalow in Ceylon, where examination proved that no trees had been felled. Mrs. Edwards, her husband, and their servants were on several occasions disturbed by these sounds, which were unmistakable and distinct. The Cingalese attribute the noises to a Pezazi or spirit. I find a description of precisely the same disturbances in Sahagun’s account of the superstitions of the Aztecs. Brother Sahagun was one of the earliest Spanish missionaries in Mexico, and his account of Aztec notions is most intelligently written. In Mexico, too, “the Midnight Axe” is supposed to be a phenomenon produced by woodland spectres. A critic in the _Athenæum_ suggested that the fact of the noise, attested by English witnesses in Ceylon who knew not Sahagun, was matter for the Psychical Society. Perhaps some physical examination would be more likely to discover the actual origin of the sounds of tree-felling. I was not aware, however, till Mr. Leslie Stephen pointed it out, that the Galapagos Islands, “suthard of the line,” were haunted by the Midnight Axe. De Quincey, who certainly had not heard the Ceylon story, and who probably would have mentioned Sahagun’s had he known it, describes the effect produced by the Midnight Axe on the nerves of his brother, Pink:—

So it was, and attested by generations of sea-vagabonds, that every night, duly as the sun went down and the twilight began to prevail, a sound arose—audible to other islands and to every ship lying quietly at anchor in that neighborhood—of a woodcutter’s axe.... The close of the story was that after, I suppose, ten or twelve minutes of hacking and hewing, a horrid crash was heard, announcing that the tree, if tree it were, that never yet was made visible to daylight search, had yielded to the old woodman’s persecution.... The woodcutter’s axe began to intermit about the earliest approach of dawn, and, as light strengthened, it ceased entirely, after poor Pink’s ghostly panic grew insupportable.[40]

[40] _Autobiographic Sketches_, p. 337.

I offer no explanation of the Midnight Axe, which appears (to superstitious minds) to be produced by the _Poltergeist_ of the forests.

A much more romantic instance, savage and civilised, of a haunted woodland may perhaps be regarded as a superstition transmitted by French settlers to the natives of New Caledonia. The authority for the following anecdote is my friend and kinsman, Mr. J. J. Atkinson, of Viewfield, Noumea, New Caledonia.

Mr. Atkinson has lived for twenty years remote from books, and in the company of savage men. He informs me that a friendly Kaneka came to visit him one day, and seemed unusually loth to go. After one affectionate farewell he came back and took another, and then a third, till Mr. Atkinson asked him why he was so demonstrative. The native then replied that this would be their last meeting; that in a day or two he would be dead. As he seemed in perfect health, the Englishman rallied him on his fears. But he very gravely explained that he had met in the woods one whom he took for the girl of his heart. It was not till too late that he recognised the woman for a forest-haunting spirit. To have to do with these is death in three days, and their caresses are mortal. As he said, so it happened, for the unlucky fellow shortly afterwards died. I do not think my informant had ever heard of Le Sieur Nann and the Korrigan, the well-known Breton folk-song of the knight who met the forest fairy, and died in three days. A version of the ballad is printed by De la Villemarque, Barzaz-Breiz (i. 41). Variants exist in Swedish, French, and even in a Lowland Scotch version, sung by children in a kind of dancing game. In this case, what we want to know is whether the Kaneka belief is native, or borrowed from the French. That there really exist fair and deadly women of the woods perhaps the most imaginative student will decline to believe. Among savages men often sicken, and even die, because they consider themselves bewitched, and the luckless Kaneka must have been the victim of a dream or hallucination reacting on the nervous system. But that does not account for the existence of the superstition.

The ghosts which at present excite most interest are ghosts beheld at the moment of their owner’s decease by persons at a distance from the scene of death. Thus Baronius relates how “that eximious Platonist, Marsilius Ficinus,” appeared at the hour of his death on a white horse to Michael Mercatus, and rode away, crying “O Michael, Michael, vera, vera sunt illa,” that is, the doctrine of a future life is true. Lord Brougham was similarly favored. Among savages I have not encountered more than one example, and that rather sketchy, of a warning conveyed to a man by a ghost as to the death of a friend. The tale is in FitzRoy’s _Voyage of the ‘Adventurer’ and the ‘Beagle’_ (ii. 118). Jemmy Button was a young Fuegian whom his uncle had sold to the ‘Beagle’ for a few buttons.

While at sea, on board the “Beagle,” about the middle of the year 1842, he said one morning to Mr. Byno, that in the night some man came to the side of his hammock, and whispered in his ear that his father was dead. Mr. Byno tried to laugh him out of the idea, but ineffectually. He fully believed that such was the case, and maintained his opinion up to the time of finding his relations in Beagle Channel, when, I regret to say, he found that his father had died some months previously.

Another kind of ghost, again, that of a dead relative who comes to warn a man of his own approaching decease, appears to be quite common among savages. In his interesting account of the Kurnai, an Australian tribe, Mr. Howitt writes:—

Mr. C. J. Du Vé, a gentleman of much experience with the Aborigines, tells me that, in the year 1860, a Maneroo black fellow died while with him. The day before he died, having been ill for some time, he said that, in the night, his father, his father’s friend, and a female spirit he could not recognize, had come to him, and said that he would die next day, and that they would wait for him.

To this statement the Rev. Lorimer Fison appends a note which ought to interest psychical inquirers. “I could give many similar instances which have come within my own knowledge among the Fijians, and, strange to say, the dying man, in all these cases, kept his appointment with the ghosts to the very day.” A civilised example recorded by Henry More is printed in the _Remains_ of the late Dr. Symonds. In that narrative a young lady was wakened by a bright light in her bedroom. Her dead mother appeared to her, exactly as the father of the Maneroo black fellow did, and warned her that she was to die on the following midnight. The girl made all her preparations, and, with Fijian punctuality, “kept her appointment with the ghosts to the very day.” The peculiarity of More’s tale seems to be the brilliance of the light which attended the presence of the supernatural. This strange fire is widely diffused in folk-lore. If we look at the Eskimo we find them convinced that the Inue, or powerful spirits, “generally have the appearance of a fire or bright light, and to see them is very dangerous ... _partly as foreshadowing the death of a relation_.”[41] In the story repeated by More, not a kinsman of the visionary, but the visionary herself was in danger. In the _Odyssey_, when Athene was mystically present as Odysseus and Telemachus were moving the weapons out of the hall (xix. 21-50), Telemachus exclaims, “Father, surely a great marvel is this I behold! Meseemeth that the walls of the hall, and the fair spaces between the pillars, and the beams of pine, and the columns that run aloft are bright as it were with flaming fire. Verily some god is within of them that hold the wide heaven.” Odysseus answers, “Lo, this is the wont of the gods that possess Olympus.” Again, in Theocritus, when Hera sends the snakes to attack the infant Heracles, a mysterious flame shines forth, φάος δ’ ἀνἀ οἶκον ἐτύχθη.[42] The same phenomenon occurs in the saga of Burnt Njal when Gunnar sings within his tomb. Philosophers may dispute whether any objective fact lies at the bottom of this belief, or whether a savage superstition has survived into Greek epic and idyll, and into modern ghost stories. Into Scotch legend, too, this faith in a mysterious and ominous fire found its way—

Seemed all on fire that chapel proud, Where Roslin’s chiefs uncoffined lie, Each baron, for a sable shroud, Sheathed in his iron panoply.

Scott derives the idea from the tomb fires of the Sagas, but we have shown the wide diffusion of the belief.

[41] Rink, _Tales and Traditions of the Eskimo_, p. 43.

[42] “And all the house showed clear as in the light of dawn.”—Theoc. xix. 30-40, ed. Ahrens.

By way of ending this brief sketch of the comparative study of ghost stories, an example may be given of the recurrent tale which is told of different people in different ages and countries. Just as the anecdote of William Tell and the Apple occurs in various times, and among widely severed races, so, in a minor degree, does the famous Beresford ghost story present itself in mythical fashion. The Beresford tale is told at great length by Dr. F. G. Lee, in his _Glimpses of the Supernatural_. As usual, Dr. Lee does not give the names of his informants, nor trace the channels through which the legend reached them. But he calls his version of the myth “an authentic record” (p. 51). To be brief, Lord Tyrone and Miss Blank were orphans, educated in the same house “in the principles of Deism.” When they were about fourteen years of age their preceptor died, and their new guardians tried to “persuade them to embrace revealed religion.” The boy and girl, however, stuck to Deism. But they made a compact that he or she who died first should appear to the survivor “to declare what religion was most approved by the Supreme Being.” Miss Blank married Sir Martin Beresford. One day she appeared at breakfast with a pale face, and a black band round her wrist. Long afterwards, on her death-bed, she explained that this band covered shrunken sinews. The ghost of Lord Tyrone, at the hour of his death, had appeared to her, had prophesied (correctly) her future, and had touched her wrist by way of a sign.

He struck my wrist; his hand was as cold as marble; in a moment the sinews shrank up, every nerve withered.... I bound a piece of black ribbon round my wrist. The black ribbon was formerly in the possession of Lady Betty Cobb, who, during her long life, was ever ready to attest the truth of this narration, as are, to the present hour, the whole of the Tyrone and Beresford families.

Nothing would induce me to dispute the accuracy of a report vouched for by Lady Betty Cobb and all the Tyrones and Beresfords. But I must be permitted to point out that Lord Tyrone merely did what many ghosts had done before in that matter of touching Lady Beresford’s wrist. Thus, according to Henry More “one” (bogie) “took a relation of Melanchthon’s by the hand, and so scorched her that she bore the mark of it to her dying day.” Before Melanchthon the anecdote was “improved” by Eudes de Shirton in a sermon (_Mémoires de l’Académie des Inscriptions_, 1877). According to Eudes, a certain clerk, Serlon, made with a friend the covenant which Miss Blank made with Lord Tyrone. The survivor was to bring news of the next world. Well, the friend died, and punctually appeared to Serlon, “in a parchment cloak, covered with the finest writing in the world.” Being asked how he fared, he said that this cloak, a punishment for his love of Logic, weighed heavier than lead, and scorched like the shirt of Nessus. Then he held out his hand, and let fall a drop which burned Serlon to the bone—

And ever more that Master wore A covering on his wrist.

Before Eudes de Shirton (1081-1153) William of Malmesbury knew this anecdote, which he dates about 1060-1063, and localises in Nantes. His characters are “two clerks,” an Epicurean and a Platonist, who made the usual contract that the first to die should appear to the survivor, and state whether Plato’s ideas or Epicurus his atoms were the correct reply to the conundrum of the universe. The visit was to be paid within thirty days of the death. One of the philosophical pair was killed, a month passed, no news of him came. Then, when the other expected nothing less, and was busy with some ordinary matter, the dead man suddenly stood before him. The spectre explained that he had been unable to keep his appointment earlier; and, stretching out his hand, let fall three burning drops of blood, which branded, not the wrist, but the brow of the psychical inquirer. The anecdote recurs later, and is attached by certain commentators on Dante to one Siger de Brabant. Now this legend may be true about Lady Beresford, or about William of Malmesbury’s two clerks, or about Siger de Brabant, or about Serlon; but the same facts of a compact, the punctual appearance of the survivor, and the physical sign which he gave, can scarcely have occurred more than once. I am inclined, therefore, to believe that the narrative vouched for by two noble families is accurate, and that the tales of William of Malmesbury, Henry More, Eudes de Shirton, and Siger de Brabant are myths—

Or such refraction of events As often rises ere they rise.

Though this sketch of a new comparative science does not perhaps prove or disprove any psychical or mythological theory, it demonstrates that there is a good deal of human nature in man. From the Eskimo, Fuegians, Fijians, and Kurnai, to Homer, Henry More, Theocritus, and Lady Betty Cobb, we mortals are “all in a tale,” and share coincident beliefs or delusions. What the value of the coincidence of testimony may be, how far it attests facts, how far it merely indicates the survival of savage conceptions, Mr. Tylor and Mr. Edmund Gurney may be left to decide. Readers of the _Philopseudes_ of Lucian will remember how the Samosatene settled the inquiries of the psychical researches of his age, and in that dialogue there are abundant materials for the comparative student of ghost stories.—_Nineteenth Century._

THE GERMAN ABROAD.

BY C. E. DAWKINS.

I.

The present movement in Germany towards colonial expansion promises to set in its right place the part played by her people in the settlement of the earth. This has been hitherto under-estimated, as Germany has established no colonies of her own, and up to the present century her colonial activity has been intermittent. But the colonizing instinct has, since the earliest times, been innate in the German character. For centuries the history of civilization in North Germany is the history of the gradual conquest of the Eastern Provinces from the Wends, and of the patient reclamation of the soil. By their superior persistence and industry the Teutonic settlers pushed back in turn the various Sclavic populations whose irruptions had once thrust them to the west. Under different conditions the struggle continues at the present day, and German thrift and discipline even now gain ground in the Baltic provinces of Russia. This expansion of Germany to the east was followed by the rise of the great Hanseatic commerce. Nor can there be much doubt that, if the towns of the Hansa had retained their commercial pre-eminence, and if the steady increase of German population had been left unhindered, German enterprize in due time would have claimed its share in the allotment of the New World. But at the decisive epoch the heaviest calamity she ever experienced, and one that influenced the whole of her succeeding history and retarded her development, fell upon Germany.

The religious troubles of the sixteenth century drew to a head in the great religious war. When the Peace of Westphalia was signed, and the storm which had raged through the length and breadth of the land for nearly thirty years, was at last spent, Germany was left desolate and exhausted. Her fields lay untilled, her forests had been wasted with fire, her commerce dislocated, while something like two-thirds of her population had perished. So appalling did the want of men and labor seem at the time that even the Catholic Church, according to some historians, sanctioned marriage among its priests. From that time to the beginning of this century, Germany practically retires from the field of colonial and commercial activity; for, whatever may be the last motives which impel the emigrant to leave his home, the necessary condition of successful colonization in the modern world is the presence of a redundant population at home. Moreover, the policy of the petty Governments into which the country was broken up, was now uniformly directed to attracting and then restricting labor. This was absolutely necessary in the first place for the actual cultivation of the soil. In 1768 the humanitarian Emperor, Joseph II., issued a warning to the princes of the Holy Roman Empire against allowing the migration of their subjects for this reason. With the rise of political ambitions an additional motive was supplied. In Prussia and elsewhere the serfs contributed exclusively the rank and file of the armies, which were officered by the nobility, while the commercial classes were exempted from military service.

After a long interval German population began to recover itself in the last century. But the process was gradual, and it received a heavy blow from the Seven Years’ War, and again from the protracted Napoleonic struggle. During the eighteenth century the only considerable emigration was Catharine the Second’s great importation of German peasants into Southern Russia. And in connection with this appears for the first time that deep-rooted aversion to paying the blood-tax of conscription, which became an article of faith with the Menonite sect, and removed it wholesale from the Dantzig region.

II.

After the Treaty of Paris the enormous reproductive vigor of the German race soon reasserted itself, and the surplus population began to swarm off in ever-larger numbers. The stream of emigration, which had begun to dribble into New York before the close of last century, where the son of a Baden butcher had already established the future fortunes of the Astors, assumed its present volume and importance about 1820. Since that time it has kept roughly proportionate to the growth of population, increasing temporarily when wars and rumors of war have been in the air, and subsiding, as they disappeared, to its normal limits. Taking the last sixty years from 1822, the total number of German immigrants into North America was something over three millions, and the last decade has contributed a million alone. They have increased and multiplied in the land of their adoption, and the United States contain to-day some seven million citizens in all of German origin, who, according to many observers, are destined to become the predominant element in the new community. It has certainly pervaded the whole organization of society. German names are to be found among the leading merchants, the great financiers, and, to a minor extent, among the politicians, and if they occur less frequently than might be expected, it must be remembered that a regular process of converting German into English names, according to their signification, was instituted in the New York of last century.

The German settler, as a rule, makes a less enterprising pioneer than the British. He is averse to giving hostages to fortune, and trusts rather to patient industry along the beaten tracks. But where the English or Scotch American has pushed to the West or founded a new mining-camp, the less adventurous Teuton follows, and, with his genius for plodding industry, not unfrequently reaps the fruits of the others’ daring. Accordingly the mass of the German Americans may be found within the more settled Eastern and Central States. A large proportion go to recruit the territorial democracy, and an almost equally large number find employment in the mines, on roads and railways, and in the engineering sheds. The female immigrants do something to supply the general want of domestic servants, and the ubiquitous German Kellner is almost as well known in New York as in Dresden or Vienna. A small residue, again, which has carried into the New World the impracticable ideas and habits which made residence in the Fatherland impossible, sink into the discontented urban populations among which Socialistic ideas are germinating freely.

Vast as their powers of assimilation are, the United States, however, do not absorb all the redundant population of Germany. Though no longer imported and settled in large bodies by improving Empresses as an example of thrift, the peasants still find their way across the Russian frontier. The Czar now counts nearly three quarters of a million subjects of German origin, chiefly of the Bauer class, and they supply the best agricultural labor in his dominions. But, unlike their brethren in the more congenial atmosphere of America, they refuse to throw off their Deutschthum, and remain in unyielding opposition to their unsympathetic environment