The Supernatural in Modern English FictionScarborough, Dorothy
History
The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction
Scarborough, Dorothy
English fiction -- History and criticism; Supernatural in literature
[222] _The Ghost Moth._
The dog is frequently the subject of occult fiction, more so than any
other animal, perhaps because the dog seems more nearly human than any
save possibly the horse. Mrs. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward shows us a
dog very much at home in heaven, while she has a ghost-dog on earth
coming back to march in a Decoration Day parade beside his master.
Isabel Howe Fisk in a drama shows the Archangel Raphael accompanied by
his dog, a cavortive canine, not apparently archangelic. Ambrose Bierce
evokes one terrible revenge-ghost, a dog that kills the murderer of his
master, while[223] Eden Phillpotts represents a pack of spectral dogs
that pursue the Evil One over the earth till the Judgment Day, each
being a lost soul. A young girl's little unbaptized baby is thought
to be one of the number. Conan Doyle's Hound of the Baskervilles
is a terrifying canine of legendary power. Kerfol by Edith Wharton
shows the ghosts of five dogs, each carefully individualized,--a
Chinese sleeve-dog, a rough brindled bulldog, a long-haired white
mongrel, a large white pointer with one brown ear, and a small black
grayhound. These specters of animals that have been killed by a jealous
husband--he had the cheerful habit of strangling every pet his wife
cared for and laying it without a word on her pillow--appear once a
year on the anniversary of the day on which the wife in desperation
slew him. They preserve a most undoglike silence and follow the
beholder with strange gaze. Kipling's dog Harvey is a supernatural
beast, but what he represents I have never been able to determine. _At
the Gate_ is a recent story, showing a great concourse of dogs just
outside the portals of heaven, unwilling to enter till their masters
come to join them.
[223] In _Another Little Heath Hound_.
The diabolic horse in Poe's _Metzengerstein_ is a curious composite of
metempsychosis, haunted inanimate object, and straight ghost, but at
all events sufficiently terrifying to the victim it pursued. Algernon
Blackwood in Wendigo has created a supernatural animal that flies
through the air and carries men away to insanity and death. Henry
Rideout shows the ghost of a white tiger, while there are assorted
elephant spooks, and Miss Burns in her studies in Shropshire folk-tales
relates stories of human beings whose ghosts appear as animals suited
to the personality of the deceased, as bears, bulls, hogs, and so
forth. That adds a new terror to death!
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