SUPERNATURAL IN FICTION.

Auckland Star, Volume LVIII, Issue 89, 16 April 1927, Page 33

SUPERNATURAL IN FICTION.

THE HUMAN BODY HAUNTED HOUSES.

Man's interest in the rare and the curious; his natural tendency to superstition; ghosts, with their long pedigree, and their treatment by modern writers of fiction were among the fascinating topics dealt with by Mr. Walter de la Maro in his concluding lecture in London, recently, when he chose as his subject, "The Supernatural in Fiction." Most of us, said the lecturer, take a delight in the curious, the mysterious, and the far-fetched, and prefer to leave some quiet ordinary things unexplained —why, for example, we live, or love, or laugh — in the fear, perhaps, that otherwise they might be explained away. A new truth was apt to become uninteresting when it ceased to be novel, and any event that was tinged with mystery or strangeness was a genuine treasure trove. What company was more trying than that oi the man who could explain everything? Even our convictions were less interesting than our superstitions. A tiny amorous beetle taps on the wall — we call it "the Death-watch;" we persuade ourselves to pass beneath a ladder, and cross our thumbs; we "thank our lucky stars," and at the same moment touch wood. Apart from the world without, there was a world within—of the mind and the imagination. There we were free to do what we liked with our own; to think what we pleased; to invent what wo could. To be the slaves of one's nerves was one thing; to refuse to believe in their whispered evidence was quite anothr. As to what was a definition of a ghost, evidence of the real depended on our senses, but our senses were limited in range. It was a fairly reasonable inference that there were living beings around us of whose presence we were wholly unaware. Recent scientific developments had made renl things which had been thought unreal. To-day we could speak to people at the other end of the earth. To-morrow we might bo able to see the ghost of Queen Elizabeth scolding that of Sir Walter Raleigh. Unless we were mere machines, then these bodies of ours were themselves haunted houses. A brief hour of solitude and darkness; a furtive, unfamiliar sound out of the unknown; the- mere screech of an owl; the sighing of the wind in the chimney, and the restless ghost within us stirs, awakes, and hearkens. Fortunately the writer of fiction need not concern himself with tho mere fncts of the case, but was at liberty to invent all he needed. He could do as he pleased with his own creation. All he needed was to make it imaginatively credible. It was not a piece of nature, but a work of art. It was a prepared illusion, and its chief delight was its illusivcness. The lecturer read extracts from Charlotto Bronte's "Wuthering Heights" and Henry James' "The Turn of the Screw."' upon which ho commented. When they asked what certainty—what assurance —lay behind this rare, and it miplii be, illusive ranjrc- of experience, who could reply? They were at least at liberty to maintain that all experience had its use and value and, moreover, that imagination, cither in poetry or science, could not rest in life's certainties. It coveted its possibilities and potentialities. It was the outskirts of life that lured us on.