Adventures among Books [30]
of New England's past, science takes a stain of romance and superstition. Elsie Venner, through an experience of her mother's, inherits the nature of the serpent, so the novel is as far from common life as the tale of "Melusine," or any other echidna. The fantasy has its setting in a commonplace New England environment, and thus recalls a Hawthorne less subtle and concentrated, but much more humorous. The heroine of the "Guardian Angel," again, exposes a character in layers, as it were, each stratum of consciousness being inherited from a different ancestor--among others, a red Indian. She has many personalities, like the queer women we read about in French treatises on hysterics and nervous diseases. These stories are "fairy tales of science," by a man of science, who is also a humourist, and has a touch of the poet, and of the old fathers who were afraid of witches. The "blend" is singular enough, and not without its originality of fascination.
Though a man of science Dr. Holmes apparently took an imaginative pleasure in all shapes of superstition that he could muster. I must quote a passage from "The Professor at the Breakfast Table," as peculiarly illustrative of his method, and his ways of half accepting the abnormally romantic--accepting just enough for pleasure, like Sir Walter Scott. Connected with the extract is a curious anecdote.
"I think I am a little superstitious. There were two things, when I was a boy, that diabolised my imagination,--I mean, that gave me a distinct apprehension of a formidable bodily shape which prowled round the neighbourhood where I was born and bred. The first was a series of marks called the 'Devil's footsteps.' These were patches of sand in the pastures, where no grass grew, where even the low- bush blackberry, the "dewberry," as our Southern neighbours call it, in prettier and more Shakespearian language, did not spread its clinging creepers, where even the pale, dry, sadly-sweet 'everlasting' could not grow, but all was bare and blasted. The second was a mark in one of the public buildings near my home,--the college dormitory named after a Colonial Governor. I do not think many persons are aware of the existence of this mark,--little having been said about the story in print, as it was considered very desirable, for the sake of the Institution, to hush it up. In the north-west corner, and on the level of the third or fourth storey, there are signs of a breach in the walls, mended pretty well, but not to be mistaken. A considerable portion of that corner must have been carried away, from within outward. It was an unpleasant affair, and I do not care to repeat the particulars; but some young men had been using sacred things in a profane and unlawful way, when the occurrence, which was variously explained, took place. The story of the Appearance in the chamber was, I suppose, invented afterwards; but of the injury to the building there could be no question; and the zigzag line, where the mortar is a little thicker than before, is still distinctly visible.
"The queer burnt spots, called the 'Devil's footsteps,' had never attracted attention before this time, though there is no evidence that they had not existed previously, except that of the late Miss M., a 'Goody,' so called, who was positive on the subject, but had a strange horror of referring to an affair of which she was thought to know something . . . I tell you it was not so pleasant for a little boy of impressible nature to go up to bed in an old gambrel- roofed house, with untenanted locked upper chambers, and a most ghostly garret,--with 'Devil's footsteps' in the fields behind the house, and in front of it the patched dormitory, where the unexplained occurrence had taken place which startled those godless youths at their mock devotions, so that one of them was epileptic from that day forward, and another, after a dreadful season of mental conflict, took to religion, and became renowned for his ascetic sanctity."
It is a pity that Dr. Holmes does not give the whole story, instead of hinting at it,
Though a man of science Dr. Holmes apparently took an imaginative pleasure in all shapes of superstition that he could muster. I must quote a passage from "The Professor at the Breakfast Table," as peculiarly illustrative of his method, and his ways of half accepting the abnormally romantic--accepting just enough for pleasure, like Sir Walter Scott. Connected with the extract is a curious anecdote.
"I think I am a little superstitious. There were two things, when I was a boy, that diabolised my imagination,--I mean, that gave me a distinct apprehension of a formidable bodily shape which prowled round the neighbourhood where I was born and bred. The first was a series of marks called the 'Devil's footsteps.' These were patches of sand in the pastures, where no grass grew, where even the low- bush blackberry, the "dewberry," as our Southern neighbours call it, in prettier and more Shakespearian language, did not spread its clinging creepers, where even the pale, dry, sadly-sweet 'everlasting' could not grow, but all was bare and blasted. The second was a mark in one of the public buildings near my home,--the college dormitory named after a Colonial Governor. I do not think many persons are aware of the existence of this mark,--little having been said about the story in print, as it was considered very desirable, for the sake of the Institution, to hush it up. In the north-west corner, and on the level of the third or fourth storey, there are signs of a breach in the walls, mended pretty well, but not to be mistaken. A considerable portion of that corner must have been carried away, from within outward. It was an unpleasant affair, and I do not care to repeat the particulars; but some young men had been using sacred things in a profane and unlawful way, when the occurrence, which was variously explained, took place. The story of the Appearance in the chamber was, I suppose, invented afterwards; but of the injury to the building there could be no question; and the zigzag line, where the mortar is a little thicker than before, is still distinctly visible.
"The queer burnt spots, called the 'Devil's footsteps,' had never attracted attention before this time, though there is no evidence that they had not existed previously, except that of the late Miss M., a 'Goody,' so called, who was positive on the subject, but had a strange horror of referring to an affair of which she was thought to know something . . . I tell you it was not so pleasant for a little boy of impressible nature to go up to bed in an old gambrel- roofed house, with untenanted locked upper chambers, and a most ghostly garret,--with 'Devil's footsteps' in the fields behind the house, and in front of it the patched dormitory, where the unexplained occurrence had taken place which startled those godless youths at their mock devotions, so that one of them was epileptic from that day forward, and another, after a dreadful season of mental conflict, took to religion, and became renowned for his ascetic sanctity."
It is a pity that Dr. Holmes does not give the whole story, instead of hinting at it,