n or
heard in told or written tales; we mean the ghost which slowly rises up
in our mind, the haunter not of corridors and staircases, but of our
fancies. Just as the gods of primitive religions were the undulating,
bright heat which made mid-day solitary and solemn as midnight; the warm
damp, the sap-riser and expander of life; the sad dying away of the
summer, and the leaden, suicidal sterility of winter; so the ghost,
their only modern equivalent, is the damp, the darkness, the silence,
the solitude; a ghost is the sound of our steps through a ruined
cloister, where the ivy-berries and convolvulus growing in the fissures
sway up and down among the sculptured foliage of the windows, it is the
scent of mouldering plaster and mouldering bones from beneath the broken
pavement; a ghost is the bright moonlight against which the cypresses
stand out like black hearse-plumes, in which the blasted grey olives and
the gnarled fig-trees stretch their branches over the broken walls like
fantastic, knotted, beckoning fingers, and the abandoned villas on
the outskirts of Italian towns, with the birds flying in and out of
the unglazed windows, loom forth white and ghastly; a ghost is the
long-closed room of one long dead, the faint smell of withered flowers,
the rustle of long-unmoved curtains, the yellow paper and faded ribbons
of long-unread letters ... each and all of these things, and a hundred
others besides, according to our nature, is a ghost, a vague feeling we
can scarcely describe, a something pleasing and terrible which invades
our whole consciousness, and which, confusedly embodied, we half dread
to see behind us, we know not in what shape, if we look round.

Call we in our artist, or let us be our own artist; embody, let us see
or hear this ghost, let it become visible or audible to others besides
ourselves; paint us that vagueness, mould into shape that darkness,
modulate into chords that silence--tell us the character and history
of those vague beings ... set to work boldly or cunningly. What do we
obtain? A picture, a piece of music, a story; but the ghost is gone. In
its stead we get oftenest the mere image of a human being; call it a
ghost if you will, it is none. And the more complete the artistic work,
the less remains of the ghost. Why do those stories affect us most in
which the ghost is heard but not seen? Why do those places affect us
most of which we merely vaguely know that they are haunted? Why most
of all