nature as a prosaic machine constructed
by no one in particular, the more poignantly, on the other hand,
do we feel the delight of the transient belief in the vague and
the impossible; the greater the distinctness with which we see and
understand all around us, the greater the longing for a momentary
half-light in which forms may appear stranger, grander, vaguer than they
are. We moderns seek in the world of the supernatural a renewal of
the delightful semi-obscurity of vision and keenness of fancy of our
childhood; when a glimpse into fairyland was still possible, when things
appeared in false lights, brighter, more important, more magnificent
than now. Art indeed can afford us calm and clear enjoyment of the
beautiful--enjoyment serious, self-possessed, wide-awake, such as befits
mature intellects; but no picture, no symphony, no poem, can give us
that delight, that delusory, imaginative pleasure which we received as
children from a tawdry engraving or a hideous doll; for around that doll
there was an atmosphere of glory. In certain words, in certain sights,
in certain snatches of melody, words, sights, and sounds which we now
recognise as trivial, commonplace, and vulgar, there was an ineffable
meaning; they were spells which opened doors into realms of wonder;
they were precious in proportion as they were misappreciated. We now
appreciate and despise; we see, we no longer imagine. And it is to
replace this uncertainty of vision, this liberty of seeing in things
much more than there is, which belongs to man and to mankind in this
childhood, which compensated the Middle Ages for starvation and
pestilence, and compensates the child for blows and lessons, it is to
replace this that we crave after the supernatural, the ghostly--no
longer believed, but still felt. It was from this sickness of the
prosaic, this turning away from logical certainty, that the men of
the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of this century, the men
who had finally destroyed belief in the religious supernatural, who
were bringing light with new sciences of economy, philology, and
history--Schiller, Goethe, Herder, Coleridge--left the lecture-room and
the laboratory, and set gravely to work on ghostly tales and ballads. It
was from this rebellion against the tyranny of the possible that Goethe
was charmed with that culmination of all impossibilities, that most
daring of ghost stories, the story of Faustus and Helena. He felt the
seduction of