ancient tales of spirits and records of recent instances. "There are in the Fourth Book of Gregory the Great's Dialogues a number of stories of the passing of souls which are curiously like some of those collected by the Psychical Research Society," he says. Possibly human personality is much the same in all lands and all times.

Conversely, some of the best examples of ghostly literature have had their inspiration in the records of the society, Henry James's The Turn of the Screw being a notable example. Algernon Blackwood, that extraordinary adapter of psychic material to fiction, makes frequent mention of the Psychical Research Society, and uses many aspects of the psychical in his fiction. Innumerable stories, novels, plays and poems have been written to show the nearness of the dead to the living, and the thinness of the veil that separates the two worlds. There is deep pathos in the concept of the longing felt by the dead and living alike to speak with each other, to rend the dividing veil, which adds a poignancy to literature, even for readers incredulous of the possibility of such communication. There are many who are unconvinced of the reality of the messages in Raymond, for instance,—yet who could fail to be touched by the delicate art with which Barrie suggests the dead[Pg xiii] son's return in his play, The Well-Remembered Voice? While one may be repelled by what he feels is fraud and trickery in some of the psychic records, it is impossible not to be moved by such an impressive piece of symbolism as Granville Barker's Souls on Fifth, where the lonely, futile spirits of the dead are represented as hovering near the place they knew the best, seeking piteously to win some recognition from the living. The repulsive aspects of spirit manifestations have been treated many times and with power, as in Joseph Hergesheimer's The Meeker Ritual, to give one very recent example. The subject has interested the minds of many writers who have dealt with it satirically or sympathetically, or with a curious mixture of scoffing and respect, as did Browning in Sludge, the Medium. Even such pronounced realists as William Dean Howells and Hamlin Garland have written novels dealing with attempts at spirit communication.

[Pg xiii]

Any subject that has won so incontestable a place in our literature as this has, possesses a right to our thought, whatever be our attitude of acceptance or rejection of its claims to actuality. No person wishes to be ignorant of what the world is thinking with reference to a matter so important as the spirit. Hence this volume, The Best Psychic Stories, in presenting these 

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