Page:Works of Charles Dickens, ed. Lang - Volume 31.djvu/16

viii a telepathic reflection of a dream then entertained by the prototype of Mr. Micawber. The anecdote does not occur, I think, in Mr. Forster's Life of Dickens, but it may have been among the "ghost-stories" which Dickens liked to tell.

Here it is told as a prelude to the story of the occupation of a haunted house of the usual noisy type. Having once taken part in a similar quest, I can recognise the accuracy of most of Dickens's remarks. "You can fill any house with noises, if you will," he says, "until you have a noise for every nerve in your nervous system." Doubtless Dickens could do this if he liked, but my humble experience was that ne faict ce tour qui veult, and that the noisy house was rather unusually quiet. On the other hand, the "real terror" of the Odd Girl, who, for all that, "made many of the noises we heard," is an authentic touch of nature. Indeed, even to persons not on the level of the Odd Girl in education, the temptation to produce "phenomena" for fun is all but overwhelming. That people communicate hallucinations to each other "in some diseased way without words," is a modem theory perhaps first formulated here by Dickens. But, having set his allied story-tellers in motion, he deserts his psychological researches, and, dropping into autobiography, tells us how, in Copperfield days, his bed was "thrown into a lot" with "a brass coal scuttle, a roasting-jack, and a birdcage." Thus the certainly unprogressive study of haunted houses makes no advance in Dickens's hands. His two ghost-stories are based on such flashes of intuition, or second sight, or whatever we should call it, as are pretty well attested in most ages and countries. But his ghost in a court of justice is of an "outdacious" description, and worthy of his nurse, ill named Mercy, to whom he again refers in this volume, as in The Uncommercial Traveller. Decently well-attested spectres never reach the