part of ghosts for being interviewed just now. At present
book-reviewers, for instance, had better be careful, lest the wraiths
take their own method of answering criticism. It isn't safe to speak or
write with anything but respect of ghosts now. _De mortuis nil nisi
bonum_, indeed! One should never make light of a shade.

Modern ghosts have a more pronounced personality than the specters of
the past. They have more strength, of mind as well as of body, than the
colorless revenants of earlier literature, and they produce a more vivid
effect on the beholder and the reader. They know more surely what they
wish to do, and they advance relentlessly and with economy of effort to
the effecting of their purpose, whether it be of pure horror, of beauty,
or pathos of humor. We have now many spirits in fiction that are
pathetic without frightfulness, many that move us with a sense of poetic
beauty rather than of curdling horror, who touch the heart as well as
the spine of the reader. And the humorous ghost is a distinctive shade
of to-day, with his quips and pranks and haunting grin. Whatever a
modern ghost wishes to do or to be, he is or does, with confidence and
success.

The spirit of to-day is terrifyingly visible or invisible at will. The
dreadful presence of a ghost that one cannot see is more unbearable than
the specter that one can locate and attempt to escape from. The
invisible haunting is represented in this volume by Fitz-James O'Brien's
_What Was It?_ one of the very best of the type, and one that has
strongly influenced others. O'Brien's story preceded Guy de Maupassant's
_Le Horla_ by several years, and must surely have suggested to
Maupassant as to Bierce, in his _The Damned Thing_, the power of evil
that can be felt but not seen.