The Ghost Ship

The Ghost Ship

The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Ghost Ship, by Richard
Middleton This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and
with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away
or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net
Title: The Ghost Ship
Author: Richard Middleton
Release Date: February 11, 2004 [EBook #11045]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE
GHOST SHIP ***

Produced by Tom Harris

THE GHOST-SHIP
by Richard Middleton

Thanks are due to the Editors of _The Century_, _English Review_,
_Vanity Fair_, and _The Academy_, for permission to reproduce most
of the stories in this volume.

Preface
The other day I said to a friend, "I have just been reading in proof a

volume of short stories by an author named Richard Middleton. He is
dead. It is an extraordinary book, and all the work in it is full of a quite
curious and distinctive quality. In my opinion it is very fine work
indeed."
It would be so simple if the business of the introducer or preface-writer
were limited to such a straightforward, honest, and direct expression of
opinion; unfortunately that is not so. For most of us, the happier ones of
the world, it is enough to say "I like it," or "I don't like it," and there is
an end: the critic has to answer the everlasting "Why?" And so, I
suppose, it is my office, in this present instance, to say why I like the
collection of tales that follows.
I think that I have found a hint as to the right answer in two of these
stories. One is called "The Story of a Book," the other "The Biography
of a Superman." Each is rather an essay than a tale, though the form of
each is narrative. The first relates the sad bewilderment of a successful
novelist who feels that, after all, his great work was something less than
nothing.
He could not help noticing that London had discovered the secret
which made his intellectual life a torment. The streets were more than a
mere assemblage of houses, London herself was more than a tangled
skein of streets, and overhead heaven was more than a meeting-place of
individual stars. What was this secret that made words into a book,
houses into cities, and restless and measurable stars into an unchanging
and immeasurable universe?
Then from "The Biography of a Superman" I select this very striking
passage:--
Possessed of an intellect of great analytic and destructive force, he was
almost entirely lacking in imagination, and he was therefore unable to
raise his work to a plane in which the mutually combative elements of
his nature might have been reconciled. His light moments of envy,
anger, and vanity passed into the crucible to come forth unchanged. He
lacked the magic wand, and his work never took wings above his
conception.
Now compare the two places; "the streets were more than a mere
assemblage of houses;" . . . "his light moments . . . passed into the
crucible to come forth unchanged. He lacked the magic wand." I think
these two passages indicate the answer to the "why" that I am forced to

resolve; show something of the secret of the strange charm which "The
Ghost-Ship" possesses.
It delights because it is significant, because it is no mere assemblage of
words and facts and observations and incidents, it delights because its
matter has not passed through the crucible unchanged. On the contrary,
the jumble of experiences and impressions which fell to the lot of the
author as to us all had assuredly been placed in the athanor of art, in
that furnace of the sages which is said to be governed with wisdom.
Lead entered the burning of the fire, gold came forth from it.
This analogy of the process of alchemy which Richard Middleton has
himself suggested is one of the finest and the fittest for our purpose; but
there are many others. The "magic wand" analogy comes to much the
same thing; there is the like notion of something ugly and insignificant
changed to something beautiful and significant. Something ugly; shall
we not say rather something formless transmuted into form! After all,
the Latin Dictionary declares solemnly that "beauty" is one of the
meanings of "forma" And here we are away from alchemy and the
magic wand ideas, and pass to the thought of the first place that I have
quoted: "the streets were more than a mere assemblage of houses," The
puzzle is solved; the jig-saw--I think they call it--has been successfully
fitted together, There in a box lay all the jagged,