a page opened at
random of Sprenger's _Malleus Malificarum_. Yes; over the plain, the
towns, and castles, monotonous and dull, the fiends are hovering; even
over the stakes where their votaries are being burnt; and see, the
peasant asleep in the field, with his spade and hoe beside him, is being
surrounded by magic circles, by the invisible nets of the demon, who
prowls round him like a kite ready to pounce on to its quarry.

Why is there no need to write the word _witchcraft_ beneath this
picture? Why can this nameless smearer succeed where Raphael has failed?
Because he is content to suggest to the imagination, and lets it create
for itself its world of the supernatural; because he is not an artist,
and because Raphael is; because he suggests everything and shows
nothing, while Raphael creates, defines, perfects, gives form to that
which is by its nature formless.

If we would bring home to ourselves this action of art on the
supernatural, we must examine the only species of supernatural which
still retains vitality, and can still be deprived of it by art.
That which remains to us of the imaginative workings of the past is
traditional and well-nigh effete: we have poems and pictures, Vedic
hymns, Hebrew psalms, and Egyptian symbols; we have folklore and dogma;
remnants of the supernatural, some labelled in our historic museums,
where they are scrutinised, catalogue and eye-glass in hand; others
dusty on altars and in chapels, before which we uncover our heads and
cast down our eyes: relics of dead and dying faiths, of which some are
daily being transferred from the church to the museum; art cannot
deprive any of these of that imaginative life and power which they have
long ceased to possess. We have forms of the supernatural in which we
believe from acquiescence of habit, but they are not vital; we have a
form of the supernatural in which, from logic and habit, we disbelieve,
but which is vital; and this form of the supernatural is the ghostly. We
none of us believe in ghosts as logical possibilities, but we most of
us conceive them as imaginative probabilities; we can still feel the
ghostly, and thence it is that a ghost is the only thing which can in
any respect replace for us the divinities of old, and enable us to
understand, if only for a minute, the imaginative power which they
possessed, and of which they were despoiled not only by logic, but by
art. By _ghost_ we do not mean the vulgar apparition which is see