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Two months afterward he was reported fit for duty, but, in spite of the fact that he was urgently needed to help an undermanned Commission stagger through a deficit, he preferred to die; vowing at the last that he was hag-ridden. I got his manuscript before he died, and this is his version of the affair, dated 1885: My doctor tells me that I need rest and change of air.
I don't think of myself as Homer and my Challon identification is a mental-verbal linkage. Even 'Challon' is a compromise simplification." "I guess it would be. Those cracks I made " "Forget them. To what you call the hag-ridden moron jittering out of sight in your mind, so many things equate to a threat to survival.
Their conscience was sickened, their imagination hag-ridden, by the discovery of so much beauty united to so much corruption; and, among our latter-day students of the Renaissance, there became manifest the same morbid pre-occupation, the same exaggerated repulsion, which is but inverted attraction, which were rife among the playwrights who wrote of Avengers and Atheists, Giovannis and Annabellas, Brachianos and Corombonas, and other White Devils, as old Webster picturesquely put it, of Italy.
This matted appearance of colts' manes, which is only the natural result of their not being groomed or combed when young and unbroken, was known in many country places as "hag-ridden." Such superstitions are now nearly, if not quite, extinct, but still linger in old place-names, for it was usual in former times to attribute any uncommon or surprising physical appearance to supernatural agency.
"Yet this is an absurd position for man, the heir of all the ages: hag-ridden by the flimsy creatures of his own brain. If a pebble in our boot torments us, we expel it. We take off the boot and shake it out. And once the matter is fairly understood it is just as easy to expel an intruding and obnoxious thought from the mind. About this there ought to be no mistake, no two opinions.
The ill-fated Duncan was slain; the Witches of Endor capered fearsomely about their fearsome cauldron of snaky, froggy horrors; and then taking some liberties with the theme as set down by the original author the operator presented a picture wherein Macbeth, tortured by sleeplessness and hag-ridden with remorse, saw, in imagination, the dripping blood upon his hands and vainly sought to scour it off.
"You've done almost everything," I continued, "that a man can do in expiation of offences. But there is one thing more that you must do in order to find peace. You couldn't find peace if you married Betty and left her in ignorance. You must tell Betty everything everything that you have told me. Otherwise you would still be hag-ridden.
It is a profound criticism that, if once grasped by the foreign reader, will enable him to understand much in Russian fiction that otherwise would be a sealed book. Every one must have noticed how Russians are hag-ridden by an idea; but no one except Merezhkovski has observed the PASSION of abstract thought.
Not till after long years, and unspeakable agonies, did the believing heart surrender; sink into spell-bound sleep, under the nightmare, Unbelief; and, in this hag-ridden dream, mistake God's fair living world for a pallid, vacant Hades and extinct Pandemonium.
She had found a formula for the resolution of problems, both physical and mental, which had hag-ridden her for years. The theology, the medical science and indeed the philosophy or psychology of the New England of the sixties contributed strongly, through their limitations, to the growth of bizarre systems which had in them elements of truth.
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