Also that “It isn’t always the parsons that go highest first,” and that “It isn’t what you’ve professed; it’s what you’ve done.” Something of this kind we have long suspected. Something of this kind has long been hinted from the plain pulpits of the world.
I fear it is the impatience of the human mind, the hardness of the human heart, which make us restless under too much preaching. Volume after volume of “messages” have been sent to us by spirits during the last few years. There is no fault to be found with any of them, and that sad word, “uplifting,” may well apply to all. Is it possible that, when we die, we shall preach to one another; or is it the elusiveness of ghostly audiences which drives determined preachers to the ouija board? The somewhat presumptuous title, “To Walk With God,” which Mrs. Lane and Mrs. Beale have given to their volume of revelations, was, we are told, commanded by the spirit who dictated it. “Stephen,” the dead soldier who stands responsible for the diffuse philosophy of “Our Unseen Guest,” dedicates the book to the “wistful” questioners who seek enlightenment at his hands. “Anne Simon,” a transcendental spirit with a strong bias for hyphenated words, sends her modest “Message,” dictated through her husband, to “world-mortals for their regeneration.”
How lightly that tremendous word, “regeneration,” is bandied about by our ghostly preceptors. Mr. Basil King, in “The Abolishing of Death,” reports the spirit of Henry Talbot, the distinguished Boston chemist, as saying, “My especial mission is to regenerate the world.” It is a large order. The ungrateful but always curious mortal who would like a few practical hints about chemistry, is told instead that “grief is unrhythmical,” which proves that Mr. Talbot never read “In Memoriam”; or finds himself beset by figurative phrases. “Literature is the sun, music is the water, sculpture is the earth, dancing is life, and painting is the soul. These in their purity can never be evil. I have spread a table in your sight. Whatever is on it is for your use. Take freely, and give it to others. They hunger for the food.”
For what do we hunger? For any word which will help us on our hard but interesting way, any word which is wise, or practically useful, or beautiful. It has been revealed to Mr. King that poets as splendid as Homer and Shakespeare bloom in the spirit world. Why, in the general assault by dead authors, are they the silent ones? Could they not give us one good play, one good lyric, one good sonnet, just to show a glint of their splendour? What is wrong with psychic currents that they bear nothing of value? “Stephen,” the “Unseen Guest,” assures us that many a man we call a genius “simply puts into words the thoughts of some greater mentality in the other life.” But this is not adding to our store. It is trying to take away from us the merit of what we have. “Anne Simon” reads the riddle thus: “In earth-proximity the spirit leaves behind him his efficacy, for the time, of Heaven-emanation; so it is better to open the heart, and wish the larger beneficence than to visualize the spirit-form. For the spirit-form without its spirit-treasure does not bring the mortal to the higher places.”
Which, though not wholly intelligible, is doubtless true.
If we do not get what we hunger for, what is it we receive? Professor Hyslop once assured me that the authorship of “Jap Herron” was “proved beyond question.” This contented him, but dismayed me. The eclipse of the “merry star” which danced above Mark Twain’s cradle, and which shone on him fitfully through life, suggests direful possibilities in the future. It is whispered that O. Henry is busily dictating allegories and tracts; that Dickens may yet reveal “The Mystery of Edwin Drood”; that Washington Irving has loomed on the horizon of an aspiring medium. The publication of “Shakespeare’s Revelations, by Shakespeare’s Spirit: A Soul’s Record of Defeat,” adds a touch of fantastic horror to the situation. The taste of the world, like the sanity of the world, has seemingly crashed into impotence.
Patience Worth is fortunate in so far that she has no earlier reputation at stake. In fact, we are informed that three of her stories are told in “a dialect which, taken as a whole, was probably never spoken, and certainly never written. Each seems to be a composite of dialect words and idioms of different periods and different localities.” It is Mr. Yost’s opinion, however, that her long historical novel, “The Sorry Tale,” is composed “in a literary tongue somewhat resembling the language of the King James version of the Bible in form and style, but with the unmistakable verbal peculiarities of Patience Worth.” “What bringeth thee asearch?” and “Who hath the trod of the antelope?” are doubtless verbal peculiarities; but for any resemblance to the noble and vigorous lucidity of the English Bible we may search in vain through the six hundred and forty closely printed pages of this confused, wandering, sensuous, and wholly unreadable narrative, which purports to tell the life-history of the penitent thief. I quote a single paragraph, snatched at random from the text, which may serve as a sample of the whole:
“And within, upon the skins’-pack, sat Samuel, who listed him, and lo, the jaws of him hung ope. And Jacob wailed, and the Jew’s tongue of him sounded as the chatter of fowls, and he spake of the fool that plucked of his ass that he save of down. Yea, and walked him at the sea’s edge, and yet sought o’ pools. And he held aloft unto the men who hung them o’er the bin’s place handsful of brass and shammed precious stuffs, and cried him out.”
Six hundred and forty pages of this kind of writing defy a patient world. And we are threatened with “the larger literature to come”!
“Hope Trueblood,” Patience Worth’s last novel, is written in intelligible English, as is also the greater part of her verse. The story deals with the doubtful legitimacy of a little girl in an English village which has lived its life along such straight lines that the mere existence of a bastard child, or a child thought to be a bastard, rocks it to its foundations, and furnishes sufficient matter for violent and heart-wounding scenes from the first chapter to the last. It is difficult to follow the fortunes of this child (who might have been the great original devil baby of Hull House for the pother she creates) because of the confusion of the narrative, and because of the cruelly high pitch at which all emotions are sustained; but we gather that the marriage lines are at last triumphantly produced, and that the village is suffered to relapse into the virtuous somnolence of earlier days.