But these effusions were desultory and amateurish. They were designed as personal communications, and were betrayed into publicity by their recipients. We cannot regard their authors—painstaking but simple-hearted ghosts—as advance guards of the army of occupation which is now storming the citadel of print.
It is passing strange that the dead who seek to communicate with the living should cling so closely to the alphabet as a connecting link. Dying is a primitive thing. Men died, and were wept and forgotten, for many, many ages before Cadmus sowed the dragon’s teeth. But letters are artificial and complicated. They belong to fettered humanity which is perpetually devising ways and means. Shelley, whose impatient soul fretted against barriers, cried out despairingly that inspiration wanes when composition begins. We strive to follow Madame de Sévigné’s counsel, “Laissez trotter la plume”; but we know well how the little instrument halts and stumbles; and if a pen is too clumsy for the transmission of thought, what must be the effort to pick out letters on a ouija board, or with a tilting table? The spirit that invented table-rapping (which combines every possible disadvantage as a means of communication with every absurdity that can offend a fastidious taste) deserves to be penalized by its fellow spirits. Even Sir Oliver Lodge admits that the substitution of tables for pen and ink “has difficulties of its own.”
Yet nothing can overcome the infatuation of ghostly visitors for this particular piece of furniture. They cannot keep their spectral fingers off one, and they will come any distance, and take any pains, for the pleasure of such handling. Maeterlinck relates with enviable gravity the details of an evening call paid by a monk who had lain in the cloisters of the Abbaye de Saint Wandrille since 1693, and who broke a sleep of two centuries that he might spin a table on one leg for the diversion of the poet’s guests. Their host, while profoundly indifferent to the entertainment, accepted it with a tolerant shrug. If it amused both mortals and the monk, why cavil at its infantile simplicity?
The frolicsome moods of the Lodge table must have been disconcerting even to such a receptive and sympathetic circle. It performed little tricks like lying down, or holding two feet in the air, apparently for its own innocent delight. It emulated Æsop’s affectionate ass, and “seemed to wish to get into Lady Lodge’s lap, and made caressing movements to and fro, as if it could not get close enough to her.” It jocularly thumped piano-players on the back; and when a cushion was held up to protect them, it banged a hole in the cover. What wonder that several tables were broken “during the more exuberant period of these domestic sittings, before the power was under control”; and that the family was compelled to provide a strong and heavy article which could stand the “skylarking” (Sir Oliver’s word) of supernatural visitors.
The ouija board, though an improvement on the table, is mechanical and cumbersome. It has long been the chosen medium of that most prolific of spirit writers, Patience Worth; and a sympathetic disciple once ventured to ask her if there were no less laborious method by which she could compose her stories. To which Patience, who then used a language called by her editor “archaic,” and who preferred to “dock the smaller parts-o’-speech,” replied formidably,—
“The hand o’ her do I to put be the hand o’ her, and ’t is ascribe that setteth the one awither by eyes-fulls she taketh in.”
The disciple’s mind being thus set at rest, he inquired how Patience discovered this avenue of approach, and was told,—
“I did to seek at crannies for to put; ay, an’t wer the her o’ her who tireth past the her o’ her, and slippeth to a naught o’ putting; and ’t wer the me o’ me at seek, aye, and find. Aye, and ’t wer so.”
The casual and inexpert reader is not always sure what Patience means to say; but to the initiated her cryptic and monosyllabic speech offers no difficulties. When asked if she were acquainted with the spirit of the late Dr. William James, she said darkly,—
“I telled a one o’ the brothers and the neighbours o’ thy day, and he doth know.”