“This,” comments Mr. Yost, “was considered as an affirmative reply,” and with it her questioners were content.
All fields of literature are open to Patience Worth, and she disports herself by turns in prose and verse, fiction and philosophy. Other spirits have their specialties. They write, as a rule, letters, sermons, didactic essays, vers libre, and an occasional story. But Patience writes six-act dramas which, we are assured, could, “with a little alteration,” be produced upon the stage, short comedies “rich in humour,” country tales, mystical tales, parables, aphorisms, volumes of verse, and historical novels. In three years and a half she dictated to Mrs. Curran, her patient ouija-board amanuensis, 900,000 words. It is my belief that she represents a spirit syndicate, and lends her name to a large coterie of literary wraiths. The most discouraging feature of her performance is the possibility of its indefinite extension. She is what Mr. Yost calls “a continuing phenomenon.” Being dead already, she cannot die, and the beneficent limit which is set to mortal endeavour does not exist for her. “The larger literature is to come,” says Mr. Yost ominously; and we fear he speaks the truth.
Now what do we gain by this lamentable intrusion of ghostly aspirants into the serried ranks of authorship? What is the value of their work, and what is its ethical significance? Perhaps because literary distinction is a rare quality, the editors and publishers of these revelations lay stress upon the spiritual insight, the finer wisdom, which may accrue to us from direct contact with liberated souls. They even hint at some great moral law which may be thus revealed for our betterment. But the law of Christ is as pure and lofty as any code our human intelligence can grasp. We do not live by it, because it makes no concession to the sickly qualities which cement our earthly natures; but we hold fast to it as an incomparable ideal. It is not law or light we need. It is the power of effort and resistance. “Toutes les bonnes maximes sont dans le monde; on ne manque que de les appliquer.”
The didacticism of spirit authors is, so far, their most striking characteristic. As Mr. Henry James would put it, they are “awkward writers, but yearning moralists.” Free from any shadow of diffidence, they proffer a deal of counsel, but it is mostly of the kind which our next-door neighbour has at our command.
In the volume called “Letters from Harry and Helen,” the dead children exhort their relatives continuously; and their exhortations, albeit of a somewhat intimate character, have been passed on to the public as “an inspiration to the life of brotherhood.” Helen, for example, bids her mother and sister give away the clothes they do not need. “You had better send the pink dress to B. You won’t wear it. Lace and a few good bits of jewelry you can use, and these won’t hurt your progress.” She also warns them not to take long motor rides with large parties. The car holds four comfortably; but if her sister will go all afternoon with five people packed into it, she is sure to be ill. This is sensible advice, but can it be needful that the dead should revisit earth to give it?
Harry, a hardy and boisterous spirit, with a fine contempt for precautions, favours a motor trip across the continent, gallantly assures his family that the project is “perfectly feasible,” tells his sister to “shoot some genuine food” at her sick husband, who appears to have been kept on a low diet, and observes with pleasure that his mother is overcoming her aversion to tobacco. “Mamma is learning,” he comments patronizingly. “Some day she will arrive at the point where a smoker will fail to arouse a spark of criticism, or even of interest. When that day comes, she will have learned what she is living for this time.”
Here was a chance for a ghostly son to get even with the parent who had disparaged the harmless pleasures of his youth. Harry is not the kind of a spirit to miss such an opportunity. He finds a great deal to correct in his family, a great deal to blame in the world, and some things to criticize in the universe. “I suppose the Creator knows his own business best,” he observes grudgingly; “but there have been moments when I felt I could suggest improvements. For instance, had I been running affairs, I should have been a little more open about this reincarnation plan of elevating the individual. Why let a soul boggle along blindly for numberless lives, when just a friendly tip would have illuminated the whole situation, and enabled him to plan with far less waste?”
“O eloquent, just and mighty death!” Have we professed to break thy barriers, to force thy pregnant silence into speech, only to make of thy majesty a vulgar farce, and, of thy consolations, folly and self-righteousness?
The “Living Dead Man” has also a course of instruction, in fact several courses of instruction, to offer. His counsels are all of the simplest. He bids us drink plenty of water, because water feeds our astral bodies; to take plenty of sleep, because sleep fits us for work; and on no account to lose our tempers. He is a gentle, garrulous ghost, and his first volume is filled with little anecdotes about his new—and very dull—surroundings, and mild little stories of adventure. He calls himself an “astral Scheherazade,” but no sultan would ever have listened to him for a thousand and one nights. He chants vers libre of a singularly uninspired order, and is particular about his quotations. “If you print these letters,” he tells his medium, “I wish you would insert here fragments from that wonderful poem of Wordsworth, ‘Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.’” Then follow nineteen lines of this fairly familiar masterpiece. There is something rather droll in having our own printed poets quoted to us lengthily by cultivated and appreciative spirits.
The “War Letters” dictated by the “Living Dead Man” in the spring and summer of 1915 are more animated and highly coloured. Some long-past episodes, notably the entrance of the German soldiers into Brussels, are well described, though not so vividly as by the living Richard Harding Davis. We are told in the preface that on the fourth of February, 1915, the spirit wrote: “When I come back” (he was touring to a distant star), “and tell you the story of this war, as seen from the other side, you will know more than all the Chancelleries of the nations.” This promises well; but in the three hundred pages that follow there is not one word to indicate that the “Living Dead Man” had any acquaintance with real happenings which were not published in our newspapers; or that he was aware of these happenings before the newspapers published them. He is always on the safe side of prophecy. In a letter dictated on the seventh of May, the date of the sinking of the Lusitania, he makes no mention of the crime; but the following morning, after the ghastly news was known to the world, he writes that he could have told it twenty-four hours earlier had he not feared to shock Mrs. Barker’s sensibilities.