Mildred Tresham. (A Blot in the ’Scutcheon.) The lady who is loved by Lord Henry Mertoun, and visited by him in secret at night. She dies when she learns that her brother has killed her lover.
Misconceptions. (Men and Women, 1855.) A beautiful fancy of a branch on which a bird has rested a moment bursting into bloom for pride and joy that it has been so honoured. The poet treats it as symbolical of a heart which has thrilled for a moment under the smiles of a queen ere she went on to her true-love throne.
Mr. Sludge, “The Medium.” (Dramatis Personæ: 1864.) Mr. Sludge is a “medium” who has been detected by his dupe in the act of cheating. He has worked upon his patron’s love for his dead mother, has pretended that he has had communications with the spirit world, and has found it a profitable business. However, he is found out, the game is up, he is half throttled by the man whom he has swindled, and is about to be kicked out of his house. He admits the cheating, but tries to make out that it was prompted by a low species of spirit (elementals as they are called). He offers, if liberally paid, to explain how the fraud has been carried out. He pretends one moment that he is repentant, the next he proposes to increase his guilt by falsely accusing his too confiding benefactor. He is prepared to swear that he picked a quarrel with him to get back the presents he had given. The bargain is made; and the medium, seated again at the “dear old table” which has so often been the partner of his performances, proceeds to explain that it is much more the fault of the public that they are cheated, than that of the artful folk who are always ready to meet demand by supply. In many things, but especially in affairs relating to the unseen world, people are willing to be deceived; and, as Demosthenes said, “Nothing is more easy than to deceive ourselves, as our affections are subtle persuaders.”
“It’s all your fault, you curious gentlefolk!”
said Sludge. “Everybody is interested in ghosts, and everybody will listen to the ghost-seer. A poor lad, the son of a servant in your house, talks to you about money, and you immediately suspect him of having stolen some; if he talk to you about seeing spirits, you encourage him to tell his story, and you listen with open ears. You make allowances for the unexplained ‘phenomena,’ and you are not disconcerted by his blunders. So the boy is encouraged to try again, to see more, hear more and stranger things. You have patience with the primary manifestations, always weak at first; you discourage doubts as always fatal to them, and thus educate the boy in his cheating. He is compelled to invent; you prompt him, your readiness to be deceived confirms him in his readiness to deceive. It is not that the boy starts as a liar; he will soon enough develop into that; at first however,
“‘It’s fancying, fable-making, nonsense-work—
What never meant to be so very bad.’
He brightens up his dull facts till they shine, and you no longer recognise them as dull, but brilliant. He hears what other mediums have done, he estimates your demands of him; you push him to the brink, he is compelled to dive. Let him confess his deception, and he has to go back to the gutter from which you have taken him. Let him keep on, and he lives in clover. And so he manufactures for you all you demand. He has heard raps and seen a light. ‘Shaped somewhat like a star?’ you eagerly inquire. ‘Well, like some sort of stars, ma’am.’ ‘So we thought!’ you say. ‘And any voice?’ ‘Not yet.’ ‘Try hard next time!’ Next time you have the voice. The medium is launched in the rapids. The falls are hard by: nothing can hinder but he must go over. He becomes the medium which has been required of him. The spirits forthwith speak up and become familiar and confidential. If any complain that the spirits do not fulfil our expectation of what the ghosts of Bacon, Cromwell, or Beethoven should be and do, the answer is ready and assumes two forms. If Bacon is deficient in spelling, does not know where he was born or in what year he died, this is no argument against spiritualism. The spirits are of all orders; and many, perhaps most, are tricksy, undeveloped, and delight to deceive. Or, again, the explanation is put in this way:—What is a medium? He is the means, and the only means, by which the spirits can hold converse with mortals. They have no organs; they must use ours. The medium holding converse with the spirit of Beethoven, not being much of a musician, is, of course, only able very imperfectly to express the composer’s musical soul. He pours in—to Sludge’s soul—a sonata. If it comes out the Shakers’ Hymn in G, that is the defect of the means or medium by which the master has been driven to express himself.” Sludge tells his dupe that it was thus he helped him out of every scrape; and the fools who attended every seance did not criticise. Why should they? They did not criticise his wine or his furniture—why should they criticise his medium? Of course they sometimes doubted. “Ah!” says the host, “it was just this spirit of doubt pervading the circle which confused the medium and accounted for his errors!” Sludge often got out of his difficulties that way. Sometimes, however the awful aspect of truth would present itself so sternly before him as to spoil all the cockering and cosseting he received, and he would gnash his teeth at the thought of the ruin of his soul by the humbug forced upon him. The cheating was nursed out of the lying. He would have stopped, but his dupes were for progress; they always demanded fresh and more striking “phenomena”—from talking to writing, from writing to flowers from the spirit world. If he actually were detected in jogging the table, or making squeaks with his toes, he would be accused of joking; if he pretended he was not, then he was at once in the dupe’s power. Then the cheating is so easy! A master of an ordinary trade can perform miracles to the untaught. The glass-blower, pipe maker, even the baker, by long practice, can puzzle the uninitiated; practise table-tilting, joint-cracking, playing tricks in the dark, and the phenomena of the medium’s business become easy as an old shoe. But, apart from this actual trickery, can the hardest head detect where the cheating begins, even if he is on his guard? There is a real love of a lie, and liars have no difficulty in attracting those who are only waiting to be deceived, and the most sceptical are just the most likely to be caught. Then the Solomon of saloons, the philosophic diner-out,—these were his patrons. They “wanted a doctrine for a chopping-block.” They had to be singular, and hack and hew common sense to show their skill in dialectics. These had Sludge injured. Then he reminds his patrons that the Bible teaches spiritualism. We all start with a stock of it; and stars even, we are taught, are not only worlds and suns, but stand for signs when we should set about our proper business. Sludge declares he has taught himself to live by signs: he is broken to the way of nods and winks. He has not waited for the tingle of the bell, but has obeyed the tap of knuckles on the wall. Suppose he blunders nine times out of ten as to the meaning of the knuckle summons, is he not a gainer if the tenth time he guesses right? Everybody blunders even as he. The thing is to imitate the ant-eater, and keep his tongue out to catch all nature’s motes for food. It is wisdom to respect the infinitely little, for God comes close behind the animalcule, life simplified to a mere cell. All was not cheating either: he has told his lie and seen truth follow. He knows not why he did what he never tried to do, described what he never saw, spoke more than he ever intended; and though he believes everybody can and does cheat, he is not less sure that every cheat’s every inspired lie contains a germ of truth. Pervade this world by an influx from the next, and all the dead, dry, dull facts of existence spring into life and freshness, as at the touch of harlequin’s wand; and harlequin’s wand is Sludge’s lie, for which the inanimate world was waiting. You see the real world through the false, and so you have the golden age all by the help of a little lying. At most, Sludge is only a poet who acts the books which poets write. The more to his honour! But all his specious reasoning fails to reassure his awakened dupe, who gives him the notes he promised and dismisses him. No sooner is the medium out of the presence of the man whom he has deceived than he pours out a volley of abuse, and wishes he dare burn down the house; he will declare that he throttled his “sainted mother”—the old hag—in such a fit of passion as his throat had just felt the effects of; he reproaches himself for not having prophesied he would die within a year; but he consoles himself with counting his money, and reflecting that his awakened dupe is not the only fool in the world. “Sludge” is D. D. Home, the American medium. Mrs. Browning was an ardent spiritualist, and Mr. Browning, in consequence, had considerable experience of the ways of mediums and the talk and arguments of their followers. Although no medium ever reasoned with such skill and subtlety as Sludge, the main arguments used by this impostor are precisely those put forward by spiritualists. The mediums are a wretchedly weak, invertebrate order of beings, quite incapable of any such virile processes of thought as those expressed in the poem. There could be no greater mistake than to suppose that Mr. Browning intended to make any defence for any phase of spiritualism whatever: he has simply gathered into a poem the best which could be put forward for spiritualism, and directed it upon the personality of Sludge. Intimate friends of the Brownings assure me that Mr. Browning with great difficulty restrained his disgust at the practices of spiritualists, and his annoyance at the fact that his wife devoted so much time and attention to this aspect of human folly. Perhaps the feature which angered him most was the habit of trading upon and outraging the most sacred feelings of the human heart, in the endeavour to gain clients for a money-making occupation.
Notes.—Catawba wine: a white wine of American make, from grapes first discovered about 1801 near the banks of the Catawba river. Its praises have been sung by Longfellow. Greeley: Horace Greeley, the eminent American editor. His history was identified with the fortunes of his paper the Tribune. “Nothing lasts, as Bacon came and said”: Bacon’s Essay LVIII. is Of the Vicissitude of Things. Phenomena: the spiritualists’ term for the antics of tables, pats, twitchings, ghostly lights, tinkling of bells, etc., at their séances. The Horseshoe: the great waterfall of that name at Niagara. Pasiphae: the daughter of the Sun and of Perseis, who married Minos, King of Crete. She was enamoured of a bull, or more probably of an officer named Taurus (a bull). Odic Lights: Od, the name given by Reichenbach to an influence he believed he had discovered; it was held to explain the phenomena of mesmerism, and to account for the luminous appearances at spirit-rapping circles. “Canthus of my eye” == the corner of the eye. Stomach cyst, an animalcule which is nothing more than a bag, without limbs or organs; one of the infusoria, the simplest of creatures endowed with animal life. “The Bridgewater book”: The Earl of Bridgewater (1758-1829) devised by his will £8,000 at the disposal of the President of the Royal Society, to be paid to the authors of treatises “On the Power, Wisdom and Goodness of God as manifested in the Creation.” Several of the treatises are now famous books, as Bell on The Hand, Kirby on Habits and Instincts of Animals, and Whewell’s Astronomy. Eutopia == Utopia.
Molinos. See [Molinists].