And in the midst of gulls who persistently refuse to be undeceived cheating is so "cruel easy." The difficulty is rather that the cheating, even when acknowledged, should ever be credited for what it is. The medium has confessed! Yes, and to cheat may be part of the medium nature; none the less he has the medium's gift of acting as a conductor between the visible and the invisible worlds. Has he not told secrets of the lives of his wondering clients which could not have been known by natural means? And Sludge chuckles "could not?"—could not be known by him who in his seeming passivity is alive at every nerve with the instinct of the detective, by him whose trade was
Throwing thus
His sense out, like an ant-eater's long tongue,
Soft, innocent, warm, moist, impassible,
And when 'twas crusted o'er with creatures—slick,
Their juice enriched his palate. "Could not Sludge!"
Haunters of the séance of every species are his aiders and abettors—the unbeliever, whom believers overwhelm or bribe to acquiescence, the fair votaries who find prurient suggestions characteristic of the genuine medium, the lover of the lie through the natural love of it, the amateur, incapable of a real conviction, who plays safely with superstition, the literary man who welcomes a new flavour for the narrative or the novel, the philosophic diner-out, who wants the chopping-block of a disputable doctrine on which to try the edge of his faculty. Is it his part, Sludge asks indignantly, to be grateful to the patrons who have corrupted and debased him?
Gratitude to these?
The gratitude, forsooth, of a prostitute
To the greenhorn and the bully.
The truculence of Sludge is not without warrant; it is indeed no other than the truculence of Robert Browning, "shaking his mane," as Dante Rossetti described him in his outbreaks against the spiritualists, "with occasional foamings at the mouth."[[56]]
Where then is the little grain of truth which has vitality amid the putrefaction of Sludge's nature? Liar and cheat as he is, he cannot be sure "but there was something in it, tricks and all." The spiritual world, he feels, is as real as the material world; the supernatural interpenetrates the natural at every point; in little things, as in great things, God is present. Sludge is aware of the invisible powers at every nerve:
I guess what's going on outside the veil,
Just as the prisoned crane feels pairing-time
In the islands where his kind are, so must fall
To capering by himself some shiny night
As if your back yard were a plot of spice.
He cheats; yes, but he also apprehends a truth which the world is blind to. Or, after all, is this cheating when every lie is quick with a germ of truth? Is not such lying as this a self-desecration, if you will; but still more a strange, sweet self-sacrifice in the service of truth? At the lowest is it not required by the very conditions of our poor mortal life, which remains so sorry a thing, so imperfect, so unendurable until it is brought into fruitful connection with a future existence? This world of ours is a cruel, blundering, unintelligible world; but let it be pervaded by an influx from the next world, how quickly it rights itself! how intelligible it all grows! And is the faculty of imagination, the faculty which discovers the things of the spirit—put to his own uses by the poet and even the historian—is this a power which cheats its possessor, or cheats those for whose advantage he gives it play?
Browning's design is to exhibit even in this Sludge the rudiments—coarse, perverted, abnormally directed and ineffective for moral good—of that sublime spiritual wisdom, which, turned to its proper ends and aided by the highest intellectual powers, is present—to take a lofty exemplar—in his Pope of The Ring and the Book. It is not through spiritualism so-called that Sludge has received his little grain of truth; that has only darkened the glimmer of true light which was in him. Yet liar and cheat and coward, he is saved from a purely phantasmal existence by this fibre of reality which was part of his original structure. The epilogue—Sludge's outbreak against his corrupter and tormentor—stands as evidence of the fact that no purifying, no cleansing, no really illuminating power remains in what is now only a putrescent luminosity within him. His rage is natural and dramatically true; a noble rage would be to his honour. This is a base and poisonous passion with no virtue in it, and the passion, flaring for a moment, sinks idly into as base a fingering of Sludge's disgraceful gains.