“I have spent a great part of my life in oriental lands, and have seen there many magicians.... I have read and listened to every explanation of the Davenport ‘tricks’ hitherto placed before the English public, and, believe me, if anything would make me take that tremendous jump ‘from matter to spirit,’ it is the utter and complete unreason of the reasons by which the ‘manifestations’ are explained.”
Nor was it in England alone that able men were completely fooled by the Davenports’ performance. Frenchmen as well, after seeing the exhibition, hastened to put their favorable opinions in writing. Hamilton, a well-known expert in the art of legerdemain, and son-in-law of Robert Houdin, the famous conjuror, wrote:
“Messrs. Davenport,—Yesterday I had the pleasure of being present at the seance you gave, and I came away from it convinced that jealousy alone was the cause of the outcry against you. The phenomena produced surpassed my expectations, and your experiments were full of interest for me. I consider it my duty to add that those phenomena are inexplicable, and the more so by such persons as have thought themselves able to guess your supposed secret, and who are, in fact, far indeed from discovering the truth.
“Hamilton.”
M. Rhys, a manufacturer of conjuring implements and himself an inventor of tricks, wrote the Davenports:
“... I have returned from one of your seances quite astonished. As a person who has devoted many years to the manufacture of instruments for legerdemain performances, my statement made with due regard to fidelity, and guided by the knowledge long experience has given me, will, I trust, be of some value to you.... I was admitted to examine your cabinet and instruments ... with the greatest care but failed to find anything that could justify legitimate suspicions. From that moment I felt that the insinuations cast about you were false and malevolent.”
These are but a few of innumerable instances where men of culture, knowledge and experience, were deluded by the performance of the Davenport Brothers, just as men are to-day with my presentations, and when the reader takes into consideration the confession of Ira Erastus Davenport[33] to me in 1909, and the fact that he taught me his full method of manipulating seances, he can then form some conception of the extent to which the most intelligent minds can be led astray by what seem to them phenomena, but to me, mere problems susceptible of lucid explanation.
CHAPTER III
DANIEL DUNGLAS HOME
Following the first seances of the “Fox Sisters,” in 1848, mediums sprang up all over the country like mushrooms but of this multitude there have not been more than a dozen whose work, in spite of repeated exposure, is still pointed to as proof of Spiritualism, and whose names have found a permanent place in connection with its development and history. Of these, one of the most conspicuous and lauded of his type and generation was Daniel Dunglas Home. He was the forerunner of the mediums whose forte is fleecing by presuming upon the credulity of the subject. A new and fertile field was opened and from that time to the present day there have been numerous cases of mediums falling into the clutches of the law as a direct result of using his methods, but Home had characteristics which went far in many cases to keep him out of trouble. Outwardly a lovable character with a magnetic personality and a great fondness for children; suave, captivating to the last degree, a good dresser fond of displaying jewelry; an appearance of ill-health which aroused sympathy and with an assumption of piety and devotion to established forms of religious worship, he made his way easily and found favor with many who would have spurned him under other conditions and this too, strange as it may seem, in spite of persistent rumors of immorality in his private life.