Then there was Fowler, an American medical student and pious amateur medium, who was regarded with reverence by the American Spiritualists. I invite the reader's particular attention to this man, as he is one of those unpaid individuals who are supposed (by Spiritualists) to have no conceivable motive for cheating. Yet he lied and cheated in the most original fashion. He told his friends that ghostly men entered his bedroom at nights, produced ghostly pens and ink, and left messages in Hebrew on his table. An expert in Hebrew found that the message was a very bad copy of a passage from the Hebrew text of Daniel. This did not affect the faith of Spiritualists, who put a piece of parchment in Fowler's room for a further message. They had a rich reward. They found next day a spiritual manifesto signed by no less than fifty-six spirits, including some of the statesmen who had signed the Declaration of Independence.
The frauds were very gross in those early decades. Franklin, Washington, even Thomas Paine, sent hundreds of messages from the "Summerland." As time went on, Socrates, Plato, Sir I. Newton, Milton, Galileo, Aristotle, and nearly everybody whose name was in an encyclopædia, guided the automatic writers. When one reads the inane twaddle signed with their names, one wonders that even simple people could be deceived. Dante dictated a poem of three thousand lines in the richest provincial American. One automatic writer wrote, under inspiration, a book of a hundred thousand words. It is estimated that there were two thousand writing mediums in the United States alone four years after the foundation of the movement.
Mrs. Piper was chiefly an automatic writer in the latter part of her famous career as a medium, but we need scarcely discuss further her accomplishments. In her later years she said that she did not claim to be controlled by spirits, and this is sometimes wrongly described as a confession of fraud. What she directly meant was that she did not profess any opinion as to the source of the knowledge she gave to sitters. She seemed to favour the theory of telepathy. When, however, we remember that she spoke constantly in the name of spirits (Longfellow, Phinuit, Pelham, Myers, etc.), the plea seems curious. Those who believe that she was really in a sort of trance-state, and knew not what she was doing, may be disposed to accept Podmore's theory, that her subconscious personality dramatized these various spirits or supposed spirits. Some of us do not like this idea of trance. In the hundreds of exact records of proceedings with mediums that I have read, I have not seen a page that suggested a genuine "trance," but I have noted scores and scores of passages which showed that the medium feigned to be in a trance, but was very wide awake.
Mrs. Thompson is another clairvoyant and automatic writer who has been much appreciated by modern Spiritualists. It is well to recall that before 1898 she was a medium for "physical phenomena." She even brought about materializations. Then she met Mr. Myers, and her powers assumed a more refined form. Dr. Hodgson, that quaint mixture of blunt criticism and occasional credulity, had six sittings with her, and roundly stated that she was a fraud. The correct information which she gave him was, he said, taken from letters to which she had access, or from works of reference like Who's Who. In one case, which made a great impression, she gave some remarkably abstruse and correct information. It was afterwards found that the facts were stated in an old diary which had belonged to her husband. She herself produced the diary, and said that she had never read it; so, of course, everybody believed her. When Professor Sidgwick died, in 1900, his "spirit" used to communicate through her. She reproduced his manner, and even his writing (which she said she had never seen), very fairly; but she could give no communication from him of "evidential" value.
The impersonation of dead people by the "entranced" medium makes a great impression on Spiritualists. It is difficult to understand why. One medium quite convinced a friend of mine by such a performance. She sat, in the circle, in a trance one day, when she suddenly rose from her chair, stroked an imaginary moustache, and began to speak in a gruff voice. "He"—the young lady had become a cavalry man—explained in a dazed way that he had died at Knightsbridge Barracks on the previous day, and gave his name. Great was the joy of the elect on finding afterwards that a soldier of the name had died at Knightsbridge on the previous day.
It was quite childish. It is just by learning such out-of-the-way facts, as they easily can, and making use of them, that the mediums keep up their reputations. There was no reason whatever why the medium should not have learned of the death and made so profitable a use of it. Stainton Moses often did such things. One day he was possessed by the spirit of a cabman who said that he had been killed on the streets of London that very afternoon. By an unusual oversight the spirit did not give his name. It was afterwards found that the accident was reported in an evening paper which Stainton Moses might have seen just before the séance; and, by a curious coincidence, the reporter had not given the cabman's name. In other cases, where mediums had been invited to districts with which they were not familiar, yet they gave quite accurate details about local dead, it was found on inquiry that the information might have been gathered from the stones in the local cemetery.
A common retort of the Spiritualist, when you point out the possibility of the medium impersonating the dead, is that, "if she did so, she must be one of the cleverest actresses in England." You are asked, triumphantly, why the lady should be content with a few pounds a week as a despised medium, when she might be making five thousand a year on a stage. Any person who has seen these "trances" will know the value of their "dramatic" art. Almost anybody could do it. The medium makes from three to five pounds a week by such things, but if she tried the stage she would have, at the most, a minor part with fifty or sixty pounds a year. Spiritualists get their judgments weirdly distorted by their bias. I need only quote the extravagant language in which Sir A. C. Doyle refers to Mr. Vale Owen's trash or Mrs. Spencer's picture of Christ. He makes the miracle in which he wishes to believe.
Two particular cases of spirit messages by automatic writing have lately been pressed upon us, and we must briefly examine them. One is given in a book by Mr. F. Bligh Bond, called The Gate of Remembrance, which is recommended to us by Sir A. C. Doyle as one of the five particularly convincing works which he would have us read. He again fails to tell his readers that Mr. Bligh Bond draws a very different conclusion than his own from the facts. He has a mystical theory of a universal memory or consciousness, a sort of ocean into which the memories of the dead have flowed. He does not believe that the individual spirits of the dead monks of pre-Reformation days came along and dictated their views through his automatic-writing friend.
Any person, however, who reads the book impartially will see no need for either the Spiritualist view or Mr. Bond's. The main point is that, through Mr. Bond's friend, Mr. John Alleyne, what purported to be the ghosts of the old monks of Glastonbury Abbey wrote quite vivid sketches of their medieval life in the Abbey and, particularly, suggested the position and general features of a chapel that was at the time unknown. As to the character or impersonation of the monks, which seems to Spiritualists so impressive, we are told by experts on medieval language that it will not sustain criticism. The language is quaint and pleasant to read, but it is not consistent either in old English or Latin. It is the language of a man who is familiar with medieval English and Latin, but does not speak it as his own language, and so often trips. It is, in other words, Mr. John Alleyne writing old English and medieval Latin, and stumbling occasionally.