As to the indication of a buried chapel, both this and the general impersonation of the old monks are intelligible to any man who has read the book itself, not Spiritualist accounts of it. Mr. Bond, an architect and archæologist, expected to be appointed to the charge of the ruins, and he and his friend Mr. Alleyne steeped themselves, all through the year 1907, in the literature of the subject. They read all that was known about Glastonbury, and lived for months in the medieval atmosphere. Then Mr. Alleyne took his pencil and began to write automatically. The general result is not strange; nor is it at all supernatural that he should have formed a theory about the lost chapel and conveyed this to paper in the guise of a message from one of the old monks.
The next work recommended to us is a short paper by Mr. Gerald Balfour called "The Ear of Dionysius" (published in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. xxix, March, 1917). The writing medium, Mrs. Verrall, a Cambridge lady of a highly cultivated and refined type and an excellent classical scholar, found in her automatic "script" on August 26, 1910, a reference to "the Ear of Dionysius." Three years and a-half later another writing medium, Mrs. Willett, got one of those rambling and incoherent messages, which are customary, in reference to "the Ear of Dionysius." This seemed to be more than a coincidence, as Mrs. Willett is no classical scholar. But Mr. Balfour candidly warns us that Mrs. Willett said that she had heard nothing about the earlier reference to the Ear of Dionysius in Mrs. Verrall's case. It would be remarkable if the fact had been kept entirely secret for three and a-half years, as some importance was attached to it in psychic circles, and we may prefer to trust Mr. Balfour's memory rather than Mrs. Willett's. He says that he feels sure that one day, in the long interval, Mrs. Willett asked him what the Ear of Dionysius was.
Mr. Balfour, however, believes that in the sequel we have fair evidence of spirit communication. The reader who is not familiar with these matters should know that a new test had been devised for controlling the origin of these messages. It was felt that if the "spirit" of one of the dead psychical researchers (who could no longer read or remember the sealed messages they had left) were to give an unintelligible message to one medium, a second unintelligible message to a second medium, and then the key to both to either or to a third medium, and if the contents of these messages were strictly withheld from the mediums (each knowing only her own part), a very definite proof of spirit origin would be afforded. Thus the ghost of Mr. Verrall or Mr. Myers might take a line of an obscure Greek poet, give one word of it to Mrs. Thompson, another to Mrs. Willett, and then point out the connection through Mrs. Verrall. Mr. Balfour claims that this was done in connection with the Ear of Dionysius. Mrs. Willett, who does not know Latin or Greek, got messages containing a number of classical allusions. Among them was one which no one could understand, and the key to this was some time afterwards given in the automatic writing of Mrs. Verrall.
The reader will now begin to understand the serious and respectable part of modern Spiritualism. I presume that these cultivated Spiritualists regard the "physical phenomena" of the movement and the ordinary mediums with the same contempt that I do. They know that fraud is being perpetrated daily, and that the history of the movement, since its beginning in 1848, has reeked with fraud. It is on these refined messages and cross-references that they would stake their faith.
But, while we readily grant that these things offer an arguable case and must not be dismissed with the disdain which we have shown in the previous chapters, we feel that the new basis is altogether insecure and inadequate. Two mediums get a reference to so remote and unlikely a thing as "the Ear of Dionysius." When you put it in this simple form it sounds impressive; but we saw that there was an interval of three and a-half years, and we do not feel at all sure that people so profoundly interested, so religiously eager, in these matters would succeed in keeping the first communication entirely from the ears of medium No. 2. In point of fact, Mr. Balfour tells us that he has a distinct recollection of being asked by Mrs. Willett, during the interval, what the Ear of Dionysius was. Mrs. Willett denies it. We shall probably prefer the disinterested memory of Mr. Balfour. Now, the very same weakness is found even in the second part of the story. For any evidential value it rests on two very large suppositions:—
1. That one medium knew absolutely nothing about the most interesting and promising development which was for months agitating the minds of her own friends.
2. That another medium heroically refrained from reading up any classical dictionaries or works on the subject, and reserved her mind strictly for whatever information the spirits might give her.
One can scarcely be called hypercritical if one has doubts about these suppositions. There does not seem to be any room for the theory either of telepathy or of spirit communication.
The two experiences I have just analysed are selected by Sir A. C. Doyle as the most convincing in the whole of the work of the more modern and more refined Spiritualists. I need not linger over other experiences of these automatic writers. For the most part, automatic writing provides only vapid or inaccurate stuff which is its own refutation. In the early years, when Franklin, Shakespeare, Plato, and all the most illustrious dead wrote nonsense of the most vapoury description, the situation was quite grotesque. Nor is this kind of thing yet extinct. There are mediums practising in London to-day who put the sitter in communication with the sages and poets of ancient times. In the very best of these cases there is a certain silliness about the communications which makes them difficult to read. Even the spirits of Myers and Verrall seem to be in a perpetual Bank-Holiday mood, making naive little puns and jokes, and talking in the rambling, incoherent way that scholars do only in hours of domestic dissipation. There is a world thirsting (it is said) for proof that the dead still live. Here are (it is said) men like W. T. Stead, Myers, Hodgson, Verrall, Sidgwick, Vice-Admiral Moore, Robert Owen, etc., at the "other end of the wire," as William James used to say. Yet, apparently, nothing can be said or done that quite clearly goes beyond the power of the mediums. The arrogance of the Spiritualists in the circumstances is amazing.
There are a dozen ways in which the theory could be rigorously tested. One has been tried and completely failed: the communication of messages which were left in proper custody before death. We shall, of course, presently have an announcement that such a message has been read. Some zealous Spiritualist will leave a sealed message, and will take care that some medium or other is able to read it. We may be prepared for such things. The fact is that half-a-dozen serious and reliable Spiritualists have tried this test, and it has hopelessly miscarried. Another test was that devised by Dr. Hodgson—to leave messages in cipher, though not sealed. This also has completely failed. A third test would be for one of these ghosts of learned Cambridge men, who are so fluent on things that do not matter, to dictate a passage from an obscure Greek poet through a medium who does not know Greek at the request of a sitter. It is a familiar and ancient trick for a medium to recite or write a passage in a foreign language. It has been learned beforehand. But let a scholar ask the spirit of a dead scholar to spell out through the ignorant medium there and then a specified line or passage within his knowledge. I have tried the experiment. It never succeeds. Another test would be for one of these ghostly scholars to dictate a word of a line of some obscure Greek poet (chosen by the sitter) to one medium (ignorant of Greek), and another word of the same line to another medium immediately afterwards, before there was the remotest possibility of communication.