Nor does the poet omit the development of Receptivity:—
'I'm eyes, ears, mouth of me, one gaze and gape,
Nothing eludes me, everything's a hint,
Handle and help.'
At the last the youth, once an innocent jester, pours a stream of half-believed lies upon the man who, having caught him in his fraud, lets him go with a chance to start life afresh.
Browning does not carry the idea of repression as far as I do, Sludge producing clouds of rationalisations to cover his inconsistencies. The idea of dissociation does not present itself, but the whole picture can be taken to represent the evolution of many mediums with their mixture of belief and deception.
Just as in the hysteric we meet with mechanical ways of deceit, shown by self-inflicted injuries, so in the medium we meet with mechanical tricks for the production of spurious phenomena. In both cases fully-conscious deceit, reconciled to the moral complexes by rationalisations, is the easiest explanation, but sometimes fully-conscious deceit is unlikely.
There is a disappointing lack of originality in spiritualist literature, for the same stories of the marvellous are repeated in one book and another. The Fox Sisters, Slade, Eglington, Eusapia Palladino and others appear according to the fancy of the writer, and their fraudulent tricks may or may not be acknowledged. It is a peculiarity of spiritualist reasoning that if a medium is caught cheating it only proves that he was cheating when he was caught; if he is not caught next time, we must accept as genuine the phenomena then produced.
But no spiritualist writer can avoid the names of Home, Stainton Moses and Mrs. Piper, for they were never caught cheating; nevertheless, we apparently need testimonials at great length to their honesty. Mr. J. Arthur Hill gives two pages of testimonials to Stainton Moses, and repeats a story telling how the Reverend medium made an automatic drawing of a horse and truck and gave a spirit message concerning a man who had been killed that day under a steamroller in Baker Street. Mr. Hill says: 'Mr. Moses had passed through Baker Street in the afternoon, but had heard nothing of any such incident.'[26]
If Mr. Hill knew anything about dissociation he would not give us this oft-quoted but flimsy story. Whence does he obtain his evidence that the medium had heard nothing of the incident? Of course, from the honest personality of Mr. Stainton Moses himself.
But a story of some terrifying episode is often, by psychological technique, extracted from a war-strained soldier only to be repressed and honestly denied by the man a little while later. If the dissociated sufferer can deny the truth of an incident which, when recalled again, fills him with horror, then the denial by another Dissociate that he has heard of a street accident does not carry weight, even if we read a bookful of testimony to his honesty.
The accounts of this famous medium, who is still held in awe by believers, are full of such happenings. On another occasion the spirit in possession of him gave the names of members of a family who had died in India and were unknown to him or any one present. The names were verified by reference to the obituary column of The Times of a few days before. We can assume that the honest Stainton Moses did not read The Times, but that the dissociated Stainton Moses read and remembered.