But Miss A. still sat unmoved and helpless, so we waited. Presently she remarked that the influence wanted her to do something, she knew not what, only that she had to get up and go across the room, which she did with the feeble step of an old man. She crossed the room and took down from the wall a colored French lithograph, and, coming to me, laid it on the table before me, and by gesture called my attention to it. She then went through the pantomime of stretching a sheet of paper on a drawing-board, then that of sharpening a lead pencil, following it up by tracing the outlines of the subject in the lithograph. Then followed in similar pantomime the choosing of a water-color pencil, noting carefully the necessary fineness of the point, and then the washing-in of a drawing, broadly. Miss A. seemed much amused by all this, but as she knew nothing of drawing she understood nothing of it. Then with the pencil and her pocket handkerchief she began taking out the lights, "rubbing-out," as the technical term is. This seemed to me so contrary to what I conceived to be the execution of Turner that I interrupted with the question, "Do you mean to say that Turner rubbed out his lights?" to which she gave the affirmative sign. I asked further if in a drawing which I then had in my mind, the well-known "Llanthony Abbey," the central passage of sunlight and shadow through rain was done in that way, and she again gave the affirmative reply, emphatically. I was so firmly convinced to the contrary that I was now persuaded that there was a simulation of personality, such as was generally the case with the public mediums, and I said to my brother, who had not heard any of my questions, that this was another humbug, and then repeated what had passed, saying that Turner could not have worked in that way. After this I did not care to follow the conversation further.
My object in maintaining the mental questioning was, of course, to prevent Miss A. from getting any clue to the meaning of the questions, and I carried the precaution so far as not to look at her while forming the questions in my mind. I also ascertained that she knew nothing of drawing, or of Turner; but while I could not resist the evidence of a mental activity absolutely independent of that of Miss A., I was convinced that there was no question of actual identity. Both the doctor and I were, however, satisfied that on the part of Miss A. there was no attempt at deception, and that the phenomenon, whatever might be the case as to identity, was a genuine manifestation of an intelligence independent of that of the girl. Six weeks later I sailed for England, and, on arriving in London, I went at once to see Ruskin, and told him the whole story. He declared the contrariness manifested by the medium to be entirely characteristic of Turner, and had the drawing in question down for examination. We scrutinized it closely, and both recognized beyond dispute that the drawing had been executed in the way that Miss A. indicated. Ruskin advised me to send an account of the affair to the "Cornhill," which I did; but it was rejected, as might have been expected in the state of public opinion at that time, and I can easily imagine Thackeray putting it into the basket in a rage.
I offer no interpretation of the facts which I have here recorded, but I have no hesitation in saying that they completed and fixed my conviction of the existence of invisible and independent intelligences to which the phenomena were due. The question of the identity of these intelligences—which we may, without prejudging their nature, leaving that to be determined by more complete experiences, consider disembodied—with the persons in the flesh whose names they use, is one on which I have great difficulty in forming a conclusion, though, as a rule, my experience in "circles" has been that the imposture was too gross to deceive a person of ordinary intellectual power. The two cases which I have related in the foregoing pages are the only ones in which I have ever been able to find the color of an identification, and of the probability of this I leave the reader to judge. More on the internal than on the external evidence, I consider the probability in the two cases narrated to be in favor of the identity; beyond that I am unwilling to go.
Of the actuality of a disembodied and individual being which, for want of more intelligence of its nature, we call a "spirit," I have no more doubt than I have of my own embodied and individual existence. If, to my philosophic and skeptical critics, this is an indication of intellectual weakness, and excites contempt of my faculties, I cannot help it. I will be honest with myself and the world, have the courage of my convictions, and take the consequences; and I am of the opinion that, if all the cultivated minds which, having studied the subject, agree with me in my conclusions were to be as frank as I am, there would be a large body of witnesses in accord with me. If the inference of a disembodied intelligence, as the source of such phenomena, is difficult of acceptation, that of fraud and collusion is inadmissible, and that of hallucination more difficult than that of the spiritual origin. Of the different hypotheses, then, I take that which seems the most satisfactory one in view of the ascertained facts. But "seeing is believing," and I can fully appreciate the incredulity of reasonable minds as to phenomena which are not in line with our ordinary experience of life, and which, at the same time, are of extreme rarity, and require, for their investigation and actual observation, great patience and the sacrifice of much time and the exercise of much tolerance, surrounded, as the subject is, by gross charlatanry and fraud. But if the beginnings of physical life are worth the years of patient study which science has accorded them, I must believe that the final issue of it is worth the time and study needed to arrive at such results as would, I am convinced, finally crown them. If it were worth while, I could, I am persuaded, define, a priori, the lines of investigation along which we should move, but each investigator will choose his own route, and better so.
Two conclusions I draw from my investigations as immovably established, so far as I am concerned. The first is that there are about us, and with certain facilities for making themselves understood by us, spiritual individualities; and, second, that the human being possesses spiritual senses, parallel with the physical, by which it sees what the physical sense cannot see, and hears what is inaudible to the physical ear. And my general and, I think, logical conclusion is that the spiritual senses appertain to a spiritual body which survives the death of the physical.
CHAPTER X
LIFE IN THE WILDERNESS
Under the stimulus, in part, of the desire for something out of the ordinary line of subject for pictures, and in part from the hope that going into the "desert" might quicken the spiritual faculties so tantalized by the experience of the circles, I decided to pass the next summer in the great primeval forest in the northern part of New York State, known as the Adirondack wilderness. It was then little known or visited; a few sportsmen and anglers had penetrated it, but for the most part it was known only to the lumberers. Here and there, at intervals of ten to twenty miles, there were log houses, some of which gave hospitality in the summer to the sportsmen, and in the winter to the "loggers" who worked for the great lumber companies. It was a tract of a hundred miles, more or less, across, mainly unbroken wildwood, cut up by rapid rivers, impossible of navigation, otherwise than by canoes and light skiffs which could be carried from one sheet of water to another on the backs of the woodsmen, around the cascades, and over tracts of intervening land through virgin forests, without roads, and, to a large extent, without paths. I hoped here to find new subjects for art, spiritual freedom, and a closer contact with the spiritual world—something beyond the material existence. I was ignorant of the fact that art does not depend on a subject, nor spiritual life on isolation from the rest of humanity, and I found, what a correct philosophy would have before told me, nature with no suggestion of art, and the dullest form of intellectual or spiritual existence.
One of my artist friends—S.R. Gifford, landscape painter, like myself on the search for new subjects—had been, the year before, to the Saranac Lakes, and gave me the clue to the labyrinth, and I found on Upper Saranac Lake a log cabin, inhabited by a farmer whose family consisted of a wife, a son, and a daughter. There I enjoyed a backwoods hospitality at the cost of two dollars a week for board and lodging, and passed the whole summer, finding a subject near the cabin, at which I painted assiduously for nearly three months. I passed the whole day in the open air, wore no hat, and only cloth shoes, hoping that thus the spiritual life would have easier access to me. I carried no gun, and held the lives of beast and bird sacred, but I drew the line at fishing, and my rod and fly-book provided in a large degree the food of the household; for trout swarmed. I caught in an hour, during that summer, in a stream where there has not been a trout for years, as large a string as I could carry a mile. All the time that I was not painting I was in the boat on the lake, or wandering in the forest.
My quest was an illusion. The humanity of the backwoods was on a lower level than that of a New England village—more material if less worldly; the men got intoxicated, and some of the women—nothing less like an apostle could I have found in the streets of New York. I saw one day a hunter who had come into the woods with a motive in some degree like mine—impatience of the restraints and burdens of civilization, and pure love of solitude. He had become, not bestialized, like most of the men I saw, but animalized—he had drifted back into the condition of his dog, with his higher intellect inert. He had built himself a cabin in the depth of the woods, and there he lived in the most complete isolation from human society he could attain. He interested me greatly, and as he stopped for the night at the cabin where I was living, we had considerable conversation. He cared nothing for books, but enjoyed nature, and only hunted in order to live, respecting the lives of his fellow-creatures within that limit. He only went to the "settlements" when he needed supplies, abstained from alcoholic drinks, the great enemy of the backwoodsman, and was happy in his solitude. As he was the first man I had ever met who had attempted the solution of the problem which so interested me,—the effect of solitude on the healthy intellect,—I encouraged him to talk, which he was inclined to do when he found that there was a real sympathy between us on this question.