What I Remember, Volume 1

But other guests arrived, Sir David Brewster I remember among them, and Daniel had to be summoned to the business of the evening. This was commenced by our all placing ourselves round a very large and very heavy old-fashioned mahogany dining table, where we sat in expectation of whatever should occur. Before long little crackings were heard, in the wood of the table apparently. Then it quivered, became more and more agitated, was next raised first at one end and then at the other, and finally was undeniably raised bodily from the ground. At that moment Sir David Brewster and myself, each acting on his own uncommunicated impulse, precipitated ourselves from our chairs under the table. The table was seen to be for a moment or two hovering in the air, perhaps some four or five inches from the floor, without its being possible to detect any means by which it could have been moved.

I said to Sir David, as our heads were close together under the table, and we were on “all fours” on the floor, “Does it not seem that this table is raised by some means wholly inexplicable?” “Indeed it would seem so!” he replied. But he wrote a letter to the Times the next day, or a day or two after, in which he gave an account of his visit to Ealing, but ended by denying that he had seen anything remarkable. But it is a fact that he did do and say what I have related.

This was the sum of what occurred. There was no pretence of the presence of any spiritual visitor. I may observe that although an ordinarily strong man might have lifted either end of the table while the other end remained on the ground, I am persuaded that no man could have raised it bodily, unless perhaps by placing his shoulders under the centre of it.

After the table exhibition Mr. Hume fell into a sort of swoon or trance. And it was then that he uttered the often-quoted words, “When Daniel recovers give him some bottled porter!” which was accordingly done! It may be observed, however, that he did appear to be much exhausted.

Various little fragments of experiences, and the increasing amount of attention, which the world was giving to the subject, had kept the matter in my mind, till some years afterwards I had an opportunity of inviting Mr. Hume to visit me in my house in Florence. He came, and stayed with us for a month. And during the whole of that time—every evening as it seems to my remembrance, though I have no diary which records the fact—we had frequent experiments of his “mediumship.”

Of course it is (happily for the reader) out of the question for me to attempt to give any detailed record of the proceedings and experiences of those repeated séances. I can only select a few facts which appeared to me most striking at the time, and add the general result as to the impression produced on my mind.

All our Florentine friends and acquaintances were eager to have an opportunity of passing an evening with the already celebrated medium. We generally limited our number to about eight persons; but pretty regularly had as many as that every evening. The performance usually began by crackings and oscillations of the round table at which we sat. Then would come more distinct raps; then the declaration that a visitor from the spirit world was present, then the demand for whom the said visit was intended, to which a reply was “knocked out,” by raps indicating the letters required to form the desired name as the letters of the alphabet, always on the table, were rapidly run over. Sometimes a mistake was made, and an unintelligible word produced in consequence of too great haste in doing this. And then the process had to be gone through again. The medium never corrected any such mistake at the moment it was made, but seemed to await the completion of the process as the rest did.

One or more “spirits” came, to the best of my recollection, every evening. Nor could I detect any sort of favouritism, or motive of any sort for the selection of the parties said to be visited. This is the sort of thing that would occur: There was present a well known and much respected English banker, established in Florence, a hale, robust, cheery sort of man, and a general favourite—the last man in the world one would say to be credited with nervous impressionability. A “spirit” was announced as having “come for him.” Who is it? A name was rapped out in the manner described. The elderly banker declared that he had never had any friend or relative of that name, and had never heard it before. A second time the name was spelled out while the banker sat thrashing out his recollections. Suddenly he struck his forehead with his hand, and exclaimed, “By Heaven! it is true! Nanny ——” (I forget the name.) “She was my nurse in Yorkshire more than half a century ago!” Of course those who do not understand that scepticism is frequently more credulous than faith, say at once that Mr. Hume, in the exercise of his profession, like the gipsies in the exercise of theirs, had made it his business to discover the former existence of Nanny ——, and her connection with the person he was bent on befooling. But taking into consideration the total severance of the old banker’s infancy both as to years and locality from any of his then surroundings; the fact that it was so long since he had heard the name in question mentioned, that he had himself entirely forgotten it; and the further fact that there was nobody in Florence who had any connection with him or his family in his early years, and the circumstance that he that evening saw Mr. Hume for the first time, I confess that it seems to me that the improbability of any proposed explanation of the mystery must be incalculably great indeed, for a solution the improbability of which approaches so very near to impossibility to be preferably accepted.

Here is one other case, which I will give both because the person on whose testimony the value of it depends, was one on whose accurate veracity I could depend as on my own, and because it illustrates one specialty of Mr. Hume’s performances which I have not yet spoken of. This was a sensation of being touched, which was frequently experienced by many of those present. This touching almost invariably took the form of a knee being grasped under the table, or a hand being laid upon it. In the case I am about to relate this was experienced in a more remarkable manner.

A very highly valued old female servant, who had lived in my then wife’s family since her birth, and had followed her when she married me, had some months previously died in my house. The affection which had subsisted between her and my wife was a very old and a very strong one. Now there was, it would seem, an old nursery pet name, by which this woman had been long years before in the habit of calling my wife. I had never heard it, or of it. My wife herself had never heard it for very many years. She and the old servant had never for years and years spoken on the subject. But one evening this pet name was very distinctly spelled; and my wife declared that she at the same time felt a sort of pressure at her side, as she sat in the circle, as if some person or thing had been endeavouring to find a place by her side. But for all that, my wife, though utterly mystified and incapable of suggesting any theory on the subject, was a strong disbeliever in all Mr. Hume’s pretensions. She strongly disliked the man. And were it not that, as we all know, her sex never permits their estimate of facts to be influenced by their feelings, it might be supposed possible that this biassed her mind upon the subject!

I could add dozens of cases to the above two, but they were all very similar; and it is sufficient to say that the same sort of thing occurred over and over again.

I may mention, however, that I observed that any question addressed to the supposed spirits bearing on theology and matters of creed were invariably answered according to the views of the questioner. Catholics, Protestants, materialists, were all impartially confirmed in the convictions of their diverse persuasions.

Also I should not omit to mention that my wife, taking her occasion from Mr. Hume’s complaints of his own weakness of lungs, spoke of my brother’s death in Belgium and of my life at Ostend, and at a sitting some few days afterwards asked if she could be told where I had last seen my brother on earth. The answer came promptly, “At Ostend.” But the truth is, as the reader knows, that I took my leave of him on board the Ostend steamer in the Thames.

My account of these sittings would not be as judicially accurate as I have endeavoured to make it, however, were I to omit the statement that Mr. Hume on two or three occasions offered to cause “spirit hands” to become visible to us. The room was darkened for this purpose; and at the opposite side of a rather large table from that at which the spectators were sitting, certain forms of hands did become faintly visible. To me they appeared like long kid gloves stuffed with some substance. But I am far from asserting that they were such.

On the whole, the impression left on my mind by my month-long intercourse with Mr. Hume was a disagreeable one of doubt and perplexity. I was not left with the conviction that he was an altogether trustworthy and sincere man. Nor was I fully persuaded of the reverse. I saw nothing which appeared to me to compel the conclusion that some agency unknown to the ascertained and recognised laws of nature was at work. But I did hear many communications made in Mr. Hume’s presence in the manner which has been described, which seemed to me to be wholly inexplicable by any theory I could bring to bear upon them. It may be observed that no theory of thought-reading will serve the turn, for in many cases the facts, circumstances, or names communicated were evidently not in the thoughts of the persons to whom they were so communicated. Of course it may be answered, “Ah! but however ‘evident’ that may have seemed to you, the facts were in the thoughts of the parties in question.” To this I can only reply that to me, my very complete knowledge of the persons in question, and of their veracity—one of them, as in the case above related, being my own wife—renders the explanation suggested absolutely inadmissible.

I have seen at various subsequent periods a great many professors of “mediumship,” and their performances. I was present at many sittings given by Mrs. G.——, a huge mountain of a woman, very uneducated, apparently good-natured and simple, but with a tendency to become disagreeable when her attempts at communication with the unseen world were declared to be failures.

I will give here the copy of a letter which I wrote to the secretary of “The Dialectical Society,” which had applied to me for my “experiences” on the subject. I cannot at the present day sum up any better the conclusions to which they led me.

If I am asked what, upon the whole, is my present state of mind upon the subject, I can only say that it is that unpleasant one expressed in Lord Chancellor Eldon’s often-quoted words, “I doubt.”

Before, however, quitting the subject, my gossip about which has run to a length only excusable on the ground of the very general interest that has been attracted by it, I will give two more excerpts from my recollections, which relate to cases respecting which I have no doubt. They both refer, however, to purely physical phenomena.

A French professor of “animal magnetism” came to Florence. His name, I think, was Lafontaine. He had a young girl with him, his patient. He brought her to my house, in which there was a long room, at one end of which he directed me to stand, then put the girl immediately in front of me, and told me to hold her, so as to prevent her from coming to him, when, standing at the further end of the room, he should draw her to him. I accordingly placed my arms around her waist, interlacing my fingers in front of her. She was a small, slight girl, and I was at that time a somewhat exceptionally strong man. The operator then standing at the distance of some twenty feet or more made “passes” as it were, beckoning her with his hands to come to him. She struggled forwards. I held her back with all my force, but was dragged after her towards the magnetiser. This may be accepted as an absolutely accurate and certain fact.

This same Lafontaine had entirely failed in attempts to magnetise me, and in telling me, as he promised to do, what I in my house was doing at a given moment while he was absent.

My second excerpt concerns also my own experience, and shall be given with equally truthful accuracy.

My wife, my wife’s sister, and myself, had been spending the evening in the house of Mr. Seymour Kirkup, an artist, who, once well known in the artistic world, lived on in Florence to a great age after that world had forgotten him. A girl, his daughter by a servant who lived several years in his house, and who also had pretended to very strongly-developed spiritualistic powers, developed, as he asserted, similar powers in a very wonderful degree. And during his latter years the old man absolutely and entirely lived, in every respect, according to the advice and dictates of “the spirits,” as oracularly declared by Imogene, for that was her name. In short, she was a clever, worthless hussy, and he was a besotted old man. Our visit to his house was to witness some of Imogene’s performances. There was also present a Colonel Bowen, who was a convinced believer.

I, my wife, and sister-in-law detected unmistakably the girl’s clumsy attempts at legerdemain, but knew poor old Kirkup far too well to make any attempt to convict her. But as we walked home with our minds full of the subject, we said, “Let us try whether we can produce any effect upon a table, since that seems the regulation first step in these mysteries; and, at least, we shall have the certainty of not being befooled by trickery.” So, on reaching home, we took a table—rather a remarkable one. It was small, not above eighteen or twenty inches across the top of it. But it was very much heavier than any ordinary table of that size, the stem of it being a massive bit of ancient chestnut-wood carving, which I had adapted to that purpose.

Well, in a minute or two the table began to move very unmistakably. We were startled, and began to think that the ladies’ dresses must have, unconsciously to them, pressed against it. We stood back therefore, taking care that nothing but the tips of our fingers touched the table. It still moved! We said that some unconscious exertion of muscular force must have caused the movement, and finally we suspended our fingers about an inch or so above the surface of the table, taking the utmost care to touch it in no way whatever. The table still turned, and that to such an extent that, entirely untouched, it turned itself over, and fell to the ground.

I can only observe of this, as the little boy said who was accused of relating an impossibility as a fact, “I don’t say it is possible, I only say it is true!”

In Kirkup’s case his entire and never-varying conviction of the truthfulness of Miss Imogene’s material manifestations and spiritual revelations was the more remarkable in that he had for many years—for all his life, for aught I know to the contrary—entertained and professed the most thorough persuasion of the futility and absurdity of all belief that the soul of man survived material death. His tenets on this subject are the more strongly impressed on my memory by an absurd incident that occurred to my present wife in connection with his materialistic theories.

He and she were one day talking upon the subject, as they sat tête-à-tête on opposite sides of a table. Now Kirkup was very deaf—worse by a great deal than I am—and my wife failing to make him hear a question she put to him, and having no other writing materials at hand, hastily drew a card from her card-case, and pencilled on the back of it: “What are your grounds for assurance that the visible death of the body is the death of the spirit also?” He read, and addressed himself to reply, letting the card fall on the table between them, which she, thinking only of the matter in discussion, mechanically put back into her card-case, and—left at the next house at which she happened to be making a morning call!

Kirkup’s conversion to spiritualism was so complete that, as I have said, his entire life was shaped according to the dictates which Miss Imogene chose to represent as coming from her spiritual visitors. The old man had lived for very many years in Florence. All the interests which still bound him to life were there, and he was much attached to the city in which so large a portion of his long life had been passed. But Imogene one day announced that “the spirits” declared that he must go and live in Leghorn! Of course the blow to the old man was a terrible one, but he meekly and unhesitatingly obeyed, and submitted to be uprooted when he was past eighty and packed off to Leghorn! I discovered subsequently—what I might have guessed at the time—that the good-for-nothing jade had a lover at Leghorn. Kirkup’s new faith in the existence of a soul in man, separable from his body, continued firm, I believe, till his death, which occurred shortly afterwards.

I have at various times and in various countries been present at the performances of spiritualistic mediums (a monstrous word, but one can’t write media), and always with an uniformly similar result in one respect. No non-material experience whatever has ever been vouchsafed to me myself. Material phenomena of a very surprising nature, and altogether unaccountable in accordance with any received physical theories, I have seen in great abundance. And I must in justice say that the performances of Messrs. Maskelyne and Cooke, which attracted so much attention in Piccadilly, masterly as they were as exhibitions of legerdemain, did not by any means succeed in proving the imposture of the pretensions of Hume and others, by doing the same things. I think the Piccadilly performances did achieve this as regards the tying and loosening of knots in a dark cabinet. But when one of the performers above mentioned proceeded to “float in the air,” he only demonstrated the impossibility of doing by any means known to his art, that which Hume—or Home—was declared on the most indisputable testimony to have done. Mr. Maskelyne certainly “floated in the air” above the heads of the spectators, but I saw very unmistakably the wire by which he was suspended. It may not have been wire, but I saw the cord, thread, or whatever it may have been, by which he was suspended. Nor is it possible to doubt that the gentlemen, who saw, or supposed themselves to have seen, Mr. Hume floating in the air above them, would have failed to detect any such artifice as that by which the professor of legerdemain was enabled to do the same. And then we must not lose sight of the all-important difference between the two performances, arising from the fact, that the one performer has at command all the facilities afforded by a locale in which he has had abundant opportunity of making every preparation which the resources of his art could suggest to him; whereas the other exhibits his wonders under circumstances absolutely excluding the possibility of any such preparation.

But I never saw Mr. Hume float in the air! The only physical phenomena which I saw produced by him consisted in the moving and lifting of tables—in some cases very heavy tables. But I have witnessed in very numerous cases, communications made by the medium to individuals who have declared it to have been absolutely impossible that Mr. Hume should by any ordinary means have known the facts communicated. And it has appeared to me, knowing all the circumstances, to have been as nearly impossible as can well be conceived without being absolutely so.

Here is one more remarkable case—one out of dozens of such. A middle-aged Italian gentleman of the Jewish persuasion, asked that the spirit of his father, who, it was stated by the medium, was present, should mention where he and his son, then communicating with him, last met on earth. It should be stated that the inquirer, having abandoned the faith of his fathers, professed entire disbelief in any existence of the soul, or any future life. The answer to his query was spelled out in the manner I have already described, a certain Italian city being named. I watched the face of the sceptical inquirer as the letters were “rapped out” and gradually completed the name required. And I needed no confession of the fact from him to know that the answer had been correctly given. I thought the man would have fallen from his chair. He became ghastly pale, and trembled all over. He was in truth very terribly impressed and affected, but—and the phenomenon is a very curious, though by no means an uncommon one—a few days afterwards the impression had entirely faded from his mind. He continued fully to admit that the fact which had occurred was altogether inexplicable, but wholly refused to believe that it involved any supposition inconsistent with his strictly materialistic creed.

In the above case, as in that of the banker given above, it may of course be said that it was within the bounds of possibility that Mr. Hume should have previously ascertained the fact that he stated. It is, of course, impossible for me here to explain to the reader every detail of the circumstances that seem to me to render such an explanation wholly inadmissible. I can only say that to a mind as entirely open upon the subject as I think my mind is, the supposition in question appears so improbable, that it fails to impress me as a possibility.

On the other hand, I have to say that every attempt of a similar kind, whether by Mr. Hume or by any other so-called medium, in which I myself have been the subject of the experiment, has absolutely and wholly failed. Mr. Hume never, to the best of my remembrance, introduced or announced the presence of any spirit “for me.” I was like the boy at school whom no relative ever comes to see! The Mrs. G—— who has been mentioned at an earlier page, announced upon one occasion the presence of my mother, with results which would have sufficed to prove very satisfactorily that my mother’s spirit was not there, if I had previously fully believed the case to have been otherwise.

I once went to visit the then celebrated Alexis in Paris. He knew that I was a resident in Florence, and began operations by proposing to describe to me my house there. Of course such an experiment admitted of almost every conceivable kind of mystification and uncertainty. I told him that the proposed description would necessarily occupy more of his time than seemed to me needed for producing the conviction of the reality of his power, which I was anxious to acquire; and that it would be abundantly sufficient for that purpose if he would simply tell me the number composed of four figures which I had written on a piece of paper, and sealed in a (perfectly non-transparent) packet. He refused to make the attempt.

Many years subsequently I attended the séances of a gentleman in London, whose performances attracted a good deal of attention at the time—of an unfavourable description, for the most part—and whose chief specialty consisted in enclosing a piece of slate pencil loosely between two ordinary framed slates, securely tied together, and awaiting communications to be made by writing produced on the slate by the pencil thus enclosed acting automatically. I did see written words thus produced, where to the best of my observation there had been no words before the slates were (quite securely) tied together. Nor could I form any theory or guess as to the manner in which this writing was produced under circumstances which seemed to make it perfectly impossible that it should be so produced. But the words so written conveyed no remarkable or surprising information—and indeed to the best of my recollection had little meaning at all.

Thus once again that portion of the performance which was, or might have been, of the nature of sleight of hand, was done so well as to cause much puzzlement and surprise; while what may be called the spiritual part of the promised phenomenon failed entirely.

I have witnessed the performances of sundry other mediums—I hate to write the word!—always with the same net result. That is to say, the strictly physical phenomena witnessed were in very many cases—not in all—utterly unaccountable and incomprehensible. The statement that the performances of many masters of legerdemain are also unaccountable and incomprehensible appears to me, while I fully admit the truth of it, to be of very little value. The phenomena produced by these professors are in almost every case totally different in kind, and are in every case placed in a wholly different category by the fact that the performers of them have the assistance of tools and means—the highly-skilled preparation and combination of which constitute a very important (if not the most essential) part of their professional equipment—and of the resources of their own prepared locale. Furthermore, I cannot forget the testimony of that “prince of conjurors,” Bosco, to the effect that the phenomena, which I declared to him I had seen, were entirely unachievable by any of the resources of his art.

Above all I have the certain knowledge (resting not only on my own very perfect recollection, but on the unvarying testimony of the two other persons engaged in the experiment) that a table did move much and violently, as recorded above, while wholly and certainly untouched by any human hands or persons, and uncommunicated with—if I may use such an expression—save by the minds of the operators.

The net conclusion, therefore, of my rather extensive experience in the matter is, that as regards phenomena purely physical, such have been and are frequently produced by the practisers of “animal magnetism”—or by whatever name it may be preferred to call it—of a nature wholly inexplicable by any of the theories or suggestions which have been adduced for the explanation of them.

With regard to non-physical phenomena—that is to say, such as imply the abnormal exercise of intelligences, whether incarnate or disembodied, outside the intelligence of the individual experimenting—I have to testify that I have heard from many highly credible persons the statement of their own experience of such communication with intelligences other than their own. And I have heard such statements immediately on the occurrence of the facts. But I have never in my own person received or been made the subject of any such.

INDEX.

A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, Y, Z