Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/336

 320 CRITICAL STUDIES to find in them any sane and genuine worth, only with languid contemptuous curiosity, wondering to what depths of nervous disease, idiocy, lunacy, or swindling charlatanism human beings could sink in countries calling themselves civilised, without being committed to the hospital, the asylum, or the gaol : it was so evident that the mediums (this appears to be the approved "spiritist" plural) ranged from dis- eased and hysterical dupes to deep and damnable deceivers. The spirits of the noblest poets usually dictated such senseless and measureless balderdash (their metre being a gas-metre) that it was clear they had decayed into drivelling imbecile Strulbrugs in the other world. When, very rarely, a very small oasis in a very vast desert, a piece of any merit and melody was discovered, it was not beyond the achieve- ment of a person of ordinary intelligence and educa- tion, with a nervous temperament and the "fatal facility" in rhyming. So notoriously silly or worse are the vast majority of such alleged communications, that even Professor Wallace, during the Slade inquiry, said that he was interested only in the question of how the message was written, the message itself being very seldom of any value or significance. And in the exceedingly rare cases where the alleged com- munications and dictations are not contemptibly worthless or worse than worthless, what assurance have we of the honesty of the medium? The so- called improvisation may have been carefully com- posed beforehand, by the medium or some other knave cleverer at rhymes ; wherefore the saner or less mad world very promptly and properly commits such inspired productions to what Mr. Rossetti calls