Page:Saints or Spirits, Agnes Repplier, 1920.pdf/5

1920.], who communicates with the sitter. Naturally something is lost in this multiplicity of parts, and naturally, as Lodge feelingly observes, "a great deal of rubbish comes through." One of "Raymond's" controls was an American Indian named "Redfeather," and another a little girl, Indian or Negro, named "Feda," who must have exasperated his family to the verge of madness.

The Spiritists are logical in asserting that the nature of the communications received from the dead cannot disqualify their validity. If it be proven that the messages are genuine, our disappointment at their triviality is not a determining factor. It does, however, materially lessen the number of intelligent converts to Spiritism. Sensitive minds are repelled by the earthiness of souls who have escaped from earth; practical minds by their incompetence. "If anybody would endow me," wrote Huxley, "with the faculty of listening to the chatter of old women and curates in the nearest Cathedral town, I should decline the privilege, having better things to do. And if the folk in the spiritual world do not talk more wisely and sensibly than their friends report them to do, I put them in the same category."

Mæterlinck, that great lover of borderlands who dwells preferably in the shadows, finds the company of accredited spirits (I use the term only to designate those who are introduced to us with the usual formalities) to be inexpressibly burdensome and depressing. He is not incredulous. He can relate with enviable gravity the details of an evening call paid by a monk who had lain in the cloisters of the Abbaye de Saint-Wandrille since 1693, and who broke a sleep of two centuries that he might spin a table on one leg for the diversion of the poet's guests. The simplicity of this form of entertainment was accepted by Mæterlinck with a tolerant shrug; but his taste, his scholarship, his vivid and delicate imagination revolt from the fruitless chatter of the séance.

"Why," he asks, "do the dead jealously hug the narrow strip of territory which memory occupies on the confines of both worlds, and from which only indecisive evidence can reach us? Are there then no other outlets, no other horizons? Why do they tarry about us, stagnant in their little pasts, when, free from the flesh, they might wander at ease over the virgin stretches of space and time? Do they not know that the sign