curiosity. He and his more intimate friends, not marchionesses but
middle-class people, corresponded in a style of rather distasteful
effusiveness. He was a pleasant young man in a house, not a Don Juan.
I have never heard a whisper about light loves--unless Mr. Hamilton
Aïdé, to be quoted later, reports such a whisper--not a word against
his private character, except that he allowed a terribly vulgar rich
woman to adopt him, and give him a very large sum of money, later
withdrawn. We shall see that she probably had mixed motives both for
giving and for withdrawing the gift, but it was asserted, though on
evidence far from sound, that 'the spirits' had rapped out a command
to give Home some thirty thousand pounds. Spirits ought not to do
these things, and, certainly, it would have been wiser in Home to
refuse the widow's gold even if they did. Beyond this one affair, and
an alleged case of imposture at a _séance_, Home's private character
raised no scandals that have survived into our knowledge. It is a very
strange thing, as we shall see, that the origin of Home's miracles in
broad daylight or artificial light, could never be traced to fraud,
or, indeed, to any known cause; while the one case in which imposture
is alleged on first-hand evidence occurred under conditions of light
so bad as to make detection as difficult as belief in such
circumstances, ought to have been impossible. It is not easy to feel
sure that we have certainly detected a fraud in a dim light; but it is
absurd to believe in a miracle, when the conditions of light are such
as to make detection difficult.
Given this mild young musical man, the problems of how he achieved his
social successes, and how he managed to escape exposure, if he did his
miracles by conjuring, are almost equally perplexing. The second
puzzle is perhaps the less hard of the two, for Home did not make
money as a medium (though he took money's worth), and in private
society few seized and held the mystic hands that moved about, or when
they seized they could not hold them. The hands melted away, so people
said.
A sketch of Home's life must now be given.[16] He was born in 1833, at
Currie, a village near Edinburgh. In his later years he sent to his
second wife a photograph of the street of cottages beside the burn, in
one of which he first saw the light. His father had a right to bear
the arms of the Earls of Home, with a _brisure_, being the natural son
of Alexander, tenth Earl of Home.[17] The Medium's ancestor had
fought, or, according to other accounts, had shirked fighting, at
Flodden Field, as is popularly known from the ballad _The Sutors of
Selkirk_. The maiden name of Home's mother was Macneil. He was adopted
by an aunt, who, about 1842, carried the wondrous child to America. He
had, since he was four years old, given examples of second sight; it
was in the family. Home's mother, who died in 1850, was
second-sighted, as were her great-uncle, an Urquhart, and her uncle, a
Mackenzie. So far there was nothing unusual or alarming in Home's
case, at least to any intelligent Highlander. Not till 1850, after his
mother's death, did Home begin to hear 'loud blows on the head of my
bed, as if struck by a hammer.' The Wesley family, in 1716-17, had
been quite familiar with this phenomenon, and with other rappings, and
movements of objects untouched. In fact all these things are of
world-wide diffusion, and I know no part of the world, savage or
civilised, where such events do not happen, according to the evidence.
[Footnote 16: I follow _Incidents in My Life_, Series i. ii., 1864,
1872. _The Gift of Daniel Home_, by Madame Douglas Home and other
authorities.]
[Footnote 17: Home mentions this fact in a note, correcting an error
of Sir David Brewster's, _Incidents_, ii. 48, Note 1. The Earl of Home
about 1856 asked questions on the subject, and Home 'stated what my
connection with the family was.' Dunglas is the second title in the
family.]
In no instance, as far as I am informed, did anything extraordinary
occur in connection with Home which cannot be paralleled in the
accounts of Egyptian mediums in Iamblichus.[18]
[Footnote 18: The curious reader may consult my _Cock Lane and Common
Sense_, and _The Making of Religion_, for examples of savage,
mediæval, ancient Egyptian, and European cases.]
In 1850 America was interested in 'The Rochester Knockings,' and the
case of the Fox girls, a replica of the old Cock Lane case which
amused Dr. Johnson and Horace Walpole. The Fox girls became
professional mediums, and, long afterwards, confessed that they were
impostors. They were so false that their confession is of no value as
evidence, but certainly they were humbugs. The air was full of talk
about them, and other people like them, when Home, aged seventeen, was
so constantly attended by noises of rappings that his aunt threw a
chair at him, summoned three preachers, an Independent, a Baptist, and
a Wesleyan (Home was then a Wesleyan), and plunged into conflict with
the devil. The furniture now began to move about, untouched by man,
and Home's aunt turned him out of the house. Home went to a friend in
another little town, people crowded to witness the phenomena, and the
press blazoned the matter abroad. Henceforth, Home was a wonder
worker; but once, for a whole year--February 1856 to February
1857--'the power' entirely deserted him, and afterwards, for shorter
periods.
In 1852 he was examined by the celebrated American poet, Bryant, by a
professor of Harvard, and others, who reported the usual physical
phenomena, and emphatically declared that 'we know we were not imposed
upon or deceived.' 'Spirits' spoke through the voice of the entranced
Home, or rapped out messages, usually gushing, and Home floated in the
air, at the house of Mr. Ward Cheney, at South Manchester,
Connecticut. This phenomenon is constantly reported in the Bible, in
the Lives of the Saints by the Bollandists, in the experiences of the
early Irvingites, in witch trials, in Iamblichus, and in savage and
European folklore. Lord Elcho, who was out with Prince Charles in the
Forty-Five, writes in his unpublished Memoirs that, being at Rome
about 1767, he went to hear the evidence in the process of canonising
a saint, recently dead, and heard witnesses swear that they had seen
the saint, while alive, floating about in the air, like Home. St.
Theresa was notorious for this accomplishment. Home's first feat of
this kind occurred 'in a darkened room,' a very dark room indeed, as
the evidence shows. It had been darkened on purpose to try an
experiment in seeing 'N rays,' which had been recently investigated by
Reichenbach. Science has brought them recently back into notice. The
evidence for the fact, in this case, was that people felt Home's feet
in mid air. 'I have been lifted in the light of day only once, and
that was in America;' also, in the light of four gas lamps 'in a room
in Sloane Street.'
After attracting a good deal of notice in New York, Home, on April 9,
1855, turned up at Cox's Hotel, Jermyn Street, where Mr. Cox gave him
hospitality as a _non_-'paying guest.' Now occurred the affair of Sir
David Brewster and Lord Brougham. Both were capable of hallucinations.
Lord Brougham published an account of a common death-bed wraith, which
he saw once while in a bath (the vision coincided with the death of
the owner of the wraith), and Sir David's daughter tells how that
philosopher saw that of the Rev. Mr. Lyon, in St. Leonard's College,
St. Andrews, a wraith whose owner was in perfect health. Sir David
sent letters, forming a journal, to his family, and, in June (no day
given) 1855, described his visit to Home. He says that he, Lord
Brougham, Mr. Cox, and Home sat down 'at a moderately sized table,
_the structure of which we were invited to examine_. In a short time
the table shuddered and a tremulous motion ran up our arms.... The
table actually rose from the ground, when no hand was upon it. A
larger table was produced, and exhibited similar movements. An
accordion was held in Lord Brougham's hand, and gave out a single
note.... A small hand-bell was then laid with its mouth on the carpet,
and after lying for some time, it actually rang when nothing could
have touched it. The bell was then placed upon the other side, still
upon the carpet, and it came over to me, and placed itself in my hand.
It did the same to Lord Brougham. These were the principal
experiments: we could give no explanation of them, and could not
conjecture how they could be produced by any kind of mechanism.... We
do not believe that it was the work of spirits.'
So Sir David wrote in a private letter of June 1855, just after the
events. But the affair came to be talked about, and, on September 29,
1855, Sir David wrote to _The Morning Advertiser_. He had seen, he
said, 'several mechanical effects which I was unable to explain....
But I saw enough to convince myself that they could all be produced by
human feet and hands,' though he also, in June, 'could not conjecture
how they could be produced by any kind of mechanism.' Later, October
9, Sir David again wrote to the newspaper. This time he said that he
might have discovered the fraud, had he 'been permitted to take a peep
beneath the drapery of the table.' But in June he said that he 'was
invited to examine the structure of the table.' He denied that 'a
large table was moved about in a most extraordinary way.' In June he
had asserted that this occurred. He declared that the bell did not
ring. In June he averred that it rang 'when nothing could have touched
it.' In October he suggested that machinery attached to 'the lower
extremities of Mr. Home's body' could produce the effects: in June 'we
could not conjecture how they could be produced by any kind of
mechanism.' On Sir David's death, his daughter and biographer, Mrs.
Gordon, published (1869) his letter of June 1855. Home then scored
rather freely, as the man of science had denied publicly, in October
1855, what he had privately written to his family in June 1855, when
the events were fresh in his memory. This was not the only case in
which 'a scientist of European reputation did not increase his
reputation' for common veracity in his attempts to put down Home.
The adventures of Home in the Courts of Europe, his desertion of the
errors of Wesleyan Methodism for those of the Church of Rome, his
handsome entertainment by diamond-giving emperors, his expulsion from
Rome as a sorcerer, and so forth, cannot be dealt with here for lack
of space. We come to the great Home-Browning problem.
In 1855, Home met Mr. and Mrs. Browning at the house of a Mr. Rymer,
at Ealing, the first of only two meetings.[19] On this occasion, says
Home, a wreath of clematis rose from the table and floated towards
Mrs. Browning, behind whom her husband went and stood. The wreath
settled on the lady's head, not on that of Mr. Browning, who, Home
thought, was jealous of the favour. This is manifestly absurd. Soon
after, all but Mr. Rymer were invited to leave the room. Two days
later, Mr. Browning asked to be allowed to bring a friend for another
_séance_, but the arrangements of the Rymers, with whom Home was
staying, made this impossible. Later, Home, with Mrs. Rymer, called on
the Brownings in town, and Mr. Browning declined to notice Home; there
was a scene, and Mrs. Browning (who was later a three-quarters
believer in 'spirits') was distressed. In 1864, after Mrs. Browning's
death, Mr. Browning published _Mr. Sludge, the Medium_, which had the
air of a personal attack on Home as a detected and confessing American
impostor. Such is Home's account. It was published in 1872, and was
open to contradiction. I am not aware that Mr. Browning took any
public notice of it.
[Footnote 19: _Incidents_, ii. 105.]
In July 1889 the late Mr. F.W.H. Myers and Professor W.F. Barrett
published, in the _Journal of the Society for Psychical Research_, p.
102, the following statement: 'We have found no allegations of
_fraud_' (in Home) 'on which we should be justified in laying much
stress. Mr. Robert Browning has told to one of us' (Mr. Myers) 'the
circumstances which mainly led to that opinion of Home which was
expressed in _Mr. Sludge, the Medium_.' It appears that a lady (since
dead) repeated to Mr. Browning a statement made to her by a lady and
gentleman (since dead) as to their finding Home in the act of
experimenting with phosphorus on the production of 'spirit lights,'
'which (so far as Mr. Browning remembers) were to be rubbed round the
walls of the room, near the ceiling, so as to appear when the room was
darkened. This piece of evidence powerfully impressed Mr. Browning;
but it comes to us at third hand, without written record, and at a
distance of nearly forty years.'
Clearly this story is not evidence against Home.
But, several years ago, an eminent writer, whom I need not name,
published in a newspaper another version. Mr. Browning had told him,
he said, that, sitting with Home and Mrs. Browning (apparently alone,
these three) in a darkened room, he saw a white object rise above the
table. This Home represented as the phantasm of a child of Mr. and
Mrs. Browning, which died in infancy. Mr. Browning seized the
phantasm, which was Home's naked foot.
But it must be remembered that (1) Mr. and Mrs. Browning had no child
which died in infancy; and (2) Mrs. Browning's belief survived the
shock. On December 5, 1902, in the _Times Literary Supplement_, a
letter by Mr. R. Barrett Browning appeared. He says: 'Mr. Hume, who
subsequently changed his name to Home' ('Home' is pronounced 'Hume' in
Scotland), 'was detected in a "vulgar fraud," for I have heard my
father repeatedly describe how he caught hold of his foot _under_ the
table.' In the other story the foot was _above_ the table; in the new
version no infant phantasm occurs. Moreover, to catch a man's foot
under a table in itself proves nothing. What was the foot doing, and
why did Mr. Browning not tell this, but quite a different story, to
Mr. Myers? We 'get no forrarder.'
On November 28, 1902, Mr. Merrifield, in the _Times Literary
Supplement_, published a letter on August 30 (?), 1855, from Mrs.
Browning to Miss De Gaudrion, as to the _séance_ with the Brownings at
Ealing. Mrs. Browning enclosed a letter from Mr. Browning, giving his
impressions. '_Mine, I must frankly say, were entirely different_,'
wrote Mrs. Browning; and Home says: 'Mrs. Browning was much moved, and
she not only then but ever since expressed her entire belief and
pleasure in what occurred.' In her letter, Mrs. Browning adds: 'For my
own part, and in my own conscience, I find no reason for considering
the medium in question responsible for anything seen or heard on that
occasion.' But 'I consider that the seeking for intercourse with any
particular spirit would be apt to end either in disappointment or
delusion,' and she uses the phrase 'the supposed spirits.'
This lady who wrote thus at the time cannot conceivably have been
looking for the ghost of a child that never was born, and been
deceived by Home's white foot, which Mr. Browning then caught hold
of--an incident which Mrs. Browning could not have forgotten by August
30, 1855, if it occurred in July of that year. Yet Mr. ---- has
published the statement that Mr. Browning told him that story of
Home's foot, dead child, and all, and Mr. ---- is a man of undoubted
honour, and of the acutest intelligence.
Mr. Browning (August 30, 1855) assured Miss De Gaudrion that he held
'the whole display of hands,' 'spirit utterances,' &c., to be 'a cheat
and imposture.' He acquitted the Rymers (at whose house the _séance_
was held) of collusion, and spoke very highly of their moral
character. But he gave no reason for his disbelief, and said nothing
about catching hold of Home's foot either under or above the table. He
simply states his opinion; the whole affair was 'melancholy stuff.'
How can we account for the story of Mr. Browning and Home's foot? Can
poets possess an imagination too exuberant, or a memory not wholly
accurate?
But Mr. Merrifield had written, on August 18, 1855, a record of an
Ealing _séance_ of July 1855. About fourteen people sat round a table,
in a room of which two windows opened on the lawn. The nature of the
light is not stated. There was 'heaving up of the table, tapping,
playing an accordion under the table, and so on.' No details are
given; but there were no visible hands. Later, by such light as exists
when the moon has set on a July night, Home gave another _séance_.
'The outlines of the windows we could well see, and the form of any
large object intervening before them, though not with accuracy of
outline.' In these circumstances, in a light sufficient, he thinks,
Mr. Merrifield detected 'an object resembling a child's hand with a
long white sleeve attached to it' and also attached to Home's shoulder
and arm, and moving as Home moved. A lady, who later became Mrs.
Merrifield, corroborated.[20]
[Footnote 20: _Journal S.P.R._, May 1903, pp. 77, 78.]
This is the one known alleged case of detection of fraud, on Home's
part, given on first-hand evidence, and written only a few weeks after
the events. One other case I was told by the observer, very many years
after the event, and in this case fraud was not necessarily implied.
It is only fair to remark that Mr. F.W.H. Myers thought these
'phantasmal arms instructive in more than one respect,' as supplying
'a missing link between mere phantasms and ectoplastic phenomena.'[21]
[Footnote 21: _Human Personality_, ii. 546, 547. By 'Ectoplastic' Mr.
Myers appears to have meant small 'materialisations' exterior to the
'medium.']
Now this is the extraordinary feature in the puzzle. There are many
attested accounts of hands seen, in Home's presence, in a good light,
with no attachment; and no fraud is known ever to have been detected
in such instances. The strange fact is that if we have one record of a
detection of Home in a puerile fraud in a faint light, we have none of
a detection in his most notable phenomena in a good light. To take one
example. In _The Nineteenth Century_ for April 1896 Mr. Hamilton Aïdé
published the following statement, of which he had made the record in
his Diary, 'more than twenty years ago.' Mr. Aïdé also told me the
story in conversation. He was 'prejudiced' against Home, whom he met
at Nice, 'in the house of a Russian lady of distinction.' 'His _very_
physical manifestations, I was told, had caused his expulsion from
more than one private house.' Of these aberrations one has not heard
elsewhere. Mr. Aïdé was asked to meet M. Alphonse Karr, 'one of the
hardest-headed, the wittiest, and most sceptical men in France' (a
well-merited description), at a _séance_ with Home. Mr. Aïdé's
prejudice, M. Karr's hard-headed scepticism, prove them witnesses not
biassed in favour of hocus-pocus.
The two arrived first at the villa, and were shown into a very large,
uncarpeted, and brilliantly lighted salon. The furniture was very
heavy, the tables were 'mostly of marble, _and none of them had any
cloths upon them_.' There were about twenty candles in sconces, all
lit, and a moderator lamp in the centre of 'the ponderous round
rosewood table at which we were to sit.' Mr. Aïdé 'examined the room
carefully,' and observed that wires could not possibly be attached to
the heavy furniture ranged along the walls, and on the polished floor
wires could not escape notice. The number present, including Home, was
nine when all had arrived. All hands were on the table, but M.
Alphonse Karr insisted on being allowed to break the circle, go under
the table, or make any other sort of search whenever he pleased. 'This
Home made no objection to.' Raps 'went _round_ under the table,
fluttering hither and thither in a way difficult to account for by the
dislocation of the medium's toe' (or knee), 'the common explanation.'
(I may remark that this kind of rapping is now so rare that I think
Mr. Frederick Myers, with all his experience, never heard it.) Mr.
Aïdé was observant enough to notice that a lady had casually dropped
her bracelet, though she vowed that it 'was snatched from her by a
spirit.' 'It was certainly removed from her lap, and danced about
under the table....'
Then suddenly 'a heavy armchair, placed against the wall at the
further end of the _salotto_, ran violently out into the middle of
the room towards us.' Other chairs rushed about 'with still greater
velocity.' The heavy table then tilted up, and the moderator lamp,
with some pencils, slid to the lower edge of the table, but did not
fall off. Mr. Aïdé looked under the table: Home's legs were inactive.
Home said that he thought the table would 'ascend,' and Alphonse Karr
dived under it, and walked about on all fours, examining everybody's
feet--the others were standing up. The table rose 'three or four
feet,' at highest, and remained in air 'from two to three minutes.' It
rose so high that 'all could see Karr, and see also that no one's legs
moved.' M. Karr was not a little annoyed; but, as 'Sandow could not
have lifted the table evenly,' even if allowed to put his hands
beneath it, and as Home, at one side, had his hands above it, clearly
Home did not lift it.
All alike beheld this phenomenon, and Mr. Aïdé asks 'was I
hypnotised?' Were all hypnotised? People have tried to hypnotise Mr.
Aïdé, never with success, and certainly no form of hypnotism known to
science was here concerned. No process of that sort had been gone
through, and, except when Home said that he thought the table would
ascend, there had been no 'verbal suggestion;' nobody was told what to
look out for. In hypnotic experiment it is found that A. (if told to
see anything not present) will succeed, B. will fail, C. will see
something, and so on, though these subjects have been duly
hypnotised, which Mr. Aïdé and the rest had not. That an unhypnotised
company (or a company wholly unaware that any hypnotic process had
been performed on them) should all be subjected by any one to the same
hallucination, by an unuttered command, is a thing unknown to science,
and most men of science would deny that even one single person could
be hallucinated by a special suggestion not indicated by outward word,
gesture, or otherwise. We read of such feats in tales of 'glamour,'
like that of the Goblin Page in _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_, but to
psychological science, I repeat, they are absolutely unknown. The
explanation is not what is technically styled a _vera causa_. Mr.
Aïdé's story is absolutely unexplained, and it is one of scores,
attested in letters to Home from people of undoubted sense and good
position. Mr. Myers examined and authenticated the letters by post
marks, handwriting, and other tests.[22]
[Footnote 22: _Journal S.P.R._, July 1889, p. 101.]
In one case the theory of hallucination induced by Home, so that
people saw what did not occur, was asserted by Dr. Carpenter,
F.R.S.[23] Dr. Carpenter, who was a wondrously superior person, wrote:
'The most diverse accounts of a _séance_ will be given by a believer
and a sceptic. One will declare that a table rose in the air, while
another (who had been watching its feet) is confident that it never
left the ground.' Mr. Aïdé's statement proves that this explanation
does not fit _his_ case. Dr. Carpenter went on to say what was not
true: 'A whole party of believers will affirm that they saw Mr. Home
float in at one window and out at another, whilst a single honest
sceptic declares that Mr. Home was sitting in his chair all the
time.'[24] This was false. Dr. Carpenter referred to the published
statement of Lord Adare (Dunraven) and Lord Lindsay (the Earl of
Crawford), that they saw Home float into a window of the room where
they were sitting, out of the next room, where Home was, _and float
back again_, at Ashley Place, S.W., December 16, 1868. No 'honest
sceptic' was present and denied the facts. The other person present,
Captain Wynne, wrote to Home, in a letter printed (with excisions of
some contemptuous phrases) by Madame Home, and read in the original
MS. by Mr. Myers. He said: 'I wrote to the _Medium_ to say I was
present as a witness. I don't think that any one who knows me would
for one moment say that I was a victim to hallucination or any humbug
of that kind.' Dr. Carpenter, in 1871, writing in the _Quarterly
Review_ (Vol. 131, pp. 336, 337), had criticised Lord Lindsay's
account of what occurred on December 16, 1868. He took exception to a
point in Lord Lindsay's grammar, he asked why Lord Lindsay did not
cite the two other observers, and he said (what I doubt) that the
observations were made by moonlight. So Lord Lindsay had said; but the
curious may consult the almanack. Even in a fog, however, people in a
room can see a man come in by the window, and go out again, 'head
first, with the body rigid,' at a great height above the ground.
[Footnote 23: _Contemporary Review_, January 1876.]
[Footnote 24: _Contemporary Review_, vol. xxvii. p. 286.]