A FAITH-HEALER
It was in those days that there suddenly came wafted to us across the
ocean the tidings of a wondrous discovery, a strange new pursuit for
pastime,--I scarce know what to call it,--a new method of healing and
new branch of scientific research, some would say, though certainly in
this last particular it has not yet justified its claims to be admitted
to rank as a science, but has like that other dark mysterious agent,
electricity, of which we also know so little, to this day advanced but
little beyond the infantile stage. Animal magnetism, table-turning,
spirit-rapping, thought-reading and psychography, each and all of these
names have been used in turn to designate the various manifestations of
this hitherto unknown, or it may be merely neglected and forgotten
force.
Now with regard to the phenomena I am about to describe, there could
perhaps scarce be a more accurate and trustworthy witness than a child
of nine years, absolutely healthy in mind and body, and bringing the
quick observation and clear untroubled gaze of childhood to bear on
these strange occurrences, without preconceived leanings towards belief
or doubt, and even probably with a little less curiosity than might have
belonged to one a few years older. To so young a child, the whole world
is a subject of perpetual awe and wonder, nearly every incident in its
daily experience being startling and inexplicable, yet all accepted
alike in the same spirit of implicit good faith. Was there then after
all, in these new occurrences that set everyone talking, anything so
much more wonderful than in a hundred others with which we were already
familiar? Were we not acquainted with the miracle of the caterpillar’s
metamorphosis to the butterfly, of the transformation of the blossom
into fruit? And could there be anything at once more natural and more
terrible than those frightful spasms that racked my mother’s whole
frame, paralysing every movement of her limbs? That this never struck us
as anything unusual or uncommon was shown by my answer to another little
girl, who had asked me to suggest a new game.--“Let us play at being
mother and child,” I promptly replied, “and you shall be the mother, and
must sit still in this chair, as you cannot walk about.” And I was
honestly surprised both at my little companion’s astonishment and also
to hear my mother’s voice calling to me from the next room, enquiring if
I thought that a nice sort of game, to be making fun of my mother’s
ill-health? I was dreadfully discomfited, but I had meant no harm at
all, it simply arose from the impossibility of dissociating in my own
mind the idea of one’s mother from that of being lame. I had seen too
how completely medical science had been at fault, just with those of my
own family who had been obliged to have recourse to the doctors’ skill,
one celebrated practitioner after another having tried in vain to bring
about some improvement in my father’s health, or to find out a course
of treatment that should alleviate my mother’s sufferings, and bring
some relief to the constant pain that made my younger brother’s life a
martyrdom. It was perhaps the reiterated failure of any of the old
recognised methods to work a cure, that rendered us all quite free from
prejudice against the pretensions of outsiders, and hearing so much said
of the wonderful cures wrought by magnetism, I felt no surprise when I
learnt that it was to be tried in my mother’s case. Soon the
professional magnetiser appeared upon the scene, in the person of a very
stout Englishwoman with beady black eyes, to whom my brothers and I
immediately took an intense dislike, on account of her appearance and
her very disagreeable manner towards us. Her skill did procure for my
mother a little of the rest she stood so much in need of, as the
operator could by means of the magnetic passes, or even by merely laying
her hand on the patient’s forehead, send her for hours into a deep
sleep, from which she could not awake of her own accord. But the fact
that the magnetiser had, as she boasted, herself brought fifteen
children into the world, had not apparently imbued her with very tender
feelings towards children in general, and the influence she was not slow
in acquiring over her patient she so thoroughly abused in tyrannising
over us, that we three cordially detested her, and were thankful when a
too glaring usurpation of authority led to her summary dismissal. Her
brief stay in our midst had, however, awakened among us all the desire
to ascertain by similar experiments, what latent magnetic power might
possibly reside in some of us, and it was very soon shown that my uncle,
Nicholas of Nassau, was possessed of a quite exceptional degree of the
mesmeric or hypnotic force, which he, a lively, thoughtless youth of
twenty, did not scruple to use for all sorts of practical jokes. A
favourite one was to prevent his sister’s governess from getting up out
of her chair; do what she would, she was as if nailed down to it
whenever he chose to forbid her to rise, and he would even sometimes
mount his horse and ride away for a couple of hours, deaf to the
entreaties and adjurations of his victim. Another time he ordered her to
put out her tongue, in the midst of a ceremonious Court dinner, and
almost crying with indignation, she was forced to obey. His sisters
found it equally impossible to disobey whatever extravagant commands he
might lay on them, such as forcing my mother to stand still holding out
her hand whilst he threatened to aim a heavy blow at it with his
riding-whip. Such displays of his extraordinary and inexplicable powers
afforded great amusement to himself and others, above all to the child
spectators, who laughed heartily to see their elders for once reduced to
such submissiveness. It was therefore a sad disappointment to us when,
in consequence of the fits of hysterics into which one or two ladies had
been thrown by some of my uncle’s pranks, he was obliged to desist from
them. We little ones had enjoyed them the more, that he never tried them
on us, from whom it would indeed have been superfluous to exact
obedience in this fashion, trained as we were to carry out
unquestioningly and with military promptness and exactitude, whatever
orders were given us. For this was in the old days, when it seemed to be
a recognised thing, that children had come into the world just to do
what they were told, and learn whatever was taught them! Nobody thought
of asking them if they found it a tedious restraint to behave properly,
nor were they consulted as to whether their lessons bored them. If in my
youthful days, for instance, I played badly in my piano-lesson, it was
so much the worse for me, as I soon found out, when the music-master had
gone. As for over-pressure, the word had not been invented then, and
nervous fatigue, hysteria and neurasthenia, with all of which the modern
child is familiar, had not yet been heard of. Our elders certainly
themselves set us a good example in all such respects, and I can
remember the severe animadversion passed on the poor degenerate
creatures who first indulged in the above unbecoming weaknesses. All
through her married life my grandmother had to stand every evening with
her ladies, in full dress upright beside the billiard-table, to watch
her lord and master’s play, and neither she nor anyone else dared to be
tired or feel bored, until the match was finished. Or perhaps it would
be more correct to say that people in those days knew how to be bored to
death with the utmost decorum! There were no comfortable easy-chairs to
lean back in; if one sat down at all, it was bolt upright on a chair of
most uncompromising severity. For our lessons we had very hard high
wooden chairs, from which our poor little legs dangled till they ached,
very different from the nice comfortable schoolroom chairs with their
foot-rest, which children have now. And worst of all, there was the
dreadful invention for deportment, a horrible heart-shaped contrivance,
of iron covered with leather, into which we were strapped to make us
hold ourselves upright. To my indescribable humiliation, I was sometimes
obliged to go for a walk with the odious machine fastened to my back.
Even this seemed quite mild though, compared to the means employed in a
former generation, one of my great-aunts being able to tell of the
spiked collar, which in addition to the iron back-board, she was forced
to wear, to prevent her from ever allowing her head to droop. Was it the
effect of this instrument of torture, that in her ninetieth year, she
had never been known to lean back in her chair?
Out of this hard training, of this undue repression, and as a natural
consequence too of the incessant cupping and bleeding, practised on the
former generation as a remedy for all existent and non-existent
maladies, there came forth another, debilitated, unnerved, an easy prey
to the whole host of nervous disorders lying in wait for it. I have
lived through and looked on at every phase of the transformation.
Healthy as I was, I should hardly have escaped the drastic measures to
which the so-called plethoric were subjected, had it not been
sufficiently proved that their application had been injurious rather
than beneficial to my mother. The immense strides made by medical
science of recent years, make it difficult to judge rightly the mental
attitude of those, who in their impatience of the inanity and futility
of orthodox treatment, seem formerly to have welcomed and blindly
followed the advice of every quack, calling himself a mesmeriser. We
should be slower to condemn them, had we also suffered from the
ignorance and incompetence of the regular practitioner, and perhaps be
equally willing to sign a pact with the Evil One and his agents, in
order to regain the blessing of health! It was this tendency that led to
the first great disappointment of my life, which I experienced when I
was only five years old, in the following manner:
I had a little birth-mark on my left cheek, which was a great source of
vexation to my parents, nobody understanding in those days how to remove
anything of the sort. They were therefore all the more readily disposed
to put faith in the assertion of a wandering charlatan, of his ability
to make it disappear. I was fetched from my lessons by my father, placed
in a chair, and the stranger proceeded to apply a dark fluid from a
little phial to the spot, assuring my parents that when this had dried
up, they would find on its removal no trace of the mole left. Somehow or
other I had understood that by means of this magical process, I should
never be naughty again. As might be expected, when the stain of the
fluid was washed away, the mole was there just as before, with a slight
scar into the bargain, and I was as naughty as ever! That was my first
real big disappointment. The next came when I was six, with my first
glimpse of the sea. When we reached the shore to go on board the boat,
it was low tide, and instead of the wide far-reaching plain of water I
was prepared to see, there was nothing but sand, with a few pools. To my
mother’s apostrophe,--“Look, Elizabeth! there is the sea!” I could not
find a word to say in reply, I was too bitterly disappointed. I had
expected to behold a great towering wall of water, like that I was
familiar with in the pictures of the crossing of the Red Sea by the
Children of Israel. And here was nothing but sand, with a few wretched
pools! Afterwards I saw the great expanse of water, always in movement,
and stretching out far away, but it was too late then, the first
impression was over and all was spoilt. The third disappointment came
much later, at first sight of Rome, and does not belong here.
To return to my story. In one of my uncle’s letters from America, he
told us of his visit to a house, where the guests were all amusing
themselves by setting a table in motion by simply letting their hands
rest lightly on it, as they stood round. It had interested him, but he
had not been able to induce my father to take any part in the
proceedings, the latter declining even to countenance such nonsense,
declaring himself the enemy of every sort of humbug. At home, on the
contrary, curiosity was immediately aroused, our former experience with
the magnetiser and the discovery of my uncle’s marvellous powers, having
to a certain extent initiated us into the mysteries of the occult. Young
and old, children and grown-up people, we were all pressed into the
service, and were soon all standing in a ring round a very big table,
our hands resting on it, so that one’s little finger touched that of
one’s neighbour on either side. Thus we stood and waited, with some
impatience, and a good deal of inward merriment, to see what would
occur. Just as we were getting thoroughly disheartened and tired out, a
tiny tremor was felt in the table, which then, in spite of its great
weight, actually began to move from the spot. Naturally, each one
accused the other of pushing, but that explanation would have been
neither satisfactory nor admissible, standing as we were with our hands
in full view of one another, so that no attempt at cheating could have
passed unperceived. And our astonishment was increased when we observed
how when my mother was wheeled into the room, she had but to lay her
finger ever so lightly on the table, for it at once to begin to move
quicker, even setting off to rush about in all directions, so that she
had to be pushed after it in her chair. We all followed, with peals of
laughter at the strange sight, the ungainly movements of this new sort
of dancing-bear, and so much amusement did this afford, that we set to
work at once to experiment on all sorts of other inanimate objects. We
soon found that all were not in the same degree susceptible of
locomotion, nor were all human beings equally endowed with the latent
force by which automatic movement could be imparted to things usually
inert. Count Oriola proved to be the possessor of a quite exceptional
degree of this psychic or magnetic force; he had only to stretch out
his hand within a few paces of a small table, and it immediately came
marching towards him, apparently with great glee, to our inexpressible
delight, but to the unspeakable horror of my governess, from whose
sitting-room the table had been borrowed, and who energetically refused
to receive such an impish piece of furniture back again!
Not only tables, but chairs, sofas, all sorts of things seemed now
suddenly to have become capable of walking about; it was even told of a
young girl staying in our house, that holding her hand over a big glass
shade that covered a clock, to her surprise the shade lifted itself up
in the air to reach her hand, and remained for a time firmly fixed to
it. Naturally enough, the thing being once admitted in principle, its
possibility established beyond a doubt, there were no bounds, no limits
to our curiosity, and every other form of amusement was cast into the
background by this. It was much more interesting than simple
mesmerising, and instead of being like that confined to an experiment on
one person at a time, in this all could take part. We moreover obtained
the proof that the force by which these results were obtained, was not
entirely confined to certain more highly-favoured individuals, but lay
in some degree latent in everyone, and could be immensely developed by
practice. Nor was this ever attended with the least inconvenience to the
experimenter, an effort of the will, a certain tension and concentration
of mind, being the chief conditions of success. It was, however, also of
great moment that such experiments should be undertaken in a proper
spirit, _i.e._, seriously, with a real desire to investigate their
nature and to turn them to the advantage of one’s fellow-beings, for we
soon noticed that those who treated the matter as a mere joke,
approaching it in a frivolous mood, generally failed in all they
attempted. As might be expected, the persons whose fund of magnetism was
most considerable, proved also to be those who could most easily induce
in others the magnetic trance. All seemed to resolve itself into that
one process of mental concentration, and someone remarked that this word
“concentration” was the one most often heard, and that formulated the
rule of life and scheme of education in our family. Perhaps I owe it to
the habit acquired then, that I am never absent-minded, but always able
to concentrate my thoughts on the matter in hand, and taking into
consideration my lively imagination, I think this may be looked upon as
an educational triumph!
Whilst “concentration” was thus the order of the day among us, it
happened that my mother heard of the marvellous cures, recalling those
told of in the Bible, being worked in Paris by a “Faith-healer,” as we
should certainly now call him, since they were effected by no other
means than the simple laying-on of hands. One of the patients then under
treatment, and making rapid progress, was Schleiermacher’s daughter,
Countess Schwerin, whose case so nearly resembled my mother’s own, that
the latter could not refrain from writing to tell my father all she had
heard, with the result that on his way home from America he stopped in
Paris, to make further enquiries. He called on the magnetiser, whose
name was Count Szápary, and begged him to undertake my mother’s case.
This request met at first with a decided refusal, it being impossible
for him, the Count stated, to abandon for a new patient the many now
being treated by him, these being, moreover, already so numerous that he
could not think of adding to them. He did, however, in the end so far
modify his refusal, as to promise that in the course of a journey he was
about to take, and which should lead him Rhinewards, he would certainly
pay my mother a visit, and see what could be done for her.
Three days had not yet passed over our heads in Bonn since my father’s
return, when the little garden gate was suddenly flung open by a
stranger of distinguished presence--in spite of a slight limp (the
result, we afterwards learned, of a carriage accident, some time
previous, in Hungary)--and in whose thick dark moustache the first
silvery threads were beginning to appear, though not yet in the rather
long and wavy thick dark hair, a lock of which, escaping, was
continually falling over his forehead. My father went forward to meet
this gentleman, whom he introduced as Count Szápary, and who brought the
scrutinising glance of his big black eyes to bear on our little group,
with but little, at first sight it seemed, of the kindly smile which on
better intimacy lit up his face so constantly. His own wonderful powers,
which he was now bent on using for the good of mankind, had been
revealed to him by chance, some might call it, in reality by his
despairing efforts to procure by mesmerism the boon of sleep and respite
from pain for an invalid daughter, given up by the regular doctor. To
his glad astonishment, not only did the magnetic passes send the patient
into a refreshing slumber, but a repetition of the experiment was
equally successful, and, being persevered with, in time restored her to
health. In his gratitude for his child’s life being spared, the father
determined to use his gift henceforth for the benefit of others, and in
order to cultivate it systematically, he went to Paris to study medicine
for a time, and establishing himself there, the cures wrought by him
were very soon widely talked of. There was a minute of suspense as the
thoughtful, enquiring glance rested on my mother, and we trembled lest
the objections urged against my father’s pleadings in Paris should still
be maintained. But at that critical moment, poor little Otto happened to
join us, and again the sharp restless eyes travelled from the sorely
tried young mother to the unhappy child, and back again to the pale,
emaciated father, already in a rapid decline, and all hesitation was at
an end. The spectacle of so much suffering was decisive for the man
whose whole life was given up to alleviating human misery. Without
further demur he agreed to devote his time, his skill, to the case
before him. “But,” he hastened to add, after a rapid examination of his
patient, “your life I can perhaps save, more I cannot say, I cannot
promise that you will ever recover the use of your limbs!” And indeed at
that time it looked as if the one leg were completely atrophied, it was
as if withered--literally reduced to skin and bone. When our new friend
took his leave, it was with the promise to return in a very few weeks’
time, to accompany us himself to Paris, as he feared that without him my
mother might not even survive the journey.
So we set out for Paris, my brother Wilhelm and I in one railway
compartment with tutor and governess, Otto in another for himself with
his faithful attendant, our good old nurse, and my mother in hers, in
the hammock slung for her, with my father and Fräulein von Preen close
at hand, and Count Szápary standing beside her, steadying the hammock
with the one hand, whilst with the other he continued uninterruptedly
making the mesmeric passes, to still the frightful paroxysms of pain,
which almost threatened to prove fatal during the journey. Terrible as
it was, it yet differed from former journeys undertaken under like
circumstances, in the absence of the overpowering smell of chloral,
ether, and other medicaments, for all such were from this moment
abolished and never heard of more. It was not astonishing, when we did
arrive safely and were installed in the house taken for us in the Champs
Elysées, that directly he had seen his patient carried upstairs and put
to bed, Count Szápary should have sought his own room, and falling
exhausted on his bed, have slept on without waking for ten hours.
Next day began the treatment--no easy matter, as my mother’s extreme
weakness made it necessary to proceed with the utmost precaution, and
Count Szápary afterwards owned that he had more than once feared that
she might die while undergoing it. But he persevered, and was rewarded
at the end of six months by perceiving a faint twitching in the toes of
the till then apparently lifeless foot. “Ah! you will be able to walk
again after all!” he exclaimed in his delight, and continued the massage
so vigorously and to such good purpose, that life seemed to return
gradually to the whole of the paralysed limb, and in the course of a few
weeks the patient could actually take a few steps. Only a very few at
first, leaning on her companion’s arm, and with the tears streaming down
her cheeks with the effort and the pain, sometimes severe enough to make
her faint away before it was over. But through it all she could see us
watching her, the first time she was taken into the garden, and she told
us afterwards of our anxious faces, mine flushed with excitement as I
ran towards her, whilst Wilhelm turned deadly pale as he tried to move
away every little pebble in her way in the path. Then, a few days later,
Otto also was allowed to look on, and for him it was something even more
solemn and wonderful, for it was the first time in his life that he had
seen his mother able to walk a step. Without a word he went up to her,
took her by the hand, and walked slowly beside her the whole time, in
perfect silence. For all of us it was the grandest and most impressive
event of our whole childhood, something that seemed to partake of the
nature of a miracle, and that brought the stories of miraculous cures in
times of old quite near to us, making them a more living reality than to
most people, since we had ourselves with our own eyes witnessed
something similar in the person of one so near and dear to us. It will
readily be believed, that our admiration and gratitude for him who had
wrought this marvel knew no bounds. To say that we looked upon him as a
saint, seems but a feeble expression of the feeling of veneration with
which we regarded him.
Of the actual working of the cure, of the mode of treatment, we saw
nothing, and heard but little; I only know that little by little, the
terrible convulsions were transformed into regular exercise of the
muscles, in fact into an involuntary process of therapeutic gymnastics.
In course of time, not only was the cure complete, but her own fund of
natural magnetism had been discovered to be so exceptional, that my
mother was anxious to celebrate her restoration to health by performing
a like good work for others, and began visiting Count Szápary’s other
patients with him, undertaking a portion of the treatment. At her
pressing invitation the lame Fräulein von Bunsen came to stay with us,
and thanks to the combined efforts of my mother and Count Szápary, she
also was set on her feet again and able to walk after being for
five-and-twenty years considered beyond all hope of recovery!
For my mother it was the beginning of a new life in more meanings than
one, for it was now her turn, after her own miraculous cure, to
cultivate and turn to account in the service of humanity, the gift
bestowed upon her unawares. She perhaps never became quite so strong as
had been at first hoped, and, in fact, she often felt far from well,
but the lameness never returned. And it very soon became clearly
established, that the possession of magnetic force by no means
corresponds to our physical strength or indeed to our bodily health.
Concerning this, very thorough investigations were made by my father,
who would not have tolerated the idea of anything being done by his wife
which could possibly have been harmful to her own health. On that point
there could be no shadow of doubt; our experiments in mesmerising and
table-turning furnishing constant examples of the presence of these
powers in a transcendent degree in persons of specially fragile build
and constitutional delicacy. It was just by these that feats were
accomplished, which would not merely have taxed their ordinary strength,
but would have been impossible to the strongest man. All this will no
longer seem so very surprising at the present day, but the period I deal
with is of fifty years ago, when these marvels were not yet subjects of
common parlance. No Charcot had yet made his experiments with suggestion
and hypnotism; indeed, the very names were scarcely known. My father,
who was so little inclined to credulity that friends and relations had
dubbed him the unbelieving Thomas, gave himself up to the serious study
of the question. His naturally philosophic bent found here ample matter
for reflection. “I have not the dogmatic arrogance,” he was accustomed
to say, “which would enable me to deny the existence of phenomena,
simply because I fail to comprehend them!” Investigating them in this
spirit, from the purely scientific point of view, he acquired the
conviction that they were manifestations of an inner life, the proof of
a persistence of thought independent of cerebral cognition, and he
therefore gave to the book he wrote on the subject, the title,
“Subconscious Mental Life.” I am aware that the theory he upheld is now
much contested, that there are those who, while they do not dispute the
genuineness of the manifestations, would ascribe them to quite another
cause, looking upon them as of purely objective nature, and entirely
independent of the medium. Time alone can decide which of these two
schools of psychical research is the better justified. Then, at all
events, it had not yet occurred to any of us to seek the explanation of
these phenomena from without, everything appearing sufficiently to
demonstrate their origin in our own mentality; a belief which did not,
however, in the least preclude our full recognition of the superiority
of the results achieved, to all similar performances by the same
individual in the normal state. Our experiments were now no longer
confined to mere spirit-rapping or observations made on subjects during
the mesmeric trance; they were henceforth specially directed to
psychography, and with the most gratifying results. It was perhaps the
manifestations in this higher sphere which overcame the last barriers of
my father’s incredulity; the simple manner in which they were obtained,
by means of a pencil, passed through a large woollen ball, on which two
persons placed their hands, absolutely preventing any possibility of
fraud. Very often he made the experiment himself, together with one
other person, generally a young girl whose store of magnetism was known
to be above the average, and he was able thus to convince himself that
the movements of the pencil, tracing characters with lightning rapidity
in its course across the paper, were entirely independent of human
agency.
Questions of deepest import were asked, answers on subjects either of
private or of general interest obtained, and many a philosophic doubt
laid to rest, by this spirit-writing. And these messages, I cannot
sufficiently repeat, seemed to have as a rule little in common with the
mental powers or culture of the person through whom they were
transmitted, being on an altogether different plane, a higher
intellectual level than that of society in general. Certainly no means
was neglected of raising the tone of conversation among the
ever-widening circle of friends who assembled for these _séances_; all
frivolous chatter was banished, gossip was a thing utterly unknown, and
it is hardly too much to say, that it was in a well-nigh religious
spirit that most of us gathered round the table on which the
manifestations took place. Among the guests in our house, was the aged
musician, Neukomm, and very often, as a preliminary to the evening’s
proceedings, he would seat himself at the organ, and by a soft and
solemn prelude would induce in all present a frame of mind suitable to
the solemnity of the occasion. As I was now in my twelfth year, and my
mind unusually developed for my age, I was allowed to participate in all
that went on. Above all, I loved to hear my father talk of those
philosophic questions that occupied his own thoughts, and it was from
this time that dated the delightful long walks we took together, in
which he instructed me in the history of philosophy, explaining to me
the various philosophic systems, and reading to me passages from his own
writings, thereby giving me my first insight into the metaphysical
problems in which his soul took refuge from the noise and bustle of the
world. His dream it doubtless was, to make of me a philosopher like
himself, and his enthusiasm and earnestness could not fail to arouse my
interest in the themes on which he waxed so eloquent; but my own bent
was a different one--the field of metaphysical speculation, as thrown
open to me by my beloved and revered father, might well entice my spirit
awhile,--my sojourn there could be but brief, it was in another
dreamland I was eventually to find my home, and already, unknown to
everyone, I had made my first excursions, my first timid flights within
those realms. Everything I heard, everything I saw, each fresh addition
to my store of knowledge, each wonderful revelation of the world above
and beyond the perception of the senses, into which it was our privilege
to obtain a glimpse by the marvellous experiences chronicled above--all
this did but furnish material for my active imagination, and was
absorbed, and pondered over, and woven into the intangible,
unsubstantial fabric of many a future song. Meantime, the influences of
the hour were naturally all-powerful in magnifying the veneration in
which I held my parents. It was in truth no ordinary every-day
existence which they led; and that which was most remarkable was the
perfect harmony in aim and action of these two so dissimilar natures,
and their admirable co-operation in furthering the well-being of their
fellow-creatures, the special gifts of each being employed to the same
end, my father’s theoretically, my mother’s in the direction of
practical utility. Of the cures which the latter was enabled to work, I
shall tell elsewhere; suffice it to say in this place, that they were
effected with a swiftness, and attended with circumstances so remarkable
as to surpass if anything those of Szápary himself. In later years, when
the extraordinary cures wrought by Metzger and other masseurs were
spoken of in my mother’s presence, it did not astonish anyone who knew
her that she should calmly remark, with a pitying smile--“That is all
very well, but it is nothing to what I could do! I had but to stretch
out my hand and say--Rise up, thou art healed!”
The somnambulistic experiments I witnessed were perhaps more marvellous
than all the rest. It would almost seem as if in the case of the
somnambulist the law of gravitation were abolished, so entirely free
from the trammels of material existence does the human body appear to be
while in this state. Certainly my mother often appeared to us no longer
to tread the earth, she seemed to float rather than walk, and any
further and more complete abolition of what we are accustomed to term
the laws of nature, would assuredly have occasioned among us no surprise
at all. No amount of familiarity, on the other hand, could ever do away
with the feeling of awe, with which my mother’s ecstatic trance
invariably inspired us. Unconscious of all around, she sang and
prayed--the words and melody alike of her own composition; it was a
deeply moving spectacle.
Brought up in an atmosphere so highly charged with the marvellous, it
has ever been impossible to me to assume a sceptical attitude towards
mysteries which elude my comprehension. The word supernatural seems to
me to be an absolute contradiction in terms. Who are we that we should
dare to set limits to the forces of nature, and to decide that this or
that occurrence is beyond her control? Did we but understand such events
aright, we must needs acknowledge them to be perfectly natural. Egyptian
priests of old, and Indian fakirs of the present day may alike laugh us
to scorn, that in our ignorance and impotence we presume to question the
existence of forces whose workings they have fathomed and turned to such
good account. Recourse to the supernatural is but a return to nature.
For this reason it may well be that outside the domain of surgery,
wherein such incontestable triumphs have been achieved, of the whole of
our modern medical practice the so-called nature-cures will in the end
alone survive. They rest indeed on a purely rational basis, the
treatment being none other than the art of transforming pathological
phenomena into therapeutical processes.
I refer of course to the treatment I have myself seen practised and to
the examples quoted here. The system made considerable demands on the
goodwill and concurrence of the patient, these being, in the opinion of
Count Szápary, indispensable conditions of its success. An entirely
different principle is acted upon, I am aware, by those who practise
massage at the present day. With them the patient remains entirely
passive, and the massage itself is alone supposed to work the cure. I
will not enter into the question of the respective merits of the two
systems, I would merely point out the benefit that accrued to the
patient from the independence to which he was encouraged by the earlier
one. All who had sufficient energy to follow the prescribed path, were
able in course of time to continue the treatment alone, whilst such as
were found incapable of making the necessary effort for recovery, and
disposed to fall into a morbid state of dependence on the doctor, were
dismissed as a hindrance to the others. Every phase of illness was
treated as a stepping-stone to progress, every symptom turned to
account; the somnambulistic trance, for instance, was made use of as a
stage in the transition from sickness to health, a state of repose
deeper and more refreshing than ordinary sleep, during which by no other
means than the rest prescribed by nature, the weakened frame and
overstrung nerves might recover their equilibrium. Every step in the
treatment was accompanied by prayer; it bore indeed from first to last a
markedly religious character. All the members of our little circle felt
themselves lifted above the common wants and desires of humanity by the
nobler prospects which the wider horizon opened out before them; we
were as neophytes whom some rite of initiation sets apart for holier
purposes. It was difficult to live invariably on that exalted level, the
circumstances might not always be propitious, and on myself they seemed
sometimes to bear too heavily. It was the sight of so much suffering,
the perpetual intercourse with invalids, that preyed on my spirits and
against which my own youthful health and strength could at times scarce
react. But at such moments my mother’s iron discipline stood me in good
stead. I had been so well drilled, and had my feelings under such
perfect control, that neither to her nor anyone else, and scarce even to
myself would I ever have acknowledged that life had sometimes become a
burden to me. I knew that for the sake of others I must keep a smiling
face, and do my best to cheer them, whatever my own sadness.
Count Szápary was always cheerful, or at any rate always wore an
appearance of cheerfulness, laughing and singing with the joviality of a
true Hungarian, and rejoicing in magnificent health and strength. This
doubtless aided him to give confidence to his patients, who must have
been trying at times with their whims and caprices. It has been given to
few to benefit their fellow-creatures to a like extent, or to reap the
harvest of benedictions that will forever blossom round his name.