FOREWORD.
In the pages in which I analyse these scripts, purporting to come from
Oscar Wilde, I assume throughout that I am speaking of a discarnate
personality of whose existence there is no question.
I leave it to my readers to pronounce on the case. I speak with
assurance of Oscar Wilde's continued existence, merely for convenience; my
own feeling is that of a diver who has pulled up a strange creature from
the deep and wonders of what nature he may be! I hope he may excite
criticism from every point of view and strengthen the ranks of those who
take psychic study seriously. A highly intelligent ghost seems worthy of
investigation; I have therefore made an effort to put the case fairly from
the three angles which seem possible.
I do not hold myself responsible for any of the literary criticism in
these scripts-the opinions expressed by “Oscar Wilde” are not mine.
I dedicate this book, with his permission, to Sir William Barrett,
F.R.S.,
respectfully and gratefully.
HESTER TRAVERS SMITH.
Whatever interpretation the reader may put upon the remarkable scripts
which are here published, there can be no doubt that they present an
amazing and most interesting psychological problem.
The complete solution of this problem may not be reached for many
years, but that any educated person should regard it as unworthy of study,
or that science should treat it with scorn, is a view now, happily, very
rare. The time has gone by when these novel psychical phenomena were
regarded by Dr. Carpenter and others as “epidemic delusions,” or as “an
odious fraud,” which is what the Lancet said of hypnotism in the middle of
the last century.
Psychologists now tell us that to regard these phenomena either as
delusions or fraud is nonsense; in fact, hypnotism has become a
therapeutic agent, recognised by the medical profession. Automatic scripts
are considered as the emergence of the subconscious,” and doubtless, in
some cases, do indicate “a dissociation of personality.”
Recently one of the foremost physiologists in Europe, Professor Richet,
after thirty years investigation of psychical research, has startled the
scientific world by his courageous publication of the results he has
obtained. With noble loyalty to truth he asserts that he has been
convinced of the genuineness of phenomena so amazing that many psychical
researchers hesitate to admit the facts. He is, however, a materialist and
explains his results from that point of view. He divides all psychical
phenomena into two classes: either subjective, such as automatic writing
and speaking; or objective, such as the physical phenomena of spiritism.
He does not believe in survival, and regards the phenomena as merely due
to psychical faculties possessed by certain persons who are psychics or
mediums. The subjective he attributes to “cryptesthesia,” the objective to
“pragmatic cryptesthesia.” But these polysyllables do not help us any more
than the names given by some learned psychologists, who tell us all these
psychical phenomena are illustrations of the “exteriorised effects of
unconscious complexes.”
One is reminded, by this formidable nomenclature,of the numerous and
recondite hypotheses by which Ptolemaic astronomers tried to make their
observations square with the geocentric theory of the universe. To the
plain man it seems simpler, less improbable, and more in accordance with
facts, for biologists to recognise, what astronomers have done, that the
universe is not explicable from the restricted viewpoint of the earth or
of the brain. Personally I am convinced that whilst many super-normal
psychical phenomena may ultimately be proved to be due to abnormal
conditions of the brain, yet there will be found to remain well attested
facts which will compel science to admit the existence of a soul; and also
of a spiritual world,-peopled with discarnate intelligent beings, some of
whom can occasionally, but more or less imperfectly, get into
communication with us.
Whether these scripts, purporting to come from Oscar Wilde, will
support this view or not it is perhaps too soon to decide. Every reader
will form his own conclusions; to me it seems that-given the entire
honesty and trustworthiness of the automatists themselves, and of this
there is no reason to doubt-they do afford strong prima facie evidence of
survival after the dissolution of body and brain. Of the condition of the
soul in the unseen, at present we can only to; see through a glass darkly
”; for the messages that purport to come from the discarnate are little
more than the record of their earth memories and habits. We have little or
no evidence of that higher and more ample existence which we desire and
mean by eternal life. Perhaps this is because none of those whom the world
has known as saints ever seem to communicate; though many stupid
personations of the great and good frequently occur.
Since the foregoing was put in type, Miss G. D. Cummins, for many years
a friend and collaborator of Mrs. Travers Smith, has published in the
Occult Review for February 1924 an extremely interesting and impartial
study of these Oscar Wilde Scripts. Miss Cummins, like Mrs. Travers Smith
herself, was at first very sceptical and regarded the results of
automatism-much as orthodox psychologists do-as merely interesting
illustrations of the emergence of the subconsciousness of the automatist.
But as time went on, during the eight years she studied these psychical
phenomena, she was compelled to abandon her preconceived opinion. The
striking personality of the soi-disant Oscar Wilde gradually became
apparent. Miss Cummins remarks: “Style, handwriting, personality, the
speed of the communication, the facts unknown to the mediums” must all be
carefully considered before any judgment can be passed.
It will be seen from the dispassionate examination of the scripts which
Mrs. Travers Smith gives in the present volume that she is disposed to
agree with Miss Cummins, that the whole contents of the scripts afford
“more convincing evidence of survival than the giving of certain facts
unknown to the mediums.”
Nevertheless, my own belief is that, just as here on earth our true
personality cannot reveal itself except through some material medium such
as the brain, so after death the soul must await the clothing of “the
spiritual body” before it can fully manifest itself to others. Be this as
it may, the fragmentary and elusive glimpses we get of those who have
passed into the unseen do afford to some a basis for religious belief, and
frequently they give inexpressible comfort and hope to many bereaved and
stricken hearts.
WILLIAM F. BARRETT.
This book bears the title of “Psychic Messages from Oscar Wilde.”
Twenty-three years have passed since the author of “De Profundis" passed
out of the present life. It may seem incredible that he should make an
attempt to send his thoughts back again to a world in which his share of
ill-fame exceeded his good fame and fortune. Have we adequate reason for
supposing that these messages are genuine? That Oscar Wilde still exists?
The public must judge of these matters; those to whom the writings came
can only transmit them to the world to which they are addressed.
How and by whom were these messages received? They came through
automatic writing and the ouija board, two methods of psychic
communication which are described later on in this book. In all cases
Oscar Wilde was “the communicator,” not what is termed “the control.” This
distinction between “a control” and “a communicator” may not be clear to
those who have not made a special study of Psychic Phenomena. “Control” is
a term which is applied to that mysterious entity who professes to be the
“spirit guide” of the medium. He is the intermediary who admits suitable
communicators. He is a being whose identity it is difficult to establish.
The “communicator” professes to be the discarnate spirit of a human being.
Our communicators, not our controls, go to prove or disprove survival.
These messages came directly from Oscar Wilde to his mediums. My control,
who calls himself “Johannes,” merely introduces this communicator, rather
unwillingly, to me. In the automatic writing there was no control or
intermediary.
In the chapters which follow the automatic script I have more fully
described the circumstances under which these writings came. I have
frequently quoted and referred to the work of Professor C. Richest, not
only because I value his conclusions, but also because he has formulated a
theory which is logical and not impossible, and by which he seeks to
explain psychic phenomena without accepting the spirit hypothesis. It is a
significant fact, for those who refuse to consider psychical research
seriously, that Professor Richet has devoted thirty years of his life to
the study of this subject. His great distinction, as perhaps the most
eminent physiologist in Europe, should give him a hearing, though his
present theoretical opinion may be open to dispute. In fact, Sir Oliver
Lodge has already dealt very ably with the problem of “cryptesthesia” as
an explanation of psychic phenomena. It will seem difficult to many.
The first of our messages from Oscar Wilde came in automatic writing,
as follows:
CHAPTER I. AUTOMATIC SCRIPT OBTAINED ON JUNE
8TH, 1923.
Sitters-Mrs. Travers Smith and Mr. V.
Lily, my little Lily-No, the lily was mine-a crystal thread-a silver
reed that made music in the morning. (Who are you?) Pity Oscar Wilde-one
who in the world was a king of life. Bound to Ixion's wheel of thought, I
must complete for ever the circle of my experience. Long ago I wrote that
there was twilight in my cell and twilight in my heart, but this is the
(last?) twilight of the soul. In eternal twilight I move, but I know that
in the world there is day and night, seed time and harvest, and red sunset
must follow apple-green dawn. Every year spring throws her green veil over
the world and anon the red autumn glory comes to mock the yellow moon.
Already the may is creeping like a white mist over lane and hedgerow, and
year after year the hawthorn bears blood-red fruit after the white death
of its may. (Mrs. T.S.-Are you Oscar Wilde?) Yes, Oscar Wilde. (Mrs. T.S.-Tell
me the name of the house you lived in in Dublin. Tell me where your father
used to practice.) Near Dublin. My father was a surgeon. These names are
difficult to recall. (Mrs. T.S.-Not at all difficult if you are really
Oscar Wilde.) I used to live near here-Tite Street. (Mrs. T.S.-There is a
Tite Street near here and he has spelt it correctly. I don't know where he
lived in London. Did you know about it?) (Mr. V, the writer of the
script.-I have never been in Chelsea before to-day, and to the best of my
knowledge I had never heard of Tite Street.) (Mrs. T.S.-Well, Oscar Wilde,
what was your brother's name?) William-Willie. (Mrs. T.S.-Now, what did
your mother, Lady Wilde, call herself?) Speranza. Pity Oscar Wilde. (Mrs.
T.S.-Why have you come here?) To let the world know that Oscar Wilde is
not dead. His thoughts live on in the hearts of all those who in a gross
age can hear the flute voice of beauty calling on the hills or mark where
her white feet brush the dew from the cowslips in the morning. Now the
mere memory of the beauty of the world is an exquisite pain. I was always
one of those for whom the visible world existed. I worshipped at the
shrine of things seen. There was not a blood stripe on a tulip or a curve
on a shell or a tone on the sea that but had for me its meaning and its
mystery and its appeal to the imagination. Others might sip the pale lees
of the cup of thought, but for me the red wine of life.
Pity Oscar Wilde. To think of what is going on in the world is terrible
for me. Soon the chestnuts will light their white candles and the
foxgloves flaunt their dappled, drooping bells. Soon the full moon will
swim up over the edge of the world and hang like a great golden
cheese-Stop! Stop! Stop! Stop! This image is insufferable. You write like
a successful grocer, who from selling pork has taken to writing poetry.
(Mrs. T.S.-Who said that?) Oscar. I find the words in my medium's mind.
Try again-like a great golden pumpkin hanging in the blue night. That is
better, but it is a little rustic. Still, I adore rustic people. They are
at least near to nature, and, besides, they remind me of all the simple
pleasures I somehow missed in life. (Here Mrs. T.S. made some remark about
Lady Wilde being a half crazy old woman who thought she could write
poetry.) Please do not insult my mother. I loved and honoured her. (Mrs.
T.S.-We are not insulting her. Spell out the name by which your mother
called herself.) Speranza. Yes, it is quite true what I said. I lived for
the beauty of visible things. The rose flushed, anemones that star the
dark woodland ways, those loveliest tears that Venus shed for Adonis, and
shed in vain, were more to me than many philosophies.*
* Mr. V. wrote with Mrs. T.S.'s hand resting on his. When she took her
hand off, the pencil only tapped and did not continue. The italics have
been inserted in the above copy to indicate quotations similar in style
which were afterwards discovered in Wilde's works. Mr. V. is a
mathematical scholar and had no special interest in Oscar Wilde. He stated
he had read “The Ballad of Reading GaoL” “De Profundis” and “The Picture
of Dorian Gray.”
COPY OF AUTOMATIC SCRIPT OBTAINED MONDAY,
JUNE 18TH, 1923.
Present.-Mr. V., Mrs. Travers Smith, Mr. B., Mr. Dingwall (Research
Officer of the Society for Psychical Research), Miss Cummins.
Mr. V. was the automatist, Mrs. T.S. touching his hand.
Oscar Wilde. Being dead is the most boring experience in life. That is,
if one excepts being married or dining with a schoolmaster. Do you doubt
my identity? I am not surprised, since sometimes I doubt it myself. I
might retaliate by doubting yours. I have always admired the Society for
Psychical Research. They are the most magnificent doubters in the world.
They are never happy until they have explained away their spectres. And
one suspects a genuine ghost would make them exquisitely uncomfortable. I
have sometimes thought of founding an academy of celestial
doubters...which might be a sort of Society for Psychical Research among
the living. No one under sixty would be admitted, and we should call
ourselves the Society of Superannuated Shades. Our first object might well
be to insist on investigating at once into the reality of the existence
of, say, Mr. Dingwall.
Mr. Dingwall, is he romance or reality? Is he fact or fiction? If it
should be decided that he is fact, then, of course, we should strenuously
doubt it. Fortunately there are no facts over here. On earth we could
scarcely escape them. Their dead carcases were strewn everywhere on the
rose path of life. One could not pick up a newspaper without learning
something useful. In it were some sordid statistics of crime or disgusting
detail relating to the consumption of pork, that met the eyes, or we were
told with a precision that was perfectly appalling and totally
unnecessary-What time the moon had decided to be jealous and eclipse the
sun. (Mrs. T.S.-Shall we ask him some questions?) Don't degrade me into
giving you facts. Enquire about Mrs. Chan Toon. I had the honour of her
acquaintance some years ago.
(Mr. B. told a story of Whistler and Wilde. Wilde had expressed a wish
to have made a certain witty remark which had just been uttered by
Whistler. Whistler retorted: “You will, Wilde; you will in time.”) The
pencil suddenly moved and wrote: With James, vulgarity always begins at
home.
RECORD OF A COMMUNICATION RECEIVED AT THE OUIJA BOARD, JUNE 17TH, 1923,
AT 11.30 P.M.
Recorded by Miss Cummins. The medium was Mrs. Travers Smith.
Oscar Wilde. I have come, as you asked for me. I am naturally an
interesting person-not only do I flaunt the colours of literature, but I
have the lurid flame of crime attached to me also. My dear lady, do you
realise that you are talking to a social leper? (Yes, we do.) I do not
wish to burden you with details of my life, which was like a candle that
had gutted at the end. I rather wish to make you believe that I was the
medium through which beauty filtered and was distilled like the essence of
a rose.
Forget my history, dear lady, and think of my best powers as they were
when London was the haunted house of the...Oscar is speaking again...the
haunted house which was peopled by the shades of Olympus. I think you may
reasonably believe you are a living being and I a chimera of your mind.
But let me explain that to me you are a mere chimera, and, in reality, you
are less alive than I am. For I am still a living soul and mind, and I
have as great a feeling for beauty as I had when I wore a top hat and let
my hair stream from beneath it. (Tell us about Mrs. Chan Toon.) I will not
tell you anything about her. For I want you to make enquiries about the
lady. She was a perfect specimen, fit for the satin lining of a
jewel-case; and if she is still alive she could tell you much that would
throw a light on my life as she knew it. It was not the life of a rustic,
but it had something of the rustic element in it, and I can confidently
say I had in my heart the innocent joy of a rustic who has never seen the
stones of this great prison house, where if a man is unfortunate he is
despised and thrown out upon his own mental chance of regeneration. Mine
was not a very lucky one. My chance, as I was, when I left that quiet and
monastical retreat where justice made me repose and take my pleasures
sadly. (Here Wilde was interrupted with the query: “Who did you
communicate through at the sitting for automatic writing this afternoon?
Through Mr. V, or through Mrs. Travers Smith?”) Through you, dear lady. He
is a tool. You are the light that lets me peep again into the world which
seems so dazzling, now that the Divine justice finds it His pleasure to
keep me in dim twilight. (Did you know Mr. W. B. Yeats?) I knew Yeats very
well-a fantastical mind, but so full of inflated joy in himself that his
little cruse of poetry was emptied early in his career. (What of his
work?) A little drop of beauty that was spread only with infinite pains
over the span of many years.
He will not be interested to know that I have still the voice to speak
and the mind to put my thoughts on paper. He is too full of his own
literary salvation to worry over a brother in art who fell from too much
beauty, or rather, the desire for beauty. (Mrs. T.S.-Give us a proof of
your identity.) Do not ask me for proofs. I do not wish to visualise my
medium as an old spinster nosing into the other world in the hope that she
may find salvation for herself when Providence removes her from this
sphere. I rather like to think of her as a creature who hag a certain
feeling for those who strive from twilight to reach the upper air. (We
admire your work.) I am infinitely amused by the remarks you all make. You
seem to think that I am gratified by your approval and your smiles, which
mean that, in spite of all his crime, he had a certain value for us. I
have value as each and all of you have; and I am none the worse for having
drunk the dregs as well as the best of the vintage....
Here we are in the most amusing position. We are like so many ants that
creep round and round and do our silly tasks daily without any interest in
our work. I feel like a very ancient aunt nowadays. I am doing what is
little better than picking oakum in gaol. There, after all, my mind could
detach itself from my body. Here, I have no body to leave off. So one of
my most interesting occupations is impossible. It is not by any means
agreeable to be a mere mind without a body. That was a very decorous
garment, that made us seem very attractive to each other; or, perhaps,
supremely the opposite. Over here that amusement is quite out of the
question, and we know far too much about the interiors of each others'
ideas. They grow very pale in this process, and one tires of one's ideas
so easily. You can see them just as you saw the slightly creased and
dabbled clothes of your friends on earth. (Have you seen your mother?)
Yes, I have seen her. She has not really improved in the process of dying.
She is less comely now than, when Speranza used to lead the intelligentsia
in Dublin in those days when we had stiff the relics of civilisation among
us. (Will you come again?) I will come again gladly, if you will let me
buzz on as an autumn bee might who was tired of hunting for fresh blossoms
out of season. I am tired, too, but I like to remind myself now and then
of the fact that there are people who regard this little globe as the
whole of what is reality.
COPY OF AUTOMATIC SCRIPT WRITTEN ON JULY 2ND, 1923.
The writer was Mr. V, who was assisted by Mrs. Travers Smith touching
his hand.
Present-Miss Cummins.
Note.-A portion of this script deals with the novels of Arnold Bennett,
H. G. Wells, and Eden Philpotts. Neither Mrs. Travers Smith nor Mr. V. are
great novel-readers. They had each read one novel by Arnold Bennett, three
or four of H. G. Wells' earlier novels; they had not read anything
whatever by Eden Philpotts.
Oscar Wilde. Like blind Homer, I am a wanderer. Over the whole world
have I wandered, looking for eyes by which I might see. At times it is
given me to pierce this strange veil of darkness, and through eyes, from
which my secret must be forever hidden, gaze once more on the gracious
day. I have found sight in the most curious places. Through the eyes out
of the dusky face of a Tamal girl I have looked on the tea fields of
Ceylon, and through the eyes of a wandering Kurd I have seen Ararat and
the Yezedes, who worship both God and Satan and who love only snakes and
peacocks.
Once on a pleasure steamer on its way to St. Cloud I saw the green
waters of the Seine and the lights of Paris, through the vision of a
little girl who clung weeping to her mother and wondered why. Ah! those
precious moments of sight. They are the stars of my night, the gleaming
jewels in my casket of darkness, the priceless guerdon for whose sake I
would willingly barter all that fame has brought me, the nectar for which
my soul thirsts. Eyes I what can it profit a man if he loses them, or what
can a man give in exchange for them? They are fairer than silver, better
than seed pearls or many-hued opals. Fine gold may not buy them, neither
can they be had for the wishes of kings.... (A pause to rest the mediums.)
It may surprise you to learn that in this way I have dipped into the
works of some of your modern novelists. That is, I have not drawn the
whole brew, but tasted the vintage. You have much to learn. Time will
ruthlessly prune Mr. Wells' fig trees. As for Mr. Arnold Bennett, he is
the assiduous apprentice to literature, who has conjured so long with the
wand of his master Flaubert that he has really succeeded in persuading
himself and others that he has learnt the trick. But Flaubert's secret is
far from him. Of his characters, one may say that they never say a
cultured thing and never do an extraordinary one. They are, of course,
perfectly true to life-as true as a bad picture. They are perfectly
commonplace, and, for the Clayhangers, the Lessways and the Tellwrights,
oblivion will have a plentiful meed of poppy. Mr. Bennett has undertaken a
grave irresponsibility by adding to the number of disagreeable types in
the world. Of late, we understand, he has taken to producing prostitutes.
It is pleasanter to turn to Mr. Eden Philpotts, who, unlike Mr. Bennett,
on whose sterile pages no flowers bloom or birds sing, has a real and
unaffected love of nature, and, unfortunately, all nature's lack of
variety. He is a writer who has been very faithful, far too faithful, to
his first love. One wishes that spring would sometimes forget to come to
Dartmoor.
The following communication came through Mrs. Travers Smith's hand at
the Ouija Board, July 2nd, 1923, at 11 p.m.
Recorded by Miss Cummins.
Oscar Wilde. I have no very special desire to give my thoughts from
this place of dimness to you who are breathing the upper air. But if it
gives you pleasure to speak to one, who is in a manner soiled in the eyes
of the world, I will continue to talk to you and to spin my webs of
thought around you. As you know, I have only dimness around me. It is that
darkness, which is reserved for those who are the prey of social
conventions, which has cast me into a state which is not beneficial for me
from the point of development of mind. My mind is now a rusty lock, into
which the key grates with a rasp. It does not move easily and lightly as
it used. I will go on and tell you how I have wandered into the minds of
the moderns, as you are pleased to call them.
It is a rather entertaining process. I watch for my opportunity, and
when the propitious moment comes I leap into their minds and gather
rapidly these impressions, which are largely collective. I spoke to-day of
Mr. Bennett and Mr. Wells. These two writers have somehow managed to
attain a summit which has deceived themselves. They actually believe they
are fit for the company of the gods who drink the nectar of pure mind. And
here they are utterly lost, neither of these gentlemen can do more than
prepare a ready-made costume for the lay figure. They cannot create, and
even when the lay figure is nailed together they cannot clothe it.
I feel the London of my time has been swallowed up; an article of a
coarser quality is now in its place. The women of my time were beautiful,
from the outward side at least. They had a mellifluous flow of language,
and they added much to the brilliant pattern of society. Now woman is an
excrescence, she protrudes from social life as a wart does from the nose
of an inebriate. (Do you see women?) I see them now and then, dear lady,
when I have the chance of using the eyes of a suitable medium. (Do you see
this room?) Yes, a little dimly. (Mrs. T.S.-Do you see me?) Yes, I can see
you quite clearly. (How do you manage when Mr. V. and I sit together?) I
can control his hand. I can only control your mind. Your hand is guided by
your mind....
(What is your opinion of Bernard Shaw?) Shaw, after all, might be
called a contemporary of mine. We had almost reached the point of rivalry,
in a sense, when I was taken from the scene of action. I had a kindly
feeling towards poor Shaw. He had such a keen desire to be original that
it moved my pity. Then he was without any sense of beauty, or even a sense
of the dramatic side of life, and totally without any idea of the outside
of any human being as he was utterly ignorant of his internal organs. And
yet there was the passionate yearning to be a personage, to force his
person on the London world and to press in, in spite of the better taste
of those who went before him. I have a very great respect for his work.
After all, he is my fellow-countryman. We share the same misfortune in
that matter. I think he may be called the true type of the pleb. He is so
anxious to prove himself honest and outspoken that he utters a great deal
more than he is able to think. He cannot analyse, he is merely trying to
overturn the furniture and laughs with delight when he sees the canvas
bottoms of the chairs he has flung over. He is ever ready to call upon his
audience to admire his work; and his audience admires it from sheer
sympathy with his delight.
(Whom do you admire among the moderns?)
I am not given to admiration, I fear. But if you ask me sincerely whom
I admire among the modern dramatists, I think there is only one who has
any approach to form and a sense of drama. I feel that if I give you the
name of this writer you will think that I praise his work chiefly as Shaw
might, with a desire to be original. But I assure you, the only mind I
have entered into which appeals to my literary sense is John Galsworthy.
He is my successor, in a sense. For although he dives more deeply into the
interior of the human being he is ever occupied with the exterior, which
is so important in the play of society; and he succeeds, with this very
difficult medium, in producing something akin to life with all the
artificiality which is so essential to the stage. He is the aristocrat in
literature, the man who takes joy in selection, as our poor friend Shaw
never did. Shaw plunges in and seizes the first object his hand can grasp
and takes a wholesome joy in ripping it to pieces. Galsworthy is slow in
his selection, but when he selects he does so from an exquisite sense of
fitness and he presents the complete pattern of his idea....
It gives me pleasure to dive a little into the present time. It is a
form of amusement over here.
The following communication came through Mrs. Travers Smith's hand at
the Ouija Board, July 4th, 1923 Recorded by Miss Cummins.
Oscar Wilde is here. I shall readily speak to you, because it seems to
me that these glimpses of the sun keep me from growing too mouldy here
below. Hamlet speaks of his father's ghost as “old mole.” I often used to
smile in my unregenerate days at the clumsy way in which the
Englishman-for surely our Shakespeare was nothing if not English.... The
clumsy way in which he addressed the shade of his father used to wound my
feelings of delicacy and selection. But now that I am a mole myself I
understand. I fully appreciate this expression. It was well chosen and
should be of interest to the Society for Psychical Research, as it
displays an inward knowledge of the state over here....
So far I cannot be said to have found the after life a state of
bliss-rather it is the dimming of the senses and the stultifying of the
brain from lack of light and colour.... But doubtless the Almighty has an
excellent purpose in stamping out as far as possible that taste for his
creations which worked so deeply to my detriment....
I am a little astray as to what special subjects are of interest to
you. (We are interested in drama.) If you tempt me to speak of drama I
shall weary you with my complaints and my fancies. I had a different
thought from my fellows when my plays were shaped, and consequently I
cannot absorb their attitude towards the stage. My dear lady, how do you
approach the theatre? From what side of your nature does it repel or
attract you? Have you ever considered whether our task should be to aim at
representing life in its rather crude and disgusting shape, or whether the
stage, like the other platforms from which we endeavour to bring home the
essence of things to the herd, should be reserved for the exposition of
beauty in some form.... (Do you ask for my opinion?)
Oscar is still here. I do not intend to listen to your modern
criticism, because you have the misfortune to live in an age of harshness.
In my lifetime I strove to bring beauty home to the hearts of men. But in
your time the main endeavour of the so-called artist is to torture the
senses. Pain is the only quality which is essential to any literary work
of the present day which is to find its way into the favour of the pleb
who rules the world at the present hour....
(Tell me about your plays?) My idea in writing a play was to weave a
pattern of humanity, as I mentioned to you before, I think. I am quite
sensible of the fact that I sound superficial, and you may argue, if you
wish, that the poet who is an artist in weaving patterns from words cannot
approach the problem of weaving patterns from the human material at his
disposal.
I have never swerved from my ideal. I have served the theatre in my own
way, and from my own standpoint I succeeded. (Tell us about your earth
life.).... I have delayed a little. I feel it an effort now to lay my past
feelings before your eyes. They are past, after all; and in our state it
is difficult to look into the abyss that ties behind us.
I find it easier to speak of the present time for two reasons. One,
that you, my dear lady, are more useful to me when I speak of what you are
familiar with; and the other, that I enjoy my glimpses into the present
chaotic conditions. It affords me great happiness when I reflect that I
escaped this age of rasp.
MRS. TRAVERS SMITH AT THE OUIJA BOARD,
JUNE 20TH, 1923.
Recorded by Miss Cummins.
Johannes. (Will you summon Oscar Wilde?) He is unpleasant. You may
speak to him, but not often or much.... Oscar Wilde is speaking. Yes, I
will give you a few minutes'; light; that allows me to look through the
peephole. It quite amuses me in a desultory way; it is not strictly an
intellectual occupation, but it is a mild distraction from the twilight of
my present state, which is somewhat the condition that is suitable for the
propagation of a low form of vegetable existence. (Mrs. T.S.-I have sent
your communications to Mr. Yeats.) He will not be gratified by finding me
still extant, unless it affords him some proof that he will continue to
inflate, in a further state, his ecstatic penetration of the universe.
(What about your literary work?) I do not get much literary stimulus over
here. I am rather in the condition of coma of the mind that used to
overcome me when the great massed-up population of London oppressed my
being. The shades here are really too tumultuous. They are overcrowded and
we get confused by seeing into each others' thoughts....
I wish you would just take me as I come. I crawl into your mind like a
sick worm and try to bore a hole above the earth so that I may once more
look at the sun....
(Why do you speak to me?)
I like to speak to you because you remind me of the time when I too was
a creature hampered by that garment you call a body. I really do not miss
it much, because there is a joy in that nakedness which leaves all the
thoughts and ideas of the mind, whether foul or fair, open to the public
gaze. I feel now as if the extreme reticence of wearing a body was almost
indecent. It is far more decent to go about blaring one's loves and hates,
blowing them in the faces of those we meet-as it were, being so much on
the outside that we cannot be said to have an inside. My dear lady, what
will it be for you to lose your little shape, to have no shape, to be a
fluid and merely stream about in such an undecided way that it is like
drifting before a Heavy tide. My mind is not really as repulsive as you
would expect. It looks quite respectable at times. Of course there are
times when it looks like an ancient thief, who steals away from me with
shame in his face. That is only one aspect of me. I have other attractive
ones. There is the brilliant orange of my thoughts, and the deep rose red
of my desires, which cling to me still. They are perfumed and smell sweet
to me. But there is somehow a sense that they are getting a little stale.
This condition of twilight is bringing out a delicate mossy mould upon
them which rather damages their hue. (Here the sitting was interrupted.)
The following communication came through Mrs. Travers Smith's hand at
the Ouija Board, June 24th, 1923.
Recorded by Miss Cummins.
Oscar Wilde is speaking. I have come, as if I were a servant-maid who
replied to her mistress's bell with great assiduity.
I am glad to have a little of the upper air to breathe now and then.
And you, dear lady, have given me an opportunity.... I see you have made
up your mind that I am not a reasonable shade, that I am a capricious
ghost, who merely behaves as if he had no reason to guide his mind, which
now without a body to act as pilot strays about fluidly in space. But, my
dear lady, you are mistaken. My mind is quite clear. I am in excellent
condition for exploiting the English language, if only you give me a theme
to weave patterns on. (Tell us about your time at Trinity College,
Dublin.)
I almost forget that time when I was chained within the walls of the
university. I was like a carrier pigeon who had flown by mistake into a
nest of sparrows. These Dublin students could see such a short distance. I
was a giant among pigmies. (We are great admirers of your plays.)
I bend deeply to your compliment. My plays were scarcely drama. They
were more the weaving of character into pattern; and this, with the use of
language which I chose in each instance to illustrate the surface of the
human being. I did not propose to go deeply into the heart, as it is
called-that organ, which is so frequently maligned, did not interest me. I
was more intrigued by the human pattern as it appeared on the surface of
London society. It seemed to me we used to get more from each other by
accepting the outside than by probing into the intestines. The outside of
this great machine was at that date comely, and presented to the eye a
picture which had the charm of much shade and little light. It was a time
when beauty was spoken of, but kept in the innermost chamber and not
permitted to walk abroad....
I feel inclined to relate little tales to-day of my adventures on the
surface of society here. I may not be as full of grace if you call me
another time.... I should rather like to give you some idea of what it
meant to plunge into this huge heap of philistinism. I felt like a
goldfish who has choked from devouring too much bread. The meal did not
nourish me, it merely distended my stomach. It seemed a foolish thing to
go on living in such a world as this was. And I found I had a mission-the
mission of drawing aside the veil from beauty and showing her in her
nakedness to the world. I had all the ardour of a missionary; and my own
rather unusual appearance gave me, the suitable garb of a parson. The
priest of art, of culture, must of necessity show it in his own form.
The following communication came through Mrs. Travers Smith's hand at
the Ouija Board, July 5th, 1923.
Recorded by Miss Cummins. It was with difficulty the recorder kept pace
with the message.
Oscar Wilde. (I have a question to ask.) Your question shall have my
best attention, if it savours of what concerns yourself; if it concerns
me, I reserve the right to be silent if necessary. (Why did you select me
as your medium?) That, my dear lady, is not easy to explain. I have told
you how I gazed through the eyes of many nations that I might gain once
more a look into the glory of the world. I had often fancied conveying my
thoughts from this place of darkness to someone who had a fitting
understanding of a mind such as mine is-fantastical and pained by a desire
to express beauty in words. I tried many times to secure a vial for my
ideas, which could contain them in an essence as it were. But until the
day when I seized the pencil from some unnoticeable being, who seemed to
make an effort to press through the brain of “the tool,” never before had
I found the exact quality I needed. If I am to speak again as I used, or
to use the pen, I must have a clear brain to work with. It must let my
thoughts flow through as fine sand might if filtered through a glass
cylinder. It must be clear and there must be material which I can make use
of. I can use the hand of the tool and leave an impress of my writing as I
used. But his brain does not serve me. I cannot use it, for ideas would
stick there as flies do in a cloyed mass.
MRS. TRAVERS SMITH AT THE OUIJA BOARD,
JULY 6TH, 1923, 11.45 P.M.
Recorded by Miss Cummins. This communication came through with the same
rapidity as the previous message.
Oscar Wilde. I will try to let my thoughts fly through your brain. (I
was tired when I spoke to you last.) I found you less sensitive to my
ideas than before, but even when you are tired you are a perfect aeolian
lyre that can record me as I think. (Mrs. T.S.-A legend has sprung up
concerning you. It is believed by some that you did not die when you were
supposed to have died.)
Men are ever interested, my dear lady, in the remains of those who have
had the audacity to be distinguished, and when, added to this, the corpse
has the flavour of crime, the carrion birds are eager to light on it. In
my case the corpse was taken from the humble place where it was cast off
by my mental portion and conveyed to a retreat where it might decay
quietly and in peace. It had none of the gaudy obsequies which would have
fitted such as I was. And hence this legend, which had a charm, in spite
of the fact that I had passed from the public gaze long before this
dissolution took place. It is really delightful to think that when one has
striven and conquered London-for I conquered London partly through my
supposed crime-it is delightful to think that after the carcase has been
conveyed to its modest hole a legend is woven round its decaying
particles. You, I am sure, give me credit for the fact that I really
accomplished the feat of dying when I was supposed to die. I did not fly
from the world a second time in order to create fiction. This legend was
merely an accident due to the fact that I was still talked about. (Mrs.
T.S. took her hand off to rest her arm.)
(Mrs. T.S.-Are you there, Oscar?) I waited for your returning strength
as a footman might wait for his mistress, standing with deferential pomp
behind her. (That is very neat.) Thank, you, dear lady; I smile at your
approval.
(What is your opinion of “Ulysses,” by James Joyce?)
Yes, I have smeared my fingers with that vast work. It has given me one
exquisite moment of amusement. I gathered that if I hoped to retain my
reputation as an intelligent shade, open to new ideas, I must peruse this
volume. It is a singular matter that a countryman of mine should have
produced this great bulk of filth. You may smile at me for uttering thus
when you reflect that in the eyes of the world I am a tainted creature.
But, at least, I had a sense of the values of things on the terrestrial
globe. Here in “Ulysses” I find a monster who cannot contain the
monstrosities of his own brain. The creatures he gives birth to leap from
him in shapeless masses of hideousness, as dragons might, which in their
foulsome birth contaminate their parent.... This book appeals to all my
senses. It gratifies the soil which is in everyone of us. It gives me the
impression of having been written in a severe fit of nausea. Surely there
is a nausea fever. The physicians may not have diagnosed it. But here we
have the heated vomit continued through the countless pages of this work.
The author thought no doubt that he had given the world a series of ideas.
Ideas which had sprung from out his body, not his mind!
I, who have passed into the twilight, can see more clearly than this
modern prophet. I also know that if he feels his work has sprung from
courage, which is innate in him, he should be led to realise that
“Ulysses” is merely involuntary. I feel that if this work has caught a
portion of the public, who may take it for the truth, that I, even I, who
am a shade, and I who have tasted the fulness of life and its meed of
bitterness, should cry aloud: “Shame upon Joyce, shame on his work, shame
on his lying soul. Compare this monster Joyce with our poor Shaw. Here we
find very opposite poles. For both these writers cry aloud that they have
found the truth. Shaw, like a coy and timid maiden, hides his enormous
modesty with bluster. Joyce, on the other hand, is not a blusterer at all.
In fact he has not vomited the whole, even in this vast and monumental
volume-more will come from Joyce. For he has eaten rapidly; and all the
undigested food must come away. I feel that Joyce has much to give the
world before, in his old age, he turns to virtue. For by that time he will
be tired of truth and turn to virtue as a last emetic.
(You are most amusing.)
I am glad that a poor ghost can bring laughter to your eyes.
(I am interested in literature.)
I quite appreciate that fact. You have a sense of style, and this helps
me to put poor thoughts before you.
(What do you think of Hardy and Meredith?)
I adore the rustic, as you know. His simple mind appeals to mine; and
for that reason I should be interested in Mr. Hardy's work. But all that
is in me of rusticity revolts against this realism that flaunts itself in
hopeless wanderings among the fields of Dorsetshire. Think for one moment
and reflect that Mr. Hardy's works are just the jottings down of a limited
village experience with a primitive sense of romance added to it. A very
harmless writer, Hardy. He almost succeeded in being a little risky now
and then in that dull period when he wrote. I well remember how his Tess
set maiden hearts athrobbing. It was a tale which might attract the
schoolgirl who imagined she had just arrived at puberty; but as a work
this book is shapeless and has neither value as an artificial rendering of
rustic life nor as a minute study of the village. Mr. Hardy is indeed the
middle class provincial. He never dreamt he could arrive, and yet he had
his day, partly because he tried to paint the peasant, who at this period
was just about to peep above the horizon for the first time. We were quite
interested to meet the peasant; we even found him rich for a short space,
but soon his day had passed. For Mr. Hardy wearied us. We wearied of his
peasants, and he had to fall back upon a class a little more elevated but
totally uninteresting. This, I feel, was the reason for his steady decay.
(What do you think of Meredith?)
I am frankly an admirer of Meredith. He, of course, was a man without
any appreciation whatever of beauty, but he had a most ingenious way of
plaiting words, so that his most ardent admirers could never extricate his
thoughts from them. They clung about his ideas as barnacles on an old
ship. And he was so completely clogged that his ideas escaped and only
words were left. But, after all, what an immense achievement it is to
plait the English language! I never attempted this experiment myself. My
plan was to select my words, to cherish them and move them from one corner
of my room to another, until they each and all received their due.
Meredith collected them and wove them so intricately that his intelligence
was cramped by them, and no one ever penetrated their crustated masses.
Note.-About a year previous to this sitting Mrs. Travers Smith hid
glanced at a copy of “Ulysses” for a few minutes in Ireland. Out of seven
hundred pages she could not have read more than half a dozen, nor had she
read reviews of this work. So she was not in a position to criticize it.
She is a great admirer of Meredith, and believes him to have a fine sense
of beauty. She therefore almost entirely disagreed with Wilde's caustic
estimate of his work.
The following communication came through Mrs. Travers Smith's hand at
the Ouija Board, July 8th, 1923. Present-Miss D., Mr. M.L., Mr. C.L.
Recorded by Miss Cummins.
Oscar Wilde. (Give us your opinion of women?) Dear lady, do you really
wish to speak again to your criminal? I feel rather melancholy to-night.
So possibly it is an occasion on which I may reasonably babble about my
lost illusions. I have long since passed into a state in which women
appear to me merely to exist as the coloured phantoms of an over-excited
brain. But even here., in this condition into which the Almighty has found
it His pleasure to confine me, he cannot shut out from my only-too-fertile
memory the images of those who passed in and out of my life-flashes of
lightning flitting across the leaden Heaven....
I desired to say that not one woman passed across my path in life who
left no furrow on the road behind her. My sensations were so varied with
regard to your sex, dear lady, that you would find painted on my
heart-that internal organ so often quoted by the vulgar-you would find
every shade of desire there-and even more. (An interruption.) These women,
who like dancing flowers sprang on my path, these jewels, who crowned me
with torturing pleasure, were the strings of my lyre. They gave me words
to weave, and thoughts to cluster round my words.
(Tell us about one woman?)
Women were ever to me a cluster of stars. They contained for me all,
and more than all, that God has created. Evil came through them, and all
the best of me was woven from the woman. (Here there was an interruption
from those present.)
Oscar is speaking. Woman was to me a colour, a sound. She gave me all.
She gave me first desire, desire gave birth to that mysterious essence
which was within me, and from that deeply distilled and perfumed drug my
thoughts were born; and from my thoughts words sprang. Each word I used
became a child to me. I loved my words and cherished them in secret. They
became so precious they were hidden from the gaze of men until I nurtured
them, and in their fullness brought them forth as symbols of the woman....
I feel it very difficult to make your simple nature follow me in this
matter. Do I insult you if I maintain that woman must ever be to man the
force that is creative. That was what made her hateful in my sight-hateful
and sweet as a too powerful vintage.
(Were all women the same to you?)
Women came to me like clustered stars. I gathered them as flowers might
be culled from a rich garden. All their varied perfumes came to me as an
intoxicating draught-not singly, but combined. This twined wreath
encircled me through life, and made my days both sweet and bitter....
(Are you there, Oscar?)
Oscar is still waiting on your fainting strength.
(Mr. L. What do you think of the Sitwells? Have you read their poetry?)
No. I do not spend my precious hours in catching tadpoles. I only leap
into the minds of those who have a certain value. Below this standard I do
not sink.
The criticism communicated by Oscar Wilde was considered too malicious
to be published. A sitting was therefore held at 15 Cheyne Gardens,
Chelsea, January 4th, 1924, and when Oscar Wilde spoke he was asked to
write a criticism of George Moores works which would be less unkind than
the previous one. The message was received through Mrs. Travers Smith's
hand at the ouija board. Recorded by Miss G. D. Cummins.
(What do you think of George Moore?)
My fellow-countryman from Dublin! Dear lady, here is a fine and
intricate mind deeply nurtured in culture; steeped in it in fact, to a
point that compels him to lose sight of the common forms of man and woman.
To my nature, writing of this kind is almost incomprehensible. I used the
heavy pen; and, from the soil my tool had turned, roses and flaunting
lilies rose; but from the rocky soil, on which Moore strives to plant the
rose, only the lichen draws sufficient nourishment. How can we meet on any
grounds?
One difficulty, in reading him, is to differentiate between the sexes.
To me masculine and feminine are the entirely arbitrary division of
nature, while to him they seem perpetually to merge in each other. I am
ever intrigued as to whether his men are women or his women men. And yet,
what a fine perception of style has Moore; style, if you like to style it
so. A continual flow of words, rippling, as a stream without colour, flows
through a level plain-no rush in these waters; they follow their course
with a certainty which may be considered monotonous by the full-blooded.
The continual flow and ripple of Moore's prose lulls the reader to a
dozing state. It is “half slumber” that carries him through these
colourless pages.
Thus Moore murmurs on; never a clear or masculine idea, but the
half-tone, delicately sexless, sustained throughout. Do you agree, dear
lady? In your mind I find an admiration of Moore's style. Consider my own
productions, which have entirely sprung from out the male. How can I speak
of one whose delicacy of perception exceeds my own. My work was fashioned
in the glare of sunlight, his in the mist of evening. For, after all, dear
lady, even these figures, which move behind the blind in Moore's tales,
are but shadows.
I cannot speak too highly of what our Moore has said of art; here,
indeed, we find the slow but determined intention to criticize where there
is no intuitive taste. A worthy critic, Moore! Most conscientious, in that
he tries to approach that which, to him, is almost unintelligible. I
cannot praise his industry too highly, for sheer determination has led him
to the studio; and what he says is the result of a decision to become what
he is not, by nature.
(What do you think of “Hail and Farewell ”?)
I have not, personally, a craving for the dissecting room. The
enquiring mind of Moore has induced him to lay his friends and enemies
thus on the table, in order that he may have the opportunity of observing
their entrails while still they are alive. An accurate method, but rather
a severe tension for the unfortunate subjects, who have to undergo this
ordeal in the cause of literature.
(A pause.)
I have a gentle feeling for poor George. He is so entirely opposed to
me in nature that I feel we, perhaps, are the complement of each other;
possibly the two halves of the whole. I have a sensation of mild curiosity
in trying to discover of what ingredients he is fashioned.
Note.-Mrs. T.S. has always been a great admirer of George Moore's work,
and more especially his style.
Copy of communication received at the Ouija Board by Mrs. Travers
Smith, July 12th, 1923.
Recorded by Miss Cummins.
Oscar at your bidding, dear lady. (Do you object to speaking of your
prison life?)
I do not at all object to speaking to you about what was to me a most
enthralling experience. When I say enthralling I mean that my circuit of
the world's pain would not have been adequate without that supreme misery,
for to me it was supreme. I, who worshipped beauty, was robbed not only of
the chance of beholding her face, but I was cast in on myself; and there,
in that barrenness of soul, I languished until my spirit rose once more
and cried aloud that this was its great opportunity.
If I may be a little autobiographical, I will go back to the beginning.
It seemed to me at first that I had died and passed across the bitter
stream to that place of dimness where now I am confined. There was a
desolation of the soul that savoured of despair; and yet within me despair
had never found a lodgment. I was a fallen god, a fallen king, and felt I
had the dignity of royal blood within me. I hardly realised my state. It
seemed impossible that beauty had deserted me. I had been condemned-it
seemed a monstrosity-condemned by whom? Not by the world, but by a
spiteful, narrow crew who could not steer their ship if it fell on a
storm. I knew the value of that crew; the knowledge helped me in my
impotence. I sat and brooded on the values of the world. Hounded down by
little men and called unclean by Pharisees and Philistines I had a greater
place in the world's scheme than they had ever dreamed of. This thought
brought me a certain quiet. And as day by day came one by one creeping
upon each other in sterile dimness, my soul cried aloud that it was
healing....
Oscar, dear lady, waits for you. My soul was healing, but my vision of
things seen was blind. What service are the eyes if they behold nothing
but bare and ugly walls and barer, uglier humanity? What food for me, or
such as I, was then within these prison walls? My eyesight was my food, my
nourishment; and every stimulating glimpse of the world's wonder was shut
out from me-the pain to think of beauty there without, but not for me! The
agony to feel that still the seasons followed in their courses! Spring
dancing in with all its songs and blossoms, and Summer in her fullness of
repletion, and Autumn laden downwards with the fruit her womb had born,
and Winter ashen white...and in my cell was dimness, only dimness!
These were my pains-not suffering because the world was faithless to
me, but suffering because all that gave me life and gave the value of my
life was shut away from me. But here I learnt what I could never learn
when beauty was my playmate and companion....
I learnt the force and use of indignation, which, surging upwards in my
spirit, became a fury, a possession. It gave me life again-a scarlet
life-flashes of scarlet on a sombre background. But life it gave me, and
from the hour when first I realised the power of indignation I was a
living man again.
(Was that what induced you to write “The Ballad of Reading Gaol ”?)
Here, in the twilight, I can think about the time I fought within
myself and conquered. I lived as fully then as in the days when I
proclaimed the triumph of my mistress beauty, and all the world of London
stood still and hearkened to my paeans in her praise.
Dear lady, could you only know the real values of the world, you would
not reckon crime a loss rather than a gain. For here I found for the first
time what strength is lodged within a man. My daily tasks were easy to me
from that day when from out my surging soul came this great revelation of
the spirit.
(Are you in dimness because of what you were sent to prison for?)
I worshipped the divine inhuman Power that casts me into darkness once
again. It is a different darkness from that within my cell. For over here
the soul and spirit have reached a realisation of themselves. Here is no
glorious birth for soul and spirit as that which sprang from me in Reading
Gaol....
(Do you know Galsworthy's play, “Justice”?)
Yes, I know it well. I have carefully digested what our friend has said
about a subject he knows nothing of. His fertile brain could not devise a
prison such as mine was. The world divides what it is pleased to call our
sins from our good deeds. This cleavage is possibly the net result of
total ignorance. For what can be called “justice” that rises from half the
man? I, bound as to a wheel which ever in its revolutions adds to my pain,
my pleasure and experience can speak of justice; and if you are pleased to
listen to me, I will give you what has come to me from joy, an ecstasy of
joy, an ecstasy of pain, an ecstasy of knowing every day what can be known
both in the body and in this state of fluid mind....
There is no justice possible here or in the world. For justice is the
full completion of experience, nothing more. The man who dares to dive
below the surface and pick from the depths the creatures of the darkness,
must ever be despised and hunted while still upon the earth he lives
within the body. The world has formulated many schemes for what he calls
the safety of his race; but he has never seen that in this scheme with
which he joys to torture those of his fellows who despise his edicts he is
providing for himself a torture of the soul's remorse. For here we learn
that what is anguish, more acute than human beings can attain to in the
world, is the remorseful soul, who, blind, even as a worm is blind, has
spent his hour in torturing his fellows as a benediction.
(I am tired. Could you speak of this some other time?)
I should be grateful if your womanhood would bend to hear me longer....
I wither here in twilight, but I know that I shall rise from it again
to ecstasy. That thought is given to us to help us to endure.... The human
spirit must pierce to the innermost retreats of good and evil before its
consummation is complete. I suffer here because my term is long, and yet I
have the power of knowledge-knowledge, such as all the justice that has
tortured the poor world since it was born, cannot attain to.
(I must stop now.)
I shall come again and speak to you of what you must experience before
you come to fitness.
Copy of automatic script written on July 13th, 1923.
The writer was Mr. V, with Mrs. Travers Smith touching his hand.
Present-Miss Cummins. The communication was written in an hour and a half.
The only interruptions were the replacing of one pencil by another when
the point was worn down.
Oscar Wilde. Society sent me to prison and then into exile. The world
that had welcomed me so gladly thrust me out from its care. With the brand
of Cain on my brow and the charity of Christ in my heart, I set out to
seek my bread in sorrow-and, like Christ or Cain., I found how weary the
way was-and, like Dante, how salt the bread when I found it. The world had
no place for me. When I walked in public places I was asked to go, and
when in hot confusion I retreated, the curious craned their heads or
raised their lorgnettes that they might the better view a monster of vice.
I had lost everything except my genius. All the precious things that I had
gathered about me in my Chelsea home and that had become almost a part of
my personality were scattered to the winds or lost or passed into careless
and alien hands. The very children of my imagination were thought unworthy
to live, and a lady whom I had trusted and who in the days of my pride had
often called me her friend, deliberately destroyed a manuscript of mine.
As the man was tainted so must his work be tainted also. The leper with
his cowl and little bell was not more shunned than I.... But though I have
forgiven the world the humiliations that were heaped upon me, and though I
can forgive even that last insult of posthumous popularity that has been
offered me, I find it hard to forgive them for translating my beautiful
prose into German. You may smile, but that to the artist was a very real
form of murder. To have maimed my soul was terrible, but to have maimed
the soul of my work was more terrible still. For my work, besides being my
great memorial, is my one link with the minds of living men. More than
that, it is the golden thread that will draw me close to the happier
generations in the after time. And I am filled with a noble pleasure when
I think that children yet unborn will read in my pages the story of one
who found love better than riches or of him who refused the fair raiment
of a king that justice might hold her sceptre in the land; or of one who
denied the mother that bore him and expiated his sin in deeds of mercy and
kindness. I once said-I think it was in “Dorian Gray"-that art had a soul
but man had not. When I wrote those words they were perhaps no more to me
than a phrase flung from the flippant lips of a cynic. I did not realise
that they would have any tragic relation to my own life or to the lives of
us all. They were perhaps only half true. It would have been better to
have said that man has a soul and that the soul finds its true immortality
through art. Art is the true Vishnu, the preserver, who embalms the soul
for eternity, and embalms it not in natron or in wax or in honey like some
poor lifeless thing but in its own living fires.
The makers of history, those who ruled mankind with Justice or with the
pitiless sword, may find that the secret springs of their actions are
hidden from posterity and their motives misunderstood so that the good
they did is accounted unto them as evil and the evil good.
The man of science lives in the name of the flower or the star he has
discovered, and, like a flower or a star, his memory has no secure abiding
place. His work can be seen only in relation to the work of others, his
theories are superseded.
The little stone of jasper or of beryl is hidden away under the masonry
of many hands so that they, who contemplate the finished edifice, forget
the individual builder. To take one perfect illustration of this, look at
the history of astronomy.
On that wondrous shield forged by Hephaestos for Achilles, on which was
depicted the whole of the life of man in its joy and sorrow, we are told
was wrought “the earth and the sea and the unwearying sun, the Pleiads and
the Hyads, she that men call the Bear who watches Orion, and alone hath no
part in the baths of ocean.”
That picture in its ageless simplicity of charm is as true to-day as it
was in historic times. The mariner at his wheel or the peasant in the
silent fields at evening may gaze on the same stars as Homer's heroes, can
watch the blazing Sirius and know not that to the Greek it brought fever
and pestilence and sorrow, can note the Pleiads and remember not that
their rising was the sign for the great horned ships to go forth on the
sea. But with science it is very different. We talk about the changeless
constellations, but through the ages of science the scroll of the heavens
is a palimpsest on which are written and erased the names of many men. At
the coming of Copernicus the heavens of Ptolemy ceased to revolve, and
after Copernicus came Galileo and Tycho Brahe, and Kepler followed the
Dane, and the fair guiding angel of Kepler's planets faded into the cold
dawn of Newton's great formula, and last, like a monstrous fish, Newton
himself lies snared in the strange nets of space and time that Einstein
has set about him. And of all these men what can we know, what whisper of
personality reaches us through the ages? A few anecdotes, and these mostly
myths, such as the myth of Newton losing his horse and returning the
bridle, or of Newton forgetting he had dined; or of Kepler solving the
problem of matrimony by mathematics, or of Galileo telling the bystanders
that nature abhorred a vacuum, but a vacuum of not more than thirty feet.
And as it was in the past, so it will be in the future. When we have
forgotten all that Poincare did in mathematics, we shall remember that he
walked the streets of Paris with a strange bird cage which he had picked
up at some stall and was puzzled to know how to dispose of. And if we turn
to the artists and poets we shall find that their lives are just as
uninteresting and as incomplete.
Even the love affairs of the poets are like those of ordinary mortals.
We feel as we read them they are as purely accidental, as incomplete, and
as frankly physical as those of thousands of quite commonplace people.
Which of us really wants to pry into Chopin's life at Majorca, or his
relations with George Sand; or who, without weariness, can read the
ravings of Keats over poor, foolish Fanny Brawne?
These things don't interest us, and simply because they do not reveal
to us personality. In fact a ploughman in love and a poet in love present
much the same spectacle, only the poet has a capacity for self-deception
that the ploughman, happily for himself, can never attain to. These things
are of no real vital consequence. They may, like Charlotte Brontes'
teapot, furnish lachrymal urns for the sentimental or go to swell the muck
heaps of that latest terror of modern society, the psycho-analyst-but to
the student of letters, the seeker after personality, they signify so very
little. In his search for the, real Chopin and the real Keats, he will
turn his eyes elsewhere. He will realise that all we should care to know
of Chopin, all at least that it is important for us to know, the poet has
put into those impassioned preludes, and in that wonderful last sonnet the
soul of Keats shines, as steadfast as the lone star to which it was
addressed, and sings as sweetly in the great Ode as the immortal bird once
sang in the Hampstead Garden.
COPY OF AUTOMATIC SCRIPT RECEIVED ON JULY 13TH THROUGH THE HAND OF MR.
V.
Mrs. Travers Smith touching his hand.
Tell me, dear lady, what are the virtues that are necessary for a happy
life? Tell me in a few words. I don't want to know anything about the
vices! (Mrs. T.S.-Give me your views.) I have no views. I wish I knew. If
I did I should not tell you, since it is always bad advice that is given
away. (Mrs. T.S.-I really cannot name any virtue that makes for a happy
life.) I was afraid you were going to say work. Never having done any in
my life I am naturally an authority on it. Ah! I forget! I once trundled
the barrow for poor old John Ruskin, and in a moment of weakness I almost
renounced the great cardinal doctrine of the indignity of labour. But
during those few days I learned so much about the BODY of man, under
Socialism that afterwards I only cared to write about the soul. I told
people that I never even walked. But that was a pardonable exaggeration. I
always walked to bed. Don't talk to me about work, dear lady. It is the
last refuge of the mentally unemployed, the occupation of those too dull
to dream. To be eternally busy is a sign of low vitality. They who go to
the ant to learn her ways always come back ANTIQUATED but seldom wise. And
while it may be true that Satan sometimes finds mischief for idle hands to
do, even God does not know what to do with the industrious.
So, dear lady, live to do nothing and be happy. Eschew work and be
fine. No one should ever do anything. At least no woman should. The woman
who was content to merely BE was always charming, but the woman who DID
was often detestable. This is a maxim which might be taken to heart by our
modern business girls. Then, instead of hunting so diligently for their
husbands in dusty offices, they would stay at home and their husbands
would come to them.
COPY OF AUTOMATIC SCRIPT OBTAINED ON JULY 19TH, 1923.
The writer was Mr. V., Mrs. Travers Smith's hand touching his.
Present-Miss Travers Smith, Miss Cummins.
Oscar Wilde. Let me descend for once into the dull abyss of facts. I
would like the world to know that the story of Walter Pater wanting to
kiss my hand was not true. It was invented by me perhaps to assist in the
revival of a lost art. (A story unknown to those present.) Pater, of
course, admired me immensely, but he was far too sensible to do that.
Pater sat at my feet. In fact everybody sat at my feet. He could not talk
at all himself.... It is so difficult to drag the past from memory's black
cave. One of my earliest recollections was of a little farm in Ireland at
McCree...Cree...no, that's not the name...Glencree?...where we stayed with
Willie and Iso...and there was a good old man...used to look after our
lessons...a priest...Father...Prid...Prideau? There was a beautiful stream
near the farm.... Other memories.... Dining with Arnold and Pater near
Hyde Park. Lunching with Margot Tennant, Mrs. Fox Blunt and others in
London. Asquith was like a fish out of water. I did most of the talking
and afterwards told Margot stories. Stayed behind.*... (These statements
were not within the knowledge of anyone present.) (Here Miss T.S. put her
hand on Mr. V's hand instead of Mrs. T.S. The writing remained the same in
character but became considerably larger.)
*In “My Diaries,” by Wilfred Scawen Blunt, on pp. 178-79, the following
entry occurs: “17th July-A brilliant luncheon with Margot and her husband
at 30 Upper Grosvenor Street, and I took her a Wedding Ode which I had
written for her amusement. The other guests were, Mrs. Grenfell, Mrs.
Daisy White, Ribbesdale, his brother, Reggie Lister, and Oscar Wilde. All
immensely talkative, so that it was almost like a breakfast in France.
Asquith alone, rather out of it. I sat next to him and was rather sorry
for him, though he was probably happy enough. After the rest had gone
away, Oscar remained telling stories to me and Margot.” No “Mrs. Fox” was
present at the luncheon. This confusion may have occurred in connection
with the next “memory,” referring to Father “Prideau-Fox.” Wilde evidently
forgot his second name, as he speaks of “Father Prid-Prideau.”
Oscar Wilde. One of my happiest moments.... One of my few happy moments
after leaving prison was when I entertained the little schoolchildren at
the little village near Berneval?...
Of course I was M. Sebastian MELNOTTE in those days.... MELMOTH from
some ancestor of mine. Sebastian in memory of the dreadful arrows. Jean
Dupre I knew in a Paris Cafe. Everything is confused and I misplace events
in time.
Another memory of poor Whistler. His painting was quite delightful. It
had all the charm of being perfectly incomprehensible, and so formed an
excellent basis for criticism. Unfortunately, in a rash moment, and in
forgetfulness of a maxim which every conjuror knows, that where there is
no mystery there can be no magic, he set about to explain himself. (Mrs.
T.S.-Do write smaller.) I do the best I can. Have patience.
Poor James! He was really very absurd. I would watch him paint and he
would sing to himself some foolish ditty about his heart being true to
Poll.” I forget what....
His pictures were interesting, but, of course, not so interesting as
the things I should have said about them.
Communication received by Mrs. Travers Smith at the Ouija Board, July
26, 1923.
Present-Miss D. (recording) and Miss Travers Smith.
Asked about the Epstein monument in Paris.
Allow me to be slightly egotistical for once. The French are a humorous
nation, but, at the same time, full of serious moral feelings. They,
naturally, wished to do honour to one who had served Art as far as his
humble powers would permit him, and hence they raise a mighty tomb, which
in its monstrous want of taste does homage to the man whose monstrous want
of morals suggested the design.
The French, dear lady, are a nation of moralists. Their morals are
condensed, they have packed them so tightly that they cannot allow any
sense of humour to come through.
This mighty monument, built and designed to ornament my tomb, outraged
the moral sense of the French nation so deeply that they decided with one
voice that Wilde and Epstein taken together were dangerous to France. The
moral tone of the great nation would risk a blot upon its escutcheon if
this indelicate block of hewn and carven marble was permitted to stand
unchallenged.
In this design a part of me is given, that part which the world has
chosen as my symbol. But this enormous mass of stone does not contain an
atom of that power which came to me direct from my great ancestors. The
power which can create and fashion beauty is absent from this mountain,
erected by a man who should have known, that each and all of us contain
both what is noble and divine, combined with what is built of heavy clay.
The French nation did me honour in refusing to permit a monument which
expressed merely the earthy clay.
(Someone said here that the monument expressed the spirit struggling to
shake off the clay.)
An insult such as this should not be offered to the artist. The artist
does not struggle from the clay. The artist is a spirit which creates, not
a mere body which is striving upwards.
My spirit, which created beauty, was spirit; a passionate spirit
craving for form and colour. It did not strive to break its bonds, because
no bonds were there to bind it. The monstrous creature shaped by Mr.
Epstein does not express the soul of Oscar Wilde. In rejecting it, the
French did me great service therefore. My wings were spread, ready to
carry me away into the heavens, not lying slack and lifeless. This was an
instinct in the French, this sure appreciation of my genius.
OSCAR WILDE, JULY 26,1923.
I bow to your call, dear lady. Why have I lost you? The world cares
little for a shade, but if the shadows of my thoughts still interest, I am
willing that they should go forth as little moths flit into the deep
night.
(Asked about Freud's theory of dreams.)
Dreams, dear lady; in your sterile age, dreams are degraded even as
woman. Dreams are the food on which the children of the light subsist, and
in your age of cold and harsh ideas dreams have become the offal, not the
food. But if you listen to the poet's voice, the priest of beauty in her
shrine; dreams dwell far from the world, and in your gross age they live
on those who know that life is faded and without form, unless the dream
comes which creates for us the veritable image of beauty as she is.
We, who have passed beyond your ken, we only know what these men (Freud
and Jung) guess at. Tell the world that vision for it must ever be
obscure. While body still exists, the mind is trammelled by weights such
as the heaviest burden borne by man cannot compare to.
CHAPTER II. THE AUTOMATIC WRITING
IN his recently published volume, “Thirty Years of Psychical Research,”
Professor Richet, that eminent physiologist, speaks of certain hitherto
discredited branches of abnormal psychology as having come within the
realm of science. He even opens the door to ectoplasms and pre-vision. The
fact that he devotes 626 pages to the demonstration of the scientific
value of such subjects means that we, who are interested in what used to
be called “ghosts” and “hauntings,” need no longer be alarmed at accepting
phenomena of that nature as being of supreme interest. We may reasonably
cry aloud on the house-tops that we have been wiser than some of our
scientific brethren in devoting time and attention to the sifting of
evidence in this direction. For, although Professor Richet cautiously
limits his declared beliefs to the acceptance of cryptesthesia* as an
explanation of monitions, premonitions and pre-vision, he confirms his
belief in the genuineness of materialisations and so-called ectoplasmic
forms as scientific facts, admitting that, so far, he is unable to explain
them.
*A super-normal power of discovering what is unknown.
I feel that the acceptance of the phenomena of pre-vision by an eminent
scientific man is of supreme importance to psychical research. The
impossible seems to have become possible if we are permitted to feel that
we may, without ridicule, give grave attention to what comes to us in
dreams or from the clairvoyante in its bearing on future events. We shall
still have constant backslidings and disappointments, but we are confirmed
in believing that every case which comes in our way is worthy of
attention.
For many years we have talked about telepathy until that theory has
become so extended that it threatens to snap asunder, if it has not done
so already. We are still deeply occupied with the study of the
sub-conscious. It is flattering to feel that each of us possesses a deep
well of stored-up memories into which we may dive if conditions permit us,
and from this diving we may draw up creatures rare and strange. Their long
sojourn in the waters of Lethe bring them back to us as new ideas.
Now Professor Richet tells us that each of us possesses “cryptesthetic
power.” We may not discover the fact during our earth existence, but if we
analyse our experiences sufficiently carefully we shall recognise that
occasionally we have had a glimpse of the unknown; that we have been
cognisant of facts which must be outside our sub-consciousness. So here we
pause and look back and find that two of the planks on which we stood are
floating out to sea. If we are to take Professor Richet seriously we shall
begin to put less faith in that speechless converse of mind with mind
which served us so long; we shall begin to wonder whether the vast well of
our memories really contains this swarming mass of images. The submerged
self is a comparatively new suggestion; it has absorbed us since Freud
boldly laid his map of our dreams before us.
We wonder what the next step will be. Professor Richet has heaped us
with responsibilities. Where it was a case of “agent and percipient,” our
percipient has vanished; we alone are responsible for what we used to call
“telepathic” impressions. We create our own phantoms, we even materialise
them in some cases. Our automatic messages are all part of ourselves. They
are largely fished from the great well which we call the sub-conscious,
but when we recognise impressions which must be outside our memories,
because, as yet they have not become memories, we have created them
through that new sense which in future we shall recognise as cryptesthesia.
Professor Richet expresses absolute pain in having to make some of these
admissions. He has not suffered the supreme pain, however, of accepting
the spiritist theory; which, of course, is the simplest explanation of the
shadows that beset us from time to time. He seems more ready to believe
that angels and demons are in touch with us than to give consideration to
the possibility that those, who loved the world and what it contains, may
survive in some form and seize any opportunity, no matter how dim, to
impress their continued existence on us.
For my own part, I am an agnostic in these matters; I dare not say I
believe in the experimental proof of survival, though it seems to me on
the whole a less romantic idea than belief in annihilation. At any rate,
in our psychic studies, we should always bear in mind the possibility that
our communications are coming direct from the minds of human beings who
once were imprisoned in the body. After all, telepathy, the sub-conscious
and cryptesthesia are only words which serve to express ideas covering
phenomena which are so mysterious that the scientific truth about them
to-day may be the childish folly of to-morrow.
One of Professor Richet's arguments against “spirit” communication is,
that, in most cases, when we get messages purporting to come from the
dead, they are of a poor and trivial nature and rather tend to show that
death deprives us of our finer mental parts. I entirely agree with this
criticism of much that I have come across. At times we sicken when it
dawns on us that death seems to diminish mental vision, if our messages
are to be accepted.
I think this difficulty may be largely due to the imperfect means of
communication at our disposal. If the medium could be dispensed with and a
suitable “telephone” invented between this world and the other, no doubt
results would be less uneven and clearer. I am quite certain that the
mental and physical condition of the medium makes or mars the messages to
a great extent. If conditions are satisfactory the communicator takes
entire command; the medium remains absolutely passive and can be “used.”
Satisfactory conditions chiefly consist in freedom from distraction of any
kind whatever. Physical upset makes communication almost impossible, any
mental worry is still more mischievous; noise, windy weather, etc., all
injure the quality of what comes through. The reason is very evident to
anyone who has had experience of hypnotism. If we are to be used as
“instruments” we must remain passive. In order to acquire complete
passivity, anything that jars on the mind or distracts it in any way or
keeps the consciousness awake must be eliminated. Trance or “somnambulism”
is the most favourable state for good results, but here, when entire
control of the personality is possible, that entity which we call the
“guide” seems to interfere. I believe that many of the trivial results,
attributed to discarnate personalities, are in reality the work of the
“guide” or “control” of the medium. This happens less frequently automatic
writing or ouija work, because hypnosis of the medium is slight and an
alteration in the communicator would be observed immediately by an
experienced sitter.
The “Oscar Wilde” script which I offer to the public, both because of
its literary and psychic interest, seems to me to suggest definitely the
possibility that we may be in touch with an external influence. If I were
fully convinced of that fact, I should certainly be as fully convinced
that Oscar Wilde had spoken to the world again. I should not attribute any
messages so characteristic of the whole man to an impersonation on the
other side. I think in this case it is a choice of two hypotheses; either
Oscar Wilde is speaking, or the whole script, ouija board and automatic
writing must be derived from the subconsciousness or clairvoyance of two
mediums. In either case, the matter of the messages and the manner in
which they came are of such unusual interest that I feel the entire case
should he stated as fully as possible. I believe it to be quite outside
those which can be accused of being trivial or dull. Perhaps it is best
first to explain how these scripts came to us.
A gentleman, whom I shall call “Mr. V,” had several sittings for ouija
board work with me at the British College of Psychic Science. He seemed
quite conversant with his subject, but gave me to understand that he had
no powers as a medium himself. He is a mathematician and is interested in
music, but, so far as I know, he has no special interest in literature. I
soon perceived that he was one of those persons, who, in some mysterious
way, are helpful at a sitting. He was very reticent, but I had a sense
that he made communication easy and harmonious. There was a clearness of
psychic atmosphere when I sat with him which is not usual with strangers
who come to me for the first time.
In May of the present year, Mr. V. joined a small class of mine for the
development of automatic writing. I had a firm conviction that he had
mediumistic power, but to my disappointment he made no progress at the
first two sittings, either with writing or the ouija board. He seemed in
fact to have less power than the other members of my class. At the third
meeting Mr. V. wrote for the first time. I rested my hand on his, while he
held the pencil, and a sentence or two were written slowly, purporting to
come from a deceased friend of his own. This was rather more encouraging,
but it did not indicate that Mr. V. possessed any special facility for
automatism.
At the fourth meeting, which took place at my own house, Mr. V. was the
only one of my class able to be present. He wished to continue the
automatic writing. So we pursued the same method as on the former
occasion. Mr. V. held the pencil, I sat beside him and rested my fingers
lightly on the back of his hand. Before we had started he asked me whether
it would make any difference if he closed his eyes. I was pleased at his
suggestion. On two former occasions that desire to work with closed eyes
had been the prelude to interesting results,
At first his pencil tapped repeatedly on the paper, then it began to
move more rapidly than at our last meeting. He wrote the name of his
deceased friend again; the message concerned his daughter Lily. “I want my
daughter Lily, my little Lily,” it began. As the word “Lily” was written I
was sensible of an interruption; I felt instinctively that the
communicator had changed. I asked who was speaking; immediately “Oscar
Wilde” was written and the message continued more and more rapidly. I
looked at Mr. V. He seemed only half conscious, his eyes were closed. His
pencil was so firmly controlled that I found it very difficult to move it
from the end of one line to the beginning of the next. I lifted my hand
from his; the pencil stopped instantly; it merely tapped impatiently on
the paper.
These first scripts, written by Mr. V. and myself, were short in
comparison with some of the later ones. It seemed that he wrote in a state
of semi-coma and this condition was of short duration. He stopped and
spoke two or three times while writing the first communication; as soon as
his pencil began to move he dosed his eyes and looked unconscious. I was
surprised at the clearness and accuracy of the writing. The words were
divided, the t's crossed, the i's dotted, even quotation marks were added
and punctuation attended to. The signature struck me as unusual, and on
reading the script over I noticed that at times a Greek a was used; also
that there were strange breaks between the letters of the words, such as
d-eath, vin-tage, etc. Neither Mr. V. nor I had ever seen Wilde's writing
so far as we could remember. When he was gone it struck me that it would
be interesting to compare the script with a fac-simile, if I could find
one. I was singularly fortunate, for at the Chelsea Book Club, not only
did I see a facsimile of Wilde's writing, but an autograph letter of his
happened to be there for sale. I was amazed; the handwritings seemed
similar, allowing for the fact that our script was written with a heavy
pencil and the autograph letter, probably, with a steel pen. There was a
Greek a, used occasionally, not invariably; and there were the long breaks
between the letters of certain words.
In this first communication there are many points of interest; some of
them seem to indicate sub-conscious plagiarism. I shall deal in a later
chapter with passages which, though not actually quotations, bear a strong
resemblance to ideas and sentences in various published works of Oscar
Wilde's-” Intentions,” “De Profundis,” etc. Against the sub-conscious
theory is the fact that certain questions I asked were answered in a
manner indicating that the communicator did not reply from material which
was in Mr. V's mind or mine. I asked for the address in Dublin where Sir
William Wilde (his father) lived and with which Oscar must have been
familiar. I could have written it without a moment's hesitation as I know
the house well; probably it was not in Mr. V's mind as he does not know
Dublin. The reply was: “Near Dublin; my father was a surgeon; these names
are difficult to recall.” I was disappointed, this savoured of the usual
dodging of evidence we meet with so often in automatism. No. 1, Merrion
Square, where Oscar Wilde lived, is in the centre of the city. I
continued: “Not at all difficult if you are really Oscar Wilde.” The
pencil moved again and wrote: “I used to live near here, Tite Street.” I
took my hand off Mr. V's for a moment and said: “There is a Tite Street
near here and he has spelt it correctly. I don't know where he lived in
London, do you?
Mr. V. replied: “I have never been in Chelsea until to-day, and, to the
best of my knowledge, I never heard of Tite Street.” Oscar continued the
writing. My next question was, “What was your brother's name?” “William,”
then a stroke underneath, and below it “Willie” was written. I then asked
for Lady Wilde's nom de plume, and “Speranza” was written without
hesitation. So far as he can tell, Mr. V. did not know Oscar Wilde's
address in London and neither did I, and yet it was written without my
having asked for it. I knew the Dublin address and no attempt was made to
give it; I knew Lady Wilde"s nom de plume, Mr. V. did not, yet he wrote it
immediately it was asked for. Taking these facts into consideration, it
cannot be said that the information was in the mind of the mediums; it
might probably be accounted for by, cryptesthesia if we exclude the
possibility that Oscar Wilde may have been speaking.
At our next meeting several persons were present. Mr. Dingwall,
research officer of the Society for Psychical Research; Mr. B, who is an
excellent medium, and Miss Cummins, who has wide experience of psychic
work.
Mr. Dingwall probably gave the impetus to our message that day. The
entire departure from the redundant style of our first script into the
“Wilde” epigram interested and amused us all. It seemed such an unexpected
development from that “other side” from which so often we get either
trivialities or empty pomposities. My suggestion that we might ask some
questions was swept aside haughtily by our communicator. Wilde has twice
refused to give definite proofs, but on several occasions he has
volunteered information which was not in the mind of either medium, so far
as they know, and which proves to be correct. While the little tale about
James McNeill Whistler was told by Mr. B., Mr. V. and I sat as before, he
holding the pencil while my hand rested on his. When the story was
finished the pencil moved and wrote: “With James vulgarity always begins
at home!”
I have observed during all these sittings that this communicator is
very sensitive to the influence of those present or to the condition of
the mind of either medium. This is, of course, quite natural, whether we
consider that Oscar Wilde is speaking or that the sub-consciousness of the
sitters is responsible. At the first sitting (allowing the communicator
was Oscar Wilde) the control seemed passionately anxious to convince us of
his identity; he proceeded to do so by pouring out an essay which would at
once arrest attention by reason of its similarity to well-known passages
in his prose works. It does not seem to me that the fact that he almost
quoted from his own writings proves it to be a case of sub-conscious
plagiarism, because, in later scripts, this is not the case. Certainly in
this short essay on the Society of Psychical Research he does not quote,
and yet, if it was read aloud, the name of the author being kept back, I
think it would immediately suggest Wilde to anyone conversant with his
work. I need hardly draw attention to what is obvious, that, in judging
automatic script, allowance must be made for the intervention of the
medium. If the brain of the medium or mediums is used, their personality
must lend a certain flavour to the communication. Less of this is
traceable in these writings than in the average automatic message. Again,
if we return to the suggestion of sub-conscious plagiarism, it is well to
make it clear that neither Mr. V. nor I had ever had any special interest
in Oscar Wilde. Mr. V. states that he had only read “The Picture of Dorian
Gray,” “De Profundis,” and “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” and all these
before the war. I had read more than Mr. V. and I had been interested in
Wilde's plays, but, except “Salome,” I had not read a page of Oscar
Wilde's work for twenty years past. This, of course, does not reduce the
value of the sub-conscious explanation, but it is as well to state exactly
how things stood before the first message came and to make it plain that
no recent suggestion had recalled Oscar Wilde to our memories.
MORE than half this script came to me when I was sitting alone at the
ouija board. Perhaps I had better explain this method of communication, as
it seems less familiar to most people than automatic writing. The ouija
board, which I use, is an ordinary card table covered in green baize. On
this the letters of the alphabet are placed; they are cut out singly and
arranged in any convenient order. A sheet of plate glass is laid over the
table and the letters. When using the board I rest my fingers on a small,
heart-shaped piece of wood covered with rubber and shod underneath with
three pads of carpet felt. This little “traveller,” very much the same as
a planchette, without its pencil, flies over the glass from letter to
letter, I prefer it to automatic writing because of the speed with which I
can get messages in this way. A shorthand writer is at times necessary
owing to the rapidity with which the communications are spelt out.
On the evening after the first script had come to Mr. V. and me, I
tried the experiment of asking whether Wilde would speak through the ouija
board to me alone. My control, “Johannes,” was very unwilling to permit
this. Apparently he considered I was getting into bad company. With a
little persuasion, however, he consented, and soon the name “Oscar Wilde”
was spelt out. The traveller flew from letter to letter with its usual
lightning rapidity, occasionally making a pause as if the communicator was
feeling for the right word. I gathered that this was a conversation. The
script in the afternoon seemed more premeditated and rather of the nature
of a short essay; the ouija was a method of “talking” to Wilde. In this
first “talk,” I interrupted him several times. I hoped that he might give
me some definite proofs of his identity. A hint of any intention of the
kind was evidently unwelcome. Various circumstances, which were not in my
mind or Mr. V's, have come through spontaneously, but a definite demand
for evidence was always refused. In this first talk Wilde describes his
condition on the “other side” in a most depressing manner. In the
automatic writing he had spoken of being in twilight, here he makes it
plain that some routine work has been given him which bores him
infinitely. He is shut away from the beauty of the world and doing what is
little better than “picking oakum in goal.” It is here for the first time
he speaks of that nakedness of mind which lays our thoughts and feelings
bare when the “decorous garment of a body “is cast off. Ideas grow stale,”
he says, and look like the slightly creased and dabbled clothes of our
friends on earth.” I have never had a statement of this kind in any
message before. The average communicator sometimes speaks of seeing into
my mind; that is to be expected if it is being used; but no one except
Oscar Wilde has mentioned this exposure of thought. Amongst the questions
asked was, whether Mr. V's mind or mine was used when the automatic
writing came through. The reply, “through you, dear lady, he is a 'tool,'
you are the light that lets me peep into the world,” must not be taken
literally. Some explanation was bound to come and this may have been
considered flattering to me. It is interesting that the word “tool” should
be used of Mr. V. In Mr. Bligh Bond's first “Glastonbury" scripts two
mediums were responsible, Mr. Bligh Bond and an automatic writer, and in
these scripts the automatist is always spoken of as “the instrument.” In
cases of double mediumship, such as the Glastonbury and the Oscar Wilde
scripts, it is so difficult to deter; mine how the results are produced
that it seems almost idle to attempt to solve the problem. The facts as
they stand now are
1. Mr. V. and I produced the first five or six automatic scripts. I
could not get the handwriting without him; he could get nothing without my
help. 2. I found that I could get communications from Wilde sitting at the
ouija board alone. 3. I tested Mr. V. with four different persons at my
house, but out of these only one succeeded in getting anything through
with him. 4. When my daughter touched his hand the same writing, magnified
at least twelve times, appeared. Since then, I understand that Mr. V. has
found two other mediums with whom he can work. The nature of the writings
seems to vary with each medium. So far as I know no literary criticism has
come with anyone except myself. On the occasion, when a strong circle was
present, Mr. V. was able to write alone. I sat beside him. The script was
long; not Wilde at his best, I thought.*
*It must be recognised that in cases of double mediumship the
communications cannot be attributed to either operator alone. In my
experience the ideas expressed are more definitely connected with the
person who lays his hand on the writer's hand than with the actual
automatist. The messages are definitely a joint production.
This case of Oscar Wilde is the third instance of successful double
mediumship which has come to me during the twelve years I have been
working at Psychical Research. The first opened up the path to the most
interesting series of experiments I have ever had.* These were sittings at
the ouija board, of which I have spoken before; both the mediums being
blindfolded; the messages being taken down by a shorthand writer in
absolute silence, so that the sitters had no idea what they had been
spelling out until their masks were removed from their eyes. Mr. L, my
fellow-medium, had never seen a ouija board until one evening he came by
chance to my house. He failed to get any movement whatever with his eyes
open, but immediately they were closed messages came rapidly when he and I
sat with both our fingers on the traveller. Mr. L. found one other lady
with whom he could work, but his results with her were rather different
from his results with me. In this manner we did a long series of most
intricate telepathic tests and had many interesting messages, including a
very accurate prophecy of the course of the Balkan war, which came to us
on the day after hostilities had begun. After these blindfold sittings
with Mr. L. I found one other medium who could work with me in the same
way. Mr. X. had enormous “driving” power at the ouija board, but alone he
could not spell out one word coherently. When he and I sat together we
never failed to get script blindfolded; without my help he could move the
traveller about at a tremendous rate, but there it ended. He got no
coherent messages when he worked alone. I quote these two cases of Mr. L.
and Mr. X., who worked with me blindfolded, to show that better results
often come through double mediumship than through one person. It does not
follow that other sitters cannot succeed with either medium, it
demonstrates rather that there is a certain psychic harmony in which one
automatist seems to complete the other. It is a matter which is difficult,
if not impossible, to explain.
* See my book “Voices From the Void” (Rider).
Here I think I must impress the fact on those who are not familiar with
automatism, that both these ouija scripts and the automatic writing came
from Wilde at such a headlong pace that it is impossible to imagine that
the mediums could possibly have improvised them consciously. The only
possible accusation might be that they were composed and memorised. I can
vouch for my own being entirely unpremeditated, and in double mediumship
the fact that both operators have a share in the work, sets that
contention aside; memorising would not serve where there was more than one
automatist. The speed of both the ouija work and the writing was
tremendous. The long script (700 words), in which Wilde mentions the
planets, came through in an hour and a quarter on a sweltering day in
July.
To return to my ouija scripts. After my first “talk” we had another
sitting for automatic writing, and the second half of that afternoon's
work was a little essay on the novels of H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett and
Eden Philpotts. Wilde states in that essay that he is permitted to gather
a little of the literature of to-day by dipping into the minds of modern
novelists. He explains this method rather more fully to me in a later
ouija script. He says:
It is a rather entertaining process. I watch for my opportunity and
when the propitious moment comes I leap into their minds and gather
rapidly these impressions, which are largely collective.” These statements
were, to say the least of it, astonishing. I felt that as the essay in
automatic writing had been so entertaining I might test the communicator's
powers in that direction a little further. The criticisms of modern
writers in the script are not my conscious criticisms, of that I can speak
definitely. I cannot answer for my sub-consciousness, but I can hardly
imagine that any part of my mind could speak as Wilde does here. I found
no difficulty in inducing him to give his opinion in any case which occurs
in the script; but twice I asked for his ideas about a writer with whom he
must have been familiar and with whom I am familiar also: Henry James.
There may have been a complex there; no results came on either occasion. I
am personally a great admirer of Henry James and would have been
interested to have “Oscar's” ideas on his work.
All through we have the continual repetition of the state of dimness on
the other side into which, apparently, “victims of the social convention”
are cast. It is quite obvious that Wilde has lost neither his pride nor
his egotism, but he complains repeatedly of the dimming of his senses “for
lack of light and colour.” “My mind is now a rusty lock into which the key
grates with a rasp,” he says. “It does not move easily and lightly as it
used.” Later on he speaks of “these glimpses of the sun keeping him from
growing too mouldy here below.” It has been objected by some critics that
these messages have not the edge which we find in Wilde's finest prose. I
feel the persons who expect a style equal to his best know little or
nothing of the difficulties of Psychic communication. He ended his life a
wreck, saddened and disappointed, and he has evidently found a certain
meed of punishment awaiting him at the other side. He seizes on this
chance of speaking again to the world, to which his love of objective
beauty still binds him fast. Can we reasonably hope that his brilliance
should be still untarnished, that the edge of his wit should be as keen as
in the nineties? As I have said in the foreword, I assume throughout this
book that I am convinced that Oscar Wilde is actually speaking at these
sittings. The fact is, I try to keep an entirely open mind on this point,
but “an open mind” means that the spiritist theory must have a hearing,
for, to my thinking, our imagination must be called on in any case,
whether we accept Professor Richet's cryptesthesia or the sub-conscious or
the spiritist theory as our hypothesis. It seems that, taking into
consideration the universal faith inherent in human beings that we survive
death, it is equally probable that Oscar Wilde's spirit is communicating
with us or that Mr. V. and I, and in some cases I alone, possess
cryptesthetic power, or possibly, that this is a case of plagiarism,
arising from the sub-conscious, which is less likely in my opinion. All
three explanations must be taken into account, but it is simpler for me to
assume that Oscar Wilde is actually with us again when I write of these
scripts.
I do not consider that, even if we do accept the view of some of our
critics that Wilde's genius is diminished and that the edge of his wit is
less finely ground than when he was alive, it detracts from the enormous
importance of our having produced something so much akin to his style that
it invites discussion. It must be borne in mind that this individual style
is coupled with handwriting which is remarkably like Wilde's; that fact
adds enormously to our evidence in favour of its being a genuine case of
continued personality. It demands a very wide stretch of imagination to
believe that sub-conscious memory from a possible glance at Wilde's
writing could produce hundreds of pages of script which never varies in
its imitation and is written in a handwriting which is totally unlike Mr.
V.'s or mine. Most of those facts which were unknown to the mediums, but
which I have verified as being correct, came in automatic writing. One
important point, however, occurs in the ouija script which is of great
psychic interest. I quote three passages from the ouija messages relating
to Wilde's state on the other side.
He says: “My dear lady, what will it be for you to lose your little
shape, to have no shape, to be a fluid and merely stream about in such an
undecided way that it is like drifting before a heavy tide.” Again he
says, speaking of his mind that is now without a body to act as pilot
strays about fluidly in space.”
In another passage he says: “The shades here are really too tumultuous.
They are overcrowded....”
In Sherard's “Real Oscar Wilde” (which I did not read until all these
scripts came through) he mentions a sitting for automatic writing held at
Andre Gide's house after Oscar's death. Ruyssemberg said: “We would like
to know your opinion of life beyond the grave.” Wilde answered: “A chaotic
confusion of fluid nebulosities, a cloaque of souls.” I think it is
interesting to find the same idea in two of the three communications which
we actually know of from Wilde since he passed over.
In the ouija script, I have on several occasions tried to discover what
this process of entering into the brain of the medium actually is. Replies
to my questions are as vague as such replies generally are. Wilde says:
“If I am to speak again as I used, or to use the pen, I must have a clear
brain to work with. It must let my thoughts flow through as fine sand
might if filtered through a glass cylinder. It must be clear and there
must be material which I can make use of.” Again he says: “Even when you
are tired you are a perfect aeolian lyre that can record me as I think.”
It is difficult to follow exactly what is meant here, more especially as I
cannot reproduce Wilde's handwriting. If the actual content of the
medium's brain is used, possibly a training in passivity may serve, also
the fact that, in my case, there has been a literary training also.
I felt it rather difficult and dangerous ground to ask about Wilde's
prison experience. What goes to prove, I think, that the ouija talks and
the automatic writing are from the same source is that Wilde willingly
spoke to me of his sufferings in gaol and continued the subject without
any suggestion on our part on the next occasion when Mr. V. and I sat.
This “prison” script is quite in harmony with what came before. It would
seem that, if there is a ruling Providence which moulds our destinies,
Wilde's love of objective beauty had to be starved before the spirit could
assert itself. For, except in “De Profundis” and “The Ballad of Reading
Gaol,” we get beauty of a certain type from him, but it is beauty of the
flesh not the spirit. If we may carry speculation a little further it may
be imagined that his prison life had purged him only to a slight extent.
There was a drifting back to evil conditions, partly, perhaps, due to the
fact that when he was free again, nothing was left him, not even his power
to Create. In the “Real Oscar Wilde,” Sherard says: “The terrible fact is,
that he was drinking because he could not work. He was seeking in the
palpable Hell of being unable to produce, because his brain was exhausted,
the artificial Paradise that alcohol affords.” Possibly his social fall
was merely the beginning of what is continued in the Hades where he is now
shut away again from the joy of, “seeing,” which was nourishment his
nature demanded.
Despair never really caught hold of Oscar Wilde; he had a hungry
eagerness for what the world contained and even in prison he used, when in
the infirmary, to entertain his fellows with jokes and stories. In the
ouija script he says that when he learnt the power of indignation he was a
living man again. But his present condition is different from his state in
Reading Gaol. He says: “It is a different darkness from that within my
cell. For over here the soul and spirit have reached a realisation of
themselves. Here is no glorious birth for soul and spirit as that which
sprang from me in Reading Gaol.” I must make it quite clear that until all
my ouija talks had come through I did not dare to open a book about Oscar
Wilde. I had forgotten most of his work that I had read, and I had never
been sufficiently interested in him to look up any facts about his life
outside what was made public at the time of his trial. Even now I refrain
from reading Ransome's Life in case I should have further sittings. As it
is, I feel, having published this book, I have been forced to enquire too
deeply into the subject to make further script evidential.
A passage (in the ouija talks) where he speaks of women, is, I think,
in its idea at least, very characteristic of the man. “Woman was to me a
colour, a sound. She gave me all, she gave me first desire, desire gave
birth to that mysterious essence which was within me. And from that deeply
distilled and perfumed drug my thoughts were born: and from my thoughts
words sprang. Each word I used became a child to me.” This worship of
words is underlined in my script. Twice Wilde speaks of “weaving patterns
from words in his poems, and he also speaks of weaving patterns from
character “in his plays. This feeling for the sound of words must have
been strong in him, though I believe he, like many other poets, was not
musical. I have made several attempts to get him to speak of music, with
no success, although music is my own special subject. I asked him to
compare music and colour. He immediately replied that colour was far more
closely allied to literature than music, and, leaving out the question of
music altogether, began discussing its relation to words.
Again and again he emphasises the importance of dealing with the
surface of both society and literature and forebearing to “probe into the
intestines.” His words were in reality his children rather than his ideas.
During his prison life, however, ideas dominated him, perhaps for the
first time. |
