The Wizard From Connecticut

by JEAN BURTON

1

ONE January evening in Paris, in the year 1863, twelve ladies and gentlemen of quality ranged themselves soothingly beside a confused and nervous hostess as they waited for the guest of honor to make his appearance. Their hostess was Mme Jauvin d’Attainville; among those present were Princess Pauline Metternich and her husband, the Austrian Ambassador; and the guest whose momentarily expected arrival created such tension was a Mr. Daniel Dunglas Home, late of the United States.

Mr. Home had been in Paris on his present visit for some days, as usual spending much time at court. He transformed the Tuileries, by Princess Metternich’s graphic account, into “a regular witches’ sabbath”: in his presence massive pieces of furniture, which it would take half a dozen men to lift, rocked violently, untouched by human hands, while armchairs “flew from one end of the room to the other as if driven by a hurricane.” As everyone in Paris could testify, Princess Metternich, sharptongued, wiry, audacious, and sensation-loving, was not a young woman to be intimidated without due cause. But she made no pretense of being altogether at her ease with Mr. Home.

It was over six years since there had first, been announced in the capital “the arrival of a noted spiritualist, a man who disdained the parlour t ricks performed by ordinary mortals, one who professed to belong to the select company of ‘great mediums.’ ” And from the beginning Parisian hostesses had found him select, in another sense. He more than matched them in exclusiveness.

Indeed Mr. Home was unique. He was neither an entertainer nor a holy man; he must be received strictly as an equal; and one must never, never so far forget oneself as to offer him money. Jewels, clothes, fur coats, trips to fashionable wateringplaces — in some respects his tastes were rather like a cocotte’s — were acceptable; but money, no. Moreover he would not even consider invitations unless they came through an intermediary well known to him.

Tonight this intermediary had been Prince Joachim Murat, one of the Second Empire’s more decorative objects of salvage. On this particular evening, however, Murat’s hostess was surprisingly ungrateful for his efforts. Mme Jauvin d’Attainville was devote, and did not care to encourage wizards. But her guests assured her on their honor that Mr. Home was not only a Christian but a Catholic — which last had to her knowledge been true for a brief period, and perhaps still was: at least, for the time being neither he nor the Roman Catholic Church wished specifically to deny it. But now voices were hushed and all heads turned in the same direction. “Then the door opened, and at. Prince Murat’s side we beheld the mysterious, long-awaited hero of the day, the man who inspired fear and uneasiness alike, Dunglas Home.”

As Murat, proudly smiling, led the way to their hostess, Princess Metternich swiftly appraised the newcomer who followed him: “Fairly tall, slim, well-built, in his dress-suit and white tie he looked like a gentleman of the highest social standing. His face was attractive in its expression of gentle melancholy. He was very pale, with light chinablue eyes — they were not piercing; rather were they inclined to be sleepy — reddish hair, thick and abundant, but not inordinately long, no pianist’s or violinist’s mop; in short, he was of pleasing appearance with nothing striking about him except, perhaps, the pallor of his complexion, which seemed natural from its contrast with his red hair and beard.”

Murat introduced him ceremoniously to the other guests and a little polite conversation took place, Home speaking fluent French with only traces of his original Scots burr. Presently, still chatting, they began to drift towards the table and take their places at or near it.

The performance which then took place was reasonably typical of the seances of which Home, during his prime — he was now just under thirty — gave literally hundreds a year.

There were all together fifteen present (nearly twice as many as he liked) and they sat in a large drawing room crowded with gilt and marble furniture in the ornate style of the period. Princess Metternich further mentioned that it was “ blazing” with light from chandeliers and lamps, which was probably no exaggeration. Of cut-glass chandeliers a Second Empire drawing room could never have enough.

Home chose an armchair some three or four yards from the circle, offhandedly calling to their attention that the table was beyond his reach; and warned, as he usually did by way of preface, that They (the spirits) might not come at all. He then leaned back and was observed to grow visibly paler. Then Home spoke. “Bryan, are you there?” he asked. Sharp raps sounded from the table.

“At once the lustres of the chandeliers began to move, and from the back of the room a chair came, as if propelled by an irresistible force, and suddenly stopped in front of us. Home remained in his seat without moving a muscle. Suddenly he exclaimed: ‘They are here! They are all around us!”’

At the same instant, Princess Metternich screamed — with some excuse: an invisible iron hand had just gripped her by the knuckles. In the confusion, others were heard excitedly proclaiming that they too had felt that harsh iron grasp on their arms, hands, or necks, and could distinguish the pressure of its individual fingers, though strangely none felt pain. “One must have been through the experience to realise what it means.”

They were cut short by a new and breath-taking spectacle. The tapestry which covered the table was now seen to be slowly rising, while beneath it something — a concealed hand? — was moving towards them. Princess Metternich shrank back in her chair. But her husband, and others of the more skeptical and alert, sprang forward to catch the object; and each in turn had the same frustrating experience. When seized, it quietly “melted away.” One of the men tore off the cloth; others hurled themselves beneath the table. All in all, the Attainville drawing room must have presented a curious and unwonted appearance for the next few minutes. But they found nothing, nothing whatever. Home sat motionless, watching them with an expression impossible to read.

Presently, annoyed and a little disturbed as well, they scrambled to their feet and resumed their places. Immediately a perfect rain of derisive taps sounded from out of the table. At this Prince Metternich’s diplomatic calm entirely deserted him. The rest could do as they pleased, he announced loudly, but he was going back underneath that table. Hitching up the knees of his elegant trousers, and directing a challenging stare at Home, he lowered himself once more to his cramped observation post. There was only an infinitesimal pause, as if to allow him time to settle himself, before the maddening raps resumed at an accelerated tempo. Prince Metternich’s distinguished head shot out like a turtle’s and he peered indignantly upward. “No jokes, if you please!” he called testily. The nonplused circle assured him with perfect truth that no one except himself had stirred. But now they began to glance sideways at each other, and at Home, with genuine perturbation.

Home was by this time in deep trance, white as a sheet, head fallen back, and he cried out again that the spirits were all around them. “ One is quite near you. You surely feel it, like a light breath?” Men and women alike acknowledged shakily that they did.

Then, before they had time to recover, Home pointed to a corsage of violets which someone had left on the piano, and asked that it be brought to them. His head sank back against the armchair; and at the same moment the violets began to “glide over the smooth surface, rise, and unsteadily traverse the empty space that lay between the piano and the table.” They fell, by chance or design, directly into Princess Metternich’s lap, and as they fell her husband bounded forward to seize them and search feverishly for the thread or hair to which they might — or rather must — be attached. Again he found nothing.

At the end of the séance everyone burst out in animated speculation. Sleight of hand was by far the most popular theory, but there was also much knowledgeable allusion to “electro-biologism,” hallucination, and mass hypnotism. Princess Metternich dealt with the latter briskly: “That he was an unrivalled hypnotist is not impossible; but what I roundly deny is that any of us had any feeling that we had been hypnotised.” She also reminded her readers that the drawing room was as brightly lit as if it were day and had not at any stage of the proceedings been darkened, that it was in constant use by the family, and that Home, who had never been in the house before that evening, could hardly have set up any paraphernalia in advance.

A few days later the Metternichs attended a seance in the Empress’s rooms at the Tuileries, between live and six in the afternoon. This was not, on the whole, successful. “The spirits did not seem to be in the right mood.” At one point, when the customary tattoo was played by a regiment marching through the gardens, the table accompanied it with muffled raps. Princess Metternich, however, thought this a trifle childish, “though curious.” On the other hand she was very much struck by a phenomenon which had not been included the first evening, though it was a specialty of Home’s, and which fretted minds a great deal more scientific than hers; namely, that when tables tilted in his presence, at no matter how sharp an angle, objects lying upon them not only did not fall off, but adhered firmly to the surface and powerfully resisted all efforts to move them.

“On the little table that had just played the drum so prettily, there stood a candlestick with a lighted candle. The table began to move, to rise, to dance, then to lean so far forward that under ordinary circumstances, anything placed upon it would inevitably have fallen off. But what happened? Not only did the candlestick not fall off, but the flame, instead of continuing to burn perpendicularly — as of course normally happens when one holds a candle at a slant — leant over at the same angle as the candle and the table.”

One afternoon shortly after these events took place, Home favored Princess Metternich herself with a social call. She happened to be alone when lie was announced and, admitting to a moment’s distinct qualm, almost sent word that she vas engaged. Then, her justly famous spirit reasserting itself, she ordered him shown in. Home sat opposite her and they exchanged civilities, but her attention soon wandered somewhat. “Close by me, a peculiar noise, like that of big plashing drops, began to fall upon my ear.”

She tried bravely to ignore it, but the sound grew so loud and insistent that at length she could not resist glancing quickly behind her. At this Home, who had been tranquilly waiting for some notice to be taken of his little divertisement, allowed himself a fleeting smile and murmured that it was nothing — only one of Them. They followed him everywhere, he told her resignedly.

Home added unexpectedly (and this last touch demoralized her completely) that when his little son Gricha was around, the manifestations were even more vigorous. Mediumship ran in the family. “If you like, Princess,” he offered politely, “I’ll bring the boy with me one day; he’s three years old. I’ll let him stay alone with you. You will be astonished and — convinced.”

Princess Metternich thanked him shudderingly, but declined. This tête-à-tête with a wizard of adult years she could just sustain, but at the thought of a baby wizard her blood ran cold.

2

NOWHERE else in the world had the rapping spirits produced louder echoes than in the AngloAmerican colony of Florence. “ When people gather round a table now it isn’t to play whist,” Mrs. Robert Browning observed wisely. Mr. Browning maintained an attitude of virile and ill-concealed impatience. But as “confederate friends ranged with me on the believing side” his wife listed Sir Edward Lytton’s son, then attache of the English Embassy and “visionary enough to suit me, which is saying much”; Mr. Frederick Tennyson, elder brother of the poet, and a Swedenborgian; Mr. Hiram Powers, the American sculptor; and Mr. A. S. Jarves of the Boston Jarveses, a wealthy art critic, a medium in his own right, and what was more important, “perfectly veracious. Even Robert admits this.”

Together they were a formidable band and “Robert has to keep us at bay as he best can,” she told her friend Miss Haworth. She herself heard nothing wherever she went but talk of spirit hands, self-playing pianos, “flesh and blood human beings floating about rooms in company with tables and lamps,” and mediums speaking in tongues. “The unbelievers writhe under it,” said Mrs. Browning with satisfaction.

Daniel Home had not been long in England before Mrs. Browning was again drawn to him as by an irresistible magnet. She secured an introduction to the Rymers, with whom Home was staying, after which she wrote her sister in the country: —

MY BELOVED HENRIETTA,
. . . As to Hume¹ — we shall see him, and I will tell you. He’s the most interesting person to me in England out of Somersetshire, and 50 Wimpole Street. . . .
Your ever, ever affectionate BA.

England’s foremost poetess then journeyed to Ealing and sat raptly, dark eyes glowing in her small ivory-pale face, through an hour of wonders. But also in attendance was her distinguished husband, handsome, immaculately groomed, and frowning in deep distaste for this intellectual slumming expedition. Consequently her next letter was written in an agitated hand: —

MY DEAREST DEAR HENRIETTA:
You . . . want to hear the results of our seeing Hume — so I will tell you — on the condition though, that when you write to me you don’t say a word on the subject — because it’s a tabooed subject in this house — Robert and I taking completely different views, and lie being a good deal irritated by any discussion of it.

First she must explain that her friend Mr. Lytton was also in England and had visited Ealing with his father two days earlier. “We did not see quite as much as Mr. Lytton did — but we were touched by the invisible, heard the music and raps, saw the table moved, and had sight of the hands.” Then had occurred the famous garland episode, the recollection of which more than everything else kept Browning’s rage simmering through the years. “At the request of the medium, the spiritual hands took from the table a garland which lay there, and placed it upon my head. The particular hand which did this was of the largest human size, as white as snow, and very beautiful. It was as near to me as this hand I write with, and I saw it as distinctly. . . .

“Robert and I did not touch the hands. Mr. Lytton and Sir Edward both did. The feel was warm and human — rather warmer in fact than is common with a man’s hand. The music was beautiful.”

To turn to Home’s account, it gradually dawned on him that for some reason Mr. Browning “appeared to be very much out of temper” while this was going on. But he was too pleasantly engaged with Mrs. Browning (“who was so kind and attentive to me”) to pay much attention at first. The wreath which caused all the turmoil was of clematis which Home and the Rymer children had picked in the garden; and just before the seance it had been put on the table, “whether naturally or by spirit hands I do not remember.” There it lay until it was “raised by supernatural power in the presence of us all, and whilst we were watching it, Mr. Browning, who was seated at the opposite side of the table, left his place and came and stood behind his wife, towards whom the wreath was being slowly carried, and upon whose head it was placed in full sight of us all, and whilst he was standing close behind her. He expressed no disbelief; as indeed, it was impossible for any one to have any. . . . Mrs. Browning was much moved.”

This was emphatically where Home should have stopped, as he valued his life. Instead he rashly hinted that Browning had hurried to place himself in the trajectory of the wreath in the hope that it would alight on his brow. (Chesterton has remarked that it was almost too dreadful to conjecture what the poet’s language would have been if it. had taken any such liberty.) Browning’s reaction was all that could have been expected.

Unhappy Mrs. Browning assured Henrietta that her husband acquitted the Rymer family of collusion, “believes in their veracity — but cries out. against Hume’s humbugging.” Even she felt constrained to admit that Home, in trance, had talked “a great deal of much such twaddle as may be heard in any fifth-rate conventicle.”

To many observers, the most puzzling phenomena were the spirit hands, which later psychists preferred to designate austerely as psychic rods, terminals, extrusions, or “pseudopods” — literally “false feet.”

Home’s spirit, hands had been given a searching inspection by no less an anatomical authority than Hiram Powers. Powers in turn introduced him to Baron Seymour Kirkup, noted artist of an earlier day. Kirkup, very ancient, very deaf, living amid decayed grandeur in a state of indescribable mental and physical confusion, had been lost for years in the obscurest mazes of occultism. Even Mrs. Browning smiled a little at some of his revelations. But he exerted himself with a surprising access of practicality to make sketches of a hand and arm materialized by Home, which was more than anyone else had thought to do. “You must be able to show proof,” the old gentleman submitted.

To Nathaniel Hawthorne, who had attended Home’s seances in Florence, the spirit messages presented no difficulty: it seemed obvious to him that these had their origin in the subconscious minds of the circle and that some form of telepathy “returned the inquirer’s thoughts and veiled reflections to himself.” He could dismiss everything on this basis, in fact, except the bothersome pseudopods. “The hands are certainly an inexplicable phenomenon. They are impressions of the two senses, sight and touch, but how produced I cannot tell.”

Browning’s spluttering theory, as advanced to Hawthorne, was that the spirit hands produced by Home were either “the scoundrel’s naked foot” or contrivances attached thereto. As he spoke Mrs. Browning kept putting in little distressed expostulations in her sweet and tiny voice. But Browning forged ahead, and “the marvellousness of the fact, as I have read of it and heard it from other eyewitnesses, melted strangely away in his hearty gripe, and at the sharp touch of his logic,” said Mr. Hawthorne uncomfortably. Here were two clever, likable, witty people, both of whom Hawthorne respected, and as to whose complete intellectual integrity he would have taken his oath. But it was one’s word against the other’s.

Browning also fumed to William Allingham that he had never seen so impudent a piece of imposture in his life but that shortly after the seance Home, to his amazement, had called on him in town “with his right hand outstretched in amity. He bore no ill-will — not he!” Browning’s response had been to point to the nearest exit with the inhospitable words: “If you are not out of that door in half a minute I’ll fling you down the stairs.” But, he continued, grinding his handsome teeth, “now comes the best of it all. What do you suppose he says of me? You’ll never guess. He says to everybody, ‘How Browning hates me! — and how I love him!’”

Mrs. Browning defiantly wound up her letter to Henrietta: —

For my own part, I am confirmed in all my opinions. To me it [the séance] was wonderful and conclusive; and I believe that the medium present was no more responsible for the things said and done, than I myself was. ... A very little patience, and we shall not speak such things in a whisper: for it is but the beginning. . . .
Your ever attached BA.

3

FROM Rome [where he had gone to recover from a severe cold] Home advised friends in Paris that he went little into society, the spirits thinking a complete rest necessary. But he spent April both pleasantly and profitably, for shortly afterwards Mrs. Browning heard what seemed to her the greatest wonder yet: the medium was engaged to be married.

In Rome he had fallen in with a young Cossack nobleman, Count Gregoire Koucheleff-Besborodka, who had a beautiful wife and sister-in-law. The latter was the seventeen-year-old Alexandrina (Sacha) de Kroll, youngest daughter of the late General Count de Kroll and a goddaughter of the late Tsar Nicholas. She had been educated in Paris, as most girls of good Russian family were, and was just out of her convent — vivacious, impressionable, charming, and little more than a child.

Koucheleff asked Home to come and spend a quiet evening with the family, but when he arrived around ten he found a large rollicking Russian party in full swing. Supper was served at midnight. Home sat at his hostess’s right, and when she introduced him to the pretty, dark-haired little girl on his other side “a strange impression came over me at once, and I knew she was to be my wife.” At the same moment Sacha began to laugh. “Mr. Home,” she teased, “you will be married before the year is ended.” Home asked why. Oh, she said, it was an old Russian superstition — it never failed when a man sat at table between two sisters he had just met. Both omens were fulfilled. Twelve days later the engagement of Mile de Kroll and the medium was formally announced.

It must be considered entirely a tribute to Home’s social charm, for Sacha had not yet seen him in action. Indeed discussion of his profession was rather carefully avoided. Once his fiancee turned to him as they were sitting out a dance and said lightly, “Do tell me about spirit-rapping, for you know I don’t believe in it.” Home’s diplomatic and gently quelling response was: “Mademoiselle, I trust you will ever bear in mind that I have a mission entrusted to me. It is a great and holy one. I cannot speak with you about a thing which you have not seen, and therefore cannot understand.”

The wedding was to take place in Russia. Sacha went ahead from Marseilles while Home made a hurried trip to Scotland to provide himself with a birth certificate, disappointing friends in Florence who had hoped for a glimpse of the pair. “Certainly her taste must be extraordinary,” marveled Mrs. Browning. “How strange the fortunes of that young man are! . . . My friend Mr. Jarves spent a night with Hume once,” she went on by a not too obscure association of ideas, “and a four-posted bed was carried into the middle of the room — shadowy figures stood by the pillow, or lay down across the feet of those about to sleep — nothing threatening, everything kind; but, at best,” she concluded thoughtfully, “extremely disturbing.”

In June, Home joined Count and Countess Koucheleff-Besborodka, who were waiting for him in Paris. One night he took them to call on Alexandre Dumas; they found each other wonderfully congenial, and when someone suggested that Dumas be best man at the wedding he accepted at once with Gargantuan roars of delight. With this lastminute addition to their party they proceeded northward, a trip amusingly described by Dumas in De Paris a Astrakan. Alas, he said, the wizard could not bid the waves of the Baltic be still, but was seasick for the entire voyage.

Sacha’s relations were gathered expectantly at Polonstrava, the estate bestowed on Koucheleff’s grandfather by Catherine II. It stood just outside St. Petersburg, with a glorious view of the Neva. There were illuminated fetes and ceremonial dinners, and young and old appeared delighted with the match: to Dumas’s surprise they made no objection whatever to bestowing their lovely Sacha on a young man with no background, no visible means of livelihood, and most visibly in shocking health. One more proof that he was, of course, a sorcerer, a caster of spells.

What others thought even more astounding, being utterly without precedent, was the suspension in Home’s case of the ironclad rules governing marriages of the noblesse. But Alexander II had given his permission without question; the newly crowned Tsar of Freedom was bent on emulating the court of France in all things.

There was, at the last, some little difficulty about his birth certificate, but Alexander quickly set this right. “All the obstacles in the way of my marriage were removed by his most gracious Majesty, who upon this, as upon every occasion, has shown to me the greatest kindness.” Three days before the wedding the Tsar sent a blinding diamond ring by his chamberlain, Count Schouvaloff.

Until now Sacha had not been allowed to see any of Home’s phenomena, which possibly was wise. “My wife’s first introduction to anything of the kind” came when two apparitions entered their bedroom, and for a moment “her actions betrayed a certain shrinking.” But on the whole she took it well. When the apparitions vanished and raps began to sound, she was soon happily engrossed in putting questions and learning to count the raps which replied. Judged as an artist, Home gave as finished a performance in the home as outside it; judged as an impostor, he took no one into his confidence.

The next landmark in Home’s life was the birth of his son on May 8, 1859, at seven o’clock of a wild and stormy evening. Not only did signs and portents attend the birth, but the child had given certain evidences of being a prenatal medium. (As an early sign of vocation, it was pointed out, this topped the record even of Jenny Lind, whose first cry on entering the world was a high F.) The warbling of an invisible bird was heard, and mysterious illuminations glowed through the night over the cradle of the infant, who to a trained eye gave every indication of remarkable occult potentialities. But the proud father, while making this clear, added that he would never encourage the development of such a gift. A medium had too hard a life.

The Tsar sent Mme Home a congratulatory emerald brooch set with sixteen diamonds. The baby was christened Gregoire (Gricha). His Aunt Luba (Countess Koucheleff-Besborodka) was godmother, and the French Minister, the Marquis de Chateaureynard, was godfather. On this occasion he was christened a Roman Catholic. When he was rebaptized in the Greek Church some years later his sponsors were more exalted, being none other than H.I.H. the Grand Duchess Constantine, and the Tsar of All the Russias.

4

WITHIN a few weeks of his return to England Home had given seances for Lord Stafford, Mrs. Milner Gibson, Elizabeth Lady Dunsany, Baron and Lady Pollock, Lady Compton, Lady Salisbury, Lady Trelawney, Sir Daniel and Lady Cooper, Lady Loftus Otway, Sir Charles Nicholson, Lady Helena Newnham, Lady Palmerston, and Lady Egerton of Tatton. He was taken to perform before Lord Lyndhurst at the aged Chancellor’s residence; and, more importantly, before the Duchess of Sutherland at Stafford House. The approval of the Duchess, a generous sponsor of high-minded causes, could hardly be overestimated.

For a time it seemed that Home would be more or less appropriated by Lady Shelley, a pleasant, lively little woman of inexhaustible energy. But against heavy opposition the victor was Mrs. Thomas Milner Gibson, whose social gifts had made her a well-known figure in more than one European capital. “That impulsive, compassionate, affectionate woman,” Dickens characterized her (adding confidentially to their mutual friend Mrs. Lynn Linton, England’s first woman journalist, “but as to the strength of her head —?”). Latterly political refugees — Louis Blanc, Mazzini, and Kossuth — had absorbed her time and attention, but. Home was soon the undisputed lion of her “ Mondays ” at 3 Hyde Park Place. And the only one who was not entirely happy over this arrangement was Mr. Gibson.

“I hear from England that the subject is advancing with a large section of the public,” Mrs. Browning wrote from Italy. “Milner Gibson’s dinner table is, in the middle of dinner, lifted up to an angle of forty-five — he praying (or rather swearing) for leave to get his dinner in peace.” Mr. Gibson gave further pain by declining to attend seances in his own home or elsewhere; and if by chance he opened the door on such gatherings he would pause only to groan, “Well, my dear, at it again!” before vanishing with lightning speed.

But it was not so easy to dissociate himself from his wife’s enthusiasm where the public was concerned. Gibson was one of the great parliamentary triumvirate of Free Trade (the other two being Cobden and Bright), and it happened that about this time he was negotiating a commercial treaty with France. One day, wishing to report to the Commons on exchanges that had passed between the two governments, Mr. Gibson arose and cleared his throat. “ I have been a medium —” he began. But that was all they heard, the rest being drowned in the uncontrollable roar that went up from both sides of the House.

Though it was sometimes forgotten, Home had a domestic as well as a public life. He was an exemplary husband; but some of Mrs. Browning’s premonitions seemed borne out by his account of a little incident that took place in April, 1860.

In Mrs. Gibson’s salon he had often met Louis Blanc, the socialist leader exiled from France under the dictatorship of Napoleon III. Like other distinguished refugees, M. Blanc was much sought after as a lecturer; and one evening Home and a party of friends (Sacha had gone to bed early suffering from a headache) went to hear him speak. The lecture proved to deal with Mesmer and Cagliostro, whose hidden contributions to the revolutionary forces of 1789 had, according to Blanc, never been seriously enough appraised.

Home’s detractors had frequently likened him in a most unflattering way to the self-styled Count de Cagliostro, the arch-magician whose harsh shadow fell across the French and Russian courts of an earlier day. Accordingly a good many in the audience glanced surreptitiously at Home as the lecture progressed, and they found him wearing an oddly distraught air. For the very good reason, he explained later, that the old magician’s astral body had entered the hall a few minutes after Blanc began to speak of him. When he went back to the hotel and Sacha roused herself to ask how he had enjoyed the lecture, his reply (hardly soothing to one with migraine) was: “I have been haunted all evening by Cagliostro.”

Sacha put both hands to her aching head. “Pray,” she exclaimed faintly, “do not use that word haunted, it sounds so weird-like, and quite frightens me!”

Home meanwhile had blown out the candles; but now the room was luridly lit up for an instant. Sacha, all at once very wide-awake, asked if this was Cagliostro. Three blue flashes answered in the affirmative. Then footsteps were heard, and in a moment they felt a pressure on the bed which seemed to indicate that their visitant was companionably seating himself beside them. Both his wife and he himself, said Home, were temporarily struck dumb by this free and easy behavior on the part of a spirit who was, as he put it, “in no way related to us.” But presently Cagliostro began to speak “in a distinct Voice audible to both of us” and cleared up some much debated questions. ("My biographers have ever done me injustice.”) He appeared to be making an effort at cordiality for Sacha’s benefit, and such experiences might be harmless — but at best, as Mrs. Browning had said, disturbing.

5

TAKEN singly, neither Home’s phenomena nor his facile charm, both of which captured sensation seekers, could have quite explained the kind and degree of success he had attained. Taken together they justified the title of an article in Thackeray’s literary monthly, the Cornhill Magazine, in August, 1860: “Stranger Than Fiction.”

The anonymous author was quickly identified as Robert Bell, an Irish journalist and critic previously associated with Lytton. The scene was Mrs. Gibson’s drawing room, and Bell began by describing the bewitching of its furniture. This was fairly stereotyped, except that a table had turned over on one side and traveled about the room with a weaving motion so rapid that they could hardly keep up with it. Finally it had tried to climb an ottoman, succeeded after several attempts, and descended nimbly on the other side, winding up triumphantly poised on one leg like a ballerina. Then the lights had been dimmed, and it was what came next that brought his readers up short and staring. To judge the full impact on the Cornhill’s subscribers, the story had best be told in his own words: —

“Mr. Home was seated next the window. Through the semi-darkness his head was dimly visible against the curtains, and his hands might be seen in a faint white heap before him.

“Presently he said, in a quiet voice, ‘My chair is moving — I am off the ground — don’t notice me — talk of something else,’ or words to that effect. . . . In a moment or two more he spoke again. This time his voice was in the air above our heads. He had risen from his chair to a height of four or five feet from the ground. As he ascended higher he described his position, which at first was perpendicular, and afterwards became horizontal. He said he felt as if he had been turned in the gentlest manner, as a child is turned in the arms of a nurse. . .

It would be hard to find a modern parallel for the furore created by this article. So liberal an education on sense deception and mal-observation did the public all at once receive that if Home achieved nothing else, he severely undermined the prest ige of human evidence. Shallow-minded persons were being Hume-bugged right and left, sneered Punch, coming out the next week with a poem entitled “Home, Great Home!”

As for Home’s converts, the kindest thing said of them was that they were of the class born for no other purpose than to be deluded. Controversies in the sixties were normally abusive; this one was only a trifle more so than most. Edmund Yates, who had a long-standing journalistic and personal feud with Thackeray and could hardly credit his good fortune at seeing his enemy thus delivered into his hands, made it a point to inveigh not so much against Home as against his “silly dupes, eleven-twelfths of whom are hopeless fools.” A number resented this classification hotly enough to give up their protective anonymity and corroborate the Cornhill article in angry detail.

Thackeray had first met. Home during an American tour some years before. On that occasion he had been as excited as a boy — lowering his plump form to peer beneath the table, getting down on hands and knees to examine the floor, mopping his brow from these unwonted exertions, and keeping up a running fire of questions. Then he hurried back to his hotel to write his friends in England, instructing them exactly how to go about it so that they too might form circles and make tables tilt. “It is the most wonderful thing . . .!”

Now, implored on all sides to wash his hands of the article, Thackeray refused. They had not seen what he had, he told expostulating friends. “Why, presently, the body being removed, shouldn’t we personally be anywhere at will?” he inquired — and “anywhere” included Mrs. Gibson’s drawing room. Home could not claim him as a believer, but he was undeniably a friendly advocate. “It pleases me that Thackeray has had the courage to maintain the facts before the public,” approved Mrs. Browning. “I think much the better of him for doing so.”

Home traveled to Italy at the end of the year in the new and unexpected role of sculptor. This had come as a surprise to his closest intimates, but he explained that he wished to make himself financially independent. It was his plan ultimately to open a studio in Paris. In the meantime Joseph Durham had given him some preliminary lessons in his new art and had given him letters of introduction to leading sculptors in Rome, including William Wetmore Story. When Browning got wind of this last his indignation verged on the apoplectic. He wrote Isabella Blagden: —

Dec. 19 th, 1863
Hume went to Rome with a letter . . . to Story, asking to become his pupil; Story refused, but got him a studio, conceiving himself bound to do so much by the letter: Mrs. S. wrote me this: of course Hume immediately wrote to England (to Dr. Gully a Gull indeed) that S. had taken him as a pupil — it is Story’s own business — he chooses to take this dungball into his hand for a minute, and he will get more and more smeared.

Home was saddened by this exhibition of vindictiveness, but hardly surprised. “I happen to know,” he wrote darkly, “that Mr. Browning once remarked of me that I was in the habit of being assisted home drunk by the police nightly.”

He settled down quietly in the artist colony, going about his business and conscientiously visiting the art galleries; but he was not allowed to make much progress in his new career. In January the Papal Government swiftly moved to have him expelled from the city, although it later relented to permit Home to stay if he would swear to “desist from all communication with the spirit world.”

But Home, as always, replied that this was out of his control. The utmost he could promise was this: “I give my word as a gentleman that, during my stay in Rome, I will have no seance, and that I will avoid, as much as possible, all conversations upon spiritualism. DANIEL DUNGLAS HOME, PalazziPaoli, 4 January, 1864.”

It was not enough, and he was requested with finality to be outside the gates of Rome the next day.

6

FROM the day Browning’s pulverizing “ Mr. Sludge” appeared in 1864, its inspiration was obvious to everyone in England with the exception of Mr. D. D. Home. “No person even slightly acquainted with me could discover one point of resemblance,” he protested with his most charming smile. But “ I find myself compelled to notice this remarkable poem of Mr. Robert Browning,” he wrote distantly after some years had elapsed, “as an offensively coarse attack upon the cause I have the honour to represent and an insult to the memory of his deceased wife, who lived and died a believer in Spiritualism — and whose intellect,” said Mr. Home (becoming human for one moment), “was far superior to his own.”

Other and more disinterested critics had thought the poem not in the best of taste on this score, for it was known that this was almost the only topic on which the Brownings ever differed. But. Mrs. Browning had grown to be a most attractive and exceptional type of spiritist, laughing cheerfully at her own enthusiasm — “I dare say you all set me down as raving mad,” she told her sister — and keeping family arguments on a resolutely light plane. Nevertheless, to the day of her death in 1861 she had neither recanted nor compromised. “It grows, it grows,” she had exulted at each fresh report of the movement’s progress.

Taken at face value Sludge’s hysterical, cringing confession was a recital of nothing but sordid beginnings, sordid cheats, and icy and unfathomable contempt for a race of dupes. To the sole dissenting commentator, Chesterton, its significance, like that of all Browning’s monologues, lay rather in its probing of “a reality tangled almost inextricably with unrealities in a man’s mind.” Moreover, Sludge in his extremity told all; the formidable thing about Home was that he never relaxed his guard. His life must have been one of perpetual and exhausting wariness, his wits must often have raced against disaster, but the hairbreadth triumphs that constituted the real drama of his existence could never be shared. “A really accomplished impostor,” reflected Chesterton, “is the most wretched of geniuses; he is a Napoleon on a desert island.”

And even for Sludge, he pointed out, Browning had left one door ajar. “When he has nothing left either to gain or to conceal, then he rises up into a perfect bankrupt sublimity and makes the great avowal which is the whole pivot and meaning of the poem.”

It is doubtful whether Home would have been grateful for this loophole even if anyone had noticed it at the time, which no one did. But in contrast to Browning there now entered his life John Ruskin, whose attitude was full of balm. Ruskin was introduced to seances by his confidante Mrs. Cowper Temple, who like many others had been intensely concerned for him since he announced his loss of faith in revealed religion. Mrs. Temple felt that séances would almost certainly lift him out of his despondency. For her own part, as she wrote Home, “I feel now no interest, except in the spiritworld.”

At one seance a. poem was dictated to Home by the spirit of Southey, while the table beat time. Mr. Ruskin, who was sitting opposite, then asked diffidently if he might recite a little poem. Pray do, said the spirits. Ruskin’s choice was a religious verse, and the table, rising on two legs, beat time to this with special fervor.

The change in him was marked, and friends reacted to it in differing ways. “ When we last met,” blurted Holman Hunt, staring, “you declared you had given up all belief in immortality!” True, true, admitted Ruskin, wincing at the memory of those desolate days; but since then he had had unanswerable evidence to the contrary.

In the fall, just before Home left for the States, solemn Mr. Ruskin wrote him a letter which, with all allowances, must be considered peculiar: —

DENMARK HILL, 4TH September, 1864
DEAR MR. HOME, —
It is so nice of you to like me! I believe you are truly doing me the greatest service and help that one human being can do another in trusting me in this way, and indeed I hope I so far deserve your trust, that I can understand noble and right feeling and affection — though I have myself little feeling or affection left, being worn out with indignation as far as regards the general world. . . .
Till March is long to wait — and it really isn’t all my fault. . . . You never told me you were going away before Monday. . . .
Well — do, please, write me a line to say you are safe in America. And come to see me the moment you come back. I shall be in every way, I hope, then more at leisure and peace.
May you be preserved in that wild country, and brought back to us better in health and happier.
Ever affectionately yours,
J. RUSKIN.

7

THE climactic levitation took place at Ashley House before Lord Adare, Captain Lindsay, and Charles Wynne. Adare and Lindsay wrote separate accounts (later microscopically examined for discrepancies). Wynne, not a literary type, contented himself with a gruff and general corroboration.

First came telekinetic phenomena witnessed by all three, and apparitions visible only to Lindsay. (He saw one spirit form leaning an arm on Wynne’s shoulder.) Then Home, who had been in trance for some time, began to walk about uneasily and finally wandered into an adjoining room. At the same moment Lindsay heard a voice whisper in his ear: “He will go out of one window and in at another.” He had barely time to communicate this startling intelligence before they heard a window in the next room being flung up. Lindsay’s account continues: “We heard the window in the next room lifted up, and almost immediately afterwards we saw Home floating in the air outside our window.

“The moon was shining full into the room. My back was to the light; and I saw the shadow on the wall of the windowsill, and Home’s feet about six inches above it. He remained in this position for a few seconds, then raised the window and glided into the room feet foremost, and sat down.

“Lord Adare then went into the next room to look at the window from which he had been carried. It was raised about eighteen inches, and he expressed his wonder how Mr. Home had been taken through so narrow an aperture.

“Home said (still in trance) ‘I will show you’; and then, with his back to the window, he leaned back and was shot out of the aperture head first, with the body rigid, and then returned quite quietly.

“The window is about seventy feet from the ground. I very much doubt whether any skillful rope-dancer would like to attempt a feat of this description, where the only means of crossing would be a perilous leap.

“The distance between the windows was about seven feet six inches, and there was not more than a twelve-inch projection to each window, which served as a ledge to put flowers on.”

From Adare’s version: “When Home awoke, he was much agitated; he said he felt as if he had gone through some fearful peril, and that he had a most horrible desire to throw himself out of the window. He remained in a very nervous condition for a short time, and then gradually became quiet. Having been ordered not to tell him, we said nothing of what had happened. . . .”

Large books could be filled, and in fact have been filled, with the controversy over this seance alone. The most sensible conclusion that emerged was that it would probably remain unexplained until it was repeated under observation; and this has yet to be done. The late Houdini went on record as being able to duplicate it on the same premises and under the same conditions, and when he was in London in 1920 made plans to do so. But the project fell through, apparently because of some dispute with his assistant. It might be mentioned in passing that Houdini, though convinced that Home was “a hypocrite of the deepest dye,” had a certain respect for him as a performer who worked tirelessly to improve his act. He could think of several ways in which the illusion in question might have been worked, but did not exclude the possibility that “a man of Home’s audacity with levitation feats” might have swung from one window to the other, with a wire placed in readiness below.

8

HOME met and deeply interested William Crookes, the brilliant and ambitious young physicist and chemist. There was only a year’s difference in their ages; they were soon Dan and William to each other; and before long Crookes was afire to study Home’s phenomena in the laboratory.

Crookes’s announced objectives when he began his celebrated tests with Home were, all things considered, modest. “The Spiritualist,” he explained, “tells of rooms and houses being shaken, even to injury, by superhuman power. The man of science merely asks for a pendulum to be set vibrating when it is in a glass case. . . .

“The Spiritualist tells of heavy articles of furniture moving from one room to another without human agency. But the man of science . . . is justified in doubting the accuracy of the observations, if the same force is powerless to move the index of his instrument one poor degree.”

His apparatus — which seemed an extremely impressive array at the time — included a galvanometer, a thermometer, an accordion placed in a sort of cage wound with insulated copper wire, a small hand-bell, an electromagnet, two Grove cells, and a spring balance attached to a board, with a selfregistering index to record variations in weight. (Home could hardly, Crookes pointed out, mesmerize instruments.) He then issued invitations to a picked list of his colleagues to witness the tests; but almost to a man they declined with emphasis and haste. At the outset he had, however, the jubilant approbation of the press, which, as Mme Home later remarked bitterly, “hastened to confer on him a printed certificate of fitness for his task.” When he brought in his totally unlooked-for verdict, the tone abruptly changed.

An enormous literature has grown up around the Crookes tests. It need only be said here that the reaction in scientific circles was sharp, not to say anguished, when they read that Mr. Crookes “affirmed conclusively” the existence of “a new force, in some unknown manner connected with the human organisation, which for convenience may be called the Psychic Force”; and that of all persons so endowed Mr. Home was the most remarkable. Mr. Home’s power was, indeed, strong enough to withstand even “ the antagonistic influence of light.” Consequently, except on two special occasions, “everything which I have witnessed with him has taken place in the light.”

“Pray do not hesitate to mention me as one of the firmest believers in you,” Crookes told Home. The scientific world was in an uproar. Inevitably and lamentably personalities entered into the dispute; charges of observational bias and experimental error (to mention only the kindest) flew; poor trusting Mr. Crookes, it was jibed, had been taken in by tricks that would not deceive a normally bright child of ten. Crookes, a high-tempered man and a forceful debater, struck back with vigor.

For a time Crookes’s well-wishers had feared that a brilliant scientific career was at an end. But he survived an ordeal of merciless ridicule; and by 1898, when he was elected President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, all was forgiven if not forgotten. On the last night of British Association conventions it was the custom to hold an informal “Red Lion” dinner, the room being decorated with a shield for each President, bearing his name, crest, and a suitable motto. The motto assigned Crookes (now Sir William) was: “Ubi Crux, ibi Lux.” But on this particular evening a burlesque shield was also made ready, with the motto: “Ubi Crookes, ibi Spooks.” Everyone, including Crookes, laughed a trifle louder and longer than the jest strictly called for, and amity was restored.

To this day, if psychical researchers are disposed to make any exceptions whatever to the axiom that every physical medium is fraudulent, the one to whom they give the greatest benefit of the doubt is the enigmatic Mr. Home.

In the spring of 1886 Mme Home took her husband to Paris lung specialists, who gave a negative prognosis, and then back to Auteuil by easy stages. He died there on June 21, with a Greek Orthodox priest in attendance, and was buried in the Russian cemetery at Saint-Germain-en-Laye.

No one could say whether or to what extent Daniel Home believed in his own legend. All that was certain was that he had given a brilliant and marvelously sustained performance; and sometimes great actors who play one role for many seasons almost forget where the role ends and their own personality begins.