No More Learning

I often think I would put this belief in magic from me if I could,
for I have come to see or to imagine, in men and women, in houses, in
handicrafts, in nearly all sights and sounds, a certain evil, a certain
ugliness, that comes from the slow perishing through the centuries of a
quality of mind that made this belief and its evidences common over the
world.


II

Some ten or twelve years ago, a man with whom I have since quarrelled
for sound reasons, a very singular man who had given his life to
studies other men despised, asked me and an acquaintance, who is now
dead, to witness a magical work. He lived a little way from London,
and on the way my acquaintance told me that he did not believe in
magic, but that a novel of Bulwer Lytton's had taken such a hold upon
his imagination that he was going to give much of his time and all his
thought to magic. He longed to believe in it, and had studied though
not learnedly, geomancy, astrology, chiromancy, and much cabalistic
symbolism, and yet doubted if the soul outlived the body. He awaited
the magical work full of scepticism. He expected nothing more than an
air of romance, an illusion as of the stage, that might capture the
consenting imagination for an hour. The evoker of spirits and his
beautiful wife received us in a little house, on the edge of some kind
of garden or park belonging to an eccentric rich man, whose curiosities
he arranged and dusted, and he made his evocation in a long room that
had a raised place on the floor at one end, a kind of dais, but was
furnished meagrely and cheaply. I sat with my acquaintance in the
middle of the room, and the evoker of spirits on the dais, and his wife
between us and him. He held a wooden mace in his hand, and turning to a
tablet of many-coloured squares, with a number on each of the squares,
that stood near him on a chair, he repeated a form of words. Almost
at once my imagination began to move of itself and to bring before me
vivid images that, though never too vivid to be imagination, as I had
always understood it, had yet a motion of their own, a life I could
not change or shape. I remember seeing a number of white figures, and
wondering whether their mitred heads had been suggested by the mitred
head of the mace, and then, of a sudden, the image of my acquaintance
in the midst of them. I told what I had seen, and the evoker of spirits
cried in a deep voice, 'Let him be blotted out,' and as he said it the
image of my acquaintance vanished, and the evoker of spirits or his
wife saw a man dressed in black with a curious square cap standing
among the white figures. It was my acquaintance, the seeress said, as
he had been in a past life, the life that had moulded his present,
and that life would now unfold before us. I too seemed to see the man
with a strange vividness. The story unfolded itself chiefly before
the mind's eye of the seeress, but sometimes I saw what she described
before I heard her description.
She thought the man in black was
perhaps a Fleming of the sixteenth century, and I could see him pass
along narrow streets till he came to a narrow door with some rusty
ironwork above it. He went in, and wishing to find out how far we had
one vision among us, I kept silent when I saw a dead body lying upon
the table within the door. The seeress described him going down a long
hall and up into what she called a pulpit, and beginning to speak. She
said, 'He is a clergyman, I can hear his words. They sound like Low
Dutch. ' Then after a little silence, 'No, I am wrong. I can see the
listeners; he is a doctor lecturing among his pupils. ' I said, 'Do you
see anything near the door? ' and she said, 'Yes, I see a subject for
dissection. ' Then we saw him go out again into the narrow streets, I
following the story of the seeress, sometimes merely following her
words, but sometimes seeing for myself. My acquaintance saw nothing; I
think he was forbidden to see, it being his own life, and I think could
not in any case. His imagination had no will of its own. Presently the
man in black went into a house with two gables facing the road, and up
some stairs into a room where a hump-backed woman gave him a key; and
then along a corridor, and down some stairs into a large cellar full of
retorts and strange vessels of all kinds. Here he seemed to stay a long
while, and one saw him eating bread that he took down from a shelf. The
evoker of spirits and the seeress began to speculate about the man's
character and habits, and decided, from a visionary impression, that
his mind was absorbed in naturalism, but that his imagination had been
excited by stories of the marvels wrought by magic in past times, and
that he was trying to copy them by naturalistic means. Presently one of
them saw him go to a vessel that stood over a slow fire, and take out
of the vessel a thing wrapped up in numberless cloths, which he partly
unwrapped, showing at length what looked like the image of a man made
by somebody who could not model.