Spiritist Review - Journal of Psychological Studies - 1867

A novel can be a way of expressing Spiritist thoughts, without compromising oneself, because the fearful author can always respond to the mocking criticism that he has only intended to create a work of fantasy, that is true for the majority; however, anything goes with fantasy. But fantastic or not, it is still one of the forms by which the Spiritist idea can penetrate circles where it would not be accepted in a serious form.

Spiritism is still too little, or better still, hardly known in literature, to have offered subject of many works of this kind; the main one, as we know, is the one that Théophile Gautier published under the name of “Spirite”, and still one can reproach the author for having deviated from the true idea in several points.

Another work that we have also talked about, and that without being made especially in view of Spiritism, is attached to it in a certain way, is that of Mr. Elie Berthet, published in feuilletons in Le Siècle, in September and October 1865, with the title The double sight. Here the author demonstrates a thorough knowledge of the phenomena he speaks of, and his book adds to this merit that of style and sustained interest. It is, at the same time, moral and instructive.

The second life, by X.-B. Saintine, serialized in Le Grand Moniteur, in February 1864, is a series of short stories that have neither the impossible fantastic, nor the dismal character of Edgar Poe's tales, but the sweet and gracious simplicity of intimate scenes between the inhabitants of this world and those of the next, in which Mr. Saintine firmly believed. Although these are fantasy stories, in general they do not deviate much from the phenomena that many people may have witnessed. Besides, we know that, when alive, the author, whom we have personally known, was neither incredulous nor materialist; Spiritist ideas were sympathetic to him, and what he wrote reflected his own thought.

“Séraphita”, by Balzac, is a philosophical novel, based on the doctrine of Swedenborg. In "Consuelo" et la "Comtesse de Rudofstadt", by Madame George Sand, the principle of reincarnation plays a major role. “Le Drag”, by the same author, is a comedy performed a few years ago at Vaudeville, and whose script is entirely Spiritist. It is based on a popular belief, among the sailors of Provence. Drag is a mocking Spirit, more mischievous than bad, who likes to play bad pranks. We see him as a young man, exerting his influence and forcing a person to write against his own will. The press, usually so benevolent with this writer, was harsh with this play, that deserved a better reception.

France does not have an exclusive monopoly on these kinds of productions. “Le Progrès colonial de l'Ile Maurice” published in 1865, with the title Stories from the Other World, Told by Spirits, a novel that ran no less than twenty-eight series, whose intrigue was all carried by Spiritism, and in which the author, Mr. de Germonville, has demonstrated a perfect knowledge of the subject.

In a few other novels, the Spiritist idea simply provides the subject of episodes. Mr. Aurélien Scholl, in his New mysteries of Paris, published by the Petit Journal, brings in a magnetizer that questions a table by typtology, then a young girl is put into a somnambulistic state, whose revelations create difficulties to some of the assistants. The scene is well rendered and perfectly plausible. (Petit Journal of October 23rd, 1866.)

Reincarnation is one of the most fruitful ideas for novelists, and that can provide exciting effects as they do not deviate in any way from the possibilities of material life. Mr. Charles Barbara, a young writer who died a few months ago in a nursing home, used it as one of the most fortunate applications in his novel entitled The Assassination of the Red Bridge, recently reproduced by the “Événement “ in a serialized form.

The main character is a, exchange rate broker, that fled, taking abroad the fortune of his clients. Attracted by a person to a miserable house, with the excuse of favoring his escape, he is assassinated, stripped, then thrown into the Seine, with the help of a woman, named Rosalie, that lived with this man. The assassin was so careful, and knew so well how to take precautions, that every trace of the crime disappeared, and every suspicion of murder was ruled out. Shortly after, he married his accomplice Rosalie, and both could henceforth live lavishly, without fear of any persecution, except that of remorse, when a circumstance came to put an end to their anguish. Here is how he tells it himself:

“This peace of mind was disturbed from the first days of our marriage. Unless there was a direct intervention of an occult power, it must be admitted that chance here proved to be strangely intelligent. However wonderful the fact may seem, you won't even think of doubting it, even more so because you have a living proof of the fact in my son. As a matter of fact, many people would not fail to see in it a purely physical and physiological fact, and to explain it rationally. Anyway, I suddenly noticed traces of sadness on Rosalie's face. I asked her why. She avoided answering me.

The next day and the following days, her melancholy only increased, and I begged her to get me out of my anxiety. She ended up confessing something that moved me greatly. The very first night of our honeymoon, although we were in the dark, she had seen in my place, but really seen as I see you, she claimed, the pale face of the broker. She had, uselessly, exhausted her forces, by chasing away what she, at first, took for a simple memory; the ghost had not left her eyes until the first lights of dawn. Moreover, which certainly was such as to justify her fear, the same vision had persecuted her, with similar tenacity, for several consecutive nights.

I simulated a deep disdain and tried to convince her that she had been a victim of hallucination. I understood, from the grief that seized her and turned imperceptibly into that torpor in which you saw her, that I had not succeeded in instilling my feeling in her. A painful, agitated pregnancy, equivalent to a long and painful illness, made this uneasiness still worse; and if a happy childbirth, filling her with joy, had a healthy influence on her morale, it was of very short duration. On top of that I saw myself constrained to deprive her of the happiness of having her child with her, since, with respect to to my official resources, a live-in nanny, at home, would have seemed an expense beyond my means.

Moved by the feelings of figuring honorably in a pastoral, we went to see our child fortnightly. Rosalie loved him passionatly, and I myself was not far from loving him with frenzy; for, something singular, on the ruins heaped up in me, the instincts of fatherhood alone still remained standing. I was carried away by ineffable dreams; I promised myself to give my child a solid education, to preserve him, if possible, from my vices, my faults, my tortures; he was my consolation, my hope.

When I say myself, I also mean the poor Rosalie, who felt happy just to see this son growing up with her. So, what were our worries, our anxiety, as the child developed, we saw lines on his face that resembled that of a person we wanted to forget forever. At first, it was just a suspicion, about which we remained silent, even when we were alone with one another. Then, the child's physiognomy approached so much that of Thillard, that Rosalie spoke of it with me in horror, and that I could only half conceal my cruel apprehensions. Finally, the resemblance was such that it really seemed to us that the broker was reborn in our son.

The phenomenon would have upset a brain less solid than mine. Still too firm to be afraid, I pretended to remain insensitive to the blow on my paternal affection, sharing my indifference with Rosalie. I maintained that it was just a coincidence; I added that there was nothing more changeable than the faces of children, and that, probably, this resemblance would fade away with age; finally, in the worst case, it would always be easy for us to keep this child away. I failed completely. She persisted in seeing in the identity of the two figures a providential fact, the germ of a dreadful punishment that sooner or later was to crush us, and, under the sway of such conviction, her rest was forever destroyed.

On the other hand, not to mention the child, what was our life like? You yourself could see the permanent disturbance, the agitations, the more violent shocks each day. When all traces of my crime had disappeared, when I had absolutely nothing to fear from men, when the opinion about me had become unanimously favorable, instead of an assurance based on reason, I felt my anxieties, my concerns, my horrors growing. I worried myself with the most absurd fables; I saw an allusion to my crime in the gesture, the voice, the looks of the first comer.

The allusions kept me incessantly on the hangman's easel. Remember that evening when Mr. Durosoir recounted one of his instructions. Ten years of excruciating pain that will never equal what I felt, the moment I was walking out of Rosalie's room, I found myself facing the judge, staring at me. I was made of glass; he read to the bottom of my chest. For a moment I had a glimpse of the gallows. Remember that saying, "No rope should be mentioned in a hanged man's house," and twenty other details of such kind. It was an ordeal every day, every hour, every second. No matter what, there was frightening havoc in my mind.

Rosalie's condition was even more painful: she was really living in flames. The child's presence in the house made the stay intolerable. Incessantly, day and night, we lived amid the cruelest scenes. The child froze me with horror. I nearly suffocated him twenty times. Furthermore, Rosalie felt that she was dying, and believed in a future life, in punishments, and aspired to be reconciled with God. I taunted her, I insulted her, I threatened to beat her. Raged, I wanted to assassinate her. She died in time to spare me from a second crime. What agony! She will always be in my memory.

I haven't lived since. I had flattered myself that I had no conscience: this remorse grew by my side, in flesh and blood, in the form of my child. This child, of whom, despite the imbecility, I agree to be the guardian and the slave, does not stop torturing me with his air, his strange looks, with the instinctive hatred that he carries towards me. No matter where I go, he follows me step by step, he walks or sits by my side. At night, after a day of fatigue, I feel him by my side, and his touch is enough to drive the sleep away from me, or at least, to disturb me with nightmares. I fear that, suddenly, reason will come to him, that his tongue will loosen, that he will speak and accuse me.

The Inquisition, in its talent for torture, Dante himself, in his ordeal-mania, never imagined anything so appalling. I become a monomaniac. I find myself drawing, with a pen, the room where I committed my crime; I write this footnote: In this room, I poisoned the broker Thillard-Ducornet, and I sign. Thus, in my feverish hours, I detailed in my journal, almost word for word, everything I told you.

That's not all. I succeeded in escaping the torture with which men punish the murderer, and now this torture is repeated for me almost every night.

I feel a hand on my shoulder, and I hear a voice whispering in my ear: “assassin!” I am taken in front of red dresses; a pale face rises in front of me and cries out: "There he is!" It's my son. I deny. My drawing and my own memories are presented to me with my signature. You see, reality mingles with the dream and adds to my astonishment. Finally, I witness all the ups and downs of a criminal trial. I hear my condemnation: “Yes, he is guilty.” I am taken to a dark room where the executioner and his assistants come to join me. I want to flee, but shackles stop me, and a voice cries out: "There is no longer any mercy for you!" I even feel the cold of the blades on my neck. A priest prays on my side, and sometimes invites me to repent.

I reject it with a thousand blasphemies. Half-dead, I am jolted by the movements of a dray, on the pavement of the city; I hear the murmurs of the crowds, comparable to those of the waves of the sea, and above, the execrations of a thousand voices. I come within sight of the gallows. I climb the steps. I only wake up when the blade slips between the grooves, when, however, my dream does not continue, when I am not dragged into the presence of the one I wanted to deny, God himself, to have my eyes burnt by the light, to plunge into the abyss of my iniquities, to be tortured there by the feeling of my own infamy. I am suffocating, sweat floods me, horror fills my soul. I no longer remember how many times I have already suffered this torture."

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The idea of reviving the victim in the murderer's child himself, and who is there like the living image of his crime, attached to his footsteps, is both ingenious and very moral. The author wanted to show that, if this criminal knows how to escape the pursuits of men, he could not escape those of Providence. There is more here than remorse, it is the victim that constantly stands before him, not in the guise of a ghost or an apparition, that one could regard as an effect of the disturbed imagination, but in the guise of her child; it is the thought that this child can be the victim himself, a thought corroborated by the instinctive aversion to the child, though silly, by his father; it is the struggle of paternal tenderness against this thought that tortures him, a horrible struggle that does not allow the culprit to peacefully enjoy the fruit of his crime, as he had imagined.

This picture has the merit of being true, or better yet, perfectly probable; that is, nothing deviates from the natural laws that, we know today, govern the relationships among the human beings. Nothing fantastic or wonderful here; everything is possible and justified by the many examples that we have, of individuals being reborn in the environment where they have already lived, in contact with the same individuals, to have the opportunity to repair mistakes, or to fulfill duties of recognition.

Let us admire here the wisdom of Providence, casting a veil over the past during life, without which hatreds would perpetuate, while they end by being appeased in this new contact, and under the influence of reciprocal good practices. Thus, little by little, the feeling of fraternity ends up succeeding that of hostility. In the case in question, if the murderer had had absolute certainty about the identity of his child, he could have sought his safety in a new crime; the doubt left him grappling with the voice of nature, that spoke to him through that of fatherhood; but doubt was a cruel torture, a perpetual anxiety for the fear that this fatal resemblance would lead to the discovery of the crime.

On the other hand, the broker, guilty himself, had, if not as incarnate, but as Spirit, the consciousness of his position. If he served as an instrument for the punishment of his murderer, his position was a torture for him as well; thus, these two individuals, both guilty, punished one another, while being arrested, in their mutual resentment, by the duties imposed on them by nature. This distributive justice that punishes by natural means, by the consequence of the fault itself, but that always leaves the door open to repentance and rehabilitation, that places the guilty on the path of reparation, isn’t that more worthy of God's goodness than the irredeemable condemnation to the eternal flames? For the fact that Spiritism rejects the idea of hell, as it is represented, can we say that it removes all brakes to the bad passions? We understand this kind of punishment; we accept it, because it is logical; it is more impressive for being felt to be fair and possible. This belief is a more powerful brake than the prospect of a hell that is no longer believed, and that is laughed at.

Here is a real example of the influence of this doctrine, in a case that, although less serious, does not prove less the power of its action:

A gentleman, of our personal acquaintance, a keen and enlightened Spiritist, lives with a very close relative that he believes, from several indications, with high probability, to have been his father. However, this relative does not always act towards him as he should. Without this thought, this gentleman would have, in many circumstances, for matters of interest, used a rigor that was his own right, and caused a rupture; but the idea that he might have been his father held him back; he showed himself patient, and moderate; he endured what he would not have done in the hands of a person that he would have considered a stranger to him. During the life of his father, there was no great sympathy between him and his son; but, wasn’t the conduct of the son, in this circumstance, such as to bring them together spiritually, and to destroy the preventions that estranged them from one another?

If they recognized each other for sure, their respective position would be very false and very embarrassing; the son’s doubt is enough to prevent him from doing badly, but nevertheless leaves it entirely up to his free will. Whether or not the relative was his father, the son nonetheless has the merit of the feeling of filial piety; if he is nothing to him, his good practices will always be taken into account, and the true Spirit of his father will be grateful to him for it.

You that mock Spiritism, because you do not know it, if you knew what power it contains for moralization, you would understand all that society will gain from its propagation, and you would be the first to applaud it; you would see it transformed under the empire of beliefs that lead, by the very force of things and by the very laws of nature, to fraternity and true equality; you would understand that only it can triumph over the prejudices that are the stumbling block of social progress, and instead of flouting those who propagate it, you would encourage them, because you would feel that it is in your own interest, in your security. But patience! it will come, or, to put it better, it is already coming; every day the prejudices subside, the idea spreads, infiltrates quietly, and we begin to see that there is something more serious here than we thought. The time is not far off when moralists, the apostles of progress, will see in it the most powerful lever they have ever had in their hands.

Reading Mr. Charles Barbara's novel, one might think he was a keen Spiritist; he was not, though. He died, we have said, in a nursing home, throwing himself out of the window, in a fit of hot fever. It was a suicide but mitigated by the circumstances. Once mentioned shortly after, at the Parisian Society, and questioned about his ideas concerning Spiritism, here is the communication he gave on this subject:



Paris, October 19^th, 1866 – medium Mr. Morin

“Allow, gentlemen, a poor, unhappy and suffering Spirit to ask your permission to come and attend your sessions, full of instruction, devotion, fraternity, and charity. I am the unfortunate man whose name was Barbara, and if I ask you for this grace, it is because the Spirit has stripped the old man, and no longer believes himself to be as superior in intelligence, as he did in his life.

I thank you for your call, and, as far as it is in my power, I will try to answer the question motivated by a page of one of my works; but, I would ask you, beforehand, to allow me to share with you my current condition, that strongly feels the disturbance, quite naturally, moreover, that one experiences on passing abruptly from one life to another.

I am troubled for two main causes: the first is my ordeal, that was to endure the physical pain that I experienced, or rather that my body experienced, when I committed suicide. - Yes, gentlemen, I am not afraid to say it, I committed suicide, because if my Spirit was lost at times, I owned it before I broke on the pavement, and… I said: so much for the better! … What a mistake and what a weakness! The struggles of material life were over for me, my name was known, I now had only to walk on the path that was open to me, and that was so easy to follow! … I was afraid! … And yet, at the times of uncertainty and discouragement, I had struggled, anyway. Misery and its consequences had not discouraged me, and it was when everything was over for me that I cried out: The step is taken, so much the better! … I will no longer have to suffer! Selfish and ignorant! ...

The second is that when, after having wandered in life, between the conviction of nothingness and the presentiment of a God that could only be a single, unique, great, just, good and beautiful power, we are in the presence of a countless multitude of beings or Spirits, who have known you, whom you have loved; that you find your affections alive, your fondness, your loves; when you realize, in short, that you have only changed domicile. So you can imagine, gentlemen, that it is quite natural that a poor being, that has lived between good and evil, between belief and disbelief in another life, it is quite natural, as I say, that he is disturbed ... with happiness, joy, emotion, a little shame, seeing himself obliged to admit to himself that, in his writings, what he attributed to his laborious imagination, was a powerful reality, and that often the man of letters, that is puffed up with pride by seeing his pages read and applauded, that he believed to be his own work, he is sometimes only an instrument that writes under the influence of these same occult powers whose names he casts at random, from the pen, in a book.

How many great authors, of all times, have written, without knowing their full philosophical value, immortal pages, milestones of progress, placed by them and by the order of a higher power, so that, in a given time, the collection of all these scattered materials forms a whole, all the more solid as it is the product of several intelligences, for the collective work is the best: it is, moreover, what God will assign to man, because the great law of solidarity is immutable.

No, gentlemen, no, I did not know Spiritism at all when I was writing this novel, and I confess that I myself noticed, with surprise, the profound turn of the few lines that you have read, without understanding their full significance, that I can clearly see today. Since I wrote them, I learned to laugh at Spiritism, to do like my enlightened colleagues, and not willing to appear more advanced in the ridiculous than they themselves wanted to be. I laughed! …; I am crying now; but I also hope, because I have been taught it here that every sincere repentance is progress, and every progress leads to good.

Do not doubt it gentlemen, many writers are often unconscious instruments, for the propagation of ideas that the invisible powers believe useful for the progress of mankind. Do not be surprised to see some who write about Spiritism without believing in it; for them, it is a subject like any other, that lends itself to the result, and they have no idea that they are being pushed into it, without their knowledge. All these Spiritist thoughts that we see emitted by those that, apart from this, make opposition, are suggested to them, and they do not make less their way. I was one of them.

Pray for me, gentlemen, for prayer is an ineffable balm; prayer is the charity owed to the unfortunate of the other world, and I am one of them.”

Barbara