There are many portraits of Priscilla Penn Cropper in existence; she was obviously a person of considerable beauty and ample charms. During the 1860s and 1870s her house was a centre for spiritualist research, in which, with her customary enthusiasm, she attempted to involve the thinking men of the whole civilised world. It must have been one of these attempts that elicited the letter from Randolph Henry Ash which for some mysterious reason excited me so and gave rise to my life's absorbing interest. I have never, despite my most diligent enquiries, been able to come across the letter she must have written to him, and the fear is constant that he may have destroyed it. I do not know why this one of the many treasures in our possession moved me most. God moves in a mysterious way-it may even be that Randolph Henry's rebuff to my ancestress's interest gave rise to my wish to show that we were, after all, worthy to understand, and, so to speak, to entertain him. Certainly I felt, when my father first handed me the handwritten pages, preserved in tissue, to see if I could decipher them, something akin to the thrill of Keats's stout Cortez, silent on his peak in Darien. And when I had touched the letter, I felt, in Tennyson's words, that the dead man had touched me from the past: I have made my life among "Those fallen leaves which keep their green/The noble letters of the dead."
Our Cabinet of Treasures has an ingenious little cupola with a windowed dome of plain, not many-coloured, glass, which can be shaded by half-blinds or wholly shuttered by the turning of a handle. On that day, unusually, my father had opened not only the shutters but the green blinds through which a soft safe light is slowly filtered, so the room was full of sunbeams. In that sunlit hush was conceived the germ of the idea that gave rise to the Stant Collection which adorns the Harmonia Museum of Robert Dale Owen University, of which my ancestor Sharman Cropper was an illustrious co-founder, and to which the Regenerative Powders contributed their fertilising mite.
I give in full my great-grandmother's letter. It now stands in its proper place in Volume IX of my edition of the Collected Letters (No. 1207, p. 883), and an excerpt from it is included in the footnotes to Mummy Possest, RHA's spiritualist poem, in the edition of the Complete Works, proceeding surely, if regrettably slowly for enthusiasts, under the overall editorial direction of James Blackadder of the University of London. I do not accept Professor Blackadder's identification of my ancestress with the grossly credulous fictional Mrs Eckleburg in that poem. There are far too many striking points of dissimilarity, which I have detailed in my article on the subject, "A case of mis-identification" (PMLA, LXXI, Winter 1959, pp. 174-80), to which I refer the curious.
Dear Mrs Cropper,
I thank you for your communication to me about your experience with the planchette. You were right in supposing that I might feel some interest in anything at all that came from the pen of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.I mustalsofeel, I shall tell you directly, considerable abhorrence at the thought of thatbright spirit, having made his painful way out of our weary and oppressive earthly life, being constrained to heave mahogany tables, or float partially embodied,through flrelit drawing-rooms, or turn his liberated Intelligence to the scrawling of such painful and inane nonsense as you have sent to me. Should he not now feed in peace on honey dew and drink the milk of Paradise?
I am not jesting, Madam. I have attended attempted exhibitions of the kind of manifestations you allude to -nihil humanum a me alienum puto, I may say, as all of my profession should say - and I think the likeliest explanation is a combination of bald fraud and a kind of communal hysteria, a miasma or creeping mist of spiritual anxiety and febrile agitation, that plagues our polite society and titillates our tea-party talk. A speculative temperament might find the cause of this miasma in the increasingmaterialism of oursociety, and in therigorous questioning - both natural and inevitable, given the present state ofour intellectual Development - of our historicalreligious narratives. All is indeeduncertainty in that field, and the historian and the man ofscience alike make inroads on our simple faith. Even if the end result of our strenuous inquisitions be to strengthen thatfaith, it will not, quite properly, happen with ease, or in our time, maybe. This is not to say that the Nostrums thrown up to gratify a queasy public hunger for certainties or solidities are either sanative or solidly based.
The Historian and the Man of Science alike may be said to traffic with the dead. Cuvier has imparted flesh and motion and appetites to the defunct Megatherium, whilst the living ears of MM Michelet and Renan, of Mr Carlyle and the Brothers Grimm, have heard the bloodless cries of the vanished and given them voices. I myself with the aid of the imagination, have worked a little in that line, have ventriloquised, have lent my voice to, and mixt my life with, those past voices and lives whose resuscitation in our own lives as warnings, as examples, as the life of the past persisting in us, is the business of every thinking man and woman. But there are ways and ways, as you must well know, and some are tried and tested,and others arefraught with danger and disappointment. What is read and understood and contemplated and intellectually grasped is our own, madam, to live and work with. A lifetime's study will not make accessible to us more than a fragment of our own ancestral past, let alone the aeonsbefore our race was formed. But thatfragment we must thoroughly possess and hand on. Hoc opus, hie labor est. There is, I am tempted to assert, no easy way, no short cut: we are, in attemptingthose, like Bunyan 's Ignorance who found a path to Hell at the very gate of the City of Heaven.
Think what you do, Madam, in attempting to address them, the dear and terribledead, directly. What wisdom in all this waste of time have they imparted? ThatGranny has left her new brooch in the grandfather clock, or that an ancient Aunt resents,from beyond the bourn, the imposition of an infant coffin upon her own in thefamily Vault. Or as your S.T.C. solemnly assures you, that there is "eternal bliss for they who deserve such and a time of correction for they who do not" in the Beyond. (He who never misplaced a pronoun in seven languages.) It needs no ghost, Madam,come from the grave, to tell us this.
That there may be wandering spirits I grant you, earth-bubbles, exhalations, creatures of the air, who occasionally cross our usual currentsof apprehension, proceeding on their own unseen errands. That agonised reminiscence of some kind in some mental form does inhere in some terrible places there is some evidence. There are indeed more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy. But they will be found out I believe, not through rappings or tappings or palpable handlings or Mr Home floating round and round the chandelier with his arms stiffly upheld, nor yet through the scribblingsof your planchette, but through long and patient contemplation of theintricate workings of dead minds and live organisms, through wisdom thatlooks before and after, through the microscope and the spectroscope and not through the interrogation of earth-obsessed spectres and revenants. I have known a good soul and a clear mind, quite unhinged by such meddling, and to no good end, indeed to a bad one.