The Unknown Guest
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Maurice Maeterlinck >> The Unknown Guest
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I asked her to pass beyond us and come to the writer of the note.
She then saw a girl of fifteen or sixteen, almost a child, who
had been in rather indifferent health, but who was now very well
indeed. The girl was in a beautiful garden, in front of a large
and luxurious house standing in the midst of rather hilly
country. She was playing with a big, curly-haired, long-eared
dog. Through the branches of the trees one caught a glimpse of
the sea.
On inquiry, all the details were found to be astonishingly
accurate; but, as usual, there was a mistake in the time, that is
to say, the girl and her dog were not in the garden at the
instant when the medium saw them there. Here again an habitual
action had obscured a casual movement; for, as I have already
said, the vision very rarely corresponds with the momentary
reality.
4
There is nothing exceptional in the above example; I selected it
from among many others because it is simple and clear. Besides,
this kind of experience is already, so to speak, classical, or at
least should be so, were it not that everything relating to the
manifestations of our subconsciousness is always received with
extraordinary suspicion. In any case, I cannot too often repeat
that the experiment is within everybody's reach; and it rarely
fails to achieve absolute success with capable psychometers, who
are pretty well known and whom it is open to any one to consult.
Let us add that it can be extended much further. If, for
instance, I had acted as I did in similar cases and asked the
medium questions about the young girl's home-circle, about the
character of her father, the health of her mother, the tastes and
habits of her brothers and sisters, she would have answered with
the same certainty, the same precision as one might do who was
not only a close acquaintance of the girl's, but endowed with
much more penetrating faculties of intuition than a normal
observer. In short, she would have felt and expressed all that
this girl's subconsciousness would have felt with regard to the
persons mentioned. But it must be admitted that, as we are here
no longer speaking of facts that are easily verified,
confirmation becomes infinitely more difficult.
There could be no question, in the circumstances, of transmission
of thought, since both the medium and I were ignorant of
everything. Besides, other experiments, easily devised and
repeated and more rigourously controlled, do away with that
theory entirely. For instance, I took three letters written by
intimate friends, put each of them in a double envelope and gave
them to a messenger unacquainted with the contents of the
envelopes and also with the persons in question to take to Mme.
M--. On arriving at the house, the messenger handed the
clairvoyant one of the letters, selected at random, and did
nothing further beyond putting the indispensable questions,
likewise at random, and taking down the medium's replies in
shorthand. Mme. M-- began by giving a very striking physical
portrait of the lady who had written the letter; followed this up
with an absolutely faithful description of her character, her
habits, her tastes, her intellectual and moral qualities; and
ended by adding a few details concerning her private life, of
which I myself was entirely unaware and of which I obtained the
confirmation shortly afterwards. The experiment yielded just as
remarkable results when continued with the two other letters.
In the face of this mystery, two explanations may be offered,
both equally perplexing. On the one hand, we shall have to admit
that the sheet of paper handed to the psychometer and impregnated
with human "fluid" contains, after the manner of some
prodigiously compressed gas, all the incessantly renewed,
incessantly recurring images that surround a person, all his past
and perhaps his future, his psychology, his state of health, his
wishes, his intentions, often unknown to himself, his most secret
instincts, his likes and dislikes, all that is bathed in light
and all that is plunged in darkness, his whole life, in short,
and more than his personal and conscious life, besides all the
lives and all the influences, good or bad, latent or manifest, of
all who approach him. We should have here a mystery as
unfathomable and at least as vast as that of generation, which
transmits, in an infinitesimal particle, the mind and matter,
with all the qualities and all the faults, all the acquirements
and all the history, of a series of lives of which none can tell
the number.
On the other hand, if we do not admit that so much energy can lie
concealed in a sheet of paper, continuing to exist and develop
indefinitely there, we must necessarily suppose that an
inconceivable network of nameless forces is perpetually radiating
from this same paper, forces which, cleaving time and space,
detect instantaneously, anywhere and at any distance, the life
that gave them life and place themselves in complete
communication, body and soul, senses and thoughts, past and
future, consciousness and subconsciousness, with an existence
lost amid the innumerous host of men who people this earth. It
is, indeed, exactly what happens in the experiments with mediums
in automatic speech or writing, who believe themselves to be
inspired by the dead. Yet, here it is no longer a discarnate
spirit, but an object of any kind imbued with a living "fluid"
that works the miracle; and this, we may remark in passing, deals
a severe blow to the spiritualistic theory.
Nevertheless, there are two rather curious objections to this
second explanation. Granting that the object really places the
medium in communication with an unknown entity discovered in
space, how comes it that the image or the spectacle created by
that communication hardly ever corresponds with the reality at
the actual moment? On the other hand, it is indisputable that the
psychometer's clairvoyance, his gift of seeing at a distance the
pictures and scenes surrounding an unknown being, is exercised
with the same certainty and the same power when the object that
sets his strange faculty at work has been touched by a person who
has been dead for years. Are we, then, to admit that there is an
actual, living communication with a human being who is no more,
who sometimes--, for instance, in a case of incineration--has
left no trace of himself on earth, in short, with a dead man who
continues to live at the place and at the moment at which he
impregnated the object with his "fluid" and who seems to be
unaware that he is dead?
But these objections are perhaps less serious than one might
believe. To begin with, there are seers, so-called
"telepsychics," who are not psychometers, that is to say, they
are able to communicate with an unknown and distant person
without the intermediary of an object; and in these seers, as in
the psychometers, the vision very rarely corresponds with the
actual facts of the moment: they too perceive above all the
general impression, the usual and characteristic actions. Next,
as regards communications with a person long since dead, we are
confronted with one of two things: either confirmation will be
almost impossible when it concerns revelations on the subject of
the dead man's private deeds and actions, which are unknown to
any living person or else communication will be established not
with the deceased, but with the living person, who necessarily
knows the facts which he is called upon to confirm. As Dr. Osty
very rightly says:
"The conditions are then those of perception by the intermediary
of the thoughts of a living person; and the deceased is perceived
through a mental representation. The experiment, for this reason,
is valueless as evidence of the reality of retrospective
psychometry and consequently of the recording part played by the
object.
"The only class of experiment that could be of value from this
point of view, would be that in which confirmation would come
subsequently from documents whose contents remained unknown to
any living person until after the clairvoyance sitting. It might
then be proved that the object can latently register the human
personalities which have touched it and that it is sufficient in
itself to allow of a mental reconstruction of those personalities
through the interpretation of the register by a clairvoyant or
psychometer."
5
It may be imagined that experiments of this sort, in which there
is no crack, no leak on the side of the living, are anything but
easy to carry through. In the case of a murder, for instance, it
can always be maintained that the medium discovers the body and
the circumstances of the tragedy through the involuntary and
unconscious intermediary of the murderer, even when the latter
escapes prosecution and suspicion altogether. But a recent
incident, related by Dr. Osty with the utmost precision of detail
and the most scrupulous verification in the Annales des Sciences
Psychiques of April, 1914, perhaps supplies us with one of those
experiments which we have not been able to achieve until this
day. I give the facts in a few words.
On the 2nd of March of this year, M. Etienne Lerasle, an old man
of eighty-two, left his son's house at Cours-les-Barres (Cher)
for his daily walk and was not seen again. The house stands in
the middle of a forest on Baron Jaubert's estate. Vain searches
were made in every direction for the missing man's traces; the
ponds and pools were dragged to no purpose; and on the 8th of
March a careful and systematical exploration of the wood, in
which no fewer than twenty-four people took part, led to no
result. At last, on the 18th of March, M. Louis Mirault, Baron
Jaubert's agent, thought of applying to Dr. Osty, and supplied
him with a scarf which the old man had worn. Dr. Osty went to his
favourite medium, Mme. M--. He knew only one thing, that the
matter concerned an old man of eighty-two, who walked with a
slight stoop; and that was all.
As soon as Mme. M-- had taken the scarf in her hands, she saw the
dead body of an old man lying on the damp ground, in a wood, in
the middle of a coppice, beside a horse-shoe pond, near a sort of
rock. She traced the road taken by the victim, depicted the
buildings which he had passed, his mental condition impaired by
age, his fixed intention of dying, his physical appearance, his
habitual and characteristic way of carrying his stick, his soft
striped shirt, and so on.
The accuracy of the description caused the greatest astonishment
among the missing man's friends. There was one detail that
puzzled them a little: the mention of a rock in a part of the
country that possessed none. The search was resumed on the
strength of the data supplied by the clairvoyant. But all the
rocks in a forest are more or less alike; the indications were
not enough; and nothing was found.
It so happened that the second and third interviews with Mme. M--
had to be postponed until the 30th of March and the 6th of April
following. At each of these sittings, the details of the vision
and of the road taken became clearer and clearer and were given
with startling precision, so much so that, by pursuing step by
step the indications of the medium, the man's friends ended by
discovering the body, dressed as stated, lying in the middle of a
coppice, just as described, close to a huge stump of a tree all
covered with moss, which might easily be mistaken for a rock, and
on the edge of a crescent-shaped piece of water. I may add that
these particular indications applied to no other part of the
wood.
6
I refer the reader to Dr. Osty's conscientious and exhaustive
article for the numerous details which I have been obliged to
omit; but those which I have given are enough to show the
character of this extraordinary case. To begin with, we have one
certainty which appears almost unassailable, namely, that there
can be no question of a crime. No one had the least interest in
procuring the old man's death. The body bore no marks of
violence; besides, the minds of those concerned did not for a
moment entertain the thought of an assault. The poor man, whose
mental derangement was known to all those about him, obsessed by
the desire and thought of death, had gone quietly and obstinately
to seek it in the nearest coppice. There was therefore no
criminal in the case, in other words, there was no possible or
imaginable communication between the medium's subconsciousness,
and that of any living person. Hence we are compelled to admit
that the communication was established with the dead man or with
his subconsciousness, which continued to live for nearly a month
after his death and to wander around the same places; or else we
must agree that all this coming tragedy, all that the old man was
about to see, do and suffer was already irrevocably contained and
inscribed in the scarf at the moment when he last wore it.
In this particular case, considering that all relations with the
living were definitely and undeniably severed, I can see no other
explanations beyond these two. They are both equally astounding
and land us suddenly in a world of fable and enchantment which we
thought that we had left for good and all. If we do not adopt the
theory of the tell-tale scarf, we must accept that of the
spiritualists, who maintain that the spirits communicate with us
freely. It is possible that they may find a serious argument in
this case. But a solitary fact is not enough to support a theory,
all the more so as the one in question will never be absolutely
safe from the objection that could be raised if the case were one
of murder, which is possible, after all, and cannot be actually
disproved. We must, therefore, while awaiting other similar and
more decisive facts, if any such are conceivable, return to those
which are, so to speak, laboratory facts, facts which are only
denied by those who will not take the trouble to verify them; and
to interpret these facts there are only the two theories which we
mentioned above, before this digression; for, in these cases,
which are unlike those of automatic speech or writing, we have
not as a rule to consider the possibility of any intervention of
the dead. As a matter of fact, the best-known psychometers are
very rarely spiritualists and claim no connection with the
spirits. They care but little, as a rule, about the source of
their intuitions and seem very little interested in their exact
working and origin. Now it would be exceedingly surprising if,
acting and speaking in the name of the departed, they should be
so consistently ignorant of the existence of those who inspire
them; and more surprising still if the dead, whom in other
circumstances we see so jealously vindicating their identity,
should not here, when the occasion is so propitious, seek to
declare themselves, to manifest themselves and to make themselves
known.
7
Dismissing for the time being the intervention of the dead, I
believe then that, in most of the cases which I will call
laboratory cases, because they can be reproduced at will, we are
not necessarily reduced to the theory of the vitalized object
representing wholly, indefinitely and inexhaustibly, through all
the vicissitudes of time and spice, every one of those who have
held it in their hands for a little while. For we must not forget
that, according to this theory, the object in question will
conceal and, through the intermediary of the medium, will reveal
as many distinct and complete personalities as it has undergone
contacts. It will never confuse or mix those different
personalities. They will remain there in definite strata,
distinct one from another; and, as Dr. Osty puts it, "the medium
can interpret each of them from beginning to end, as though he
were in communication with the far-off entity."
All this makes the theory somewhat incredible, even though it be
not much more so than the many other phenomena in which the shock
of the miraculous has been softened by familiarity. We can find
more or less everywhere in nature that prodigious faculty of
storing away inexhaustible energies and ineffaceable tram,
memories and impressions in space. There is not a thing in this
world that is lost, that disappears, that ceases to be, to retain
and to propagate life. Need we recall, in this connection, the
incessant mission of pictures perceived by the sensitized plate,
the vibrations of sound that accumulate in the disks of the
gramophone, the Hertzian waves that lose none of their strength
in space, the mysteries of reproduction and, in a word, the
incomprehensibility of everything around us?
8
Personally, if I had to choose, I should, in most of these
laboratory cases, frankly adopt the theory that the object
touched serves simply to detect, among the prodigious crowd of
human beings, the one who impregnated it with his "fluid."
"This object," says Dr. Osty, "has no other function than to
allow the medium's sensitiveness to distinguish a definite force
from among the innumerable forces that assail it."
It seem more and more certain that, as the cells of an immense
organism, we are connected with everything that exists by an
inextricable network of vibrations, waves, influences, of
nameless, numberless and uninterrupted fluids. Nearly always, in
nearly all men, everything carried along by these invisible wires
falls into the depths of the unconsciousness and passes
unperceived, which does not mean that it remains inactive. But
sometimes an exceptional circumstance--in the present case, the
marvellous sensibility of a first-class medium--suddenly reveals
to us, by the vibrations and the undeniable action of one of
those wires, the existence of the infinite network. I will not
speak here of trails discovered and followed in an almost
mediumistic manner, after an object of some sort has been sniffed
at. Such stories, though highly probable, as yet lack adequate
support. But, within a similar order of ideas, and in a humbler
world and one with more modest limits, the dog, for instance, is
incessantly surrounded by different scents and smells to which he
appears indifferent until his attention is aroused by one or
other of these vagrant effluvia, when he extricates it from the
hopeless tangle. It would seem as though the trail took life,
vibrating like a chord in unison with the animal's wishes,
becoming irresistible, and taking it to its goal after
innumerable winds and turns.
We see the mysterious network revealed also in
"cross-correspondence." Two or three mediums who do not know one
another, who are often separated by seas; or continents, who are
ignorant of the whereabouts of the one who is to complete their
thought, each write a part of a sentence which, as it stands,
conveys no meaning whatever. On piecing the fragments together,
we perceive that they fit to perfection and acquire an
intelligible and obviously premeditated sense. We here find once
more the same faculty that permits the medium to detect, among
thousands of others, a definite force which was wandering in
space. It is true that, in these cases, the spiritualists
maintain that the whole experiment is organized and directed by a
discarnate intelligence, independent of the mediums, which means
to prove its existence and its identity in this manner. Without
incontinently rejecting this theory, which is not necessarily
indefensible, we will merely remark that, since the faculty is
manifested in psychometry without the intervention of the
spirits, there can be no sufficient reason for attributing it to
them in cross-correspondence.
9
But in whom does it reside? Is it hidden in ourselves or in the
medium? According to Dr. Osty, the clairvoyants are mirrors
reflecting the intuitive thought that is latent in each of us. In
other words--it is we ourselves who are clairvoyant, and they but
reveal to us nor own clairvoyance. Their mission is to stir, to
awaken, to galvanize, to illumine the secrets of our
subconsciousness and to bring them to the surface of our normal
lives. They act upon our inner darkness exactly as, in the
photographic dark-room, the developing-bath acts upon the
sensitized plate, I am convinced that the theory is accurate as
regards intuition and clairvoyance proper, that is to say, in all
cases where we are in the medium's presence and more or less
directly in touch with him. But is it so in psychometry? Is it we
who, unknown to ourselves, know all that the object contains, or
is it the medium alone who discovers it in the object itself,
independently of the person who produces the object? When, for
instance, we receive a letter from a stranger, does this letter,
which has absorbed like a sponge the whole life and by choice the
subconscious life of the writer, disgorge all that it contained
into our subconsciousness? Do we instantly learn all that
concerns its author, absolutely as though he were standing before
us in the flesh and, above all, with his soul laid bare, though
we remain profoundly ignorant of the fact that we have learnt it
until the medium's intervention tells us so?
This, if you like, is simply shifting the question. Let it be the
medium or myself that discovers the unknown personality in the
object or tracks it across time and space: all that we do is to
widen the scope of our riddle, while leaving it no less obscure.
Nevertheless, there is some interest in knowing whether we have
to do with a general faculty latent in all men or an inexplicable
privilege reserved to rare individuals. The exceptional should
always be eliminated, if possible, and not left to hang over the
abyss like an unfinished bridge leading to nothing. I am well
aware that the compulsory intervention of the medium implies
that, in spite of all, we recognize his possession of abnormal
faculties; but at any rate we reduce their power and their extent
appreciably and we return sooner and more easily to the ordinary
laws of the great human mystery. And it is of importance that we
should be ever coming back to that mystery and ever bringing all
things back to it. But, unfortunately, actual experience does not
admit of this generalization. It is clearly a case of a special
faculty, one peculiar to the medium, one which is wholly unknown
to our latent intuition. We can easily assure ourselves of this
by causing the medium to receive through a third party and
enclosed in a series of three envelopes, as in the experiment
described above, a letter of which we know the writer, but of
which both the source and the contents are absolutely unknown to
the messenger. These unusual circumstances, in which all
subconscious communications between consultant and consulted are
strictly cut off, will in no way hamper the medium's
clairvoyance; and we may fairly conclude that it is actually the
medium himself who discovers directly, without any intermediary,
without "relays," to use M. Duchatel's expression, all that the
object holds concealed. It, therefore, seems certain that there
is, at least in psychometry, something more than the mere mirror
of which Dr. Osty speaks.
10
I consider it necessary to declare for the last time that these
psychometric phenomena, astonishing though they appear at first,
are known, proved and certain and are no longer denied or doubted
by any of those who have studied them seriously. I could have
given full particulars of a large number of conclusive
experiments; but this seemed to me as superfluous and tedious as
would be, for instance, a string of names of the recognized
chemical reactions that can be obtained in a laboratory. Any one
who pleases is at liberty to convince himself of the reality of
the facts, provided that he applies to genuine mediums and keeps
aloof from the inferior "seers" and especially the shams and
imposters who swarm in this region more than in any other. Even
with the best of them, he will have to be careful of the
involuntary, unconscious and almost inevitable interference of
telepathy, which is also very interesting, though it is a
phenomenon of a different class, much less surprising and
debatable than pure psychometry. He must also learn the art of
interrogating the medium and refrain from asking incoherent and
random questions about casual or future events. He will not
forget that "clairvoyance is strictly limited to the perception
of human personality," according to the role so well formulated
by Dr. Osty. Experiments have been made in which a psychometer,
on touching the tooth of a prehistoric animal, saw the landscapes
and the cataclysms of the earth's earliest ages displayed before
his eyes; in which another medium, on handling a jewel, conjured
up, it would seem with marvellous exactness, the games and
processions of ancient Greece, as though the objects permanently
retained the recollection or rediscovered the "astral negatives"
of all the events which they once witnessed. But it will be
understood that, in such cases, any effective control is, so to
speak, impossible and that the part played by telepathy cannot be
decided. It is important, therefore, to keep strictly to that
which can be verified.
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