The Sun.
London, England, 1845-11-18 00:00:00

MESMERISM.

TO TIIX EDITOR OF TILE LEAMINGTON SPA COURIER.
Sir,—On Thursday night last, Mr. Spencer T. Hall, at the
close of the lecture, made, I understand, a very violent and
vulgar attack upon me during my absence. The cause of this
attack was, that I had publicly exposed the hollowness of
some of his pretensions to Mesmerism, and that I called in
question the honesty of the two boys who itinerate with him,
and perform at his exhibitions. As it was only towards the
close of his philippic, about eleven o'clock, that I returned to
the room, I had not the pleasure of hearing the more furious
portion of his address ; what I did hear, however, seemed to
me rather the spasmodic violence of a weak mind, convulsed
by rage and shame, than the indignant utterance of an honest
man, who has been traduced. I have no personal dispute
with' Mr. Hall, nor with any man of his character and mode
of life. I have no objection to Mesmerism, fairly inquired
into, whatever; that there are certain phenomena belonging
to the art well worthy of the attention of men of science, is an
opinion I have long entertained and expressed; but the im-
posture by which the art is surrounded—and by which it is
retarded far more than by the apathy and opposition of
medical men—this I felt compelled to condemn. My only
object in interfering in this business at all was to advance
truth, or rather to retard error, by exposing imposture; and
it is in further pursuance of the same object that I now
address you.
Though I had said nothing discourteous of Mr. Hall, I
could not be surprised at his vehemence and venom. He had
come here looking for fame and fortune, and found, instead,
detection and disgrace. It was his intention, I am told, to
pursue his mesmeric practice here for some period; but the
reception he has met with will, I venture to predict, ma-
terially shorten his stay. Had these lectures been permitted
to pass uncriticised, there would have been numbers of pa-
tients belonging to the town sent to sleep before the public,
and we should have been once more deluged with mesme-
risees ; whereas, it seems now impossible to procure one.
Had Mr. 11., whom I have heard called the Eagle among
mesmeric fowls, not been marked down at first, he would
have soared aloft in triumph over U 3 duringthe whole winter;
but he finds his wings clipped now, and, as that noble bird
is said sometimes to do, is insanely dashing off his beak
against his cage.
The chief of his charges against me on Tuesday evening, I
have been informed, was, that the means I had used to in-
duce the four boys exhibited at Mr. Donovan's Lecture on
Mesmerism, in March last, to confess their trickery, were
unfair. Now there were gentlemen of high respectability
present who will vouch for the fairness and candour with
which the whole was conducted; you, Sir, the editor of this
paper, were present taking a report, and know that there
was no doubt whatever of the guilt of the boys; and they
are, moreover, still in the town, and adhere to their confes-
sion. It is quite absurd to say, that because these boys con-
fessed for fear of justice, therefore their confessions are in-
valid. Supposing that Mr. Hall himself were, either from
conscientious fears, or fears of justice, to confess that he had
been long imposing on the public—that he had, at first, been
himself deceived, and at last ended by deceiving others,
does he think any one would doubt the sincerity of his con-
fession? Perhaps " little Henry" and his companion might
doubt him, and declare that this was all done from " fear of
the policeman," but no one, whose virtue had not been ex-
alted and purified by mesmeric influences, would have any
doubt of it whatever.
The other charge against me was, that I have taken away
the character of these boys. I confess I think it would be
very difficult to take away their good character; I am aware
it has often been attempted in venous towns, but as, ex nihilo
nihil fit, uniformly without success. The time, I have no
doubt, will shortly come, when they will be much obliged to
any one who will take away their present character. Mr.
Hall's mesmeric predecessor in Leamington, Mr. Donovan,
urged the same argument in the case of his four young
friends, and the public sympathised with the whole five until
the deception was discovered. Mr. Donovan had the mo-
deity to decamp without attempting explanation or defence,
and I think it would have been quite as sound policy had
Mr. Hall followed his example. Mr. Hall, I hear, talks, or
talked of an action at law to be brought against me on ac-
count of " little Henry." It would be amusing to learn
what damages twelve Englishmen would award " for loss of
wages as a public somnambulist," or "for injury done his
character as a clairvoyant."
Only one Scotch professor, and one distinguished English
physician, are believers in mesmerism—and these are consi-
dered authority sufficient to weigh down all other professors
and physicians • but, unfortunately, there is no mesmeric
judge, so that I suspect it will be prudent to defer the action
until " the science" is further advanced.
The reasons why I, and many others besides myself, look
upon the whole of the conduct of these boys as trick are the
following:-Ist. Many itinerant mesmerisers and platform
boys have already been discovered to be imposters ;—so
much so that Dr. Elliotson, Miss Martineau, and the more
respectable believers, will not recognise in any way these
wandering advocates of the science. To suspect them from
the first, therefore, is reasonable. 2d. They exhibit nothing
but what any boys awake could easily show. The rigidity of
the muscles, as shown by the little boy, is easily learnt, and
any common posture boy, or dancing girl, performs much
more difficult feats than those boasted of as wonders by Mr.
11. Yet it is upon the fact that these feats are beyond the
power of a boy in his natural condition, that we are asked
to believe in them. 3d. The exaggerations of the per-
formance. These boys have in Leamington for three nights
successively, and elsewhere innumerable times, gone
through these manoeuvres—thrown themselves into the
same tableaux vivants, grasped each others' hands in good
fellowship at " Auld Lang Syne," and exhibited the same
ridiculous grimacing and fiddling at " Such a getting up
stairs." Whatever was thought of the more serious portions
of the performance, this part was always looked upon as mere
trick and absurdity even by most believers. Any one who
has read an article on " Natural Somnambulism," which the
mesmeric is asserted to simulate, can scarcely be deceived, but
will at once perceive that the dramatic grouping, and the
reiteration, night after night, of the same figures and fool-
eries, is totally inconsistent with any other belief than one of
previous arrangement and trick.
The playing at chess, under the pretence of their eyes being
closed, was too ridiculous even for comment. It was felt
even by a mesmeric audience to be "too bad." And this
brings me to notice other reasons for feeling convinced that
there is error and deception in the whole affair, and as one
consequence, among others, that the boys are deceiving the
public. Mr. Hall said he did not bring these boys forward
as cases of clairvoyance. But as it was understood distinctly
by the audience and by those gentlemen who peered
" scrutinisingly " under their eyelids,—who, in newspaper
phrase, " carefully tested the experiments," that the eyes
were closed, and that they were playing by mesmeric
means alone,—what was the case, if not one of clair-
voyance ? Either the eyes of the boys were open, and they
saw what they were doing, or if—as the audience
was induced to believe—their eyes were shut, then it was
clairvoyance. This led to an inquiry as to Mr. Hall's
present assertions respecting clairvoyance, and to an offer
that he should have 100/. if he could prove what he and all
other mesmeric writers assert to be the fact, viz., that clair-
voyants can be had who can read without the aid of vision.
How Mr. 11. shrunk from this test the public is aware ; and
when we find a man thus practically proving his want of
belief in one of his most confident assertions—hew can we do
otherwise than doubt him in others ? In his book, "Mes-
meric Experience"—and which, by-the-by, is the weakest
and most contemptible book of some eighteen or twenty
which I have read on the subject, done in the true Morrison's
Pill style of literature—he says, speaking of Clairvoyance,
p. Se :
" It must not, however, be inferred, that because so few ex-
amples of this or any other class of phenomena have been
introduced, that such cases are rare. On the contrary, great
numbers of them have occurred under my immediate obser-
vation." Then again of "little Henry," the second day that
he was mesmerisedi" he was perfectly lucid, and described the
internal structure and economy of the human frame, and the
di-eases of several strange parties with whom he was brought
into proximity, as clearly and correctly as could have been
done by a regular professor of anatomy," &c. ; and further
on, of the same boy, he says, "he can read and run about,
and occasionally give the prognosis of a disease when in the
sleep ;" of course if the " reading" means anything here at all,
it is "reading" as he read the "internal structure" and
" diseases," by some power independent of vision ; in short,
clairvoyance. Again, at p. 17, he mentions the case of a
phreno-mesmeric patient who became " more susceptible and
clear as the experiments proceeded, until he distinctly read
the papers as they were handed past the back of his head,
and soon afterwards gave with intense effect the natural
language of any organ my coadjutor thought of, even before
he had time to write the name of it 1"
Clairvoyant patients, then, according to Mr. Hall, are
quite c,numon, and so says almost every other mesmeric
writer; but what can we consider their statements worth,
when they shrink from public proof, even with the prospect
of receiving a premium on their veracity?
One more quotation from Mr. Hall, though not from the
same book :
"J. F. on being thrown into the mesmeric trance at
Liverpool, as we sat side by side, described to us, as accu-
rately as any eye-witness could have done, what was then
transacting in a particular room in Sheffield, though he had
never been in it, not a leading question being put to him.
At Wolverhampton he described anything held behind his
head as accurately as though he had observed it with his
eyes; and, late on Saturday evening, read verbatim two let-
ters then coming to him by post, one from London, and the
other from Sheffield, which were not delivered to him till the
following day at Walsall."
Mr. Hall tells us he kept the post-office of his native town.
Should he ever return to that department, I trust that Sir
James Graham will engage him and "J. F." in his own
private office, by which means he may arrive at the contents
of letters without breaking their seals or creating national
discontents.
Believing, after much inquiry and reading on the subject,
that clairvoyance is a mere delusion, I shall leave the pro-
weal 1 made to Mr. Hall open to all mesmerists (viz. to give
1001.), and promise to fulfil my portion of the engagement,
if any clairvoyant,' from any country, can be found to read a
line of written or printed words shut up in the commonest
way from the usual organs of vision, provided the candidate
will suffer the forfeit if he fail.
When Mr. Hall excused himself from showing clairvoy-
ance on account of the " atmosphere of incredulity," he
illustrated his incapacity to perform these feats before scep-
tical persons, by drawing a parallel between himself and our
Saviour, when in "his own country," the apostle Matthew
says, and Mr. 11. quoted, as applicable to himself, " And lie
did not many mighty works there because of their unbelief."
When this allusion was condemned by me, it was asserted by
Mr. H. that he had made the reference in no improper spirit.
I imagine that no allusion whatever can be made to this sub-
ject in connexion with mesmerism, except one which is
Impious.
Many mesmerists assert that the miracles of our Saviour
were performed by means of mesmerism, and his healing dis-
eases, and changing water into wine, have their parallels in
mesmeric practice. Mr. Hall himself, more cautious, says,
"he does not deny" (p. 26) that our Saviour worked by
means of mesmerism, and sent forth his apostles to heal dis-
eases by means of the same agent. Now, the argument for
the truth of Christianity, drawn from the Scripture miracles,
is of too great importance to permit it to be insidiously
sapped in this manner. If there be any force in the argu-
ment drawn from the miracles of our Saviour at all, it must
be because the works done were proofs of superhuman power.
The divinity of His character and mission are asserted on
the grounds that the miracles could only be performed by one
of divine origin and nature. If our Saviour used a power
which science has unfolded to us, His works are no longer
miraculous in the sense conveyed by Scripture, and the argu-
ment fails.
When Captain Cook foretold an eclipse of the sun, and
thus awed the minds of the savages of the South Sea Islands,
he to them performed a miracle. Now to say tlfal our
Saviour merely wrought his miraculous works by the agency
of a science unknown to the Jews, is to place him precisely
in the relation of Captain Cook to the savages—a man of
science among barbarians—not a Divine Being among men.
Any interpretation, then, of these miracles which takes away
their superhuman character saps and destroys the evidence
they a erd of the truth of Chriatiany, and any allusion
whatever to them in connexion with mesmerism is to be
condemned.
Another reason for my conviction that there was error and
imposture in these experiments, was that one of a very
striking nature, which took great bold of the public mind,
was omitted every night after the first—l allude to the young
man being enabled to " swing round " two of the strongest
men in the room by bending his arm in obedience to the mes-
meric traction ofthe lecturer. On the morning after the first lec-