“Mr Sludge the Medium” is not a mere attack on spiritualism; it is a dramatic scene in the history of a soul; and Browning, with his democratic feeling in things of the mind, held that every soul however mean is worth understanding.  If the poem is a satire, it is so only in a way that is inevitable.  Browning’s desire is to be absolutely just, but sometimes truth itself becomes perforce a satire.  He takes an impostor at the moment of extreme disadvantage; the “medium” is caught in the very act of cheating; he will make a clean breast of it; and his confession is made as nearly as possible a vindication.  The most contemptible of creatures, in desperate straits, makes excellent play with targe and dagger; the poetry of the piece is to be found in the lithe attitudes, absolutely the best possible under the circumstances, by which he maintains both defence and attack.  Half of the long apologia is a criticism not of those who feast fools in their folly, but of the fools who require a caterer for the feast; it is a study of the methods by which dupes solicit and educate a knave.  The other half is Sludge’s plea that, knave though he be, he is not wholly knave; and Browning, while absolutely rejecting the doctrine of so called spiritualism, is prepared to admit that in the composition of a Sludge there enters a certain portion of truth, low in degree, perverted in kind, inoperative to the ends of truth, yet a fragment of that without which life itself were impossible even for the meanest organism in the shape of man.

Cowardly, cunning, insolent, greedy, effeminately sensual, playing upon the vanity of his patrons, playing upon their vulgar sentimentality, playing upon their vulgar pietisms and their vulgar materialism, Sludge after all is less the wronger than the wronged.  Who made him what he is?  Who, keen and clear-sighted enough in fields which they had not selected as their special parade-ground for self-conceit, trained him on to knavery and self-degradation?  Who helped him through his blunders with ingenious excuses—­“the manifestations are at first so weak”; or “Sludge is himself disturbed by the strange phenomena”; or “a doubter is in the company, and the spirits have grown confused in their communications”?  Who proceeded to exhibit him as a lawful prize and possession, staking their vanity on the success of his imposture?  Who awakened in him the artist’s joy in rare invention?  Who urged him forward from modest to magnificent lies?  Who fed and flattered him?  What ladies bestowed their soft caresses on Sludge?  And now and again in his course of fraud did he not turn a wistful eye towards any reckless tatterdemalion, if only the vagrant lived in freedom and in truth?

     It’s too bad, I say,
    Ruining a soul so!