It would be difficult to imagine any figure more indecently confessional, more entirely devoid of not only any of the restraints of conscience, but of any of the restraints even of a wholesome personal conceit, than Sludge the Medium.  He confesses not only fraud, but things which are to the natural man more difficult to confess even than fraud—­effeminacy, futility, physical cowardice.  And then, when the last of his loathsome secrets has been told, when he has nothing left either to gain or to conceal, then he rises up into a perfect bankrupt sublimity and makes the great avowal which is the whole pivot and meaning of the poem.  He says in effect:  “Now that my interest in deceit is utterly gone, now that I have admitted, to my own final infamy, the frauds that I have practised, now that I stand before you in a patent and open villainy which has something of the disinterestedness and independence of the innocent, now I tell you with the full and impartial authority of a lost soul that I believe that there is something in spiritualism.  In the course of a thousand conspiracies, by the labour of a thousand lies, I have discovered that there is really something in this matter that neither I nor any other man understands.  I am a thief, an adventurer, a deceiver of mankind, but I am not a disbeliever in spiritualism.  I have seen too much for that.”  This is the confession of faith of Mr. Sludge the Medium.  It would be difficult to imagine a confession of faith framed and presented in a more impressive manner.  Sludge is a witness to his faith as the old martyrs were witnesses to their faith, but even more impressively.  They testified to their religion even after they had lost their liberty, and their eyesight, and their right hands.  Sludge testifies to his religion even after he has lost his dignity and his honour.

It may be repeated that it is truly extraordinary that any one should have failed to notice that this avowal on behalf of spiritualism is the pivot of the poem.  The avowal itself is not only expressed clearly, but prepared and delivered with admirable rhetorical force:—­

    “Now for it, then!  Will you believe me, though? 
    You’ve heard what I confess:  I don’t unsay
    A single word:  I cheated when I could,
    Rapped with my toe-joints, set sham hands at work,
    Wrote down names weak in sympathetic ink. 
    Rubbed odic lights with ends of phosphor-match,
    And all the rest; believe that:  believe this,
    By the same token, though it seem to set
    The crooked straight again, unsay the said,
    Stick up what I’ve knocked down; I can’t help that,
    It’s truth!  I somehow vomit truth to-day. 
    This trade of mine—­I don’t know, can’t be sure
    But there was something in it, tricks and all!”

It is strange to call a poem with so clear and fine a climax an attack on spiritualism.  To miss that climax is like missing the last sentence in a good anecdote, or putting the last act of Othello into the middle of the play.  Either the whole poem of “Sludge the Medium” means nothing at all, and is only a lampoon upon a cad, of which the matter is almost as contemptible as the subject, or it means this—­that some real experiences of the unseen lie even at the heart of hypocrisy, and that even the spiritualist is at root spiritual.