ke a novelist, and
so indiscreet and prosaic," I said to myself, "I shall, if good luck or
bad luck make my life interesting, be a great poet; for it will be no
longer a matter of literature at all." Yet when I re-read those early
poems which gave me so much trouble, I find little but romantic
convention, unconscious drama. It is so many years before one can believe
enough in what one feels even to know what the feeling is.

XXXI

Perhaps a year before we returned to London, a Catholic friend brought me
to a spiritualistic seance at the house of a young man who had been lately
arrested under a suspicion of Fenianism, but had been released for lack
of evidence. He and his friends had been sitting weekly about a table in
the hope of spiritual manifestation and one had developed mediumship. A
drawer full of books had leaped out of the table when no one was touching
it, a picture had moved upon the wall. There were some half dozen of us,
and our host began by making passes until the medium fell asleep sitting
upright in his chair. Then the lights were turned out, and we sat waiting
in the dim light of a fire. Presently my shoulders began to twitch and my
hands. I could easily have stopped them, but I had never heard of such a
thing and I was curious. After a few minutes the movement became violent
and I stopped it. I sat motionless for a while and then my whole body
moved like a suddenly unrolled watch-spring, and I was thrown backward on
the wall. I again stilled the movement and sat at the table. Everybody
began to say I was a medium, and that if I would not resist some wonderful
thing would happen. I remembered that my father had told me that Balzac
had once desired to take opium for the experience sake, but would not
because he dreaded the surrender of his will. We were now holding each
other's hands and presently my right hand banged the knuckles of the woman
next to me upon the table. She laughed, and the medium, speaking for the
first time, and with difficulty, out of his mesmeric sleep, said, "tell
her there is great danger." He stood up and began walking round me, making
movements with his hands as though he were pushing something away. I was
now struggling vainly with this force which compelled me to movements I
had not willed, and my movements had become so violent that the table was
broken. I tried to pray, and because I could not remember a prayer,
repeated in a loud voice

Of Man's first disobedience and