The Equinox (Volume III, Number I)

THE EQUINOX reader like Christiansen. Nor is it particularly encouraging to those who believe in him when they find him compelled to produce a book like this. It is very clev- erly compiled, most readable and amusing, but there seems to be no care to dis- criminate between well authenticated cases and evident inventions. The critical spirit is hopelessly undeveloped. In particular, I must protest against the pub- lishing of Mr. Machen’s excellent short story about the Angels of Mons with- out any reference to its author, as if there were one single particle of evidence that the story were true. Mr. Carrington is a sincere and ingenious investigator of immense learning and experience. He has probably been forced into these evil courses by the abomin- able falsity of the publicists of America. The outrage in his case is hardly less than in Theodore Dreiser’s. The instinct of self-preservation has apparently driven him to acquire a Ph.D. degree from some so-called university in Iowa. What a tragic farce life in America is for any one with the mustard seed of intelligence! Ah! the cock crows! Hamter R. Patience Wortu. By Casper S. Yost. Henry Holt & Co. I HAVE so deep a debt of gratitude in my personal ledger to Mrs. Emily Grant Hutchings, that I can but be prejudiced most favorably with regard to anything with which she may be connected. I consequently take especial pains to discount the obligation, and I may be relied upon to say the worst of Patience Worth. It is, I think, beyond all question the most interesting of the records ‘purporting to be the utterance of the stiff. There is an unquestionable personality in Patience Worth with perhaps no one beyond the scope of “subliminal Mrs. Curran” and the hypothesis is reasonable since Mrs. Curran is always at the board when Patience manifests. To me it seems a much simpler hypothesis to suppose that Patience is Mrs. Curran’s sub-conscious memory of an Elizabethan incarnation than that Pa- tience is wandering, unchanged for several centuries, about the astral plane, where things are so easily broken up. It is also quite feasible to imagine Patience as an elemental spirit. But undoubtedly her utterance is remarkably distinctive and coherent. It is almost entirely free from the worst of the disfigurements to which psychical researchers have acclimatized us, confound them. The mention of psychical researchers has ruined my temper again. I am going to be nasty even to my dear Mrs. Hutchings. It is very easy to spoil a case by claiming too much. Jesus preferred would stand higher in the market to-day if some would-be clever press agent had not added ridiculous Pagan stories of the Virgin Birth, and so on, to the earlier and more plausible legend. And the most serious criticism of Patience Worth is the existence of that ridiculous novel by “Mark Twain.” Patience Worth is not impossible, or even improbable. She 300