tural, saying that he knew
a farmer whom the fairies had dragged out of bed and beaten.
Now suppose Mr. Yeats had told Mr. Moore, then moving in this
glamorous atmosphere, another story of the same sort.
Suppose he had said that the farmer's pigs had fallen under
the displeasure of some magician of the sort he celebrates,
who had conjured bad fairies into the quadrupeds, so that they
went in a wild dance down to the village pond. Would Mr. Moore
have thought that story any more incredible than the other?
Would he have thought it worse than a thousand other things that a
modern mystic may lawfully believe? Would he have risen to his feet
and told Mr. Yeats that all was over between them? Not a bit of it.
He would at least have listened with a serious, nay, a solemn face.
He would think it a grim little grotesque of rustic diablerie,
a quaint tale of goblins, neither less nor more improbable
than hundreds of psychic fantasies or farces for which there is
really a good deal of evidence. He would be ready to entertain
the idea if he found it anywhere except in the New Testament.
As for the more vulgar and universal fashions that have followed
after the Celtic movement, they have left such trifles far behind.
And they have been directed not by imaginative artists
like Mr. Yeats or even Mr. Moore, but by solid scientific
students like Sir William Crookes and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
I find it easier to imagine an evil spirit agitating the legs
of a pig than a good spirit agitating the legs of a table.
But I will not here enter into the argument, since I am only
trying to describe the atmosphere. Whatever has happened in more
recent years, what Huxley expected has certainly not happened.
There has been a revolt against Christian morality, and where there
has not been a return of Christian mysticism, it has been a return of
the mysticism without the Christianity. Mysticism itself has returned,
with all its moons and twilights, its talismans and spells.
Mysticism itself has returned, and brought with it seven devils
worse than itself.

But the scientific coincidence is even more strict and close.
It affects not only the general question of miracles,
but the particular question of possession. This is the very
last element in the Christian story that would ever have been
selected by the enlightened Christian apologist. Gladstone would
defend it, but he would not go out of his way to dwell on it.
It is an excellent worki