Quote of the Day (Henry James, on a Fraudulent Medium)

“[T]he individual who was repairing the tattered flag, turned round, perceived me, and showed me a countenance which could belong only to an ‘infallible waking medium.’ It was not, indeed, that Professor Fargo had the abstracted and emaciated aspect which tradition attributes to prophets and visionaries. On the contrary, the fleshly element in his composition seemed, superficially, to enjoy a luxurious preponderance over the spiritual. He was tall and corpulent, and wore an air of aggressive robustness. A mass of reddish hair was tossed back from his forehead in a leonine fashion, and a lustrous auburn beard diffused itself complacently over an expansive but by no means immaculate shirt front. He was dressed in a black evening suit, of a tarnished elegance, and it was in keeping with the festal pattern of his garments, that on the right forefinger of a large, fat hand, he should wear an immense turquoise ring. His intimate connection with the conjuring class was stamped upon his whole person; but to a superficial glance he might have seemed a representative of its grosser accomplishments. You could have fancied him, in spangled fleshings, looking down the lion's mouth, or cracking the ringmaster's whip at the circus, while Mlle. Josephine jumped through the hoops. It was his eyes, when you fairly met them, that proved him an artist on a higher line. They were eyes which had peeped into stranger places than even lions' mouths. Their pretension, I know, was to pierce the veil of futurity; but if this was founded, I could only say that the vision of Ezekiel and Jeremiah was but another name for consummate Yankee shrewdness. They were, in a single word, the most impudent pair of eyes I ever beheld, and it was the especial sign of their impudence that they seemed somehow to undertake to persuade you of the disinterested benevolence.”—American novelist, short-story writer, playwright, and essayist Henry James (1843-1916), “Professor Fargo,” originally printed in Galaxy, August 1874, reprinted in Complete Stories, 1874-1884 (1999)

Though Henry James’ most famous short story might be “Turn of the Screw,” he wrote approximately two dozen tales of the supernatural that gave critical cachet to a genre that could use some at the time.

One of his earliest stories in this vein, “Professor Fargo,” featured more than just characters whose consciousness is profoundly disrupted by horrifying people, events or phenomena. It also involved contention for an innocent soul, and added a theme would preoccupy him for the of rest of his life: the pernicious effect of those who pursue wealth without scruples.

Together with Colonel Gifford, a down-on-his luck inventor now forced into billing as “The Great Mathematical Magician and Lightning Calculator,” Professor Fargo exploits the credulity of the grieving by promising to bring their loved ones back from the afterlife.  

Their “connection,” Gifford confides to the tale’s narrator, implies “no intellectual approval of his [Fargo’s] extraordinary pretensions.” But Gifford becomes even more alarmed by his partner’s growing influence over the colonel’s deaf-and-dumb teenage daughter.

When Gifford vents his disgust, Fargo proposes another “exhibit”: "Allow me to exhibit your daughter for a month, in my own way and according to my own notions, and I assume your debt."

Miss Gifford responds instantly to Fargo’s glance of command: “The poor child fixed her charming eyes on his gross, flushed face, and awaited his commands. She was fascinated; she had no will of her own.”

I don’t know where James came up with the idea for this haunting short story, but he seems to have been fascinated for a long time afterward by the instinct underlying stage hypnosis. After attending a lecture by his friend George du Maurier, he confessed his fascination with mass audiences’ susceptibility to sensation and sound, “the many-headed monster…, mak[ing] the mass (as we know the mass), to vibrate.”