" 3fETHRATTON."
WE are always a little amused at the surprise which journalists either feel, or affect, when some local " wizard " like Hartwell, the Birmingham fortune-teller, " philo- sopher, astrologer, grand master of the mysteries, enchanter, sorcerer, and dealer in magic and spells," is committed for trial for obtaining money on false pretences, or sentenced as a rogue. The man has always adopted some magnificently ridiculous name —in this instance, Methratton, surely given him in joke by some learned gipsy, if, as we suspect, it is an Indian word, which means " Jewel of falsehood "—has always proposed to deal in the secrets of futurity, amulets, and love philtres ; has always betrayed a craving eagerness for silver coins, in this instance half-crowns; has always found hundreds of dupes, usually girls ; always relies upon their reluctance to give evidence in Court ; and always is punished somehow, some- times, we fear, to the straining of the law. Thereupon the journal- ists lift up their hands, and either cry, " Who would have thought it, in these days of education ?" or moralise upon the fund of superstition still remaining in the human heart in an age of telephones and photographs. Well, the last proposition is tree enough. There is' a fund of superstition in the majority of people of all races—not in all, though—probably incurable, except by the dominance of a religious belief, and at all events quite beyond the influence of telegraphs and express trains ; but that being so, why do we wonder that it exists in ignorant girls, in secluded country-houses, and in farms where ideas are never fresh P Why should it not exist, and what has education, in the sense of Board-School teaching, to do with the matter P The wonder is not that so much superstition about magic exists, but that there is not infinitely more of it. The readiness to be supersti- tions, the strong curiosity, the deep fear of the unknown, the keen pleasure in the indulgence of wonder, all the elements which produce superstitions exist, and are directed into the queer channels usually noticed in England, into a search, that is, either for love or cash, partly by a traditional method of fraud prac- tised by whole classes, such as the gipsies, partly by a vast body of traditional teaching which, like some of the herbalists' knowledge, is handed down from house to house, cottage to cottage, and age to age, without the tutors of mankind being any the wiser. Sometimes an old clergyman stumbles upon the track of this teaching, sometimes some mother in Israel who has cured in her flock the fear of ridicule detects suddenly a faith the clergyman never heard of, sometimes it is revealed before the Magistrates, but all who discover it alike are startled with its extent and its influence. Two hundred silly people in Birmingham paid Hartwell, and some of them, at least, were in good posi- tions. Positive beliefs, hardly distinguishable from beliefs in magic, are still in existence in England; and though those who hold them are now afraid of acknowledging them, for fear of the ridicule of the young and the frowns of the clergy, they still, in many places, penetrate very far. The writer can testify of his own knowledge to positive faith in astrology, in fortune- telling by the cards, and in palmistry as existing among fairly educated persons; and among the ignorant the range of beliefs is much more extensive, covering a whole armoury of philtres—one of which is distinctly dangerous—and the use of a charmed mirror, the rationale of which the writer, who as a child in Norfolk heard of it constantly, would very much like to trace. Upon minds essentially ignorant, that is, without the power of thinking out anything so as to correlate cause and effect, and deeply imbued with this teaching, the promises of any" Methratton " have their effect, if it be only the effect of in- tensely stimulating curiosity and a kind of fear, motives which would be indulged much more often, but for a belief equally traditional, long descended, and untraceable, that any resort to magic is necessarily wrong. That feeling is quite as strong as the belief in magic, and in hundreds of villages, which never, perhaps, heard of the elder Christianity from which it has come down, is the strongest corrective to a credulity which might easily become monstrous, and, indeed, every now and then—as in the horrible case which occurred at Sible Hedingham a few years since—does so become. As for "education," how is that to remove such a faith P "The three R's" are no disproof of magic in themselves, and the teachers, who might disprove it, or wake up the brains of their pupils to the necessary clearness, never touch upon the subject. We are told in books that the Catholic Clergy, who necessarily hear more of the secret thoughts of the people, do in England sometimes exhort the foolish victims of " necromancy ;" but the Established Clergy despise the whole set of ideas too much to :speak of them, and are known to despise them, and consequently never hear of them except in the vaguest way, through the talk of some child, or the cursing of some angry man. The Magistrates do, it is true, hear of them, and do rebuke them, and in that fact is, perhaps, the best justifica- tion of the existing law. It is a little hard on a rascal, often a half-believer in his own trade, that he should be imprisoned for selling a charm which his customer is foolish enough to ask for, when quacks are every day selling impossible medicines, ridicu- lous recipes, and injurious hair-dyes ; but if the sale of the amulet were unpunishable, the ignorant would never hear that the cultivated thought amulets absurd. The two hundred girls who bought Methratton's rubbish are very much disenchanted by his going to prison. Indeed, that teaching might be effectual, but that the Magistrates are supposed to act on the law of the land; and not on their own opinion—which need not be identical—and that the sentence destroys belief only in Methratton, and not in. Methrattondom at large. He was a rogue, you see, for the Magistrates sent him to prison; but then that astrologer ten miles off, who sells bits of stone, instead of bits of paper or parchment, may be the genuine article. And so the belief lasts on, to be reported to the next generation, with any evidence, real or imaginary, that the reporter may have heard of. Education would break the long chain, no doubt, if it were education of the right kind, from the right people ; but where is that, in the usual course of things, to come from P Sometimes it does come. There is a clergyman's wife in the parish, or a squire's daughter, who is entirely trusted, because he or she "don't never jeer ;" or a schoolmaster who has a telescope, and "is a bit of a 'strologer hisself ;" or best of all, a hard-bitten old farmer who knows it all, believes it all, and calls all who act on the belief fools and cowards —he ducks the wizard, which is disenchanting—and then in that village the man of mystery, even if he is a gipsy, has no chance at all. But in the ordinary run of events, nobody teaches about such things in a way which comes home to the taught, and so the superstitions linger. You cannot believe in magic mirrors after you have seen Pepper's " Ghost," but you can very much after learning any amount of compound arithmetic. Rule-of- three, they say, is very deadly to amulets ; but then that is because the mind which comprehends rule-of-three has begun to think for itself, instead of merely remembering. True educa- tion kills magic, but what is called education does not, nor does shrewdness. The Roman populace can do sums, and believe in the jettatore all the same, while no possible teaching of mere practical things will ever make an English lad as shrewd as the Hindoo, who knows at a glance what you are at, who is a senior wrangler in some trade, and who cannot be done out of his money, but who for all that will abandon a specu- lation if he sees a hare, and is furious with alarm if you praise his child, or if a faquir remarks that he shall curse his house.
The Times seems to think that a good many of Methratton's victims are induced to pay money by a half-belief which is not belief, and that, undoubtedly, is true. The astrologer is often consulted as the " Sortes Biblianm" are still consulted, from the vague interest excited by any method of guessing by rule. The girl is undecided whether she shall prefer the light suitor or the dark one, the joiner or the blacksmith, and consults the wizard, not because he is a wizard, but because his answer is a guide less controlable by herself than, for example, tossing a penny would be ; but this form of questioning, though it swells the fortune-teller's receipts, does not make up their bulk. The majority of applicants want something positive, be it philtre, or charm, or amulet, or sometimes, we fear, drug, and are so ashamed of wanting it, that they will give no evi- dence. They want it because they have been told, they hardly know how, that such things have their " effec," and have never had the slightest chance of being " educated " as to the folly of snoh belief, any more than they have had as to the folly of believing that asses have a stripe because Balaam's ass was struck. Suppose a girl of the kind that sends the half- crown had learned " the three R's," and hemming, and some cookery quite perfectly, but had never heard the elementary truths of astronomy, would she not believe that the Sun went round the world ? And she has, as she thinks, nearly as much evidence for the amulet, namely, the constant testimony of an unreal experience, the facts that Aunt Jane's Mary Ann wore an amulet, "and never caught nothin' all her life." The weight of apparent evidence is with the believer, and its influence is not to be abolished by an instruction which never, in ordinary cases, approaches the point at issue.
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