The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864, page 239 by Various Authors
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"Mr. Sludge, the Medium," cannot be called a poem. It would not be possible to write satire, epic, idyl, not even elegy, upon that "rat-hole philosophy," as Mr. Emerson once styled the new fetichism of the mahogany tables. It has not one element that asks the sense of beauty to incorporate it, or challenges the weapon of wit to transfix it. It is humiliating, but not pathetic, not even when yearning hearts are trying to pretend that their first-born vibrates to them through a stranger's and a hireling's mind. It is not even grotesque, but it is gross, and flat, and stale; its messages are fatuous, its machinery the rickety heirlooms of old humbugs of Greece and Alexandria. No thrill, no terror, no true awe, nothing but "goose-flesh" and disgust, creep from the medium's presence. Pegasus need not be saddled; summon, rather, the police.
Yet this composition, which Mr. Browning must have undertaken in a moment of high indignation, with the motive of self-relief, is full of common sense. Mr. Sludge's vindication of his career turns upon the point that people like on the whole to be deceived, especially in matters relating to the invisible world. Sludge must be right in this; otherwise the theologians would not have had such a successful run. The facile and eager "circle" betrays the imaginative medium into reporting what it appears most to desire. The superstition of the people excites and feeds his own. He is only one against a crowd which deluges him with its expectation, and resents a scarcity of the supernatural. Mr. Sludge is not so much to blame: the people at length push the thing so far that he is obliged to cheat in self-defence. And when a man tasks his wits successfully, if it be only to mislead the witless, he has a sense of satisfaction in the effort akin to that of the rhetorician and the quack.
But shrewdness and good sense cannot make a poem by assuming the measure of blank verse. And a few Yankee phrases are pasted into Mr. Sludge's talk, such as "stiffish cock-tail," "V-n