It was on these grounds—claiming the power to prove human immortality—that Spiritualists competed with established clergy in the decades around the turn of the twentieth century. But James Mansfield and his like were not the only contenders for the cultural authority that had been exercised by the church. Among those claiming to be gatekeepers of the transcendent were novelists. In an essay commissioned for a forum on the afterlife in Harper’s Bazaar in 1909, later published as a volume titled In After Days, Henry James proposed that the “artistic consciousness” endures forever. The attention James had cultivated in his career as a writer had, he wrote, put him “in communication with sources” beyond all “observation and experience.
To say that writing novels trained a mind for eternity was a bold professional claim. James admitted that he might sound like a traditional Christian, urging a program of moral attention that would open the door to heaven. But he dismissed the Protestant parallel as “superficial” and turned the tables by suggesting that Protestantism was “insidiously built on” the same “sense of appearances” that emerged from an artist’s experience. James was making a bid for literary art as a worthy successor to religion in the modern age not because literature embodied “sweetness and light” (as Matthew Arnold had argued, using his favored synonyms for beauty and intelligence), but because literary attentiveness might enable the human mind to endure forever.
Both James the novelist and Mansfield the medium wanted to be taken seriously as professionals. Both sought that status by demonstrating, in their writing and apart from any church doctrine, the capacity of human consciousness to endure beyond death. James’s written output comprised not messages from dead people but the invention of fictional ones. Still, the task for a paranormal writer such as Mansfield and for a prestige novelist such as James was, in one key respect, the same: to outdo the claims of traditional Christianity by convincing readers that the words put on a page by a living man could prove the durability of the human soul.