Has he not told secrets of the lives of his wondering clients which could not have been known by natural means?
And Sludge chuckles "could not ?"--could not be known by him who in his seeming passivity is alive at every nerve with the instinct of the detective, by him whose trade was Throwing thus His sense out, like an ant-eater's long tongue, Soft, innocent, warm, moist, impassible, And when 'twas crusted o'er with creatures--slick, Their juice enriched his palate.

"Could not Sludge!" Haunters of the seance of every species are his aiders and abettors--the unbeliever, whom believers overwhelm or bribe to acquiescence, the fair votaries who find prurient suggestions characteristic of the genuine medium, the lover of the lie through the natural love of it, the amateur, incapable of a real conviction, who plays safely with superstition, the literary man who welcomes a new flavour for the narrative or the novel, the philosophic diner-out, who wants the chopping-block of a disputable doctrine on which to try the edge of his faculty.

Is it his part, Sludge asks indignantly, to be grateful to the patrons who have corrupted and debased him?
Gratitude to these?
The gratitude, forsooth, of a prostitute To the greenhorn and the bully.
The truculence of Sludge is not without warrant; it is indeed no other than the truculence of Robert Browning, "shaking his mane," as Dante Rossetti described him in his outbreaks against the spiritualists, "with occasional foamings at the mouth."[56] Where then is the little grain of truth which has vitality amid the putrefaction of Sludge's nature?
Liar and cheat as he is, he cannot be sure "but there was something in it, tricks and all." The spiritual world, he feels, is as real as the material world; the supernatural interpenetrates the natural at every point; in little things, as in great things, God is present.

Sludge is aware of the invisible powers at every nerve: I guess what's going on outside the veil, Just as the prisoned crane feels pairing-time In the islands where his kind are, so must fall To capering by himself some shiny night As if your back yard were a plot of spice.
He cheats; yes, but he also apprehends a truth which the world is blind to.

Or, after all, is this cheating when every lie is quick with a germ of truth?
Is not such lying as this a self-desecration, if you will; but still more a strange, sweet self-sacrifice in the service of truth?
At the lowest is it not required by the very conditions of our poor mortal life, which remains so sorry a thing, so imperfect, so unendurable until it is brought into fruitful connection with a future existence?
This world of ours is a cruel, blundering, unintelligible world; but let it be pervaded by an influx from the next world, how quickly it rights itself! how intelligible it all grows! And is the faculty of imagination, the faculty which discovers the things of the spirit--put to his own uses by the poet and even the historian--is this a power which cheats its possessor, or cheats those for whose advantage he gives it play?
Browning's design is to exhibit even in this Sludge the rudiments--coarse, perverted, abnormally directed and ineffective for moral good--of that sublime spiritual wisdom, which, turned to its proper ends and aided by the highest intellectual powers, is present--to take a lofty exemplar--in his Pope of _The Ring and the Book_.