Читать книгу: «The Martian: A Novel», страница 19

They are great engineers and excavators, great irrigators, great workers in delicate metal, stone, marble, and precious gems (there is no wood to speak of); great sculptors and decorators of the beautiful caves, so fancifully and so intricately connected, in which they live, and which have taken thousands of years to design and excavate and ventilate and adorn, and which they warm and light up at will in a beautiful manner by means of the tremendous magnetic current.

This richly parti-colored light is part of their mental and moral life in a way it is not in us to apprehend, and has its exact equivalent in sound – and vice versa.

They have no language of words, and do not need it, since they can only be isolated in thought from each other by a distance greater than that which any vocal sound can traverse; but their organs of voice and hearing are far more complex and perfect than ours, and their atmosphere infinitely more conductive of phonal vibrations.

It seems that everything which can be apprehended by the eye or hand is capable of absolute sonorous translation: light, color, texture, shape in its three dimensions, weight, and density. The phonal expression and comprehension of all these are acquired by the Martian baby almost as soon as it knows how to swim or dive, or move upright and erect on dry land or beneath it; and the mechanical translation of such expression by means of wind and wire and sounding texture and curved surface of extraordinary elaboration is the principal business of the Martian life – an art by which all the combined past experience and future aspirations of the race receive the fullest utterance. Here again personal magnetism plays an enormous part.

And it is by means of this long and patiently evolved and highly trained faculty that the race is still developing towards perfection with constant strain and effort – although the planet is far advanced in its decadence and within measurable distance of its unfitness for life of any kind.

All is so evenly and harmoniously balanced, whether above ground or beneath, that existence is full of joy in spite of the tremendous strain of life, in spite also of a dreariness of outlook, on barren nature, which is not to be matched by the most inhospitable regions of the earth; and death is looked upon as the crowning joy of all, although life is prolonged by all the means in their power.

For when the life of the body ceases and the body itself is burned and its ashes scattered to the winds and waves, the infinitesimal, imponderable, and indestructible something we call the soul is known to lose itself in a sunbeam and make for the sun, with all its memories about it, that it may then receive further development, fitting it for other systems altogether beyond conception; and the longer it has lived in Mars the better for its eternal life in the future.

But it often, on its journey sunwards, gets entangled in other beams, and finds its way to some intermediate planet – Mercury, Venus, or the Earth; and putting on flesh and blood and bone once more, and losing for a space all its knowledge of its own past, it has to undergo another mortal incarnation – a new personal experience, beginning with its new birth; a dream and a forgetting, till it awakens again after the pangs of dissolution, and finds itself a step further on the way to freedom.

Martia, it seems, came to our earth in a shower of shooting-stars a hundred years ago. She had not lived her full measure of years in Mars; she had elected to be suppressed, through some unfitness, physical or mental or moral, which rendered it inexpedient that she should become a mother of Martians, for they are very particular about that sort of thing in Mars: we shall have to be so here some day, or else we shall degenerate and become extinct; or even worse!

Many Martian souls come to our planet in this way, it seems, and hasten to incarnate themselves in as promising unborn though just begotten men and women as they find, that they may the sooner be free to hie them sunwards with all their collected memories.

According to Martia, most of the best and finest of our race have souls that have lived forgotten lives in Mars. But Martia was in no hurry; she was full of intelligent curiosity, and for ten years she went up and down the earth, revelling in the open air, lodging herself in the brains and bodies of birds, beasts, and fishes, insects, and animals of all kinds – like a hermit crab in a shell that belongs to another – but without the slightest inconvenience to the legitimate owners, who were always quite unconscious of her presence, although she made what use she could of what wits they had.

Thus she had a heavenly time on this sunlit earth of ours – now a worm, now a porpoise, now a sea-gull or a dragon-fly, now some fleet-footed, keen-eyed quadruped that did not live by slaying, for she had a horror of bloodshed.

She could only go where these creatures chose to take her, since she had no power to control their actions in the slightest degree; but she saw, heard, smelled and touched and tasted with their organs of sense, and was as conscious of their animal life as they were themselves. Her description of this phase of her earthly career is full of extraordinary interest, and sometimes extremely funny – though quite unconsciously so, no doubt. For instance, she tells how happy she once was when she inhabited a small brown Pomeranian dog called "Schnapfel," in Cologne, and belonging to a Jewish family who dealt in old clothes near the Cathedral; and how she loved them and looked up to them – how she revelled in fried fish and the smell of it – and in all the stinks in every street of the famous city – all except one, that arose from Herr Johann Maria Farina's renowned emporium in the Julichs Platz, which so offended the canine nostrils that she had to give up inhabiting that small Pomeranian dog forever, etc.

Then she took to man, and inhabited man and woman, and especially child, in all parts of the globe for many years; and, finally, for the last fifty or sixty years or so, she settled herself exclusively among the best and healthiest English she could find.

She took a great fancy to the Rohans, who are singularly well endowed in health of mind and body, and physical beauty, and happiness of temper. She became especially fond of the ill-fated but amiable Lord Runswick – Barty's father. Then through him she knew Antoinette, and loved her so well that she determined to incarnate herself at last as their child; but she had become very cautious and worldly during her wandering life on earth, and felt that she would not be quite happy either as a man or a woman in Western Europe unless she were reborn in holy wedlock – a concession she made to our British prejudices in favor of respectability; she describes herself as the only Martian Philistine and snob.

Evil communications corrupt good manners, and poor Martia, to her infinite sorrow and self-reproach, was conscious of a sad lowering of her moral tone after this long frequentation of the best earthly human beings – even the best English.

She grew to admire worldly success, rank, social distinction, the perishable beauty of outward form, the lust of the flesh and the pride of the eye – the pomps and vanities of this wicked world – and to basely long for these in her own person!

Then when Barty was born she loved to inhabit his singularly well constituted little body better than any other, and to identify herself with his happy child-life, and enjoy his singularly perfect senses, and sleep his beautiful sleep, and revel in the dreams he so completely forgot when he woke – reminiscent dreams, that she was actually able to weave out of the unconscious brain that was his: absolutely using his dormant organs of memory for purposes of her own, to remember and relive her own past pleasures and pains, so sensitively and highly organized was he; and to her immense surprise she found she could make him feel her presence even when awake by means of the magnetic sense that pervaded her strongly as it pervades all Martian souls, till they reincarnate themselves among us and forget.

And thus he was conscious of the north whenever she enjoyed the hospitality of his young body.

She stuck to him for many years, till he offended her taste by his looseness of life as a Guardsman (for she was extremely straitlaced); and she inhabited him no more for some time, though she often watched him through the eyes of others, and always loved him and lamented sorely over his faults and follies.

Then one memorable night, in the energy of her despair at his resolve to slip that splendid body of his, she was able to influence him in his sleep, and saved his life; and all her love came back tenfold.

She had never been able to impose a fraction of her will on any being, animal or human, that she had ever inhabited on earth until that memorable night in Malines, where she made him write at her dictation.

Then she conceived an immense desire that he should marry the splendid Julia, whom she had often inhabited also, that she might one day be a child of his by such a mother, and go through her earthly incarnation in the happiest conceivable circumstances; but herein she was balked by Barty's instinctive preference for Leah, and again gave him up in a huff.

But she soon took to inhabiting Leah a great deal, and found her just as much to her taste for her own future earthly mother as the divine Julia herself, and made up her mind she would make Barty great and famous by a clever management of his very extraordinary brains, of which she had discovered the hidden capacity, and influence the earth for its good – for she had grown to love the beautiful earth, in spite of its iniquities – and finally be a child of Barty and Leah, every new child of whom seemed an improvement on the last, as though practice made perfect.

Such is, roughly, the story of Martia.

There is no doubt – both Barty and Leah agreed with me in this – that it is an easy story to invent, though it is curiously convincing to read in the original shape, with all its minute details and their verisimilitude; but even then there is nothing in it that the author of Sardonyx could not have easily imagined and made more convincing still.

He declared that all through life on awaking from his night's sleep he always felt conscious of having had extraordinary dreams – even as a child – but that he forgot them in the very act of waking, in spite of strenuous efforts to recall them. But now and again on sinking into sleep the vague memory of those forgotten dreams would come back, and they were all of a strange life under new conditions – just such a life as Martia had described – where arabesques of artificial light and interwoven curves of subtle sound had a significance undreamt of by mortal eyes or ears, and served as conductors to a heavenly bliss unknown to earth – revelations denied to us here, or we should be very different beings from what we most unhappily are.

He thought it quite possible that his brain in sleep had at last become so active through the exhausting and depleting medical régime that he went through in Malines that it actually was able to dictate its will to his body, and that everything might have happened to him as it did then and afterwards without any supernatural or ultranatural agency whatever – without a Martia!

He might, in short, have led a kind of dual life, and Martia might be a simple fancy or invention of his brain in an abnormal state of activity during slumber; and both Leah and I inclined to this belief (but for a strange thing which happened later, and which I will tell in due time). Indeed, it all seems so silly and far-fetched, so "out of the question," that one feels almost ashamed at bringing this Martia into a serious biography of a great man – un conte à dormir debout! But you must wait for the end.

Anyhow, the singular fact remains that in some way inexplicable to himself Barty has influenced the world in a direction which it never entered his thoughts even to conceive, so far as he remembered.

Think of all he has done.

He has robbed Death of nearly all its terrors; even for the young it is no longer the grisly phantom it once was for ourselves, but rather of an aspect mellow and benign; for to the most sceptical he (and only he) has restored that absolute conviction of an indestructible germ of Immortality within us, born of remembrance made perfect and complete after dissolution: he alone has built the golden bridge in the middle of which science and faith can shake hands over at least one common possibility – nay, one common certainty for those who have read him aright.

There is no longer despair in bereavement – all bereavement is but a half parting; there is no real parting except for those who survive, and the longest earthly life is but a span. Whatever the future may be, the past will be ours forever, and that means our punishment and our reward and reunion with those we loved. It is a happy phrase, that which closes the career of Sardonyx. It has become as universal as the Lord's Prayer!

To think that so simple and obvious a solution should have lain hidden all these æons, to turn up at last as though by chance in a little illustrated story-book! What a nugget!

Où avions-nous donc la tête et les yeux?

Physical pain and the origin of evil seem the only questions with which he has not been able to grapple. And yet if those difficulties are ever dealt with and mastered and overcome for us it can only be by some follower of Barty's methods.

It is true, no doubt, that through him suicide has become the normal way out of our troubles when these are beyond remedy. I will not express any opinion as to the ethical significance of this admitted result of his teaching, which many of us still find it so hard to reconcile with their conscience.

Then, by a dexterous manipulation of our sympathies that amounts to absolute conjuring, he has given the death-blow to all cruelty that serves for our amusement, and killed the pride and pomp and circumstance of glorious sport, and made them ridiculous with his lusty laugh; even the bull-fights in Spain are coming to an end, and all through a Spanish translation of Lifeblood. All the cruelties of the world are bound to follow in time, and this not so much because they are cruel as because they are ridiculous and mean and ugly, and would make us laugh if they didn't make us cry.

And to whom but Barty Josselin do we owe it that our race is on an average already from four to six inches taller than it was thirty years ago, men and women alike; that strength and beauty are rapidly becoming the rule among us, and weakness and ugliness the exception?

He has been hard on these; he has been cruel to be kind, and they have received notice to quit, and been generously compensated in advance, I think! Who in these days would dare to enter the holy state of wedlock unless they were pronounced physically, morally, and mentally fit – to procreate their kind – not only by their own conscience, but by the common consent of all who know them? And that beauty, health, and strength are a part of that fitness, and old age a bar to it, who would dare deny?

I'm no Adonis myself. I've got a long upper lip and an Irish kink in my nose, inherited perhaps from some maternally ancestral Blake of Derrydown, who may have been a proper blackguard! And that kink should be now, no doubt, the lawful property of some ruffianly cattle-houghing moonlighter, whose nose – which should have been mine – is probably as straight as Barty's. For in Ireland are to be found the handsomest and ugliest people in all Great Britain, and in Great Britain the handsomest and ugliest people in the whole world.

Anyhow, I have known my place. I have not perpetuated that kink, and with it, possibly, the base and cowardly instincts of which it was meant to be the outward and visible sign – though it isn't in my case – that my fellow-men might give me a wide berth.

Leah's girlish instinct was a right one when she said me nay that afternoon by the Chelsea pier – for how could she see inside me, poor child? How could Beauty guess the Beast was a Prince in disguise? It was no fairy-tale!

Things have got mixed up; but they're all coming right, and all through Barty Josselin.

And what vulgar pride and narrownesses and meannesses and vanities and uglinesses of life, in mass and class and individual, are now impossible! – and all through Barty Josselin and his quaint ironies of pen and pencil, forever trembling between tears and laughter, with never a cynical spark or a hint of bitterness.

How he has held his own against the world! how he has scourged its wickedness and folly, this gigantic optimist, who never wrote a single line in his own defence!

How quickly their laugh recoiled on those early laughers! and how Barty alone laughed well because he laughed the last, and taught the laughers to laugh on his side! People thought he was always laughing. It was not so.

Part Ninth

"Cara deûm soboles, magnum Jovis incrementum."

– Virgil.

The immense fame and success that Barty Josselin achieved were to him a source of constant disquiet. He could take neither pride nor pleasure in what seemed to him not his; he thought himself a fraud.

Yet only the mere skeleton of his work was built up for him by his demon; all the beauty of form and color, all the grace of movement and outer garb, are absolutely his own.

It has been noticed how few eminent men of letters were intimate with the Josselins, though the best among them – except, of course, Thomas Carlyle – have been so enthusiastic and outspoken in their love and admiration of his work.

He was never at his ease in their society, and felt himself a kind of charlatan.

The fact is, the general talk of such men was often apt to be over his head, as it would have been over mine, and often made him painfully diffident and shy. He needn't have been; he little knew the kind of feeling he inspired among the highest and best.

Why, one day at the Marathonæum, the first and foremost of them all, the champion smiter of the Philistines, the apostle of culture and sweetness and light, told me that, putting Barty's books out of the question, he always got more profit and pleasure out of Barty's society than that of any man he knew.

"It does me good to be in the same room with him; the freshness of the man, his voice, his aspect, his splendid vitality and mother‐wit, his boyish spirit, and the towering genius behind it all. I only wish to goodness I was an intimate friend of his as you are; it would be a liberal education to me!"

But Barty's reverence and admiration for true scholarship and great literary culture in others amounted to absolute awe, and filled him with self‐distrust.

There is no doubt that until he was universally accepted, the crudeness of his literary method was duly criticised with great severity by those professional literary critics who sometimes carp with such a big mouth at their betters, and occasionally kill the Keatses of this world!

In writing, as in everything else, he was an amateur, and more or less remained one for life; but the greatest of his time accepted him at once, and laughed and wept, and loved him for his obvious faults as well as for his qualities. Tous les genres sont bons, hormis le genre ennuyeux! And Barty was so delightfully the reverse of a bore!

Dear me! what matters it how faultlessly we paint or write or sing if no one will care to look or read or listen? He is all fault that hath no fault at all, and we poor outsiders all but yawn in his face for his pains.

They should only paint and write and sing for each other, these impeccables, who so despise success and revile the successful. How do they live, I wonder? Do they take in each other's washing, or review each other's books?

It edifies one to see what a lot of trouble these deriders of other people's popularity will often take to advertise themselves, and how they yearn for that popular acclaim they so scornfully denounce.

Barty was not a well‐read man by any means; his scholarship was that of an idle French boy who leaves school at seventeen, after having been plucked for a cheap French degree, and goes straightway into her Majesty's Household Brigade.

At the beginning of his literary career it would cut him to the quick to find himself alluded to as that inspired Anglo‐Gallic buffoon, the ex‐Guardsman, whose real vocation, when he wasn't twaddling about the music of the spheres, or writing moral French books, was to be Mr. Toole's understudy.

He was even impressed by the smartness of those second‐rate decadents, French and English, who so gloried in their own degeneracy – as though one were to glory in scrofula or rickets; those unpleasant little anthropoids with the sexless little muse and the dirty little Eros, who would ride their angry, jealous little tilt at him in the vain hope of provoking some retort which would have lifted them up to glory! Where are they now? He has improved them all away! Who ever hears of decadents nowadays?

Then there were the grubs of Grub Street, who sometimes manage to squirt a drop from their slime‐bags on to the swiftly passing boot that scorns to squash them. He had no notion of what manner of creatures they really were, these gentles! He did not meet them at any club he belonged to – it was not likely. Clubs have a way of blackballing grubs – especially grubs that are out of the common grubby; nor did he sit down to dinner with them at any dinner‐table, or come across them at any house he was by way of frequenting; but he imagined they were quite important persons because they did not sign their articles! and he quite mistook their place in the economy of creation. C'était un naïf, le beau Josselin!

Big fleas have little fleas, and they've got to put up with them! There is no "poudre insecticide" for literary vermin – and more's the pity! (Good heavens! what would the generous and delicate‐minded Barty say, if he were alive, at my delivering myself in this unworthy fashion about these long‐forgotten assailants of his, and at my age too – he who never penned a line in retaliation! He would say I was the most unseemly grub of them all, and he would be quite right; so I am just now, and ought to know better – but it amuses me.)

Then there were the melodious bardlets who imitate those who imitate those who imitate the forgotten minor poets of the olden time and log‐roll each other in quaint old English. They did not log‐roll Barty, whom they thought coarse and vulgar, and wrote to that effect in very plain English that was not old, but quite up to date.

"How splendidly they write verse!" he would say, and actually once or twice he would pick up one or two of their cheap little archaic mannerisms and proudly use them as his own, and be quite angry to find that Leah had carefully expunged them in her copy.

"A fair and gracious garden indeed!" says Leah. "I won't have you use such ridiculous words, Barty – you mean a pretty garden, and you shall say so; or even a beautiful garden if you like! – and no more 'manifolds,' and 'there‐anents,' and 'in veriest sooths,' and 'waters wan,' and 'wan waters,' and all that. I won't stand it; they don't suit your style at all!"

She and Scatcherd and I between us soon laughed him out of these innocent little literary vagaries, and he remained content with the homely words he had inherited from his barbarian ancestors in England (they speak good English, our barbarians), and the simple phrasing he had learnt from M. Durosier's classe de littérature at the Institution Brossard.

One language helps another; even the smattering of a dead language is better than no extra language at all, and that's why, at such cost of time and labor and paternal cash, we learn to smatter Greek and Latin, I suppose. "Arma virumque cano" – "Tityre tu patulæ?" – "Mæcenas atavis" – "[Greek: Mênin aeide]" – and there you are! It sticks in the memory, and it's as simple as "How d'ye do?"

Anyhow, it is pretty generally admitted, both here and in France, that for grace and ease and elegance and absolute clearness combined, Barty Josselin's literary style has never been surpassed and very seldom equalled; and whatever his other faults, when he was at his ease he had the same graceful gift in his talk, both French and English.

It might be worth while my translating here the record of an impression made by Barty and his surroundings on a very accomplished Frenchman, M. Paroly, of the Débats, who paid him a visit in the summer of 1869, at Campden Hill.

I may mention that Barty hated to be interviewed and questioned about his literary work – he declared he was afraid of being found out.

But if once the interviewer managed to evade the lynx‐eyed Leah, who had a horror of him, and get inside the studio, and make good his footing there, and were a decently pleasant fellow to boot, Barty would soon get over his aversion – utterly forget he was being interviewed – and talk as to an old friend; especially if the reviewer were a Frenchman or an American.

The interviewer is an insidious and wily person, and often presents himself to the soft‐hearted celebrity in such humble and pathetic guise that one really hasn't the courage to snub him. He has come such a long way for such a little thing! it is such a lowly function he plies at the foot of that tall tree whose top you reached at a single bound! And he is supposed to be a "gentleman," and has no other means of keeping body and soul together! Then he is so prostrate in admiration before your Immensity…

So you give way, and out comes the little note‐book, and out comes the little cross‐examination.

As a rule, you are none the worse and the world is none the better; we know all about you already – all, at least, that we want to know; we have heard it all before, over and over again. But a poor fellow‐creature has earned his crust, and goes home the happier for having talked to you about yourself and been treated like a man and a brother.

But sometimes the reviewer is very terrible indeed in his jaunty vulgarization of your distinguished personality, and you have to wince and redden, and rue the day you let him inside your house, and live down those light familiar paragraphs in which he describes you and the way you dress and how you look and what jolly things you say; and on what free and easy terms he is with you, of all people in the world!

But the most terrible of all is the pleasant gentleman from America, who has yearned to know you for so many years, and comes perhaps with a letter of introduction – or even without! – not to interview you or write about you (good heavens! he hates and scorns that modern pest, the interviewer), but to sit at your feet and worship at your shrine, and tell you of all the good you have done him and his, all the happiness you have given them all – "the debt of a lifetime!"

And you let yourself go before him, and so do your family, and so do your old friends; is he not also a friend, though not an old one? You part with him almost in sorrow, he's so nice! And in three weeks some kind person sends you from the other side such a printed account of you and yours – so abominably true, so abominably false – that the remembrance of it makes you wake up in the dead of night, and most unjustly loathe an entire continent for breeding and harboring such a shameless type of press reptile!

I feel hard‐hearted towards the interviewer, I own. I wish him, and those who employ him, a better trade; and a better taste to whoever reads what he writes. But Barty could be hard‐hearted to nobody, and always regretted having granted the interview when he saw the published outcome of it.

Fortunately, M. Paroly was decently discreet.

"I've got a Frenchman coming this afternoon – a tremendous swell," said Barty, at lunch.

Leah. "Who is he?"

Barty. "M. Paroly, of the Débats."

Leah. "What is he when he's at home?"

Barty. "A famous journalist; as you'd know if you'd read the French newspapers sometimes, which you never do."

Leah. "Haven't got the time. He's coming to interview you, I suppose, and make French newspaper copy out of you."

Barty. "Why shouldn't he come just for the pleasure of making my acquaintance?"

Leah. "And mine – I'll be there and talk to him, too!"

Barty. "My dear, he probably doesn't speak a word of English; and your French, you know! You never would learn French properly, although you've had me to practise on for so many years – not to mention Bob and Ida."

Leah. "How unkind of you, Barty! When have I had time to trouble about French? Besides, you always laugh at my French accent and mimic it – and that's not encouraging!"

Barty. "My dear, I adore your French accent; it's so unaffected! I only wish I heard it a little oftener."

Leah. "You shall hear it this afternoon. At what o'clock is he coming, your Monsieur Paroly?"

Barty. "At four‐thirty."

Leah. "Oh, Barty, don't give yourself away – don't talk to him about your writings, or about yourself, or about your family. He'll vulgarize you all over France. Surely you've not forgotten that nice 'gentleman' from America who came to see you, and who told you that he was no interviewer, not he! but came merely as a friend and admirer – a distant but constant worshipper for many years! and how you talked to him like a long‐lost brother, in consequence! 'There's nobody in the world like the best Americans,' you said. You adored them all, and wanted to be an American yourself – till a month after, when he published every word you said, and more, and what sort of cravat you had on, and how silent and cold and uncommunicative your good, motherly English wife was – you, the brilliant and talkative Barty Josselin, who should have mated with a countrywoman of his own! and how your bosom friend was a huge, overgrown everyday Briton with a broken nose! I saw what he was at, from the low cunning in his face as he listened; and felt that every single unguarded word you dropped was a dollar in his pocket! How we've all had to live down that dreadfully facetious and grotesque and familiar article he printed about us all in those twenty American newspapers that have got the largest circulation in the world! and how you stamped and raved, Barty, and swore that never another American 'gentleman' should enter your house! What names you called him: 'cad!' 'sweep!' 'low‐bred, little Yankee penny‐a‐liner!' Don't you remember? Why, he described you as a quite nice‐looking man somewhat over the middle height!"