Science Fiction Studies

Documents in the History of Science Fiction

The reviews printed below were sent to us by John Eggeling of Phantasmagoria Books, 8 Colwell Road, East Dulwich, London SE22.

Edward Maitland. By and By: An Historical Romance of the Future. Three volumes, Bentley, 1873. [From The Examiner, April 26, 1873, pp 434-36].

There is danger of our having too many imitations of 'Erewhon' and 'The Coming Race,' but 'By and By' is hardly an imitation. Though its method may have been suggested by one or other of those works, it differs from them in being much more of a novel, and Mr. Maitland appears to have thrown his imaginary history a few centuries into the future, instead of placing it in the past or present, only in order that he may show what he thinks is likely to be "the evolution of religion and morals" after "the Victorian Emancipation," concerning which he is very hopeful, has borne its natural fruits in the freer society and the higher intelligence of remote generations. They who take up the book merely for pastime will, perhaps, think that he has overloaded his first volume with philosophical disquisition and scientific speculation; but the romance gets under weigh in time, and after that it floats as rapidly and easily as any of the aeromotives that play a conspicuous part in its action. It is needless to say that it abounds in fine thought and brilliant writing, and, though we cannot exactly see how it completes the trilogy of which 'The Pilgrim and the Shrine' and 'Higher Law' are the preceding parts, it is extremely interesting and highly instructive. Mr. Maitland thoroughly maintains the reputation that has been won for him by the earlier works of which he now, for the first time, publicly avows himself the author, and perhaps he will enhance the reputation as a social philosopher which those works will ensure him. Though they may not assent to all his conclusions, his readers must admire the force and clearness with which he presents them, and the skill and completeness with which he portrays the distant future as a living present, and traces back his principles and precedents to the times in which we now live. It must be admitted, too, that his wildest imaginings are very plausible, and that many of them become more and more reasonable the more closely they are examined.

The hero of the book, not quite happily named, is a Christmas Carol, so called because he was born on Christmas Eve, the scene of his birth being an improved balloon stranded on an iceberg. The development of science in the period intervening between our day and the day in which he is supposed to live has turned air-voyaging into the most convenient mode of travelling, and Criss, as the hero is familiarly called, having been born in the air, has a special aptitude for this sort of locomotion, and finds in it almost boundless opportunities for bringing distant places near together, and holding intimate communion with the denizens of heaven, who are material angels presenting no impossible differences from the dwellers on the earth. By that communion his fine nature is further refined, but he is altogether an earthling, and on earth most of his life is passed. His chief home is London, London magnified and improved as it may reasonably be by the legitimate expansion of scientific knowledge and social wisdom in the ages to come. Here is one glimpse of it:

We in our days are so accustomed to things as we have them, that we are apt to forget they were not always so. There was a time when the roofs of their houses were as strange and mysterious to the inmates as the interior of the earth on which they stood. But the practice of aeromotion, and the substitution of magnetism for coal in the production of heat, combined to bring about a great revolution in our architecture and habits, and affected even our system of jurisprudence. For it was found necessary, in the interests of that privacy which is essential to the development of the character and affections, to secure our interiors from the observation of impertinent aerialists, by making certain changes in our window system, and also to add certain stringent provisions to the laws relating to libel and slander. The most effective of these provisions was one that was in direct opposition to the enactment of our ancestors. There was a period when they suffered the libeler to go free on pleading justification and sustaining his plea by proof of its truth. We, on the contrary, treat such a plea as an aggravation of the original offence, and punish it accordingly.

But what would our ancestors have said, could they have seen the London of to-day, on a fine evening! The growing scarcity of coal, once deplored by them as the commencement of Britain's decline and downfall, proved in reality its greatest blessing through the impulse it gave to scientific research and the discovery of substitutes. Not to dwell upon the mechanical and economical gains thus effected, I will mention only the gain in comfort and health. Who now that sees our flat and commodious roofs, with their friendly gatherings and elegant adornments, can realise the time when, for an aerialist to pass over a large town at a moderate height, would have been to court destruction by suffocation! For then every house was a volcano and every chimney a crater, in a state of perpetual eruption, vomiting forth fire and smoke that made the atmosphere lurid and loaded it with darkness and poison. Now the roofs of our houses are the favourite resort of invalids, where the freshest air and the quietest repose are to be found, and not a "London black," once so proverbial, comes to soil their garments. Instead of seeking pure air in the country, as people used to do, such is the perfection to which sanitary science has been brought in our time, that invalids leave the country to seek the purer air of the town. The abolition of coal-gas for the purpose of lighting has much to do with this. So brilliant now are our towns at night that in many a house little extra light is needed beyond that which comes from without. Many a pleasant acquaintance did Criss make in his town sallies over the roofs, and many a sick person learnt to watch eagerly for his bright look and cheerful converse.

An important episode in this "historical romance of the future," and the most important of the hero's benefactions to the world, is his successful project for diverting the waters of Lake Tchad and opening up communications with the ocean, so that the desert of Sahara is turned from a sea of sand into a spacious lake, and the now desolate interior of Africa is thereby fertilised; but the book has principally to do, as we have said, with "the evolution of religion and morals." Mr Maitland makes much of the project which he has worked out at some length in these columns, for converting the National Church into a really useful agent for the instruction of the people in that genuine religion which is an outcome of science and morality, for developing Christianity in its proper channels and separating it wholly from what in one place he calls Churchianity and from the dominion of every sort of priestcraft in any way connected with dogma. In his regenerated world such Christianity as exists nowadays is relegated to the most barbarous races, or confined in civilised states to a small and contemptible class of Remnants, the mass of society having profited by the growth of free thought that is dated from the Victorian Emancipation of the nineteenth century. The change from the old to the new religion is thus briefly stated:

The physical good of man must be the basis of the moral. The grand mistake of the ancient world lay in its commencing at the wrong end. It inverted the Pyramid. Placing religion first, they proceeded from it to morals, and thence to physics. That is, they built on that of which they knew the least. From the unknown and unknowable, they inferred the knowable. It was because their religion, while claiming to be the basis of morals, consisted in assumptions, that it failed to regenerate the world. We moderns, on the contrary starting from the physical and verifiable, make morals the basis of religion. We cannot, as did our forefathers, even imagine a religion divorced from, or antagonistic to morality. We hold it as impossible for the Divine Will to be in conflict with the moral law, as with the physical. For us, Religion signifies the relation of the part to the whole, as Morality is the relation of part to part. We must learn the smaller and nearer lesson first. From our duty to the finite springs the idea of our duty to the Infinite. If we care not for that which is within our reach, we are not likely to care for that which lies beyond. The love of the seen must precede and produce the love of the unseen.

And this is given as the cardinal dogma of the New Church--or rather as a definition that is not a dogma, "inasmuch as it does not claim to be true, independently of reason and evidence:"

As in the region of Morals the Divine Will can never conflict with the Moral law, so, in the region of Physics, the Divine Will can never conflict with the Natural law.

Whatever may have been the mental capacity of primitive man, it has been found that under its modern development the human mind is unable to conceive of universal law as proceeding from any source short of the Divine--that is, the supreme all-pervading creative energy of the Universe. And we find it to be equally impossible for us to regard as Divine a will or law that is variable and self-contradictory. So that, did we find a conflict occurring between Law and Will, we should necessarily and involuntarily determine that one or the other was not entitled to be regarded as Divine.

Our readers will see from these extract, the shortest of many that we could make, of what a liberal nature are the religious views that Mr. Maitland places prominently in his work. Intimately connected with them are various social reformations, the chief being those affecting women and all the relations of sex. Some notion of Mr. Maitland's views on this subject, which he bravely and wisely advanced in his 'Higher Law,' may be gleaned from this paragraph:

The days happily are long past in which, while to man all careers were open, to women there was but one, and it depended upon the will of individual men to accord them that. It is little wonder that, thus placed, the women of those times should have devoted themselves to the pursuit of marriage with an eagerness commensurate with the uncertainty of success, and reckless whether the issue promised ill or well. Nor is it strange that, caring nothing for the characters of the men, but only for their wealth, women should have so deteriorated in their own characters that the men ceased to care for them, except as companions of the moment, and declined to ally themselves with them in any but the most temporary manner. The literature of the Victorian era, just preceding the Emancipation, abounds in evidences of the hapless condition of the British female of that period, particularly in the middle and upper classes. It was the very intensity of her despair of any amelioration of her condition by conventional remedies that precipitated the radical change of which we are now so richly reaping the benefits. That this change was not effected long before was owing, it must be confessed, to the timidity of the men and their want of faith in the inherent goodness of the female heart. The men had suffered the women to retain their belief in ecclesiastical infallibility long after they themselves had abandoned such belief. The irrevocability of marriage, dictated as it was by priests, had at least the appearance of being a revenge taken by them for their own exclusion from it. It was the disastrous result of ecclesiastical restriction upon the relations of the sexes, far more than a process of rational investigation, that opened the female mind to the baselessness of ecclesiastical pretensions. The men fought their own way to freedom by dint of hard brain-work. It was for them a battle royal between truth and falsehood, or rather between the right to obey the dictates of their own minds and consciences and the claims of antiquated tradition. But they did not take their women with them. Either through difference of nature or difference of training, these were not amenable to the considerations which had influenced the men. Woman cared nothing for the abstract truth or falsehood of her religion. Her heart was the sole instrument whereby she judged such matters. The ordinance of the church, which rigidly forbade all intercourse with the other sex save on condition of an indissoluble life-long contract, had come to have the effect of abolishing even those very contracts. While those who were already involved in them, finding themselves unable to part, were driven more and more to desert. Woman had so far subordinated her intellect and moral sense to the authority of her priests, so far forgotten her heart, as to accept at their hands a deity and a faith which were independent of any considerations recognisable by those faculties. Her new-born infant might be consigned to everlasting torture for the omission by its parents of a prescribed ecclesiastical ceremony; but the system that kept her from getting a husband in this world was intolerable. And by insisting on the absolute permanence of the tie, the church had virtually abolished marriage.

Mr. Maitland speaks slightingly of the demands of women in the present day for a share in political suffrage. He considers that the great revolution in the condition of women which he expects and hopes for must come from the collapse of the existing marriage institutions--of which he says, very happily, "Our ancient customs in regard to women were such that we can hardly refer to them without a flush; so fatal to their morals was apt to be the struggle to secure their virtue." He anticipates a gradual, but hardly a slow, reform from the abolition of the present arrangement by which the majority of women have very little other prospect before them than the choice between selling themselves to men as slaves for life and selling themselves as playthings for an hour, and he shows how in his emancipated society sexual vice is almost abolished and both men and women are infinitely advanced in true morality by the replacing of the present bondage of wedlock by "the extension of the principle of limited liability to the relations between the sexes." In his new society there are three degrees of marriage; "those which are dissoluble only through the intervention of a court of law" [but in which "the old laws that forbade divorce save as a premium on one sort of vice" are no longer in force]; "those which require the mutual consent of the parties; and those which are voidable at the will of one of the parties." Under this arrangement sexual vice is reduced to a minimum, especially as with it is combined a reversal of the cruel treatment accorded to the greatest victims of that vice in the nineteenth and earlier centuries. This is illustrated in the history of the most refined and charming of all the women introduced into his story, who in girlhood had been betrayed by an evil-minded man. "Her unhappiness on this score was sufficient without the added agony of the social stigma once attached to the hopeless victim of the seducer's arts. Society nowadays accords to a girl under such circumstances either a passing laugh of good-natured ridicule or a smile of kindly compassion, and bids her be more careful in the choice of her next lover. Its serious reprobation falls upon the man. Thenceforth he has no chance of getting a decent woman to accept him. The sex itself avenges its betrayed member!"

Much honour is due to Mr Maitland for the fearless manner in which, delicately and incisively, he discusses these questions of conventional and real morality in 'By and By.' He also discusses a great number of other subjects, and all in the course of a vigorous and attractive "romance." We have no intention of telling the plot of his story. That, indeed, is slight; but it is none the less interesting for its slightness. Many parts of it, like the description of the insurrection in Abyssinia and the flight and death of its Emperor, are told with great dramatic power. Some episodes, however, appear inartistic. Having given one unsuitable wife to Criss, it is difficult to see why he should have fastened upon him another, and, as regards the first, the base and futile efforts made to reform her appear quite out of keeping with the otherwise noble character of the hero. Had Mr. Maitland desired to show that the unreasonable passion of love as it is fostered nowadays by novels and religious literature is a form of madness that the wisest men cannot hope to cure, it seems to us that he might have chosen a better way than the one he adopts.

One fanciful passage in the book reads curiously in connection with a statement that has lately been made in the scientific journals. Mr Maitland's angels are without sex in youth, and he has a pretty description of the way in which two, in accordance with the progress of their moral and intellectual growth, develop into male and female. It is now reported that a scientific lady in America had discovered that butterflies, according to the food given to them, can be converted to either sex. Does Mr Maitland consider that in the highest as well as in the lowest varieties of animal life--for his angels are only rarified humanity--sex can be made a mere matter of training?

B.

Percy Greg. Across the Zodiac: The Story of a Wrecked Record. Two volumes. Trübner & Co., 1880. [From The Saturday Review, February 14, 1880, pp 219-20].

Of late years there has been a notable revival of the fashion of producing imaginary travels and adventures in which the field of the writer's fancy or satire is enlarged by calling up visions of regions or worlds outside our real experience as to inhabitants, situation in space, or both. The late Lord Lytton amused himself for a while with concealing the authorship of The Coming Race, a very successful work of the kind. Then came Mr. S. Butler's Erewhon--also issued anonymously at first--which, if not equal to The Coming Race in workmanship and semi-poetical imagination, must be allowed, we think, to excel it in humour and originality of conception. M. Jules Verne has shot up two Americans and one Frenchman from the earth to the moon, which they failed to hit by no fault in their arrangements or calculations, but by the perturbation due to an unmannerly and unaccountable meteorite which crossed their path, so that they fell back into the sea; where the cylindro-conical shell, being of course hollow to hold them and their provisions, floated with ease and security till a rescue expedition which had been wildly taking soundings all over the ocean at last found them playing dominoes. The story is told with a most ingenious combination of American vastness, French airiness, and minute scientific plausibility. But an attempt to trace all the literature of this class, even in the last ten or twenty years, would be as tiresome as (with all respect for the splendid poetical qualities shown by Victor Hugo in the passage) Don Ruy Gomez's catalogue of the portraits of his ancestors is found on the stage. "J'en passe, et des meilleurs" can hardly be our phrase; for we think we have named the best recent specimens. A very curious monograph might be produced by any qualified worker who would follow up the parentage of these books through Voltaire's Micromegas, Gulliver, Rabelais, More's Utopia, and back to Lucian, if not further; it might be difficult to stop short of the Odyssey. In any case, we must now pass on to the latest comer now before us. Mr. Percy Greg has given two whole volumes to a course of adventures in Mars. We are disposed to affirm as a general proposition that the length of two volumes is too much for an exercise of fancy of this kind; but we are unable to deny in this case that, notwithstanding its length, the tale of unearthly adventure is made to maintain its interest. The work shows great powers of description, no small constructive imagination, and the general merits of practised and forcible writing; against which there are to be set two grave drawbacks--an almost entire absence of humour, and the presence of obtrusive moral. Mr. Percy Greg seems to have chosen pessimism as a profession, and he descants on his theme with all that exquisite relish which appears to sweeten a settled conviction that the world is in a thoroughly bad way, especially when one has the power of compelling attention by expressing it in elegant language. The state of Mars, as described in the record of Mr. Greg's imaginary adventurer, appears to show in a parable what mankind have to expect, or may plausibly be represented as having to expect, from the further progress of science. It is curious that in this book, as in The Devil's Advocate, the author has used a form of writing most effectually fitted to conceal the extent to which he believes in his own prophecies.

His tale purports to be the translation of a MS. written in Latin of a medieval style and in a strange cipher, the sole coherent relic of a quasi-meteoric catastrophe witnessed by an ex-Colonel of the Confederate army on an unknown island in the South Pacific. We are left to infer that this was the final wreck of the extra-terrestrial voyager and his aerial craft. The circumstances account for a good many lacunae in the MS., which have a way of occurring whenever an exact statement is demanded by the context. As for the traveller, his origin and country on this earth are left in much obscurity. The best conjecture we can piece together is that he is an Italian soldier of fortune who has served in India under Mahometan princes, and more or less conformed to Islam; at least he invokes Allah in the course of one desperate encounter. Yet he holds strongly to European ideas of morality and family institutions. Where or how he got the scientific knowledge and command of material resources necessary for the construction of his flying-machine is wholly unexplained. It would seem that he had no family ties, and was in no hurry about returning to the earth within any particular time; for he finds no serious difficulty in marrying a wife in Mars. The date of his journey is laid about 1830, for some reason which likewise does not appear. Five-and-thirty years have to be accounted for between his leaving the earth and his disastrous return; and the time covered by his sojourn in Mars, though we have not calculated it, can in any case be only a small part of this. Perhaps the rest will be filled up in a possible continuation of which Mr. Greg speaks. These remarks are of course pedantic; but we have a purpose in making them. It seems to us that the introductory machinery of Across the Zodiac is an example of a fault extremely difficult to avoid in this kind of writing. It is elaborate, and yet vague; it is always raising questions of detail which it does not even pretend to satisfy. The safer way, which Mr. Greg has presumably spurned as too easy, is to deal in sweeping assertions and invent the first reason that comes to hand for not giving particulars. The telling of impossible things, with a show of minute and probable explanation is an art of itself, and a very difficult one. We are not sure, indeed, that Swift is not the sole master of it. Mr. Greg's middle course neither satisfies the imagination nor leaves it free; we have a feeling of being imposed on.

Lord Lytton's "Coming Race," it may be remembered, were of gigantic stature, were generally admirable if not very interesting, had advanced far beyond us in science, and also cultivated mesmerism and other branches of so-called occult knowledge. In the population of Mars the stature is diminutive, and the other qualities are unequally divided between two factions. The majority are slaves of science. They have lost all religion, all public spirit, a good deal of their morality, and most of their interest in life. Disease and old age, as we understand them on the earth, have been abolished for centuries, yet the people somehow die of no other apparent cause than being tired of living. A century or two of communism which preceded the reign of science has thoroughly disgusted them with politics, and the whole planet is under an enlightened despotism. After abolishing the subjection of women for a time, and greatly misliking the experiment, they have reverted to polygamy. They practise infanticide in moderation, but disapprove of euthanasia on the ground of its obvious inconvenience. They cannot understand how anybody should find any pleasure in dangerous pursuits, or be willing to incur danger to save another from it. But there is a minority which in secret maintains different principles. This body has preserved traditions of spiritual and transcendental doctrine, and has cultivated the practical application of them to the point of making itself extremely formidable. If any of the profane attempt to do a mischief to the Order or betray its secrets, they die suddenly, or go mad, or fall off a housetop. It fares with them as with the sceptics once mentioned by a South-Indian villager to a Government official. Some men had been now and then known, he said, to express doubt if there were any such person as John Company; but of such it was always observed that something bad soon happened to them. Specimens of these mysterious powers are given in the course of the story; and we fail to perceive, notwithstanding an attempted explanation, what was to prevent the Order from subduing the whole planet. The terrestrial voyager is admitted into this society, and by family interest (his Martial father-in-law being the chief man) attains high rank in it, on which the romantic part of the story depends. We shall not further disclose it than by saying that at the end of the book there is an attempted revolution, and a fight quite as lively as terrestrial ones; though, as the traveller notes, it is very ill conducted, in consequence of the art of war having been forgotten for many centuries. The terrestrial visitor flies away after seeing the triumph of his surviving friends assured, and putting a final touch to it by letting down his air-ship so as to crush a considerable number of the profane mob.

The appliances of life in Mars are described in much detail and with great ingenuity. As for the science, we find it rather disappointing. The phonograph and telephone are in common use, and electricity has superseded all other motive powers. But it is not economically applied, if we may credit the traveller's statement that the heat produced in the working of the electric engines used on board ship is sufficient to warm the interior of the vessel in passing through cold regions. We hear very little about the scientific methods and theories of the Martians. Here are a few of the things which we conceive they ought to have done in all those centuries of uninterrupted scientific progress. They ought to have carried the treatment of problems in physics, by both analytical and graphical methods, to a point far beyond our terrestrial mathematicians; and, as a consequence of this, conceptions which among us are reserved for the higher mathematics would be part of the common stock of all educated people and be familiarly used in conversation. They would be in possession of a complete symbolical logic (the more necessary because having only one language would make their verbal reasoning very liable to fallacies), and they would have reduced statistics to a deductive science. They would have decomposed most of the so-called elements; the study of molecular chemistry would have led to the invention of new mathematical methods, and these again to new physical researches; and some Martial Laplace might have established his fame by a classical treatise on the constitution of an atom. The traveller, however, does not seem to have informed himself much about science in the abstract; or perhaps his purely scientific notes were in another book, which was destroyed. In short, there runs through the whole work the feeling we have already expressed, that it is both too much and too little. The Martians, or Martialists, or whatever it should be, are too like terrestrial men. There is really no reason, save the want of a sufficient undiscovered continent, why the adventure should not as well have taken place on the earth. Nor is there any that we can see why Mr. Percy Greg should not write an interesting and successful terrestrial romance if he chose; which, after all, is a more legitimate and enduring form of literary art.

There are one or two other fictions of the Utopian class which we should like just to mention. One is, like Mr. Greg's, a prophecy of the triumphs of science; but, unlike Across the Zodiac, it is the work of a man who saw the day of science coming, and was in nowise afraid. We mean the splendid fragment of Bacon--unhappily but a fragment--entitled The New Atlantis. Another is an anonymous book, called Adventures in the Moon and Other Worlds (London, 1836), excelling in the qualities of humour and a light hand, which we rather miss in Mr. Greg's work. It is almost forgotten now; but its merit is very great. At the time it was thought by some good judges worthy of Peacock. We may also mention a very recently published little volume, Erchomenon; or, the Republic of Materialism (Sampson Low & Co.), in which the conditions of the society described are in some respects curiously like those of Mr. Greg's Martialists; only the scene is laid in the England of six hundred years hence, to which the narrator is transported in a dream. The last piece of the kind we wish to note is contained in a few pages of Sir Humphry Davy's Consolations in Travel, and is distinguished by the success with which unlikeness to terrestrial conditions, yet within the general laws of the solar system, is indicated. The narrator falls into a vision in which he is transported to Saturn by a powerful and beneficent guide, who is manifest to him only as a voice. The inhabitants are creatures with six wings, brilliantly coloured, and furnished with convolutions of tubes which are the organs of senses unknown to dwellers on the earth. Their habitations are suspended in the air and moveable, and they can direct them at will to various regions of the atmosphere for pleasure or research. Strife is unknown to them, their passions are few, and their only ambitions are intellectual. In this pure and noble exercise of scientific fancy there is a very different sort of pleasure from any that can be found in Mr. Percy Greg's powerfully and studiously disagreeable picture of the institutions and manners of Mars.

Back to Home