II.
ITER EXTATICUM COELESTE.
The hours and days that I devoted to the study of these psychologicaland telepathical questions did not prevent my observing Mars through thetelescope, and taking geographical drawings of it, every time that ouratmosphere, so often cloudy, would permit. Besides, it may be realizedthat while in the study of Nature and in science all questions arerelated to each other, yet that astronomy and psychology are mostclosely united to each other, since the psychic universe has thematerial world for its habitat, while astronomy has for its object thestudy of the regions of eternal life, and we could form no idea of theseregions if we did not know them astronomically. In fact, whether we knowit or not, we are living now, at this moment, in heavenly regions, andall beings, whatever they may be, are eternally citizens of heaven. Itwas not without a secret divination of things that antiquity made Uraniathe Muse of all the sciences.
My mind had been occupied with the planet Mars for a long time, when oneday, in a solitary ramble on the edge of a wood, after several hours ofJuly heat, I seated myself at the foot of a clump of oak-trees, and wasnot long in dropping off to sleep.
The heat was overpowering, the landscape silent, the Seine seemed quietas a canal at the bottom of the valley. I was strangely surprised onwaking up after a few minutes' nap at no longer recognizing thelandscape nor the trees, nor the river flowing at the foot of the hill,nor the undulating meadows which stretched far away to the distanthorizon. The setting sun was smaller than we are accustomed to see it,the air thrilled with harmonious sounds unknown to Earth, and insectsas large as birds were fluttering about on the leafless trees, whichwere covered with gigantic red flowers. Astonishment made me spring upwith so energetic a bound that I found myself on my feet feelingsingularly light and buoyant. I had taken but a few steps before itseemed to me that more than half the weight of my body had evaporatedduring my sleep. This inner sensation struck me even more forcibly thanthe metamorphosis of Nature spread out before me.
I could hardly believe my eyes or senses. Besides, my eyes were not atall the same. I did not hear in the same way, and I realized at oncethat my organization had developed several new senses quite differentfrom those of our terrestrial body, especially a magnetic sense, bywhich one being can communicate with another without the necessity oftranslating thoughts audibly by words. This sense reminds one of themagnetic needle, which, from a cellar in the Paris Observatory, startsand shivers when an aurora borealis appears in Siberia, or when anelectric explosion breaks out in the Sun.
The orb of day had just sunk in a distant lake, and the rosy gleams oftwilight were hovering far down the sky, like a last dream of light. Twomoons were beginning to shed their rays at different heights: the first,a crescent, hung over the lake in whose bosom the Sun had disappeared;the second, in its first quarter, was much higher, and towards the east.They were very small, and but distantly resembled the immense torch ofour earthly nights. It seemed as if they shed their bright but feeblerays regretfully. I looked from one to the other in utter bewilderment.Perhaps the strangest thing in all this strange spectacle was that thewestern moon, which was about three times as large as its companion inthe east, although five times smaller than our terrestrial moon,travelled through the sky with a motion very easy to follow with theeye, and seemed to speed quickly from right to left to join itscelestial sister in the west.
A third moon, or rather a brilliant star, could also be seen in the lastbeams of the setting Sun, which were dying away. Smaller than thesmallest of the satellites, it showed no appreciable disk, but its lightwas dazzling. It looked out from the evening sky as Venus in her mostbrilliant season beams in our own heavens, when the "shepherd's star"reigns like a queen over balmy evenings in spring, and weaves the fabricof happy dreams.
The more brilliant stars were already lighting up the sky. I recognizedArcturus with its golden rays, Vega so white and pure, the seven starsof the Septentrion, and several of the zodiacal constellations. Theevening star, the new vesper, was shining in the constellation of theFishes. After having studied its position in the heavens for a fewmoments, and finding out by the constellations where I was myself; afterexamining the two satellites and reflecting on the lightness of my ownbody,--I was convinced that I was on the planet Mars, and that thebeautiful evening star was--the Earth!
* * * * *
My eyes rested on it with that feeling of mournful love which thrillsthe fibres of our hearts when our thoughts fly away to a beloved objectfrom whom we are separated by cruel distance; for a long time I lookedat that fatherland where so many different feelings meet and jostle eachother, and I thought,--
"What a pity it is that the numberless human beings living on thatlittle habitation do not know where they are! That little Earth is mostbeautiful thus lighted up by the Sun, with its microscopic moon whichlooks like a speck beside it. Borne through the invisible by the divinelaws of attraction, a floating atom in the harmony of the skies, itfills its place and hovers overhead like an angelic island! But itsinhabitants are unaware of it! Singular humanity! They find the Earthtoo wide, so divide themselves up into flocks, and spend their timeshooting one another. In that angelic isle there are as many soldiers asthere are male inhabitants; they are all in arms against one another,and think it glorious to change the names of countries and the colorsof flags, when it would have been so simple a matter to live peacefully.War is the favorite occupation of its nations, and the primordialeducation of the people. Aside from that, they spend their existence inadoring matter. They do not appreciate intellectual worth, areindifferent to the most wonderful problems of creation, and live anobjectless life! What a pity! A citizen of Paris who had never heard thecity's name mentioned, nor that of France, would not be more of astranger than they in their own country. Ah! if they could but see theEarth from here! How delighted they would be to return to it, and howtransformed all their ideas would be, both general and individual! Thenthey would at least know the land they live in; it would be abeginning,--they would study progressively the sublime truths about it,instead of vegetating under a horizonless fog, and after a while theywould live the true life, the intellectual life."
* * * * *
"What honor he pays it! One would think he had left friends in thatprison yonder!"
I had not spoken, but I distinctly heard this sentence, which seemedlike a reply to my inward conversation. Two of the dwellers upon Marswere looking at and had understood me, by virtue of that sixth sense ofmagnetic perception to which I before alluded. I was somewhat confused,and, I must confess, deeply wounded, by this apostrophe. "After all," Ithought, "I love the Earth; it is my country, and I am patriotic." Mytwo neighbors both began to laugh.
"Yes," answered one of them, with unexpected good-nature, "you arepatriotic; any one might know that you have just come from the Earth."
And the elder added,--
"Let your compatriots alone. They will never be any more intelligent orless blind than they are now. They have been there eighty thousand yearsalready, and you yourself acknowledge that they are not yet capable ofthinking. It is really very absurd of you to look at the Earth with suchsorrowful eyes. It is too foolish."
Dear reader, have you not, in your journey through the world, sometimesmet men who were puffed up with imperturbable pride, and who thoughtthemselves sincerely and unquestionably above all the rest of the world?When these proud personages find themselves face to face with anythingsuperior, they are instantly hostile to it, they cannot endure it. Verywell. In the preceding dithyramb (of which you have had but a very poortranslation), I felt myself greatly superior to earthly humanity, sinceI felt pity for it, and invoked for it better days. But when these twoinhabitants of Mars pitied me, and I thought I discovered in them a coldsuperiority to myself, I was for a moment like these foolish, proudpeople. My blood gave one bound, and, restraining myself by a remnant ofFrench politeness, I opened my mouth to say,--
"After
all, gentlemen, the inhabitants of the Earth are not as stupid asyou appear to think, but are worth perhaps more than you."
Unfortunately they did not give me time to begin my sentence, inasmuchas they had understood it all while it was being formed by the vibrationof the substance of the brain.
"Permit me to remark at once," said the younger, "that your planet is anabsolute failure, in consequence of an occurrence which happened aboutten million years ago. It was at the time of the primary period of theearthly genesis. There were plants already, and very fine plants too;the first animals were beginning to appear in the depths of the sea andalong the shores,--mollusks that were headless, deaf, mute, and withoutsex. You know that respiration is all a tree requires for its entirenourishment, and that your most robust oaks, your most gigantic cedars,have never eaten anything, and that that has not prevented their growth.They are nourished solely by respiration. Misfortune, Fatality, hadwilled that a drop of water thicker than the surrounding medium shouldpass through one of the mollusks. Perhaps he liked it. That was thefirst digestive tube, which was to exert so baleful an effect on theentire animal kingdom, and later on mankind itself. The first murdererwas the mollusk who ate. Here we do not eat, have never eaten, and nevershall eat. Creation is developing itself gradually, peacefully, andnobly, as it began. Organisms are nourished; or, to express itdifferently, renew their molecules by a simple respiration, like yourterrestrial trees, each leaf of which is a little stomach. In yourprecious country you can live a single day only on condition of killing.With you, the law of life is the law of death. Here, the idea ofkilling even a bird has never occurred to any one.
"You are all more or less butchers. Your hands are stained with blood,your stomachs are gorged with food. How can you expect to havewholesome, pure, elevated ideas,--I will even say (excuse my frankness)clean ideas,--with such coarse organisms? What souls could live in suchbodies? Reflect a moment, and do not soothe yourself any more with blindillusions, too ideal for such a world."
"What!" I cried, interrupting him, "do you deny us the possibility ofhaving clean ideas? Do you take human beings for animals? Have Homer,Plato, Phidias, Seneca, Virgil, Dante, Columbus, Bacon, Galileo, Pascal,Leonardo, Raphael, Mozart, Beethoven, never had lofty aspirations? Youthink our bodies coarse and repulsive; if you had seen Helen, Phryne,Aspasia, Sappho, Cleopatra, Lucretia Borgia, Agnes Sorel, Diane dePoitiers, Marguerite de Valois, Borghese, Talien, Recamier, Georges, andtheir charming rivals, you would perhaps think differently. Ah, my dearMartial, let me in my turn regret that you know the Earth only fromafar."
"You are mistaken there; I lived in that world for fifty years. That wasenough for me, and I assure you I would not return to it again.Everything is a failure there, even--what seems most delightful to you.Do you imagine that in all the earths of heaven the flowers produce thefruits of the same sorts? Would not that be a little cruel? As for me, Ilike primroses and rosebuds."
"Well, but still," I answered, "notwithstanding all that, there havebeen great minds on the Earth, and creatures really worthy ofadmiration. May we not comfort ourselves with the hope that physicaland moral beauty will go on perfecting themselves more and more asthey have done hitherto, and that intelligence will enlighten itselfprogressively? We do not spend all our time eating. Men will surely end,in spite of their material labors, by giving up a few hours every day tothe development of their understanding. Then probably they will nolonger continue to manufacture little gods in their own image; andperhaps also they will abolish their childish boundaries, so thatharmony and fraternity may reign."
"No, my friend, for if they wished it, they could do so now; but theyare very careful not to. Terrestrial man is a little animal who on theone hand feels no need of thinking, not even having independence ofsoul, and who on the other likes to fight, and squarely establishesright by might. Such is his good pleasure, and such is his nature. Youwill never make peaches grow on a thorn-bush. Remember that the mostexquisite beauties, to whom you alluded just now, are but coarsemonsters compared to the aerial women of Mars, who live on our springair, the perfume of our flowers, and are so captivating in the veryquivering of their wings, in the ideal kiss of a mouth which has nevereaten, that if Dante's Beatrice had been of such a nature, the immortalFlorentine would never have been able to write two of the parts of his'Divine Comedy;' he would have begun with Paradise, and could never haveleft it. Reflect that our youths have as much innate science asPythagoras, Archimedes, Euclid, Kepler, Newton, Laplace, and Darwinafter all their laborious studies; our twelve senses put us in directcommunication with the universe; we feel from here Jupiter's attractionas he passes, a hundred million leagues away. We see the rings of Saturnwith the naked eye, we detect the coming of a comet, and our body isimpregnated with the solar electricity which puts all Nature invibration. Here there has never been either religious fanaticism orexecutioners, or martyrs or international divisions or wars, but fromthe first, humanity, naturally peaceful, and freed from all materialneeds, has lived independent in body and mind, in a constantintellectual activity, raising itself unhindered to the knowledge of thetruth. But come over here."
* * * * *
I walked a few steps on the mountain-top with my new acquaintances, andcoming in sight of the other slope, I saw multitudes of differentcolored lights flitting about in the air. It was the inhabitants, who,when they desire it, become luminous at night. Aerial cars, apparentlyformed of phosphorescent flowers, were carrying orchestras and choruses;one of them passed us, and we took our places in it, in the midst of acloud of perfumes. The sensations which I experienced were singularlyunlike any which I had ever felt on the Earth, and this first night onMars passed like a rapid dream; for the dawn found me still in theaerial car conversing with my entertainers, their friends, and theirindescribably lovely companions. What a panorama with the rising sun!Flowers, fruits, perfumes, fairy-like palaces rose on the islands withtheir orange vegetation; the waters stretched themselves out like limpidmirrors, and joyous aerial couples were whirling down to theseenchanting shores. There, all material work is done by machines, anddirected by a few perfected races of animals whose intelligence is verynearly of the same order as that of mankind on the Earth. Theinhabitants live only for and by the mind; their nervous system hasreached such a degree of development that each one of these beings, atonce very delicate and very strong, seems an electric battery, and theirmost sensual impressions, felt more by their souls than their bodies,surpass a hundredfold all those that our five terrestrial sensestogether could ever offer us. A kind of summer palace illuminated by therays of the rising Sun opened beneath our aerial gondola. My neighbor,whose wings were fluttering with impatience, placed her delicate footupon a tuft of flowers which rose between two jets of perfume. "Will youreturn to the Earth?" she asked, holding out her arms to me.
"Never," I cried, springing towards her.
* * * * *
But at that moment I found myself alone near the wood on the slope ofthe hill, at whose feet the Seine was winding with undulating curves.
"_Never_," I repeated, trying to grasp the sweet, vanished dream oncemore. Where had I been? It was beautiful. The Sun had just set, and theplanet Mars, then very brilliant, was already shining in the sky. "Ah!"I said, as a fugitive beam reached me, "I have been there!" Drawn by thesame attraction, the two neighboring planets are looking at each otherthrough transparent space. May we not catch a first glimpse of theeternal journey from this celestial fraternity? The Earth is no longeralone in the universe. The panoramas of the infinite are beginning toopen themselves out. Whether we live here or near by, we are not thecitizens of a country or of a world, but are in very truth the _Citizensof Heaven_!