FICTION:
A PREHISTORICAL NOVEL.*
TILE present writer can have been little more than ten years old when, he remembers, he spent a whole morning stock still on a crowded pavement, his nose glued to Jack. London Before Adam. He sighs now to think of the delight that The Long Journey would have given him at that age. It is a romantic, almost an epic presentation of the history of primi- tive man, from before the coming of the Ice to the earliest Vikings, treated in an episodic manner : that is to say, the author regards each successive advance as being the work of a single revolutionary individual, a single significant genera- tion followed by centuries of conservativism, rather than of a smooth evolutionary process. He is thus able to concentrate his artistic fire, to avoid that dissipation which the hugeness of the theme tends to engender ; to give his work a hero, or rather a series of heroes.
But it must not be presumed that The Long Journey is a book for boys ; it is a book which a boy also—if he have a romantic passion for the primitive—will most certainly enjoy : a very different matter indeed. The force and concentration of its style will undoubtedly move him, though its humour may miss him—except such passages as this, which concerns primitive man's relations with his fellow animals
Before the elephant they lay flat, literally, in the most profound subjection ; he was to see that they would not stand up against him : down with you, every man, when Father Elephant shows himself ! And the great pachyderm had to step carefully to avoid treading on the courteous people in the grass. The tiger shows an evil grin, at a distance ; he, too, has a respect for the elephant, but cannot help hinting at the unfairness of the match between himself and the pachyderm : it is a low trick of the elephant to wear pegs in his mouth and cover himself with slates."
Or such another, of their relations with each other :- " The Forest Folk were divided into many herds, each with its leader : they despised and kept clear of each other ; but if their poths,unavoidably met the result was a single combat ; each leader dealt his chest resounding blows and abused the other for half a day on end, without budging from the spot, until something or other occurred to separate them, such as a fall of rain or the total hoarse- ness of one of the parties."
It is from this curious anthropoid in the tropical grasses, which Mr. Jensen treats with a half-affectionate irony, that he traces the rise of the human race. First, there is the coming of fire t the Scandinavian Prometheus who brings it
* The Long Journey : Fire and Zoo. By Johannes V. Jensen. London' Gyldenthal. [1s. 6d. net.]
down to his people from a crack in the volcano, and further invents for them the axe and other useful things. He is naturally soon identified with the divine gift he brings, and the romantic hero grows distressingly obese upon the fat of offering, until at last his tribe, in sudden panic, sacrifice him on his own altar . . and then, tradition grows. Naturally it was not they, but the angry gods who worked his martyrdom I But, nevertheless, those who partook of his " funeral " receive a peculiar respect, as having a bit of the god within them
It is noticeable that each successive stage starts againz from the beginning. When Carl (in whom the features of Odin arc
recognizable) stays behind to fight the Ice which is gradually driving his fellows to the south, it is once more without fire that he makes his stand ; it is not, really, till he has con- quered without it that lie discovers how to knock it from stones. And when White Bear—Thor—who comes to build the first ship, the first chariot, is exiled from his people, lie, too, has to start again from the beginning, build up his life by his own wit. It is not till he comes in contact with the " Badgers," the descendants of those who had given in to the ice and migrated before it, that one realizes how much the northern race had developed, both mentally, physically, and consequently morally.
Mr. Jensen has an extraordinarily vivid descriptive power. His language is like one of the primitive horses—a live and wriggling thing to whose back he clings with astonishing skill.
To quote almost any passage would be to delight the reader with his imaginativeness and power of words. But probably the most impressive passage of all—too long, unfortunately, for quotation—is the description of Carl's vision of the remote future, in which, by the symbol of a forest that is somehow human, through which a vague animal creation moves, he foreshadows in a way impossible otherwise to do the evolution of a kind of creature as far above man as the beast is beyond the vegetable. It is a passage of that curious lyricism which is half a virtue, half a vice of the Scandinavian writers.
But back to earth! The satire of the following passage is surely delightful by way of conclusion:— "When the women were not at their dainty arts by the fire they wove themselves clothes, each finer and more extravagant than the last, bid always in the strictest conformity with the general taste. One century it was absolutely necessary to wear nothing but a polar bear's skin, which had to be open all down the front ; the polar bears were almost exterminated, and the women never went out of doors, because the fashion was such a chilly one ; but what were they to do ? What made it indispensable to dress in this particular way was that nobody on any account might have the smallest glimpse of a woman's back. A later and more sober age found it difficult to understand that people of olden time could be such unfortunate victims of a one-sided modesty."
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