THE GREEK GULLIVER.
WE must confess to the intellectual defect, if it be a defect, as it probably is, of finding but little enjoyment in the Mfinchausen style of story, the literature of satiric exaggeration. The fun in such stories always seems to us too broad, and the satire either too palpable or too savage, to stimulate true literary zest. " Gulliver's Travels" is perhaps an exception, for in that book one can admire, besides the keenness of the satire,—which, however, sinks in the chapters on Yahoos and. Honynyhyms into mere brutality,—the wonderful accuracy of detail which Swift in his most grotesque exaggerations always preserved. His giants' hands are always in exact proportion to his giants' heads. We are conscious, however, even in reading "Gulliver" of lacking the intense appreciation some critics feel, and with Mfinchausen's best stories before us are aware of weariness, as when we listen to the boasters, now growing few, whose talk is always of themselves and their feats, and whom the Baron's stories were intended to make ridicu- lous. Something of disgust afflicts us at Peter Wilkins's poor conception of flying women, which scorned, we fancy, to a past generation even poetical ; and in the hundred tales of the day of imaginary lands, peopled by races with novel ways and imaginary powers, nothing genuinely attracts U9 except the central thought, as, for example, that of Lord Lytton in the "Coming Race," that will could become, under cer- tain conditions, an effluent and, as it were, visible energy. Verne's stories, the secret of the success of which is the exaggeration of science, till knowledge of physics becomes, in fact, a supernatural agency working miracles among persons strictly of the nineteenth century, as, for instance, in "Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea," and its two very inferior sequels, strike us as tiresome, as requiring for enjoyment an assent to a fundamental hypothesis which we have not to give. We cannot, therefore, appre- ciate the adaptation of Lucian's "Vera Historia," just given to the world by Mr. Church as its accomplished author probably appreciates it himself. We see the fun, we believe, and the pungent little hits at popular theological beliefs, the raps at old and poetic legends, the contempt thrown on popular cosmogony ; but the machinery of the story, the exaggeration of natural history till birds and beasts and fishes, and even trees and. plants, become claimonic monstrosities, excites in us no admiration. We can be amused with the quaint distortion of thought shown in the story that the travellers diluted fishes caught in rivers of wine, and therefore intoxicating, with fishes caught in water, and therefore watery, and so made of the two cheering, but not intoxicating food; but the mighty monster of the sea, in whose stomach was an inhabited island eighty miles round, gives us no more pleasure than the measurements by which the old Hindoos strove to express the inexpressible die- tuxes and times of infinity. There is nothing in the big fish but his bigness, and he might as well have held the universe in his maw. A man with his beard, growing above his knee, a foot consisting of one toe, and tears of honey, does not strike us as a Brobdignagiau does, as a new creature, but as something built of words, and not realised in the imagination. It is a weariness to read of him as great as to indulge in a day-
dream without limitations. You can dream with interest of the uses to which you can put an impossible fortune, but just imagine the fortune limitless, and the thought instantly becomes meaningless. The trained imagination insists on
• A Traveller's True Tale. After the Greek of Lucian of Samosate. 13y Alfred J. Church, M.A. With 12 Illustrations by C. 0. Murray. London Seeley, Jaokson, and Halliday. 1880. limits, just as the trained. intellect does, before it can be entranced. Mahommed knew that, as Lucian did not, and numbered for his followers the enjoyments he promised, instead of simply affirming that they were limitless. We turn from the ox-headed people who eat human flesh, and the ships of
pumpkin-shells ninety feet long, with a sensation of distaste, and only genuinely enjoy when Lucian gives the rein to his fancy in a different direction, and enables us to see what a Greek would have invented, had ho been in Mahommed's position, for a physical paradise :—
"When this sentence had been given, immediately our chains fell off of their own accord, and we wore loosed by our guards and led into the city, to the Banqueting House of the Blessed. Now this city is wholly built of gold, and the wall which encircles it is of emerald ; and it has seven gates, each of them of cinnamon-wood, made in one piece. And the pavement of the city and all the space that is within the walls is of pure ivory. There are temples to all the gods in it, these being built of boryl-stones, and in the temple very great altars of amethyst, every altar being of one amethyst. On these altars they offer sacrifice, and every sacrifice is of a hundred boasts. And round about the city there flows a river of fragrant oil, more beautiful than can be conceived, the breadth of which is 100 royal cubits, and the depth such that a man can easily swim in it. There are baths in the city, groat houses of glass, and these are heated with fires of cinnamon-wood. But in these baths they use not water; but dew. The clothes which they wear are of spider-web, very fine, and of a purple colour. They have no bodies, nor flesh, nor can they be touched; but yet, though they have the form and semblance only of men, they stand and more, and think and speak. It seemed to me when I saw them as if it were the bare soul, clothed only with a certain likeness of the body, that did these things. But no man would know that what ho sees has not a bodily substance, unless he sought to touch it. For these people, though they are shadows, are yet shadows that stand upright, and not such as we see here, cast upon the ground or upon a wall. In thia country none grow old, bat whatever a man's ago may be when he comes hither, at that he re- mains. Nor have they in their land any night, nor yet the day in its full brightness ; but as the twilight is with us, when it grows very mar to the morning, but the sun has not yet risen, such is the light that prevails continually among them. Also they have but one season in their year, for it is always spring-time with them ; and they have only one wind that blows, and that is the west wind. And the whole land is covered with every kind of flower and shrub that is, both of the wild and of the garden sorts. The vines which they have bear their fruit twelve times in the year, so that in every month there is a vintage. As to the pomegranates and the apples, and all other kinds of fruit, these, they told me, ripened not twelve, but thirteen times in the year, for that in one month, which they call the month of Minos, they ripen twice. As to their wheat, it does not bear ears such as we have among us, but loaves at the end of the stalk, roady-made and baked for eating. Round about the city there are three hundred and sixty and live springs of water, and as many more of honey, and of perfume five hundred, though these, indeed, are smaller than the springs of water and honey ; there are seven rivers of milk, and of wine eight."
That touch about the twilight, that exquisitely sensuous dis- tinction between the early and therefore cool twilight and the hotter twilight of evening, tells of the very soul of the Greek,— the Greek of Asia, restless amidst his summer if the light were too strong, the Greek who made Antioch, and shrouded. his pleasure-city in dark groves.
There must, however, be in many minds a genuine enjoyment in these extravagances, such as we are unable to feel. Lucian's "True Story" has lived down through the ages, and has been praised by many generations. " Gulliver's Travels" has survived deluges of children's
books, and its first part receives constantly the high honour of insertion among carefully edited fairy-stories. Baron Miinchauseu still circulates and sells, and has reached in several countries the dignity of 6clitions tl luxe, M. Jules Verne has made a fortune, and is so sought as a story-teller that he is becoming hardly pressed for subjects on which to employ his novel supernatural agency. We suppose there is in some European, as in all Asiatic minds, a pleasure in seeing the imagination disport itself unrestrained by laws, akin to the pleasure English humouriats feel in some forms of nonsenae,—humour uncon- fined within any intellectual boundaries. They enjoy the mighty pumpkin as others enjoy the Jabberwook, That the tendency exists in some races cannot be denied. The Hindoo revels in descriptions of impossible dimensions and absurd performances, and cannot see that in a spade with a
handle a billion of miles long there is no grandeur, or that a god on a gigantic elephant, or a snake leagues long is, beside Homer's goddesses, who moved by pure volition, but a poverty-stricken conception. The merely gigantic seems to excite some imaginations with a sense of awe, till they derive the pleasures of admiration froin the description
of a bird that can fly to a mountain-top with a ship and its passengers in its beak. The conception is only that of a bird, and it might as easily be made to fly away with a world ; but still, they derive from the mere exaltation of size a pleasure as if from originality. The comedy, too, of exaggeration is felt by some people very forcibly. Anything enormous strikes them as funny, and their enjoyment of a Miinchausen story, such as Marryat used often to tell, arises not from the ridicule thrown on liars, but from something comic in the very exaggeration itself. They do not laugh when they hear that the enemy's fire shotted all the guns in the Bucephalus,' because that bold lie makes old sailors' yarns ridiculous ; but because of the thing itself, which arouses in them, untrue as they see it to be, the sense of surprise that is said to be the foundation of laughter. There exists, probably, in the majority of minds a hunger for the luxury of wonder which can be gratified with very coarse food, and which is gratified even by non- sense as mad as that of the "Vera Historia," where the old Greek of Syria—who may have known something, by the way, of Rabbinical legend—after writing the fine passage we have quoted, places in his Land of the Blessed trees of glass, whose fruits are drinking-cups, which when set before the guest fill themselves of themselves with wine. That seems to us no more imaginative than the Land of Cockaigne, where roast chickens fly about crying, "Come, eat me 1" and not half so humorous ; but there is some mental mood which it delights, and there are men who chuckle over it internally, as over some conceit of rare and mirth-moving in- congruity. We wonder if they would be equally moved by a new story of the kind. There are men alive who could tell such stories, with far more both of humour and of true exag- geration in them than Lucian, or even Swift, whom we must still believe master of the method; and we wonder if the stories would now meet with an appreciation which would keep them a thou- sand years,—whether fresh generations would chuckle over fresh displays of the humour of wild exaggeration. The prince of that style of literature is still among us,—he who made the world. in which the only way to advance is to recede, who wrote the song of the "Walrus and the Carpenter," and who made all childland more sensible, by pouring through it a flood of non- sense. Will not Lewis Carroll try P
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