by M. P. Shiel
will understand what I mean when you consider thequite recent date of, say, the introduction of anaesthetics orantiseptics, the discovery of the knee-jerk, bacteriology, or even ofsuch a doctrine as the circulation of the blood. We are at this verytime, if I mistake not, on the verge of new insights which will enableman to laugh at disease--laugh at it in the sense of over-ruling itsnatural tendency to produce death, not by any means in the sense ofdestroying its ever-expanding _existence_. Do you know that at thismoment your hospitals are crammed with beings in human likenesssuffering from a thousand obscure and subtly-ineradicable ills, all ofwhom, if left alone, would die almost at once, but ninety in thehundred of whom will, as it is, be sent forth "cured," likemissionaries of hell, and the horrent shapes of Night and Acheron, tomingle in the pure river of humanity the poison-taint of their proteanvileness? Do you know that in your schools one-quarter of the childrenare already purblind? Have you gauged the importance of your tremendousconsumption of quack catholicons, of the fortunes derived from theirsale, of the spread of modern nervous disorders, of toothless youth andthrice loathsome age among the helot-classes? Do you know that in thecourse of my late journey to London, I walked from Piccadilly Circus toHyde Park Corner, during which time I observed some five hundredpeople, of whom twenty-seven only were perfectly healthy, well-formedmen, and eighteen healthy, beautiful women? On every hand--with athrill of intensest joy, I say it!--is to be seen, if not yetcommencing civilisation, then progress, progress--wide as theworld--toward it: only here--at the heart--is there decadence, fattydegeneration. Brain-evolution--and favouring airs--and the ripeningtime--and the silent Will of God, of God--all these in conspiracy seemto be behind, urging the whole ship's company of us to some undreamableluxury of glory--when lo, this check, artificial, evitable. Less death,more disease--that is the sad, the unnatural record; childrenespecially--so sensitive to the physician's art--living on by hundredsof thousands, bearing within them the germs of wide-spreading sorrow,who in former times would have died. And if you consider that theproper function of the doctor is the strictly limited one of curing thecurable, rather than of self-gloriously perpetuating the incurable, youmay find it difficult to give a quite rational answer to this simplequestion: _why?_ Nothing is so sure as that to the unit it is acruelty; nothing so certain as that to humanity it is a wrong; to saythat such and such an one was sent by the All Wise, and must_therefore_ be not merely permitted, but elaborately coaxed and forced,to live, is to utter a blasphemy against Man at which even the ribaldtongue of a priest might falter; and as a matter of fact, society, injust contempt for this species of argument, never hesitates to hang,for its own imagined good, its heaven-sent catholics, protestants,sheep, sheep-stealers, etc. What then, you ask, would I do with theseunholy ones? To save the State would I pierce them with a sword, orleave them to the slow throes of their agonies? Ah, do not expect me toanswer that question--I do not know what to answer. The whole spirit ofthe present is one of a broad and beautiful, if quite thoughtless,humanism, and I, a child of the present, cannot but be borne along byit, coerced into sympathy with it. "Beautiful" I say: for if anywherein the world you have seen a sight more beautiful than a group ofhospital _savants_ bending with endless scrupulousness over a littlepauper child, concentering upon its frailty the whole human skill andwisdom of ages, so have not I. Here have you the full realisation of aparable diviner than that of the man who went down from Jerusalem toJericho. Beautiful then; with at least surface beauty, like the serpent_lachesis mutus_; but, like many beautiful things, deadly too,_in_human. And, on the whole, an answer will have to be found. As forme, it is a doubt which has often agitated me, whether the centraldogma of Judaism and Christianity alike can, after all, be really oneof the inner verities of this our earthly being--the dogma, that by theshedding of the innocent blood, and by that alone, shall the race ofman find cleansing and salvation. Will no agony of reluctance overcomethe necessity that one man die, "so that the whole people perish not"?Can it be true that by nothing less than the "three days of pestilence"shall the land be purged of its stain, and is this old divinealternative about to confront us in new, modern form? Does theinscrutable Artemis indeed demand offerings of human blood to suage heranger? Most sad that man should ever need, should ever have needed, tofoul his hand in the [Greek: musaron aima] of his own veins! But whatis, is. And can it be fated that the most advanced civilisation of thefuture shall needs have in it, as the first and chief element of itsglory, the most barbarous of all the rituals of barbarism--theimmolation of hecatombs which wail a muling human wail? Is it indeedpart of man's strange destiny through the deeps of Time that he one daybow his back to the duty of pruning himself as a garden, so that he runnot to a waste wilderness? Shall the physician, the _accoucheur,_ ofthe time to come be expected, and commanded, to do on the ephod andbreast-plate, anoint his head with the oil of gladness, and add to thefunction of healer the function of Sacrificial Priest? These you say,are wild, dark questions. Wild enough, dark enough. We know howSparta--the "man-taming Sparta" Simonides calls her--answered them.Here was the complete subordination of all unit-life to the well-beingof the Whole. The child, immediately on his entry into the world, fellunder the control of the State: it was not left to the judgment of hisparents, as elsewhere, whether he should be brought up or not, but acommission of the Phyle in which he was born decided the question. Ifhe was weakly, if he had any bodily unsightliness, he was exposed on aplace called Taygetus, and so perished. It was a consequence of thisthat never did the sun in his course light on man half so godlystalwart, on woman half so houri-lovely, as in stern and stout oldSparta. Death, like all mortal, they must bear; disease, once and forall, they were resolved to have done with. The word which they used toexpress the idea "ugly," meant also "hateful," "vile," "disgraceful"--and I need hardly point out to you the significance of thatfact alone; for they considered--and rightly--that there is nosort of natural reason why every denizen of earth should not beperfectly hale, integral, sane, beautiful--if only very moderate painsbe taken to procure this divine result. One fellow, indeed, calledNancleidas, grew a little too fat to please the sensitive eyes of theSpartans: I believe he was periodically whipped. Under a system so verybarbarous, the super-sweet, egoistic voice of the club-footed poetByron would, of course, never have been heard: one brief egoistic"lament" on Taygetus, and so an end. It is not, however, certain thatthe world could not have managed very well without Lord Byron. The onething that admits of no contradiction is that it cannot manage withoutthe holy citizen, and that disease, to men and to nations, can have butone meaning, annihilation near or ultimate. At any rate, from theseremarks, you will now very likely be able to arrive at someunderstanding of the wording of the advertisements which I sent to thepapers.'
Zaleski, having delivered himself of this singular _tirade_, paused:replaced the sepulchral relief in its niche: drew a drapery of silvercloth over his bare feet and the hem of his antique garment of Babylon:and then continued:
'After some time the answer to the advertisement at length arrived; butwhat was my disgust to find that it was perfectly unintelligible to me.I had asked for a date and an address: the reply came giving a date,and an address, too--but an address wrapped up in cypher, which, ofcourse, I, as a supposed member of the society, was expected to be ableto read. At any rate, I now knew the significance of the incongruouscircumstance that the Latin proverb _mens sana etc._ should be adoptedas the motto of a Greek society; the significance lay in this, that themotto _contained an address_--the address of their meeting-place, or atleast, of their chief meeting-place. I was now confronted with the taskof solving--and of solving quickly, without the loss of an hour--thisenigma; and I confess that it was only by the most violent andextraordinary concentration of what I may call the dissecting faculty,that I was able to do so in good time. And yet there was no specialdifficulty in the matter. For looking at the motto as it stood incypher, the first thing I perceived was that, in order to read thesecret, the heart-shaped figure must be left out of consideration, if
there was any _consistency_ in the system of cyphers at all, for itbelonged to a class of symbols quite distinct from that of all theothers, not being, like them, a picture-letter. Omitting this,therefore, and taking all the other vowels and consonants whetheractually represented in the device or not, I now got the proverb in theform _mens sana in ... pore sano._ I wrote this down, and whatinstantly struck me was the immense, the altogether unusual, number of_liquids_ in the motto--six in all, amounting to no less than one-thirdof the total number of letters! Putting these all together you get_mnnnnr_, and you can see that the very appearance of the "m's" and"n's" (especially when _written_) running into one another, of itselfsuggests a stream of water. Having previously arrived at the conclusionof London as the meeting-place, I could not now
