An Unknown World

by Pierre de Sélènes

  “I arrived at the nomenclature of the thermal baths I’d tried and told him, without attaching any particular importance to it, that the use of Vichy water seemed to have procured me some relief. That was a revelation. ‘Ah!’ he cried. ‘Vichy did you good. Well, Milord, go back to Vichy!’ He stood up. Amazed, I did likewise. The consultation was over. He added, obligingly: ‘That’s three pounds.’”

  Marcel laughed frankly.

  “You’ve had the bad luck,” said Jacques, “to happen upon one of those fakers who exploit public credulity in the name of medicine. But all that results in useful information. If your stomach was tormenting you, it was because it had excellent reasons to do so. One knows that dinners as delicate as they’re lavish are routine in diplomatic society, and, without wishing to offend you, you’d abused them somewhat. Since you’ve been reduced to a regime that has the precious advantage of rendering any excess impossible, your stomach has left you perfectly tranquil.”

  “That’s possible,” Lord Rodilan replied, “but at the risk of a few cramps, I wouldn’t be sorry to find myself sitting at a table in the Yacht Club.”

  By means of attentive study of the physiological structure of the members of the lunar human race, Jacques eventually observed a particularity that had escaped his notice at first, and which explained, to some degree, their moral superiority.

  Freed from the cares of nourishment, they had no need of a sense of taste, and nature, which does nothing unnecessary, had not endowed them with one. Among them, the papillae of the tongue and palate did not receive any impression of various savors, but fulfilled another function. Endowed with a sensibility whose delicacy we can hardly imagine, they formed a kind of electric emission apparatus, and the movements elaborated in the brain that their will imposed on that organ produced waves, which, although very weak, were transmitted to other individuals by means of a receptive organ of equal sensitivity.19 That organ was located in the ear, where a second membrane, analogous to the tympanum but infinitely more delicate, vibrated in its turn and conveyed the impression to the brain.

  Thanks to that sense, with the aid of were translated ungraspable states of mind that escape our observation, thoughts, in being transmitted from one person to another, expressed idea, sentiments and determinations sincerely, and without it being possible to dissimulate them. That sense functioned at the same time as speech.

  In the same way that, among us, several senses exercised simultaneously collaborate in the complete expression of thought or sentiment—the voice in translating ideas; the eyes, the movements of the face and sometimes even gestures completing the manifestation—in the individuals that Jacques was studying, that unknown sense made sincerity the very law of nature.

  Beings who could not dissimulate any of their thoughts or sentiments had never been able to conceive of the idea of lying. There was, in consequence, no scope among them for hypocrisy of fraud. In consequence, there was no deceit, no secret machinations and no intrigues to the profit of unavowed ambitions. Being unable to hide anything, they never thought of hatching plots, planning maneuvers or setting traps. It was impossible to have one thing on the lips and another in the heart. In sum, among the fortunate inhabitants of the Moon, diplomatic science, which is more often than not a science of artifice and lies, was absolutely unknown.

  Jacques had also wondered how, during the many centuries that lunar humankind had been living in those new conditions, the increase of population, if it was subject to the same principles as ours, had not already filled the limited space it inhabited to excess. He had soon realized, however, that births, submissive to the same physiological conditions as on Earth, escaped the law of progression. Nature, in its foresight, had sagely enclosed the development of life, for the human race as for animal species, within inviolable limits. It was content to replace losses; unions were far from being as fecund as among us, and the number of births never exceeded that of deaths.

  Thanks to the vigor of their constitution, the inhabitants of the Moon lived for a long time, beyond the limits we know. They frequently attained a hundred and twenty-five or a hundred and thirty of our years. And in those robust natures, of which no morbid cause damaged the functioning, bodily strength and the faculties of intelligence were conserved without noticeable deterioration into the most advanced age.

  The period of weakening that preceded death was relatively short. Organic activity decreased first, leaving almost intact what physiologists call the “life relationship.” An old man, whose physical strength gradually abandoned him and in whom the nutritive function—which is to say, respiration—diminished, retained his clarity of mind and the vivacity of his sentiments until the end. Resigned, thanks to a sophisticated philosophy to which he owed the incontestable demonstration of a future life, he was slowly extinguished in the midst of his family, addressing his final advice to them, and the last words he pronounced embodied not a desperate adieu but an au revoir full of promise and hope.

  In that sage conclusion, similar to the slumber of someone going to sleep on a completed task, there was nothing lugubrious and sinister, as among us. One never saw the repulsive spectacle of those decompositions that seem to anticipate the tomb, those deplorable collapses of an intelligence that appears to be extinguishing in fragments and leaving nothing in the hands of those surrounding an old man but a miserable rag retaining nothing human but the form.

  XVII. Letters and Arts

  A society whose intellectual and moral culture was so highly developed could not remain inferior in the domain of the arts. All of them, those manifest in time as well as in space, had been assiduously cultivated there for many centuries, and served to maintain the love of the beautiful and the sentiment of virtue.

  In the first rank was literature.

  All genres were represented there, from lyric poetry, whose generous flights rose up toward God in sublime verses, to amiable and charming tales, in which fantasy mingled the gracious creations of a disciplined imagination—which never departed from respect for oneself or others—with the gravest conceptions of reason. The poets celebrated in their hymns the grandeur of the Sovereign Spirit, the marvelous spectacles of nature, the revolutions of the worlds in space, and the leaps of the soul toward infinity—everything that might draw humans out of their inferior condition and reveal within them the sensation of their immortal destiny.

  Admirable epic poems, more beautiful than our Iliads and Odysseys, inspired by an ardent love of humankind, retraced the exploits of ancient times for the education of new ages. There was nothing therein of the cold and incoherent mythology in which the inhabitants of Earth, adoring themselves, divine their worst passions and their most reprehensible actions. Heroes with pure souls passed through them, tall and strong, having in view not the satisfaction of gross desires of culpable ambitions, but the welfare of their fellows. They struggled against natural forces in order to liberate other humans from that servitude and joyfully giving their lives, if that was the result, for those for whom they were making the sacrifice, in order to accomplish progress and increase the sum of happiness. It was in past ages, in the times when lunar humankind had lived on the surface of the satellite, when it too had been obliged, by dint of courage and perseverance, to win its independence and advanced civilization from a hostile nature, that the divine singers found those noble figures for whom respect imposed universal admiration.

  One did not encounter, in that purified literature, anything similar to our dramatic poetry. Among us, in fact, tragedy only puts to work the most disorderly passions. If a flash of grandeur and heroic devotion occasionally traverses that dark night, one only perceives by its light a confused swarm of ardent hatreds, frantic jealousies and unrestrained ambitions; our tragic stage is always streaming with blood and tears.

  Comedy, such as we can conceive it, does not show our sad humankind in a more favorable light. That, it must be said, is because it is merely the excessively faithful reproduction of what we really are. If the catas
trophes with which the characters are mixed up are less cruel and less frightening, they are nevertheless more refined and more subtle in their perfidy. One finds nothing there but knavery and duplicity, unhealthy intrigues in which appeal is made to the vilest passions, and the basest kinds of avarice are displayed. Libidinous old men who are the victims of tricksters, adulterous and coquettish women, young women whose false innocence hides a precocious depravity, thieving valets, procurers of every sort—those are the characters usually agitating in a plot whose complexity and confusion are often the sole merit. And the public guffaws and admirers, as if delighted by the spectacle of its own turpitudes.

  Authors doubtless flatter themselves that they are correcting mores by means of laughter, but that laughter only underlines the immorality of their conceptions, familiarizing the spectators with their miseries and rendering them less odious and more acceptable by familiarization.

  Although, among those beings of a higher moral level, inaccessible to our weaknesses, once could not imagine analogues of our tragic or comic poems, they had not renounced seductive charms and scenic representations in consequence. At the most solemn festivals, the assembled crowds were given spectacle of nature to elevate souls and maintain a cult of gratitude to those who had been the benefactors of humankind. As there was in those ceremonies a character simultaneously religious and patriotic, it was an honor to figure in them and play a role therein, so the actors, if one can give that name to those who were invested with that highly prized mission, were recruited from among the noblest and most intelligent, those who possessed to a high degree the rarest qualities of intellect and imagination.

  It was not a matter, in fact, of reciting, with a more or less perfect memory and a mime more or less adapted to the character of a fictitious individual, the work of a poet traced in advance and invariable in its expression. A theme was given—some great act of devotion, one of those glorious enterprises that had contributed to the emancipation of humankind, to augment the sum of its happiness and prosperity—only the broad outlines being traced. Each of those who were to figure in the drama chose his role, the best adapted to his own nature and sentiments. He then identified with the character he was to represent, penetrating profoundly into his intimate personality, in such a way as to think, feel and act like him. When he had mastered the part, he abandoned himself on the stage to his own inspiration. As the incidents of the action unfolded, he experienced all the sensations involved in those various situations; he spoke in accordance with sentiments truly felt. It was his own personality that was in play, and the spectators had before their eyes not a vain and cold illusion but life in all its reality, in everything that it possesses of the most noble and the most generous.

  The manifestations of the musical art were also concurrent, among the inhabitants of the Moon, with the imposing grandeur of those solemnities. But there, as for the scenic art, works of absolute sincerity were required for people who could only be moved by the truth.

  Thanks to the progress that had been made in the science of acoustics, they could obtain a contribution from all of nature, and give it a role of sorts in their artistic conceptions. They had already taken note of the mysterious sound of the spheres that gravitate in the immensity. Similarly, they perceived and fixed the most fugitive of harmonies, the sound of waves that sometimes break softly on the shore and sometimes, under the action of the wind, crash with a deafening din, the murmur of streams running over plains, birdsong and the delicate rustle of the breeze in foliage.

  On those themes, furnished to them by the environment in which they lived, inspired artists embroidered the most various creations of their fantasy. According to whether they were penetrated by joy or sadness, enthusiasm or melancholy, they adapted those rich and various motifs to their sentiments. They added the expression of their own passions, and they made a whole of it, in which it was impossible to distinguish what they owed to nature from what their creative genius had added.

  Melodies resulted of an inexpressible charm, harmonious concerts whose softness cradled souls tenderly, revealed the noblest sentiments in hearts, and formed a marvelous accompaniment to the great dramatic scenes that unfurled before the eyes of the emotional spectators.

  It was in the capital of the lunar world that these festivals were celebrated, which owed their magnificence not to the puerile or pretentious accumulation of vain ostentations, but to the delicate choice and grandeur of artistic conceptions of which they were the pretext and the occasion. Its inhabitants were not, moreover, the only ones to enjoy these magnificent spectacles. With the means that science had already vulgarized in that privileged world a long time ago, everything that was done and everything that was said on those grandiose stages was immediately transmitted to all the cities and the most remote villages. Those who were unable to go to the place where the government was seated had those imposing before their eyes, with the most scrupulous fidelity. They saw the actors, and they heard and perceived the sound of the instruments. Nothing was lost for them, and, on the days when the cult of the fatherland and virtue was exalted, the entire population of the Moon was united in a common surge of fervor and love.

  Vast halls, expertly designed for viewing and acoustics, received the numerous spectators that the festivals attracted. On widely-spaced tiers, everyone was comfortably seated, and no one was inconvenienced, as in our narrow theaters where people are crammed into the point of asphyxiation, either by neighbors or by the comings and goings of egotistical or distracted individuals who have no scruple about disturbing twenty people to return to their seat. There was no lack of air or space, and furthermore, all the audience members, penetrated by the gravity of the performances, enjoyed the great scenes that unfurled before them with a meditative mind and an emotional heart.

  As those who went to the solemnities in question did not do so to show themselves or to make an ostentatious display of jewels or garish costumes, but in order to abandon themselves to the noblest enjoyments of artistry, the architects who had constructed those vast edifices had taken care to leave the audiences in the shadows and project all the light on to the stage where the actors in the heroic or lyric dramas were moving. What was set before the eyes was life in all its reality and all its intensity.

  Faithful to the traditions of the beautiful, which were transmitted without alteration from generation to generation, painters and sculptors inspired the noblest and purest sentiments. Nothing falsified their superior judgment, the worship of purified form and the sentiment of the ever-renewed beauties of nature. There was never anything therein of the paltry or the contorted, nothing pretentious or artificial, and above all nothing that might degrade souls and, under a false exterior of plastic beauty, give birth to the appetite of vile instincts and degrading acts.

  The gymnasia in which, under the direction of respected masters, the disciples of the great art were formed, did not resound, as among us, with the noise of the quarrels of rival schools; there were no disputes there over form or color; no one there bandied around such labels as “impressionist” or “symbolist.” Only one form of art was known there: the one that combined in a sovereign expression the splendor of form and the nobility of idea.

  Thanks to the greatly perfected means at their disposal, writers and composers were not enslaved by the necessity of noting down their thoughts painfully with the aid of slowly-drawn signs in which the movement and warmth of inspiration is often lot. Special kinds of apparatus seized, at the very moment of production, the words emerging from the poet’s lips and the sounds that the musician drew from the instrument that gave his emotions a sensible form. And the work, forever fixed, thus appeared still utterly vibrant with the impulsions of the soul that had given them birth, in the splendor or grace of spontaneity.

  Rich libraries filled with all the remarkable works left by previous ages, and the periodicals that recorded on a daily basis the incessant conquests of a science ever on the alert, furnished inexhaustible treasures to all. Everythi
ng that the progress of the art of typography, illustration and engraving had been able to realize was combined to place before the eyes of those who turned the pages of the vast collections the conquests that the genius of the ages had realized by dint of toil and perseverance.

  The simplicity of methods, the clarity of demonstrations, the abundance of observed facts and the rigor of critical intelligence that presided over their classification rendered accessible to all minds the knowledge of problems that, among us, are the privilege of a few elite intelligences. And thanks to that scientific diffusion, those beings, so well endowed with regard to comprehension and reasoning, maintained an intellectual level that we can hardly imagine.

  In that world, where everything was harmonious and simple, social organization was fixed and sheltered from all the revolutions that are excited on Earth by the ambition or fury of parties. Nor was what we call “current affairs” known there, so they enjoyed the inappreciable advantage of having no newspapers. In consequence, the ardent polemics in which unleashed private interests make a tabula rasa of public interests were unknown, as well as the injurious diatribes in which, to satisfy savage hatreds or base grudges, the most reputable men are vilified, vice and perfidy exalted, and honesty and virtue dragged through the mud.

  Nor was there anything similar to the scandalous enterprises in which, under the pretext of serving general utility, a multitude whose avidity matches their stupidity is deceived, the worst passions are subject to speculation, individuals enrich themselves at the expense of others, and the sickening spectacle is provided of colossal fortunes founded on gambling and double-dealing, on the ruination of a host of victims.

  While Marcel and Jacques studied the lunar world from different points of view, moving from one surprise to another, Lord Rodilan was not inactive. His philosophical mind had been forcefully struck by the simplicity of the mores and institutions that regulated that society of a superior order. His skepticism, maintained by the contradictions and incoherence that were encountered in the bosom of terrestrial humankind, had not held up before the harmonious reality of a numerous gathering of human beings living in perfect concord, with a minimum of laws and government that utopian dreamers had scarcely dared to glimpse.