Chapter VII. The Martian Cycle (Concluded).—The Ultra-Martian
CHAPTER VII
THE MARTIAN CYCLE (concluded).—THE ULTRA-MARTIAN
ALL things become wearisome at last, and the planet Mars is no exception to the rule. The subliminal imagination of Mlle. Smith, however, will probably never tire of its lofty flights in the society of Astané, Esenale, and their associates. I myself, I am ashamed to acknowledge, began, in 1898, to have enough of the Martian romance.
Once having satisfied myself as to the essential nature of the Martian language, I did not desire to make a profound study of it, and since the texts had made their appearance so slowly, for two years, as to threaten to continue during the remainder of my natural existence, as well as that of the medium, without coming to an end; finding, on the other hand, that the texts, considered as simple psychological curiosities, varied but little and were at length likely to become burdensome, I decided to try some experiment which, without drying up their source, might at least break through this monotony. Up to that time, without giving a positive opinion as to the Martian, I had always manifested a very real interest in these communications, as well as in Mlle.
[paragraph continues] Smith in her waking state, and in Leopold in his incarnations. Both of these showed themselves fully persuaded of the objective verity of this language, and of the visions which accompanied it. Leopold had not ceased, from the first day, to affirm its strictly Martian authenticity. Hélène, without maintaining absolutely that it came from Mars rather than from any other planet, shared the same faith in the extra-terrestrial origin of these messages; and, as appeared from many details of her conversations and conduct, she saw in it a revelation of the loftiest import, which might some day cause "all the discoveries of M. Flammarion" to sink into insignificance. What would happen if I made up my mind to strike this strange conviction a telling blow, and demonstrate that the pretended Martian was only a chimera, a product, pure and simple, of somnambulistic autosuggestion?
My first tentative experiment, addressed to Leopold, had no appreciable influence on the course of the Martian cycle. It was at the seance of February 13, 1898. Hélène was profoundly asleep, and Leopold was conversing with us by gestures of the arm and spelling on the fingers. I categorically informed him of my certainty that the Martian was of terrestrial fabrication, and that a comparison with the French proved it so to be. As Leopold responded by emphatic gestures of dissent, I detailed to him some evidences, among others the accord of the two languages as to their pronunciation of ch, as to the homonym of the pronoun and article le. He listened to me, and seemed to understand my arguments,
but he refused to admit the force of these characteristic coincidences, and said: "There are some things more extraordinary," and was unwilling to give up the authenticity of the Martian. We stood by our respective opinions, and the later texts do not show any trace of our interview. It seemed, therefore, that it was not through the intervention of Leopold that a modification of the Martian romance was to be suggested.
I allowed some months to pass, then tried a discussion with Hélène while she was awake. On two occasions, in October, 1898, I expressed to her my utter skepticism as to the Martian. The first time, on the 6th of October, in a visit which I made to her outside of any seance, I confined myself to certain general objections to it, to which she replied, in substance, as follows: First, that this unknown language, by reason of its intimate union with the visions, and in spite of its possible resemblances to the French, must necessarily be Martian, if the visions are. Then nothing seriously opposes that actual origin of the visions, and, consequently, of the language itself; since there are two methods of explaining this knowledge of a far-off world—namely, communications properly spiritistic (i.e., from spirits to spirits, without material intermediary) the reality of which cannot be held to be doubtful; and clairvoyance, that faculty, or undeniable sixth sense, of mediums which permits them both to see and hear at any distance. Finally, that she did not hold tenaciously to the distinctly Martian origin of that strange dream, provided it is conceded that it comes
from somewhere outside herself, it being inadmissible to regard it as the work of her subconsciousness, since she had not, during her ordinary life, absolutely any perception whatever, any sentiment, not the shadow of a hint of that alleged interior work of elaboration to which I persisted in attributing it against all the evidence and all common-sense.
Some days later (October 16th), as Mlle. Smith, perfectly awake after an afternoon seance, passed the evening at my house, and seemed to be in the fulness of her normal state, I returned to the charge with more of insistence.
I had until then always avoided showing her the full translation of the Martian texts, as well as the alphabet, and she only knew by sight, so to speak, the Martian handwriting, and was ignorant of the value of the letters.
This time I explained to her in detail the secrets of the language, its superficial originalities and fundamental resemblances to French: the frequent occurrence of i and e, its puerile construction, identical with French, even to the slipping in of a superfluous euphonic m between the words bérmier and hed in order to imitate the expression reviendra-t-il? its numerous caprices of phonetics and homonyms, evident reflexes of those to which we are accustomed, etc. I added that the visions seemed to me to be also suspicious through their improbable analogies with that which we see on our globe. Supposing that the houses, the vegetation, and the people of Mars were constructed on the same fundamental plan as those here below, it was nevertheless very doubtful whether
they had the same proportions and typical aspect; in short, astronomy teaches us that on Mars the physical conditions—the length of the year, the intensity of weight, etc.—are all other than with us: the last point, in particular, should act on all the products, natural and artificial, in such a way as to alter greatly the dimensions as well as the proportions of height and size which are familiar to us. I observed, again, that there are doubtless on Mars, as on the earth, a great variety of idioms, and the singular chance which made Esenale speak a language so similar to French was very astonishing. I concluded, finally, by remarking that all this was easily explicable, as well as the Oriental aspect of the Martian landscapes and the generally infantile character of that romance, if it were regarded as a work of pure imagination, due to a secondary personality or to a dream state of Mlle. Smith herself, who recognized having always had "great taste for that which is original and connected with the Orient."
For more than an hour Hélène followed my demonstration with a lively interest. But to each new reason, after having appeared at first a little disconcerted by it, she did not hesitate to repeat, like a triumphal refrain and as an unanswerable argument, that science is not infallible; that no scientist has yet been on Mars; and that consequently it is impossible to affirm with any certainty that affairs there are not conformable to her visions. To my conclusion she replied that, as far as concerns Mars or anything else, her revelations did not, in any case, spring from sources within herself, and that she did not understand
why I was so implacable against that which is the most simple supposition, that of their authenticity, or why I should prefer to it this silly and absurd hypothesis of an underlying self plotting in her, unknown to her, this strange mystification.
Maintaining all the while that my deductions appeared to me strictly correct, I felt bound to admit that science is not infallible, and that a voyage to Mars could alone solve all our doubts as to what takes place there. We parted good friends, but that conversation left me with a very clear impression of the complete uselessness of my efforts to make Mlle. Smith share my conceptions of the subliminal consciousness. But this, however, neither surprises nor grieves me, since from her point of view it is perhaps better that she thus believes.
The following shows, however, that my reasonings on that evening, sterile in appearance, were not without effect. If they have not modified Mlle. Smith's conscious manner of seeing, and, above all, the opinion of Leopold, they have nevertheless penetrated to the profound strata where the Martian visions are elaborated, and, acting there as a leaven, have been the source of new and unexpected developments. This result brilliantly corroborates the idea that the whole Martian cycle is only a product of suggestion and autosuggestion. Just as formerly the regret of M. Lemaître at not knowing that which passes on other planets had furnished the first germ of that lucubration, so now my criticisms and remarks on the language and peoples of that upper world served as a point of departure for new circuits of Hélène's subliminal
imagination. If, in fact, the content of our discussion of the 16th of October, which I have above briefly summed up, is compared with the visions of the following months (see beginning with text 30), it is clear that these latter contain an evident beginning of an answer, and are an attempt to satisfy the questions which I raised. A very curious attempt is there made, naïve and infantine, like the whole Martian romance, to escape the defects of which I complained on that occasion, not by modifying and correcting it—that would have been to reverse and to contradict herself—but by going beyond it in some sort, and by superposing upon it a new construction, an ultra-Martian cycle, if I may be permitted that expression, hinting at the same time that it unfolds itself on some undetermined planet still farther away than Mars, and that it does not constitute an absolutely independent narrative, but that it is grafted on the primitive Martian romance.
The suggestive effect of my objections of the 16th of October was not immediate, but became a work of incubation. Text 30, coming the following week, differed but slightly from the preceding, save for the absence of a euphonic letter, which, however, had been better in place between the words bindié idé, trouve-t-on, than in the bèrimir m hed of text 15, to which I had attracted Hélène's attention; possibly it is allowable to regard this little detail as a first result of my criticisms. The apparition, a little later, of a new Martian personage, Ramié, who promised Hélène some near revelations as to a planet not otherwise specified (text 31), proves that
the ultra-Martian dream was in process of subconscious ripening, but it did not burst forth until the 2d of November (seventeen days after the suggestion with which I connect it), in that curious scene in which Ramié reveals to Mlle. Smith an unsuspected and grotesque world, the language of which singularly differs from the usual Martian. The detailed description of that strange vision, which Hélène sent me, is worth the trouble of citing (see also texts 32 to 35):
"I was awakened, and arose about twenty minutes ago. It was about a quarter-past six in the morning, and I was getting ready to sew. Then, for an instant, I noticed that my lamp was going out, and I ended by not seeing anything more. At the same moment I felt my waist clasped, strongly held by an invisible arm. I then saw myself surrounded by a rose-colored light, which generally shows itself when a Martian vision is coming. I quickly took paper and pencil, which are always within reach on my toilet-table, and placed these two things on my knees, in case some words should come to be noted.
"Hardly were these preparations concluded when I saw at my side a man of Martian visage and costume. It was, in fact, the personage [Ramié] who had clasped my waist with his left arm, showing me with his right hand a tableau, at first indistinct, but which finally outlined itself quite clearly. He spoke also some sentences, which I can note very well, it seems to me [text 32, where Ramié attracts the attention of Hélène to one of the worlds which surround him and makes her see strange beings.]
"I saw then a section of country peopled by men altogether different from those which inhabit our globe. The tallest of all were three feet high, and the majority were an inch or two shorter. Their hands were immense, about ten inches long by eight broad; they were ornamented with very long black nails. Their feet also were of great size.
"I did not see any tree, any bit of verdure. I saw a medley of houses, or rather cabins, of the most simple style, all low, long, without windows or doors; and each house had a little tunnel, about ten feet long [see Fig. 33] running from it into the earth.