Chapter VII

Chapter VII

A new visitor arrived at the Abbey, in the person of Mr Asterias,

the ichthyologist. This gentleman had passed his life in seeking the

living wonders of the deep through the four quarters of the world;

he had a cabinet of stuffed and dried fishes, of shells, sea-weeds,

corals, and madrepores, that was the admiration and envy of the Royal

Society. He had penetrated into the watery den of the Sepia Octopus,

disturbed the conjugal happiness of that turtle-dove of the ocean, and

come off victorious in a sanguinary conflict. He had been becalmed

in the tropical seas, and had watched, in eager expectation, though

unhappily always in vain, to see the colossal polypus rise from the

water, and entwine its enormous arms round the masts and the rigging.

He maintained the origin of all things from water, and insisted that

the polypodes were the first of animated things, and that, from their

round bodies and many-shooting arms, the Hindoos had taken their gods,

the most ancient of deities. But the chief object of his ambition, the

end and aim of his researches, was to discover a triton and a mermaid,

the existence of which he most potently and implicitly believed, and

was prepared to demonstrate, a priori, a posteriori, a fortiori,

synthetically and analytically, syllogistically and inductively,

by arguments deduced both from acknowledged facts and plausible

hypotheses. A report that a mermaid had been seen 'sleeking her soft

alluring locks' on the sea-coast of Lincolnshire, had brought him in

great haste from London, to pay a long-promised and often-postponed

visit to his old acquaintance, Mr Glowry.

Mr Asterias was accompanied by his son, to whom he had given the name

of Aquarius--flattering himself that he would, in the process of time,

become a constellation among the stars of ichthyological science. What

charitable female had lent him the mould in which this son was cast,

no one pretended to know; and, as he never dropped the most distant

allusion to Aquarius's mother, some of the wags of London maintained

that he had received the favours of a mermaid, and that the scientific

perquisitions which kept him always prowling about the sea-shore, were

directed by the less philosophical motive of regaining his lost love.

Mr Asterias perlustrated the sea-coast for several days, and reaped

disappointment, but not despair. One night, shortly after his arrival,

he was sitting in one of the windows of the library, looking towards

the sea, when his attention was attracted by a figure which was moving

near the edge of the surf, and which was dimly visible through the

moonless summer night. Its motions were irregular, like those of a

person in a state of indecision. It had extremely long hair, which

floated in the wind. Whatever else it might be, it certainly was not a

fisherman. It might be a lady; but it was neither Mrs Hilary nor Miss

O'Carroll, for they were both in the library. It might be one of the

female servants; but it had too much grace, and too striking an air of

habitual liberty, to render it probable. Besides, what should one of

the female servants be doing there at this hour, moving to and fro,

as it seemed, without any visible purpose? It could scarcely be a

stranger; for Claydyke, the nearest village, was ten miles distant;

and what female would come ten miles across the fens, for no purpose

but to hover over the surf under the walls of Nightmare Abbey? Might

it not be a mermaid? It was possibly a mermaid. It was probably a

mermaid. It was very probably a mermaid. Nay, what else could it be

but a mermaid? It certainly was a mermaid. Mr Asterias stole out of

the library on tiptoe, with his finger on his lips, having beckoned

Aquarius to follow him.

The rest of the party was in great surprise at Mr Asterias's movement,

and some of them approached the window to see if the locality would

tend to elucidate the mystery. Presently they saw him and Aquarius

cautiously stealing along on the other side of the moat, but they saw

nothing more; and Mr Asterias returning, told them, with accents of

great disappointment, that he had had a glimpse of a mermaid, but she

had eluded him in the darkness, and was gone, he presumed, to sup with

some enamoured triton, in a submarine grotto.

'But, seriously, Mr Asterias,' said the Honourable Mr Listless, 'do

you positively believe there are such things as mermaids?'

MR ASTERIAS

Most assuredly; and tritons too.

THE HONOURABLE MR LISTLESS

What! things that are half human and half fish?

MR ASTERIAS

Precisely. They are the oran-outangs of the sea. But I am persuaded

that there are also complete sea men, differing in no respect from us,

but that they are stupid, and covered with scales; for, though our

organisation seems to exclude us essentially from the class of

amphibious animals, yet anatomists well know that the foramen ovale

may remain open in an adult, and that respiration is, in that case,

not necessary to life: and how can it be otherwise explained that the

Indian divers, employed in the pearl fishery, pass whole hours under

the water; and that the famous Swedish gardener of Troningholm lived

a day and a half under the ice without being drowned? A nereid, or

mermaid, was taken in the year 1403 in a Dutch lake, and was in every

respect like a French woman, except that she did not speak. Towards

the end of the seventeenth century, an English ship, a hundred and

fifty leagues from land, in the Greenland seas, discovered a flotilla

of sixty or seventy little skiffs, in each of which was a triton, or

sea man: at the approach of the English vessel the whole of them,

seized with simultaneous fear, disappeared, skiffs and all, under

the water, as if they had been a human variety of the nautilus. The

illustrious Don Feijoo has preserved an authentic and well-attested

story of a young Spaniard, named Francis de la Vega, who, bathing with

some of his friends in June, 1674, suddenly dived under the sea and

rose no more. His friends thought him drowned; they were plebeians and

pious Catholics; but a philosopher might very legitimately have drawn

the same conclusion.

THE REVEREND MR LARYNX

Nothing could be more logical.

MR ASTERIAS

Five years afterwards, some fishermen near Cadiz found in their nets a

triton, or sea man; they spoke to him in several languages--

THE REVEREND MR LARYNX

They were very learned fishermen.

MR HILARY

They had the gift of tongues by especial favour of their brother

fisherman, Saint Peter.

THE HONOURABLE MR LISTLESS

Is Saint Peter the tutelar saint of Cadiz?

(None of the company could answer this question, and MR ASTERIAS

proceeded.)

They spoke to him in several languages, but he was as mute as a fish.

They handed him over to some holy friars, who exorcised him; but the

devil was mute too. After some days he pronounced the name Lierganes.

A monk took him to that village. His mother and brothers recognised

and embraced him; but he was as insensible to their caresses as any

other fish would have been. He had some scales on his body, which

dropped off by degrees; but his skin was as hard and rough as

shagreen. He stayed at home nine years, without recovering his

speech or his reason: he then disappeared again; and one of his old

acquaintance, some years after, saw him pop his head out of the water

near the coast of the Asturias. These facts were certified by his

brothers, and by Don Gaspardo de la Riba Aguero, Knight of Saint

James, who lived near Lierganes, and often had the pleasure of

our triton's company to dinner.--Pliny mentions an embassy of the

Olyssiponians to Tiberius, to give him intelligence of a triton which

had been heard playing on its shell in a certain cave; with several

other authenticated facts on the subject of tritons and nereids.

THE HONOURABLE MR LISTLESS

You astonish me. I have been much on the sea-shore, in the season, but

I do not think I ever saw a mermaid. (He rang, and summoned Fatout,

who made his appearance half-seas-over.) Fatout! did I ever see a

mermaid?

FATOUT

Mermaid! mer-r-m-m-aid! Ah! merry maid! Oui, monsieur! Yes, sir, very

many. I vish dere vas von or two here in de kitchen--ma foi! Dey be

all as melancholic as so many tombstone.

THE HONOURABLE MR LISTLESS

I mean, Fatout, an odd kind of human fish.

FATOUT

De odd fish! Ah, oui! I understand de phrase: ve have seen nothing

else since ve left town--ma foi!

THE HONOURABLE MR LISTLESS

You seem to have a cup too much, sir.

FATOUT

Non, monsieur: de cup too little. De fen be very unwholesome, and I

drink-a-de ponch vid Raven de butler, to keep out de bad air.

THE HONOURABLE MR LISTLESS

Fatout! I insist on your being sober.

FATOUT

Oui, monsieur; I vil be as sober as de reverendissime pere Jean. I

should be ver glad of de merry maid; but de butler be de odd fish,

and he swim in de bowl de ponch. Ah! ah! I do recollect de leetle-a

song:--'About fair maids, and about fair maids, and about my merry

maids all.' (Fatout reeled out, singing.)

THE HONOURABLE MR LISTLESS

I am overwhelmed: I never saw the rascal in such a condition before.

But will you allow me, Mr Asterias, to inquire into the cui bono of

all the pains and expense you have incurred to discover a mermaid? The

cui bono, sir, is the question I always take the liberty to ask when

I see any one taking much trouble for any object. I am myself a sort

of Signor Pococurante, and should like to know if there be any thing

better or pleasanter, than the state of existing and doing nothing?

MR ASTERIAS

I have made many voyages, Mr Listless, to remote and barren shores:

I have travelled over desert and inhospitable lands: I have defied

danger--I have endured fatigue--I have submitted to privation. In the

midst of these I have experienced pleasures which I would not at any

time have exchanged for that of existing and doing nothing. I have

known many evils, but I have never known the worst of all, which, as

it seems to me, are those which are comprehended in the inexhaustible

varieties of ennui: spleen, chagrin, vapours, blue devils,

time-killing, discontent, misanthropy, and all their interminable

train of fretfulness, querulousness, suspicions, jealousies, and

fears, which have alike infected society, and the literature of

society; and which would make an arctic ocean of the human mind, if

the more humane pursuits of philosophy and science did not keep alive

the better feelings and more valuable energies of our nature.

THE HONOURABLE MR LISTLESS

You are pleased to be severe upon our fashionable belles lettres.

MR ASTERIAS

Surely not without reason, when pirates, highwaymen, and other

varieties of the extensive genus Marauder, are the only beau ideal

of the active, as splenetic and railing misanthropy is of the

speculative energy. A gloomy brow and a tragical voice seem to have

been of late the characteristics of fashionable manners: and a morbid,

withering, deadly, antisocial sirocco, loaded with moral and political

despair, breathes through all the groves and valleys of the modern

Parnassus; while science moves on in the calm dignity of its course,

affording to youth delights equally pure and vivid--to maturity, calm

and grateful occupation--to old age, the most pleasing recollections

and inexhaustible materials of agreeable and salutary reflection; and,

while its votary enjoys the disinterested pleasure of enlarging the

intellect and increasing the comforts of society, he is himself

independent of the caprices of human intercourse and the accidents of

human fortune. Nature is his great and inexhaustible treasure. His

days are always too short for his enjoyment: ennui is a stranger to

his door. At peace with the world and with his own mind, he suffices

to himself, makes all around him happy, and the close of his pleasing

and beneficial existence is the evening of a beautiful day.[6]

THE HONOURABLE MR LISTLESS

Really I should like very well to lead such a life myself, but the

exertion would be too much for me. Besides, I have been at college.

I contrive to get through my day by sinking the morning in bed,

and killing the evening in company; dressing and dining in the

intermediate space, and stopping the chinks and crevices of the few

vacant moments that remain with a little easy reading. And that

amiable discontent and antisociality which you reprobate in our

present drawing-room-table literature, I find, I do assure you, a very

fine mental tonic, which reconciles me to my favourite pursuit of

doing nothing, by showing me that nobody is worth doing any thing for.

MARIONETTA

But is there not in such compositions a kind of unconscious

self-detection, which seems to carry their own antidote with them? For

surely no one who cordially and truly either hates or despises the

world will publish a volume every three months to say so.

MR FLOSKY

There is a secret in all this, which I will elucidate with a dusky

remark. According to Berkeley, the esse of things is percipi. They

exist as they are perceived. But, leaving for the present, as far

as relates to the material world, the materialists, hyloists, and

antihyloists, to settle this point among them, which is indeed

A subtle question, raised among

Those out o' their wits, and those i' the wrong:

for only we transcendentalists are in the right: we may very safely

assert that the esse of happiness is percipi. It exists as it is

perceived. 'It is the mind that maketh well or ill.' The elements of

pleasure and pain are every where. The degree of happiness that any

circumstances or objects can confer on us depends on the mental

disposition with which we approach them. If you consider what is meant

by the common phrases, a happy disposition and a discontented temper,

you will perceive that the truth for which I am contending is

universally admitted.

(Mr Flosky suddenly stopped: he found himself unintentionally

trespassing within the limits of common sense.)

MR HILARY

It is very true; a happy disposition finds materials of enjoyment

every where. In the city, or the country--in society, or in

solitude--in the theatre, or the forest--in the hum of the multitude,

or in the silence of the mountains, are alike materials of reflection

and elements of pleasure. It is one mode of pleasure to listen to

the music of 'Don Giovanni,' in a theatre glittering with light, and

crowded with elegance and beauty: it is another to glide at sunset

over the bosom of a lonely lake, where no sound disturbs the silence

but the motion of the boat through the waters. A happy disposition

derives pleasure from both, a discontented temper from neither, but

is always busy in detecting deficiencies, and feeding dissatisfaction

with comparisons. The one gathers all the flowers, the other all the

nettles, in its path. The one has the faculty of enjoying every thing,

the other of enjoying nothing. The one realises all the pleasure of

the present good; the other converts it into pain, by pining after

something better, which is only better because it is not present, and

which, if it were present, would not be enjoyed. These morbid spirits

are in life what professed critics are in literature; they see nothing

but faults, because they are predetermined to shut their eyes to

beauties. The critic does his utmost to blight genius in its infancy;

that which rises in spite of him he will not see; and then he

complains of the decline of literature. In like manner, these cankers

of society complain of human nature and society, when they have

wilfully debarred themselves from all the good they contain, and done

their utmost to blight their own happiness and that of all around

them. Misanthropy is sometimes the product of disappointed

benevolence; but it is more frequently the offspring of overweening

and mortified vanity, quarrelling with the world for not being better

treated than it deserves.

SCYTHROP (to Marionetta)

These remarks are rather uncharitable. There is great good in human

nature, but it is at present ill-conditioned. Ardent spirits cannot

but be dissatisfied with things as they are; and, according to their

views of the probabilities of amelioration, they will rush into the

extremes of either hope or despair--of which the first is enthusiasm,

and the second misanthropy; but their sources in this case are the

same, as the Severn and the Wye run in different directions, and both

rise in Plinlimmon.

MARIONETTA

'And there is salmon in both;' for the resemblance is about as close

as that between Macedon and Monmouth.

* * * * *

* * *