This World and Nearer Ones. Brian AldissЧитать онлайн книгу.
with Gaelic bards. Not analogies only but morals were to be drawn. As William Cowper put it, in the first book of his poem, The Task:
E’en the favoured isles,
So lately found, although the constant sun
Cheer all their seasons with a grateful smile,
Can boast but little virtue; and, inert
Through plenty, lose in morals what they gain
In manners – victims of luxurious ease.
It is a Protestant viewpoint not entirely dead today.
From the discoveries, from the debates, new sciences sprang. ‘Geography is a science of fact,’ said Bougainville, knowing he challenged an older and contradictory point of view. The depressing story of Tasmania – its history of the slaughter of the indigenous population boding ill for the inhabitants of any possible future planet any possible future space-travellers might come across – is lightened only by the French expedition there in 1802, when François Péron made the first anthropological record. Péron established amiable relations with the Tasmanians, and brought back to Europe 100,000 animal specimens, of which 2500 were of unknown species. Numerous meetings with the inhabitants were faithfully recorded.
All such findings were closely linked to the continuing search for the nature of man. Péron himself, addressing the French authorities, declared, ‘No doubt it is wonderful to gather the inert moss which grows on the eternal ice of the Poles, or to pursue into the burning heart of the Sahara those hideous reptiles which Nature seems to have exiled in order to protect us from their fury; but – let us have the courage to say it – would it be less wonderful, less useful to society, to send with the naturalists on this mission some young doctors specially trained in the study of man himself, to record everything of interest in both moral and physical matters which diverse peoples may have to reveal – their habitat, their traditions, their customs, their maladies both internal and external, and the cures which they use?’
The study of man himself. It was a sensible and enlightened goal. Yet, only a year after the French expedition to Tasmania, the British established a penal colony there. The wretched Tasmanians were then hunted to death, suffering alike at the hands of criminals and philanthropists. All became extinct within thirty years. The unfittest had not survived. Neither the most enlightened statesmen, nor all the rococo in all the churches in Europe could stem a general extermination.
Ideas or ideologies always arise which cushion us from clear perceptions of our own cruelty; the Victorians took refuge in a popular view of Darwinism, garbled in a loose phrase, ‘the survival of the fittest’; the Nazis believed they were ridding the German race of impurity by massacring six million Jews; Stalinists justified the Great Purge by their sterile belief in the entrails of Marx and Lenin; and the West turned a blind eye to the killing of perhaps a million Chinese in Indonesia in 1965 and 1966 because the victims were labelled Communist.
Despite the slaughters, the findings brought back by British and French three-masters stimulated a debate on the nature of man and his place in the universe which still continues. The slow, creaking three-masters have been replaced by speedy surrealist kitchen utensils cutting up the sky. The findings of Mariner spacecraft, with their startling crop of pictures, the harvest from Pioneers, Vikings and Voyagers, give impetus to the quest for extraterrestrial life. But our modern findings are undoubtedly less corporeal: eighteenth-century sailors copulated on warm sands with the dusky ladies of the South Seas in exchange for nails. The rewards of technology were never better or more immediately demonstrated.
The more efficiently the early engines could be seen to work, the faster they multiplied. The faster they multiplied, the more dominant they became. It was like a re-run of the story of prehistoric reptiles. Samuel Butler observed this phenomenon clearly and, in Erewhon (1872), gives one of his scribes this ominous sentence: ‘The present machines are to the future as the early Saurians are to man.’ The argument goes on, ‘I would repeat that I fear none of the existing machines; what I fear is the extraordinary rapidity with which they are becoming something very different to what they are at present.’
Butler’s fear was not a particularly common one, judging by the success of technology. When Cook was killed in 1779, Britain was rapidly becoming covered with a network of canals – the first modern transport system, the biggest thing since Roman roads. Soon no major city lay farther than fifteen miles from a busy water link. In another generation, the new roads had arrived; 1600 Road Acts went through Parliament between 1751 and 1790. On new roads, new light coaches – a new thing; all classes could afford to travel. And in a further generation, at the moment when coaching had reached its zenith of speed and organisation, in came the men from the North with their railways, and swept into darkness with a vast exhalation of coal smoke, the slow moving past.
When the painter J. M. W. Turner, born as the American War of Independence began, died in 1851, the Western world had undergone one of its greatest periods of transition – and was undergoing another.
New landscapes required new perceptions. The interpretation by trained artists of those exotic panoramas first sighted over the taffrail of the Endeavour or the Bounty led to the overthrow of a classical generalised style of art in favour of the art of the closely studied and the particular. This is what Ruskin means when he says in Modern Painters, apropos of Turner, that, ‘For the better comfort of the non-imaginative painter, be it observed, that it is not possible to find a landscape, which if painted precisely as it is, will not make an impressive picture.’ So Zoffany and Reynolds give place to Constable and Ward, and early Turner to late.
The earthworks thrown up all over England to accommodate the railway line left their mark in the minds of men. When Brunel built his Great Western Railway from Paddington to Bristol, the comparative feebleness of his steam-power meant that the track had to run level to within 1/12,000th of an inch for the whole hundred-mile journey. One can see Brunel’s cuttings still, guarding the line up the Thames valley to Oxford. There lie the chalk strata, put down millions of years ago by minute creatures, brought back to the grimy light of day a century ago by sturdy Victorian navvies.
A cardinal perception dawned: that the rocks of old Earth, or the coral islands of the new oceans, were petrified Time. It was almost but not quite what Burnet meant when he said: ‘We have still the broken materials of that first world, and walk upon its ruins.’ Embalmed in gritty streets lay secrets of past history just as urgent as a journey from Birmingham to Liverpool. Understanding lent a window on epochs long past and on times to come.
Geology was in many ways the giant, the Prometheus, of nineteenth-century science, bursting open the other doors of the cultural gallery. It is a curious linkage of the physical and the metaphysical to think of the poor stonemason, Hugh Miller, chopping away in the dust of the red sandstones of Scotland, and thereby helping to sketch that teeming pageant of organic life we now accept without blinking: that pageant which belongs with amino acids in a nameless ocean, and the first single-celled creatures, and which swells in grandeur and colour and possibly hideousness through the ages of amphibians and rampant trees and great dinosaurs that walked like men, on to the dodo and to Us, going about our archaic rituals. That pageant is among the most permanent to emerge from the permanent ways of the Railway Age.
Almost all that we can learn or imagine is inherited, the produce of the labours of others. So it always was. Aided by the work of Miller, and of Lyell and James Hutton and Wallace and others, Charles Darwin pieced together the jigsaw of facts which form evolutionary theory. Darwin’s researches took him many years; they began when Captain Fitzroy, a godfearing sailor, had the misfortune to take Darwin aboard the Beagle.
The voyage of the Beagle was almost as momentous as that of the Endeavour; its findings concluded part of the debate opened up by Cook. No longer ‘in doubt to deem himself a God or Beast’, man now saw himself ranged with the animals rather than the angels. Theology was never to be as popular again; but zoology won many adherents.
The early geologists learnt to distinguish between rocks of a sedimentary character and rocks formed by what Darwin calls plutonian processes. One wonders how far this dramatic inorganic model of rock-formation influenced