THE CHILD PAUL
1. PAUL AND HIS NEPTUNIAN PARASITE
WHY do I choose Paul for study? Why do I propose to tell you more of him than of anyone else in my collection? I have examined in detail at one time and another an immense number of specimens of your kind, not only your contemporaries but many others whose date is earlier than yours, and many who in your day are still to live. I have made myself familiar with every trait and whim, every minute episode in the minds of selected individuals from among the Greeks, the Indians, the early Teutons, the ancient Egyptians, the Chinese of all China’s phases, and also the still unborn Americans and Patagonians. In fact, there is no race of the First Men that has not yielded me samples; which, as I have grown intimate with them, have so captivated me with their fantastic personalities that I have come to regard them not merely as specimens but, in a manner, as friends. For these beings have yielded me the secrets of their nature to an extent impossible in normal intercourse; and yet they have never communicated with me, and for the most part have never suspected my existence.
If I chose, I could tell you many strange secrets about your famous characters, for instance about your Queen Elizabeth, who is among my collection. Through her eyes I have looked not only on the fair face of Essex, but also on that abnormal formation of her own body which caused her to be so lonely, so insistent on her womanhood, and withal so kingly. And I have tasted her bitter rage against fate, her greedy self-love, her love of England. Leonardo da Vinci also I have inhabited. It was I that tormented him with a thousand ideas in advance of his age. It was the enigma of my influence in him that he embodied in pigment as a smile. Aknahton also I swayed, and in his wife’s face my influence conjured another smile. There are moments in my life on Neptune when my beloved specimens crowd in upon my memory and overwhelm me with the infinity of their uniquenesses; when, forgetful of my own Neptunian personality, I seem to be nothing but the theatre in which these many play their parts.
If it is incredible to you that I should have millions of these intimates, remember, not only that the minds of the Last Men are far more agile and far more capacious than your minds, but also that I have spent many thousands of years upon the work, and that in most cases a whole terrestrial lifetime occupies me for no more than a day of my life on Neptune. Of course even my millions of specimens can afford only partial knowledge of your kind. But those of my colleagues who have been working in the same field have worked with no less industry. No doubt all of us together have studied only a minute fraction of your species; but at least we have by now sampled every culture, every local strain, every generation. And your own age, since it is the turning-point of your history, we have sifted again and again with special care.
Why then out of all this collection do I choose Paul as the text and the epitome of what I have to say to you? I choose him because he does epitomize in his character, his circumstances, and his reaction to my influence, the spiritual crisis of your age, and indeed the doom of your species. It would not be true to say that he was an exceptionally average member of his race. Far from it. Though in a sense typical and significant, Paul was not average. Indeed both in character and in circumstance he was rather unusual. Yet he is typical in that he illustrates very clearly the confused nature of his species, and the disorder of its world. In Paul’s life there appear with an almost naive simplicity of outline certain phases of spiritual growth, distorted by the all-pervading blight of his age, nay of his species. In all of you, from the earliest flint-worker, even to the last survivors of Patagonia, the conflict between the primitive simian nature and the genuinely human (or from your point of view the super-human) is present as a fundamental condition of life. In Paul the old simian nature was undisguised and insistent, while the new human nature had defined itself with precision and emphasis. The conflict therefore was clear.
I pride myself somewhat on the discovery of Paul. My crowning research upon the mentality of the First Men and on the crisis of their career demanded a specimen such as I knew would be hard to find. I cannot tell you at all clearly what was necessary, since you are ignorant of the principles of my work. But, to repeat, I had to select an individual both typical and unique, a being of average intelligence, average abilities, average strength of will, but one in whom the simian and the distinctively human were both well developed and delicately balanced. Further, he must be one capable of a degree of self-consciousness abnormal in your species. Many other more subtle requirements I must leave unmentioned. In order to discover this unique creature I had to explore not only your own age but many earlier generations in search of genetic strains favourable to my requirements.
In the Seventeenth Century there was a German family which promised what I wanted; but in them the desirable features were complicated by a musical sensitivity which in many individuals afforded escape from the conflict. I noticed, however, that those members of the clan who most nearly fulfilled my requirements had a subtly characteristic laugh; or rather that, though they laughed in many different styles, the laughter of each had a curious fleeting tremor of bewilderment. Armed with this clue, and certain others more introspective, I continued my search, until in the England of King Alfred I found a similar and even more promising strain. This I followed through the generations hither and thither. One branch of it, the most promising, was exterminated by the Black Death, another became hopelessly contaminated by interbreeding with a strain of defectives, a third produced witches in the Sixteenth Century and mystics in the Seventeenth. Early in the Eighteenth Century a member of this line married into another stock which I had already marked out, and produced a number of more scientifically-minded folk. Throughout the Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Centuries this line suffered social decline, and proliferated in a swarm of poverty-stricken households scattered over the industrial north of England. From one of these sprang Paul’s grandmother, who by good fortune married into yet another of my chosen lines. Paul’s father also was of a stock that had already interested me.
Having now discovered my unique specimen, I first took a hasty glance at his career, and found to my delight that circumstance was destined to intensify and clarify in him the characteristics which I proposed to study. In that first hasty glance I saw also the quite unmistakable effects of a Neptunian influence, doubtless my own influence which I had not yet exerted. I then proceeded to make a thorough investigation of every line of Paul’s ancestry, in order that I might know his nature through and through. Many volumes could be filled with the results of this inquiry, but here I need not elaborate. Incidentally I traced the evolution of Paul’s physical appearance, of his nose, eyebrows, hands, and so on. A curious twist of the hair of his left eyebrow, which was a recessive character, and had not appeared in any of his more recent ancestors, came in with a French strain in the Fourteenth Century. A certain scarcely noticeable prominence of the cheek-bones I traced to a Danish invader of the Eighth Century, and beyond him through Swedes and Finns into Central Asia. Another remarkable line of his ancestry, in part responsible for his intellectual curiosity and certain features of his thumb-print, took me via a Dutch merchant of the Seventeenth Century, a Rhenish baron of the Thirteenth, various Swiss herdsmen and Italian farmers to Syracuse, and so to ancient Greece, where one of Paul’s ancestors once handed a cup to Socrates. But apart from a dozen or so curious threads of this type, which of course occur in many family trees, Paul’s ancestry was the usual tangle of intercrossing lines; stretching back in manifold complexity among the Norse, the Low Germans, the Ancient British, and the Neolithic, and beyond these to the common forefathers of all your races. It would have been useless to trace Paul’s ancestry any further in detail, since nothing more that was distinctive of Paul himself remained to be discovered. In the more remote past the genes that were to produce Paul were ancestral also to the mass of his contemporaries. This story was already known to me.
I must now tell you what it was that I intended to do with Paul, and how I carried out my plan. I wished to perform certain delicate experiments on him and observe his reactions. To some of the readers of this book the mental vivisection which I had to practise upon Paul may seem merely brutal. I would remind them first that it was a necessary part of a very lofty task; second, that Paul himself in his best moments would have gladly accepted all and more of my torturing manipulation for the sake of that high enterprise; and lastly that the final result upon Paul, the individual human being, was a very great spiritual enrichment.
It is difficult to give you any clear idea of my aim beyond saying that, having found this uniquely typical yet also exceptionally self-conscious being, I intended to influence him periodically in such a manner that he should see his world as far as possible from the Neptunian point of view. I should then be able to observe in detail the effect of this vision on his primitive nature. Had he been of the heroic type, this policy would have turned him into some kind of prophet or crank. But he was made of milder stuff, and would never spoil my experiment in that style. Indeed, one effect of my intermittent manipulation of his experience was to inspire him with a dread of showing himself to be different from others. Just because he possessed a whole secret world of his own, and was prone to see the actual world turn farcical or hideous in the light cast by that other world, he became increasingly anxious to maintain a secure footing in the actual world and conform to all the customary modes of behaviour. For in spite of his Neptunian vision he remained essentially a product of his own world. But as my influence extended, he was forced to admit that there was something in him profoundly alien to his environment, something alien even to himself. At times he feared he was going mad; at other times he would persuade himself with immense complacency that he was ‘inspired’, and that he must indeed be a prophet; but as he was incapable of any such heroism, this delusion was soon shattered. There were moments when he threatened to break into two personalities, one the natural Paul, the other a violent and spasmodic idealist. But I had chosen him carefully; he was too well integrated actually to succumb to this easy solution of his conflict. Instead of disintegrating, he remained one mind, though torn and perplexed.
But as time passed a change came over him. At first he had regarded his native terrestrial mentality as himself, and the Neptunian influence as alien, disturbing, irrational, insane. He was fascinated by it, but he wished to keep it thoroughly suppressed and ineffective. Later, however, it came to seem a divine enlightenment, sane and joyous, still alien to himself but most precious. Then at last he began to try to live according to my influence, and incurred at once the ridicule and hostility of his own world. With horror he now foreswore his ‘inner light’ which had so misled him. He earnestly tried to become blind to it, and to be like his fellows. But my influence left him no peace. It found something responsive in him, which, as he matured, was emboldened to identify itself wholly with the Neptunian point of view. Little by little he came to think of this Neptunian factor in his mind as truly ‘himself’, and the normal Terrestrial as’ other’, something like an unruly horse which his true self must somehow break in and ride. There followed a period of struggle, which ended in despair; for it became clear that he could not master his Terrestrial nature. Indeed, it seemed to him that he himself was bound and helpless upon the back of this uncontrolled animal; or that while his body and his mundane intelligence went about the world performing all manner of aimless antics, his essential spirit was imprisoned somewhere in his head watching all, but almost wholly impotent. This essential spirit which he regarded as ‘himself’ was not, of course, merely my influence in him; it was his own best and most human nature, on which my influence was able to work. But this best of his was only the rudimentary best which was characteristic of his species; and though my influence had endowed it with an immense treasure of imagination, it remained almost wholly ineffective, as is usual with your kind. Yet there were times in his life when Paul did succeed in acting in a manner that was really human, and on these occasions my influence played a part. Of these crises I shall presently tell.