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No Traveller Returns
by John Collier
The Apology
Two, among the many orders of men who merit the contempt and hatred of their fellows, are undoubtedly these: the groveling minds which have never aspired to fancy an Utopia, and those ardents who have had the generosity to conceive a plan of our future good, and cannot refrain from afflicting us with a presentation of it.
At one time these incontinent oracles were content to insult us, by faking up a blissful state which should prevail (they said) when philosophy and conduct, and justice and society, and our tastes and theirs, should have become one. In more recent days, a class of enthusiasts has arisen, who, without abating at all the insult of a damaging comparison, have contrived to combine with it a formidable degree of injury. These are so extremely good as to promise us a Millennium, if we will permit the rude best of our lives to be lived for us by a number of devices which the scientists propose to perfect.
Yet, in spite of their persuasiveness on behalf of the men of science, there still remain among us a few (of whom it is my only pride to count myself one) who consider the single great man, among all that swarm of pretentious mechanics, to have been the celebrated amateur, Captain C-nd-m, who, weary of the futility of grape shot and cold steel in reducing the superfluity of the race, perfected a simple means of anticipating the good offices of his profession.
Although the scientists have much elaborated the instruments of the captain's benevolence, both those which he employed in the field, and that which he invented for the home, we shall hardly thank them for it, if we consider that in every hundred devices of their blind and inconsiderate spawning, two or three are likely to make some accidental flutter against the evil trend of the vast majority. Rather shall we blame them the harder for not having perceived that law, which insists that man shall receive no material gift but his myopic opportunism must convert it to its most damaging use, so that having enfeebled himself by resorting to all kinds of props and crutches (in offering him which science has doomed all his lovely playgrounds, forests, seas, wastes, terras incognitas, and time and space themselves), having enfeebled himself thus, he cries out for more and more of the facile and enervating manna of the refrigerator and the tin, that he may feed his lasciviousness to the begetting, and his vanity in the contemplation, of the greatest possible number of offspring in the image of his own unbeautiful wantonness.
None are more prominent among those, who, for lack of money or for lack of wit, are loud to advertise the pseudo-benefactions of science, than are the modern writers of Utopias, who are not content with the agents of our present decay, but strain their spectacled peepers after those which are still, thank God! a little way over the rim of our horizon. When they have speculated as to what these shall be, they sing out a cackling paean, eager to foist them upon us as so many steps to Paradise. But the Paradise they prophesy is really nothing but an uneasy Nirvana, in which, as has been said, these damnable toys shall live for us the lives which they have contrived to render not worth our living.
Any attempt that is made to contradict these infatuated progressives upon their own ground, must suffer under serious disadvantages. It is necessary to lie as brazenly as they do, but with infinitely less chance of being believed, for the mob, now in full cry after a shadow, is not likely to give much credit to a merely shadowy denial. Moreover, these emigrationists of that undiscovered country, from which not only no traveller returns, but for which not a man-jack of them all has ever set forth, have so bemused the vulgar, that there is no doubt we must all henceforward proceed by the Davy Lamp of science, and strike a course into the mines and caverns of snoring comfort, if only that its beams may show to better advantage than among the shining positive pleasures of our upper earth. This is not my lot, and if my descendants choose to ignore the precepts of their dad, they may tunnel to Hell for all I care, and be as heartily damned at the end of their laborious journey, as if they had got there by a simple and pleasant short cut, which I might, but will not, prescribe.
The certainty of their fate, however, is depressing to one who would dissuade them from embracing it, and their infatuation is likely to render a hopeless task also a thankless one. Although the days of the pillory are past, and not yet returned, nothing but obscurity is likely to save me from the cruelest check that it lies in their power to inflict: that is, that I am not scientific. Gladly as I would open my bosom to this thrust, that it might warm the cockles of my chilly heart, I am prevented from doing so by the fad that, in this gull's eye view of the remote future, I have curbed every rocketing of Pegasus, and ridden him along the tramlines of laboratory reasoning.
My accuracy will chiefly be impugned, I imagine, over the suggestion that scientists may come to figure as music-hall buffoons. Yet in deducing this, I have only applied the cyclical theory of the most scientific (and the most uninspired) of sociologists. It may be observed universally, that Gods, heroes, gladiators and merry-Andrews are fundamentally the same characters, at successive stages on an inevitable curve — Olympus, Olympia, the Colosseum, the Coliseum — and the seeds or vestiges of the others are discernible in each individual stage. Sometimes they overlap. Bully parsons are preaching in the temple of Science, who are prepared to sacrifice themselves (their own rabbits!) on the altar. Or is the temple a theater, whose stalls began to fill with Science from an Easy Chair? There is a complete change of program once a fortnight. Little children in the gallery cry Oh! and Ah! impressed by the marvels of God knows what. A face pokes through the curtain: the observed of all Observers. The overture appears to be by Sullivan.
How I came by my knowledge of other parts of the future, I am not disposed to conceal. The process is very similar to that by which a certain sect has arrived at the conclusion, that the universe is a thought in the mind of a great Mathematician. That is, by wanting and trying, as Mr. Bernard Shaw would say, and chiefly by the former. The only point in which I differ from them is in the conclusion; for I hold that all is the thought of a great Satirist, an opinion in which I rest: the more secure, in that however little mathematics they may discover in me, in support of their theory, I find that mine is in no way invalidated when I come to examine theirs and them.
