Bibliographic NewsThe novel of the future
by E. Bonnemère
Last year, the Spirits told us that before long, literature would enter the path of Spiritism, and that 1867 would see several important works appear. In fact, shortly after, the Spiritist, by Théophile Gautier, appeared; it was, as we have said, less of a Spiritist novel than the novel of Spiritism, but that had its importance by the name of the author.
Then came, at the beginning of this year, the touching and gracious story of Mirette. On the occasion, the Spirit of Dr. Morel Lavallée said at the Society:
“The year 1866 presents the new philosophy in all its forms; but it is still the green stem that encloses the ear of wheat, and waits to show it until the heat of spring has made it ripen and open. 1866 prepared, 1867 will mature and achieve. The year opens under the auspices of Mirette, and it will not pass without seeing the appearance of new publications of the same kind, and more serious still, in the sense that the novel will become philosophy and that philosophy will make history.” (Spiritist Review, February 1867).
These prophetic words come true; we take it for certain that an important work will appear before long; it will not be a novel, that one can consider as a work of imagination and fantasy, but the very philosophy of Spiritism, highly proclaimed and developed by a name that will be able to give food for thought to those who claim that all followers of Spiritism are fools.
In the meantime, here is a work that has only the name of novel, because the intrigue is almost zero, and it is only a framework for developing, in the form of conversations, the highest thoughts of moral, social and religious philosophy. The title of Novel of the Future seems to have been given only by allusion to the ideas that will govern society in the future, and that are, for the moment, only in the form of a novel. Spiritism is not named there, but it can all the better claim its ideas, since most of them seem to be drawn textually from the doctrine, and if there are some that deviate a little from it, they are few in number and do not go to the heart of the matter. The author admits the plurality of existences, not only as rational, in conformity with the justice of God, but as necessary, indispensable to the progression of the soul, and acquired from sound philosophy. But the author seems inclined to believe, although he does not say it clearly, that the succession of existences is accomplished more from world to world than in the same environment, because he does not speak explicitly of multiple existences on the same world, although this idea can be implied. This is, perhaps, one of the most divergent points, but that, as a matter of fact, in no way harms the substance, since in the end the principle would be the same.
This work can, therefore, be placed among the most serious books, intended to popularize the philosophical principles of the doctrine in the literary world, where the author holds a distinguished prestige. We were told that when he wrote it, he did not know Spiritism; that seems difficult, but if it is so, it would be one of the most striking proofs of the spontaneous fermentation of these ideas, and of their irresistible power, for chance alone does not bring together so many researchers in the same field.
The preface is not the least curious part of this book. The author explains the origin of his manuscript. “What,” he said, “is my collaboration in the Novel of the Future? Are we two, or three, or is the author called a Legion? I leave these things to the appreciation of the reader, after I have told them a very truthful adventure, although it has all the appearances of an otherworldly story."
Having stopped one day in a modest village in Brittany, the hostess told him that there was a young man in the country who was doing extraordinary things, real miracles. “Without having learned anything,” she said, “he knows more than the rector, the doctor, and the lawyer together, and all the wizards combined. He locks himself in his room every morning; you can see his lamp through his curtains, because he needs his lamp, even when it is daylight, and then he writes things that no one has ever seen, but that are superb. He announces to you, six months in advance, the day, the hour, the minute when he will fall in his great fits of witchcraft. Once he said it or wrote it, he does not know anything more about it, but it is true as a word of the Gospel, and infallible as a decision of the Pope, in Rome. He heals on the first try, and without being paid, those who are sympathetic to him, and before the doctor's beard, the patients whom the latter does not cure for their money. The rector says that it can only be the devil who gives him the power to heal those to whom the good Lord sends diseases for their good, to test them or to chastise them."
I went to see him, adds the author, and my lucky star wanted me to be sympathetic to him. He was a twenty-five year old young man, to whom his father, a rich farmer from the canton, had given a certain education, whatever my hostess had said; simple, melancholy and dreamy, pushing kindness to excellence, and endowed with a temper in which the nervous system dominated without counterbalance. He got up at dawn, in the grip of a fever of inspiration that he could not control, and jotted on the paper the strange ideas that germinated by themselves in his brain, without his knowledge and often in spite of himself.
I saw him at work. Within an hour, he invariably covered his notebook with fifteen or sixteen pages of writings, without hesitation, without corrections, without stopping for a second to look for an idea, a sentence, a word. It was an open tap, from which inspiration flowed in an ever even stream. Absolutely silent during these hours of hard work, teeth clenched, and lips contracted, his voice came back to him the moment the clock struck the resumption of field work. He would then come back to normal life, and everything he had thought or written, during those two or three hours of another existence, gradually faded from his memory, like the dream that fades and disappears, as one awakens. The next day, driven from his bed by an invincible force, he went back to work and continued the sentence or word started the day before.
He opened a cupboard for me in which were piled up notebooks loaded with his writings.
- What's in all of this? I asked him.
- I ignore it as much as you do, he replied, smiling.
- But how does all this come to you?
- I can only repeat the same answer: I ignore it as much as you do. Sometimes, I feel it's in me; other times I hear people tell me. So, without realizing it and without hearing my own words, I repeat it to those around me, or else I write it down.
It was about seventeen thousand pages, written in four years. There were about a hundred short stories and novels, treatises on various subjects, medical and other recipes, maxims, etc. I especially noticed this:
These things are revealed to me, simple of mind and education, knowing nothing, having no preconceived ideas about them, I am better able to assimilate the ideas of others. The superior beings, who left first, still purified by the transformation, come to involve me, and say:
We give you everything that cannot be learned, and that can shed light on the world in which we left our indelible mark when we departed. But you must reserve your part for personal work, without encroaching on the acquired knowledge, or on the work that each one can and must do.
In that immense jumble, I chose a simple idyll, work of fantasy, strange, impossible, and in which are laid, in a kind of light form, the bases of a whole new cosmogony. In his notebooks, this study was entitled: Unity, which I thought I should replace by that of The Novel of the future. Here is the main data of the script.
Paul de Villeblanche lived in Normandy, with his father, in the remains of an old castle, once the stately home of his family, ruined and dispersed by the Revolution. He was a young man of about twenty, of high intelligence, with the broadest and most advanced ideas, and who had put aside all prejudices of race.
In the same canton lived a very devout old marquise, who in order to redeem her sins and save her soul, had imagined pulling out of poverty and social mire a little bohemian to make her a nun; in this way, she thought, she would be assured of having someone who, out of gratitude and duty, would pray for her nonstop, during her life and after her death. This young girl had, therefore, been brought up in the convent for about eight years, and while waiting for her to take the veil, she came every two years to spend six weeks with her benefactress. But this young girl, of rare intelligence, intuitively had ideas on many things like those of Paul. She was sixteen at the time. During one of her vacations, the two young people meet, bond with a very fraternal affection, and have talks in which Paul develops new philosophical principles for his intelligent companion, but which the latter understands without effort, and often even ahead. These two elite souls are up to each other. The novel ends with a marriage, of course, but again this is only a pretext to give a practical lesson on one of the most important points of social order and caste prejudices.
We gladly include this book among those that is useful to propagate, and that have their marked place in the library of the Spiritists.
It is these conversations that make the main subject of the book; the rest is only a very simple framework for the exposition of the ideas, that one day must prevail in society.
From this point of view, to report all that would deserve to be reported, it would be necessary to quote half of the book; we reproduce only a few of the thoughts that will allow to judge the spirit in which it is conceived:
“Finding is the reward for having sought, and whatever we can do on our own should not be asked of others.
The world is a vast site in which God distributes his work to each one, assigning our tasks according to our strength. From this immense friction of various intelligences, opposed, hostile in appearance, light shines and is not off at the time of our last sleep. On the contrary, the constant march of successive generations brings a new stone to the social edifice; light becomes brighter when a child is born, bringing the first element of an ever-renewed intelligence to continue progress.
But the Marchioness keeps telling me (said the young girl) that we are all born bad, that we differ only by the more or the less propensity towards sin, and that all existence is a struggle against our inclinations, who would all tend to eternal damnation, if the religion she teaches me did not stop us on the brink of the abyss.
Do not believe these blasphemers. God would be the agent of evil, if he had not placed in each of us the compass that should guide our steps towards the accomplishment of our destinies, and if man had not been able to walk on his path until the day when the Church came to correct the imperfect and ill-accomplished work of the Lord.
Who knows if, in the immense rotation of the world, our children will not become our parents, in turn, and if they will not retribute us with the sum of miseries that we will have left to them when departing?
No evil can come from God, neither in time nor in eternity. Pain is our own work; it is nature's protest, indicating to us that we are no longer in the ways that it assigns to human activity. It becomes a means of salvation, for it is its very excess that pushes us forward, incites our lazy imagination, leading us to make the great discoveries that add to the well-being of those who must live on this globe after us.
Each of us is one of the links in this sublime and mysterious chain, that links all men together, as also with the whole creation, and that can never be broken anywhere.
After death, the worn-out organs need rest, and the body gives back to the earth the elements of which successive beings are endlessly constituted. But life is reborn from death.
We leave, taking with us the memory of the knowledge acquired here; the world to which we will go will give us its own, and we will group them all in a bundle to form progress. "
Yet, the young girl ventured, there will be an end, an inevitable end, so distant as you suppose.
Why limit eternity, after having admitted it in principle?
What we call the end of the world is just figurative. There has never been a beginning, there will never be an end of the world; everything lives, everything breathes, everything is populated. For the Last Judgment to come, there would have to be a general cataclysm that would send the entire universe back into nothingness. God, who created everything, cannot destroy his work. What good does the annihilation of life do?
Death, no doubt, is inevitable. But better understood in the future, this death that terrifies us will only be the scheduled time, perhaps expected from the start, to provide a new stage. One arrives, the other sets off, and hope wipes away the tears that flow at the time of farewell. Immensity, infinity, eternity extend their perspective to our eager gazes, to which unknown attracts us. More perfected already, we will make a more beautiful journey, then we will set out again, and we will always walk to constantly rise. For it depends on us whether death is the reward for a job done, or the punishment, when the assigned work has not been carried out.
No matter where we are in the universe, we hold each other by mysterious and sacred bonds that make us united with one another, and we will inevitably reap the harvest of good and evil, that each of us has sown behind us before leaving to the big journey.
The just born child brings his germ of progress; the man that dies leaves his place so that progress may be accomplished after him, and that he will go and continue working on himself, taking his perfected so elsewhere, and to another being.
Those, to whom you owe the day, have atoned the faults of a mysterious past in this life. They suffered but suffered courageously. The God of love and mercy undoubtedly needed them for a more important mission in another world. He called them to him, thus giving them the deserved wages, before the day was over.”
(About a young girl who, still a child, operated surprising healings by prescribing remedies by intuition.)
It made a noise, and the principal authority, the priest, was moved and intervened. A child was doing, by natural means, what neither the doctor with his science, nor he with his prayers could achieve! … Obviously, she was possessed. For men of little faith and obtuse intelligence, it is God who, in order to chastise us, as if he did not have eternity before him, or to test us, as if he did not know what we are going to do, sends us all evils, plagues of all kinds, ruins, the loss of those who are dear to us; it is Satan, on the contrary, who gives prosperity, allows treasures to be found, heals illnesses, and lavishes on us all the happiness, all the joys of this world. Finally, according to them, God does evil, while the devil is the author of all good. Mary was therefore exorcised, re-baptized by chance, so that she could no longer relieve her fellows. But nothing worked, and she continued to do good around her.
- But you who know everything, Paul, what do you say about all this?
- If I never believe what my reason rejects, replied the young count, I do not deny the facts attested by numerous witnesses, for this sole reason that science does not yet know how to explain them. God gave animals the instinct to go straight to the plant that can heal the rare diseases that afflict them; why would he have denied us this precious privilege? But man went out of the ways that the Creator had assigned him; he has put himself in hostility with nature whose warnings he has not listen to. This torch is extinguished in him, and the instinct was replaced by science, that out of pride for being successful, it has denied, fought, persecuted, annihilated as much as it was in its power to do. But who can tell that it does not survive in a few simple and primitive beings, determined to obediently enlighten themselves with all the glimmers that they themselves see, driven by the desire to come to the aid of the sufferings of others? Who knows if Mary, having already lived long ago among these tribes, in childhood in which instinct still survives, and who know wonderful secrets, or in some more advanced world from which her faults have made her decay, God does not grant her to remember things that others have forgotten?
Isn’t there, for each of us, certain knowledge that we seem to find in ourselves, so easy the study is for us, while others cannot penetrate into our mind, no doubt because they come to strike it for the first time, or because several generations have accumulated mountains of ignorance and oblivion on them?"
(About visions in dreams).
“It is the soul that has remained in exile that talks with the soul freed from its earthly part; thus, these visions are enlightened by a luminous ray that lets the poor humans glimpse at the resplendencies of the point where those who knew how to steer their skiffs have arrived, on the perilous oceans in which life floats. Without doubt, in different worlds, our bodies are made up of different elements, and we put on another outfit, more perfect or imperfect, according to the environment in which they must act. But it is always certain that these bodies live, all animated by the same breath of God; that for both, the transmission of souls takes place in countless planets that populate the infinite space, and that being the very emanation of God, they exist in the same identical conditions, in all worlds. On the other side of life, He gives us back a soul that is always purified, that allows us to constantly draw closer to heaven; it is our will alone that, sometimes, causes it to deviate from the right path.
- Yet, Paul, we are taught that we will be resuscitated with today’s bodies!
- All that is just madness and pride! Our bodies do not belong to us, but to everyone, to the beings we devoured yesterday, to those who will devour us tomorrow. They are of one day; earth lends them to us, it will take them back from us. Our soul alone belongs to us; it alone is eternal, like everything that comes from God and returns to Him."
