THE MESSAGE FROM MARS.
(Per favour of Mr. Punch.)
Mr. Punch. So you've not been signalling to Mother Earth, after all, my noble Warrior?
Mars (with a wink). What do you think? Why should I dig canals 100 miles wide, and 2,000 miles long, or build bonfires as big as Scotland, when I can always communicate what I may have to say through you?
Because Mars looks spotty or misty,
Some dreamers, with intellects twisty,
Imagine, old horse,
Mars is playing at Morse!
All bosh! You ask Dyson or Christie.
Mr. Punch. Mr. Maunder "has you under his special charge," hasn't he?
Mars. Much obliged to Mr. Maunder, I'm sure! Wants to take my photo, doesn't he? As if I were a mere politician, a popular comedian, or 'Arriet at the seaside on a Bank Holiday!
Mr. Punch. Have you any Bank Holidays in your planet?
Mars. Thank Sol, Mr. Punch, we have outlived the epoch of taking our pleasure in spasms, like your cockney victims of the vulgar voluptuary's St. Vitus's dance!
Mr. Punch. Don't be uppish, old man! 'Tis an ill-bred age of Kodaks, and Interviews, and other phases of popular Paul Pryism. But you've had your ignominious moments, Mars. If a "snap-shot" could have been taken at you when held prostrate, chained, and captive, at the feet of Otus and Ephialtes, or, still worse, when caught with Venus in the iron net of Vulcan:—
All heaven beholds, imprison'd as they lie,
And unextinguish'd laughter shakes the sky.
Mars. Spare me, excellent Punch. Eugh! Thank heaven Olympus knew no Kodaks then, or "the gay Apollo" would yet longer have had the laugh of me.
Mr. Punch. Pardon me for awaking unpleasant memories! But even gods should not be bumptious, especially when, like the Second Mrs. Tanqueray, they "have a past."
Mars. Well, anyhow I've been able to baffle the camera-wielders up to now. My ruddy countenance and "bluish radiance" have beaten Greenwich, and even licked the Lick! As they themselves admit, "Mars up to the present has defied cameral detection."
Mr. Punch. But what about those "bright spots"?
Mars. Have you no "bright spots" even on your dull and foggy old planet? I have often noticed one at 85, Fleet Street. In June and December it emits thousands of brilliant sparks of a "bluish radiance," too. But I don't jump to the conclusion that you are "signalling" to me. Look, the naked eye can see the Punchian "projection lumineuse" even from here!
Mr. Punch. I do not have to "signal" my messages to "Hellas" or "Lockyer's Land" by canals or "ten million arc lights of 100,000 candle-power apiece." Like the Sun, I am self-luminous, and do not, like the finest planets, shine by reflected light.
Mars. True for you. And from your own intellectual observatory, like Teufelsdroeckh "alone with the stars," you ofttimes scan the heavens when, as Longfellow says:—
"——the first watch of night is given
To the red planet Mars."
Mr. Punch. Precisely!
[Murmurs musingly.
And earnest thoughts within me rise
When I behold afar,
Suspended in the evening skies
The shield of that red star.A star of strength! I see thee stand
And smile upon my pain;
Thou beckonest with thy mailéd hand,
And I am strong again.The star of the unconquered will
He rises in my breast.
Serene, and resolute and still,
And calm, and self-possessed.
Mars. Ah yes! that's all very pretty and poetical, and I'm much obliged to Henry Wadsworth and the other bards who have lyrically glorified me. But Punch, old man, you and I know better! Mother Earth has ever paid, and payeth still, far too much worship to Mars—the Mars of her own militant fancy. To tell you the truth, Punch, I'm sick of my old métier, especially since Science stepped in and bedevilled it past bearing with her big guns, and dynamite-bombs, and treacherous torpedoes; weapons more fit for grubby Vulcan's subterranean Cyclops than a god, a gentleman and a soldier like me.
Mr. Punch. Hoho! That's the way the (Lockyer's) land lies, eh?
Mars. Exactly, I wasn't signalling to your stupid, conservative, bellicose old world, which, like the Bourbons, learns nothing and forgets nothing. Could I write in plain Titanic capitals across a thousand square miles of my smoothest surface Mars's Straight Tip to Mother Earth, viz.:—
FIGHTING'S AN EXPENSIVE BORE,
SO DISARM AND WAR NO MORE!
what effect would it have on any of you, from civilised England, with you to enlighten it, to the furious fighting dragons who are tearing each other in the eastern seas? None! But if any of your quidnuncs really want to know what I would say if I did signal, tell them old Mars, grown wiser, has turned up War; has nailed his raven to a barn-door as a warning; has made a pet of Peace's soft-plumed dove; and strongly advises the belligerent boobies on earth who take his old name in vain, and play his abandoned game still, to—go and do likewise!!!
Mr. Punch. By the cestus of Venus, and so I will!!!