But what if El Dorado were no such mere figment of man’s aching fancy, after all; what if the El Dorado, so passionately believed in by those eminently practical Elizabethans, did all the time, as they surmised, exist upon this solid earth, and should still quite concretely exist there....
Is it not likely that such might be the musings of a man situated as was Dr. Smyth, in the very heart of the mystery, a man of affairs, touched with imagination, as all really capable men of affairs are; and, as he listened to the old Indian tales, and talked with miners, and all manner of folk acquainted with the terrain of the legend, what could he do but fall under the same spell that had laid its ghostly hand on the mighty heart of Raleigh centuries before, and follow its beckoning, as the other inspired madmen before him?
But, as we have seen, his doom was to be different. For so long generations of dead men had come crying, like those three old horsemen in Morris’s Glittering Plain: “Is this the Land? Is this the Land?” to turn broken-hearted away; but from him, of all men born, throughout the generations, was to be heard at last the joyous, ringing cry: “This is the Land! This is the Land!”
Pause for one moment more and think what El Dorado has meant to mankind, think with all your might; and then think what must have been the feelings of the man who stood looking upon it, and knew that he—that he—had found it. In such moments of transfiguring realization men often lose their reason, and, as we say, it is not a little surprising that Dr. Smyth is alive to tell the tale. The lovely knowledge might well have struck him as by lightning, and the secret once more have been buried in oblivion.
I have all along taken it for granted that Dr. Smyth’s The Gilded Man is a genuine narrative, the true story of a wonderful happening. If any one should come to me and tell me that I am simple-minded, that it is no such thing, and that, as the children say, Dr. Smyth “made it up all out of his own head,” I should still need a lot of convincing, and, were conviction at last forced upon me, I could only answer that Dr. Smyth must then possess a power of creating illusion such as few romancers have possessed. For there is a plausibility, a particularity, a concreteness about all the scenes and personages in The Gilded Man that make it impossible not to believe them true and actual, however removed from common experience they may seem. I should like very much to be more particular, but I cannot very well be so without betraying the story—or “true and veracious history,” whichever it may turn out to be. Still I can hint at one or two matters without betraying too much. The mysterious queen, Sajipona, for example, seems not only real, but she and her love-story make one of the loveliest idylls in what, for want of a better word, one may call “supernatural” romance that has ever been written. And all the dream-like happenings in the great cave, though of the veritable “stuff that dreams are made of,” are endowed with as near and moving a sense of reality as though they were enacted on Broadway.
Of the cave itself, which may be said to be the Presiding Personage of the book, it seems to me impossible to speak with too great admiration. It is, without exaggeration, an astonishing piece of invention; I refer not merely to the ingenuity of its mechanical devices, though I might well do that, for they are not merely devised with an exceeding cleverness, but the cleverness is of a kind that thrills one with a romantic dread, the kind of awe-inspiring devices that we shudder at when we try to picture the mysteries of the temples of Moloch. Dr. Smyth’s invention here is of no machine-made, puzzle-constructed order. We feel that he has not so much invented these devices, but dreamed them—seen them himself with a thrill of fear and wonder in a dream. And the great device of them all, that by which the cave is lighted so radiantly and yet so mystically, outsoars ingenuity, and is nothing short of a high poetic inspiration. But all these details, each in itself of a distinguished originality, gain an added value of impressiveness from the atmosphere of noble poetic imagination which enfolds them all, that atmosphere which always distinguishes a work of creation from one of mere invention. I do not wish to seem to speak in superlatives, but, in my opinion, Dr. Smyth’s cave of The Gilded Man belongs with the great caves of literature. I thought of Vathek as I read it, though it is not the least the same, except in that quality of imaginative atmosphere.
With the purely “human” interest of the book, the daylight scenes and doings, he is no less successful. His plot is constructed with great skill and is full of surprises. The manner in which he “winds” into it is particularly original. Then, too, his characters are immediately alive, and there is some good comedy naturally befallen. General Herran and Doctor Miranda are delightfully drawn South American characters, and the atmosphere of a little South American republic convincingly conveyed, evidently from sympathetic experience. Nor must the absurd Mrs. Quayle be forgotten, and particularly her jewels, which play such an eccentric part in the story—one of Dr. Smyth’s quaintest pieces of cleverness.
But it is time I ended my proud rôle of showman, and allowed the show to begin. So this and no more: If Dr. Smyth has, as I personally believe from the convincing manner of his book, discovered El Dorado, he is to be congratulated alike on the discovery and his striking method of publishing forth the news; but if he has merely dreamed it for our benefit, then I say that a man whom we have long respected as a wise and generous critic of other men’s books, should lose no time in writing more books of his own.
Richard Le Gallienne.