The Martian: A Novel

by George Du Maurier

He has robbed Death of nearly all its terrors; even for the young it is no longer the grisly phantom it once was for ourselves, but rather of an aspect mellow and benign; for to the most sceptical he (and only he) has restored that absolute conviction of an indestructible germ of Immortality within us, born of remembrance made perfect and complete after dissolution: he alone has built the golden bridge in the middle of which science and faith can shake hands over at least one common possibility—nay, one common certainty for those who have read him aright.

There is no longer despair in bereavement—all bereavement is but a half parting; there is no real parting except for those who survive, and the longest earthly life is but a span. Whatever the future may be, the past will be ours forever, and that means our punishment and our reward and reunion with those we loved. It is a happy phrase, that which closes the career of Sardonyx. It has become as universal as the Lord's Prayer!

To think that so simple and obvious a solution should have lain hidden all these æons, to turn up at last as though by chance in a little illustrated story-book! What a nugget!

Où avions-nous donc la tête et les yeux?

Physical pain and the origin of evil seem the only questions with which he has not been able to grapple. And yet if those difficulties are ever dealt with and mastered and overcome for us it can only be by some follower of Barty's methods.

It is true, no doubt, that through him suicide has become the normal way out of our troubles when these are beyond remedy. I will not express any opinion as to the ethical significance of this admitted result of his teaching, which many of us still find it so hard to reconcile with their conscience.

Then, by a dexterous manipulation of our sympathies that amounts to absolute conjuring, he has given the death-blow to all cruelty that serves for our amusement, and killed the pride and pomp and circumstance of glorious sport, and made them ridiculous with his lusty laugh; even the bull-fights in Spain are coming to an end, and all through a Spanish translation of Lifeblood. All the cruelties of the world are bound to follow in time, and this not so much because they are cruel as because they are ridiculous and mean and ugly, and would make us laugh if they didn't make us cry.

And to whom but Barty Josselin do we owe it that our race is on an average already from four to six inches taller than it was thirty years ago, men and women alike; that strength and beauty are rapidly becoming the rule among us, and weakness and ugliness the exception?

He has been hard on these; he has been cruel to be kind, and they have received notice to quit, and been generously compensated in advance, I think! Who in these days would dare to enter the holy state of wedlock unless they were pronounced physically, morally, and mentally fit—to procreate their kind—not only by their own conscience, but by the common consent of all who know them? And that beauty, health, and strength are a part of that fitness, and old age a bar to it, who would dare deny?

I'm no Adonis myself. I've got a long upper lip and an Irish kink in my nose, inherited perhaps from some maternally ancestral Blake of Derrydown, who may have been a proper blackguard! And that kink should be now, no doubt, the lawful property of some ruffianly cattle-houghing moonlighter, whose nose—which should have been mine—is probably as straight as Barty's. For in Ireland are to be found the handsomest and ugliest people in all Great Britain, and in Great Britain the handsomest and ugliest people in the whole world.