Ah, here is indeed a Fish President, the shell-fish that presided over the world’s destinies; the little murex that was the source of the greatness of Tyre, and the weaver of its purpureal robes of empire. Hence the Phœnician commerce, Carthage, the Punic Wars, and the alphabet in which I write.
Not only is colour softened by a sea change, but in this cool, glooming, and glittering world the earth-creatures seem to have been sucked down and transformed into water-creatures. There are flowers and twigs and green waving grass that seem earth-flowers and twigs and grass transposed into the key of water.
Only, these flowers and grasses are animal, these coralline twigs are conscious; as if water, emulous of the creations of earth and air, strove after their loveliness of curve and line, or as if the mermaidens coveted them for their gardens. And there are gemmed fishes, as though the mines of Ind had their counterpart in the forces producing these living jewels. And there are bird-like fishes with feathery forms, that one might expect to sing as they cleave the firmament of water: some song less troubling than the Lorelei’s, with liquid gurgles and notes of bubbling joy. And the sea, not content to be imitative, has added—over and above its invention of the fish—to the great palpitation of life; priestly forms, robed and cowled, silver-dusty pillars, half-shut parasols. Even the common crab is an original; a homely grotesque with no terraceous or aerial analogue, particularly as it floats in a happy colour-harmony with a brown or red sponge on its back, a parasite literally sponging upon it. But though you may look in vain for mermaid or Lorelei, naiad or nymph, there is no reason in Nature why all that poets feigned should not come into being. The water-babe might have been as easily evolved as the earth-man, the hegemony of creation might have been won by an aquatic creature with an accidental spurt of grey matter, and the history of civilisation might have been writ in water. The merman is a mere amphibian, not arrived. The gryphon and the centaur are hybrids unborn. ’Tis just a fluke that these particular patterns of the kaleidoscope have not been thrown. We may safely await evolutions. The winged genius of the Romans, frequent enough on Pompeian frescoes, may even be developed on this side of the skies, and we may fly with sprouted wings and not merely with detachable. Puck and Ariel perchance already frisk in some Patagonian forest, Caliban may be basking in forgotten mud. Therefore, poets, trust yourself to life and the fulness thereof. Whether you follow Nature’s combinations or precede them, you may create fearlessly. From the imitatio Naturæ you cannot escape, whether you steal her combinations or her elements.
Shelley sings of “Death and his brother Sleep,” but gazing at this mystic marine underworld of the Naples Aquarium, I would sing of Life and his brother Sleep. For here are shown the strange beginnings of things, half sleep, half waking: organisms rooted at one point like flowers, yet groping out with tendrils towards life and consciousness—the not missing link between animal and vegetable life. What feeling comes to trouble this mystic doze, stir this comatose consciousness? The jelly-fish that seems a mere embodied pulse—a single note replacing the quadruple chord of life—is yet a complex organism compared with some that flit and flitter half invisibly in this green universe of theirs: threads, insubstantialities, smoke spirals, shadowy filaments on the threshold of existence, ghostly fibres, flashing films, visible only by the beating of their white corpuscles. ’Tis reading the Book of Genesis, verse by verse. And then suddenly a hitherto unseen entity, the octopus, looses its sinuous suckers from the rock to which its hue protectively assimilates—a Darwinian observation Lucian anticipated in his “Dialogue of Proteus”—and unfolding itself in all its manifold horror, steals upon its prey with swift, melodramatic strides.
From the phantasmal polyzoa to these creatures of violent volition how great the jump! Natura non facit saltum, forsooth! She is a veritable kangaroo. From the unconscious to the conscious, from the conscious to the self-conscious, from the self-conscious to the over-conscious, there’s a jump at every stage, as between ice and water, water and steam. Continuous as are her phases, a mysteriously new set of conditions emerges with every crossed Rubicon. Dante, in making the human embryo pass through the earlier genetic stages (“Purgatory,” Canto XXV), seems curiously in harmony with modern thought, though he was but reproducing Averroes.
But mankind has never forgotten its long siesta as a vegetable. Still linked with the world of sleep through the mechanic processes of nutrition, respiration, circulation, consciously alive only in his higher centres, man tends ever to drowse back to the primal somnolence. Moving along the lines of least resistance and largest comfort, he steeps himself in the poppies of custom, drinks the mandragora of ready-made morals, and sips the drowsy syrups of domesticity, till he has nigh lapsed back to the automaton. But ever and anon through the sluggish doze stirs the elemental dream, leaps the primeval fire, and man is awake and astir and athrill for crusades, wars, martyrdoms, revolutions, reformations, and back in his true biological genus.
Not only in man appears this contest of life and sleep: it runs through the cosmos. There is a drag-back: the ebb of the flowing tide. How soon the forsaken town returns to forest! Near the Roman Ghetto you may note how the brickwork of the wall of the ancient Theatre of Marcellus has relapsed to rock; man’s touch swallowed up in the mouldering ruggedness, the houses at the base merely burrowed, the abodes of cave-dwellers.
II
I saw the sea-serpent at Naples, though not in the Aquarium. Its colossal bulk was humped sinuously along the bay. ’Twas the Vesuvius range, stretching mistily. Mariners have perchance constructed the monster from such hazy glimpses of distant reefs. Still, no dragon has wrought more havoc than this mountain, which smokes imperturbably while the generations rise and fall. Beautiful the smoke, too, when it grows golden in the setting sun, and the monstrous mass turns a marvellous purple. We wonder men should still build on Vesuvius—betwixt the devil and the deep sea—yet the chances of eruption are no greater than the chances of epidemic in less salubrious places, as the plague-churches of Italy testify.
But should a new eruption overwhelm Pompeii, and its first record be lost, there were a strange puzzle for the antiquarians of the fiftieth century exhuming its cosmopolitan population; blonde German savages in white pot-hats, ancient Britons in tweeds, extinct American cycle-centaurs; incongruously resident amid the narrow streets and wide public buildings of a prehistoric Roman civilisation.