The Novel of the Future.

— Last year the Spirits had told us that literature would soon enter upon the path of Spiritism, and that 1867 would see several important works appear. Indeed, shortly afterward there appeared the Spirite, by Théophile Gautier. As we said, it was less a Spiritist novel than the novel of Spiritism, but one which had its importance through the name of the author.

Next comes, at the beginning of this year, the touching and graceful story of Mireta. On this occasion the Spirit Morel Lavallée said at the Society:

“The year 1866 presents the new philosophy under every form; but it is still the green stalk that encloses the ear of wheat and, in order to show it, waits until the warmth of spring shall have ripened and opened it. 1866 prepared, 1867 will ripen and accomplish. The year begins under the auspices of Mireta and will not pass away without seeing new publications of the same kind appear, more serious still, in which the novel will become philosophy and philosophy will become history.” (Review of February 1867).

These prophetic words are being fulfilled. We hold it as certain that an important work will soon appear; it will not be a novel, which may be regarded as a work of imagination and fantasy, but the very philosophy of Spiritism, loftily proclaimed and developed by a name capable of making those reflect who claim that all the partisans of Spiritism are madmen. [see Bibliographical notices. The reason of Spiritism, by Michel Bonnamy.]

— In the meantime, here is a work which has nothing of the novel but the name, because the plot in it is almost nil and is merely 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 to it only by allusion to the ideas that will govern society in the future and that, at present, are only in the state of a novel. Spiritism is not cited in it, but it can all the better claim its ideas, inasmuch as the greater part of them seem gathered textually from the doctrine, and inasmuch as if a few of them depart from it a little, they are small in number and do not touch the heart of the question. The author admits the plurality of existences, not only as rational, in conformity with the justice of God, but as necessary, indispensable to the progress of the soul and acquired through sound philosophy. But the author seems inclined to believe, though he does not say it clearly, that the succession of existences takes place rather from world to world than in the same milieu, because he does not speak explicitly of the multiple existences in one and the same world, notwithstanding that this idea may be understood. Perhaps therein lies one of the most divergent points, but one which, moreover, in no way prejudices the foundation, for, in the final analysis, the principle would be the same. Thus, this work may be placed in the class of the more serious books, intended to popularize the philosophical principles of the doctrine in the literary world, in which the author holds a notable position. We have been told that when he wrote it, he did not know Spiritism; this seems difficult to believe, but, if it is so, it would be one of the most resounding proofs of the spontaneous fermentation of these ideas and of their irresistible power, because chance, alone, does not make so many researchers meet upon the same ground.

— The preface is not the least curious part of this book. In it the author explains the origin of his manuscript. “What is — he asks — my collaboration in the Novel of the Future? Are we two or three, or is the author called legion? I leave these things to the appreciation of the reader, after I shall have told him a very truthful adventure, although it has all the appearances of a story from the other world.”

Having stopped one day in a modest little village of Brittany, the proprietress of the inn told him that there was in the region a young man who did extraordinary things, true miracles. [See: Impressions of an unconscious medium — Concerning the Novel of the Future.] She said: “Without having learned anything, he knows more than the rector, the doctor and the notary together, and more than all the sorcerers combined. He shuts himself up every morning in his room; one sees his lamp through the curtains, because he needs the lamp, even by day; then he writes things that no one has ever seen, but that are sublime. He announces six months in advance the day, the hour, the minute when he will fall into his great fits of sorcery. Once he has said or written it, he knows nothing more, but it is as true as the word of the Gospel and as infallible as the decision of the pope, in Rome. He cures at first sight, without charging, those who are agreeable to him and, under the very nose of the doctor, the sick whom the latter does not cure, even while charging. The rector says that it can only be the devil who gives him the power to cure those to whom the good God sends illnesses for their own good, in order to test them or to punish them.” “I went to see him, adds the author, and my lucky star willed that I should be agreeable to him. He was a young man of twenty-five, to whom his father, a rich peasant of the canton, had afforded a certain education, in spite of what my hostess said; simple, melancholy and dreamy, carrying goodness to the point of excellence, and endowed with a temperament in which the nervous system dominated without counterbalance. He rose at daybreak, in the grip of a fever of inspiration that he could not master, and spread abundantly upon the paper, sometimes against his will and without realizing it, the strange ideas that germinated of themselves in his brain. “I saw him at work. In the space of an hour he invariably covered his notebook with fifteen or sixteen pages of writing, without hesitation, without erasures, without stopping for a second in search of an idea, a phrase, a word. It was an open faucet, from which inspiration flowed in an ever-equal jet. Absolutely mute during those hours of obstinate labor, teeth clenched and lips contracted, speech coming to him at the instant when the clock struck the hour for the resumption of the field labors. He then returned to the life of everyone, and all that he had just thought or written during those two or three hours of another existence, little by little faded from his memory, like sleep that vanishes and disappears as one awakens. The next day, driven from his bed by an invincible force, he gave himself up to the work and continued the sentence or the word begun the day before. “He opened for me a cabinet, in which were accumulated notebooks full of his writing. — What is in all this? I asked. — I am as ignorant of it as you are, he answered, smiling. — But how does all this come to you? — I can only repeat the same answer: I am as ignorant of it as you are. Sometimes I feel that it is within me; at other times I hear what is said to me. Then, without being conscious of it and without hearing the sound of my own words, I repeat it to those around me, or I write it.

“This constituted about seventeen thousand pages, written in four years. Therein were found a hundred or so novellas and novels, treatises on various subjects, medical and other recipes, maxims, etc. I noted above all this:

“These things are revealed to me, simple as I am in spirit and in instruction, because, knowing nothing, having no preconceived ideas on the subject, I am the better fitted to assimilate the ideas of others.

“The superior beings, departed first, purified still further by the transformation, come to envelop me and to say to me:

“We give you all that is not learned and that may enlighten the world where, on departing, we left our ineffaceable mark. But one must reserve one’s share in personal labor, without usurping acquired science, nor the labor that each one can and must do.”

“In that enormous confusion, I chose a simple idyll, a work of fantasy, strange, impossible, and in which are set forth, under a more or less light form, the bases of an entirely new cosmogony. In those notebooks, the study had as its title: Unity, which I judged I ought to replace with that of Novel of the Future.” Here are the principal elements of the plot:

— Paul de Villeblanche dwelt in Normandy, with his father, in the ruins of an old castle, formerly the seigneurial residence of his family, ruined and dispersed by the Revolution. He was a young man of about twenty, of great intelligence, of broader and more advanced ideas, and who had set aside all the prejudices of race.

In the same canton lived an old marchioness, very devout, who, in order to redeem her sins and save her soul, had conceived the idea of drawing from misery and social abjection a little gypsy girl in order to make of her a nun. In this way, she thought, she would be sure of having someone who, out of gratitude and out of duty, would pray for her unceasingly, during her life and after death. This young girl was, then, educated in the convent, from about the age of eight and, while waiting for her to take the habit, came every two years to spend six weeks at the house of her benefactress. But the young girl, of rare intelligence, had intuitively and upon many things ideas on a level with those of Paul. She was then sixteen years old. During one of her vacations, the two young people meet, become bound by an entirely fraternal affection and have conversations in which Paul develops to his intelligent companion philosophical principles new to her, but which she understands without effort and, at times, surpasses. These two choice souls are on a level with each other. The novel ends in marriage, as is right, but this is only a pretext for giving a practical lesson upon one of the most important points of the social order and of the prejudices of caste. We inscribe with great pleasure this book in the roll of those that are useful to propagate, and that have their marked place in the library of Spiritists.

It is these conversations that make up the principal plot of the book; the rest is nothing but a very simple framework for the exposition of the ideas that one day must prevail in society.

To report all that, from this point of view, would deserve to be reported, it would be necessary to cite half the work. We reproduce only a few of the thoughts that may allow one to judge of the spirit in which it was conceived.

— “To find is the reward of having sought; and all that we ourselves can do, we ought not to ask of others.”

“The world is a vast workyard, in which God has distributed to each one his task, distributing ours according to our strength. From this immense friction of diverse, opposed, seemingly hostile intelligences, light springs forth, without being extinguished at the hour of our last sleep. On the contrary, the constant march of the generations that succeed one another brings a new stone to the social edifice; the light becomes more brilliant when a child is born, bringing, in order to continue progress, the first element of an ever-renewed intelligence.”

“But the marchioness ceaselessly repeats to me (says the young girl), that we are all born wicked, that we differ only by the greater or lesser propensity toward sin, and that the whole of existence is a struggle against our inclinations, that all would tend toward eternal damnation, if the religion she teaches me did not hold us back at the edge of the abyss.

“— Do not believe those blasphemers. God would be the agent of evil, if He had not placed in each one of us the compass that must guide our steps toward the realization of our destinies, and if man had not been able to march upon his path until the day when the Church came to correct the imperfect and ill-finished work of the Eternal.”

“Who knows whether, in the immense rotation of the world, our children, in their turn, will not become our parents, and whether they will not restore to us, intact, this sum of miseries which we shall have left to them on departing?”

“No evil can come from God, in time nor in eternity. Sorrow is our own work, it is the protest of Nature to indicate to us that we are no longer upon the paths fixed by her for human activity. It becomes a means of salvation, because it is its very excess that impels us forward, incites our lazy imagination and leads us to make great discoveries, which increase the well-being of those who are to pass over this globe after us.”

“Each one of us is a link of that sublime and mysterious chain which binds all men among themselves, as well as with the whole of Creation, and which never, anywhere, could be broken.”

“After death, the exhausted organs need repose, and the body returns to the earth the elements of which are constituted, unto infinity, the beings that succeed one another. But life is reborn from death.”

“On departing, we carry away with us the remembrance of the knowledge acquired here; the world to which we shall go will give us its own and we shall gather them all into sheaves, in order to form progress from them.”

“Nevertheless, ventured the girl, there will be a term, an inevitable end, however far off you may suppose it.

“— Why limit eternity, after having admitted it in principle?

“That which is called the end of the world is only a figure. There was never a beginning and there will never be an end of the world. Everything lives, everything breathes, everything is peopled. For the last judgment to be able to come, there would have to be a general cataclysm, which would make the entire Universe enter into nothingness. God, who created everything, cannot destroy His work. Of what use would the annihilation of life be?”

“Doubtless death is inevitable. But, better understood in the future, this death that terrifies us will occur only at the foreseen hour, perhaps awaited, of departure, in order to furnish a new stage. One arrives, another sets out, and hope wipes away the tears that occur at the instant of farewell. Immensity, the infinite, eternity prolong their perspectives before our eager eyes, whom the unknown attracts. Already more perfected, we shall make a more beautiful journey, then we shall depart yet again, and we shall ever march, raising ourselves unceasingly, for it depends upon us whether death be the reward of duty accomplished, or the punishment, when the work commissioned shall not have been done.” “In whatever place we may be in the Universe, we are bound by mysterious and sacred ties, which make us responsible for one another, and we shall inevitably gather the harvest of the good and of the evil that each one of us sowed behind him, before departing for the great journey.”

“The child who is born brings his germ of progress; the man who dies leaves his place so that, after him, progress may be realized and he may continue to labor, carrying elsewhere, and to another being, his perfected soul.”

“Those to whom you owe the light expiated in this life the faults of a mysterious past. They suffered, but they suffered courageously. The God of love and of mercy had need of them, doubtless, for a more important mission in another world. He called them to Himself, granting them thus the merited wages before the day had ended.”

(Concerning a young girl who, while still a child, performed astonishing cures, indicating the remedies by intuition).

This caused a stir, and the chief authority, the curate, became uneasy and intervened. The child did, by natural means, what neither the doctor with his science, nor the curate with his prayers, was capable of obtaining!… Evidently she was possessed. For men of little faith and obtuse intelligence, it is God who, with the purpose of punishing us, as though He had not eternity before Him, or of testing us, as though He did not know what we are going to do, sends us all the ills, the scourges of every kind, the ruins, the loss of those who are dear to us. On the contrary, it is Satan who gives prosperity, makes treasures be found, cures the sick, and lavishes upon us all the joys of this world. In short, according to them, God does the evil, while the devil is the author of all good. So Mary was exorcized, rebaptized at random, in order that she might no longer be able to relieve her fellow beings. But nothing availed: she continues to do good around her. — But you, who know everything, Paul, what do you say of all this?

— Though I never believe in what my reason repels, answered the young count, I do not deny the facts attested by numerous witnesses, merely because Science does not yet know how to explain them. God gave to the animals the instinct to go straight to the plant that can cure the rare illnesses that strike them. Why should He have refused us this precious privilege? But man left the paths that the Creator had fixed for him; he set himself in hostility with Nature, whose warnings he ceased to heed. The torch was extinguished in him, and Science came to replace the instinct which, in its parvenu’s pride, it denied, combated, persecuted, annihilated as far as it lay within its power to do so. But who can affirm that it does not survive in some simple and primitive beings, resolved to enlighten themselves docilely by all the glimmers they catch sight of, animated as they are by the desire to come to the aid of the sufferings of others? Who knows whether Mary, having formerly lived among those rude populaces in childhood, among whom instinct still survives and who know marvelous secrets, or else in some more advanced world, from which her faults made her decline, God does not permit her to remember things that others have forgotten? “Are there not certain kinds of knowledge, for each one of us, that seem to be found again within us, so easy is their study to us, whereas others cannot penetrate into our spirit, doubtless because they come to strike it for the first time, or because several generations have accumulated upon such knowledge mountains of ignorance and of forgetting?”

(Concerning the visions in dreams).

“It is the soul kept in its exile that converses with the soul released from its earthly part; that is why these visions are illumined by a luminous ray, which lets poor humans glimpse how resplendent is the point reached by those who knew how to steer their skiff upon the perilous ocean, where existence floats.

“Certainly, in different worlds, our bodies are constituted of different elements, and there we put on another envelope, more perfect or more imperfect, according to the milieu where they must act. But it is always certain that these bodies live, animated by the same breath of God; that the transmission of souls takes place, in some as in the others, of the innumerable planets that people infinite space, and that, being the very emanation of God, they exist identically the same, in all worlds. On the other side of life, He gives us a soul ever purified, which permits us to draw ceaselessly nearer to heaven; only our will at times makes it deviate from the straight path. — Nevertheless, Paul, they teach us that we shall rise again with our bodies of today!

— All this is folly and pride! Our bodies are not ours, but everyone’s, of the beings whom we devoured yesterday, of those who will devour us tomorrow. They are of a day; the earth lends them to us and will take them back from us. Only our soul belongs to us; it alone is eternal, like all that comes from God and returns to Him.”

[1] [Le Roman de l’avenir, par E. Bonnemère - Google Books.]