I find myself still sitting in front of the last book by Mr. H. G.
Wells, I say stunned with admiration, my family says sleepy with
fatigue. I still feel vaguely all the things in Mr. Wells's book which
I agree with; and I still feel vividly the one thing that I deny. I deny
that biology can destroy the sense of truth, which alone can even desire
biology. No truth which I find can deny that I am seeking the truth. My
mind cannot find anything which denies my mind... But what is all this?
This is no sort of talk for a genial essay. Let us change the subject;
let us have a romance or a fable or a fairy tale.
Come, let us tell each other stories. There was once a king who was very
fond of listening to stories, like the king in the Arabian Nights.
The only difference was that, unlike that cynical Oriental, this king
believed all the stories that he heard. It is hardly necessary to add
that he lived in England. His face had not the swarthy secrecy of the
tyrant of the thousand tales; on the contrary, his eyes were as big and
innocent as two blue moons; and when his yellow beard turned totally
white he seemed to be growing younger. Above him hung still his heavy
sword and horn, to remind men that he had been a tall hunter and warrior
in his time: indeed, with that rusted sword he had wrecked armies.
But he was one of those who will never know the world, even when they
conquer it. Besides his love of this old Chaucerian pastime of the
telling of tales, he was, like many old English kings, specially
interested in the art of the bow. He gathered round him great archers of
the stature of Ulysses and Robin Hood, and to four of these he gave
the whole government of his kingdom. They did not mind governing his
kingdom; but they were sometimes a little bored with the necessity
of telling him stories. None of their stories were true; but the king
believed all of them, and this became very depressing. They created the
most preposterous romances; and could not get the credit of creating
them. Their true ambition was sent empty away. They were praised as
archers; but they desired to be praised as poets. They were trusted as
men, but they would rather have been admired as literary men.
At last, in an hour of desperation, they formed themselves into a club
or conspiracy with the object of inventing some story which even the
king could not swallow. They called it The League of the Long Bow; thus
attaching themselves by a double bond to their motherland of England,
which has been steadily celebrated since the Norman Conquest for its
heroic archery and for the extraordinary credulity of its people.
At last it seemed to the four archers that their hour had come. The king
commonly sat in a green curtained chamber, which opened by four doors,
and was surmounted by four turrets. Summoning his champions to him on an
April evening, he sent out each of them by a separate door, telling him
to return at morning with the tale of his journey. Every champion bowed
low, and, girding on great armour as for awful adventures, retired to
some part of the garden to think of a lie. They did not want to think of
a lie which would deceive the king; any lie would do that. They wanted
to think of a lie so outrageous that it would not deceive him, and that
was a serious matter.
The first archer who returned was a dark, quiet, clever fellow, very
dexterous in small matters of mechanics. He was more interested in the
science of the bow than in the sport of it. Also he would only shoot at
a mark, for he thought it cruel to kill beasts and birds, and atrocious
to kill men. When he left the king he had gone out into the wood and
tried all sorts of tiresome experiments about the bending of branches
and the impact of arrows; when even he found it tiresome he returned to
the house of the four turrets and narrated his adventure. “Well,” said
the king, “what have you been shooting?” “Arrows,” answered the archer.
“So I suppose,” said the king smiling; “but I mean, I mean what wild
things have you shot?” “I have shot nothing but arrows,” answered the
bowman obstinately. “When I went out on to the plain I saw in a crescent
the black army of the Tartars, the terrible archers whose bows are of
bended steel, and their bolts as big as javelins. They spied me afar
off, and the shower of their arrows shut out the sun and made a rattling
roof above me. You know, I think it wrong to kill a bird, or worm, or
even a Tartar. But such is the precision and rapidity of perfect science
that, with my own arrows, I split every arrow as it came against me. I
struck every flying shaft as if it were a flying bird. Therefore, Sire,
I may say truly, that I shot nothing but arrows.” The king said, “I know
how clever you engineers are with your fingers.” The archer said, “Oh,”
and went out.
The second archer, who had curly hair and was pale, poetical, and rather
effeminate, had merely gone out into the garden and stared at the moon.
When the moon had become too wide, blank, and watery, even for his own
wide, blank, and watery eyes, he came in again. And when the king said
“What have you been shooting?” he answered with great volubility, “I
have shot a man; not a man from Tartary, not a man from Europe, Asia,
Africa, or America; not a man on this earth at all. I have shot the
Man in the Moon.” “Shot the Man in the Moon?” repeated the king with
something like a mild surprise. “It is easy to prove it,” said
the archer with hysterical haste. “Examine the moon through this
particularly powerful telescope, and you will no longer find any
traces of a man there.” The king glued his big blue idiotic eye to the
telescope for about ten minutes, and then said, “You are right: as
you have often pointed out, scientific truth can only be tested by the
senses. I believe you.” And the second archer went out, and being of a
more emotional temperament burst into tears.
The third archer was a savage, brooding sort of man with tangled hair
and dreamy eyes, and he came in without any preface, saying, “I have
lost all my arrows. They have turned into birds.” Then as he saw that
they all stared at him, he said “Well, you know everything changes on
the earth; mud turns into marigolds, eggs turn into chickens; one can
even breed dogs into quite different shapes. Well, I shot my arrows
at the awful eagles that clash their wings round the Himalayas; great
golden eagles as big as elephants, which snap the tall trees by perching
on them. My arrows fled so far over mountain and valley that they turned
slowly into fowls in their flight. See here,” and he threw down a dead
bird and laid an arrow beside it. “Can't you see they are the same
structure. The straight shaft is the backbone; the sharp point is the
beak; the feather is the rudimentary plumage. It is merely modification
and evolution.” After a silence the king nodded gravely and said, “Yes;
of course everything is evolution.” At this the third archer suddenly
and violently left the room, and was heard in some distant part of the
building making extraordinary noises either of sorrow or of mirth.
The fourth archer was a stunted man with a face as dead as wood,
but with wicked little eyes close together, and very much alive. His
comrades dissuaded him from going in because they said that they had
soared up into the seventh heaven of living lies, and that there was
literally nothing which the old man would not believe. The face of the
little archer became a little more wooden as he forced his way in, and
when he was inside he looked round with blinking bewilderment. “Ha, the
last,” said the king heartily, “welcome back again!” There was a long
pause, and then the stunted archer said, “What do you mean by 'again'?
I have never been here before.” The king stared for a few seconds, and
said, “I sent you out from this room with the four doors last night.”
After another pause the little man slowly shook his head. “I never saw
you before,” he said simply; “you never sent me out from anywhere.
I only saw your four turrets in the distance, and strayed in here by
accident. I was born in an island in the Greek Archipelago; I am by
profession an auctioneer, and my name is Punk.” The king sat on his
throne for seven long instants like a statue; and then there awoke in
his mild and ancient eyes an awful thing; the complete conviction of
untruth. Every one has felt it who has found a child obstinately false.
He rose to his height and took down the heavy sword above him, plucked
it out naked, and then spoke. “I will believe your mad tales about the
exact machinery of arrows; for that is science. I will believe your
mad tales about traces of life in the moon; for that is science. I
will believe your mad tales about jellyfish turning into gentlemen, and
everything turning into anything; for that is science. But I will
not believe you when you tell me what I know to be untrue. I will
not believe you when you say that you did not all set forth under my
authority and out of my house. The other three may conceivably have told
the truth; but this last man has certainly lied. Therefore I will kill
him.” And with that the old and gentle king ran at the man with uplifted
sword; but he was arrested by the roar of happy laughter, which told the
world that there is, after all, something which an Englishman will not
swallow.