Jules Verne

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 369, 1 June 1928, Page 14

Jules Verne

(Abridged from cu■■ article in “The Manchester Guardian,” by Philip Carr.) JULES VERNE was born on February 8, 1828, at Nantes, the old seaport at the mouth of the Loire. Re died on March 24, 1905, at Amiens, the cathedral town in which he spent the last 33 years of his life. In that Mfe of nearly 80 years the 20 between 1883 and 1883 were those into which the greater part of his work was compressed, while the books which have made his name famous all over the world were nearly all written during the frst 15 years of the 20. This chronology of his work is interesting in two ways. It was from the sixties to the eighties of the last century that the boys of all over £he v. orld were fired by his stories to the adventures of geographical and scientific discovery and realisation to which he showed them the way; and if, after similar acknowledgments from Nansen and Lyautey and Wilbur Wright, so recent a recruit to these adventurers a i a aviator Byrd could say that it •was Jules Verne who led him to the North Pole, he has already become almost a legend of the past to the boys of to-day. Flying across the whole of the African continent, which was so fantastically imaginative that the wonder of it made the success of Jules Verne’s first book, has become so Realisable to-day that a Cobham can undertake it as a trip with his wife, and going round the world in 80 days is now almost a record of slowness. Subsequent realisation is not the only evidence that his science can be taken seriously. One is that he took it very seriously himself, followed all the latest reports of contemporary learned societies in his search for new subjects, which he systematically indexed and classified, and devoted great pains to their plausible working

out. Another is that he was taken quite seriously by scientists. The ballistics of the projectile in his •‘Around the Moon” were so truly calculated that either Herschell or Humboldt was said to have supplied Ihem, notwithstanding the fact that both of these great men were dead; and many distinguished men of science have testified that his books, if they sometimes seemed to be based on a madman’s premise, were reasoned without a flaw. There is plenty of evidence of Jules Verne’s own preoccupation with this sort of verisimilitude. He criticised Edgar Allan Poe, whom he virtually acknowledged, upon the imaginative side, as his master, for his neglect of elementary laws of physics and mechanics, and he was always at pains to fill his own books with convincing detail. He realised, moreover, the value of all detail, not only on the scientific side, hut for the creation of a reality of atmosphere in the story; and in his first book he makes his hero express his admiration of Defoe, who never neglected such detail in ‘‘Robinson Crusoe.” The success of Jules Verne’s books was immediate in France, and still mores in England. He did not conceal his admiration for the practical and energetic qualities in the English character. He was perhaps, like Bernard Shaw In ‘‘John Bull’s Other Island,” writing less to please the English than to hold them up to the emulation of his own countrymen; but, like Shaw, it was in England that he found his greatest success. To be sure there were other reasons for that success. He had discovered an entirely new mine for the novelist, and the Treasure which he brought up certainly supplied a want which had long been felt in France as well as in England. What his publisher, Hetzel, wanted was books for The “6trenne” is the present which a good little boy—or girl—receives from his

parents when he has dutifully entered their room on New Year’s Morning, recited his little “compliment,” and wished them a “Bonne annde.” It had always been hard to find suitable book;:'. The second way in which the chronology of Jules Verne’s books is interesting is that it shows the enormous labour which he crowde-d into a few years and helps to explain why he never became a literary figure in Paris. He wrote more than 50 books, and half of these were composed in little over a dozen years. Although he had been a typical Parisian bohemian as N a young man, when he was writing the theatre, he left Paris for Le Crotoy, on the estuary of the Somme, in 1866, and in 1872 he settled in Amiens, which he hardly ever afterwards left, and where his blonde beard, grown white, and his gruff and unsoda manners gave him, at the end, the nickname of the “Polar Bear.” From the time when success first «ame to him he gave himself up entirely to his writing. He refused to stand for the French Academy, refused even to receive admiring visitors. His cne recreation was his yacht. It was called St. Michel. He had three of them of the same name in his life. But his real travels were in the imagination. Writing was to him the only reality. “When I don’t write I don’t live,” he said. He loved music, he loved the sea, he loved the idea of liberty—he had been a lad of 20 in 1848. All these loves can be traced in his books. But he loved writing more than all. He made money with his books, for Hetzel, his publisher, treated him well. He made even more money by the % plays adapted from two of them.

Btrogoff” and “Around the World in Eighty Days” were sure and constant successes in the enormous Chatelet Theatre right up to the beginning of the war, and were repeatedly revived. An odd link with the days of his activity is M. PoincarA When, in 1896, he brought out the last of his successful books, “Face au Drapeau,” the chemist Turpin, the inventor of melinite, whose career had certainly been used in the book, thought himself injured and brought an action. M. Poincare, who proudly declared that he had been a voracious reader of Jules Verne, was the advocate of the novelist.