Romancer and Romanticism

JULES VERNE--Kennefh Allott--Macmillan ($3).

This book is a life of Jules Verne (the first in English) and an analysis of the romantic-scientific viewpoint of the 19th Century. Industrious Jules Verne was a perfect exponent of that viewpoint. His books, tremendously popular, not only stimulated "progress," but furnished a grateful escape from it.

Verne's life was as quiet as his stories were lively. A lawyer's son, he went to Paris in 1848, tried his hand at playwriting, lived poor, became a stockbroker to support his wife. After the success of his Five Weeks in A Balloon, he spent most of his life at his desk, writing.

Turning out (after 1870) at least two volumes a year, scrupulously researched, he described almost every part of the surface of the earth, its center, and respectable sectors of the solar system.

The rumor rose that he really ran a sweatshop of hacks. He was at work by dawn, silent at meals, neither drinking nor smoking; only the theater could keep him out of bed after 8 p.m. When he died 5,000 people were at his funeral.

Unwittingly, this hard-working recluse had caught the whole spirit of the 19th Century, which made a faith of science. Its scientists "had about them an air of divine assurance." This faith was rooted, says Author Allott, not in Rousseau, nor in the "rational" 18th Century, but in the dynamic Renaissance and the Reformation. The idea of progress "was a Renaissance bedtime story" which seemed to come true in the 19th Century's tremendous technical realizations. Cities took on their colossal power, intricacy and ugliness; the Machine Age was on.

Among nonartists, the reaction to this air-tight ugliness took the form of seaside holidays. Nature became a sort of art gallery. Baedeker became the bible of escape. Verne's own passion for geography was romantic; his love of the sea and the undersea, which his contemporaries shared, is generally recognized today as a death wish (see cut); his greatest creation, Captain Nemo, is simply Lord Byron in a diving suit.

As for the artists, they held machines in fear and reason in contempt. They lost faith in progress, protested against life itself. The toughest of them remained within their urban prison, cultivating the stoic pose of the dandy, who scrutinized putrescence through a monocle. "To the real artist it was almost necessary to be blasphemous or mad." Indeed, "the 19th Century left the defense of primary values to madmen." Much of Allott's thesis is summed up in that arresting sentence. And pointing to such diverse phenomena as Tarzan and T. S. Eliot, he argues that 19th-Century romanticism persists to this day.

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