Читать книгу The Story of the Sun: New York, 1833-1918 - Frank Michael O'Brien - Страница 7

Most of those who incredulously regard the whole narrative as a hoax are generously enthusiastic in panegyrizing not only what they are pleased to denominate its ingenuity and talent, but also its useful effect in diverting the public mind, for a while, from that bitter apple of discord, the abolition of slavery, which still unhappily threatens to turn the milk of human kindness into rancorous gall. That the astronomical discoveries have had this effect is obvious from our exchange papers. Who knows, therefore, whether these discoveries in the moon, with the visions of the blissful harmony of her inhabitants which they have revealed, may not have had the effect of reproving the discords of a country which might be happy as a paradise, which has valleys not less lovely than those of the Ruby Colosseum, of the Unicorn, or of the Triads; and which has not inferior facilities for social intercourse to those possessed by the vespertiliones-homines, or any other homines whatever?

Some persons of little faith but great good nature, who consider the “moon story,” as it is vulgarly called, an adroit fiction of our own, are quite of the opinion that this was the amiable moral which the writer had in view. Other readers, however, construe the whole as an elaborate satire upon the monstrous fabrications of the political press of the country and the various genera and species of its party editors. In the blue goat with the single horn, mentioned as it is in connection with the royal arms of England, many persons fancy they perceive the characteristics of a notorious foreigner who is the supervising editor of one of our largest morning papers.

We confess that this idea of intended satire somewhat shook our own faith in the genuineness of the extracts from the Edinburgh Journal of Science with which a gentleman connected with our office furnished us as “from a medical gentleman immediately from Scotland.”

Certain correspondents have been urging us to come out and confess the whole to be a hoax; but this we can by no means do until we have the testimony of the English or Scotch papers to corroborate such a declaration. In the mean time let every reader of the account examine it and enjoy his own opinion. Many intelligent and scientific persons will believe it true, and will continue to do so to their lives’ end; whilst the skepticism of others would not be removed though they were in Dr. Herschel’s observatory itself.

The New York showmen of that day were keen for novelty, and the moon story helped them to it. Mr. Hannington, who ran the diorama in the City Saloon—which was not a barroom, but an amusement house—on Broadway opposite St. Paul’s Church, put on “The Lunar Discoveries; a Brilliant Illustration of the Scientific Observation of the Surface of the Moon, to Which Will Be Added the Reported Lunar Observations of Sir John Herschel.” Hannington had been showing “The Deluge” and “The Burning of Moscow,” but the wonders of the moon proved to be far more attractive to his patrons. The Sun approved of this moral spectacle:

Hannington forever and still years afterward, say we! His panorama of the lunar discoveries, in connexion with the beautiful dioramas, are far superior to any other exhibition in this country.

Not less popular than Hannington’s panorama was an extravaganza put on by Thomas Hamblin at the Bowery Theatre, and called “Moonshine, or Lunar Discoveries.” A Sun man went to review it, and had to stand up; but he was patient enough to stay, and he wrote this about the show:

It is quite evident that Hamblin does not believe a word of the whole story, or he would never have taken the liberties with it which he has. The wings of the man-bats and lady-bats, who are of an orange color and look like angels in the jaundice, are well contrived for effect; and the dialogue is highly witty and pungent. Major Jack Downing’s blowing up a whole flock of winged lunarians with a combustible bundle of Abolition tracts, after vainly endeavoring to catch a long aim at them with his rifle, is capital; as are also his puns and jokes upon the splendid scenery of the Ruby Colosseum. Take it altogether, it is the most amusing thing that has been on these boards for a long time.

Thus the moon eclipsed the regular stars of the New York stage. Even Mrs. Duff, the most pathetic Isabella that ever appeared in “The Fatal Marriage,” saw her audiences thin out at the Franklin Theatre. Sol Smith’s drolleries in “The Lying Valet,” at the Park Theatre, could not rouse the laughter that the burlesque man-bats caused at the Bowery.

All this time there was a disappointed man in Baltimore; disappointed because the moon stories had caused him to abandon one of the most ambitious stories he had attempted. This was Edgar Allan Poe, and the story he dropped was “Hans Pfaall.”

In the spring of 1835 the Harpers issued an edition of Sir John Herschel’s “Treatise on Astronomy,” and Poe, who read it, was deeply interested in the chapter on the possibility of future lunar investigations:

The theme excited my fancy, and I longed to give free rein to it in depicting my day-dreams about the scenery of the moon; in short, I longed to write a story embodying these dreams. The obvious difficulty, of course, was that of accounting for the narrator’s acquaintance with the satellite; and the equally obvious mode of surmounting the difficulty was the supposition of an extraordinary telescope.

Poe spoke of this ambition to John Pendleton Kennedy, of Baltimore, already the author of “Swallow Barn,” and later to have the honour of writing, as the result of a jest by Thackeray, the fourth chapter of the second volume of “The Virginians.” Kennedy assured Poe that the mechanics of telescope construction were so fixed that it would be impossible to impart verisimilitude to a tale based on a superefficient telescope. So Poe resorted to other means of bringing the moon close to the reader’s eye:

I fell back upon a style half plausible, half bantering, and resolved to give what interest I could to an actual passage from the earth to the moon, describing the lunar scenery as if surveyed and personally examined by the narrator.

Poe wrote the first part of “Hans Pfaall,” and published it in the Southern Literary Messenger, of which he was then editor, at Richmond, Virginia. Three weeks afterward the first instalment of Locke’s moon story appeared in the Sun. At the moment Poe believed that his idea had been kidnapped:

No sooner had I seen the paper than I understood the jest, which not for a moment could I doubt had been suggested by my own jeu d’esprit. Some of the New York journals—the Transcript, among others—saw the matter in the same light, and published the moon story side by side with “Hans Pfaall,” thinking that the author of the one had been detected in the author of the other.

Although the details are, with some exceptions, very dissimilar, still I maintain that the general features of the two compositions are nearly identical. Both are hoaxes—although one is in a tone of mere banter, the other of down-right earnest; both hoaxes are on one subject, astronomy; both on the same point of that subject, the moon; both professed to have derived exclusive information from a foreign country; and both attempt to give plausibility by minuteness of scientific detail. Add to all this, that nothing of a similar nature had even been attempted before these two hoaxes, the one of which followed immediately upon the heels of the other.

Having stated the case, however, in this form, I am bound to do Mr. Locke the justice to say that he denies having seen my article prior to the publication of his own; I am bound to add, also, that I believe him.

Nor can any unbiassed person who reads, for purpose of comparison, the “Astronomical Discoveries” and “Hans Pfaall” suspect that Locke based his hoax on the story of the Rotterdam debtor who blew his creditors to bits and sailed to the moon in a balloon. Chalk and cheese are much more alike than these two products of genius.

Poe may have intended to fall back upon “a style half plausible, half bantering,” as he described it, but there is not the slightest plausibility about “Hans Pfaall.” It is as near to humour as the great, dark mind could get. “Mere banter,” as he later described it, is better. The very episode of the dripping pitcher of water, used to wake Hans at an altitude where even alcohol would freeze, is enough proof, if proof at all were necessary, to strip the tale of its last shred of verisimilitude. No child of twelve would believe in Hans, while Locke’s fictitious “Dr. Grant” deceived nine-tenths—the estimate is Poe’s—of those who read the narrative of the great doings at the Cape of Good Hope.

Locke had spoiled a promising tale for Poe—who tore up the second instalment of “Hans Pfaall” when he “found that he could add very little to the minute and authentic account of Sir John Herschel”—but the poet took pleasure, in later years, in picking the Sun’s moon story to bits.

“That the public were misled, even for an instant,” Poe declared in his critical essay on Locke’s writings, “merely proves the gross ignorance which, ten or twelve years ago, was so prevalent on astronomical topics.”

According to Locke’s own description of the telescope, said Poe, it could not have brought the moon nearer than five miles; yet Sir John—Locke’s Sir John—saw flowers and described the eyes of birds. Locke had an ocean on the moon, although it had been established beyond question that the visible side of the moon is dry. The most ridiculous thing about the moon story, said Poe, was that the narrator described the entire bodies of the man-bats, whereas, if they were seen at all by an observer on the earth, they would manifestly appear as if walking heels up and head down, after the fashion of flies on a ceiling.

And yet the hoax, Poe admits, “was, upon the whole, the greatest hit in the way of sensation—of merely popular sensation—ever made by any similar fiction either in America or Europe.” Whether Locke intended it as satire or not—a debatable point—it was a hoax of the first water. It deceived more persons, and for a longer time, than any other fake ever written: and, as the Sun pointed out, it hurt nobody—except, perhaps, the feelings of Dr. Dick, of Dundee—and it took the public mind away from less agreeable matters. Some of the wounded scientists roared, but the public, particularly the New York public, took the exposure of Locke’s literary villainy just as Sir John Herschel accepted it—with a grin.

As for the inspiration of the moon story, the record is nebulous. If Poe was really grieved at his first thought that Locke had taken from him the main imaginative idea—that the moon was inhabited—then Poe was oversensitive or uninformed, for that idea was at least two centuries old.

Francis Godwin, an English bishop and author, who was born in 1562, and who died just two centuries before the Sun was first printed, wrote “The Man in the Moone, or a Discourse of a Voyage Thither by Domingo Gonsales, the Speedy Messenger.” This was published in London in 1638, five years after the author’s death.

In the same year there appeared a book called “The Discovery of a World in the Moone,” which contained arguments to prove the moon habitable. It was written by John Wilkins—no relative of the fictitious Peter of Paltock’s story, but a young English clergyman who later became Bishop of Chester, and who was the first secretary of the Royal Society. Two years later Wilkins added to his “Discovery of a World” a “Discourse Concerning the Possibility of a Passage Thither.”

Cyrano de Bergerac, he of the long nose and the passion for poetry and duelling, later to be immortalized by Rostand, read these products of two Englishmen’s fancy, and about 1650 he turned out his joyful “Histoire Comique des Etats et Empires de la Lune.” But Bergerac had also been influenced by Dante and by Lucian, the latter being the supposed inspiration of the fanciful narratives of Rabelais and Swift. Perhaps these writers influenced Godwin and Wilkins also; so the trail, zigzagged and ramifying, goes back to the second century. It is hard to indict a man for being inspired, and in the case of the moon story there is no evidence of plagiarism. If “Hans Pfaall” were to be compared with Locke’s story for hoaxing qualities, it would only suffer by the comparison. It would appear as the youthful product of a tyro, as against the cunning work of an artist of almost devilish ingenuity.

Is there any doubt that the moon hoax was the sole work of Richard Adams Locke? So far as concerns the record of the Sun, the comments of Locke’s American contemporaries, and the belief of Benjamin H. Day, expressed in 1883 in a talk with Edward P. Mitchell, the answer must be in the negative. Yet it must be set down, as a literary curiosity at least, that it has been believed in France and by at least one English antiquary of repute that the moon hoax was the work of a Frenchman—Jean Nicolas Nicollet, the astronomer.

Nicollet was born at Cluses, in Savoy, in 1786. First a cowherd, he did not learn to read until he was twelve. Once at school his progress was rapid, and at nineteen he become preceptor of mathematics at Chambry. He went to Paris, where in 1817 he was appointed secretary-librarian of the Observatory, and he studied astronomy with Laplace, who refers to Nicollet’s assistance in his works. In 1823 he was appointed to the government bureau of longitudes, and at the same time was professor of mathematics in the College of Louis le Grand.

He became a master of English, and through this knowledge and his own mathematical genius he was able to assemble, for the use of the French life-insurance companies, all that was known, and much that he himself discovered, of actuarial methods; this being incorporated in his letter to M. Outrequin on “Assurances Having for Their Basis the Probable Duration of Human Life.” He also wrote “Memoirs upon the Measure of an Arc of Parallel Midway Between the Pole and the Equator” (1826), and “Course of Mathematics for the Use of Mariners” (1830).

In 1831 Nicollet failed in speculation, losing not only his own fortune but that of others. He came to the United States, arriving early in 1832, the very year that Locke came to America. It is probable that he was in New York, but there is no evidence as to the length of his stay. It is known, however, that he was impoverished, and that he was assisted by Bishop Chanche, of Natchez, to go on with his chosen work—an exploration of the Mississippi and its tributaries. He made astronomical and barometrical observations, determined the geographical position and elevation of many important points, and studied Indian lore.

The United States government was so well pleased with Nicollet’s work that it sent him to the Far West for further investigations, with Lieutenant John C. Frémont as assistant. His “Geology of the Upper Mississippi Region and of the Cretaceous Formation of the Upper Missouri” was one of the results of his journeys. After this he tried, through letters, to regain his lost standing in France by seeking election to the Paris Academy of Sciences, but he was black-balled, and, broken-hearted, he died in Washington in 1843.

The Englishman who believed that Nicollet was the author of the moon hoax was Augustus De Morgan, father of the late William De Morgan, the novelist, and himself a distinguished mathematician and litterateur. He was professor of mathematics at University College, London, at the time when the moon pamphlet first appeared in England. His “Budget of Paradoxes,” an interesting collection of literary curiosities and puzzles, which he had written, but not carefully assembled, was published in 1872, the year after his death.

THE FIRST INSTALLMENT OF THE MOON HOAX

A MOON SCENE, FROM LOCKE’S GREAT DECEPTION

Two fragments, printed separately in this volume, refer to the moon hoax. The first is this:

“Some Account of the Great Astronomical Discoveries Lately Made by Sir John Herschel at the Cape of Good Hope.”—Second Edition, London, 12mo, 1836.

This is a curious hoax, evidently written by a person versed in astronomy and clever at introducing probable circumstances and undesigned coincidences. It first appeared in a newspaper. It makes Sir J. Herschel discover men, animals, et cetera, in the moon, of which much detail is given. There seems to have been a French edition, the original, and English editions in America, whence the work came into Britain; but whether the French was published in America or at Paris I do not know. There is no doubt that it was produced in the United States by M. Nicollet, an astronomer, once of Paris, and a fugitive of some kind.

About him I have heard two stories. First, that he fled to America with funds not his own, and that this book was a mere device to raise the wind. Secondly, that he was a protégé of Laplace, and of the Polignac party, and also an outspoken man. That after the Revolution he was so obnoxious to the republican party that he judged it prudent to quit France; which he did in debt, leaving money for his creditors, but not enough, with M. Bouvard. In America he connected himself with an assurance office. The moon story was written, and sent to France, chiefly with the intention of entrapping M. Arago, Nicollet’s especial foe, into the belief of it. And those who narrate this version of the story wind up by saying that M. Arago was entrapped, and circulated the wonders through Paris until a letter from Nicollet to M. Bouvard explained the hoax.

I have no personal knowledge of either story; but as the poor man had to endure the first, it is but right that the second should be told with it.

The second fragment reads as follows:

“The Moon Hoax; or, the Discovery That the Moon Has a Vast Population of Human Beings.” By Richard Adams Locke.—New York, 1859.

This is a reprint of the hoax already mentioned. I suppose “R.A. Locke” is the name assumed by M. Nicollet. The publisher informs us that when the hoax first appeared day by day in a morning newspaper, the circulation increased fivefold, and the paper obtained a permanent footing. Besides this, an edition of sixty thousand was sold off in less than one month.

This discovery was also published under the name of A.R. Grant. Sohnke’s “Bibliotheca Mathematica” confounds this Grant with Professor R. Grant of Glasgow, the author of the “History of Physical Astronomy,” who is accordingly made to guarantee the discoveries in the moon. I hope Adams Locke will not merge in J.C. Adams, the codiscoverer of Neptune. Sohnke gives the titles of three French translations of “The Moon Hoax” at Paris, of one at Bordeaux, and of Italian translations at Parma, Palermo, and Milan.

A correspondent, who is evidently fully master of details, which he has given at length, informs me that “The Moon Hoax” first appeared in the New York Sun, of which R.A. Locke was editor. It so much resembled a story then recently published by Edgar A. Poe, in a Southern paper, “Adventures of Hans Pfaall,” that some New York journals published the two side by side. Mr. Locke, when he left the New York Sun, started another paper, and discovered the manuscript of Mungo Park; but this did not deceive. The Sun, however, continued its career, and had a great success in an account of a balloon voyage from England to America, in seventy-five hours, by Mr. Monck Mason, Mr. Harrison Ainsworth, and others.

I have no doubt that M. Nicollet was the author of “The Moon Hoax,” written in a way which marks the practised observatory astronomer beyond all doubt, and by evidence seen in the most minute details. Nicollet had an eye to Europe. I suppose that he took Poe’s story and made it a basis for his own. Mr. Locke, it would seem, when he attempted a fabrication for himself, did not succeed.

In his remark that “there seems to have been a French edition, the original,” Augustus De Morgan was undoubtedly misled, for every authority consultable agrees that the French pamphlets were merely translations of the story originally printed in the Sun; and De Morgan had learned this when he wrote his second note on the subject.

The M. Arago whom De Morgan believes Nicollet sought to entrap was Dominique François Arago, the celebrated astronomer. In 1830, as a reward for his many accomplishments, he was made perpetual secretary of the Paris Academy of Sciences, and in the following year—the year of Nicollet’s fall from grace—he was elected to the Chamber of Deputies. As to the intimation that Arago was really misled by the moon story, it is unlikely. W.N. Griggs, a contemporary of Locke, insists in a memoir of that journalist that the narrative was read by Arago to the members of the Academy, and was received with mingled denunciation and laughter. But hoaxing Arago in a matter of astronomy would have been a difficult feat. Surely the discrepancies pointed out by Poe would have been noticed immediately.

It is, however, easy to understand De Morgan’s belief that Nicollet was the author of the moon story. Much of the narrative, particularly parts which have here been omitted, is made up of technicalities which could have come only from the pen of a man versed in the intricacies of astronomical science. They were not put into the story to interest Sun readers, for they are far over the layman’s head, but for the purpose of adding verisimilitude to a yarn which, stripped of the technical trimmings, would have been pretty bald.

It was plain to De Morgan that Nicollet was one of the few men alive in 1835 who could have woven the scientific fabric in which the hoax was disguised. It was also apparent to him that Nicollet, jealous of the popularity of Arago, might have had a motive for launching a satire, if not a hoax. And then there was Nicollet’s presence in America at the time of the moon story’s publication, Nicollet’s knowledge of English, and Nicollet’s poverty. The coincidences are interesting, if nothing more.

* * * * *

Let us see what the French said about Nicollet and the story that came to the Sun from “a medical gentleman immediately from Scotland.” In a sketch of Nicollet printed in the “Biographie Universelle” (Michaud, Paris, 1884), the following appears:

There has been attributed to him an article which appeared in the daily papers of France, and which, in the form of a letter dated from the United States, spoke of an improvement in the telescope invented by the learned astronomer Herschel, who was then at the Cape of Good Hope. It has been generally and with much probability attributed to Nicollet.

With the aid of this admirable improvement Herschel was supposed to have succeeded in discovering on the surface of the moon live beings, buildings of various kinds, and a multitude of other interesting things. The description of these objects and the ingenious method employed by the English astronomer to attain his purpose was so detailed, and covered with a veneer of science so skilfully applied, that the general public was startled by the announcement of the discovery, of which North America hastened to send us the news.

It has even been said that several astronomers and physicists of our country were taken in for a moment. That seems hardly probable to us. It was easy to perceive that it was a hoax written by a learned and mischievous person.

The “Nouvelle Biographie Générale” (Paris, 1862), says of Nicollet:

He is believed to be the author of the anonymous pamphlet which appeared in 1836 on the discoveries in the moon made by Herschel at the Cape of Good Hope.

Cruel, consistent Locke, never to have written down the details of the conception and birth of the best invention that ever spoofed the world! He leaves history to wonder whether it be possible that, with one word added, the French biographer was right, and that it was “a hoax written by a learned and a mischievous person.” Certain it is that Nicollet never wrote all of the moon story; certain, too, that Locke wrote much, if not all of it. The calculations of the angles of reflection might have been Nicollet’s, but the blue unicorn is the unicorn of Locke.

No man can say when the germ of the story first took shape. It might have been designed at any time after Herschel laid the plans for his voyage to the Cape of Good Hope, and that was at least two years before it appeared in the Sun. Was Nicollet in New York then, and did he and Locke lay their heads together across a table at the American Hotel and plan the great deceit?

There was one head full of figures and the stars; another crammed with the imagination that brought forth the fire-making biped beavers and the fascinating, if indecorous, human bats. If they never met, more is the pity. Whether they met, none can say. Go to ask the ghosts of the American Hotel, and you find it gone, and in its place the Woolworth Building, earth’s spear levelled at the laughing moon.

Whatever happened, the credit must rest with Richard Adams Locke. Even if the technical embellishments of the moon story were borrowed, still his was the genius that builded the great temple, made flowers to bloom in the lunar valleys, and grew the filmy wings on the vespertilio-homo. His was the art that caused the bricklayer of Cherry Street to sit late beside his candle, spelling out the rare story with joyous labour. It must have been a reward to Locke, even to the last of his seventy years, to know that he had made people read newspapers who never had read them before; for that is what he really accomplished by this huge, complex lie.

“From the epoch of the hoax,” wrote Poe, “the Sun shone with unmitigated splendor. Its success firmly established the ‘penny system’ throughout the country, and (through the Sun) consequently we are indebted to the genius of Mr. Locke for one of the most important steps ever yet taken in the pathway of human progress.”