“Nymphaeum” established an important prototype within Rosny’s oeuvre, providing a template to which he frequently returned, even though it is an inherently confused work that changes direction several times. The initial encounter between the explorers and the tiger was a confrontation that he was to echo incessantly as a supplier of melodrama, as was the chase after an abducted bride-to-be. Both these devices seem, however, to be mere accessories, awkwardly recruited to impart a measure of narrative drive to what is, in essence, a Utopian romance of how human life might have been, had evolution only worked a little differently. The heart of the story is the Rousseauesque innocence and happiness of the light-skinned Water-People—an exercise in pure Romance that is sufficient in itself to belie Rosny’s hastily-acquired reputation as a Naturalist.
Given the manner in which the story changes direction several times, it is hardly surprising that Rosny found “Nymphaeum” a difficult piece to continue or conclude; it was obviously planned as a novel, but the story had to be finished off with brutal rapidity in order that it might be sold as a novella. As an adventure story, therefore, it remains direly unsatisfactory, but lovers of speculative fiction are bound to be glad that it did creep into print in some form, for the sake of the vision of the Water-People and their strange way of life.
The fact that the story, as published, embeds its poetic component within a narrative frame that is not far removed from crude pulp fiction, might reflect the fact that the opening was tacked on at a late stage in composition, not long before the ending, but the greater likelihood is that the piece really was composed in sequence, albeit with at least one substantial break, and that the preface burdened Rosny with a necessity that proved burdensome, of having to bring his narrator back home to tell his story. The character would doubtless have been happier—and the author too—had he not been forced to do that, no matter how inevitable it might have seemed in terms of the literary conventions of the day. Indeed, the story might have worked better, in poetic terms, had it not been forced to continue representing itself as a “real” adventure at all, being allowed an ultimate retreat into the realm of dream. Perhaps, after all, it would have been better had the narrator not recovered from his encounter with the tiger, but merely hallucinated the whole Romantic adventure on the point of death.
There is, undeniably, a similar quasi-hallucinatory quality about “The Depths of Kyamo,” “The Wonderful Cave Country” and “The Voyage,” in which the commitment to an anecdotal format holds the first two stories back from the kind of general conclusion to which the third eventually breaks through. Alglave is only able to hint at his conviction that the life of the advanced great apes of Kyamo is preferable to that of civilized men, and that the scrupulous predation of the giant vampire bats is morally superior to our own use of other animal species, and even Villars, in the third story, is compelled to reflect on the symbiotic relationship of his giant elephants and primitive humans from a vast distance, perhaps spoiling its proto-ecological message with the rather fatuous offhand remark about what elephants might have accomplished had they had two trunks instead of one. In spite of that flaw, however, “The Voyage” deserves recognition as a significant ecological parable, which avoids the mystical excesses of the contemporary works of W.H. Hudson.
It cannot be a coincidence that the seemingly-anodyne title of “Le Voyage” reproduces that of one of the key exercises in Decadent symbolism featured in Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal—a book more frequently quoted by Rosny’s characters than any other. The journey that it features is not only symbolic, but wryly symbolic, in a fashion of which Baudelaire might have approved, as he would surely have approved of the calculated paradoxicality and perversity of the commentary contained in the opening paragraphs. Rosny did not often let the “poetic” side of his conflicted personality show through in the era in which this story was published, but if “The Voyage” was actually written then, it testifies to the fact that the repression of that element of his literary personality was not contrived without rebellion.
“The Great Enigma” takes up that poetic thread, albeit in a straightforwardly nostalgic vein, but it is not surprising that Rosny was tempted to develop the basic theme of the story into a much more elaborate adventure story, of a sort that he was able to tackle much more confidently after 1920 than he had in the 1880s. “The Treasure in the Snow” is, in fact, one of the most coherent and level-paced of all his adventure stories, its relative lack of ambition in terms of the population of its lost land being compensated by a much greater willingness on the part of its author and its hero to involve himself intimately with its personnel. Indeed, “The Treasure in the Snow” can be regarded as a straightforward wish-fulfillment fantasy, whose sexual component is reasonably forthright and quite unashamed. It is that element of its plot which is extrapolated—in two different but not incompatible directions—in “The Boar Men” and “In the World of the Variants.”
Rosny must have been painfully aware, in penning “Nymphaeum,” of the blatant dishonesty of having the heroine carried off by a brutal abductor while forbidding any actual spoliation. He must have felt that, however necessary it might be in terms of reader-appeasement, it was a hypocritical fudge, and it is not surprising, given his willingness to write uncompromising contes cruels when the occasion warranted it (see, for instance, “The Witch” in vol. 6), that he was willing to look at the other side of the coin. Indeed, the more surprising thing is that when he decided to use the same formula again, in the relatively straightforward transfiguration of “The Boar Men” that became “Adventure in the Wild” (see vol. 5), he embraced a different kind of hypocrisy so readily. By the time he wrote “The Boar Men,” he had already expressed the view, in “The Navigators of Space” (see vol. 1), that all human sex, brutal or not, was a poor and ugly thing by comparison with more elevated forms of imaginable love, so it is not surprising that he went on from “The Treasure in the Snow” and “The Boar Men” to pen a very different kind of sexual fantasy in “In the World of the Variants,” which moved beyond the scope of conventional lost land stories to feature one of the multitudinous coexistent realms that Alglave confesses to have always believed to be far closer at hand, although invisible, than any remote polar Eden.
The stories in this volume illustrate Rosny’s lack—through no fault of his own—of an accurate time-scale for the discussion of evolutionary variations, and certain idiosyncrasies in his understanding of evolutionary theory, but those features of his work stand out even more clearly in his prehistoric fantasies, and are more conveniently discussed in that context (see vol. 4). They are, however, the stories that make the most conspicuous display of his occasionally-crude racism. When he was reading popularizations of anthropology in the 1880s, he could hardly help encountering race theories of the crudest sort, because anthropological theory was saturated with them at that time, and Rosny belonged to a generation—and, for that matter, to a colonial culture—that took it for granted that white people were superior to people of other races. It is, however, worth noting the evidence that these stories provide that Rosny did not suffer from the horror of miscegenation that afflicted so many 19th century race theories, and that he compensated for his racist assumptions with a frank xenophilia that made hypothetical new races—as well as the recovered prehistoric race of “The Treasure in the Snow”—more attracted to him than his own. Again, this is a topic that will be developed more fully in the commentary to volume four of this series.
The lost land subgenre is so obviously unviable in the context of modern geographical knowledge that stories of that sort cannot help but seem dated, and irredeemably quaint. Indeed, it is arguable that the subgenre was obsolete even before it was pioneered by ambitious Utopian writers, let alone adapted into quasi-Romantic adventure fiction by such late 19th century writers as H. Rider Haggard. It may be the case, therefore, that the primary appeal of all Rosny’s ventures in this vein to modern readers is nostalgic, but they are deliberately and quintessentially nostalgic in their substance as well as their appearance, and their superficial nostalgia might actually be held to add to their inherent nostalgia for evolutionary circumstances that never were, but might have been—and which might perhaps have represented better paths of development than the one that humankind actually took.
That possibility is intrinsically Romantic, and has a particular enshrinement in French Romanticism by virtue of the contribution made to its inspiration by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It is not at all Naturalistic—but the kind of “poetic passion” for science that Rosny had is itself intrinsically and irreducibly Romantic, and in developing that thread of his work in the winding way that he did, he was only following its logic in a slightly more forthright and ambitious fashion than other, less audacious, explorers of strange lands.