The Coming Race - Edward Bulwer, Lord Lytton (free ereaders txt) 📗

Men.

In the elder inflectional literature the dual form existed- it
has long been obsolete.

The genitive case with them is also obsolete; the dative
supplies its place: they say the House 'to' a Man, instead of
the House 'of' a Man. When used (sometimes in poetry), the
genitive in the termination is the same as the nominative; so
is the ablative, the preposition that marks it being a prefix
or suffix at option, and generally decided by ear, according to
the sound of the noun. It will be observed that the prefix Hil
marks the vocative case. It is always retained in addressing
another, except in the most intimate domestic relations; its
omission would be considered rude: just as in our of forms of
speech in addressing a king it would have been deemed
disrespectful to say "King," and reverential to say "O King."
In fact, as they have no titles of honour, the vocative
adjuration supplies the place of a title, and is given
impartially to all. The prefix Hil enters into the composition
of words that imply distant communications, as Hil-ya, to
travel.

In the conjugation of their verbs, which is much too lengthy a
subject to enter on here, the auxiliary verb Ya, "to go," which
plays so considerable part in the Sanskrit, appears and
performs a kindred office, as if it were a radical in some
language from which both had descended. But another auxiliary
52or opposite signification also accompanies it and shares its
labours- viz., Zi, to stay or repose. Thus Ya enters into the
future tense, and Zi in the preterite of all verbs requiring
auxiliaries. Yam, I shall go- Yiam, I may go- Yani-ya, I shall
go (literally, I go to go), Zam-poo-yan, I have gone
(literally, I rest from gone). Ya, as a termination, implies
by analogy, progress, movement, efflorescence. Zi, as a
terminal, denotes fixity, sometimes in a good sense, sometimes
in a bad, according to the word with which it is coupled.
Iva-zi, eternal goodness; Nan-zi, eternal evil. Poo (from)
enters as a prefix to words that denote repugnance, or things
from which we ought to be averse. Poo-pra, disgust; Poo-naria,
falsehood, the vilest kind of evil. Poosh or Posh I have
already confessed to be untranslatable literally. It is an
expression of contempt not unmixed with pity. This radical
seems to have originated from inherent sympathy between the
labial effort and the sentiment that impelled it, Poo being an
utterance in which the breath is exploded from the lips with
more or less vehemence. On the other hand, Z, when an initial,
is with them a sound in which the breath is sucked inward, and
thus Zu, pronounced Zoo (which in their language is one
letter), is the ordinary prefix to words that signify something
that attracts, pleases, touches the heart- as Zummer, lover;
Zutze, love; Zuzulia, delight. This indrawn sound of Z seems
indeed naturally appropriate to fondness. Thus, even in our
language, mothers say to their babies, in defiance of grammar,
"Zoo darling;" and I have heard a learned professor at Boston
call his wife (he had been only married a month) "Zoo little
pet."

I cannot quit this subject, however, without observing by what
slight changes in the dialects favoured by different tribes of
the same race, the original signification and beauty of sounds
may become confused and deformed. Zee told me with much
indignation that Zummer (lover) which in the way she uttered
it, seemed slowly taken down to the very depths of her heart,
was, in some not very distant communities of the Vril-ya,
53vitiated into the half-hissing, half-nasal, wholly
disagreeable, sound of Subber. I thought to myself it only
wanted the introduction of 'n' before 'u' to render it into an
English word significant of the last quality an amorous Gy
would desire in her Zummer.

I will but mention another peculiarity in this language which
gives equal force and brevity to its forms of expressions.

A is with them, as with us, the first letter of the alphabet,
and is often used as a prefix word by itself to convey a
complex idea of sovereignty or chiefdom, or presiding
principle. For instance, Iva is goodness; Diva, goodness and
happiness united; A-Diva is unerring and absolute truth. I
have already noticed the value of A in A-glauran, so, in vril
(to whose properties they trace their present state of
civilisation), A-vril, denotes, as I have said, civilisation
itself.

The philologist will have seen from the above how much the
language of the Vril-ya is akin to the Aryan or Indo-Germanic;
but, like all languages, it contains words and forms in which
transfers from very opposite sources of speech have been taken.
The very title of Tur, which they give to their supreme
magistrate, indicates theft from a tongue akin to the Turanian.
They say themselves that this is a foreign word borrowed from a
title which their historical records show to have been borne by
the chief of a nation with whom the ancestors of the Vril-ya
were, in very remote periods, on friendly terms, but which has
long become extinct, and they say that when, after the
discovery of vril, they remodelled their political
institutions, they expressly adopted a title taken from an
extinct race and a dead language for that of their chief
magistrate, in order to avoid all titles for that office with
which they had previous associations.

Should life be spared to me, I may collect into systematic form
such knowledge as I acquired of this language during my sojourn
amongst the Vril-ya. But what I have already said will perhaps
suffice to show to genuine philological students that a
54language which, preserving so many of the roots in the
aboriginal form, and clearing from the immediate, but
transitory, polysynthetical stage so many rude incumbrances,
s from popular ignorance into
that popular passion or ferocity which precedes its decease, as
(to cite illustrations from the upper world) during the French
Reign of Terror, or for the fifty years of the Roman Republic
preceding the ascendancy of Augustus, their name for that state
of things is Glek-Nas. Ek is strife- Glek, the universal strife.
Nas, as I before said, is corruption or rot; thus, Glek-Nas may
be construed, "the universal strife-rot." Their compounds are
very expressive; thuat which the Ana have attained
forbids the progressive cultivation of literature, especially
in the two main divisions of fiction and history,- I shall have
occasion to show later.


Chapter XIII.


This people have a religion, and, whatever may be said against
it, at least it has these strange peculiarities: firstly, that
all believe in the creed they profess; secondly, that they all
practice the precepts which the creed inculcates. They unite
in the worship of one divine Creator and Sustainer of the
universe. They believe that it is one of the properties of the
all-permeating agency of vril, to transmit to the well-spring
of life and intelligence every thought that a living creature
can conceive; and though they do not contend that the idea of a
Diety is innate, yet they say that the An (man) is the only
creature, so far as their observation of nature extends, to
whom 'the capacity of conceiving that idea,' with all the
trains of thought which open out from it, is vouchsafed. They
hold that this capacity is a privilege that cannot have been
given in vain, and hence that prayer and thanksgiving are
55acceptable to the divine Creator, and necessary to the complete
development of the human creature. They offer their devotions
both in private and public. Not being considered one of their
species, I was not admitted into the building or temple in
which the public worship is rendered; but I am informed that
the service is exceedingly short, and unattended with any pomp
of ceremony. It is a doctrine with the Vril-ya, that earnest
devotion or complete abstraction from the actual world cannot,
with benefit to itself, be maintained long at a stretch by the
human mind, especially in public, and that all attempts to do
so either lead to fanaticism or to hypocrisy. When they pray
in private, it is when they are alone or with their young
children.

They say that in ancient times there was a great number of
books written upon speculations as to the nature of the Diety,
and upon the forms of belief or worship supposed to be most
agreeable to Him. But these were found to lead to such heated
and angry disputations as not only to shake the peace of the
community and divide families before the most united, but in
the course of discussing the attributes of the Diety, the
existence of the Diety Himself became argued away, or, what was
worse, became invested with the passions and infirmities of the
human disputants. "For," said my host, "since a finite being
like an An cannot possibly define the Infinite, so, when he
endeavours to realise an idea of the Divinity, he only reduces
the Divinity into an An like himself." During the later ages,
therefore, all theological speculations, though not forbidden,
have been so discouraged as to have fallen utterly into disuse.
The Vril-ya unite in a conviction of a future state, more
felicitous and more perfect than the present. If they have
very vague notions of the doctrine of rewards and punishments,
it is perhaps because they have no systems of rewards and
punishments among themselves, for there are no crimes to
punish, and their moral standard is so even that no An among
56them is, upon the whole, considered more virtuous than another.
If one excels, perhaps in one virtue, another equally excels in
some other virtue; If one has his prevalent fault or infirmity,
so also another has his. In fact, in their extraordinary mode
of life. there are so few temptations to wrong, that they are
good (according to their notions of goodness) merely because
they live. They have some fanciful notions upon the
continuance of life, when once bestowed, even in the vegetable
world, as the reader will see in the next chapter.


Chapter XIV.


Though, as I have said, the Vril-ya discourage all speculations
on the nature of the Supreme Being, they appear to concur in a
belief by which they think to solve that great problem of the
existence of evil which has so perplexed the philosophy of the
upper world. They hold that wherever He has once given life,
with the perceptions of that life, however faint it be, as in a
plant, the life is never destroyed; it passes into new and
improved forms, though not in this planet (differing therein
from the ordinary doctrine of metempsychosis), and that the
living thing retains the sense of identity, so that it connects
its past life with its future, and is 'conscious' of its
progressive improvement in the scale of joy. For they say
that, without this assumption, they cannot, according to the
lights of human reason vouchsafed to them, discover the perfect
justice which must be a constituent quality of the All-Wise and
the All-Good. Injustice, they say, can only emanate from three
causes: want of wisdom to perceive what is just, want of
benevolence to desire, want of power to fulfill it; and that
each of these three wants is incompatible in the All-Wise, the
57All-Good, the All-Powerful. But that, while even in this life,
the wisdom, the benevolence, and the power of the Supreme Being
are sufficiently apparent to compel our recognition, the
justice necessarily resulting from those attributes, absolutely
requires another life, not for man only, but for every living
thing of the inferior orders. That, alike in the animal and
the vegetable world, we see one individual rendered, by
circumstances beyond its control, exceedingly wretched compared
to its neighbours- one only exists as the