e; that I
therefore came to it with every prepossession in its favour, and strove
to like it, or to think I did. I read it again, if I remember rightly,
about the time of the excitement about M. Rostand's _Cyrano_, and liked
it less still; while when I re-read it carefully for this chapter, I
liked it least of all. There is, of course, a certain fancifulness about
the main idea of a man fastening bottles of dew round him in the
expectation (which is justified) that the sun's heat will convert the
dew into steam and raise him from the ground. But the reader (it is not
necessary to pay him the bad compliment of explaining the reasons) will
soon see that the scheme is aesthetically awkward, if not positively
ludicrous, and scientifically absurd. Throwing off bottles to lower your
level has a superficial resemblance to the actual principles and
practice of ballooning; but in the same way it will not here "work" at
all.

This, however, would be a matter of no consequence whatever if the
actual results of the experiment were amusing. Unfortunately they are
not. That the aeronaut's first miss of the Moon drops him into the new
French colony of Canada may have given Cyrano some means of interesting
people then; but, reversing the process noticed in the cases of Scarron
and Furetiere, it does not in the least do so now. We get nothing out of
it except some very uninteresting gibes at the Jesuits, and, connected
with these, some equally uninteresting discussions whether the flight to
the Moon is possible or not.

Still one hopes, like the child or fool of popular saying, for the Moon
itself to atone for Canada, and tolerates disappointment till one
actually gets there. Alas! of all Utopias that have ever been Utopiated,
Cyrano's is the most uninteresting, even when its negative want of
interest does not change into something positively disagreeable. The
Lunarians, though probably intended to be, are hardly at all a satire on
us Earth-dwellers. They are bigger, and, as far as the male sex is
concerned, apparently more awkward and uglier; and their ideas in
religion, morals, taste, etc., are a monotonously direct reversal of our
orthodoxies. There is at least one passage which the absence of all
"naughty niceness" and the presence of the indescribably nasty make a
good "try" for the acme of the disgusting. More of it is less but still
nasty; much of it is silly; all of it is dull.[271]

Nevertheless it is not quite omissible in