Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas: An Underwater Tour of the World

About This Book

By too many people Jules Verne is considered only as a master of that form of fiction which is based upon intelligent anticipation of the progress of mechanical invention. As time goes on and one after another his forecasts in this direction are justified by the event, it is likely that he will be remembered as a prophet rather than as a romancer, which is his real claim to distinction. For in imaginative fiction what is required of the writer is not verity but verisimilitude, and the supreme merit of such books as "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" and "The Clipper of the Clouds" is not that submarine and aircraft have now been proved to be possible but that they were made to seem probable then. Above all things else Jules Verne was a master of the art of writing the adventure story and his greatness is most apparent in his simplest work. In "The Lighthouse at the End of the World," Jules Verne is seen at his simplest and best. No antecedent improbability here has to be made good. The remoteness of the scene where the drama is laid supplies an element of dread of which advantage is skillfully taken, and the shortness of the period over which the story is extended adds excitement to the race against time which the villains of the piece are compelled to make in their attempt to escape justice. The rest is pure action, courage and resourcefulness pitted against ferocity and power of numbers, with no merely invented complications to retard the issue. As a simple adventure story "The Lighthouse at the End of the World" must be declared a little masterpiece.