'You will, though, by and by, when the time comes.But perhaps even then you might not know what had been given you, therefore Iwill tell you.Have you ever heard what some philosophers say -that men were all animals once?'
'No, ma'am.'
'it is of no consequence.But there is another thing that is of the greatest consequence - this: that all men, if they do not take care, go down the hill to the animals' country; that many men are actually, all their lives, going to be beasts.People knew it once, but it is long since they forgot it.'
'I am not surprised to hear it, ma'am, when I think of some of our miners.'
'Ah! But you must beware, Curdie, how you say of this man or that man that he is travelling beastward.There are not nearly so many going that way as at first sight you might think.When you met your father on the hill tonight, you stood and spoke together on the same spot; and although one of you was going up and the other coming down, at a little distance no one could have told which was bound in the one direction and which in the other.just so two people may be at the same spot in manners and behaviour, and yet one may be getting better and the other worse, which is just the greatest of all differences that could possibly exist between them.'
'But ma'am,' said Curdie, 'where is the good of knowing that there is such a difference, if you can never know where it is?'
'Now, Curdie, you must mind exactly what words I use, because although the right words cannot do exactly what I want them to do, the wrong words will certainly do what I do not want them to do.
I did not say you can never know.When there is a necessity for your knowing, when you have to do important business with this or that man, there is always a way of knowing enough to keep you from any great blunder.And as you will have important business to do by and by, and that with people of whom you yet know nothing, it will be necessary that you should have some better means than usual of learning the nature of them.
'Now listen.Since it is always what they do, whether in their minds or their bodies, that makes men go down to be less than men, that is, beasts, the change always comes first in their hands - and first of all in the inside hands, to which the outside ones are but as the gloves.They do not know it of course; for a beast does not know that he is a beast, and the nearer a man gets to being a beast the less he knows it.Neither can their best friends, or their worst enemies indeed, see any difference in their hands, for they see only the living gloves of them.But there are not a few who feel a vague something repulsive in the hand of a man who is growing a beast.
'Now here is what the rose-fire has done for you: it has made your hands so knowing and wise, it has brought your real hands so near the outside of your flesh gloves, that you will henceforth be able to know at once the hand of a man who is growing into a beast; nay, more - you will at once feel the foot of the beast he is growing, just as if there were no glove made like a man's hand between you and it.
'Hence of course it follows that you will be able often, and with further education in zoology, will be able always to tell, not only when a man is growing a beast, but what beast he is growing to, for you will know the foot - what it is and what beast's it is.
According, then, to your knowledge of that beast will be your knowledge of the man you have to do with.Only there is one beautiful and awful thing about it, that if any one gifted with this perception once uses it for his own ends, it is taken from him, and then, not knowing that it is gone, he is in a far worse condition than before, for he trusts to what he has not got.'
'How dreadful!' Said Curdie.'I must mind what I am about.'
'Yes, indeed, Curdie.'
'But may not one sometimes make a mistake without being able to help it?'
'Yes.But so long as he is not after his own ends, he will never make a serious mistake.'
'I suppose you want me, ma'am, to warn every one whose hand tells me that he is growing a beast - because, as you say, he does not know it himself.'
The princess smiled.
'Much good that would do, Curdie! I don't say there are no cases in which it would be of use, but they are very rare and peculiar cases, and if such come you will know them.To such a person there is in general no insult like the truth.He cannot endure it, not because he is growing a beast, but because he is ceasing to be a man.It is the dying man in him that it makes uncomfortable, and he trots, or creeps, or swims, or flutters out of its way - calls it a foolish feeling, a whim, an old wives' fable, a bit of priests' humbug, an effete superstition, and so on.'
'And is there no hope for him? Can nothing be done? It's so awful to think of going down, down, down like that!'
'Even when it's with his own will?'
'That's what seems to me to make it worst of all,' said Curdie.
'You are right,' answered the princess, nodding her head; 'but there is this amount of excuse to make for all such, remember -that they do not know what or how horrid their coming fate is.
Many a lady, so delicate and nice that she can bear nothing coarser than the finest linen to touch her body, if she had a mirror that could show her the animal she is growing to, as it lies waiting within the fair skin and the fine linen and the silk and the jewels, would receive a shock that might possibly wake her up.'
'Why then, ma'am, shouldn't she have it?'