Verne

Verne, JULES, was born at Nantes on February 8, 1828. After writing various comedies and operatic librettos, and turning out a great deal of hackwork, he struck a new vein in fiction whereby he earned a world-wide reputation. He cleverly exaggerated the possibilities of present-day science, and gave ingenious verisimilitude to narratives of wild adventure carried out by means of marvellous inventions. His stories, which have been translated into well-nigh every European tongue, include Five Weeks in a Balloon, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, From the Earth to the Moon, Around the Moon, Meridiana, The Survivors of the Chancellors, Martin Paz, Michael Strogoff, Keraban the Inflexible, The Green Ray, The Fur Country, A Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Hector Servadac (a wonderfully clever account of a voyage on a comet), The Mysterious Island, and Around the World in Eighty Days. The two last named are his best books—Around the World being a little masterpiece of construction and exciting narrative. The characters in these singular tales are the veriest automata. There is not a drop of human blood in all M. Verne's clockwork crowd of explorers, sailors, engineers, reporters, scientists, and puppets with labels innumerable. The reader's interest depends as solely on incident as it does in the Arabian Nights. And in M. Verne's earliest stories the interest is wonderfully well sustained. The amusement to be derived from his later books is hardly such as he aimed at creating—as in the case of his Glasgow worthies (in The Green Ray), who quaff tankards of 'foaming usquebaugh' and do other deeds equally characteristic of Scotsmen.