Those who go to visit one, however, should dismiss from their minds all the fancies with which literature has invested these sea-folk, of rosy mermaids golden-haired, and jolly mermen with Bacchus faces, crowned with coral. Some, no doubt, expect a shapely Triton with flowing beard and his conch-shell slung by his side, or dainty lady of those siren islands
“Whence fairy-like music steals over the sea,
Entrancing the senses with charmed melody.”
Others, on the other hand, visit it with preconceived ideas of some narwhal or whale creation, expecting a grampus-like thing, or anticipating a porpoise. But it is necessary to approach the mermaid with an imagination absolutely blank, for, whatever you try to imagine, you will be utterly discomfited by the reality.
Who, indeed, could soberly put before his mind the actual features of this sea-monster, so absurd in its shapelessness that if it were to be exhibited dead the most credulous rustic would sneer at it as a clumsy hoax? Even alive, the thing looks like a make-up, and a discreditable one; for in places the tail and paddling-paws — they are not fins nor yet legs — appear to have been injured, and the stuffing looks as if it was coming out. The ragged edges of the skin, if such an integument is to be called skin, frays away into threads, and, if it were not that the manatee winks occasionally, the spectator might be justified in asserting his own ability to make a better monster. But it is this very simplicity of its composition that renders the preposterous creature so astonishing and so absurd. Gustave Doré found out the secret, that, to depict the perfection of a monster only one element of incongruous monstrosity should
