Many thanks for the phothograph you have send me. It was very kind of
you to think of me to send me this token of your remembrance. I
certainly, appreciate it, and shall think of you whenever I look at it.
Ah My Dear Brother, it is impossible for me to forget you. under
favorable circumstance I confess I must prefer you. I have a grate
desire to have the beautifull chance to meet you. Ah then with the tears
of gladness to be the result of the great love of our friendness A my Sir
what pen can describe the meeting that shall be come with your second
visit if it please God.
It is my pray to Our Lord God to protect you and to keep you glad and
happy for ever.
Though we are far from each other yet we can speak with letters.
Thank God to have your love of friendness with me and mine with your
noble person.
Hopeing to hear from you,
Yours truly,
ISMAYEL, from
Byramich hizar memuerue iuse bashi.
XVIII
Material for _Erewhon Revisited_
APOLOGISE for the names in _Erewhon_. I was an unpractised writer and
had no idea the names could matter so much.
Give a map showing the geography of Erewhon in so far as the entrance
into the country goes, and explain somewhere, if possible, about Butler’s
stones.
Up as far as the top of the pass, where the statues are, keeps to the
actual geography of the upper Rangitata district except that I have
doubled the gorge. There was no gorge up above my place [Mesopotamia]
and I wanted one, so I took the gorge some 10 or a dozen miles lower down
and repeated it and then came upon my own country again, but made it bare
of grass and useless instead of (as it actually was) excellent country.
Baker and I went up the last saddle we tried and thought it was a pass to
the West Coast, but found it looked down on to the headwaters of the
Rakaia: however we saw a true pass opposite, just as I have described in
_Erewhon_, only that there were no clouds and we never went straight down
as I said I did, but took two days going round by Lake Heron. And there
is no lake at the top of the true pass. This is the pass over which, in
consequence of our report, Whitcombe was sent and got drowned on the
other side. We went up to the top of the pass but found it too rough to
go down without more help than we had. I rather think I have told this
in _A First Year in Canterbury Settlement_, but am so much ashamed of
that book that I dare not look to see. I don’t mean to say that the
later books are much better; still they are better.
They show a lot of stones on the Hokitika pass, so Mr. Slade told me,
which they call mine and say I intended them in _Erewhon_ [for the
statues]. I never saw them and knew nothing about them.
Refer to the agony and settled melancholy with which unborn children in
the womb regard birth as the extinction of their being, and how some
declare that there is a world beyond the womb and others deny this. “We
must all one day be born,” “Birth is certain” and so on, just as we say
of death. Birth involves with it an original sin. It must be sin, for
the wages of sin is death (what else, I should like to know, is the wages
of virtue?) and assuredly the wages of birth is death.
They consider “wilful procreation,” as they call it, much as we do murder
and will not allow it to be a moral ailment at all. Sometimes a jury
will recommend to mercy and sometimes they bring in a verdict of
“justifiable baby-getting,” but they treat these cases as a rule with
great severity.
Every baby has a month of heaven and a month of hell before birth, so
that it may make its choice with its eyes open.
The hour of birth should be prayed for in the litany as well as that of
death, and so it would be if we could remember the agony of horror which,
no doubt, we felt at birth—surpassing, no doubt, the utmost agony of
apprehension that can be felt on death.
Let automata increase in variety and ingenuity till at last they present
so many of the phenomena of life that the religious world declares they
were designed and created by God as an independent species. The
scientific world, on the other hand, denies that there is any design in
connection with them, and holds that if any slight variation happened to
arise by which a fortuitous combination of atoms occurred which was more
suitable for advertising purposes (the automata were chiefly used for
advertising) it was seized upon and preserved by natural selection.
They have schools where they teach the arts of forgetting and of not
seeing. Young ladies are taught the art of proposing. Lists of
successful matches are advertised with the prospectuses of all the girls’
schools.
They have professors of all the languages of the principal beasts and
birds. I stayed with the Professor of Feline Languages who had invented
a kind of Ollendorffian system for teaching the Art of Polite
Conversation among cats.
They have an art-class in which the first thing insisted on is that the
pupils should know the price of all the leading modern pictures that have
been sold during the last twenty years at Christie’s, and the
fluctuations in their values. Give an examination paper on this subject.
The artist being a picture-dealer, the first thing he must do is to know
how to sell his pictures, and therefore how to adapt them to the market.
What is the use of being able to paint a picture unless one can sell it
when one has painted it?
Add that the secret of the success of modern French art lies in its
recognition of values.
Let there be monks who have taken vows of modest competency (about £1000
a year, derived from consols), who spurn popularity as medieval monks
spurned money—and with about as much sincerity. Their great object is to
try and find out what they like and then get it. They do not live in one
building, and there are no vows of celibacy, but, in practice, when any
member marries he drifts away from the society. They have no profession
of faith or articles of association, but, as they who hunted for the Holy
Grail, so do these hunt in all things, whether of art or science, for
that which commends itself to them as comfortable and worthy to be
accepted. Their liberty of thought and speech and their reasonable
enjoyment of the good things of this life are what they alone live for.
Let the Erewhonians have Westminster Abbeys of the first, second and
third class, and in one of these let them raise monuments to dead
theories which were once celebrated.
Let them study those arts whereby the opinions of a minority may be made
to seem those of a majority.
Introduce an Erewhonian sermon to the effect that if people are wicked
they may perhaps have to go to heaven when they die.
Let them have a Regius Professor of Studied Ambiguity.
Let the Professor of Worldly Wisdom pluck a man for want of sufficient
vagueness in his saving-clauses paper.
Another poor fellow may be floored for having written an article on a
scientific subject without having made free enough use of the words
“patiently” and “carefully,” and for having shown too obvious signs of
thinking for himself.
Let them attach disgrace to any who do not rapidly become obscure after
death.
Let them have a Professor of Mischief. They found that people always did
harm when they meant well and that all the professorships founded with an
avowedly laudable object failed, so they aim at mischief in the hope that
they may miss the mark here as when they aimed at what they thought
advantageous.
The Professor of Worldly Wisdom plucked a man for buying an egg that had
a date stamped upon it. And another for being too often and too
seriously in the right. And another for telling people what they did not
want to know. He plucked several for insufficient mistrust in printed
matter. It appeared that the Professor had written an article teeming
with plausible blunders, and had had it inserted in a leading weekly. He
then set his paper so that the men were sure to tumble into these
blunders themselves; then he plucked them. This occasioned a good deal
of comment at the time.
One man who entered for the Chancellor’s medal declined to answer any of
the questions set. He said he saw they were intended more to show off
the ingenuity of the examiner than either to assist or test the judgment
of the examined. He observed, moreover, that the view taken of his
answers would in great measure depend upon what the examiner had had for
dinner and, since it was not in his power to control this, he was not
going to waste time where the result was, at best, so much a matter of
chance. Briefly, his view of life was that the longer you lived and the
less you thought or talked about it the better. He should go pretty
straight in the main himself because it saved trouble on the whole, and
he should be guided mainly by a sense of humour in deciding when to
deviate from the path of technical honesty, and he would take care that
his errors, if any, should be rather on the side of excess than of
asceticism
This man won the Chancellor’s medal.
They have a review class in which the pupils are taught not to mind what
is written in newspapers. As a natural result they grow up more keenly
sensitive than ever.
Round the margin of the newspapers sentences are printed cautioning the
readers against believing the criticisms they see, inasmuch as personal
motives will underlie the greater number.
They defend the universities and academic bodies on the ground that, but
for them, good work would be so universal that the world would become
clogged with masterpieces to an extent that would reduce it to an
absurdity. Good sense would rule over all, and merely smart or clever
people would be unable to earn a living.
They assume that truth is best got at by the falling out of thieves.
“Well then, there must be thieves, or how can they fall out? Our
business is to produce the raw material from which truth may be
elicited.”
“And you succeed, sir,” I replied, “in a way that is beyond all praise,
and it seems as though there would be no limit to the supply of truth
that ought to be available. But, considering the number of your thieves,
they show less alacrity in flying at each other’s throats than might have
been expected.”
They live their lives backwards, beginning, as old men and women, with
little more knowledge of the past than we have of the future, and
foreseeing the future about as clearly as we see the past, winding up by
entering into the womb as though being buried. But delicacy forbids me
to pursue this subject further: the upshot is that it comes to much the
same thing, provided one is used to it.
Paying debts is a luxury which we cannot all of us afford.
“It is not every one, my dear, who can reach such a counsel of perfection
as murder.”
There was no more space for the chronicles and, what was worse, there was
no more space in which anything could happen at all, the whole land had
become one vast cancerous growth of chronicles, chronicles, chronicles,
nothing but chronicles.
The catalogue of the Browne medals alone will in time come to occupy
several hundreds of pages in the _University Calendar_.
There was a professor who was looked upon as such a valuable man because
he had done more than any other living person to suppress any kind of
originality.
“It is not our business,” he used to say, “to help students to think for
themselves—surely this is the very last thing that one who wishes them
well would do by them. Our business to make them think as we do, or at
any rate as we consider expedient to say we do.”
He was President of the Society for the Suppression of Useless Knowledge
and for the Complete Obliteration of the Past.
They have professional mind-dressers, as we have hair-dressers, and
before going out to dinner or fashionable At-homes, people go and get
themselves primed with smart sayings or moral reflections according to
the style which they think will be most becoming to them in the kind of
company they expect.
They deify as God something which I can only translate by a word as
underivable as God—I mean Gumption. But it is part of their religion
that there should be no temple to Gumption, nor are there priests or
professors of Gumption—Gumption being too ineffable to hit the sense of
human definition and analysis.
They hold that the function of universities is to make learning repellent
and thus to prevent its becoming dangerously common. And they discharge
this beneficent function all the more efficiently because they do it
unconsciously and automatically. The professors think they are advancing
healthy intellectual assimilation and digestion when they are in reality
little better than cancer on the stomach.
Let them be afflicted by an epidemic of the
fear-of-giving-themselves-away disease. Enumerate its symptoms. There
is a new discovery whereby the invisible rays that emanate from the soul
can be caught and all the details of a man’s spiritual nature, his
character, disposition, principles, &c. be photographed on a plate as
easily as his face or the bones of his hands, but no cure for the f. o.
g. th. a. disease has yet been discovered.
They have a company for ameliorating the condition of those who are in a
future state, and for improving the future state itself.
People are buried alive for a week before they are married so that their
offspring may know something about the grave, of which, otherwise,
heredity could teach it nothing.
It has long been held that those constitutions are best which promote
most effectually the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Now the
greatest number are none too wise and none too honest, and to arrange our
systems with a view to the greater happiness of sensible straightforward
people—indeed to give these people a chance at all if it can be
avoided—is to interfere with the greatest happiness of the greatest
number. Dull, slovenly and arrogant people do not like those who are
quick, painstaking and unassuming; how can we then consistently with the
first principles of either morality or political economy encourage such
people when we can bring sincerity and modesty fairly home to them?
Much we have to tolerate, partly because we cannot always discover in
time who are really insincere and who are only masking sincerity under a
garb of flippancy, and partly also because we wish to err on the side of
letting the guilty escape rather than of punishing the innocent. Thus
many people who are perfectly well known to belong to the straightforward
class are allowed to remain at large and may even be seen hobnobbing and
on the best of possible terms with the guardians of public immorality.
We all feel, as indeed has been said in other nations, that the poor
abuses of the time want countenance, and this moreover in the interests
of the uses themselves, for the presence of a small modicum of sincerity
acts as a wholesome stimulant and irritant to the prevailing spirit of
academicism; moreover, we hold it useful to have a certain number of
melancholy examples whose notorious failure shall serve as a warning to
those who do not cultivate a power of immoral self-control which shall
prevent them from saying, or indeed even thinking, anything that shall
not be to their immediate and palpable advantage with the greatest
number.
It is a point of good breeding with the Erewhonians to keep their
opinions as far as possible in the background in all cases where
controversy is even remotely possible, that is to say whenever
conversation gets beyond the discussion of the weather. It is found
necessary, however, to recognise some means of ventilating points on
which differences of opinion may exist, and the convention adopted is
that whenever a man finds occasion to speak strongly he should express
himself by dwelling as forcibly as he can on the views most opposed to
his own; even this, however, is tolerated rather than approved, for it is
counted the perfection of scholarship and good breeding not to express,
and much more not even to have a definite opinion upon any subject
whatsoever.
Thus their “yea” is “nay” and their “nay,” “yea,” but it comes to the
same thing in the end, for it does not matter whether “yea” is called
“yea” or “nay” so long as it is understood as “yea.” They go a long way
round only to find themselves at the point from which they started, but
there is no accounting for tastes. With us such tactics are
inconceivable, but so far do the Erewhonians carry them that it is common
for them to write whole reviews and articles between the lines of which a
practised reader will detect a sense exactly contrary to that ostensibly
put forward; nor is a man held to be more than a tyro in the arts of
polite society unless he instinctively suspects a hidden sense in every
proposition that meets him. I was more than once misled by these
plover-like tactics, and on one occasion was near getting into a serious
scrape. It happened thus:—
A man of venerable aspect was maintaining that pain was a sad thing and
should not be permitted under any circumstances. People ought not even
to be allowed to suffer for the consequences of their own folly, and
should be punished for it severely if they did. If they could only be
kept from making fools of themselves by the loss of freedom or, if
necessary, by some polite and painless method of extinction—which meant
hanging—then they ought to be extinguished. If permanent improvement can
only be won through ages of mistake and suffering, which must be all
begun _de novo_ for every fresh improvement, let us be content to forego
improvement, and let those who suffer their lawless thoughts to stray in
this direction be improved from off the face of the earth as fast as
possible. No remedy can be too drastic for such a disease as the pain
felt by another person. We find we can generally bear the pain ourselves
when we have to do so, but it is intolerable that we should know it is
being borne by any one else. The mere sight of pain unfits people for
ordinary life, the wear and tear of which would be very much reduced if
we would be at any trouble to restrain the present almost unbounded
licence in the matter of suffering—a licence that people take advantage
of to make themselves as miserable as they please, without so much as a
thought for the feelings of others. Hence, he maintained, the practice
of putting dupes in the same category as the physically diseased or the
unlucky was founded on the eternal and inherent nature of things, and
could no more be interfered with than the revolution of the earth on its
axis.
He said a good deal more to the same effect, and I was beginning to
wonder how much longer he would think it necessary to insist on what was
so obvious, when his hearers began to differ from him. One dilated on
the correlation between pain and pleasure which ensured that neither
could be extinguished without the extinguishing along with it of the
other. Another said that throughout the animal and vegetable worlds
there was found what might be counted as a system of rewards and
punishments; this, he contended, must cease to exist (and hence virtue
must cease) if the pain attaching to misconduct were less notoriously
advertised. Another maintained that the horror so freely expressed by
many at the sight of pain was as much selfish as not—and so on.
Let Erewhon be revisited by the son of the original writer—let him hint
that his father used to write the advertisements for Mother Seigel’s
Syrup. He gradually worked his way up to this from being a mere writer
of penny tracts. [Dec. 1896.]
On reaching the country he finds that divine honours are being paid him,
churches erected to him, and a copious mythology daily swelling, with
accounts of the miracles he had worked and all his sayings and doings.
If any child got hurt he used to kiss the place and it would get well at
once.
Everything has been turned topsy-turvy in consequence of his flight in
the balloon being ascribed to miraculous agency.
Among other things, he had maintained that sermons should be always
preached by two people, one taking one side and another the opposite,
while a third summed up and the congregation decided by a show of hands.
This system had been adopted and he goes to hear a sermon On the Growing
Habit of Careful Patient Investigation as Encouraging Casuistry.
[October 1897.]
XIX
Truth and Convenience