HERMITRY
FLIGHT was one of their best methods too of achieving complete
solitude. One of the early discoveries of this people in the art of
progress was that, where men are too much or too long together, they
confirm each other’s faults and clog advance; the weaker and more
superficial ambitions get the mastery and force energy into mistaken
directions. The risk of this grew less as the individual grew older;
for he receded farther and farther from the ancestral stages of life
through which he must pass in youth and early manhood; and he came
to have less desire and less need for intercourse with his fellows.
Complete love of solitude and capacity for solitude were two of the
signs of the perfecting of the individual life; thereafter death, the
rending of the veil that divides the seen from the unseen, was the
most natural step in development, and scarcely needed effort. They
held solitude as much one of the essentials of noble life as society;
and the latter needed no stimulus; by nature and beginnings man was a
social animal, but only some strong impulse would make him seek the
companionship of his own thoughts. The final triumph of life was to be
able to be confidently alone, to stand with the highest man can think
and feel against the herded universe. Under the stimulus of the more
physical and primary passions it is the universal instinct to flock
together. The baser, the more destructive feelings are gregarious.
To ensure periods of solitude for each member of the community, every
man and every woman had a separate house, as soon as the powers were
mature. One of the horrors of the past out of which they had come was
the intrusion of friends and relatives every hour of the day, and
the irritating sense of the continually watchful eyes of servants
or slaves. Only by seeking the wilds could one find real solitude.
In all human communities there are endless opportunities for social
intercourse; opportunities for solitude are artificial. Life was
arranged in Limanora with a view to allowing and securing as frequent
and as long solitudes as were consonant with the progress of the race.
On the most prominent point of every house there was the representation
of two climbing flowers; and if these hung drooping, colourless, and
apart, everyone knew that the occupant desired seclusion; if they
flushed with rose, stood up to the sun, and twined round each other,
then was it known that human converse was permissible, if not desired.
There was indeed sufficient magnetic communion of spirit among all
the people to touch into life at intervals the love of that definite
and open intercourse so native to the human system. This inborn
social faculty might be trusted to prevent the love of loneliness
from severing all ties. There were daily public duties that brought
everyone into the knowledge and sight of his fellow-men, the rota of
physical exercise at the centre of force, the flight-drill, the general
meeting of the community, and the medical review. And every day and
almost every hour of the day communion of spirit could go on in the
magnificent baths, in the halls of recuperation, and in the valley of
memories. There was no lack of occasion to draw the Limanorans together.
But the other duty to the higher self was sacredly guarded and
fostered, especially in the earlier stages of life. One of the greatest
blunders they had to correct in their former civilisation had been
gregarious education. Large families had been one of the consequences
of a half-developed humanity, more kin to the animal world than to
the spiritual. The lower a living thing is in the scale of life the
more prolific it is, the more devoted to the mere function of keeping
its species alive. Unicellular organisms perpetuate their existence
by continual fission. Microbes become massive in their effects by
the countless myriads each is capable of producing. The higher the
organisation, the less is the energy that can be spared for generation,
and the more capable is the offspring when matured of ensuring its own
survival, of rising above and managing the laws of nature. Civilisation
has not advanced far when it acts by masses and needs masses to keep it
going. Then mere subsistence and procreation are the only purposes and
functions of most life. To feed, to reproduce, to die, that is their
history.
The Limanorans looked back to that stage of their development with a
shudder, so far in the mists and darkness of animalism did it seem.
Now one man of them was more able to do battle with nature and her
fecundity and her catastrophes than a hundred thousand of that olden
time, and not one hundred-thousandth of the generative power was
needed. Then but a poor fraction of the life-energy could be given up
to education. The offspring had to be trained in masses or have no
training at all. The parents were too busy earning the means of life
to mould their families, and had too many children to give heed to the
character of the individual. All the offspring were handed over to
professional trainers, who managed them in the mass, and who had to
work by the methods of nature with its myriad children through the law
of the survival of the fittest. They had to be handled like armies, and
the stricter the discipline, the better the result was supposed to be;
and where the people were counted in masses and moved in masses the
better it undoubtedly was for the survival of the state. Schools and
universities were a necessity of that far-back stage of civilisation;
they were the drill-sergeants of civil life, dragooning the young and
their ideas into accordance with the prevailing and accepted type. Too
much independence of character or thought or manner would have broken
the ranks and endangered the existence of the commonweal. But the chief
purpose of life on the world, the progress of the species, was ignored
in this devotion to mere persistence of the species. All variant germs
and elements that nature supplies in every individual it brings forth
were smoothed down or annihilated into uniformity. The type persisted
from century to century unchanged. Only by stealth or by audacity did
any new or alien element succeed in modifying the species; and when it
did succeed the modification was as often retrograde as progressive.
Therefore, in order to be secure from variation, public opinion
punished all habits that would lead to independence of character or
thought or feeling.
As soon as the great exilings had been completed, the Limanorans
recognised that the best chance of swift progress was the selection and
preservation of the finest variants in their character and thoughts.
They therefore abolished the profession of teacher, that manufacturer
of uniformity, and all schools and universities, hot-beds of
convention, worship of antiquity, and retrogression. They by no means
abolished education; they recreated it, intensified it, and made it the
chief function of the community. The whole time and energies of the
parents, or, as the case might be, of the proparents, were given up for
a period of from fifty to seventy years to the training and moulding
of each child. Nothing was left to nature or haphazard. And every new
tendency or faculty that was discovered in the pupil was recorded and
reported to the council of sages. It was discussed by them, and, if
judged to be hostile to the progress of the race, the parents were
assisted in eradicating it; if manifestly progressive, every means was
taken to make it grow; if doubtful in its results, it was submitted to
the community, and their instincts soon brought them to a decision.
Thus it was that their world was being continually renovated. Never was
an idea or method of action rejected simply because it was new. Every
opportunity of advance was seized and tested. Every suggestion of a new
direction of progress was investigated and followed out till it was
seen to be impracticable.
And, to prevent emphasising the old and outworn or reviving the past,
the young were isolated from one another; for, as the embryo records
in its growth the stages of animalism through which terrestrial life
passed upwards from the unicellular to the complex human organisation,
so the immature periods that come between infancy and full manhood
record human development, prehistoric as well as historic. The long
ages of primitive futility in presence of the powers of nature are
abbreviated into the helpless years of infancy. Prehistoric savagery
shows itself in various traces in the rebellious, adventure-loving,
omnivorous phase of boyhood. The first stages of civilisation appear in
the early years of puberty; its later stages in the approach to full
manhood. The imperfect past ever springs up like weeds amid the growth
of the new life, and will choke it if encouraged. And nothing, they
held, gave such persistence to the evils and imperfections of the past,
thus appearing in early life, as the gregariousness of youth. Nothing
had done so great a wrong to the race, or had so hindered its progress,
as their former education system with its schools and universities. To
throw men in the immature stages of their life into close intercourse
was to confirm their immaturities, to encourage atavism, to make the
past tyrannise over the future. As long as their old system continued,
their civilisation was enslaved to the times that were gone, and
imagination deified the world as it had been.
Next to their exiling policy, their educational reform was one of the
most important starting-points of their new and swiftly progressive
civilisation. I was astonished at the length and frequency of my
isolations during the period of my training. For years I saw few or
none but the two proparents to whose care I had been handed over,
even after I had been introduced to other sections of the community.
In the process of my advance towards Limanoran habits and powers, I
was often left for days together to my own thoughts, and yet in the
presence of some supervising power that seldom made itself definite
to any of my senses or even to my mind. Throughout these intervals of
solitude, I felt continual suggestion of noble thought and emotion
come to me from my surroundings, the divine music that rang so softly
and variedly amid the silences, the deep meaning of the arts that
filled every corner of my life, the magnetic energy that rayed forth
from unknown centres upon my spirit. The finest impulses of my nature
became dominant in me at these times and grew in strength. I came to
recognise the power that such solitude gave to character. Without it I
should have inclined to become the echo of my tutors, even though they
were ever impressing upon me the necessity of thinking and acting for
myself. They were so noble, so far above the men and women I had met
or heard of or read of that it was a hard task not to fall down and
worship them.
Once I had the misfortune to question the benefits of prolonged
seclusion. I urged the praises of friendship so common in the
literature of my country, and spoke with great fervour of the pleasures
of social intercourse, the keen emulation on the path of development
it stirred, and the wide influence which the finest characters had. I
painted in glowing colours all that refined society might become,--the
witty Parisian salons of the eighteenth century, the artistic circles
in the fifteenth-century Italian republics, the brilliant association
of thoughtful men in some of the London literary sets of the nineteenth
century. What could be nobler than such intellectual brilliancy of
intercourse as is recorded in the biographies of the great men and
beautiful and refined women of the West! Then I turned to the happiness
of children and youth together in the gardens or woods or on the
shores of the ocean, and their sadness when they moped alone in their
rooms or at their books. Companionship was the very life of childhood
and youth. Did not solitary musings even in maturity produce morbid
self-introspection? The intercourse, even with superiors and elders,
was somewhat unwholesome for the young spirit,--it crushed spontaneity
and naturalness and confidence in one’s inner self.
I worked myself up to a climax of eloquence, and thought that I had
demolished all possibility of defence of their system. But I had
succeeded only by ignoring the vices and weaknesses of society. These
wise men quietly and almost unconcernedly took me behind the gaudy
theatrical curtain of the world, and smiled to think how like their old
social ideals had been to those I had described, and to see the same
vanity and posturing in European refinement as in their own evil past.
They mourned over my blindness of mind in failing to look through the
gorgeous transparency at the tawdry vulgarities behind. Following it
through many forms and stages of life, animal and human, they showed me
the law of social intercourse; not the highest but the lowest emotional
and moral level of a herd or circle do the natures and minds of its
members ultimately reach, however lofty the aspirations of some of them
may be. A company in which free utterance is the rule is soon mastered
by base interpretation of the noblest lives, and it is to guard against
the effects of this hydrostatic law of ethics that churches and temples
have been erected. There the awe of a higher power and the conventions
of worship conceal the inevitability of the law, and save the shyer
natures for brief periods from the evil influence of the bold. The most
masterful religions have always provided permanent refuges for the
finer spirits who dread conflict with the unscrupulous wit or power of
the world, and who know how in a struggle of speech or action or even
pure thought the wielder of the fouler weapons wins. It has been the
rule throughout civilised history that the greatest characters, if
they cling to moral principle, at last withdraw into solitude partial
or complete, and become the sages of the world; if they remain in
action and succeed, the necessity for further success drives them to
accept the moral level of the lowest they have to struggle with; for if
immoral men of less intellectual power overcome them, defeat means to
them ultimate exhaustion of the soul; nothing bleaches the faculties
and reduces them to the common level like failure after failure.
However great a hero may be to begin with, success in action closes his
moral career, whilst failure closes his intellectual. To die in his
first great victory is the truest happiness that can befall him.
In fact the Limanorans came ages before to see that all public life
with its competitions and ambitions, social, artistic, political,
military, meant the triumph of cunning or force; it meant the
retrogression to the nakedest savagery hidden underneath the gewgaws
of civilisation. No real advance could be made by any form of humanity
so long as its ablest spirits were drawn into the furious struggle for
glory, in which the cruellest and most audacious cunning was bound
to win. The founders of new religions and new philosophies have been
strong spirits who saw the foul imbroglio before them in public life
and shrank back from it. The first aim of the Limanorans, when once
they had rid themselves of their more degenerate brethren, was to
abolish this contest of might and cunning, and turn their stronger
spirits to the true progress of themselves and their race. And little
difficulty was experienced in accomplishing this most fundamental
reform; the island had been purged of the furiously ambitious, of all
who longed for the naked palæstra of civilised savagery. They knew
better than most men how much of the essence of life was competition,
how necessary to all progress was the struggle for existence, how
fundamental was the law of the survival of the fittest. But they
realised vividly that nature unguided often chose false directions,
that the struggle may be in a myriad various arenas that differ greatly
from one another in nobleness or baseness, that the law if left to
itself might lead to the survival of the fiercest or cunningest or
basest according to the conditions that were to be fitted. The will
of man could work on the conditions, so elevating the struggle and
leading the law to a nobler issue. They did not, they could not, put
an end to the struggle. What they did was to withdraw it from false
grounds and false aims, and guard it from any appearance of the lower
nature, sensuality, cunning, or force. The competitive energy in every
Limanoran’s nature was bent towards his own future and the future of
his race, and strove to surpass the past, if it were great and noble,
and to cast it out, if it were base and threatened to reappear. To
strive upwards, to help the whole people to progress, these were the
aims that transformed the everlasting struggle and the ever-working law.
This revolution in existence accomplished, and public life having in
consequence vanished, there ceased all need of social display, of
conversational fireworks, and of tact in managing men either singly
or in masses. The object of gregarious education disappeared at once.
As long as the coarse and selfish struggle called public life was the
highest sphere, they knew the youth had to be trained for it, its
methods and aims had to be adopted, and schools and universities were a
necessity, as miniature reflections of the greater world. In order to
succeed in life they had to be rolled together and tumbled against one
another like pebbles in a stream till they had taken the conventional
smoothness of outline and similarity of sheen; they had to learn to
keep the wild beast in their hearts and the silken courtier in their
manners, to cloak untruth and hypocrisy in an appearance of brilliancy
or wisdom, to make grasping selfishness seem almost divine love, and
brutal cruelty and arrogance the most dazzling refinement. It was
painful to read the flashy lies and stabs in the dark that went for
wit, and the cruel intrigue and showy falsehood that went to the making
of history, in those old times. Even the friendship of the foremost was
but a piece of acting; little trust could be put in it; it served its
purpose and was abandoned as soon as it failed to impress the dupes.
And solitaries then seemed useless, moping self-analysers; they made
no history and they were soon forgotten. No parents could afford to
let any one of their children thus lose his life; and, however gentle
and meditative he might be by nature, he must be thrust into the cruel
struggle of school and university in order to acquire hardness and
brilliancy; however virtuous and noble in purpose, he had to prepare
for the arena of polished scoundrelism.
As soon as these conditions of competition ceased, education in masses
had to cease too; it must be a miniature of the general life and a
preparation for it. At a distance and in a haze it seems as if the
immature in their sports were leading a life of primitive and happy
innocence; but innocence often accompanies untamed passion and fierce
emulation. The appearance of simplicity comes from their ignorance of
the advance of the world. Nothing did the Limanorans so shudder at
as the chance of perpetuating the methods and habits of this early
and undeveloped stage throughout later life. What their associative
education in former times had done for them was to confirm the vices
of savagery under the gloved conventions that civilised life demanded,
and to destroy the simplicity for ever. Solitary training under
the supervision of sages, they soon found, had the reverse effect;
it confirmed the naturalness and spontaneity, and swept out the
inclination to intrigue and arrogance and cruelty.
There was a childlikeness in their natures that gave great beauty to
their faces; and this they retained through the longest life and the
most absorbing work. If there was one quality more than others which
marked them as a race, it was their gentle and trustful outlook upon
life, their naïve candour and transparency of character, their simple
wonder and delight over any new discovery or invention. They never
grudged the quiet admiration any word or action deserved. They never
assumed that tone of superiority or sophistication, which, coming as
it does from envy, jealousy, or malice, mars all praise or blame. They
were children to one another in the limpidity of their life. And so
their features, which had not often the attractions of regularity, had
come to be transfigured by this single-heartedness; however old and
experienced and wise they might be, all possessed this divine beauty of
childhood. Sailors and backwoodsmen, men who have to spend long periods
of their lives in comparative solitude, away from the sophistications
of crowded life, often reveal traces of this childlike beauty of
nature and expression. And it was this peculiar educational system and
its long intervals of solitary meditation that kept the Limanorans
children, simple and ingenuous, till the day each vanished in the ether.
What deprived these isolations of bitterness was that one never felt
lonely nor abandoned by his fellows during them. In a moment, there
could be communication in thought or magnetic sympathy with his dearest
friends, and within a brief space they would be at his side. They often
resisted the associative impulse, through fear that it might be but the
return of the old immaturity in disguise; and they knew that friendship
was ever at call, and that all true solitudes deepened the current of
life.
As I came to feel the spirit of their existence, these arguments grew
self-evident; I saw how all-important to progress were these intervals
of isolation. They had studied with the minutest care and ultimate
shuddering the features of their old civilisation, and they had found
that the worst of them came from the associative principle in the
training of youth. Atavism became their greatest horror; in the breast
of every child born into civilised life an embryo savage is born, and
this had been vitalised and fostered by sympathy with what was savage
in companions and schoolmates. Under their old school and university
systems the age of training was that which corresponded to the military
stage in the development of man; and boys were for ever fighting, girls
ever encouraging to fight; emulation became fierce rivalry and hatred.
A crude stage of the past was confirmed and perpetuated through life
by constant association in the time of life that stood for it. That
was why their leisured classes had so devoted themselves during peace
to the wilder sports of the hunting stage of mankind, whilst they were
ever itching for war that their sons might distinguish themselves.
That was why they had indulged so often in breaches of the marriage
bond, and outraged the monogamy that they professed to revere; the
minds of the youth had been inflamed by the free proximity of the
sexes before the passions had been mastered, before the polygamous and
unmoral stage of their career had been passed through. And education,
instead of checking the perpetuation of these immaturities, encouraged
it. Teachers had come to pride themselves in the development of these
savage stages of boyhood and girlhood, and called the weaknesses
by euphemistic names, pluck, pride, grace. The young men and women
were taught to glory in them. And thus evil became eternal. In more
primitive life, there had been of necessity a wiser method of training.
There were no large centres of population where their youth was massed
in schools and universities. Families wandered or rested by themselves;
and the hardships of existence ensured the survival of the few that
were fittest. These few had from their earliest years to join their
elders in their pursuits, and they learned in such society to pass
rapidly through the primitive stages of man’s development, emulating
the skill of their betters and following them with modesty and
reverence. In the later industrial and centralistic ages the youth had
to be massed educationally, and by the mutual encouragement of sympathy
came to glory in their immaturities as perfections, and desired to
prolong the savage stage of their life into later years. They judged
their elders by false and atavistic standards and so lost their
modesty and reverence. It was only an occasional wave of lofty feeling
issuing from some inspired poet or prophet that raised one generation
above the preceding. For centuries and centuries they stood still or
retrograded. Crimes were sanctified in war and politics; the evil past
became a fetich; impetuosity, anger, hatred, revenge, falsehood, lust,
were tricked out in the apparel of virtues, and made the aims and the
glories of the leisured. It was the associative method of education
that produced such results. And, after the great purgation of the race,
they were amazed to see how blind they had been. Would any civilised
parents agree to send out their child into the wilderness there to
spend the educable period of life amongst savages, primitive in their
instincts and habits, even if the savages had the most persuasive and
influential missionaries amongst them who would change them in a few
years into civilised beings? Yet this was what their ancestors had been
doing when they concentrated youth in schools and universities.
Never before the age of twenty-five were the Limanoran youth allowed
any freedom of social intercourse, and then only for brief periods and
under the supervision of sages. And if there was any sign of atavism
apparent in them at their first draught of social life, back they were
sent into isolation, that their character might be strengthened, and
the stage of peril passed. Even when socially enfranchised, their first
companions had lived beyond their fiftieth year. By that boundary-line,
it was held, all the risk of atavism had passed, and all the chances
and possibilities of the character had been discovered and provided
for. It was not till the seventy-fifth year that anyone was supposed
to be fit for parenthood; for then, though the faculties and powers
still went on improving even till death, most of them had reached the
maturity of self-control and intersubordination; then reason had begun
to be master, and all the stages of the development of man before the
final purgation of the race had been traversed.
Only a few years before this epoch in their lives were they permitted
to look into the deeper mysteries of existence. They thought it one
of the strangest pieces of inversion, if not desecration, to place
religious ideas, as we did, before the youngest. Nothing but evil
could come of such an attempt. With the Limanorans it was the final
initiation into life to acquaint their grown men and women with the
sublimest thoughts and doubts and emotions on the purpose of existence;
it was the copestone of their education; after all the field of
knowledge had been traversed by them and all the reverences had been
instilled into them, the last reverence was revealed to them. Then and
not till then were they capable of realising its fulness. Communicated
in childhood or early youth, before the powers were mature, before
the animal and savage stages of development had been gone through, it
could end only in gross familiarity or gross superstition; the noblest
and most inward of thoughts and emotions would be misunderstood. What
was it that had made their old religions so stagnant, so obstructive
to all advance, but this mistaken principle of attempting to teach the
holiest and deepest ideas to the young! It made their ancestors cleave
to crude superstitions as if divine and refuse to give up any item of
their childish ideas of them. So thoroughly are the sources of our
youthful impressions lost in the mists of the past that any connected
with reverence seem to come from the divine eternity beyond birth.