Through the brief and impressive scene the note of creation rang in the

music that filled the air, and never that of dissolution. Then burst

forth the chorus of freedom, which was the national song, if anything

might be so called. It was the liberation of the energy of their friend

and comrade that they united to celebrate, his entrance on a new career

untrammelled by lower forms of inert energy. The music rose as if on

wings, higher, higher, ever more exhilarant. There were in it none of

the undertones, or deeper notes, or mystic subtleties that marked so

many of their spheral harmonies. It was a sound of pure joy, ethereal,

supernal, unalloyed by any terrene longings. Who could think of grief

or the bitterness of farewells, as long as it rang through the sky?

Courage, confidence to climb upwards was the only emotion that could

live with joy in its presence.

Suddenly the music broke away into a tempest of cosmic melody. Now

wailed forth the wild song of dissolution of worlds, again the clashing

of conflicting systems, followed by the surge of new life in orbs that

were to whirl through space and elevate the existence upon them for

thousands of thousands of ages. It was the music of mingled creation

and disintegration, of development and decay which we heard once more.

Our thoughts were recalled from the heights of heaven, whither the lost

personality of our guide and friend had fled. We were absorbed again

in the struggle of a mixed existence; we felt again the agonies of

the higher active energies bound to lower and merely latent energies.

My eyes came down to the scene of the last farewell. There stood the

almost living statue of our vanished brother, erect, eager as for

flight, as at the moment when his energy had gone forth. But now it had

the clear metallic translucence of the thousands I had seen in Fialume.

The transfiguration was complete.

But there was more on the plateau than the figure of what had been.

Beside it with rapt, pleading gaze on her face stood yet unmoved the

life-comrade of the vanished. The manana was again in position, the

observers again stood by the biometer and the psychometer. Another

scene of departure and transfiguration was to be enacted. The whole

consciousness of the community had granted without words the petition

of Amiralno’s spouse. Nothing seemed to be so fitting as that the two

should leave their trammelled life together, and within the space of a

few hundred beatings of the pulse partner had followed partner. The two

lives, joined for so many centuries, had come to a close together. Out

into infinite space had fled the two intertwined energies, only a few

heartbeats apart. Perhaps together they would find their new sphere,

their new platform for still higher flight through the diviner stages

of existence.

The Limanorans, when they had reached what they considered the limits

of their usefulness in corporeal life, gained an instinctive knowledge

of the moment when death was certain to come, or perhaps it was an

instinctive power of dying. It is a common thing to see amongst savage

or half-civilised tribes a man or woman in full health deliberately

lie down, turn the face away from friends and light, and prepare to

die. They seem to know when their destiny is coming upon them, and

nothing will persuade them to take measures for driving it off. Strong

though the currents of life may be flowing in the veins at the moment,

it is not long before they have completely ebbed, and left the body a

pulseless mass of inert matter. It was this instinct, whether prophetic

or suicidal, that the aged amongst this people seemed to resume when

they had weighed the vital powers in their systems against the duties

that new ages with their progress would bring, and found them wanting.

Destiny seemed to speak out to them, when they saw the transference of

the minus to the wrong side. Their minds were made up and it needed but

a few days or hours to set the imprisoned energy free. In these later

and more scientific ages there was some delay, and not uncommonly a

postponement of the departure. A careful examination of the system by

means of their new scientific instruments revealed some radical mistake

in the judgment of the elder as to himself, or the demands of a new age

of discovery made the need of more brains and hands imperative. The

result was the same in both cases; the reason was persuaded to give up

its resolve; life flowed on in the veins with even power again; all

the old duties were resumed; and the day of farewells was put off till

a more convenient season. But once they were convinced that they were

retarding progress instead of accelerating it, the end, they felt, was

within measurable distance; they straightway relinquished their grasp

of life; they withdrew purpose and power of will from all their vital

functions; and the moment of the final collapse was practically within

their own choice, as soon as they had the consciousness of the whole

community with them.

Here stood two solid memorials to the working of this prescient or

devitalising power. The beauty of expression on the two faces was very

striking. The attitudes were as natural and noble as life itself, that

of Amiralno bidding his partner farewell, hers full of loving petition

to follow. That the whole people approved was clear in the heartiness

with which they broke into the song of liberation. Everyone was glad

that the energies of these two, who had done their full duty by the

race, were free to enter other spheres, and follow other than the

terrene methods of advance. Reverently, but still with great rejoicing,

the family of the departed placed the two lifelike statues in the

car of victory, and guided it in triumphal flight to the valley of

memories. Then the people as reverently and joyously bent their way to

the duties they had left.

I stood in a day-dream of the strange but noble ways of life that this

people followed, and suddenly awakened to find myself alone on the hill

of farewells overlooking the ocean. Sorrow over the departures I had

witnessed welled back into my heart; I had not yet got rid of the old

attitude of Western civilisation towards death. With the sorrow mingled

still the old curiosity; questions sprang into my mind concerning the

significance of the ceremony I had seen; or was it a ceremony? I was

startled with the answer in the negative. It came from Thyriel, who,

knowing my doubts, had remained to solve them. Soon I knew the whole

meaning of the scene. It was not premeditated. There was nothing

deliberate about it except the deaths themselves. The dulness of my

own inner senses had prevented me from knowing the common impulse of

the race towards Doomalona. As soon as Amiralno had finally resolved

to die, the consciousness of his resolve spread over the island, and

stirred the people at their duties to common action. They knew that the

hill of farewells would be the scene of the departure, and in bands

singing the cosmic music of farewell they made their flight through the

air to give a last valediction to the voyager into the unknown and to

impart to him in his final effort on earth all the magnetic power they

could spare for him on his journey. Every act of what I had thought

was a ceremonial was the natural and spontaneous impulse of a people

united in spirit. Their music and the changes in it were due to no

leader or signal, but to the sympathetic inspiration of the moment.

Their creational chant was an assertion of their mood of belief that

this scene was one of advance, and not of retrogression, of development

and not of decay, that the act was as much an act of cosmic life as

the creation of a world. Certain portions of the system were about to

become manifestly inert, those which were called bodily and material,

but which were as truly forms of energy as the individual energy that

was being liberated. They were made unchanging, permanent, for a time,

and so were unable to progress or retrograde; they were to retain

their energy in latency for a period long or short; but at last they

too, when their immediate purpose of remembrance of the vanished was

served, would be set free to take other forms. Their creational music

was intended, if there was any intention in so spontaneous a thing,

to keep before their minds the progressive and evolutionary nature of

death, and to quell the old and barbarous attitude of grief which

might attempt to show itself when they were bidding the final farewell

to a comrade. It was meant to bring into prominence the joy of the

spirit freed from the bondage to lower forms of energy, and the delight

of all who remained in the progress of the cosmos, even though the

immediate act should imply a separation of a loved spirit from them.

It helped them to repress any sadness at the thought that they might

never recognise the energy of their lost comrade again as an individual

and personal thing. Enough for them that the sum of existence should be

enriched by the change which was occurring to him.

But was it not a grief to them that the parting was perhaps eternal, as

far as personal recognition went? The question rose spontaneously in

my mind; and I was answered almost before I had thought it. The doubt

was still unsolved whether as impersonal energy they developed into

something new at death and for ever ceased to bear marks and memories

of the phase of existence they had just left, or whether they sallied

forth from the bonds of a lower and inert energy into the freer scope

of infinity, an individual and complete unity. This doubt, they were

certain, would be solved some day by scientific experiment. Meantime

there were compensating advantages, whichever alternative was true.

If they continued the personality they had already developed on earth

without break in consciousness or memory, then would they recognise

their old comrades and partners in Limanoran life, and make further

progress through existence together.

If, on the other hand, there was a break in the continuity, and only as

an impersonal energy they passed forth into the interstellar spaces,

then would there be the obliteration of all the animal and barbarous

past which they abhorred, as well as of the immediate and Limanoran

past which they loved. Any being that has advanced much in its more

recent stages must naturally try to forget the lower stages through

which it has gone in a more distant past. They were by no means proud

of their relationship to their exiles or to the still older and wider

humanity existing outside of their archipelago. To remember it was to

encourage the lower and less-advancing man in them. To forget it was

one of the ethical duties which their progress demanded. It was only

as a horror, as a possible hell into which they might fall, if they

retrograded, that it was still brought before them.

A race or nation that remains long proud of its past must be but

imperceptibly progressive, if it is progressive at all. Its ethical

point of view is stationary, its morals and religion are stagnant.

The history of a people should rapidly come to seem ignoble to it, if

it does its duty to itself and its progress. What is the history of

other races but a record of wars, of wholesale slaughters, because of

the ambition of a man or a section of men? And as long as we are proud

of such a past we can never advance. To have an ancestry nobler than

ourselves is an undying disgrace, and to suggest such a thing to a man

should be considered the grossest insult. Where a people is developing

as it ought to develop in the brief period it has upon earth, oblivion

should be one of its foremost duties to all but its immediate past.

Man has forgotten his bestial ancestry so effectually that when he

comes across the manifest relics of the relationship in his system,

he is startled and wildly denies it. If he progressed as rapidly as

he ought to do, after there has been implanted in him the divine

principle of reason, then would he as surely cast into oblivion his

savage and semi-civilised ancestry. Out with the ape and all relics

and memories of it is the struggle of thinking men. To be done with

the crude undeveloped past is the duty of progressive men. The ideal

of to-day should be the commonplace of to-morrow, and the disgrace of

next week. It was useful to study the immediate past in order to get

perspective for the present, and to decide on the rate of progress for

the future. But it was becoming doubtful to this people whether they

should perpetuate in the valley of memories so much of the past after

it had faded into insignificance. They had come to think that to forget

was as necessary to the advance of man as to remember, and that a

universal rubbish-destructor for the now poverty-stricken achievements

of their far past would one day become essential. As it was they still

preserved records of them lest some historical question might grow to

be of importance to their future.

It was little wonder then that they had no great abhorrence for the

obliteration of the past from their energy at death. If the other

alternative were the true, and if, as so many religions teach, they

were to be herded with the criminal and besotted and undeveloped souls

that have passed from the earth, then might they bid farewell to

true progress beyond death. And what is the meaning of continuity of

existence and memory, unless it be the intercourse of terrene souls in

the life outside of life? To be rid of the flesh and its inert energies

is still to be enslaved to worse evils, the possibility of contact with

the foul beings that inhabit the human form, even the noblest and most

belauded human form. The Limanorans would gladly abandon the delight of

recognising and loving again the souls they knew and loved, if only to

be free from such a horror. Better almost annihilation than enslavement

to the retrogrades of earth in another sphere. Whence the terror of

discontinuity of memory, if the burden of the past were to be lifted

off us, and a new and more progressive career given to our energy?

The Limanorans believed that when unyoked from the inert forms which

had come from their animal past, their higher energy would enter on a

progress that would make all they now did seem almost stagnancy; and

the power of remembering any past would only mean shame at its having

been theirs.

It never gave them pause to think that what came after death was still

unknown. They had passed a happy bright life upon the earth, free

from the pangs and agonies as well as the fierce pleasures, the snaky

involvements as well as the passionate amours, of other civilisations.

But, when the effort to live had come to be so great as to overbalance

the compensations and utilities of their life, then was it no pang for

them to leave it; for they were scientifically sure that death would be

no break in their progressive existence; if anything, it was certain to

be an intensification of the progress which they loved most.

One of the last of their great series of exilings had been to cast out

of their midst a number of men and women who never did anything but

long for death, and advocated early suicide with religious fervour as

the true and only panacea for all ills. Their doctrines would have

done little harm to the community, if they had not been rooted in

practice, and often led to tragic results. For they came from languid,

low-strung temperaments, that felt disinclined to face the strain of

life or to help the advance of the race. The current of energy in

their ancestry had gradually run more and more feebly, till it was in

them at its lowest ebb. It was against their grain to work, and they

did their share in the tasks of the community with the most patent

reluctance. This alone would have been reason enough for their exile,

inasmuch as they gave evil example to the youth around. But they were

subtle in the use of the tongue too, and could with skilful jesuitry

show how indolence was the noblest life. And worse still, when they

were left to their own devices, they soon made a violent end to their

feeble lives, and gave a tragic and ghastly appearance to death. Out

into Thanasia or the isle of death they were one and all deported, with

enough goods and provisions to keep them and their descendants alive,

if only they were industrious, for thousands of years. But none of them

would work, or till the soil, or even cook their food; and one by one

they gave themselves up to death. The more ingenious invented a method

of leaving life which had a certain grace if not nobility. They erected

great funeral pyres and connected them by a slow fuse to a huge battery

that sent up its rod into the heavens. When a tempest threatened, they

laid themselves out on these, and when the lightning began to flash,

the electricity ran along the wires, lit their fagots, and in a few

moments swept them out of existence. It was not long before the isle

of death was again left to its silences, nothing but the ashes of its

former inhabitants upon the tops of numerous mounds being left to

tell that human life had once been there. No one from the rest of the

archipelago seemed to care for life upon it; none ever landed there.

The only things that marred the mortuary stillness of the isle were

the screaming seabirds, and the tempests which drove them thither.

It was better for the cosmos that these emasculate weaklings should

as soon as possible submit the relics of energy in them to other

conditions of being. But it was not well for Limanoran immaturity to

have the spectacle of self-slaughter before them, or the contagion

of their death-pyre romance and eloquence touch the spirit of youth.

Moreover they took some time to resolve on death; and, in the process

of forming their resolution, it was the natural habit of these tame

triflers with death to put all the energy they had into their tongues.

As long as they could talk heroics to anyone about the deed they

contemplated, they were certain not to accomplish it. And romantic

chatter is catching where youth is still unbridled by reason, and in

the young who had robuster wills, the results might be more prompt.

It was different with the death-scenes of men and women who had done

their duty by the race and by human progress, and had worked out the

best possible results from the yoking of higher and lower energies.

Theirs was a true liberation from exhausted lower forms. It was not

the languor of the loftier element in them, but the exhaustion of

the lower, that brought the nausea of their hybrid life. They could

feel, as they looked back, how far their higher or spiritual energy

had risen since their entrance into earthly existence. Every year had

seen them climb upwards; nearer and nearer had their inner energy come

towards touch with that divine medium which was in and yet above all

life and which in youth they were conscious of only in lofty moments

of inspiration. Such were the supreme ascensions of life, when they

were capable of the noblest actions and the noblest moral resolves.

These moments became more and more frequent as they grew older and more

progressive, till towards the close of life they were almost habitual.

Limanoran youth snatched at these supernal moments by the help of

imagination. Limanoran age dwelt habitually in these moral altitudes

that lay far above mere passion or instinct. It was the old amongst

them who were alone capable of great creative spiritual life. They

seemed to feel the tiding of the subtlest energy in the universe, and

gave the impulses to most spiritual advance.

Here and there in other civilisations was bred a nature that had

fitful consciousness of this divine medium, at times through great

creative imagination, but oftener through noble life. Such a nature is

spoken of as inspired; and so far is it true in that it has come into

communication with the most refined and most creative medium of the

universe, that through which what we call the divine seems to work;

but only through patient self-moulding and development has it reached

such a height of nobleness. Oftenest in past ages these natures have

found shelter in religion; for in the world ambition must make use of

the coarsest tools and the grossest energies to reach its aim; and the

growth of a loftier spirit is at once checked, and noble aspiration

stifled. Peace and the shadow of devotional thought were the only

conditions allowing such a nature any scope in a world based upon war

and guided in its search for the right by might alone.

It was different with Limanoran civilisation. There it was the rule,

and not the exception, to raise the spiritual energies to sympathy

with the diviner media of the cosmos, and every condition favoured the

pursuit. Life began with but a fitful consciousness of it, but it grew

more continuous and surer. The young could scarcely distinguish its

impulses from those of their own lower energies. But the old had seldom

any hesitation as to when they were inspired; they seemed to keep in

touch with all that is divine in the world. They needed no retreat,

no religious shelter, to nurse the magnetic sympathy with the divine.

Their affinity to it grew more and more the essence of their being,

without ever having to leave their daily routine of duties. It was this

that gave them their wisdom and character, and that made the young feel

them to be almost a type apart from the ordinarily human. They became

more distinct and striking in their personality as they grew older and

felt this affinity. It had come to be a common observation of daily

life that the nobler the aspirations and the closer the intercourse

with the ethical media of the cosmos, the stronger and more distinctive

was the character; and science was not far from the conclusion that on

this intercourse depended persistence of individuality, and that the

higher they reached in their sympathies with the more refined media of

the universe, the less need was there of change in their personality

at death, of making alliance with other lower energies when they shed

their inferior and earthly forms of energy.

There was, they felt, a noble isolation or apartness of spirit in their

old men and women which raised them above common humanity, and made the

human body seem an incongruous garment for their soul. They lived above

the demands of their corporeal energies rather than in them or by them.

In the young the two seemed blended together; it was difficult often

to distinguish in them the movements of the two types of energy. But

in the old, though the corporeal had been raised and etherealised, it

seemed to hang on the skirts of the spiritual and try to drag it down;

it bore its earthly origination more manifestly on it in comparison

with the nobler refinement of the spiritual. And the longer they lived,

the stronger the contrast became, till at last nature herself seemed

to demand their eternal divorce. Euthanasia at a certain stage in

the development of Limanoran life came to be not so much a privilege

as a holy duty. To liberate the higher energy from its alliance with

the lower, to die, was but the next and most natural stage in the

evolution of the life. Even the family, who would feel the bereavement

most in the loss of their wise help and guidance, acquiesced gladly,

feeling that the liberation must mean a nobler career for the released

spiritual energy. Thus it was that on Doomalona they used the music

of creation; they gave utterance to their feeling that death was not

dissolution but creation, that the retrogression of the body was an

advance for the higher energy, the truer self. The sense of decay or

degeneration was quite absent from their thoughts. It was a triumphal

farewell; for they were convinced that for the liberated it was the

noblest deed of all to die, the very crown of all their life.

CHAPTER IV

AN EPIDEMIC

THOUGHT by thought I ejected my old view of death from my mind. I

could not forget the scene of triumph which had been enacted on the

hill of farewells; and the chanting that rilled through it haunted

my imagination, bringing a sense of satisfaction, if not joy. I got

into the habit of winging my exercise-flights towards Doomalona. I was

there with Thyriel when dawn struck the world into gladness and music.

There were we together to see the flaming picture the set of sun drew

on Lilaroma. No platform on the island so caught the inspiration of

the coming or departing orb. None, I came to feel, was so fitted for

the hegira of earth-weary souls. No such launching-ground was there

for the voyage through infinity. As I frequented it in my leisure

moments, there grew into my system the sense that death was not so much

an end as a beginning, not a dissolution, but a birth and perhaps a

forgetting. More and more was the idea of it a nucleus of delight; and

the old melancholy and sorrow, making it a burden and a terror for the

mind, disappeared.

As a proselyte to the new feeling I was eager to talk of it and make

much of its surprises. Not with Thyriel and my proparents alone did

I discuss its varied aspects; I could listen by the hour to their

teachings. But it brought me into intercourse with many whom I had

scarcely seen before except in the course of my education as I wandered

through the various halls. I was astonished to find how often they

sought opportunity to talk to me. They drew me aside as if they had

important business with me, and confidentially imparted their views

of death which I had heard a hundred times from others, until I grew

weary of their chatter, for I wished to talk myself. But they would

not allow me to break in on their everlasting torrent of babble; even

Thyriel could not endure my interruptions. Though I never grew weary of

her talk, I could not restrain the desire to have my say, too. There

was no subject on which we could not soliloquise by the hour, but we

preferred to talk of death, the freshest and most joyous of topics.

And every other youth was just as eager to deliver his opinions to me

and to everybody else. However busy they might be with the task in

hand, off they would break from it for colloquy, which soon spun itself

into the soliloquy of the stronger lungs and the most enduring tongue.

Everyone seemed to comport himself as if his views were of the utmost

importance to the world. They all seemed bursting with the obvious;

out it must come or they would die. In every other corner I would find

two or three debating with faces all aglow, sometimes in the most

confidential whispers; approaching to listen, I would find their topic

trite and stale as last year’s gossip; the speaker was pressing home

on his hearers in a voice of portentous awe what no one would think of

disputing.

The elders interfered and tried by patient advice to stop this tempest

of loquacity. Hurrying from post to post they tried to keep the young

at their work, but it was an endless task. On would go the glib current

as soon as their attention was turned elsewhere. Matters began to

look serious, for the work of the community was being neglected. The

ordinary services of life were barely performed. Little or no progress

could be made in such a state of affairs. Indeed, it became manifest

that the main aim of the race, progress, would soon be forgotten, and

retrogression supervene. The faces of the elders became graver every

day; their advice was unheeded, their example unfollowed. Babble,

babble, babble, on rolled the fluent river of talk, as if the island

had been in the midst of Western civilisation. When I closed my eyes

so loud and empty sounded the magpie babel I could easily fancy myself

back again in my native land, and believe that I had dreamt my recent

years and wakened again in Christendom.

The ominous gravity of the elders dispelled the fancy. They looked

as if doomsday were near, and were often heard to say that something

must be done. For the talkativeness was bringing other vices in its

train,--vanity, flippancy, carelessness, and want of reason. The

torrent of eloquence was spreading wider every day and seemed to have

broken down the pales of their long centuries of civilisation. No one

was capable of stopping it either by precept or example.

At last in their despair the elders appealed to the medicants. Nothing

like the phenomenon had occurred within the memory of the oldest;

nothing in the records could be found that in the least resembled it

since the series of exilings had been completed. At the periodical

inspection, the medicants made a more minute investigation of the

systems of the youth and turned their attention especially to the left

side of the brain, which is the great originator and controller of

speech. In a few they could see evidences of inflammation and morbid

secretion in the brain-tissue of this region; in most cases nothing

out of the common revealed itself to their most recent lavolans. So

they took careful electrographs of the left side of the brain of most

of them, and when they put these under their strongest clirolans, it

became plain that all of them were in a diseased condition.

The elders were now convinced that they were on the right track

of investigation, and all the young people who had shown symptoms

of the passion for eloquence were isolated and brought hourly

under the inspection of the medicants. Moving electrographs of the

thought-processes in the diseased parts were taken daily by means of

modifications of the lavolan; and under still more powerful clirolans,

made for the purpose, these revealed a microbe of extraordinary

minuteness at work in the tissue. Having found the source of the

mischief, they set themselves to remove it. At first they put the

patient into profound sleep, and, trephining the skull, they cleansed

away under the clirolan all traces of the parasite and its débris. What

they removed they carefully preserved and analysed; then, having found

the chemical elements of the mischievous spawn and their débris, they

reproduced the mixture as a cure of the new and singular disease. For

a time this was administered as an internal medicine; but finding that

it injured other nerve-centres besides those that they intended to

affect, they resolved to apply it only locally, and soon learned how to

avoid the necessity of trephining the skull. They invented an electric

syringe and injector, which caused the mixture to penetrate through

the skull into the part of the brain affected, thus sterilising the

tissues that had to do with speech and making them unattractive as a

feeding-ground for the microbe of loquacity.

The plague soon vanished and the babel ceased. There was comparative

silence throughout the island. Only such words were spoken as were

essential and relevant to the business in hand. It was, indeed,

accepted as the surest mark of the sanity of a nature that it was never

betrayed into speech unless that which conveyed necessary information,

forceful reasoning, or fresh thought. The trite was avoided as

mephitic vapours or an exhausted atmosphere would be. The utterance

of truisms immediately led to a microscopic examination of the brain

of the speaker in expectation of finding disease there. The habit of

expression merely for its own sake and not for what it expressed, for

its beauty or wit or pungency, was considered a sure indication of a

diseased or morbid condition of the brain-tissue, and the sufferer was

at once isolated for treatment, lest he should spread the contagion.

For the whole phenomenon was scientifically investigated, and

precautions were carefully taken against a return of the plague. It

had been noticed that, after any age of exceptional progress, there

generally occurred some epidemic connected with the brain-tissues or

nerve-centres, sometimes appearing in excess of emotion, sometimes in

various forms of feebleness of thought. It was due, they found, to the

comparative exhaustion of the brain and nerves by exceptional strain

upon them. As long as the enthusiasm of the new ideas and rapid advance

inspired the people, they worked with a will, nor ever thought of

sparing any part of their system. The more mature amongst them knew

how to bridle this passion for work, and took the necessary precautions

against its evil effects; from experience they had found out that

they needed more sustenance and more sleep in such periods, and they

knew almost by instinct when to rest and how often, and what halls

of sustenance and medication they should frequent. The young had not

their instincts checked or confirmed by experience, and carried even

the best of movements and impulses to abuse. In spite of inspection and

superintendence they ignored the rules laid down for their guidance,

and took their inspiration to work as better than the wisdom of their

elders, knowing that progress was the ideal and law of their race, and

thinking that everything done for progress was right.

It was thus the young and immature who generally suffered from these

epidemics. The impulse of their enthusiasm carried them far beyond

the limits of fertility of their tissues, and the ebullience of their

delight, as they saw the work grow before their eyes, obscured from

them the gradual exhaustion of their powers. They grew oblivious to

everything but the end they had immediately in view, and thus became

short-sighted in their enthusiasm for progress; they sacrificed the

demands of the future for the sake of the present, and it was difficult

for even the elders at the medical inspection to get at the real state

of the case, such an appearance of new vigour did the impetuosity of

their passion and the tumult in their blood give to their systems.

Only when the wandering germs of emotional disease had fixed on the

exhausted tissue did the result become apparent.

The wide area and serious effects of the plague of verbosity awakened

the medical elders to the necessity of special precautions. A section

of them was organised as a medical police to guard against the invasion

of such pestilences, and to prevent such exhaustion of youthful tissues

as would invite the vagrant germs or fail to repel their attacks. A

science was specialised for this purpose,--the pathology of epidemic

emotions; and a special art grew up to correspond,--the hygiene and

therapeutics of emotional infection.

The elders who attended to this periodically made careful examination

of all the tissue of the immature that had to do with emotion or with

any crude spiritual moods inapt to the control of reason and will.

And it was astonishing how rapid was the growth of the new science

and art in their hands. Delicate instruments were invented responding

to the presence even in the air of deleterious germs that tended to

settle in the nerve-centres. Still finer instruments revealed the state

of the tissues underneath the skull. The symptoms of every disease

of the emotions were classified, and the means of checking each was

investigated scientifically. Before the next period of exceptional

florescence and harvest arrived, the hygiene of all the epidemics that

had been known to follow on ages of great exertion was completely

organised; and it was chiefly an art of prevention rather than of cure.

Precautions were taken by the new section of the medicants against the

abuse of the enthusiasm natural to such a period; they examined the

nerve-tissues of the immature almost daily, and pointed out everyone

that was getting overworked, and the remedies that should be adopted

for checking the evil. The result was that no abuse could proceed for

longer than a day, and no moral or emotional epidemic unless of the

mildest type could settle in the community.

What roused them to such a step as the foundation of a new science and

art was the seriousness with which they viewed the last plague, that

of loquacity. In the series of exilings no evil had given them such

trouble as that of oratory, and they were afraid lest it was about to

return in all its virulence. At first they feared this plague to be a

case of atavism; for those whom it attacked earliest were descendants

of ancestors, or closely related to families, that had been famous in

the far past for power of expression. But it soon spread to strains of

blood that had been marked by great reticence, if not taciturnity, and

ultimately it was completely impartial in its choice of victims. It was

manifest, however, that those who had ancestral oratory in the blood

were first open to the attacks of the plague and were most difficult to

cure; and the phenomenon sent alarm to the very heart of the community.

All the mature citizens and especially the elders looked graver than I

had ever seen them look, even at the prospect of Choktroo’s invasion;

they came nearer to the appearance of dejection than I had imagined

they could come.

The whole matter drove my thoughts to work. When I reflected on the

occasion, the attitude my mind had been accustomed to in my forgotten

life returned, and it seemed to me as if there had been a storm

over nothing. Talkativeness had been one of the commonest features

of the men and women I had known in Europe; and loquacity was as

little noticed as a red head or a pug nose. Indeed the chatterbox was

ranked among the innocents who did little harm except to their own

reputations. It became a complete puzzle to me, when I saw the horror

with which the Limanorans looked on oratory. Had it not been one of

the greatest of the arts of Christendom? Were not the great orators

of my own nation looked upon as little short of inspired, and their

statues placed in the noblest niche of our temple of fame? Did we not

rush by the thousand to hear any one of them, when he was about to

perform, and stand breathless by the hour, laying up for ourselves

fatigue and faintness and asphyxia, merely for the delight of hanging

on his lips? In life he roused hurricanes of enthusiasm; and when he

died thousands who had never known him personally followed him mourning

to the tomb, and on the most revered page of our literature was his

name written. What could be the meaning of so hearty a detestation of

so noble an art on the part of this progressive race?

As usual I had not long to wait for a solution. My bewilderment had

already stirred the curiosity of my proparents and Thyriel; and they

had been watching my thoughts for some time before I put my questions,

simple enough for my young comrade and betrothed to answer. She spent

a whole afternoon that was devoted to flight-exercise, in discussing

and solving my difficulties, and the struggle ended in strengthening my

admiration for this noble people.

Their abhorrence of the vice of oratory was not the growth of any

sudden revolution, or the unreasoning prejudice often originating

amongst a long-established nation in some great personal hatred or fear

now buried in oblivion. It was the result of ages of the most patient

scientific investigation. And it found its way into practice so slowly

that the steps up to the final one are scarcely noticeable on the pages

of their history. It had an inborn prejudice in favour of oratory to

combat, all the deeper that it could not explain itself or its origin.

The reputation of some of the ablest and most influential sections of

the community was based upon the art. The orators of the nation had

acquired a fame almost greater than that of the soldiers. They had been

its leaders and founders; they had developed and mastered its politics;

they had moulded the people at certain crises in their history into a

unity. Their art had been enrolled for ages amongst the noblest they

had. It was the only civilised force which could move great masses to

enthusiasm, or fuse their varied purposes and thoughts together to

form a single ideal and aim. It was the only means their statesmen

had had for accomplishing their schemes, the only stepping-stones by

which their lawyers and preachers and politicians could rise to fame.

It seemed for ages a hopeless task to unseat it from its place in

their civilisation, or eradicate the prejudice in its favour from the

people’s minds.

The wisest Limanorans had watched its evil influence through many ages;

although they had often themselves to make use of it for their purposes

of reform and although some of the best men had been successful in

its employment, yet they were certain that it sapped the finer sense

of truth. So easily could the orator persuade a crowd to accept all

he said as true and noble that he came to think there was little

difference between the true and the false, the noble and the ignoble;

his own aim was all that was of significance, and it was, however

selfish or mean, just as good as anybody else’s aim. He needed as

little to persuade himself of the justice of an evil cause, provided it

was his own, as to persuade an assembly. He had but to isolate certain

facts and phases, and what were antagonistic to them fell into shadow;

the unjust course began to appear just, and those who opposed it were

the enemies of justice and of the orator. It mattered not what side

he took, if only it stirred his interest; he could rouse thousands to

enthusiasm for it by touching their emotions and awakening the passions

that were connected with their own self-interest. This power of moving

great masses to whatever tune he pleased gave the orator a sense of

omnipotence; after a stirring speech he felt like a Jove who held in

his hand the destinies of the world. Happily for the welfare of the

state, the tongue-doughty was hopelessly incapable when he turned to

practice; he could not organise the crusade he had preached; everything

he did with his crowd of followers tumbled to pieces as soon as he

had to do anything further than speak; a few days or even hours of

cool action revealed the hollowness of his cause or his power; the

omnipotent Jove of yesterday appeared the skulking slave of to-day. The

only crusades that ever prospered under his influence were those which

aimed at destruction; for the work of destruction is brief and sharp;

it needs but the passion of the moment to accomplish it; and the love

of demolition is the most primitive of all savage desires, and the most

unbridled when let loose; its own action as it proceeds kindles into

a conflagration the fires that give it strength. Creation is a calm

and gradual process, the last conquest of the human mind, as it is the

highest function of the energy of the cosmos. The wrecking Omnipotence

of oratory is parted from this by the eternity of cosmic development;

it is kin with the clashing of worlds and systems that may come before

the birth of a universe; but it is as opposite in nature to the slow

building up of a world and the slow evolution of its life-energy as

hell is to heaven.

The barrenness of the art in all that would develop humanity struck

even the less mature minds of Limanora forcibly as soon as vast schemes

of reform like socialism began to be discussed. These schemes meant the

devastation or the dismantling of existing institutions and systems of

life. A plague of demagogues spread throughout the nation. Hitherto

orator had neutralised orator as in a debate. Now it was the idle and

indolent who grew most tongue-valiant. They, who had before been so

discredited, now found themselves on the way to fame. They, who had

before been able to gather only a few embeggared discontents at the

street-corners to listen, and perhaps to sniff at their eloquence,

could now stir masses to action. They had been despised even by their

out-at-elbows followers for their impotence in face of the problem of

making a bare living for themselves. Now they saw before them place and

power, fortune and fame, and all through this poor member of theirs

that had not been able to earn enough to lick. Beggarly grovellers,

none so poor as not to scorn them, they were now omnipotent, with all

the work of devastation before them that these new vast political

schemes implied. When the revolution was in full blaze, they were at

their best, they thought. But it was just at this point they found

their limit. The conflagration they had kindled their eloquence failed

to control or even guide; it swept past them through institutions

and sections of the community that they specially favoured; and

at last even they, many of them, fell themselves victims to its

undiscriminating ravage. And, when it had burned itself out, not one

of them but skulked away in fear, unable to face the task of building

up again. Then it was the man of action that stepped in, the silent,

masterful disciplinarian, moulded in war and accustomed to no other

means of solving human problems than war; he it was who reaped the

dragon’s-teeth harvest sown by tongue-bravery: he seized all the glory

and place and fortune that the mob-spaniels had thought within their

grasp. Some of their ancient folk-maxims embodied this experience: The

breath of the demagogue blows the warrior to his fortune; The mouth

of the orator is the banqueting-chamber of the soldier; Tempests of

eloquence and torrents of blood; Spout, vain tongue, you invite your

tyrant; Sow a country with the teeth of haranguers and they will come

up the swords of despots; Loquacity is eaten up by her son pugnacity.

In spite of the fear of the art indicated in such folklore, it

continued to flourish; for the upper classes, who delighted in war,

flattered themselves that they would ever be the best orators, and it

is the inevitable tendency of human nature to run to tongue. Not till

the age of unbridled freedom of speech did they begin to change their

opinions. Then were they easily outfaced and out-harangued by any

idler of the poverty-stricken districts. Even in their own assemblies

they were no match for the spouters from the slums; with all their

high-toned irony and scornful superiority, they were beaten into

silence at the public palavers; they were mere stammerers beside the

glib orators of the unwashed. This age of tongue-exploits was naturally

an age of single ideas, too. When their energy had gone into speech,

they had none left for thoughts. One-idea crusades became the order of

the day. Every tongue-quixote had his scheme wherewith he would sweep

all evils out of life. He was so enamoured of his own that he could not

bear to listen to any other. And therein lay safety.

But there came a time when the wordy bravos joined forces; one vast

socialistic scheme included all theirs. The institutions of the island

were to be wiped out, and something undefined that was to make men

equal and prosperous and happy was to be put in their place. Their

tongues now wagged in unison with wonderful velocity. Each was still

for his own special constructive scheme, but they were at one in their

scheme of demolition; they must have a clear space to build on, and

their ideal was the same, to make all equal and happy. The babel of

eloquence drowned the sounds of other industry. Another revolution was

almost within earshot.

Some of the wiser hearts of Limanora anticipated the danger, and saw

that it would be better to give the discontented all than to let

destruction ravage unmuzzled again. The whole of the property of the

island was estimated, land, houses, furniture, and luxuries; and

money equivalent to its full value was handed over to the malcontent

socialists to divide amongst themselves, provided they migrated to

another island. The offer was readily accepted; for it was clear that

nothing would then be left in Limanora worth plundering. The ships

landed the enraptured equalisers of human goods with their belongings

on the shore of their new Eden, and returned.

When the decks were cleared, and a census was taken of all that

remained, it was found that the island in purging out the socialists

was rid of the plague of orators. The price they paid for their

deliverance was small indeed, they felt. They soon recreated the wealth

they had surrendered. Everyone grew ashamed and afraid of anything

that approached to oratory. Eloquence became a word of evil omen. To

prate was now the greatest offence against the commonwealth. And for

generations there reigned comparative silence and complete peace over

the land.

In the series of purgations every remaining trace of tongue-ambition

was swept out. Much of the flattering kind was found to have migrated

with the lecherous; much of the haughty kind with the aristocratic

warriors; but most of it went with the liars. There remained a horror

of all prating and tongue-valiance, and this repressed every atavistic

tendency in that direction that appeared.

CHAPTER V

LITERATURE

ALL mere word-mongering was to this people an immoral thing, a

shameless waste of the tissue and energy that were needed by the

evolution of the race, an offence against its aim and ideal, its

progress upwards through the cosmic grades. They were persuaded that

it was a base substitution of the shows of life for the reality to

make an art of words which should absorb the imagination and the skill

of hundreds for their whole lifetime. They would have nothing to do

with attention to the appearance and ornamentation of a subject to the

neglect of its true spirit. Into the very heart and purpose of life

every worker must penetrate. His relation to the progress of the race

must be clearly shown. No work that took up any of the time or energy

of anyone of the community was to be useless or unfertile.

But this did not mean that language was allowed to take care of itself.

It was one of the most diligently tended blossoms of human capacity.

No word or phrase, whether spontaneous or invented, was allowed to

take root without the fiat of the mature community. Language was more

a public institution than even government or justice in a people whose

every member was able to be a law to himself. It was not only the

great channel of communication; it was the medium and garment of every

thought. If it became corrupt, how could the mind itself be saved from

its contagion? If it acquired a false tone, how could the falsity fail

to enter into the very spirit of the men and women? It was the guardian

of law and truth; it was the key to the human heart; it was the ether,

the medium, in which the human mind lived, moved, and had its being.

How could such a potent factor in human progress be left to the

caprices of accident, or of single persons, or even of a family?

It had more influence over the spirit than all their sciences put

together, for it was more universal in its use than any one of them;

and it subtly tinged all of them, whilst it was almost the breath of

the mind which dealt with them. It might be the life or the poison of

the whole race. He who was the sole guide of language would be the

master of Limanora, not in the shallow sense of a ruler, but in that of

the complete arbiter of its destinies. He would be the despot of the

Limanoran mind and might subtly throw it back centuries, if it pleased

him.

A people so experienced and wise as this would have ruined the whole

ideal of their existence if they had allowed the most public of the

functions of their civilisation to move at the caprice of individuals.

As soon as the purgation of the race had been completed it became

plain that their language must be purified too. Hundreds of words and

phrases and idioms had had soaked into them the infiltrations of the

evil minds which were now banished. Worse than all, language had been

the commonest and safest ambush of malignity and deceit; it had been a

perpetual trap for the innocent and unwary; it had been a labyrinth,

in which even the ablest and purest-minded often lost their way when

following the lead of some great and noble thought.

The first aim of the elders was to clear it of coarse or vulgar

suggestion. But, as they proceeded, they found their horizon widen;

and the intricacies, ambiguities, and pitfalls showed themselves the

most serious evils of all. It became absolutely necessary, if they

were to have a clear and unrefractive medium of expression, to give a

definite meaning to every word, and to have one word for every meaning

or shade of meaning. The task extended itself through years. But then

they knew that, until it was thoroughly done, their science would be

like shifting clouds, and their progress would be over quicksands. If

their language was treacherous, their civilisation was but a mirage. So

they toiled on sustained by the hope that they were making sure their

footsteps in the pursuit of truth.

When their work was done, they found it was only begun. For it took a

generation to make the new and purified language the natural medium

of the whole people, and by that time new sub-meanings had crept into

most of the common words, and new shadings had discoloured most of

the everyday phraseology. The new and less used words, and the purely

technical and scientific words stood where they were. Everything that

lived had shifted ground. Everything that was purely artificial and had

taken no root had remained as it began, had been in short petrified. It

was clear that with living language there must be perpetual vigilance

and superintendence. And the whole people had to become a council for

the preservation of its purity and translucence. Every citizen set a

watch upon his words, as he used them from day to day or as he heard

them used, and reported any drift in the sense and any new shade of

meaning; and after deliberation in council and careful consideration by

the elders a new form was moulded for each new signification. This form

had to pass the ordeal of universal use for some time, and if it stood

the test, it was finally accepted as part of the language.

Nor was it ever forgotten that the ear and the sense of harmony had

as much to do with the acceptance of a word as its fitness to express

an idea. Harsh sounds wasted valuable tissue as much as unmeaning

syllables. The verbal atrocities of Western science would have made the

Limanorans shudder. Dissonance was an offence against the spirit of

harmony which pervaded the cosmos; it was as easy to form a melodious

word or phrase as one that was grating or stridulous. Euphony, it

seemed to them, was one of the first essentials of a language; and it

was much pleasanter to be silent than to talk unmusically. There had

grown up an instinct in them that moulded their sentences into what

Europeans would have called poems. The barest statement of fact ran

with a liquid sweetness that drew the ear like a piece of beautiful

music. The strictest scientific discourse sounded to me as majestic and

melodious as some of the greatest passages in our Western poets. Their

most ordinary conversation had the liquid harmony of our finest lyrics

without the monotonous rhythm, the jingling rhyme, or the mincing

gait. It never struck them that there should be a special art of words

apart from that skill which all had by instinct whenever there was a

thought to express. If it were a perfectly new thought, a discovery

or invention that was still unnamed, then it was the duty of the

whole people to make or approve of a word which would exactly fit it.

Loose-fitting language soon meant loose, shambling thought, and it was

one of their foremost responsibilities as a race to see that no one of

them was driven into that. The appearance of a special literary art,

for which some were specially gifted, would have told them at once that

their language was disorganised and that the first great public need

was its reform.

For a time after my arrival in the island I was accustomed to speak

with admiration of the great literatures of Europe, one of the few

features of our Western civilisation which I felt it no shame to

mention. I would launch into glowing praises of the beauty and aptness

of the expression, the nobleness of the music, and the majesty and

harmony of each work. When I spoke of Homer and Æschylus, of Dante and

Milton, of Shakespeare and Goethe, I was unbounded in my admiration of

their lofty genius in the management of their material. Questioned as

to the character of their thoughts, I contended that there was no need

for these to be absolutely new; the greatest merit of such poets was

that they took the wisdom of their age or country, or the wisdom of

all ages and countries, and expressed it in a way that was inimitable.

Their material they had gathered from books or from the experience of

their time; and most of their great poems had been analysed by admiring

commentators into their original elements; the source from which

almost every idea had been taken could be pointed out. But this was

only to enhance the value of their work, to increase their greatness.

It was one of the commonest observations amongst literary men in the

West, when defending themselves against the charge of plagiarism, that

there was no such thing as absolute originality of idea or material;

the great merit in literature, the test of its lastingness, was the

originality or freshness of expression; the rest belonged to the age or

people in which it was produced, or to mankind of all ages and nations.

And young men and women were encouraged to learn foreign languages, and

especially the classical tongues, at all hazards, because translations

missed what was distinctive in the great authors; if they would enjoy

the true flavour of their originality, they must learn and study the

language of the great books for themselves.

I found my efforts to communicate my enthusiasm all in vain. I was met

by a look of pity in the eyes of my listeners, and soon came to know

the source and meaning of the emotion. They were sorry that I should

continue to admire that which was the symptom of a diseased condition,

and they commiserated the retrograde state of so many millions of the

inhabitants of the globe, who could spend some of the best moments

and feelings of their lives on what was merely superficial. They

sympathised with the effort to live in a world of thought, a spiritual

world, a nobler existence than that of eating and drinking; this was a

sign of a yearning for advance. But they grieved that it should take

such a mistaken direction, that their fellow-men in the West should

glory in what was an evidence of disease. Language was singularly

disordered, when only a few could be found throughout the ages with

the capacity to use it aptly and musically. Where was the wisdom that

guided the people, if it could let this greatest instrument and medium

of thought remain so chaotic and infirm that whosoever was skilled in

fit and melodious use of it was held to be inspired? Surely it was

the first care of the elders and governors to see that the universal

means of communication was at least unambiguous and explicit. The

highway of thought was left a jungle, primeval and inarticulate as the

intercourse of animals; and one who made a clear track through any part

of the labyrinth was lauded as divine. The literature of Europe was

evidently but the outcome of the incapacity of its people for proper

self-government. That only a few should be able to write or speak in so

clear and fitting a way was a disgrace to the civilisation. To honour

them so greatly as the people did revealed the depths of incapacity

into which all had fallen, and the corrupt state of the language.

I urged the marvellous power of suggestion that European words

had in the hands of the poets. They bore so many sub-meanings and

branches of meaning that the full depths of a poem or great prose

work were never sounded. Age after age of students could go on

studying it and still find in it new significance, new inspiration.

Commentary after commentary had been written on the _Iliad_, the

_Divine Comedy_, and Shakespeare’s plays, without exhausting

all the meaning they had in them. Vast libraries of interpretation

of them had accumulated, and yet every new age found opportunity for

additions to them. This was due to the subtle under-meanings that

touched innumerable keys in the soul, and played upon a vast variety

of emotions. An able writer could bring words together so aptly as

to affect different minds in different ways. A nebulous significance

gathered round his phrases and sentences, and out of this a hundred

scholars would make each his own discovery. Mystically lay the thoughts

in the depths of his words, ready for the profounder students to

fathom. And so every great poem inspired age after age in a thousand

different directions. Would this have been the case, if every word

had been made to serve but one purpose, if every phrase had been

unequivocal in meaning, and every sentence unshaded and perspicuous? It

was the play of meaning, the opalescent glimmer of light in language

that rendered European poetry so beautiful and undyingly suggestive.

It was the twilight of words that gave such majestic and shadowy forms

to the ideas and characters and scenes of the great poems of the past.

And what would the generations of scholars and teachers have done

without these hidden meanings to reveal in their literature, without

these intricacies to disentangle, without these dim allusions and

adumbrations of sense to make clear? Where would our youth have found

their intellectual training, if all our great literature had been

transparent and precise in meaning?

I thought I had made out a splendid case for our European tongues.

But a glance at the face of my querist served to scatter my vanity

to the winds. There was the same inscrutable look of pity in the

eyes. Everything I had pleaded, as I thought, so eloquently had only

deepened the Limanoran view of the shameful waste of talent which the

undefined and perpetually shifting sense of European words produced in

the West. There must the ablest minds of most generations wrestle all

their lives with the loose-jointed languages they had to employ, and

try to get their benediction and inspiration into form for the ages

to wrestle with. There must thousands of capable men and women waste

their best years in searching for recondite meanings in the works these

have produced. There must all the immature minds spend their youth on

the hated, barren task of trying to grasp the mirage of sense in the

books they learn. What progress would there not have been in Europe if

all this talent and energy and time had been saved for the real work

of life, if all the best thinkers she produced had been set to the

labour of true discovery? It was little wonder that her civilisation

was practically unprogressive, when so much of it was built on the

quicksands of her language. All the shades and suggestions of meaning

were but pitfalls wherein most of her men and women foundered on the

journey of life. It was with mere shadows and shows that her greatest

minds fought; they were not conquering the unknown and undiscovered

that their fellow-men might advance in their footsteps. The night

encircled them as deeply as before their preternatural efforts. How

could the blind lead the blind in a land covered with mists and full of

pitfalls?

I had still a few arrows in my quiver, I thought. No one could deny

the beauty of the literary art and the training it gave to the sense

of what was fair and noble. Where will one find anything so melodious

as our great poems? Where anything so harmonious as the prose of our

finest stylists? A beautiful lyric can hold a nation entranced. A fine

piece of prose can stir thousands to admiration. What could be more

ennobling than the effect of our greatest poems on the youth of our

nations, what more refining than the study of our great prose-writers?

Again I knew how far beside the mark I had shot. Style was but the

effort of a language to throw off its diseases, an acknowledgment

of the gross imperfections that burdened it and made it a clog on

the progress of thought. If a language were what it ought to be, a

precise means of intercourse between soul and soul, a true medium of

intellectual energy, then ought the race that uses it to be completely

unconscious of anything like style. We never know we breathe, or how we

breathe, till some stoppage makes breathing difficult; we never realise

we have a heart whose pulsations are essential to life, till it beats

irregularly, and alarms us with the prospect of disease in it. So it

is with speech, the instrument of communication among men, the ether

of thought; did it perform all its functions in a healthy and perfect

way, we should pay little or no attention to it; were words unambiguous

and precise, every man would speak and write in the best of all styles,

that natural and transpicuous method of expression which fixes the

whole mind of the listener or reader, not on the means of conveyance,

but on the energy that passes through it. Speech should be no more than

one of the unpremeditated, unguided functions of our system; as soon as

it calls for attention, it is deranged; as long as we are unconscious

of it, it is healthful and strong, acting in every way as it should,

without shadow or broken light, without indefiniteness of meaning or

mistaken suggestion.

Nor should a language even in its commonest thoroughfares be devoid

of music. How false must be the rendering of a thought, if for the

sake of melody he who is called a poet should have to reject all but

musical expressions in a language which has little music in it! How

artificial must be the labours of this professional word-monger, when

he must sit amongst the débris of his vocabulary, and pick and choose

with weary exertion the words that will fit into his poem! With most

of his language unsuited to his purpose, as being invented or moulded

by unmusical people, he is like a mosaic-worker who has to make his

work out of common stone, or out of fragments of pottery thrown into

the rubbish-heap of the ages. Most languages sound like the rasping of

a file over iron, or the shooting of débris over a precipice, or at

best the crackle and hiss of fireworks. And it is not surprising; for

their individual words are made out of anything that is ready to hand

by men who care nothing for the sound of them, whether it is harsh or

melodious. Now and again if a word or phrase becomes current out of the

range of literary products, it will get its harsh grating syllables

ground off, or rounded and polished in the torrent of common speech.

Thus are prepared the only elements of the language that are fit for

the fine mosaic-work of Western poets. They rescue these time-smoothed

pebbles from their gross or vulgar surroundings and place them in a

setting that will make them seem beautiful for a time.

It is only for a time; again the fair structure they have made falls

into ruin, and fragments are whirled into the eddies of everyday speech

and abandon their beauty of form and meaning for something their

original maker would never recognise. Then begins the old process; the

débris of forgotten works, rounded and smoothed in the current of time,

serves as the rubble to be concreted into the artistic works of a new

age. Alas for the artists who have such a task before them! Out of

the rubbish heap of the past they must mould what will please the new

times. And where is there room for true harmony in the result of such a

process? The materials depend for their form on the caprice of chance;

the artists depend for the form they give on the caprice of the age in

which they work, certain to be antiquated by the next new fashion. As

long as a literary product depends on its form for its lasting effect,

it must be comparatively ephemeral; for form is nothing if it does not

suit the fancy of the age to which it appeals, and the fancy of one age

conflicts with most others. Artificial means may seem to keep it alive,

an ecclesiastical or political movement, the aid of an extraneous art,

or the ambition of scholars and critics; but the life is only galvanic,

and not from the heart of the people. No true music can come out of

that which is essentially unmusical.

CHAPTER VI

INSPIRATION

I ABANDONED the effort to defend the literature of Christendom, and

came to the conclusion that a people that so scorned all word-mongering

could not have any literature. I was soon disabused of the idea. One

day, after my education had advanced into the final stage of its

earlier course, and my loyalty to the race had been tested in many

ways, my proparents bade me accompany them to the production of a new

book. After what I had heard in depreciation of literature such as

I had been accustomed to in Europe, I was somewhat startled at this

invitation. But they said nothing to explain the anomaly, although they

knew well the nature of the discussion I had had with Thyriel.

I had thought that, during my long residence in the island and in my

countless flights over it, I had come to know every public institution

existing on it. But I was mistaken again. In our course we chose a

direction that for a space was one I had several times taken. But

soon we bent out of the usual track up Lilaroma, and turning one of

its western spurs, made for a deep valley which was concealed from

view, except to voyagers towards the sunset. Here we found the air

filled with wings and airships streaming onwards. It was a beautiful

sight, this navy of the sky fleeting across the snows of Lilaroma, or

winnowing the depths of the azure. We had been on the adjoining coast

of the island, and had not to strike far upwards in order to reach our

destination. So the air-fleet moved far above us, most of it having to

round the heights of the gleaming mountain. Nothing could surpass the

grace with which they took their way through the heaven, now to this

point, now to that; and after a time I could hear the movement of their

wings, like the rustle of silken sails.

In gazing dreamily upwards, I had allowed myself to drop too near the

earth, and in order to reach the goal of our flight exactly I had

to take another long rise. Thereafter my gaze was bent earthwards

on a still more beautiful sight beneath me. A broad valley narrowed

coastwards to a deep gorge and mountainwards into a rift in the rocks.

The river which had sculptured this singular amphitheatre had been

deflected by an artificial channel into the centre of force, but was

allowed at times to sweep its old bed free of the débris of rocks and

vegetation. Up each side vibrated in the air tier upon tier of their

automatic rests, enough to accommodate a nation. All lay open to the

sky; yet there was a subdued light down in the hollow of the vale, that

soothed the eyes tired with the gleam of the blue and snow above; and

this twilight deepened into gloom towards the head and the exit of the

valley. Only in the afternoon, as the sun westered, it shot its level

rays through the chasm at the entrance, and mellowed the gloom even

of the ravine at the upper end with its golden light. And at sunset

the concentration of the many-coloured rays through the gorge had a

striking effect upon the whole amphiteatre; it was as if a theatrical

artist were lighting it up for some supernatural scene.

The afternoon sunlight indeed soon revealed to our eyes, as we settled

on the slopes, an immense stage that shot out of the ravine on the

mountain-side. It was, I could see, the natural theatre of the island,

cut out by other than human powers. And from side to side the gentlest

whisper would carry, yet without recoil; while the sound of the moving

stage, as it rolled forth, rose along the tiers and without break or

repercussion died away into the open sky above our heads. It must have

been here, I thought, that the architects of Limanoran buildings had

learned the acoustic secrets of nature. Never a sound was lessened or

confused in passing to the farthest corner of any of their vast halls.

Nor was it from any mechanical contrivance underneath the roof, but

simply from the shape of the enclosure. Nature had formed this valley

into a perfect theatre, in the highest tier of which not one listener

could miss the smallest sound. Yet by a singular contrivance, by means

of which a globe of irelium was kept over the stage, every sound was

tenfold magnified lest the merest whisper should escape, whilst every

hearer had at hand a margol, which would soften sounds that carried too

loudly to the ear. Another strange effect of this irelium shell was

that it magnified to the eye everything upon the stage a hundredfold;

it acted as a powerful microscope, so that each spectator was far

nearer to the inner structure of any object than mere human eye-power

could bring him.

We had not to wait long for the purpose of these preparations. There

entered upon the stage two figures that underneath the globe seemed

gigantic beside the bodies of Limanoran men and women. They had

Limanoran outlines, but transmuted into something more ethereal than

aught I had seen. There was a grace of form and a beauty of face

beyond any of those around me on the slope of the hill. And even to

my eyes, untrained and limited as they were in their powers, there

was a transparency in the tissue of their bodies which revealed the

movements of their organs; I saw their hearts pulsate, and the currents

of the blood move quicker or slower along their veins as they walked

or stood still. We could even watch the effect of their emotions in

their systems, and the excited or tranquil movement of thoughts in the

tissues of their brains. The impulses that travelled along their nerves

from brain to hand or foot, and the reports that kept journeying from

the various senses to the nerve-centres, seemed all to be made plain

to us; and seemed the work of a magician, so marvellous was it, so far

above mere human achievement.

But still greater marvels were to follow. These two beings or automata

or moving shadows of beings, or whatever they might be, enacted a

scene, the significance of which I comprehended only after many days’

thought. My immediate impressions and my subsequent conclusions and

knowledge have so amalgamated that it is difficult to separate the two

elements. These two beings were chosen friends, the complements of

each other, with tendencies and tastes and loves all in unison. Such

perfect fitting of nature to nature was not as yet to be found even

in Limanora. Thought sprang to thought, and emotion to emotion, and

yet there was a spontaneity and origination in both that made each a

separate fountain of life and action. How independent the characters

and powers, and yet how mutually adapted! The scene was meant to

picture a friendship that was a true and perfect marriage.

The two had grown year by year closer in harmony till at last the

mutual sympathy had culminated in a yearning to see an individuality

that would combine the best peculiarities of each and perpetuate the

combination. We could see the thought flame into a passion in the two

systems, and then we could hear the friends talk around the longing

till it grew definite, into a common project. We saw them gather the

materials needed for the formation of the body. With intricacies of

furnace and crucible and machinery they moulded these into the skeleton

of a man, flawless and strong in every part. They tried every bone

with numberless tests, till they found it all to their satisfaction.

Then they started on the cartilages that kept the bones in place or

moved them, giving permanence and life to each, as they made it, by

the magnetism they communicated to it. Tissue by tissue they built up

the internal organs, modelling them with loving care on those they

saw at play beneath their own eyes, and testing them to see that they

performed their functions perfectly. What delicate artistic energy they

spent upon the upper tissues of the body, upon the brain and ear and

eye! Each created and developed the quality loved and admired in the

other. There was nothing they omitted to make the new being complete

and happy in all his functions. On the minute nerves and tissues they

worked under powerful microscopes, and the minutiæ of every sense and

organ and function were examined and tested again and again with the

same magnifying power turned on them. The figure they made most noble

and symmetrical in proportions and outlines, the face they made as

beautiful as human face could look. The stuff in which they worked was

ethereal in its texture and constituents. It was difficult to discern

it with our senses even under the great magnifying globe. It seemed

to be of air or some product of the ether; for it flowed underneath

their guiding fingers almost invisible. And the result was a body more

transparent than their own. It was a marvel of refinement and strength

combined; they experimented on every limb and sense, every nerve and

muscle and tissue, and they corrected every defect in it before they

reached the final act.

At last the work was completed to their satisfaction, and they braced

themselves for the most exhausting task of all. How were they to

make of this image a living creature? I smiled as I thought of the

impossibility of what was evidently before them. Yet they seemed

perfectly calm in their preparation for the final endeavour. Only there

was a subdued volcanic energy in their systems that seemed to show

that they considered it a task almost superhuman. They encouraged each

other, and we could see them infuse new magnetism into their bodies by

means of machinery of great power. Their faces were filled with the

glow of a rapturous appeal to heaven. They were putting themselves

into connection with some being they adored invisible to us, some

impalpable fountain of life. They took the hands of the image they had

formed, and raised it; they placed it between them, so that it should

be in the path of all energy that passed from one to the other. They

laid their hands upon its head and nerve-centres, and at the same

time the pleading rapture on their faces rose almost to trance. Their

spirits seemed to go out from them. They looked like two in dream. A

faint flush came upon the cheeks of the image between them, and died

out. Again their souls seemed to return to full consciousness, and the

rapture grew upon their faces. Again the signal of life dawned on the

countenance of the image. Throb by throb they gave of their own souls

to his, meantime drawing from some fountain of life and spirit unseen

by us. Slowly the eyelids rose, and the lips moved. There was true

life in the image. The three walked as in trance, yet with the joy of

creation pulsing through them. The child of their imagination was like

both, yet independent, and more beautiful to look upon. Love broke

through the new being and theirs in wild pulsations. The three awoke

to a new life. And then the scene vanished, and I seemed to have but

dreamed.

Yet there was the deep valley with the sunset rays shooting through

it; and up the slopes rested thousands of flesh-and-blood Limanorans

beside me. A few thoughts, and I knew that it was no dream. Was it

magic? I could not believe that such a people would indulge in mere

trifling with life and the powers above life. My spirit of enquiry

stirred my guardians, and I soon knew from them that this was the first

publication of a new book, called Human Sculpture. The deep valley with

its apparatus was the theatre of futurition, where every imaginative

foresight was first put into a form that would appeal to the whole

people. It was called Loomiefa or the display of pioneering.

Their literature was all science, and that the science of the future.

Romancing about the past or the present seemed to this utilitarian

people waste of the noblest faculty of man, shameful squandering of

imaginative wealth on that which is naught. Mere retrospection for

its own sake without reference to subsequent advance was thought by

them the most pernicious of madnesses; they diagnosed it as a kind

of ethical blindness, that could neither see the right nor do it. The

state of peoples who looked at nothing but the past with admiration

was one of the lowest circles of their inferno; another was that of

nations that saw nothing good outside of themselves and their immediate

surroundings. In such unprogressive national or racial attitudes they

saw all the evils of inbreeding; the weaknesses and intellectual and

moral diseases of the past grew despotic in their power over the human

system, till they came to seem the only virtues; even what had been

once virtues grew inveterate and routine, or monstrous and overpowering

in their excess. The past served only as the soil for the better

growths of the future. And an exhausted soil became barren, if not

poisonous, for all but weeds, or growths that needed and deserved no

attention or cultivation.

To spend imagination on the past, therefore, was to them a crime

against the future. What was dead and needed invention to bring before

the mind again was better in its grave. A literature that turned back

to the past for its progress clogged the wheels of progress, unless it

belonged to a race that had fallen back centuries behind the natural

advance of the world. For a progressive nation to give of its best for

the resurrection of a dead past was to confess a strain of barbarism

in it, and to prophesy its own rapid decay. The imagination was the

faculty of the future; it had its eyes set in front, and not behind

like memory; it was meant to investigate the horizon before us, and to

interpret the lights and shadows thrown from below the rim of vision,

and not to look back, whether with regret or adoration, over the region

that humanity had beaten hard with its weary footing. The future is

infinite; the human past covers but a few centuries, and a narrow

track through them. It is not for want of scope that the faculty of

futurition is driven back on the ground already trodden; it is through

a grievous and incurable malady, the malady of preterpluperfection,

that twists the face round to the back of the neck, and rots or

petrifies the tissues of the brain and the heart. They counted it the

saddest of all spectacles on earth to see a race, that by its nature

could be rapidly progressive, waste its highest energies in retracing

again and again the footsteps of its own ancestry or of the ancestry

of some other race. Nothing would persuade them to permit any study of

the past that was not meant to be wholly relevant to the future. They

tended to be, I thought, almost negligent of the value of history and

historical study; for, as our Western commonplace goes, history repeats

itself; and however new and ameliorative an age may be, it may obtain

lessons, and still more warnings, from ages past.

Their literature was all of the future. There were two of the largest

families of the race devoted to it, and their numbers were ever being

recruited by adoption into them of scions of others, who revealed

exceptional imaginative faculty. They had the generalised training

of the island; but their particular training was more completely

specialised than that of any other family. Nothing was omitted that

would tend to make them of imagination all compact, or to give them

such ease in their command of language as would bring them the exact

word without effort. Next to these points in their education stood

tutelage in all that pertained to scenic art and music. For they had to

give their ideas a staging that would at once appeal to the imagination

of the whole people. Loomiefa was in their province. And the literary

form into which they were to put their communications as to the

future had to be as perfect as it could be in their language, exactly

expressing all they had to convey, and at the same time appealing

to the ear by its melody and harmony. As far as histrionic art was

allowable in the island they were the artists, whilst in the linguistic

conventions of the people they were the leaders and suggesters in the

making of words, and in the choice of words made. They had, I could

see, the finest heads in the community; the brow was broad, full, and

shapely; the eyes were large and yet deeply set under the brows; the

base of the skull was of great width; every section of the brain that

had to do with imaginative and poetic power was well developed. Yet

their faces and features showed no difference from the common Limanoran

type; they had no more beauty or regularity of outline. It was clear

that all children of a certain shape of skull and development of brain

were selected for training and adoption by these two families, whenever

they needed recruits.

From the first the youth of these two families were educated in

the sciences of the day in order that they might know what gaps in

knowledge had to be filled, and what laws should guide and limit their

imaginative prospecting. For the literature they produce is science

in embryo. Science lays the foundations of literature, and literature

prepares the way for science. These families by their imaginative

productions based on all that is already known pioneer the scientific

investigators into the new regions of the future. They keep in touch

with the leaders of science, and act as allies to them, finding out the

track of what these are trying to discover or invent, and suggesting

methods of supplying their wants or reaching their aims. They provide

working hypotheses for the scientists to apply and test and they map

out roads for the whole race into the darkness of the unknown or the

twilight of the half-conjectured.

Thus their literature is fiction; for tentative fiction, they hold,

is the only unstagnant truth. The productions of the pioneering

families have all to be submitted to the national test. What the race

disapproves of is promptly cancelled and forgotten. What meets with the

approval of the elders or of the leaders of any one of the sciences

is handed over to them for experimentation, even though it should not

attract the rest of the people. What strikes the fancy of the nation as

a whole is adopted as the map and guide of the future; it is the sacred

book of the time, and the citizens study it daily for the purpose of

reaching the goal it sets before their life.

But every new age antiquates one or more of these sacred books. For

the region they have mapped out in the future is reached and travelled

over, the advance they anticipate is made, the ideal they paint is

realised and rapidly becoming commonplace. It puzzled me for a time

to guess what they did with their superseded books, knowing as I did

how superfluous they counted all researches into the past and all

imaginative pictures of the present. My question as usual was not long

unanswered. I was shown the library of antiquated fiction in the valley

of memories. It was used in the very earliest stages of education.

The children read the books or heard them in order to see, when they

reached years of maturity, what the race had come from and how much

it might yet advance, to gather enthusiasm from the spectacle of the

progress made, and to learn lessons for their own future. Beyond

childhood and early youth every minute was counted lost that was not

spent on the future and its possibilities; and for a man or woman of

mature years all forms of antiquarianism were counted idleness.

They never permitted themselves to lay too much stress on any sacred

book, or to adore it too passionately, however much they might be

guided by it for a time; for they knew from experience that it would

soon be worked into the nature of the race and the system of the

individual, and another would take its place. The sacred book of to-day

was bound to be transcended to-morrow. The foresights and ideals of

this year would be the truisms of next. The real desecration, they

thought, was to rest too many ages over a sacred book, its precepts

unworked into the life, its pictures and ideals unrealised; to adore

its words and deny its spirit by failing to advance beyond its point

of view. A book too long held sacred is a charge of stagnancy and

barbarism against a race and an insult to its intelligence. It proves

that the civilisation has become stereotyped, or worse, retrospective;

to eat, to sleep, to fall prostrate before a dead ideal, to propagate

and die, sum up the ultimate duties of existence at its highest level.

Every book was sacred to the Limanorans which threw light upon the

track ahead into the darkness; and so long as it still gave light

where light was needed, it remained sacred. Whenever its light became

the common daylight around the race, and especially if they had to

look backwards in order to see its waymarks, then was it promptly

committed to the valley of memories. Not a moment was wasted on its

precepts after they had become the laws of everyday existence. They

had known from their own history what a terrible engine of oppression

a book might be when once it had become antiquated without losing the

adoration of the people; its prophecies, which had become mere tales

of the past, had to be projected again into the future by mystic

interpretation; its precepts, embodying the spirit of a generation long

dead, had to be galvanised into life by casuistry; and innumerable

methods had to be extorted from its overstrained text to prevent the

human mind moving on past its own stage of morality and civilisation.

How many ages in their own history did their ancestors live with their

dead! Into the warmest feelings of their hearts had the grave-clothes

of the past intertwined; and what torture to love and the noblest

feelings, what bloodshed and horrors it cost them to be able to stand

off from their dead authority, and look at it with unprejudiced mind!

It had become a part of their best selves, and it seemed like suicide

to cast it from them, and relegate it to its true home, the graveyard

of the past.

That long experience was burned into their natures; and to lay too much

stress on any new book or idea gave them an instinctive pang. They

could not bear to linger over it, once the light had died out of it

and its leading had become a highway-mark for the passerby. To utter

or admire the obvious or commonplace was counted one of the gravest

offences against the commonweal; it awakened a look of pity in the eyes

of the listener as for one who was smitten with an incurable disease.

A repetition of the offence would lead to drastic measures with the

victim. He was haled before the medicists, and his system was minutely

examined for the source of the malady, and for weeks was he kept under

medical supervision; no labour or watching or remedial pain was spared

till the source of offending was scourged out of the constitution of

the sufferer.

As a rule it was found on investigation that the infection had come

from some book, whose spirit and precepts had become incorporated

in the past of the race and could give no more vitality to it. It

was good enough for children and youth, who were passing through the

primitive stages of development; to them it was fresh and new for a

time, and was even the source of life and vigour. But once out of

the valley of memories the men and women who could read it with any

pleasure were considered unhealthy and atavistic, and were sent to

hospital for treatment. The symptoms of the malady of the commonplace

were well known and most patent,--loquacity, fondness for confidential

communications and mysterious suggestions under solemn conditionings,

or even oaths of silence, bustling idleness, feeble smiles of impotent

superiority, jocular dogmatism, assumption of wisdom, and excessive

vanity. If the disease had not been so infectious and stealthy in its

spread, it would never have been treated so seriously and so promptly;

for it was seldom malignant, in its earlier appearances at least;

only when it became morbid, and took the shape of injured feeling at

unrecognised genius, resulting at times in jealousy and slander, or

conspiracy and rebellion, or when it grew masterful and acquired a

sense of its own infallibility and omnipotence, resulting generally in

petty spite and persecution, was there any deadly virus in it. It was

its epidemic character that made it most formidable, and necessitated

a system of moral quarantine. Special precautions were taken in

permitting the use of the sacred books of the past, and of antiquated

or superseded ideas. They were only useful for teaching the young

reverence for great thoughts and great thinkers, and for leading the

mature to estimate their own achievements modestly, when they saw the

rapid antiquation of even the most striking books.

One evil that arose from the study of past literature, the

over-valuation of literary work, they tried to obviate. They placed

noble deeds on the same footing with noble words and thoughts, and saw

that they were as carefully recorded and described. It was the duty of

the young to report, and give permanent form to, anything that was done

greatly. With their enthusiasm made more glowing by their ignorance

and inexperience, they acted as the historiographers of the race. The

youth of a family went with the elders whenever any difficulty offered

itself, and with their recording instruments, inasans and linasans and

idrosans, they took flying pictures, electrographs, and reports of the

scene for deposit in the valley of memories. If any emergency arose

and was nobly met when the youthful remembrancers were not present,

they wrote the annals of it none the less, and reproduced its scenes in

moving representations after interviewing all who witnessed the deed.

There was as much inspiration, this people held, in a great action as

in a great book, provided it illumined the darkness of the road ahead

of them.

For to them the true test of greatness and inspiration was the power

of fore-illumination or of stimulus to progress. Whatsoever flashed

light over the unknown in front must have come from a higher point of

view than their own immediate surroundings. Word or deed, it was to

them all the same, if it had this divine characteristic; the one was as

worthy of chronicling and preserving as the other. But they ceased to

look upon it as a source of stimulus to action as soon as it failed

to throw light upon their future, or to hold up an ideal that they had

not yet attained. Inspiration, like all other things and beings in the

universe, was progressive. No idea or deed, no word or book could be

permanently inspired. And the quicker a race progressed, the sooner it

sterilised its sacred thoughts and deeds. All noble human advance was a

process of deinspiration; a step upwards makes the climber capable of

looking down upon the previous point of vision, and of looking up for

a still higher, and to gaze downwards is to encourage retrogression.

Whosoever or whatsoever caught the first gleam of a peak above them was

to them inspired. But it was the duty to reach that peak in their march

upwards as soon as possible; and once it was reached, where was the

inspiration? It was itself far below with the age that supplied it.

Some new deed or thought or book was certain to take the place of that

which had for a time been considered sacred. And, if that did not come,

then woe to the race! Progress must stop and darkness must close in on

their purblind leaders, who, in order to retain their dominance, must

elevate the past, immediate or distant, into a divinity, and its best

book into an oracle. After a time so obscured do the pages of this

book become with cobwebs of interpretation that at last they must spin

new cobwebs out of their intestines. The dread of light from without

becomes a horror. If a new teacher or prophet should come, down with

him into the dust; his teachings are false, for they agree not with

the devotion-cobwebbed book. If a reformer sees light above and ahead,

he is banned as a messenger of hell; and what he sees is nothing but a

diabolic marshlight. All through the race spread the awful diseases of

spiritual inbreeding, inability to distinguish the true from the false,

love of delusion, unwholesome and insane pursuits and ends, and the

madness of cruelty and intolerance. Nothing but fierce revolution could

save a race from such a plight. And the germs of revolution must come

from without themselves and without the world.

CHAPTER VII

PIONEERING

IMAGINATION, corrected by racial instinct in the assemblies of all,

was the seeker for foregleams of what was to be. And a people that had

organised its civilisation into a disciplined advance was not likely to

leave its scouts and vanguard unorganised. Its destiny was largely in

the hands of those who went before it into the night, or who ascended

the heights above it, and told of the region to be traversed next, and

the best routes through it. There was no service that needed so much

the best powers of the race and its best organisation.

Into the pioneering families were gathered their most powerful

imaginations. For imagination is the only clairvoyant of the faculties;

it can see what lies below the horizon of knowledge; it can forecast

the world as it might be and as it is to be; and it can draw the human

mind onwards by the splendours of this forecast. This people had early

realised the sibylline character of the faculty, and the great part it

might play in their devotion to progress. And they resolved to save

it from all waste. They refused to have it become the mere slave of

luxury or of popular amusement, such as they saw it was in most other

civilised nations. Even where it conjured up the past in magnificent

literary pictures, what else was it than the pander to tastes and

habits that were overworn, the encomiast of deeds that had better be

buried in oblivion? It frequented the palaces of kings and licked the

dust off their feet, or it played the buffoon to the indolent, sensuous

crowd. At rare times it isolated itself, and, heedless of the babbling

world that offered it so many prizes, it wrestled with the powers of

darkness and ignorance. But what could a poor recluse do against the

infinite night? If it were to help the forward march of humanity, it

must be disciplined and organised to a definite aim.

All other peoples have left imagination to struggle for itself. This

people recognised it as the most unschooled and shiftless of the human

faculties, whilst they felt it to be the most divine and fullest of

promise. They determined that amongst them it should lose its reeling

gait and wandering, aimless eye, and become the pioneer of their march

onwards; instead of fixing its eye on the past or on the favours of the

great, it should skirmish before the main army into the region of the

unknown; it should report on the difficulties and the enemies to be

met, and map out the world as it was to be. What would be thought of

the shipmaster who let the keenest-eyed of his crew lounge round the

ship looking into the pockets of his comrades and making them laugh,

or lean over the stern watching the track left behind, if darkness and

cloud and a broken sea ever lay on the horizon ahead? What else were

the nations doing with their lookout faculty, imagination, but allowing

it to waste itself on providing amusement for the luxurious, or on

figuring the problem of the past?

It was one of the first duties of the Limanoran elders, after the

great series of purgations of the race, to organise and develop the

imagination they had in their midst. They had observed that there were

two great types and uses of the faculty; one was short of vision,

and could see with great distinctness the regions that were hidden

in twilight immediately in front of them; the other was far-sighted,

and could descry the features of wide regions that lay in darkness

under the horizon. There happened to be amongst them two families

distinguished from all others by their great imaginativeness, and from

each other by pre-eminence in one of these two kinds of imagination.

The task therefore was easy. It only needed care in disciplining

the members of these to the main purpose of the race, in developing

the faculty of each, and in recruiting their numbers from the most

imaginative children of other families. The Loomiamo or pioneers of

the immediate were recruited chiefly from the scientific and technical

families; for their duties lay most of all in supplying hypotheses for

experimentation, in suggesting methods of solving difficult problems,

and in tracing out paths that invention should take; invention in fact

was what they were oftenest engaged in. But there was a subordinate

function, that was, however, of equal importance for the forward

movements of the race; it was to take the far-reaching conceptions

of the other imaginative family, and show how they could be attained

by the civilisation and means they already had. They accepted the

scientific ideas and apparatus of the time as they were and out of them

and their development they engineered a highway through the intervening

twilight to the ideal that the Fraloomiamo or pioneers of the distant

had pictured and set up ahead of the race.

I had not known of this division of pioneering work when I flew back

from the marvellous spectacle in the valley of futuritions. As I

thought over it, I became more and more sceptical of the realisability

of the scene. It had the inconsecution and absurdity of a dream. I said

to Thyriel, where was the possibility of ever substituting artificial

for natural propagation of the race? It was completely out of the line

of evolution, and could lead to nothing but what was unnatural and

evil. They could modify nature to an indefinite extent, I knew; but

what was the use of attempting to supersede nature? And suppose it were

possible to supersede it in this respect, where would be the advantage?

They could already modify and guide nature so as to produce the type

of children they desired for the progress of the race; what more was

needed?

Thyriel gave no answer, partly because she thought that the elders

were more capable of answering, partly because she knew that the

publication of the book on human sculpture was by no means finished.

Next day my sense of community with the immediate yearning and aim of

the Limanorans drew me unconsciously to Loomiefa again; and on my way

the streaming wings through the sky showed me that my impulse was not

purposeless; there was a general movement towards the same goal. Soon

the whole amphitheatre was filled from height to hollow with spectators

enriched in colour by the rays of the afternoon sun.

I had scarcely settled in my rest and surveyed the scene when I knew

that all eyes were fixed on the hollow of the valley. The platform

had again run out with the globular magnifier covering it. But the

succession of scenes upon it was almost too swift for my observation,

untrained as I still was in my senses, and a certain confusion still

rests over the spectacle in my memory. Many of the links in the chain

were so amazing as to bewilder me, and yet the general purpose and

effect of the scene as a whole rise above the confusion in my mind.

I knew before it was done that it was a complete answer to my questions

and scepticism. The Loomiamo were enacting the various stages in the

evolution of the race which would connect its actual state with the

possibility of artificial human propagation. One scene enacted what

they had long been able to do, the production of animal tissue of all

kinds; even the most subtle nerve was spun, and under their microscopes

they could examine it like a rope. Another showed animal creation

at work on the combination of tissue into one of the lower types of

animal. One after another in a long series we saw the creative power

rise in its ambitions and efforts through the animal creation up to the

human. But the most striking scene was to come. It was the application

of the newly discovered biometer to the search for the principle of

life. We saw the creative artists investigate with the instrument plant

after plant and animal after animal, and fail in their attempts to

isolate it or produce it. They modified the biometer in innumerable

ways. Then we saw them fly though the atmosphere, and set the new

life-measuring apparatus afloat in space. After repeated attempts, ever

pulling the faleena back empty, they at last showed by the joy on their

faces that they had attained the goal of their quest. In the delicate

test-tubes of their new biometers was found something that kept

agitating their indicators. Soon they had it in their laboratories,

and were experimenting with it. Again and again they gathered it from

the vacuum above the atmosphere. At last by means of it they were

enabled to find it in the plants around them, and in the animals of the

surrounding islands. A series of scenes as amazing showed how they came

at the discovery of the principle of soul by means of the psychometer.

Step by step (and each step, I came afterwards to feel, represented a

Limanoran generation) they traced it back to its secret. Most of all

were they aided in their researches by investigations outside of the

atmosphere; there they captured in the tubes of their psychometers the

form of energy that constituted human soul. And in their laboratories

they were able to study it at leisure.

For long I felt that these pictures of the future were unlikely to be

realised. Yet the steps in the process were so gradual, and the scene

representing each so vivid that I came in after years to accept it as

well within the range of Limanoran possibilities; for I realised at

last how far into the future imagination could pioneer, and what a vast

number of ages one of these predictive dramas would cover. My sense of

time was crude and weak during my earlier years in the island, and it

was difficult for me to appreciate the passage of cosmic periods, such

as were often implied in the scenes representing the publication of a

book by the Fraloomiamo.

I afterwards listened to the book of Human Sculpture itself, as it

uttered itself from a loud-sounding linasan or reproducer of speech.

This automaton-reader had the long strip of irelium constituting a

Limanoran book fed into it off the cylinder on which the book was

kept rolled. It gave the sound and every intonation of the author’s

voice, so that there was no difficulty in following his every thought

as it found expression. I never came to be able to read those books

on the irelium rolls themselves under a microscope, as the Limanorans

could, and preferred to use my hearing instead of my eyes. There was no

possibility of ambiguity if I listened to the words as they came hot

from the thinker’s own lips.

A new and more esoteric kind of book tended to supersede this at a

later period. It consisted of an electrogram of the author’s thoughts,

as they developed and shaped themselves, flashed on to long moving

strips of labramor or electricity-sponge by his active magnetic sense;

this placed in an idrosan or electrograph affected the firla of the

receiver so that he followed the whole process of thinking. Such a

permanent record of creative thought in its process of creating was of

measureless value to such a people as this, for every economy of time

and intelligence meant a quickening of their march into the nobler

future. But for many ages the effort of electrographing the thought was

too much except for the most powerful of mature creative minds; and

that of receiving the flash of the electrogram through the firla was

within the capacity of none but those who had developed their magnetic

faculty to great refinement of power.

The book of Human Sculpture was the first of the recent imaginative

productions that I became acquainted with. Thyriel and I joined a

party of youth who, under the guidance of our proparents, were to

listen to it, as it sounded through the linasan in the valley of

Loomiefa. Hour after hour we followed the melodious periods, as they

echoed up the slopes; at brief intervals on the rocky curtain at the

head of the gorge there would flame out for several minutes a moving

picture of the scenes we had witnessed the enaction of on the stage;

and a still more striking illustration of the text of the book was a

magnetic communication to our minds of the originating impulse which

moulded each thought and scene in the imagination of the author, and

the creative enthusiasm he felt as each idea burst in all its light

upon his soul. By the time we had finished the book we knew its whole

conception and history, its purpose, and its probable effect upon the

civilisation.

It answered all my questions, and rooted out all my scepticism. The

whole object of their unending labours was to take command of nature by

finding out her secrets and abridging her processes, so as to make them

serviceable to their advance. I felt how absurd had been my objections;

for where would this people have been, if they had left nature to

herself? What else was barbarism but leaving nature to herself, so that

the more cruel animal part of her became dominant? Nature included

an infinite range of gradations of energy and life from what we call

dead matter to the subtle and elevated organisations that fill space

and evade the finest perception of our senses. Within our own systems

are to be found many of those, from the débris of our bodily tissues

and organs to the noblest thought we can conceive; the precept to let

nature alone is fraught with inextricable ambiguity; and if we let the

myriad natures within us fight it out, it is not difficult to see which

would have dominance, for it is easier to level down than to level up.

Every interference with the lower nature in order to bring it under the

sway of the higher, every new mastery of our systems as a whole by our

creative thought, is a step upwards in the scale of existences. Three

fourths of the process of human propagation belonged to the sphere of

our lower nature, so that civilised men and women were ashamed to

speak of it, and tended to become gross and coarse if they did freely

speak of it. Every act seemed to drag them back again to the level of

the animals, and it took them years of effort to drive the thoughts

and traces of it into oblivion. They had as a people painfully fought

their way up out of the slough of passion, and mastered the emotions

that tended to overbalance them by their excess, and to plunge them

back again into it. Guard themselves as they might by all kinds of

precautions, and spiritualise the act as they ever tried to do, its

necessary recurrence never failed to embrute the nature for a moment,

whilst it still kept open a path for retrogression. To shut out this

possibility of re-descent into the beast would be one of the greatest

services to their race.

As useful for their advance would the command of human propagation be

in another direction. The only fear of deterioration that still haunted

them arose from atavism. Nature had still a trick of returning on

her own footsteps. The child of the noblest pair had at times traces

of far-back ancestry resurgent in evil or retrogressive traits; and

it wasted the time and the best energy of parents and proparents to

obliterate these. In every germ lay dormant the potentialities of its

whole ancestral past; and any one of them might assert itself as master

during the dim unguided life of gestation. With all their precautions

something evil might still lurk in the systems of the young to be

developed in full maturity of life. But if they moulded every tissue

and organ and faculty for themselves, this retrogressive tendency that

nature treasures up in every germ and child would disappear. There

would be nothing to watch or obliterate in the immature.

A still greater economy of time and labour would result in the

abridgment of the earlier processes of education. Education, it is

true, never ceased throughout life. But the education of the mature

was self-conducted; the citizen was his own schoolmaster, and his

surroundings were his instruments and assistants. That of the earlier

stages used up the labour and wisdom of two other personalities for

the long period of discipline; they were ever on watch and guard lest

the past that lay in the youthful nature should suddenly rise and

master it. For all education is a wrestle with the superseded past,

which becomes evil as soon as it grows superfluous or obstructs further

advance. Every form of vitality that has played its part on the stage

of existence leaves it with reluctance; it clings to the new, that it

may have a little more of life, and impedes its advance. The obsolete

most survives in the tissues of the young and immature; and to educate

is to struggle with the obsolete or obsolescent. The labour and

thought needed to make the struggle end in the success of the new and

progressive have never been understood so well by any as by the elders

of the Limanorans. No effort of their civilisation was so exhausting as

the educative. To enter on parenthood or proparenthood made them pause,

for all acknowledged that the assumption of this duty was the greatest

sacrifice a man or woman could make for the progress of the race. They

knew that for half a century their individual vigilance could never

cease, and that the strain would come on all their faculties, and not

on one or two alone, as it would in most of the other duties they owed

to the race, even invention or discovery. Whatsoever would commute or

abolish this heavy service to the nation was sure to be welcomed. So

vast an amount of the best time and wisest ability of the island would

be set free that it would be difficult to calculate the acceleration of

progress it would effect.

All this and a thousand other considerations passed through my

mind, as I listened to the book of Human Sculpture and drank in its

inspirations. The doubts that its dramatic publication had left in me

were all laid. I now knew that this would be a new sacred book, which

would hold up for ages an ideal for Limanora to struggle towards.