ALEOFANIAN DEVOTION TO TRUTH
MY admiration grew as I gradually discovered how everything in this
wonderful country gave way before this great virtue. It was the first
lesson taught the child; it was the last injunction of the dying
Aleofanian to his friends as they stood round his death-bed. Every other
book that was published had this as a moral, that truth would prevail;
all their biography and history had this as their ultimate teaching; the
schoolbooks were compiled with this in view; the copy-books had as their
headlines the favourite proverbs on the theme, such as “Tell the truth
and shame the fiends,” “Nothing but truth will butter your bread,” “The
root of all evil is untruth,” “Truth is the good man’s friend, the
sinner’s foe,” “Truth is her own reward.” The popular songs and lyrics
had this virtue as their chief stock-in-trade, for embellishments and
even for topics. “True, true, love” was the parrot note of all the
songsters. Beauty was but the other side of truth, truth the only claim
to beauty. All sentiment played round the loyalty and candour of
friends. On the tombstones were the headlines from the copy-books and
the texts from the sacred writings that dealt with eulogy of the virtue.
The graveyard was a perfect school of the prophets. So, too, was every
hoarding and blank wall; for every seller of goods lavishly advertised
their “truth.”
I had grave embarrassments when I came to look at the practice of the
people in this light that beat upon their lives. But these were owing to
my ignorance of the language and the conventions. At every new paradox I
felt I was a mere novice.
I had changed my place of residence to a public hostelry in the marble
city as soon as my tutor thought I was sufficiently instructed not to
shock people by my alien speech or ways. I had found no difficulty in
negotiating and paying when I lived in the district of the poor. Now I
misunderstood every week some term of the agreement, and the mistake
always turned out to my disadvantage. It showed the selfishness of my
European human nature that I should always have interpreted the words to
my own benefit. And the correction was made with such courtesy, and so
many and so profuse apologies that I rejoiced at the mistake as an
opportunity of revealing the noble natures of the hosts. They never lost
their good temper and suavity, however often they had to correct these
financial blunders on my part. I began to feel that the ambiguity of
their language was a wise provision of nature for bringing out the
perfection of their manners in dealing with strangers and for allowing
them to compensate themselves financially for their forbearance. My
bills were generally double what I expected them to be; but I considered
myself amply repaid by the gracious manner in which I was set right. The
geometrical progression of my cost of living compelled me reluctantly to
change my hostelry from time to time, and bid farewell to numerous suave
and apologetic hosts.
I could have, if I had desired, spent all my sojourn after the first few
weeks in private houses, so profuse was the offer of hospitality. It was
a grievous thing to each host, as he proffered me the kindness, that
just at that moment his house was in disorder; in fact it was in process
of getting renewed and prepared for my reception, and he would not
dishonour me by asking me to come during such a period of confusion. At
last the invitations were so many that I dared not accept any one lest I
should have to accept all; and it would have taken the lifetime of a
Methuselah to fulfil the engagements. How deeply they grieved over this,
they kept reminding me. And their grief was ever driving them to my
hostelry and rooms that they might pour it out over my well-laden table.
I shall not soon forget the fervour with which they shared in my
victuals for my sake and performed the dorsal salutation. I never had
such a multitude of true friends in my life. Each would deal with me as
if we were the only two beings in the whole world worth a thought, and
as if nothing could untie the knot of friendship. What looks of
admiration they dealt me! At the close of every interview I felt how
great and good we both were, what a genius I was, what a noble fellow he
was. And so devoted did many of them become to me as a friend that they
overcame their sense of dignity so far as to borrow from me. I was
weighed down with the great burden of honour that was heaped upon me.
The greatest embarrassment from the wealth of their friendship was the
number of those that claimed it. Each social circle, each member of it,
came to daggers drawn with every other over me. And I began to feel
myself one of the most unfortunate of beings, to have introduced such
internecine strife amongst so peaceful and noble a people. I thought at
times that the whole of the upper classes were on the verge of civil war
over me, and that there would soon be universal bloodshed and
annihilation. But the gentleness of their natures and the ambiguity of
their tongue again stood them in good stead. They went so far as
charging one another with the sin that was unpardonable amongst them,
that of lying. But it turned out to be only a misunderstanding in each
case; the double meaning of their words was a special provision of
nature for keeping the peace. They fell on each other’s neck and wept.
Oh, how blessed was the equivocalness of the Aleofanian tongue! When
everything had been settled amicably, most of them, to prove their
friendship and devotion to me, took another loan from me. And I was
fully compensated by the grace with which they conferred the favour.
As great generosity did they show in dealing with the reputations of
their neighbours and fellow-citizens. It was cheering, indeed, to my
feeling of human kindness to hear them eulogise each other. Even the
marvellous riches of their vocabulary were found scant in the expression
of their mutual love and admiration. Their ancestors had laid out much
of their great talent for eulogy on the manufacture of language for it,
and especially of titles of address. They had, as it were, established
out of their linguistic wealth a great national bank of panegyric; and
any one of the people of the marble city might draw upon it at any
moment and to any extent, so nearly boundless were its resources. I have
now none of that false modesty which is encouraged in your civilisation
to shrink from the estimation or statement of one’s own merits, because
I have ceased to have any egotism or over-consciousness of myself; and
yet to this day I hesitate to quote some of the methods of address used
to me and the encomiums passed upon me. It was only their profanity that
prevented me from bursting into laughter at their exaggeration. I was
classed with the divinities; the attributes of godhead were applied to
me. “O celestial person,” “O propitiable refuge of the world,” were
amongst the least offensive. But I am bound to say that, when I went
into the higher ranks of society, especially into the court, I found
them most impartially peppered over the company. And it was in the same
lavish spirit that the fixed titles of the nobility and other ranks had
been measured out. They seemed to be proportionate to the acreage of the
lands from which the nucleus of each was drawn. There was a law that
superiors were to be allowed to reduce them to one thousandth part of
their usual size, and equals to one hundredth part, except on ceremonial
occasions. It was passed after a great social upheaval in which the
political faction called The Economisers of Time won the day. It would
never have succeeded but for a new king who by the death of many
intermediate claimants to the throne had been raised out of comparative
obscurity, and who delighted in outraging the proprieties. Moreover, he
was somewhat asthmatic, and royal interviews had often to be postponed
indefinitely because the royal lungs broke down in the middle of some
official’s name. Even after so many generations it was keen agony for
most of the nobility to hear the monarch address the Serene
Superintendent of the Royal Vaults as Nip, or the Grand Deputy
Supervisor of the Royal Laundry Women as Tubby, the mere preliminary
syllables of their acre-broad names. It was occasionally a relief to get
into the lower ranks of this noble society, for then the difficulty of
remembering and uttering the names of the people I met was complicated
only by a few hyphens.
But here, too, hosannas rang in every term of address and every opening
sentence. And thus having handsomely credited their neighbours and
friends with so much, they felt that the debit side of life’s account
was all the larger. It was a sharp agony, they each told me, to lay bare
the faults of those whom they so much loved and admired; but it was
their painful duty so to do. How could the state be cured of its evils
if this was not done? How could spiritual pride be subdued if the faults
of men were not laid bare? It was a world of sorrow and care, and they
had their full share of it in thus serving their friends and fellows. I
had therefore the character of every man and woman whom I came to know
faithfully analysed from a hundred different points of view. And though
at times my critical friends seemed to enjoy the anatomy of others, it
was, I was assured, only as the surgeon enjoys his own skill when he
works with his knife in cutting out malignant growths. They were indeed
most skilful anatomists of character. But it was all in the way of
discipline; they had to disparage those who were praised too much, and
sow scandal about those who had too good reputation lest that vile
contagion of pride should fall on the community. It was an agonising
duty to perform, but they had performed it without flinching; and they
had already poured balm upon the coming wounds by preliminary eulogies
drawn from the ancestral stock of curative panegyric.
Most of their social institutions and conduct had some disciplinary
purpose. I often saw men and women meet their friends with a frown or
pass them by with gloom on their faces. On asking, I found it was
generally to cure the spiritual pride or some other defect in these
friends that this sadness was assumed. I wondered, too, at the minute
division into social circles that professed to be rigidly exclusive, but
really overlapped, and at the haughty scorn with which a member of one a
step higher in the scale would treat some other citizen who seemed to me
infinitely his superior in both morals and manners, if not also in
intellect and capacity. I found that all this was based on the same
principle. The spirits of men and women had to be preserved from defect
that the state might remain secure. This was the true scheme of nature
that each man should be his brother’s keeper; and by these fences and
folds they kept their brothers apart so that they might be draughted up
or down. And in order to keep these fences ungapped they had to exercise
their hauteur and scorn. How many unhappy hours they gave themselves
thus for the good of their brethren and the state! What brotherly love,
what patriotism shone behind the frown upon their brow or the curl of
the lip or the effort to point their long noses heavenward! It was
especially evident in all large gatherings of the purest blood of the
marble city; for then the moral spread, the lesson had its fullest
effect.
The minute gradations of social life represented in the shades of this
mutual discipline puzzled me even more than their dictionaries of
overspeech. I could never reach solid ground in them. Once I thought I
had found the very innermost social circle, where none could curl the
lip at another. It included the family of the king and the monarch
himself. I was speaking with some intimacy to the highest noble of this
grade, and remarked to him in a confident tone that I supposed the king
and he were the noblest efflorescence of this world’s aristocracy. “Ay,
if only that blot had not smirched the royal pedigree a thousand years
ago,” slid out of the curling lips. What a giddy pinnacle he seemed to
stand on, this king-scorning aristocrat! He must have longed for other
worlds to scorn and patronise and discipline. Mere human insignificance
was too far beneath him to exercise his nasal elevation upon. I dared
not affront him by revealing my ignorance of his ancestry. But I at once
assumed that it was divine, when it could produce such sublimity of
social solitude and noble blood.
It was a height which must have intoxicated him to think of. For he had
only to turn to the literature of his nation to see it assumed that not
only had there never been a nobler people upon earth, but that according
to reasoning from first principles there could not be another to surpass
it. This fundamental axiom was never overtly stated except in
controversial pamphlets that had been issued against the contemptible
claims of nations in other islets of the archipelago. But in their
science and philosophy it was the tacit foundation of all reasonings and
conclusions. Every scientist in making observations of nature or basing
a law upon them had in his mind as an undisputed truth that this world
was the only world that was worth considering, and that Aleofanian
nature was nature absolute; what other peoples did or saw differently
was abnormal, a mere departure from the scheme of creation. Every
economist, much as he might disagree with others, ever agreed with them
in this: that the system of industry and wealth and classes that then
existed in Aleofane was the final economical system of human society; it
might be and must be modified in details, but its great central
principle was the only one that could keep mankind in proper gradation
and subordination. Philosophy investigated Aleofanian humanity and
systems and analysed the Aleofanian mind that it might show forth the
divine plan of the universe. As for art, what else was worth admiring
than what the Aleofanians admired? And by the Aleofanians was meant
those of them who were in society. The philosophers had only to get at
the abstract principle that lay behind Aleofanian music and
architecture, painting and sculpture, and they would have the final
secret of beauty, the ultimate principle of all art.
The only thing that shocked me almost past recovery was the application
of this axiom to the sphere of religion. Brought up as I had been, a
Christian amongst Christians, I felt that I had only to state to them
the great and undisputed doctrines and the practical precepts of
Christianity to make them turn from their idolatry of other gods, and
their crude ideas of worship. What was my surprise and anguish to find
even the most vulgar and least educated amongst them turn on me with a
patronising smile and deal with me as if I were a child or a mild
lunatic who had got adrift and had to be shepherded! They would not
condescend to argue with me, and as I reiterated or argued, they only
laughed louder at my simplicity. I had at last to cease speaking of my
own religion and suffer my agony in silence. It was true that they were
split up into innumerable sects, and many utterly denied the existence
of their gods; but the sectarians were winked at or perhaps loftily
scorned; for they at least accepted the fundamental tenets; whilst the
atheists were endured, inasmuch as it was the Aleofanian gods they
denied and thus made superior to the false gods of other races. Some two
thirds of the population never entered the doors of the great temples;
but there was much satisfaction in feeling that they entered the temples
of no other gods, and that all their incomes gave evidence of their
devotion to the Aleofanian worship by contributing one tenth each year
for its support through the state treasury. The other third of the
population were directly or indirectly interested in the temple
revenues; every family had one member at least drawing a large salary
from it by honouring it with his presence once or twice a year as
superintendent when its worship was proceeding.
The principle of the religion was self-denial; but as one of their
soundest philosophers had shown that all the world was practically
included in the self or ego, inasmuch as thought was the perpetual
creator of the world, and the chief element of the ego was thought, the
inconveniences of the principle were avoided without sacrificing any of
its glory or integrity. Their desires and appetites formed but an
infinitesimal fraction of a self that included the whole planet, and an
act of devotion once a year was more than enough to fulfil the duty of
self-denial. The other and larger portion of the self, consisting
chiefly of other people, they gladly mortified and denied and
sacrificed; such incense was ever rising from the altars of their gods.
The priests who performed the services and inculcated the precepts and
explained the tenets showed in their emaciated frames and starved
families how great the sacrifice of the deputy-self. Forgers,
embezzlers, debtors who could not pay their debts, and in short all
financial criminals were allowed to expiate their sins by devoting
themselves for life to the service of a temple for little or nothing,
generally the latter. Thus no people in the world did so much for the
central principle of religion, that of self-sacrifice.
Not that the gilded race delegated all the duty. They lavished their
wealth upon the art of the temples. The altars shone with precious
marbles and stones; brilliant mosaics covered the floors and the walls;
the domes were frescoed by the greatest painters and niched by the best
sculptors. Some of their temples were so noble and spacious and adorned
that the value of an empire seemed spent on them, and the poor human
voice of the priest as he prayed or prelected sounded like the buzzing
of a fly on a distant window-pane. And the robes that hung upon the
framework of the skeleton-officiator were stiff with jewelry and
brocade. It happened occasionally that one of the wealthy
superintendents of religion had a gift of oratory, and then you would
find his well-fed outlines filling the gorgeous vestments and his
luxurious voice filling his temple and drawing crowds. And there again
the self-sacrifice came in; every follower of his, especially of the
opposite sex, gave up time and money to his welfare; and great fortunes
were spent on this act of worship. The garments of the worshippers
displayed as gorgeous art as the temple itself that all might be in
unison in pleasing the gods.
But most of all were the gods supposed to be pleased by efforts to
persuade the outer world to their creed. The zealous were greatly
troubled at the obstinacy of the peoples of the other islets, who
refused to turn from their own shade of piety and belief; I was assured
that they were sunk in depravity and sin; for millions had been spent on
their conversion, and in the long years only a few had been gathered
into the fold. But these few were so well-kept and prosperous that they
became shining examples to their infidel brethren. Ah, the fervour, the
devotion, the self-sacrifice, the millions lavished upon these aliens!
One must have been valued as much by the gods as a thousand Aleofanians
brought up to the Aleofane worship. For tens of thousands huddled
together in the fold, heedless of their own spiritual welfare, ignoring
the existence of the temples, starving, unkempt, and ragged. Never were
the grimy mob permitted to soil the precincts of the holy places, or to
mar the beauty of the art displayed in them by the inhabitants of the
marble city. To see the squalor of the labouring horde, I was told,
would have cancelled the noblest acts of their artistic worship, would
have made the gods to faint.
I have spoken of their gods; but they would have held it profanity so to
speak. They had been polytheists in prehistoric times, and the
missionaries who had introduced monotheism had been astute enough to
take the best of their deities and find them in the qualities of the
one. The generations of subtle divines that came between had solved all
the difficulties of having many deities rolled into one, so that the
Aleofanian mind found it no sacrilege to deify a dead hero or erect a
shrine to one of their prehistoric deities, whilst they persecuted to
the death anyone who dared to deny the unity of godhead. Just as there
were myriads of stars and but one cosmos, so, they said, there were
innumerable manifestations of the deity and but one god. They were
ashamed of the polytheism of their ancestors, and as converts to the
true faith would have no slur upon it. Men might have no creed if they
pleased; but if they had a creed, it must be in one god and his
religion. Their theologians had discussed for centuries the manner in
which the various old gods and new saints coalesced into one; but none
of them had the folly to deny the unity. There had been and still
existed a score or more of theological schools, each of which agonised
over the stupidity and unreasonableness of the rest in their explanation
of the unification. The dominant school used to roast or rack their
heresies out of their opponents; they still roasted and racked, but only
socially and politically; the spirit was as true to zeal for the one
faith, only the method had changed. And their library shelves groaned
with volumes of anathemas reasoned or unreasoned.
They prided themselves on their perfect command of reason; they could
adapt it to any purpose, so skilled had they become in its use. And they
assumed as a first principle of conduct that they had reached the final
truth on all things in earth or heaven. Only reason could teach truth;
and they alone of all people in the world had mastery of reasoning. The
common beliefs of the nation were therefore absolute truth; and each
acted on the maxim that what he persuaded himself of was unconditioned
truth. Amongst a less subtle people this would have meant continual
quarrel; but with them the ambiguity of their language stepped in as
peacemaker. A disagreement never came to anything serious; it was always
found to be a misunderstanding of words.
They had no need to state this syllogism to themselves; it was at the
foundation of their conduct and beliefs. They scorned the art, the
literature, the philosophy of all other peoples as poor trivial
monstrosities, permissible, of course, in a world of variety like ours,
but ridiculous in the extreme. It was useless for a stranger like myself
to criticise them and their civilisation; I was only wasting my breath
and affording them occasion for laughing at my inordinate vanity.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration]