THE BUREAU OF FAME
I WAS evidently as far astray on this point as I had been on the
employment of convicts in the church. And when the full significance of
the functions of state had been laid before me, I had to acknowledge
that there was much in their prejudice in favour of the enslavement of
genius and talent—the most capricious of human things.
As soon as the organisation of fame became a function of government, it
was an essential that national genius and talent, the arbiters of fame,
should be robbed of their caprice and yoked to the will of a single
responsible man. What would be the use of spreading one rumour if the
press and the church, which could creep into the very heart of the
nation, were able to contradict it or render it fangless? What would all
other means avail for planting a reputation, if the reasoning,
imaginative, and rhetorical ability of the nation were not bound to
water and foster it?
It seemed to them as natural as breathing that the literary and
oratorical power of the nation should be fenced in to the service of the
nation. And no one ever thought of complaining that it was entrapped as
early in life as possible into lifelong slavery to the state. Where
would the reputations of all of them be if this were not done? They
would be as safe as the lives of their children with a jungle of wild
beasts let loose amongst them. Who could control these irresponsible
madmen we call geniuses if it were not the representative of the force
of the nation—the state?
Trained from youth by the strong hand, they might be of great service in
moulding the national future; but if left from the first to follow their
own caprice, nothing could result but the wildest confusion of
principles and beliefs, and the sacrifice of the reputation of every
average citizen to their unslakable thirst for fame. There was indeed no
alternative left for any self-respecting community but the enslavement
of all the capricious power of imagination born in its midst. They might
train it to do their behests and serve their destiny; if left uncaged,
they would have to do its behests and serve its destiny.
The amalgamation of the Bureau of Fame with the department of public
worship and public opinion was a policy of self-preservation. The church
made ready the soil, the press sowed the seed, and the bureau watered
and weeded and reaped. It would have been a national folly to allow any
disagreement or collision amongst these processes. Better almost to have
left the national genius to its old internecine conflict.
Now the Bureau of Fame was the pivot of the government; and it was the
greatest ambition of an Aleofanian to rise to its administration. Its
minister for the time being was arbiter of all for which the ablest men
lived; he could make or mar careers; he could raise whom he would to
immortality, or damn him to everlasting execration, or, what was worse,
oblivion; he was far more powerful than any pope and any monarch
combined could be; it was indeed the chance of heaven or hell he could
deal out.
There was, of course, a price-list for various kinds and periods of
reputation; and a citizen with a large fortune could buy what was for
human life immortality. But the chief business of the office was
political, to enforce the privileges and enhance the fame of the marble
citizens, and especially of those in power—a great noble, a child of the
monarch, or one whom the court and the minister delighted to honour.
If the new protégé of fame was a commoner, the first proceeding of the
bureau was to confer on him one of the noble titles which it had within
its prerogative; for it was the guardian and creator of all orders and
titles. Next it set one or more of its most imaginative criminals to
invent an ancestry for him and a life-history; a few well-known dates
and facts were supplied as the skeleton; but round the skeleton grew a
living form that no one would have recognised who knew the original, so
romantic, so striking, so sublime did it become. Into every historical
event a progenitor was thrust and a large share was assigned to him.
Marvellous incidents were interwoven with historical facts and the new
name introduced as the centre of them. Back to the heroes the family
story went until it was lost in the mists of the origin of all things.
There was not a link left broken or weak, not an opening left for
destructive criticism; for the most hypercritical of the journalistic
criminals were let loose upon the result of the heraldic fictionists’
work; they found every weak spot and tore the art to pieces. With this
analysis and criticism attached to it, it was returned to the original
authors for repairs. Again and again it went through the criticism
factory, and again and again, after submitting to every test that could
be thought of, it returned to the hands of the regenerators. Having
reached the final form that withstood the scepticism of the subtlest
critics, it was intermingled with the annals of the country and, being
printed in a form that could easily be read, it was distributed amongst
a section of the people who were unlearned yet not uninterested in the
national history. If they failed to find the seams of the patchwork and
accepted the newly intruded portions as genuine, the work was finally
passed as ready for the second process of the bureau.
A staff of poets—epic, lyric, and dramatic—were turned on to the new
episodes, and, being left to their individual tastes, picked out one
this and another that. They each worked their theme into brilliant
verse. The result in one case would be a long romance fit for recitation
during the nights of the dimmer half of the year; in another it would be
a rattling ballad or song that would, when sung through the streets or
villages, catch the ear of the people; in a third it would be a dramatic
scene or complete play that could be staged either by the church or by
the bands of strolling actors who perambulated the country districts in
the pay of the state.
Having thus got a brand-new literature manufactured for its protégé’s
life and ancestry, the office set its staff of musicians to work on the
legend and its poetry, and gorgeous pieces were composed for the
ecclesiastical and other orchestras and choirs upon its various themes;
and short catches and glees and songs were composed for the common
people and their ballad-singers. These were sent out through the length
and breadth of the island on the fingers and lips of itinerant players
and singers and in the mechanical automata that were manufactured by the
hundred to repeat any tune of a fixed number. The whole country was soon
jigging and singing to the popular chorus that enshrined the new name
and the new deed or that by a new genealogy linked the name with the
gods or the national history. And all the marble citizens and the people
of the city were trying to whistle or hum or reproduce on their private
tinkling instruments the more melodious passages or the orchestral or
choral celebration of the new fame.
Meantime the journals had been playing battledore with the topic and the
various sections of it; they introduced it in paragraphs, in articles,
in verses, in romances; there was mysterious gossip about the new name
and loud, brazen-voiced eulogy; there were subtle inquiries about its
fame and as subtle answers. And these were all adapted in method and
tone to the two great kinds of journals. For there were journals for the
common people and journals for the marble city. The one inculcated due
regard to the station into which a man was born and reverence for all
notabilities. The other fitted the idiosyncrasies of high-born society,
describing its splendours, its wit, its genius, its lofty origin, its
generosity. The one was didactic, the other descriptive and eulogistic.
The one was tedious and thoroughgoing; the other was imaginative and
sparkling. And by each the topic was treated in its own peculiar way.
The church did its duty too. It never failed to inculcate the fatalism
of class and birth, even when it was floating some new man into fame,
although he had but recently changed his class and had his ancestry
manufactured. “Each man to the station God has given him,” was the
watchword of its prayers and its prelections. How pathetically the
preachers dwelt on the fearful results of attempts to reverse the
commands of nature! They could point to their own cases as the ruin of
ill-weaved ambition. What could be a better proof of the evil of
contravening the divine arrangement of classes than their own career?
They had tried to rise above their fellows and the place God had given
them, and, to accomplish this, had been impelled to break the laws; the
consequences their hearers might see with their own eyes. And often the
tears would roll down the orator’s cheeks, and the audience would weep
with him, as he painted the horrors of transgressing the divine order of
society, and appealed to them to abstain from all such transgression and
to be content with the station God had assigned them.
Yet the next part of the service would be a recitation of the mythical
ancestry of some new man and of their great deeds, or a dramatic
representation of his heroic efforts for the state, or a hymn in his
honour with full choral or orchestral effects. Once the transgression of
the divine order of the universe was accomplished, it was accepted as a
portion of that order. However obscure the birth of the favourite,
however base his nature, it was at once transfigured by his successful
breach of the social laws of nature. And, when the Bureau of Fame
adopted him as protégé, he was within less than a generation washed pure
as snow, the noblest of the noble in personality, in ancestry, in
posterity; all his life and character and origin were consecrated in the
national consciousness; and it would have been treason, nay sacrilege,
to doubt the divine sanction or the truth of the story or to give a hint
of the poor facts that had been buried in oblivion. The name was
interwoven with the holiest feelings of reverence; the splendid fiction
in song and drama, in prayer and pulpit oration, stirred the deepest
enthusiasm of worship, and wound itself into the most sacred memories.
And the whole process had begun and gone on so impalpably, so subtly,
that it was accomplished before anyone could awaken himself to
criticism; and then it was past remedy. It was the great act of
regeneration. The character and manners and morality of the man and his
family might be as unclean and repulsive as before; his name—the true
living principle of a man according to this people—was raised to the
level of heroes and gods, was launched upon the career of immortality.
Alas! there were conditions and limits, as there are to everything
human. The negative business of the bureau, though kept in
subordination, still existed. If any man offended the minister or his
patrons or satellites, then was his name first dropped, “quick as a
falling star,” from the heaven of all public services and performances;
the literature and music and art that enshrined his deeds and the
performances of his ancestry vanished no one knew how. For a time vague
and derogatory rumours concerning him crept through the journals; they
hinted at something base, if not criminal, and yet the hints could not
be charged with any definite meaning. At last there was complete and
unbroken silence. The man was buried better than if he were dead without
tombstone or memorial.
I marvelled that a nation that so worshipped reputation could have
allowed the concentration of this power in the hands of any man. But I
was assured that it was used with great wisdom and caution. The negative
function was rarely set to work, and then in the most underground
manner; it was felt but never seen. The bureau employed no organised
band of slanderers as the company had attempted to do. In fact it
doubted the prudence or effectiveness of such a course. Continual and
open-mouthed detraction of any man would probably produce the opposite
effect; it would make the neutral suspect some plot against him and stir
their innate sympathy for the oppressed. Nay, many would court the
notoriety of organised criticism and derogation as a cheap method of
keeping their names in the mouths of the nation. What the bureau did in
the negative way was truly negative. Its policy was the inculcation of
complete silence; and oblivion was the result—a result so telling
amongst the Aleofanians that the marble citizens almost grovelled before
the court and the minister of fame, and even before their parasites.
With the common people the bureau and its power of heaven and hell had
no influence; to condemn to everlasting oblivion was no threat for them;
to raise them to immortality was no reward. It was the main engine of
discipline in the marble city. And never was there so effective a
discipline amongst an aristocracy. A frown from the minister was enough
to cow the boldest spirit. Never was a nobility so meek, so free from
turbulence and rebellious self-seeking; they were willing to take
whatever colour the court delighted in; they changed their opinions,
their manners, their principles, their morality, their life to the
subtlest changes in the court and the bureau; human chameleons, they
would change their hue even from hour to hour, as the court changed. No
group of beings in heaven or earth surpassed the discipline of these
Aleofanians.
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