The Vril-ya, being excluded from all sight of the heavenly bodies, and
having no other difference between night and day than that which they
deem it convenient to make for themselves,--do not, of course, arrive at
their divisions of time by the same process that we do; but I found it
easy by the aid of my watch, which I luckily had about me, to compute
their time with great nicety. I reserve for a future work on the science
and literature of the Vril-ya, should I live to complete it, all details
as to the manner in which they arrive at their rotation of time; and
content myself here with saying, that in point of duration, their year
differs very slightly from ours, but that the divisions of their year
are by no means the same. Their day, (including what we call night)
consists of twenty hours of our time, instead of twenty-four, and of
course their year comprises the correspondent increase in the number of
days by which it is summed up. They subdivide the twenty hours of their
day thus--eight hours,* called the “Silent Hours,” for repose; eight
hours, called the “Earnest Time,” for the pursuits and occupations of
life; and four hours called the “Easy Time” (with which what I may term
their day closes), allotted to festivities, sport, recreation, or family
converse, according to their several tastes and inclinations.
* For the sake of convenience, I adopt the word hours, days, years,
&c., in any general reference to subdivisions of time among the Vril-ya;
those terms but loosely corresponding, however, with such subdivisions.
But, in truth, out of doors there is no night. They maintain, both
in the streets and in the surrounding country, to the limits of their
territory, the same degree of light at all hours. Only, within doors,
they lower it to a soft twilight during the Silent Hours. They have
a great horror of perfect darkness, and their lights are never wholly
extinguished. On occasions of festivity they continue the duration of
full light, but equally keep note of the distinction between night and
day, by mechanical contrivances which answer the purpose of our clocks
and watches. They are very fond of music; and it is by music that these
chronometers strike the principal division of time. At every one
of their hours, during their day, the sounds coming from all the
time-pieces in their public buildings, and caught up, as it were, by
those of houses or hamlets scattered amidst the landscapes without the
city, have an effect singularly sweet, and yet singularly solemn.
But during the Silent Hours these sounds are so subdued as to be only
faintly heard by a waking ear. They have no change of seasons, and, at
least on the territory of this tribe, the atmosphere seemed to me very
equable, warm as that of an Italian summer, and humid rather than dry;
in the forenoon usually very still, but at times invaded by strong
blasts from the rocks that made the borders of their domain. But time
is the same to them for sowing or reaping as in the Golden Isles of the
ancient poets. At the same moment you see the younger plants in blade or
bud, the older in ear or fruit. All fruit-bearing plants, however, after
fruitage, either shed or change the colour of their leaves. But that
which interested me most in reckoning up their divisions of time was the
ascertainment of the average duration of life amongst them. I found on
minute inquiry that this very considerably exceeded the term allotted to
us on the upper earth. What seventy years are to us, one hundred
years are to them. Nor is this the only advantage they have over us in
longevity, for as few among us attain to the age of seventy, so, on the
contrary, few among them die before the age of one hundred; and they
enjoy a general degree of health and vigour which makes life itself a
blessing even to the last. Various causes contribute to this result:
the absence of all alcoholic stimulants; temperance in food; more
especially, perhaps, a serenity of mind undisturbed by anxious
occupations and eager passions. They are not tormented by our avarice
or our ambition; they appear perfectly indifferent even to the desire of
fame; they are capable of great affection, but their love shows
itself in a tender and cheerful complaisance, and, while forming their
happiness, seems rarely, if ever, to constitute their woe. As the Gy is
sure only to marry where she herself fixes her choice, and as here, not
less than above ground, it is the female on whom the happiness of home
depends; so the Gy, having chosen the mate she prefers to all others, is
lenient to his faults, consults his humours, and does her best to secure
his attachment. The death of a beloved one is of course with them, as
with us, a cause for sorrow; but not only is death with them so much
more rare before that age in which it becomes a release, but when it
does occur the survivor takes much more consolation than, I am afraid,
the generality of us do, in the certainty of reunion in another and yet
happier life.
All these causes, then, concur to their healthful and enjoyable
longevity, though, no doubt, much also must be owing to hereditary
organisation. According to their records, however, in those earlier
stages of their society when they lived in communities resembling ours,
agitated by fierce competition, their lives were considerably shorter,
and their maladies more numerous and grave. They themselves say that
the duration of life, too, has increased, and is still on the increase,
since their discovery of the invigorating and medicinal properties of
vril, applied for remedial purposes. They have few professional and
regular practitioners of medicine, and these are chiefly Gy-ei, who,
especially if widowed and childless, find great delight in the healing
art, and even undertake surgical operations in those cases required by
accident, or, more rarely, by disease.
They have their diversions and entertainments, and, during the Easy
Time of their day, they are wont to assemble in great numbers for those
winged sports in the air which I have already described. They have also
public halls for music, and even theatres, at which are performed
pieces that appeared to me somewhat to resemble the plays of the
Chinese--dramas that are thrown back into distant times for their events
and personages, in which all classic unities are outrageously violated,
and the hero, in once scene a child, in the next is an old man, and so
forth. These plays are of very ancient composition, and their stories
cast in remote times. They appeared to me very dull, on the whole,
but were relieved by startling mechanical contrivances, and a kind of
farcical broad humour, and detached passages of great vigour and power
expressed in language highly poetical, but somewhat overcharged with
metaphor and trope. In fine, they seemed to me very much what the plays
of Shakespeare seemed to a Parisian in the time of Louis XV., or perhaps
to an Englishman in the reign of Charles II.
The audience, of which the Gy-ei constituted the chief portion, appeared
to enjoy greatly the representation of these dramas, which, for so
sedate and majestic a race of females, surprised me, till I observed
that all the performers were under the age of adolescence, and
conjectured truly that the mothers and sisters came to please their
children and brothers.
I have said that these dramas are of great antiquity. No new plays,
indeed no imaginative works sufficiently important to survive their
immediate day, appear to have been composed for several generations. In
fact, though there is no lack of new publications, and they have even
what may be called newspapers, these are chiefly devoted to mechanical
science, reports of new inventions, announcements respecting various
details of business--in short, to practical matters. Sometimes a child
writes a little tale of adventure, or a young Gy vents her amorous hopes
or fears in a poem; but these effusions are of very little merit,
and are seldom read except by children and maiden Gy-ei. The most
interesting works of a purely literary character are those of
explorations and travels into other regions of this nether world,
which are generally written by young emigrants, and are read with great
avidity by the relations and friends they have left behind.
I could not help expressing to Aph-Lin my surprise that a community in
which mechanical science had made so marvellous a progress, and in
which intellectual civilisation had exhibited itself in realising
those objects for the happiness of the people, which the political
philosophers above ground had, after ages of struggle, pretty generally
agreed to consider unattainable visions, should, nevertheless, be so
wholly without a contemporaneous literature, despite the excellence
to which culture had brought a language at once so rich and simple,
vigourous and musical.
My host replied--“Do you not perceive that a literature such as you mean
would be wholly incompatible with that perfection of social or political
felicity at which you do us the honour to think we have arrived? We have
at last, after centuries of struggle, settled into a form of government
with which we are content, and in which, as we allow no differences of
rank, and no honours are paid to administrators distinguishing them from
others, there is no stimulus given to individual ambition. No one would
read works advocating theories that involved any political or social
change, and therefore no one writes them. If now and then an An feels
himself dissatisfied with our tranquil mode of life, he does not attack
it; he goes away. Thus all that part of literature (and to judge by the
ancient books in our public libraries, it was once a very large part),
which relates to speculative theories on society is become utterly
extinct. Again, formerly there was a vast deal written respecting
the attributes and essence of the All-Good, and the arguments for and
against a future state; but now we all recognise two facts, that there
IS a Divine Being, and there IS a future state, and we all equally agree
that if we wrote our fingers to the bone, we could not throw any light
upon the nature and conditions of that future state, or quicken our
apprehensions of the attributes and essence of that Divine Being. Thus
another part of literature has become also extinct, happily for our
race; for in the time when so much was written on subjects which no one
could determine, people seemed to live in a perpetual state of quarrel
and contention. So, too, a vast part of our ancient literature consists
of historical records of wars an revolutions during the times when the
Ana lived in large and turbulent societies, each seeking aggrandisement
at the expense of the other. You see our serene mode of life now; such
it has been for ages. We have no events to chronicle. What more of us
can be said than that, ‘they were born, they were happy, they died?’
Coming next to that part of literature which is more under the control
of the imagination, such as what we call Glaubsila, or colloquially
‘Glaubs,’ and you call poetry, the reasons for its decline amongst us
are abundantly obvious.
“We find, by referring to the great masterpieces in that department
of literature which we all still read with pleasure, but of which none
would tolerate imitations, that they consist in the portraiture of
passions which we no longer experience--ambition, vengeance, unhallowed
love, the thirst for warlike renown, and suchlike. The old poets lived
in an atmosphere impregnated with these passions, and felt vividly what
they expressed glowingly. No one can express such passions now, for no
one can feel them, or meet with any sympathy in his readers if he did.
Again, the old poetry has a main element in its dissection of those
complex mysteries of human character which conduce to abnormal vices and
crimes, or lead to signal and extraordinary virtues. But our society,
having got rid of temptations to any prominent vices and crimes, has
necessarily rendered the moral average so equal, that there are no
very salient virtues. Without its ancient food of strong passions, vast
crimes, heroic excellences, poetry therefore is, if not actually starved
to death, reduced to a very meagre diet. There is still the poetry of
description--description of rocks, and trees, and waters, and common
household life; and our young Gy-ei weave much of this insipid kind of
composition into their love verses.”
“Such poetry,” said I, “might surely be made very charming; and we have
critics amongst us who consider it a higher kind than that which depicts
the crimes, or analyses the passions, of man. At all events, poetry of
the inspired kind you mention is a poetry that nowadays commands more
readers than any other among the people I have left above ground.”
“Possibly; but then I suppose the writers take great pains with the
language they employ, and devote themselves to the culture and polish of
words and rhythms of an art?”
“Certainly they do: all great poets do that. Though the gift of poetry
may be inborn, the gift requires as much care to make it available as a
block of metal does to be made into one of your engines.”
“And doubtless your poets have some incentive to bestow all those pains
upon such verbal prettinesses?”
“Well, I presume their instinct of song would make them sing as the bird
does; but to cultivate the song into verbal or artificial prettiness,
probably does need an inducement from without, and our poets find it in
the love of fame--perhaps, now and then, in the want of money.”
“Precisely so. But in our society we attach fame to nothing which man,
in that moment of his duration which is called ‘life,’ can perform. We
should soon lose that equality which constitutes the felicitous essence
of our commonwealth if we selected any individual for pre-eminent
praise: pre-eminent praise would confer pre-eminent power, and the
moment it were given, evil passions, now dormant, would awake: other
men would immediately covet praise, then would arise envy, and with envy
hate, and with hate calumny and persecution. Our history tells us that
most of the poets and most of the writers who, in the old time, were
favoured with the greatest praise, were also assailed by the greatest
vituperation, and even, on the whole, rendered very unhappy, partly
by the attacks of jealous rivals, partly by the diseased mental
constitution which an acquired sensitiveness to praise and to blame
tends to engender. As for the stimulus of want; in the first place, no
man in our community knows the goad of poverty; and, secondly, if he
did, almost every occupation would be more lucrative than writing.
“Our public libraries contain all the books of the past which time has
preserved; those books, for the reasons above stated, are infinitely
better than any can write nowadays, and they are open to all to read
without cost. We are not such fools as to pay for reading inferior
books, when we can read superior books for nothing.”
“With us, novelty has an attraction; and a new book, if bad, is read
when an old book, though good, is neglected.”
“Novelty, to barbarous states of society struggling in despair for
something better, has no doubt an attraction, denied to us, who see
nothing to gain in novelties; but after all, it is observed by one of
our great authors four thousand years ago, that ‘he who studies old
books will always find in them something new, and he who reads new books
will always find in them something old.’ But to return to the question
you have raised, there being then amongst us no stimulus to painstaking
labour, whether in desire of fame or in pressure of want, such as have
the poetic temperament, no doubt vent it in song, as you say the bird
sings; but for lack of elaborate culture it fails of an audience,
and, failing of an audience, dies out, of itself, amidst the ordinary
avocations of life.”
“But how is it that these discouragements to the cultivation of
literature do not operate against that of science?”
“Your question amazes me. The motive to science is the love of truth
apart from all consideration of fame, and science with us too is devoted
almost solely to practical uses, essential to our social conversation
and the comforts of our daily life. No fame is asked by the inventor,
and none is given to him; he enjoys an occupation congenial to his
tastes, and needing no wear and tear of the passions. Man must have
exercise for his mind as well as body; and continuous exercise, rather
than violent, is best for both. Our most ingenious cultivators of
science are, as a general rule, the longest lived and the most free from
disease. Painting is an amusement to many, but the art is not what it
was in former times, when the great painters in our various communities
vied with each other for the prize of a golden crown, which gave them a
social rank equal to that of the kings under whom they lived. You
will thus doubtless have observed in our archaeological department how
superior in point of art the pictures were several thousand years ago.
Perhaps it is because music is, in reality, more allied to science than
it is to poetry, that, of all the pleasurable arts, music is that which
flourishes the most amongst us. Still, even in music the absence of
stimulus in praise or fame has served to prevent any great superiority
of one individual over another; and we rather excel in choral music,
with the aid of our vast mechanical instruments, in which we make great
use of the agency of water,* than in single performers.”
* This may remind the student of Nero’s invention of a musical machine,
by which water was made to perform the part of an orchestra, and on
which he was employed when the conspiracy against him broke out.
“We have had scarcely any original composer for some ages. Our favorite
airs are very ancient in substance, but have admitted many complicated
variations by inferior, though ingenious, musicians.”
“Are there no political societies among the Ana which are animated
by those passions, subjected to those crimes, and admitting those
disparities in condition, in intellect, and in morality, which the state
of your tribe, or indeed of the Vril-ya generally, has left behind in
its progress to perfection? If so, among such societies perhaps Poetry
and her sister arts still continue to be honoured and to improve?”
“There are such societies in remote regions, but we do not admit them
within the pale of civilised communities; we scarcely even give them the
name of Ana, and certainly not that of Vril-ya. They are savages, living
chiefly in that low stage of being, Koom-Posh, tending necessarily to
its own hideous dissolution in Glek-Nas. Their wretched existence is
passed in perpetual contest and perpetual change. When they do not fight
with their neighbours, they fight among themselves. They are divided
into sections, which abuse, plunder, and sometimes murder each
other, and on the most frivolous points of difference that would be
unintelligible to us if we had not read history, and seen that we too
have passed through the same early state of ignorance and barbarism. Any
trifle is sufficient to set them together by the ears. They pretend to
be all equals, and the more they have struggled to be so, by removing
old distinctions, and starting afresh, the more glaring and intolerable
the disparity becomes, because nothing in hereditary affections and
associations is left to soften the one naked distinction between the
many who have nothing and the few who have much. Of course the many hate
the few, but without the few they could not live. The many are always
assailing the few; sometimes they exterminate the few; but as soon as
they have done so, a new few starts out of the many, and is harder
to deal with than the old few. For where societies are large, and
competition to have something is the predominant fever, there must be
always many losers and few gainers. In short, they are savages groping
their way in the dark towards some gleam of light, and would demand our
commiseration for their infirmities, if, like all savages, they did not
provoke their own destruction by their arrogance and cruelty. Can you
imagine that creatures of this kind, armed only with such miserable
weapons as you may see in our museum of antiquities, clumsy iron tubes
charged with saltpetre, have more than once threatened with destruction
a tribe of the Vril-ya, which dwells nearest to them, because they say
they have thirty millions of population--and that tribe may have fifty
thousand--if the latter do not accept their notions of Soc-Sec (money
getting) on some trading principles which they have the impudence to
call ‘a law of civilisation’?”
“But thirty millions of population are formidable odds against fifty
thousand!”
My host stared at me astonished. “Stranger,” said he, “you could not
have heard me say that this threatened tribe belongs to the Vril-ya; and
it only waits for these savages to declare war, in order to commission
some half-a-dozen small children to sweep away their whole population.”
At these words I felt a thrill of horror, recognising much more affinity
with “the savages” than I did with the Vril-ya, and remembering all I
had said in praise of the glorious American institutions, which Aph-Lin
stigmatised as Koom-Posh. Recovering my self-possession, I asked
if there were modes of transit by which I could safely visit this
temerarious and remote people.
“You can travel with safety, by vril agency, either along the ground or
amid the air, throughout all the range of the communities with which
we are allied and akin; but I cannot vouch for your safety in barbarous
nations governed by different laws from ours; nations, indeed, so
benighted, that there are among them large numbers who actually live by
stealing from each other, and one could not with safety in the Silent
Hours even leave the doors of one’s own house open.”
Here our conversation was interrupted by the entrance of Taee, who came
to inform us that he, having been deputed to discover and destroy the
enormous reptile which I had seen on my first arrival, had been on the
watch for it ever since his visit to me, and had began to suspect that
my eyes had deceived me, or that the creature had made its way through
the cavities within the rocks to the wild regions in which dwelt its
kindred race,--when it gave evidences of its whereabouts by a great
devastation of the herbage bordering one of the lakes. “And,” said Taee,
“I feel sure that within that lake it is now hiding. So,” (turning to
me) “I thought it might amuse you to accompany me to see the way we
destroy such unpleasant visitors.” As I looked at the face of the young
child, and called to mind the enormous size of the creature he proposed
to exterminate, I felt myself shudder with fear for him, and perhaps
fear for myself, if I accompanied him in such a chase. But my curiosity
to witness the destructive effects of the boasted vril, and my
unwillingness to lower myself in the eyes of an infant by betraying
apprehensions of personal safety, prevailed over my first impulse.
Accordingly, I thanked Taee for his courteous consideration for my
amusement, and professed my willingness to set out with him on so
diverting an enterprise.