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.
