CHAPTER IXTHE ORGANISATION OF REPUTE
THESE items of information concerning the virtues of the race I learned not so much from the dwellers in the marble city themselves—they were too modest for that—as from public prints and the placards on hoardings and in public places. From the same sources I gathered innumerable details about the life of the monarch and the nobles and the wealthiest citizens, and these were always to their credit. Had I been as much in the habit of frequenting their temples or consulting the physicians as the gilded were, I would clearly have gathered still more, for I never heard a sermon or prayer or piece of medical advice in Aleofane but it contained or was accompanied by an elaborate eulogy of some one or more of the marble citizens besides a general exaltation of all of them.
I was also struck with the singular unobtrusiveness and even modesty of their public men; the more they were called for at public meetings, the less frequently they appeared; the more they were eulogised and fêted, the less eager did they seem to be spoken of. Their names were blazoned abroad in newspapers and on hoardings, yet they shrank from showing themselves. It was a game of hide-and-seek between them and the people. Crowds shouted for them; they ran off. Banquets and processions were held in their honour; they were the only men that withdrew from sight.
After a time I noticed that it was only a certain round of names that was kept persistently before the public. Occasionally a new one appeared and another vanished. But with them all, as long as they were in the line, it was a sort of file-firing of reputation signals.
I was at last eager to know what it meant, for it differed from any other social phenomenon I had ever observed. I soon discovered the secret of it. There was a department of state called the Bureau of Fame. At one time reputation had been allowed to look after itself, although men valued it even more than money. Private enterprise traded in it and juggled with it and made a monopoly of its growth, although it should have moved as freely as the air or water. For a time it had been in the hands of vendors of quack medicines and soaps; there were none so well known throughout the nation as they; there were none whose names would carry so much weight with the uneducated people. Simmity, the proprietor of a popular purgative, Hones, who owned the most widely advertised soap, and Bulunu, who sold the strongest kooannoo, might have divided the monarchy amongst them, had they been able to come to an agreement, and thought it worth while to rouse and lead the mob for such a mere bauble; as it was they were both richer and more famous than the king; and what did they require? Their descendants were now the most powerful nobles in the land.
The next stage in the organisation of fame was to grant to a company the monopoly of all advertising opportunities in the realm. It had long been a scandal that men with little brains, less conscience, and still less education had got their names fixed in the popular mind more firmly and more widely than the ablest or wealthiest or noblest. It needed little persuasion then on the part of the company to precipitate the grant. And it set itself at once to organise all the methods it could invent for increasing reputation. It hired the best poets and prose writers in the kingdom; its artists were the most talented painters and draughtsmen; whenever any boys or girls showed musical talent, it bound them to it by pecuniary and other chains; every demagogue with power of lung and command over words, every entertainer who could amuse the people, every jester who could make them laugh, every contriver of ingenious methods of attracting attention it had in its pay and ready at its beck. The newspapers and journals with their writers took instructions from it; for they knew there was no such good paymaster to be found. It had emissaries and claqueurs through all grades of the nation, mingling with their society, leading their thoughts, and touching their emotions.
A man could go into its office and get a quotation for any kind or extent of fame. He could have as little as a sixpenny-worth, a tanna, it was called; this consisted in a whisper set agoing in his favour within his own private circle. If he wished his name spread in a grade or locality that knew nothing of him, it would cost him a pownee, about ten pounds in our money, per month; for there was ever a time-element in these bargains. The price of keeping up a reputation increased till it was firmly established; then it lessened till the man passed his vigour of faculty; after the grand climacteric it increased again, but more gradually than before; for the mystery of retirement and the tradition of a reputation passing into the mouths of a second generation gave a man’s story almost the vogue of a myth, and thus made it easier for the company to keep up the name. On death and for a week after, its charges were lower, as the funeral and obituary notices and the dark dresses and long faces of the relatives kept the memory green for about that length of time and relieved the servants of fame of much of their onerous duty. Thereafter the price rose till at a hundred years after death it became enormous, and at a thousand it became fabulous. Only one had ever had fortune large enough to buy up his fame for that posthumous period; and I still heard his name on all sides although he had been dead for twelve hundred years. The company had made large profits out of this bargain; for the uniqueness of the transaction had made the name a traditional topic in hours of leisure and a commonplace in literature; the natural channels of fame had become its unpaid auxiliaries.
Every kind of reputation had its own price per day or month or year, though the price varied from time to time according to the rise or fall of a particular virtue or line of life in public estimation. One item in the old price-list that amazed me was the money value of a reputation for truthfulness; it was by far the most costly, and next to it came the reputation for generosity, and that for purity of life. Surely it should have been easy to acquire the name of truthful or generous or pure in a community that paid such devotion to these virtues, and cultivated them so much. But, it was explained, there was of course greater competition for fame in them; men were especially eager to gain it, for it gave them full return even in money. It struck me that, where truth and charity and chastity were so widespread, it should have been very easy to get and keep the name for them; high charges meant special rarity in the commodity or special difficulty in obtaining it; and either seemed to argue widespread scepticism as to the possession of these virtues. But I was silenced with the argument that, where all or most had a virtue, it was difficult to win a reputation for special excellence in it.
The charges for fame in each of the virtues varied too with the employment and social grade. A journalist had to pay one hundred times more than a peasant or artisan for the reputation of truthfulness. The poet and preacher and vendor of quack medicines had to pay only one half as much as a newspaper-man for it; for, it was told me, they with their clients were perfectly well aware that their profession was to deal in fiction, and they tried in unprofessional life to get clear of the taint of their trade, and took delight in blurting out the most candid truths. The highest price for reputed sobriety was demanded of the temperance reformer and the lecturer on the evils of drunkenness. The poor man and the spendthrift were charged next to nothing for the name of generous; the wealthy had to pay for the same, enormous sums in proportion to their wealth and social position. The reputation for wit was one of their cheapest commodities, being only a little higher than that for being not a bad sort of a fellow and that for being good but dull. And yet it was one of the dearest for ambitious young conversationalists and writers and orators and men of the world. It was almost as dear as a reputation for humour when professional jesters wished to buy it. The price-list indeed was one of the most striking comments on the past social history of the people.
What led to the overthrow of this strange company was a very natural extension of their business. They opened a branch for the destruction of fame, or, as they called it, for negative reputation. They found that they had continual demands made for this natural complement to their other function. At last they yielded to the pressure, and tried to use their old staff in the new service; but it was found that it destroyed their eulogistic talents; they rapidly developed into such accomplished slanderers and backbiters and defamers that they found it difficult to say a word in favour of anyone. In order to save the best of their old employees, the company had to hire a new set for the new business. They had intended to keep it an absolutely secret service. But, as the story of the new employment leaked out, their offices were daily mobbed by applicants for posts. They were of all sorts and sizes; but those who brought the most glowing testimonials to their capacity as traducers were tall and lank, long-nosed and large-mouthed, red-haired and small-skulled—as fine a crowd of Judases, it was said, as could have been picked out of living creatures. It was impossible to hire them all; half the nation would have been in the pay of the company. But those whom they rejected set themselves so vigorously to traducing the company that a yell of execration rose against it.
Such an outcry might have been ignored, but that their other department, which had been in full working order for several generations, had excited the hostility of many of the most respectable families. For the passion for posthumous fame had eaten into their fortunes. Men of wealth had taken the money that they should have left to their relatives and posterity, and willed it to the company in the purchase of as much immortality as it would buy. Some of the noblest houses were impoverished by this itch for keeping a name alive. And still more would have been reduced to poverty, but that they had a large pecuniary interest in the business, or had most of their members salaried in its employ.
It had come to be a great scandal and had roused the attention of the state; added to the outcry of the disappointed Judases, this supplied the opportunity for the reformers. And, on looking into the matter, they found that the company was growing too powerful for any government to stand up against it. It was absorbing most of the wealth and all the real influence over the Aleofanians. It had such vast and disciplined forces as no nation could bring into the field. The longing for reputation or fame had made one half the people its clients, and the necessities of fortune and the love of slander had made the other half into its servants. The king’s ministers had to move with great caution, for they would have to meet all the talking, puffing, amusing, slandering power of the race organised into a subtle impalpable phalanx; the discipline was more imperturbable than that of the strongest army; there was no breaking the ranks whilst the influence penetrated everywhere like an atmosphere. In fact for generations they had not dared to move against their own creation. And even now that there was a strong set of the current of public opinion against it, its abolition could be brought about only by a secret and sudden blow. They met in dark conclave and took their measures without any item of the secret oozing out. The company was caught unawares and surrendered. Its business was appropriated and placed under the administration of a new department. A royal proclamation, accepting all its servants as employees of the new bureau, and all its obligations as state obligations, prevented panic; and the transference was made without the slightest public commotion.
The revolutionary measure left the directors of the company wealthy but powerless. And it gave to the government a prestige no ministry had ever had. The Bureau of Fame became a tower of strength that grew at last impregnable; and the direction of it was the main object of a statesman’s ambition. It gave him the subtlest of influences over the desires of men. Before him even the greatest and proudest cringed; for he could make or annihilate that upon which their existence hung. They lived in the breath of others; to have all speak ill of them or, still worse, speak nothing of them was more bitter than death. What were wealth, huge estates, great fortune, unlimited power over luxuries, compared with the ballooning of their name whilst they lived and the surety that it would still be raised aloft when they were dead? Their present heaven consisted in the favouring winds of fame; the salvation of their souls lay in immortal reputation. One of their philosophers indeed had with much applause defined the soul as the breath not of a man’s own body, but of his neighbours and his public. To be no more talked of was real death. The disanimation of the body was not the true end of life; many died long before that; whilst some few outlived the dissolution of the dust.