CHAPTER VIALEOFANIAN 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.