CHAPTER XIVTHE VOYAGE TO TIRRALARIA
I ASKED him to sail round the bluff and communicate with my yacht. But he would not hear of it. He said that this would endanger the safety of all, for the Aleofanian king would see at once how elaborate had been the conspiracy and how treacherous we had been, and he would take every means to frustrate our departure, or, if we got safely off, to avenge the insult. I had to accept his reasons, for I was in his power. But I was sure that there were others; he was afraid that if I got on board my own ship, Blastemo would persuade me to go off with him to Broolyi; on the other hand, if he secured me for his island, my fireship would soon be in Tirralaria too.
I found out afterwards from my sailors that the king had fallen into great consternation at the firing of the guns, especially when the boats with his guards made off towards the shore. One of the shot had opportunely ploughed up the sea not far from their station and had evidently filled them with panic. My men knew that Garrulesi was waiting for me on the other side of the point, and they kept firing towards the beach till they thought that I should be on board. Then, in order to quiet the fears of the king, they put him and his boy into the yawl, and pulled him on shore. In his excitement he had forgotten all about Blastemo, and, before he had regained the upper reaches of the road and joined his troops, the yacht had lifted anchor, picked up her boat, and steamed out to sea. They saw my signal on board the falla, and knew that I was safe. So they followed my instructions and made for Broolyi, whilst the wind bore us in the opposite direction.
But the shadows thickened, and before night fell we had run into the shelter of some high land and anchored. The men hung a dirty guttering lamp in the main room of the high poop, and by its light I could see how slovenly and foul was the whole cabin. It smelt of fish-oil and of unnumbered meals past. The floor was littered with garbage, so that I had to clear a path through it to prevent slipping. I could find no convenient ledge to sit on that was not embossed with grease and oil. I was glad to reach the night air again, for it at least helped to deodorise the deck. I got them to hang me a hammock in the shrouds, resolved to keep out of the cabin as long as I could.
I was awakened at early dawn by the movements of the seamen, and through the grey light I saw that we were lying off the bleak, rocky shore of an islet. We hoisted sail and were off before a whistling wind that sang violence to come. They had considerable skill in handling the falla, and we left a long scar behind us across the crests of the emulous waves. Swift though the current and surge ran with us, we outstripped them, rising like a sea-bird to the full impulse of the wind. I could tell at a glance that the ancestors of these seamen had been accustomed to rough waters through countless ages.
My host came on deck after we were fully under way and at once joined me. He launched again into eulogies of the socialistic community. I was at the mercy of his eloquence, and resigned myself to my fate. Yet before the voyage closed and we ran into port I was rewarded for my talent of listening. He got weary of tempting my admiration by his praises, and soon slipped into what looked like fact. He gave me a picturesque description of the island when its rude outline began to sierra the horizon. There were miles and miles of lawns and orchards that terraced the lowlands from the lapping water on the beach to the roots of the mountains that I saw dim white against the sky rim. Gleaming rivers streaked the meadows with their silver, or hid beneath the blossoming or fruiting trees. Here and there they swelled into sylvan lakes whose surface was spidered into moving gossamer by flocks of tame sea-birds and by canvas bent on pleasure and ease. Towering above the tallest trees stood vast temples that seemed in their shining marbles to outstrip the snowy giants that were every hour revealing to me more and more of their stupendous proportions.
I piloted him by judicious admiration and questions into a description of their faith. It seemed to be a polytheism that was practically a pantheism. Every spirit that existed in the universe apart from body was equal to every other spirit. As soon as a man died his soul became a god, as worthy of worship as any other god that had existed from the beginning. Through the whole of space, and even permeating matter invisibly, impalpably, gods lived and moved and had their being. They needed no sustenance, no addition of energy, no extension of space to live in. The universe was full of them, immortal generators of other spirits, other gods. It was indeed an Olympus that was so united, so free from all jealousy and enmity that it formed but one god, just as the living cells of the human body, though each having its own individuality, made but one human life. And there was still infinity to fill. Worlds died every hour, having fulfilled their purpose of producing all the divine life whereof they were capable. Every hour worlds were born evolving energy and at last life, which rose by stages up to the human that dying might be divine. The stellar system is but a great god-factory. Not an atom that lives is wasted. Everything that comes into existence rises up and into the nobly human; then the physical sequence ceases and the divine begins. Death deifies all men; evil falls away from them with their bodies; and, winged through the vault, the souls flit, rid of passion and whatsoever clogs pure thought. They have no desire to materialise again; they have no desires at all. They can interpenetrate and unite and disunite without the sense of disunion. They are one with existence that is not bound to what is matter or has senses. They make the final all; and yet this all increases every moment with transcendent growth. Its one imperfection is that it cannot fill the whole of space; its one aspiration is to colonise infinity. Life is too poor to satisfy it. It must grow for ever and for ever through new systems and oceans of worlds that evolve myriads of new gods ready to people the still unmastered regions beyond its ken. Its energy is not diminished by the stupendous labour at the unceasing birth of worlds. Every new effort means increased possibility of energy. It is of the nature of pure spirit to develop its potence of energy by energising. Once freed of cumbering matter, its life grows fuller and freer the more it operates on the atoms of the ether to raise them nearer and nearer to its own nature and being. Nor can it work except through this laborious ascent; this is the only hierarchy of life, the only altar-stairs in the universe, whereon being of lower grade clambers up to godhead. Once the altar is reached there is nothing but equality. There is only imperfection and perfection in existence. Of imperfection there are as many gradations as there are kinds of being; in perfection or godhead there is no differentiation; there degree, class, distinction cease. For all gods are one in the all. In the stage just precedent to godhead, in humanity, gradation has begun to vanish. It is only the adulterate nature that still keeps distinction. The higher the range of the men the less the difference between them; and at last death obliterates it; they are perfect in freedom from the long-obstructive matter, perfect in godhead, united to the all.
This outline of the socialistic religion came on me with the surprise of one who should see wine flowing in the bed of a torrent instead of water. I began to have a certain respect for this eternal talker whose verbal bubbles had suddenly turned to pearls. He stopped just when I had wished him to go on; and, to tap the same vein, I asked him how his countrymen worshipped their god.
He came dangerously near to winding up his eloquence clockwork, for he pointed to the sky and then to the snowy bulwark that loomed along the horizon; and he straightened himself out and cleared his throat. I feared the complacent glitter of his eye, and I rushed to the water-vat and drank. The interruption seemed to switch off his energy from his almost automatic word machine. He had grown meditative and rested his head on his hands as he looked over the rail into the sea.
I approached him when I saw his new attitude, and he began in a soft, reluctant voice: “We are all priests as we are all kings in our community. To have a hierarchy or even an intermediary who should be supposed to be in more direct sympathy and communication with the gods than the rest is the worst of insults to the divine energy of the soul. To make a special profession of that which is the aim of embodied life is but to commercialise the divine and embrute the human. The priests place their feet on the necks of the ignorant, and it is their interest to reduce all to ignorance. Instead of the equality, which is the true principle of life, we should have a double tyranny; we should grovel before our gods, whose superstitions would weigh us to the ground; and we should have their professional agents introducing the caprice and imperfection of the human into their yoke. I know not which is the worse: the purely spiritual slavery of timid, startled worship, or the mingled slavery of priestcraft that makes the divine mysterious and terrible in order that the worshippers may bow before it body and soul.
“It was a question with our ancestors when they were apportioning the wealth they had brought with them to general purposes, whether they should build temples to their new and universal god or take the dome of immensity as his shrine. They had brought with them a love of art devoted to divine service, and a traditionary love of temples as the symbols of the divine dwelling-place. And yet temples would imply attendants who would soon raise themselves into a spiritual tyranny. Whilst there around them was the free ether wherein dwelt members of the godhead; there above them was the marvellous roof of night frescoed with worlds. Surely it was better that the chrysalids of gods should live in the same temple as the gods. There was no sanctuary like that which the divine had chosen and made for itself. To set apart any portion of it as a holy of holies would sully the nobleness of its workmanship. Fane there was none but the universe; and any poor chantry erected by man, however stupendous it seemed to him with his span of life to build it in, would be a mockery of the Infinite. How pigmean it would seem beneath the vault of night, wherein distance was fenced by the penetrative impotence of human eyes, how atomic when gauged by thought, the true instrument of worship!
“At first schism threatened over this burning question. But at last yon steaming censer of the mountains gave the solution. The first night fell, and they saw a strange glow above the ranges as if it were a fire amongst the clouds. Superficial thought would fain explain it as the after-sheen of sunset. But the hours advanced and still the radiance flushed and faded, flushed and faded, and often with fuliginous and lurid glare. At times a pillar as of smoke and flame seemed to unite earth and heaven. Every eye was fixed on the turbid glimmer as it enhaloed the sombre beauty of the night. The still lingering superstitions that lurked in the graveyards of many minds took it as a sign from the world beyond death. In the dusky aisles of night, as they discussed the theme in low and reverent voices, there spread the magnetic power of resurgent superstition in a crowd touched with the mystery of the universe; and before the dawn suffused the sky or flooded the ancestral recesses of the mind, it was resolved to take this fiery peak as the altar of their worship.
“But the elements had decided otherwise; the searing, blinding power of its everlasting snows, the torrid ebullience of its great cup, and the ruthless fury of the clouds that so often blotted out its heaven, drove the worshippers to the lowlands; and there the frequent austerity of the elements, aided by the old love of art, compelled the erection of the temples you see beginning to fleck the dusky background of the rocks and forests. But the more progressive section of the community, who favoured no temple but the open heaven, had their fears as to the future allayed by a written agreement signed by all that it should be a penal offence to propose a priesthood or a service for them. Everyone may worship where he pleases, within these tabernacles made with hands or without in the pantheon of all men and all gods, in the star-vaulted minster of infinity.”
It was indeed an impressive sight as we approached and the dim sierra grew into a stupendous range that overshadowed us; in its midst rose gigantic the gleaming peak of their fiery monarch dominating all. Above him hung, as if to shade him from the rude fire of the sun, a great tree of smoke whose leafage touched the heaven, and majestically swung in the wind. At its roots the forests and marble fanes were dwarfed. No eloquence of gesture or of word could make me turn my gaze from him to them; but a lower bastion of mountains in front moved upwards and blotted out his serenity. Then I saw the magnitude of the temples, dwarfing as they did the loftiest trees of the forest.
I asked him where the houses were, and with some reluctance he pointed off to the right, where nothing could be distinguished. Then my mind ran on to the symbols of civilised life, and I inquired for the schools and other educational institutions.
“There are none,” he said. “They are only symbols and nurses of inequality. After we had abolished caste and class and social distinctions, we soon came to see that the most offensive of all was culture, and especially scholarship and learning. Who contemns his neighbour so much as the pedagogue that knows a language or a series of facts more than other men? Academic snobbery is the most pernicious, most galling; for it can immediately put in its proofs of the superiority it claims; it can rout all but its equal and rival. It is the most exclusive, most presuming, most irritating. We started with universities and academies and technical schools, under the impression that, by making them free to all, we should give all equal privileges. Before we were through a generation of our new history the fallacy became transparent. We were rapidly manufacturing a class of intellectual peacocks, or at least men and women who sneered at the vulgar herd. By our constitution every citizen was entitled to a certain minimum of food and clothing in the year. The scholar could always live on less than this, and, by offering the surplus as payment, he could get others to perform the mechanical duties of his life. He had what he wanted in free libraries and laboratories and lectures. So he came to have an inordinate share of happiness; and in many cases he had an inordinate scorn for the bulk of the people, who took no advantage of these privileges. A yearning for books and for exercise of the mind is anything but natural to most men, and the nation was rapidly sorting itself out into a small class who were happy and prided themselves on having everything they wanted, and a majority who envied these their content and grumbled at the enormous wealth they had accumulated in their minds. It was true that these men wrote books and made discoveries and inventions; but what good were their books and facts and machines to any but themselves? Nobody else used them or wished to use them. They might talk of the advances of science and the nobleness of art and the glories of literature. But their talk was unreal to all but their own narrow circle; for the rest of the people it was like descanting on colours to the blind.
“The worst was to come; there afterwards grew up a class of sham scholars and æsthetes and critics who learned the shibboleths of the scientists and artists and writers, and used these shibboleths as instruments of offence against what they called outsiders. There were two primitive languages that had, in earlier ages before the migration and before the growth of a native literature, taken deep root in education. These were treated as the marks and symbols of culture; and their rudiments were laboriously shuffled through and promptly forgotten by a large section, who thereupon assumed great airs of superiority to their neighbours. These counterfeit scholars and critics made the two languages into a fence and stockade that would defy the assaults of the mob; within it they fell down and worshipped as the gods of the earth the few who did know them well and could speak them. Most of them had learned by rote some passages from one or two of the favourite books in them; and they were accustomed, when they were worsted in any conversation or discussion, to roll off, relevantly or irrelevantly, one or the other of these, and thus silence their opponents. Only the mock scholars ever did this; the real scholars knew too much of these languages and had too much to occupy their minds otherwise to resort to such trivial weapons. The contemptuous manners of the charlatans of culture became insufferable. You would have thought that there was something divine in these tongues, so fiercely did these bastard scholars bridle up at any disparagement of them or any comparison of them with the vernacular.
“The growth of this charlatanism became a serious danger to our socialistic community, and it was thought that by its removal the danger would be over. Accordingly it was resolved, only the scholars and their mimics dissenting, that the study and use of these primitive languages should be interdicted. The books written in them were burnt,—to the great joy of the boys and girls in the seminaries,—and it was made a penal offence to write or speak any word of them. There was much sophistry used to get round the law, as a good deal of Tirralarian phraseology was derived from them. But this difficulty was surmounted by a clearer and more detailed definition, and the cultured hung their heads defeated.
“It was not for long. Before another generation had passed, the scholars had invented other claims to pre-eminence, other shibboleths. Now it was the laws of nature and the laws of beauty that supplied the platform for scorn of neighbours. The scientists and artists and critics of art became the small privileged class, who had more than their fair share of happiness and content. They produced something that seemed to be of more value than the musty books of the scholars written in languages that none but themselves could read. And their humours and superiority were borne with at first for the sake of their discoveries and useful contrivances and beautiful works. It was they who built the temples and decorated them with such splendour and filled them with such machines and expedients for the use and comfort of the citizens. They were few, and not very obtrusive in their contempt for the multitude, and their superior airs were counterbalanced by their usefulness.
“This tolerance was a mistake. The idea of having exclusiveness without detriment to the socialistic principle was only a dream. There sprang up the fringe of insolent make-believe again. Herds of pretenders to art or science or criticism flocked into the universities and technical schools. They gabbled of genius and talent, of principles and laws, of elements and atoms, of cells and tissues, and of ideals and the spirit of beauty. The trick was more transparent than the other, for they had to use the vernacular in their patter; and a good deal of it was manifest nonsense to the simplest mind, whilst the astuter amongst the uneducated stripped even their most high-sounding maxims and laws into the nakedest of truisms. But the empiric scientists and artists and æsthetes shifted their ground every year and manufactured other and more mystic phraseology. It was difficult to follow them through their thickets and labyrinths of gibberish by which they kept off those whom they were pleased to call the rabble. They became almost as stupidly contemptuous and insolent as the possession of the rudiments of the most unintelligible languages could have made them.
“It came to be clear that the old danger to equality had only taken a new form. The mass of the nation clamoured against the new pretensions of culture. They would hear of nothing but the abolition of its factories, as they called the universities and schools of art. What would come of the principle of socialism if this aristocracy of genius and talent, brummagem or real, was to be let alone with its capacity to blow itself out with its limitless vanity about its own importance? No sane man would answer for the consequences if the wild rage of the uneducated was allowed to vent itself on this superficial pretence and shallow scorn. Scholars, scientists, artists, critics, and the parasitic crew that battened on their results and used them offensively against the multitude would fall in one great welter of blood. The gentler section of the community could not look on this risk to their ideal of society without a shudder. They convened the whole nation, and by an overwhelming majority it was resolved to abolish the institutions that fostered science and art, learning and criticism; it became high treason to establish a library or university, or a school of art or science, or a seminary of literature or criticism. There were the same attempts as before to elude the provisions of the law and get round it by quibble and sophism; but this led only to greater stringency and detail in its clauses. It was made penal to write a book, or make a scientific discovery, or invent any contrivance, or produce any work of art; and you may be quite sure that, with the bulk of the people acting policeman and spy for the law, it was soon carried into force, and pictures and statues and books and machines ceased to be made. The insolence and contempt of the intellectual parasites had no soil to fatten on, and ultimately vanished from the state.”
He stopped with a snap of the jaw that said plainly: “There now; are you satisfied? If not, you are a most unreasonable being. Where will you find a civilisation grander than ours on the face of the earth?”
I was by no means satisfied. He had left one of the main branches of my question unanswered. He had explained the history of the higher institutions and the fate of the sciences and art and literature; but I had asked him about the schools. I still pressed the question.
“Ay, that was another danger to the social constitution. The energy of talent and genius, and the sham intellectualism chased from one post of vantage took refuge in another. A pedagogic class sprang up that would have grown into a most contemptuous and insolent aristocracy. The loud and haughty arrogance and overbearing dogmatism of the charlatan fringe of the profession were beginning to impress the bulk of the nation with disgust and alarm, when there arose a fierce rebellion among the scholars. The hundreds of mean-spirited empirics that had crept into the ranks of teachers for the sake of the emoluments in the shape of prestige and opportunity for the scorn of neighbours had had to resort to the most tyrannical and cruel methods in order to keep discipline. A few genuine instructors there were, who were able to cope with the knavishness of the worst of pupils by means of their strength of character and power of sympathy and imagination; they always elicited what was best in the embryo humanity that came into their hands to be moulded; they could use the laughter and sympathy of the majority to whip the offensive disposition and will out of the laggards and would-be rebels; and the latter were cowed and disciplined without any sense of unfair treatment. But the closing of the channels of science and art and criticism to the aristocratic quackery, that flows, if unchecked, from the corrupt fountains of human nature, flooded the profession with supercilious pretenders. Their scholars easily measured their intelligence and sincerity, and turned the school-rooms into pandemonium. The high-flying charlatans conferred together and invented new and cruel modes of punishment. They introduced a reign of terror into the schools. The boys and girls formed secret societies which combined into one great brotherhood all over the island. They drilled in darkness and armed every member with a catapult and pea-shooter. They wrote the agreement and signed it in their own blood, and managed to keep the proposed rebellion shrouded in mystery for five whole days, for it was strictly confined to those above the age of twelve. But the fear that it would leak out precipitated the rising; and they drove the schoolmasters and schoolmistresses out under a fierce fire of peas and pebbles, till wounded and bleeding the charlatans took refuge up the mountains amid the snow, or in the waves of the beach, ducking to avoid the missiles. The rout was most ignominious, and the scholars were able to dictate their own terms. It was agreed that they should be exempted from school and family discipline and be admitted to the full citizenship. For it was seen that the exclusion of children above the age of twelve from the schools would so reduce the numbers of the insolent parasites and shams in the profession as to remove the forefront of the offence.
“But it was found that twelve was a mere artificial limit. Inspired by the example of their predecessors, the ten-year-olds made a successful revolution and had the minimum age of citizenship reduced to ten. Still the pedants were felt to be a most offensively arrogant class; the smaller their numbers grew, the more they plumed themselves on their superiority. And every new rebellion against their authority was aided and abetted by the multitude, who huzzaed as the catapults of the pigmy forces swept the field and the volleys from their pea-shooters told with deadly effect, and after the defeat of the pedagogues granted citizenship to every child of a certain age. Victory followed victory till at last it seemed a farce to have schools at all. They were turned into playhouses for stormy or wet weather, and the limit of age was removed from citizenship. Every child, as soon as his legs would carry him and his tongue would wag, could come to the conventions of the people and record his vote. It greatly encouraged marriage and the increase of families, for a man or woman with a dozen or score of children had become a power in the state. Thus the last vestige of privilege disappeared, and with it the last chance of intellectual charlatanism forming an aristocracy. Every man was like his neighbour, and for that matter so was every child. Sex, age, genius, talent, profession, trade had ceased to form the basis of caste. Equality within the nation had at last been reached.”
There was unspeakable complacence on his face; and yet my look of interrogation broke it up. I had heard much about the professions and their history in Tirralaria. I had heard nothing of the medical profession. I wondered how they guaranteed the healing art.
“Oh, as for that, it disappeared in the earliest jetsam of the community. Of the charlatans and nose-elevators the privileged doctors were the worst. They blundered and buried their blunders, and wildly resented every question. They kept up a mysterious patter that was of the very essence of aristocracy and privilege. The atmosphere of superstition that they threw round their old-wives’ remedies imposed upon men when they were sick; but as soon as they were well their fear vanished, and they determined to be clear of the empiricism and mummery of the profession. And at last, after a great plague had laughed at their charms and talismans and skill, and swept half the nation down to the worms, their quackery had become too apparent. One third of them had taken boat and migrated to other islands of the archipelago. Another third had died of their own plague-nostrums and salves. The remainder had lost their self-confidence and dogmatism and were willing to acknowledge that they knew little if any but the simplest diseases, and to these they applied the herbs and salves that every old woman tried. The nation took them in their mood of humility and destroyed the fences round the profession. Everyone was left free to use his own remedies. In a fit of generosity they handed over the secrets of their trade to the public, and salves and medicaments and pills and powders were manufactured wholesale by the state chemists and issued free with instructions for their use. Whether it was the abolition of the caste or not, the death-rate has, if anything, decreased, and plagues are no more frequent than they were before. Everyone who treats another and kills him is liable to punishment by the state. So, few undertake to prescribe, and every citizen is responsible for his own treatment. In times of privilege a doctor was licensed to kill with impunity; he and his brethren could always throw dust in the eyes of any inquiry by technical terms and abracadabra. We are rid of that chicanery, and in health and death-rate we are no worse off than before. So much for physic.”