Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions
known a case where a Woman has exterminated her whole household, and
half an hour afterwards, when her rage was over and the fragments swept
away, has asked what has become of her husband and her children.
Obviously then a Woman is not to be irritated as long as she is in a
position where she can turn round. When you have them in their
apartments--which are constructed with a view to denying them that
power--you can say and do what you like; for they are then wholly
impotent for mischief, and will not remember a few minutes hence the
incident for which they may be at this moment threatening you with
death, nor the promises which you may have found it necessary to make
in order to pacify their fury.
On the whole we get on pretty smoothly in our domestic relations,
except in the lower strata of the Military Classes. There the want of
tact and discretion on the part of the husbands produces at times
indescribable disasters. Relying too much on the offensive weapons of
their acute angles instead of the defensive organs of good sense and
seasonable simulation, these reckless creatures too often neglect the
prescribed construction of the women's apartments, or irritate their
wives by ill-advised expressions out of doors, which they refuse
immediately to retract. Moreover a blunt and stolid regard for literal
truth indisposes them to make those lavish promises by which the more
judicious Circle can in a moment pacify his consort. The result is
massacre; not, however, without its advantages, as it eliminates the
more brutal and troublesome of the Isosceles; and by many of our
Circles the destructiveness of the Thinner Sex is regarded as one among
many providential arrangements for suppressing redundant population,
and nipping Revolution in the bud.
Yet even in our best regulated and most approximately Circular families
I cannot say that the ideal of family life is so high as with you in
Spaceland. There is peace, in so far as the absence of slaughter may
be called by that name, but there is necessarily little harmony of
tastes or pursuits; and the cautious wisdom of the Circles has ensured
safety at the cost of domestic comfort. In every Circular or Polygonal
household it has been a habit from time immemorial--and now has become
a kind of instinct among the women of our higher classes--that the
mothers and daughters should constantly keep their eyes and mouths
towards their husband and his male friends; and for a lady in a family
of distinction to turn her back upon her husband would be regarded as a
kind of portent, involving loss of STATUS. But, as I shall soon shew,
this custom, though it has the advantage of safety, is not without its
disadvantages.
In the house of the Working Man or respectable Tradesman--where the
wife is allowed to turn her back upon her husband, while pursuing her
household avocations--there are at least intervals of quiet, when the
wife is neither seen nor heard, except for the humming sound of the
continuous Peace-cry; but in the homes of the upper classes there is
too often no peace. There the voluble mouth and bright penetrating eye
are ever directed towards the Master of the household; and light itself
is not more persistent than the stream of feminine discourse. The tact
and skill which suffice to avert a Woman's sting are unequal to the
task of stopping a Woman's mouth; and as the wife has absolutely
nothing to say, and absolutely no constraint of wit, sense, or
conscience to prevent her from saying it, not a few cynics have been
found to aver that they prefer the danger of the death-dealing but
inaudible sting to the safe sonorousness of a Woman's other end.
To my readers in Spaceland the condition of our Women may seem truly
deplorable, and so indeed it is. A Male of the lowest type of the
Isosceles may look forward to some improvement of his angle, and to the
ultimate elevation of the whole of his degraded caste; but no Woman can
entertain such hopes for her sex. "Once a Woman, always a Woman" is a
Decree of Nature; and the very Laws of Evolution seem suspended in her
disfavour. Yet at least we can admire the wise Prearrangement which
has ordained that, as they have no hopes, so they shall have no memory
to recall, and no forethought to anticipate, the miseries and
humiliations which are at once a necessity of their existence and the
basis of the constitution of Flatland.
Section 5. Of our Methods of Recognizing one another
You, who are blessed with shade as well as light, you, who are gifted
with two eyes, endowed with a knowledge of perspective, and charmed
with the enjoyment of various colours, you, who can actually SEE an
angle, and contemplate the complete circumference of a circle in the
happy region of the Three Dimensions--how shall I make clear to you the
extreme difficulty which we in Flatland experience in recognizing one
another's configuration?
Recall what I told you above. All beings in Flatland, animate or
inanimate, no matter what their form, present TO OUR VIEW the same, or
nearly the same, appearance, viz. that of a straight Line. How then
can one be distinguished from another, where all appear the same?
The answer is threefold. The first means of recognition is the sense
of hearing; which with us is far more highly developed than with you,
and which enables us not only to distinguish by the voice our personal
friends, but even to discriminate between different classes, at least
so far as concerns the three lowest orders, the Equilateral, the
Square, and the Pentagon--for of the Isosceles I take no account. But
as we ascend in the social scale, the process of discriminating and
being discriminated by hearing increases in difficulty, partly because
voices are assimilated, partly because the faculty of
voice-discrimination is a plebeian virtue not much developed among the
Aristocracy. And wherever there is any danger of imposture we cannot
trust to this method. Amongst our lowest orders, the vocal organs are
developed to a degree more than correspondent with those of hearing, so
that an Isosceles can easily feign the voice of a Polygon, and, with
some training, that of a Circle himself. A second method is therefore
more commonly resorted to.
FEELING is, among our Women and lower classes--about our upper classes
I shall speak presently--the principal test of recognition, at all
events between strangers, and when the question is, not as to the
individual, but as to the class. What therefore "introduction" is
among the higher classes in Spaceland, that the process of "feeling" is
with us. "Permit me to ask you to feel and be felt by my friend Mr.
So-and-so"--is still, among the more old-fashioned of our country
gentlemen in districts remote from towns, the customary formula for a
Flatland introduction. But in the towns, and among men of business,
the words "be felt by" are omitted and the sentence is abbreviated to,
"Let me ask you to feel Mr. So-and-so"; although it is assumed, of
course, that the "feeling" is to be reciprocal. Among our still more
modern and dashing young gentlemen--who are extremely averse to
superfluous effort and supremely indifferent to the purity of their
native language--the formula is still further curtailed by the use of
"to feel" in a technical sense, meaning, "to
recommend-for-the-purposes-of-feeling-and-being-felt"; and at this
moment the "slang" of polite or fast society in the upper classes
sanctions such a barbarism as "Mr. Smith, permit me to feel Mr. Jones."
Let not my Reader however suppose that "feeling" is with us the tedious
process that it would be with you, or that we find it necessary to feel
right round all the sides of every individual before we determine the
class to which he belongs. Long practice and training, begun in the
schools and continued in the experience of daily life, enable us to
discriminate at once by the sense of touch, between the angles of an
equal-sided Triangle, Square, and Pentagon; and I need not say that the
brainless vertex of an acute-angled Isosceles is obvious to the dullest
touch. It is therefore not necessary, as a rule, to do more than feel
a single angle of an individual; and this, once ascertained, tells us
the class of the person whom we are addressing, unless indeed he
belongs to the higher sections of the nobility. There the difficulty
is much greater. Even a Master of Arts in our University of Wentbridge
has been known to confuse a ten-sided with a twelve-sided Polygon; and
there is hardly a Doctor of Science in or out of that famous University
who could pretend to decide promptly and unhesitatingly between a
twenty-sided and a twenty-four sided member of the Aristocracy.
Those of my readers who recall the extracts I gave above from the
Legislative code concerning Women, will readily perceive that the
process of introduction by contact requires some care and discretion.
Otherwise the angles might inflict on the unwary Feeler irreparable
injury. It is essential for the safety of the Feeler that the Felt
should stand perfectly still. A start, a fidgety shifting of the
position, yes, even a violent sneeze, has been known before now to
prove fatal to the incautious, and to nip in the bud many a promising
friendship. Especially is this true among the lower classes of the
Triangles. With them, the eye is situated so far from their vertex
that they can scarcely take cognizance of what goes on at that
extremity of their frame. They are, moreover, of a rough coarse
nature, not sensitive to the delicate touch of the highly organized
Polygon. What wonder then if an involuntary toss of the head has ere
now deprived the State of a valuable life!
I have heard that my excellent Grandfather--one of the least irregular
of his unhappy Isosceles class, who indeed obtained, shortly before his
decease, four out of seven votes from the Sanitary and Social Board for
passing him into the class of the Equal-sided--often deplored, with a
tear in his venerable eye, a miscarriage of this kind, which had
occured to his great-great-great-Grandfather, a respectable Working Man
with an angle or brain of 59 degrees 30 minutes. According to his
account, my unfortunate Ancestor, being afflicted with rheumatism, and
in the act of being felt by a Polygon, by one sudden start accidentally
transfixed the Great Man through the diagonal; and thereby, partly in
consequence of his long imprisonment and degradation, and partly
because of the moral shock which pervaded the whole of my Ancestor's
relations, threw back our family a degree and a half in their ascent
towards better things. The result was that in the next generation the
family brain was registered at only 58 degrees, and not till the lapse
of five generations was the lost ground recovered, the full 60 degrees
attained, and the Ascent from the Isosceles finally achieved. And all
this series of calamities from one little accident in the process of
Feeling.
At this point I think I hear some of my better educated readers
exclaim, "How could you in Flatland know anything about angles and
degrees, or minutes? We can SEE an angle, because we, in the region of
Space, can see two straight lines inclined to one another; but you, who
can see nothing but one straight line at a time, or at all events only
a number of bits of straight lines all in one straight line--how can
you ever discern any angle, and much less register angles of different
sizes?"
I answer that though we cannot SEE angles, we can INFER them, and this
with great precision. Our sense of touch, stimulated by necessity, and
developed by long training, enables us to distinguish angles far more
accurately than your sense of sight, when unaided by a rule or measure
of angles. Nor must I omit to explain that we have great natural