Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions
the deaf and dumb, if once allowed to gesticulate and to use the
hand-alphabet, will never acquire the more difficult but far more
valuable art of lipspeech and lip-reading, so it is with us as regards
"Seeing" and "Feeling". None who in early life resort to "Feeling"
will ever learn "Seeing" in perfection.
For this reason, among our Higher Classes, "Feeling" is discouraged or
absolutely forbidden. From the cradle their children, instead of going
to the Public Elementary schools (where the art of Feeling is taught),
are sent to higher Seminaries of an exclusive character; and at our
illustrious University, to "feel" is regarded as a most serious fault,
involving Rustication for the first offence, and Expulsion for the
second.
But among the lower classes the art of Sight Recognition is regarded as
an unattainable luxury. A common Tradesman cannot afford to let his
son spend a third of his life in abstract studies. The children of the
poor are therefore allowed to "feel" from their earliest years, and
they gain thereby a precocity and an early vivacity which contrast at
first most favourably with the inert, undeveloped, and listless
behaviour of the half-instructed youths of the Polygonal class; but
when the latter have at last completed their University course, and are
prepared to put their theory into practice, the change that comes over
them may almost be described as a new birth, and in every art, science,
and social pursuit they rapidly overtake and distance their Triangular
competitors.
Only a few of the Polygonal Class fail to pass the Final Test or
Leaving Examination at the University. The condition of the
unsuccessful minority is truly pitiable. Rejected from the higher
class, they are also despised by the lower. They have neither the
matured and systematically trained powers of the Polygonal Bachelors
and Masters of Arts, nor yet the native precocity and mercurial
versatility of the youthful Tradesman. The professions, the public
services, are closed against them; and though in most States they are
not actually debarred from marriage, yet they have the greatest
difficulty in forming suitable alliances, as experience shews that the
offspring of such unfortunate and ill-endowed parents is generally
itself unfortunate, if not positively Irregular.
It is from these specimens of the refuse of our Nobility that the great
Tumults and Seditions of past ages have generally derived their
leaders; and so great is the mischief thence arising that an increasing
minority of our more progressive Statesmen are of opinion that true
mercy would dictate their entire suppression, by enacting that all who
fail to pass the Final Examination of the University should be either
imprisoned for life, or extinguished by a painless death.
But I find myself digressing into the subject of Irregularities, a
matter of such vital interest that it demands a separate section.
Section 7. Concerning Irregular Figures
Throughout the previous pages I have been assuming--what perhaps should
have been laid down at the beginning as a distinct and fundamental
proposition--that every human being in Flatland is a Regular Figure,
that is to say of regular construction. By this I mean that a Woman
must not only be a line, but a straight line; that an Artisan or
Soldier must have two of his sides equal; that Tradesmen must have
three sides equal; Lawyers (of which class I am a humble member), four
sides equal, and generally, that in every Polygon, all the sides must
be equal.
The size of the sides would of course depend upon the age of the
individual. A Female at birth would be about an inch long, while a
tall adult Woman might extend to a foot. As to the Males of every
class, it may be roughly said that the length of an adult's sides, when
added together, is two feet or a little more. But the size of our
sides is not under consideration. I am speaking of the EQUALITY of
sides, and it does not need much reflection to see that the whole of
the social life in Flatland rests upon the fundamental fact that Nature
wills all Figures to have their sides equal.
If our sides were unequal our angles might be unequal. Instead of its
being sufficient to feel, or estimate by sight, a single angle in order
to determine the form of an individual, it would be necessary to
ascertain each angle by the experiment of Feeling. But life would be
too short for such a tedious grouping. The whole science and art of
Sight Recognition would at once perish; Feeling, so far as it is an
art, would not long survive; intercourse would become perilous or
impossible; there would be an end to all confidence, all forethought;
no one would be safe in making the most simple social arrangements; in
a word, civilization would relapse into barbarism.
Am I going too fast to carry my Readers with me to these obvious
conclusions? Surely a moment's reflection, and a single instance from
common life, must convince every one that our whole social system is
based upon Regularity, or Equality of Angles. You meet, for example,
two or three Tradesmen in the street, whom you recognize at once to be
Tradesmen by a glance at their angles and rapidly bedimmed sides, and
you ask them to step into your house to lunch. This you do at present
with perfect confidence, because everyone knows to an inch or two the
area occupied by an adult Triangle: but imagine that your Tradesman
drags behind his regular and respectable vertex, a parallelogram of
twelve or thirteen inches in diagonal:--what are you to do with such a
monster sticking fast in your house door?
But I am insulting the intelligence of my Readers by accumulating
details which must be patent to everyone who enjoys the advantages of a
Residence in Spaceland. Obviously the measurements of a single angle
would no longer be sufficient under such portentous circumstances;
one's whole life would be taken up in feeling or surveying the
perimeter of one's acquaintances. Already the difficulties of avoiding
a collision in a crowd are enough to tax the sagacity of even a
well-educated Square; but if no one could calculate the Regularity of a
single figure in the company, all would be chaos and confusion, and the
slightest panic would cause serious injuries, or--if there happened to
be any Women or Soldiers present--perhaps considerable loss of life.
Expediency therefore concurs with Nature in stamping the seal of its
approval upon Regularity of conformation: nor has the Law been
backward in seconding their efforts. "Irregularity of Figure" means
with us the same as, or more than, a combination of moral obliquity and
criminality with you, and is treated accordingly. There are not
wanting, it is true, some promulgators of paradoxes who maintain that
there is no necessary connection between geometrical and moral
Irregularity. "The Irregular", they say, "is from his birth scouted by
his own parents, derided by his brothers and sisters, neglected by the
domestics, scorned and suspected by society, and excluded from all
posts of responsibility, trust, and useful activity. His every
movement is jealously watched by the police till he comes of age and
presents himself for inspection; then he is either destroyed, if he is
found to exceed the fixed margin of deviation, or else immured in a
Government Office as a clerk of the seventh class; prevented from
marriage; forced to drudge at an uninteresting occupation for a
miserable stipend; obliged to live and board at the office, and to take
even his vacation under close supervision; what wonder that human
nature, even in the best and purest, is embittered and perverted by
such surroundings!"
All this very plausible reasoning does not convince me, as it has not
convinced the wisest of our Statesmen, that our ancestors erred in
laying it down as an axiom of policy that the toleration of
Irregularity is incompatible with the safety of the State. Doubtless,
the life of an Irregular is hard; but the interests of the Greater
Number require that it shall be hard. If a man with a triangular front
and a polygonal back were allowed to exist and to propagate a still
more Irregular posterity, what would become of the arts of life? Are
the houses and doors and churches in Flatland to be altered in order to
accommodate such monsters? Are our ticket-collectors to be required to
measure every man's perimeter before they allow him to enter a theatre
or to take his place in a lecture room? Is an Irregular to be exempted
from the militia? And if not, how is he to be prevented from carrying
desolation into the ranks of his comrades? Again, what irresistible
temptations to fraudulent impostures must needs beset such a creature!
How easy for him to enter a shop with his polygonal front foremost, and
to order goods to any extent from a confiding tradesman! Let the
advocates of a falsely called Philanthropy plead as they may for the
abrogation of the Irregular Penal Laws, I for my part have never known
an Irregular who was not also what Nature evidently intended him to
be--a hypocrite, a misanthropist, and, up to the limits of his power, a
perpetrator of all manner of mischief.
Not that I should be disposed to recommend (at present) the extreme
measures adopted by some States, where an infant whose angle deviates
by half a degree from the correct angularity is summarily destroyed at
birth. Some of our highest and ablest men, men of real genius, have
during their earliest days laboured under deviations as great as, or
even greater than, forty-five minutes: and the loss of their precious
lives would have been an irreparable injury to the State. The art of
healing also has achieved some of its most glorious triumphs in the
compressions, extensions, trepannings, colligations, and other surgical
or diaetetic operations by which Irregularity has been partly or wholly
cured. Advocating therefore a VIA MEDIA, I would lay down no fixed or
absolute line of demarcation; but at the period when the frame is just
beginning to set, and when the Medical Board has reported that recovery
is improbable, I would suggest that the Irregular offspring be
painlessly and mercifully consumed.
Section 8. Of the Ancient Practice of Painting
If my Readers have followed me with any attention up to this point,
they will not be surprised to hear that life is somewhat dull in
Flatland. I do not, of course, mean that there are not battles,
conspiracies, tumults, factions, and all those other phenomena which
are supposed to make History interesting; nor would I deny that the
strange mixture of the problems of life and the problems of
Mathematics, continually inducing conjecture and giving the opportunity
of immediate verification, imparts to our existence a zest which you in
Spaceland can hardly comprehend. I speak now from the aesthetic and
artistic point of view when I say that life with us is dull;
aesthetically and artistically, very dull indeed.
How can it be otherwise, when all one's prospect, all one's landscapes,
historical pieces, portraits, flowers, still life, are nothing but a
single line, with no varieties except degrees of brightness and
obscurity?
It was not always thus. Colour, if Tradition speaks the truth, once
for the space of half a dozen centuries or more, threw a transient
splendour over the lives of our ancestors in the remotest ages. Some
private individual--a Pentagon whose name is variously reported--having
casually discovered the constituents of the simpler colours and a
rudimentary method of painting, is said to have begun decorating first
his house, then his slaves, then his Father, his Sons, and Grandsons,
lastly himself. The convenience as well as the beauty of the results