Limanora the island of progress
glasses, whilst the sounds accompanying the scene, having impressed
themselves similarly on long strips of irelium, were in one of their
sound machines reproducing themselves. It was indeed the commonest
and most repulsive of sights in the east end of any of our large
towns. What astonished me was that it should have been taken from
European life; and yet, when I gazed more attentively at it and put the
sound-magnifier to my ears, I knew that it was not European. The words
spoken were in a language I did not know, and the rags of the men and
women were the rags of a national costume I did not recognise.
I shifted my rest and lens, and I saw a rustic village, such as I had
known in my boyhood, with the toilers busy at their work. At a distance
it was a happy scene; for the men and women were absorbed in occupation
and seemed to have forgotten the evils of mankind. They were much in
the open air, which was bright with the colours of the sunlight; and
the children’s voices sounded merry at play or humming like bees from
the window of the schoolhouse. It was a picture such as city poets had
often painted as ideal and primitive happiness, yet some contrivance
seemed to analyse it all for my mind and reveal to me that it was even
more repulsive than that of the foul city lane. Not to my hearing or my
eyes did this come; but to my magnetic sense, ill-developed though it
was. I felt a deadly stupor over the whole pressing out the higher life
of every rustic. Not the diseases which often overtook them unprovided,
not the poverty leaving no outlook for their old age except reluctant
and hated charity, not the constant slavery of toil, or the meagre
assuagement of its woes by a weekly booze in the tavern, weighed upon
my spirit and made me sad to look at the scene. It was the stagnant
spiritual level on which they and their children to the thousandth
generation must live, without power of perceiving the nobleness that
was above them and around them, without the chance of ever developing
the spiritual energy that was in them, without one approach to the line
of infinite progress going on throughout the universe. To stand still
or recede was the true inferno of the Limanorans.
Again I changed my optic glass and a greater sadness came to me through
my magnetic sense. I saw men and women such as I used to envy for
their respectable life, their serene comfort, and their sure grasp of
both worlds trooping into buildings for religious worship. They bowed
and sang, they genuflected and prayed, they raised their eyes to the
ceiling, they groaned and professed to pity themselves as miserable
sinners; yet I could feel they had an inner consciousness that these
performances were superfluous on their part, so comfortably worldly,
so charitably godly were they. As they rose to leave the temple, they
seemed to purr and pat their sleek stomachs in supreme self-content.
Yet through the magnetic magnifier I knew that they were in a lower
circle of the inferno than the rustic slaves. Their past stood out
through many generations of ancestors exactly the same as their present
or better. Never a chance had they of progressing; they thought they
had reached perfection as far as earthly conditions would allow. They
prayed that they might be made better; but that was only as they
prayed that their sins might be forgiven when they were certain that
they had committed none, or as they prayed for guidance in their daily
duties when they knew that no one could manage them better than they.
Stagnancy was written on every feature of their faces and of their
lives, fatty degeneration of every faculty and organ necessary to
development. Their ethics, their religion, their business, their habits
of life had all reached a stage that made criticism superfluous and
that knew no higher outlook.
The next scene that came through the lens was one of the most envied
of Christendom. Men and women of the highest birth and best breeding
were moving to and fro in brilliantly lit and decorated rooms, in the
largest of which the dance was proceeding. In another room a luxurious
supper was laid, varied and fine enough to tempt the eye and palate
of the most fastidious gourmand. Voluptuous music and scents filled
the air; witty conversation was stirring even the most languid faces
to smiles. What could be more perfect on earth than the enjoyment of
such a scene? Yet this was a deeper slough of hell than any I had yet
viewed. The whole of life was concentrated in the senses, the least
progressive of all the organs of human nature, the organs soonest sated
with what they desire. And what a horror of life was revealed beneath
all this brilliancy! A crescendo of such pleasures was needed to drive
off ennui; and such a crescendo was not to be found. The young still
lived in hopeful mirage. The middle-aged were sick of it all. The old
sneered cynically over everything or babbled the senility of second
childhood. The vulgar consequences of vice or the entanglements of
crime, the surfeit of pleasure or the tedium of life kept most of them
within one step of suicide. Their course was ever downwards. I pitied
these magnificent voluptuaries, in all their ephemeral pursuits and
aims. The brilliancy was only an attempt to hide the ghastly grinning
of death and corruption in the reality underneath.
Another change of the point of view, and the world of fame revealed
itself in its gilded horrors. I watched the struggling poet trampled
beneath the foot of luxury and contempt, happy if only he died early
in the hateful wrestle for glory. I saw the drowning agonies of the
novices in the sea of literature, appealing in vain for help to the
wealthy as they passed in barges lulled by the rich music of flattery;
here and there a frantic swimmer clutched at help, and out again he was
thrust into the depths by the minions of literary fame. How little the
rejected knew of the reality that they strove after! I looked into
the hearts of the famous and saw corrupt masses of jealousy and hate,
or hollow shells echoing the misery of life. The most appalling sight
was, not the failures in art and learning, science and commerce, but
the successes. Behind a mask of smiling prosperity and conventional
enjoyment of the world there was but a handful of dust that bore the
weary load of existence in agony.
Generation after generation came and passed through this torturing
fire, knowing not why they bore the pangs for threescore years and
ten, or whither they were borne. They seemed to improve, but only sank
deeper into the original barbarism. Here and there they picked out a
name of one long dead and worshipped it; but the shrine was empty; it
was only a name, and not the personality for which it had once stood.
Behind I could hear the spirit wailing and cursing its fate and the
falsehood and hypocrisy of his adorers. He knew the hollowness and
pretence of the whole performance; he knew that the name had become
a weapon for offending and maiming those who in their innocence were
struggling for fame, as he had done, in vain.
The deepest circle of hell was still to meet my eyes. I thought, as
I was guided to it, that it must be that of murderers and furious
criminals. My amazement grew, as I looked into the lens and saw that
the actors, or I should more truly say the sufferers, were the great of
the earth, the monarchs and statesmen and warriors, who drew all men’s
eyes to them as the masters of life. A movement on the part of my guide
touched some key, and a strange gleam of unearthly light threw out into
relief the hidden mechanism of their existence. Round everyone was a
network of threads like a spider’s web, and the controlling ends of
the threads led up obscurely into the hands of a crowd of miscreants,
who lay out of sight of the applauding mobs; when a limb or a lip or
an eye seemed to move of its own accord to the music of huzzas, it was
jerked by a thread in the control of some scowling villain who worked
the movement for his own murderous purpose. These gorgeous figures were
but puppets playing a marionette-play upon the stage of life. One or
two of the strongest seemed instinct with the breath of originality,
but a still stronger light revealed adamantine chains woven around
them, and attached to these one master-chain which disappeared into
infinity; they were in the spider-web of fate. Still more awful was the
sight of their own hearts; each had a crimson-taloned vulture gnawing
the vitals, and each saw every detail of the agonising sight; nor could
he move to the right or left except to clutch at the bared heart of his
rival and torture him. Who could imagine hell more appalling than this?
Yet up the giddy approach to the seats of the mighty climbed eager
competitors for any place in this torture-chamber death or defeat might
empty.
Then behind all stretched the curtain of infinity; and as it rose the
ranks of worlds and universes appeared, dwarfing into pettiness the
sights that had racked my eyes. Life and the ideals of life rose higher
and higher up through the regimented worlds, and the little inferno I
had watched became a microscopic speck on the round of existence. The
shadow of their heaven fell over their heads. The agony I had seen
became but an atom in infinity.
CHAPTER XVII
MY EDUCATION CONTINUED
THE gaze into the probabilities of the future and into the realities
of the past ejected from my system whatever of dangerous admiration
I might have felt for the career of such a military adventurer as
Choktroo. In spite of my self-control and rapidly developing reasoning
faculty, there lurked in me the same longing for power that had been so
evident in my cabin-boy. Though he had fallen so wretchedly there was
a romance about his career which appealed to something deep-seated in
my spirit. I knew what a hypocrite and scoundrel he had become in order
to make his success, yet the success seemed to condone his offences
against the progress of humanity. The lust of rule that lies in the
hearts of all men had not yet been eradicated from mine. I had advanced
so far as to be ashamed of it; and I tried to reason it down or to
conceal even from myself the fact of its existence; but my guardians
knew that it was there, and they took the necessary precautions against
its growth. Thus did I pass with the whole people through the national
purification ending with a glimpse of their heaven and their hell.
And now I was ready to re-enter on my process of education. The more
spiritual portions of my nature had been remoulded or confirmed to
follow in the true path of Limanoran development. The last purificatory
process had revealed in me the virtuous or progressive balance that
ensured success in the island. The minds of my guardians were now at
rest with regard to my spiritual future, and I was on the fair way to
become one of the community.
Still my physical constitution lagged far behind the race. Nor had I
any hope of ever making up this lost time, so much had the education
of generations and the accumulations of heredity done for them. My
senses were but feebly developed compared with those of the Limanorans;
and though they gave sensuous faculties a far lower place than the
most advanced thinkers I had ever known of in Europe, they by no means
neglected them, but considered them important instruments of progress
in the material conditions of their life.
My proparents thought it necessary that I should be brought in the
development of my sensuous perceptions nearer to their own level, now
that my love of reason was so strong as to preclude the possibility
of being overwhelmed by sensuous energy. They began with the most
intellectual of the senses, the eyesight, and by the help of magnetism,