Limanora the island of progress
had fled; it might be by means of new instruments; it might be by
new senses; nothing but our own dulness broke the connection between
our energies and theirs; what we had still to win was consciousness,
if not mastery, of that finer type of matter which they now used as
medium for their energy. It was only the lifting of another of the
myriad veils that hung before our senses dulling their perceptions.
This was no more than what they had done a thousand times already. A
death was a stimulus to joy and new effort. It taught us the limits of
our knowledge and our power; and limits known were limits soon to be
overpassed.
Her bright activity and banter surprised me into laughter at my own
folly and obtuseness. Scarcely had I reached this consummation before I
knew that there was gladness in the air of the island. How could I have
failed to notice the jubilant strains that were fitfully wafted across
my hearing, unless through my dull absorption in my own feelings? I
felt thankful to Thyriel that I had been drawn out of my isolation,
which seemed to me now little less than disloyalty to the race that had
done so much for me.
I wondered what could be the occasion of all this exultation that I
was conscious of. Pæan after pæan rose from every part of the island,
and, as the moments passed, the many-sounding music seemed to gather
towards one centre. The radius lessened, and adjacent masses of melody
fused together. Nearer and nearer they came, ever more coalescing and
lessening in number; then the jubilance melted into grave and massive
harmony, and I recognised some of the world-music I had heard from the
cosmophone. The sense of universes creating and dissolving sprang into
my mind. It was the diapason of creation that was ringing through the
island. Loud, then low, the cosmic symphony swept the atmosphere like a
tempest. I knew that some far-reaching event or movement was occurring
amongst this people.
I turned to my comrade to confirm and define my conjectures, but
she was gone. Away on the horizon I could see the rapid beat of her
wings. I followed as swiftly as I could, and, as I rose in the air,
I saw company after company soaring like coveys of birds towards a
high isolated plateau that stretched from far up Lilaroma and beetled
cliff-like over the sea. I had often used it as a flight-platform
whence I could spring into the air, and had long known it by the name
of Doomalona. I had never thought over the meaning of the word, but
now it flashed upon me that it meant the hill of farewells. Thence
messengers who were embarking on difficult and important expeditions
set out. The elders of the people and the families of the couriers came
here to give them their love and benison, in order to make them feel,
as they journeyed, that the sympathy of their home went with them like
a fire from the hearth.
I had observed that in these farewells this simple-hearted people made
little outward sign of the depth of their emotions. Only the magnetic
look out of the eyes would have told a stranger what benignity lay
underneath. Nor was it merely to show how sympathetic they were that
they thus accompanied their foreign couriers to the outskirts of the
island. It was chiefly to give them each his contribution of magnetism,
to lessen their burden on their far journey, to make them feel how
much the spirit of the community went with them. Not one of them would
ever allow himself to indulge in so idle an evidence of emotion as
tears. There was in this people a vein of stoicism, I thought; they
seemed to repress all mere symbols of feeling. A European would have
called their farewells dull and emotionless, if not stony-hearted.
There was no kissing or embracing; there was not even the shaking of
hands or bowing of heads. Without physical contact their spirits could
work upon each other with a power that in other civilisations would
have been called witchcraft. Through their firlas, through their eyes,
rayed forth a keen soul-stirring magnetism. And each assisted the
other in preventing the approach of the old wasteful manifestations
of sorrow or despondency. Lamentation was a thing of the far, almost
prehistoric, past; a sob or sigh or even complaint they knew too well
from their physiological knowledge to be mere emotional extravagance,
a waste of the energy or the tissue, all of which was needed for the
strenuous endeavour towards a higher plane. So it was that they seemed
to me stoical in positions where the men and women I had known in my
youth would burst into weeping and wailing, or cries and gestures of
affection.
But in these scenes of farewell there was needed little energy of
repression; the real struggle had occurred many generations before
in their history. They had once had a most elaborate symbolism not
merely of feelings but of almost every human thought and spiritual
attitude. But when the great national repentance was leading to the
series of exilings that ultimately purified the race, they became
uneasy about this vast system of symbolism; it covered their whole
existence from birth to death, from toothache to the salvation of the
soul, and seemed to be nature her very self. They had long known it to
be the nesting-place of all hypocrisies and untruth. Under its shelter
mean things and falsity and even grossness and cruelty could flourish
fearless of harm. Everything could masquerade in the guise of anything
else it pleased. Of course there were painful revelations and scandals
at times; but they were soon hushed up. The system was too much the
interest of all who had power or reputation or prosperity, the best
of what was then life, to let it get into disrepute, or into risk of
revolution or reform. There were various professions which were deeply
involved in the retention of it, and they were recruited chiefly from
the highest social classes. The lawyers battened on the ambiguity of
the symbols, whether expressed in word or deed; the doctors would have
lost half their hysterical and hypochondriac patients if it had been
abolished; without it the life and pretensions of the military during
time of peace would have been a farce and a mockery; and the occupation
of the priests would have vanished altogether. Ceremony seemed the very
life-blood of an aristocratic state, and especially of its army and its
church. It kept the mere workers and plodders at a respectful distance,
it fenced off criticism, and supplied topics for the tongue of fame. To
abolish ceremony would have been to strike at the heart of all existing
institutions.
But, as the purgation proceeded, every occasion for it naturally
disappeared. Ceremonial ceased when the church lapsed and the priestly
profession went into exile. Ceremony vanished with the expulsion of
the militant elements and the professional politicians. The bureau
of fame collapsed with its accursed spawn, uncharitableness and evil
feeling, servility, adulation, and pretence. The pharisaism of the
whole system stood out in all its offensiveness, and the foulness and
injustice that were concealed by this constant masquerade in the robes
of greatness. It was meant to overawe the unthinking, to make ignorance
grovel at the feet of those in power. It had been useful in far past
times of savagery in cowing the beast in the human mind and keeping
it caged. But a form that has life and meaning and power in the ruder
stages of development becomes a curse, if continued into periods of
advanced civilisation. They now felt that their elaborate symbolism
had been an insult to their intelligence; for they had no brutality
in them to be muzzled. To keep up the pretence of greatness or virtue
or love or respect or truth, where there was none, was useful as long
as most of the community were ignorant, or superstitious, or fierce
and intolerant in disposition. But when the race had grown gentle and
humane and more and more progressive, it was not merely a farce to
retain so much deception and mummery in life, it was a gross outrage on
all that was just and noble and spiritual. Why should not the reverence
or affection of the human spirit be allowed to shine forth from the
countenance without such ridiculous trammels, such coarse humiliations?
Forms compelling a show of reverence or love where there is none,
are but the trappings of slaves, and soon ingrain the thoughts and
feelings of slaves on the one side, whilst bringing out and confirming
the nature of bullies and tyrants on the other. Every relic of a past
that had harboured and perpetuated such a system was painfully ejected
from their natures. They would have nothing in them that savoured of
such a death-in-life. All mere forms, all ceremonials and ceremonies
had to go. Ostentation and parade became abhorrent to them. Pageant and
spectacle, pomp and solemnity vanished from their lives. All formality
of manner or intercourse, even etiquette and salutation, was driven out
with contumely.
One of the most singular effects of this expulsion of mere symbolism
was the disappearance of ridicule and jest. This disappearance was
quite unexpected, and yet, when they came to reflect on the phenomenon,
they saw how natural it was. The obverse of the passion for applause
and influence is necessarily the desire to depreciate possible rivals,
to make them seem small, and even to trample them in the dust. And the
most successful and least apparently ill-natured method of fulfilling
this is to get them laughed at and so contemned. With the ignoble
itch for fame went the love of ridicule. The jesters, habitual as
well as professional, disappeared with the priests, the soldiers,
the lawyers, and the politicians. Not that the Limanorans abandoned
the use of humour; they still saw too clearly the incongruities of
existence, cosmic as well as human, to cease bringing them out in
startling flashes of vivid expression. They never indulged in that
boisterous laughter which is so often thought in the West the simplest
and most primitive guaranty of enjoyment; for that is as much a waste
of valuable tissue as uncontrollable grief. Their laughter was of that
low, gentle, tolerant, almost inward, kind, which brightens the nature
to its very heart; its only outer mark was perhaps a smile. Never
indeed was I amongst a people that looked at existence so cheerfully or
enjoyed its little ironies with so light-hearted a geniality. Buoyancy,
joyousness, was the most constant characteristic of their spirits.
Their intercourse with each other was ever sunny and pleasant-witted,
though never jocular. There was no malice or false sense of superiority
in their humour or laughter.
But jest they came to abhor as an indignity to the human spirit
which was striving to obliterate all traces of its ape-ancestry. The
jester implied or produced contempt for his topic, for his victim,
and generally for himself. He usually adopted mimicry as the easiest
method of bringing about his effect. And so he nursed the ape in him,
and pointed back to the vile type from which he had sprung. It was the
other kinship of man, his divine relationship, that the Limanorans
preferred to acknowledge and nurture. Never did they forget it in
their conduct. It moulded their ideals, it directed their purposes, it
created their instincts. And to use ridicule was to outrage it, to call
up the beast in them, the element, the ancestry that they did their
best to forget. Whenever the sense of mutual sympathy crept through the
community, the degradation of jest and ridicule, not for the victim
alone, but for the jester, became self-evident. They were felt to be
inhumane, if not inhuman, and died an easy death with all the vast
system of symbolism.
It was a surprise to me then to see so large an assemblage winging
their way to Doomalona. It seemed as if there was about to be a great