Limanora the island of progress
great masses to whatever tune he pleased gave the orator a sense of
omnipotence; after a stirring speech he felt like a Jove who held in
his hand the destinies of the world. Happily for the welfare of the
state, the tongue-doughty was hopelessly incapable when he turned to
practice; he could not organise the crusade he had preached; everything
he did with his crowd of followers tumbled to pieces as soon as he
had to do anything further than speak; a few days or even hours of
cool action revealed the hollowness of his cause or his power; the
omnipotent Jove of yesterday appeared the skulking slave of to-day. The
only crusades that ever prospered under his influence were those which
aimed at destruction; for the work of destruction is brief and sharp;
it needs but the passion of the moment to accomplish it; and the love
of demolition is the most primitive of all savage desires, and the most
unbridled when let loose; its own action as it proceeds kindles into
a conflagration the fires that give it strength. Creation is a calm
and gradual process, the last conquest of the human mind, as it is the
highest function of the energy of the cosmos. The wrecking Omnipotence
of oratory is parted from this by the eternity of cosmic development;
it is kin with the clashing of worlds and systems that may come before
the birth of a universe; but it is as opposite in nature to the slow
building up of a world and the slow evolution of its life-energy as
hell is to heaven.
The barrenness of the art in all that would develop humanity struck
even the less mature minds of Limanora forcibly as soon as vast schemes
of reform like socialism began to be discussed. These schemes meant the
devastation or the dismantling of existing institutions and systems of
life. A plague of demagogues spread throughout the nation. Hitherto
orator had neutralised orator as in a debate. Now it was the idle and
indolent who grew most tongue-valiant. They, who had before been so
discredited, now found themselves on the way to fame. They, who had
before been able to gather only a few embeggared discontents at the
street-corners to listen, and perhaps to sniff at their eloquence,
could now stir masses to action. They had been despised even by their
out-at-elbows followers for their impotence in face of the problem of
making a bare living for themselves. Now they saw before them place and
power, fortune and fame, and all through this poor member of theirs
that had not been able to earn enough to lick. Beggarly grovellers,
none so poor as not to scorn them, they were now omnipotent, with all
the work of devastation before them that these new vast political
schemes implied. When the revolution was in full blaze, they were at
their best, they thought. But it was just at this point they found
their limit. The conflagration they had kindled their eloquence failed
to control or even guide; it swept past them through institutions
and sections of the community that they specially favoured; and
at last even they, many of them, fell themselves victims to its
undiscriminating ravage. And, when it had burned itself out, not one
of them but skulked away in fear, unable to face the task of building
up again. Then it was the man of action that stepped in, the silent,
masterful disciplinarian, moulded in war and accustomed to no other
means of solving human problems than war; he it was who reaped the
dragon’s-teeth harvest sown by tongue-bravery: he seized all the glory
and place and fortune that the mob-spaniels had thought within their
grasp. Some of their ancient folk-maxims embodied this experience: The
breath of the demagogue blows the warrior to his fortune; The mouth
of the orator is the banqueting-chamber of the soldier; Tempests of
eloquence and torrents of blood; Spout, vain tongue, you invite your
tyrant; Sow a country with the teeth of haranguers and they will come
up the swords of despots; Loquacity is eaten up by her son pugnacity.
In spite of the fear of the art indicated in such folklore, it
continued to flourish; for the upper classes, who delighted in war,
flattered themselves that they would ever be the best orators, and it
is the inevitable tendency of human nature to run to tongue. Not till
the age of unbridled freedom of speech did they begin to change their
opinions. Then were they easily outfaced and out-harangued by any
idler of the poverty-stricken districts. Even in their own assemblies
they were no match for the spouters from the slums; with all their
high-toned irony and scornful superiority, they were beaten into
silence at the public palavers; they were mere stammerers beside the
glib orators of the unwashed. This age of tongue-exploits was naturally
an age of single ideas, too. When their energy had gone into speech,
they had none left for thoughts. One-idea crusades became the order of
the day. Every tongue-quixote had his scheme wherewith he would sweep
all evils out of life. He was so enamoured of his own that he could not
bear to listen to any other. And therein lay safety.
But there came a time when the wordy bravos joined forces; one vast
socialistic scheme included all theirs. The institutions of the island
were to be wiped out, and something undefined that was to make men
equal and prosperous and happy was to be put in their place. Their
tongues now wagged in unison with wonderful velocity. Each was still
for his own special constructive scheme, but they were at one in their
scheme of demolition; they must have a clear space to build on, and
their ideal was the same, to make all equal and happy. The babel of
eloquence drowned the sounds of other industry. Another revolution was
almost within earshot.
Some of the wiser hearts of Limanora anticipated the danger, and saw
that it would be better to give the discontented all than to let
destruction ravage unmuzzled again. The whole of the property of the
island was estimated, land, houses, furniture, and luxuries; and
money equivalent to its full value was handed over to the malcontent
socialists to divide amongst themselves, provided they migrated to
another island. The offer was readily accepted; for it was clear that
nothing would then be left in Limanora worth plundering. The ships
landed the enraptured equalisers of human goods with their belongings
on the shore of their new Eden, and returned.
When the decks were cleared, and a census was taken of all that
remained, it was found that the island in purging out the socialists
was rid of the plague of orators. The price they paid for their
deliverance was small indeed, they felt. They soon recreated the wealth
they had surrendered. Everyone grew ashamed and afraid of anything
that approached to oratory. Eloquence became a word of evil omen. To
prate was now the greatest offence against the commonwealth. And for
generations there reigned comparative silence and complete peace over
the land.
In the series of purgations every remaining trace of tongue-ambition
was swept out. Much of the flattering kind was found to have migrated
with the lecherous; much of the haughty kind with the aristocratic
warriors; but most of it went with the liars. There remained a horror
of all prating and tongue-valiance, and this repressed every atavistic
tendency in that direction that appeared.
CHAPTER V
LITERATURE
ALL mere word-mongering was to this people an immoral thing, a
shameless waste of the tissue and energy that were needed by the
evolution of the race, an offence against its aim and ideal, its
progress upwards through the cosmic grades. They were persuaded that
it was a base substitution of the shows of life for the reality to
make an art of words which should absorb the imagination and the skill
of hundreds for their whole lifetime. They would have nothing to do
with attention to the appearance and ornamentation of a subject to the
neglect of its true spirit. Into the very heart and purpose of life
every worker must penetrate. His relation to the progress of the race
must be clearly shown. No work that took up any of the time or energy
of anyone of the community was to be useless or unfertile.
But this did not mean that language was allowed to take care of itself.
It was one of the most diligently tended blossoms of human capacity.
No word or phrase, whether spontaneous or invented, was allowed to
take root without the fiat of the mature community. Language was more
a public institution than even government or justice in a people whose
every member was able to be a law to himself. It was not only the
great channel of communication; it was the medium and garment of every
thought. If it became corrupt, how could the mind itself be saved from
its contagion? If it acquired a false tone, how could the falsity fail
to enter into the very spirit of the men and women? It was the guardian
of law and truth; it was the key to the human heart; it was the ether,
the medium, in which the human mind lived, moved, and had its being.
How could such a potent factor in human progress be left to the
caprices of accident, or of single persons, or even of a family?
It had more influence over the spirit than all their sciences put
together, for it was more universal in its use than any one of them;
and it subtly tinged all of them, whilst it was almost the breath of
the mind which dealt with them. It might be the life or the poison of
the whole race. He who was the sole guide of language would be the
master of Limanora, not in the shallow sense of a ruler, but in that of
the complete arbiter of its destinies. He would be the despot of the
Limanoran mind and might subtly throw it back centuries, if it pleased
him.
A people so experienced and wise as this would have ruined the whole
ideal of their existence if they had allowed the most public of the
functions of their civilisation to move at the caprice of individuals.
As soon as the purgation of the race had been completed it became
plain that their language must be purified too. Hundreds of words and
phrases and idioms had had soaked into them the infiltrations of the
evil minds which were now banished. Worse than all, language had been
the commonest and safest ambush of malignity and deceit; it had been a
perpetual trap for the innocent and unwary; it had been a labyrinth,
in which even the ablest and purest-minded often lost their way when
following the lead of some great and noble thought.
The first aim of the elders was to clear it of coarse or vulgar
suggestion. But, as they proceeded, they found their horizon widen;
and the intricacies, ambiguities, and pitfalls showed themselves the
most serious evils of all. It became absolutely necessary, if they
were to have a clear and unrefractive medium of expression, to give a
definite meaning to every word, and to have one word for every meaning
or shade of meaning. The task extended itself through years. But then
they knew that, until it was thoroughly done, their science would be
like shifting clouds, and their progress would be over quicksands. If
their language was treacherous, their civilisation was but a mirage. So
they toiled on sustained by the hope that they were making sure their
footsteps in the pursuit of truth.
When their work was done, they found it was only begun. For it took a
generation to make the new and purified language the natural medium
of the whole people, and by that time new sub-meanings had crept into
most of the common words, and new shadings had discoloured most of
the everyday phraseology. The new and less used words, and the purely
technical and scientific words stood where they were. Everything that
lived had shifted ground. Everything that was purely artificial and had