Limanora the island of progress
their guiding fingers almost invisible. And the result was a body more
transparent than their own. It was a marvel of refinement and strength
combined; they experimented on every limb and sense, every nerve and
muscle and tissue, and they corrected every defect in it before they
reached the final act.
At last the work was completed to their satisfaction, and they braced
themselves for the most exhausting task of all. How were they to
make of this image a living creature? I smiled as I thought of the
impossibility of what was evidently before them. Yet they seemed
perfectly calm in their preparation for the final endeavour. Only there
was a subdued volcanic energy in their systems that seemed to show
that they considered it a task almost superhuman. They encouraged each
other, and we could see them infuse new magnetism into their bodies by
means of machinery of great power. Their faces were filled with the
glow of a rapturous appeal to heaven. They were putting themselves
into connection with some being they adored invisible to us, some
impalpable fountain of life. They took the hands of the image they had
formed, and raised it; they placed it between them, so that it should
be in the path of all energy that passed from one to the other. They
laid their hands upon its head and nerve-centres, and at the same
time the pleading rapture on their faces rose almost to trance. Their
spirits seemed to go out from them. They looked like two in dream. A
faint flush came upon the cheeks of the image between them, and died
out. Again their souls seemed to return to full consciousness, and the
rapture grew upon their faces. Again the signal of life dawned on the
countenance of the image. Throb by throb they gave of their own souls
to his, meantime drawing from some fountain of life and spirit unseen
by us. Slowly the eyelids rose, and the lips moved. There was true
life in the image. The three walked as in trance, yet with the joy of
creation pulsing through them. The child of their imagination was like
both, yet independent, and more beautiful to look upon. Love broke
through the new being and theirs in wild pulsations. The three awoke
to a new life. And then the scene vanished, and I seemed to have but
dreamed.
Yet there was the deep valley with the sunset rays shooting through
it; and up the slopes rested thousands of flesh-and-blood Limanorans
beside me. A few thoughts, and I knew that it was no dream. Was it
magic? I could not believe that such a people would indulge in mere
trifling with life and the powers above life. My spirit of enquiry
stirred my guardians, and I soon knew from them that this was the first
publication of a new book, called Human Sculpture. The deep valley with
its apparatus was the theatre of futurition, where every imaginative
foresight was first put into a form that would appeal to the whole
people. It was called Loomiefa or the display of pioneering.
Their literature was all science, and that the science of the future.
Romancing about the past or the present seemed to this utilitarian
people waste of the noblest faculty of man, shameful squandering of
imaginative wealth on that which is naught. Mere retrospection for
its own sake without reference to subsequent advance was thought by
them the most pernicious of madnesses; they diagnosed it as a kind
of ethical blindness, that could neither see the right nor do it. The
state of peoples who looked at nothing but the past with admiration
was one of the lowest circles of their inferno; another was that of
nations that saw nothing good outside of themselves and their immediate
surroundings. In such unprogressive national or racial attitudes they
saw all the evils of inbreeding; the weaknesses and intellectual and
moral diseases of the past grew despotic in their power over the human
system, till they came to seem the only virtues; even what had been
once virtues grew inveterate and routine, or monstrous and overpowering
in their excess. The past served only as the soil for the better
growths of the future. And an exhausted soil became barren, if not
poisonous, for all but weeds, or growths that needed and deserved no
attention or cultivation.
To spend imagination on the past, therefore, was to them a crime
against the future. What was dead and needed invention to bring before
the mind again was better in its grave. A literature that turned back
to the past for its progress clogged the wheels of progress, unless it
belonged to a race that had fallen back centuries behind the natural
advance of the world. For a progressive nation to give of its best for
the resurrection of a dead past was to confess a strain of barbarism
in it, and to prophesy its own rapid decay. The imagination was the
faculty of the future; it had its eyes set in front, and not behind
like memory; it was meant to investigate the horizon before us, and to
interpret the lights and shadows thrown from below the rim of vision,
and not to look back, whether with regret or adoration, over the region
that humanity had beaten hard with its weary footing. The future is
infinite; the human past covers but a few centuries, and a narrow
track through them. It is not for want of scope that the faculty of
futurition is driven back on the ground already trodden; it is through
a grievous and incurable malady, the malady of preterpluperfection,
that twists the face round to the back of the neck, and rots or
petrifies the tissues of the brain and the heart. They counted it the
saddest of all spectacles on earth to see a race, that by its nature
could be rapidly progressive, waste its highest energies in retracing
again and again the footsteps of its own ancestry or of the ancestry
of some other race. Nothing would persuade them to permit any study of
the past that was not meant to be wholly relevant to the future. They
tended to be, I thought, almost negligent of the value of history and
historical study; for, as our Western commonplace goes, history repeats
itself; and however new and ameliorative an age may be, it may obtain
lessons, and still more warnings, from ages past.
Their literature was all of the future. There were two of the largest
families of the race devoted to it, and their numbers were ever being
recruited by adoption into them of scions of others, who revealed
exceptional imaginative faculty. They had the generalised training
of the island; but their particular training was more completely
specialised than that of any other family. Nothing was omitted that
would tend to make them of imagination all compact, or to give them
such ease in their command of language as would bring them the exact
word without effort. Next to these points in their education stood
tutelage in all that pertained to scenic art and music. For they had to
give their ideas a staging that would at once appeal to the imagination
of the whole people. Loomiefa was in their province. And the literary
form into which they were to put their communications as to the
future had to be as perfect as it could be in their language, exactly
expressing all they had to convey, and at the same time appealing
to the ear by its melody and harmony. As far as histrionic art was
allowable in the island they were the artists, whilst in the linguistic
conventions of the people they were the leaders and suggesters in the
making of words, and in the choice of words made. They had, I could
see, the finest heads in the community; the brow was broad, full, and
shapely; the eyes were large and yet deeply set under the brows; the
base of the skull was of great width; every section of the brain that
had to do with imaginative and poetic power was well developed. Yet
their faces and features showed no difference from the common Limanoran
type; they had no more beauty or regularity of outline. It was clear
that all children of a certain shape of skull and development of brain
were selected for training and adoption by these two families, whenever
they needed recruits.
From the first the youth of these two families were educated in
the sciences of the day in order that they might know what gaps in
knowledge had to be filled, and what laws should guide and limit their
imaginative prospecting. For the literature they produce is science
in embryo. Science lays the foundations of literature, and literature
prepares the way for science. These families by their imaginative
productions based on all that is already known pioneer the scientific
investigators into the new regions of the future. They keep in touch
with the leaders of science, and act as allies to them, finding out the
track of what these are trying to discover or invent, and suggesting
methods of supplying their wants or reaching their aims. They provide
working hypotheses for the scientists to apply and test and they map
out roads for the whole race into the darkness of the unknown or the
twilight of the half-conjectured.
Thus their literature is fiction; for tentative fiction, they hold,
is the only unstagnant truth. The productions of the pioneering
families have all to be submitted to the national test. What the race
disapproves of is promptly cancelled and forgotten. What meets with the
approval of the elders or of the leaders of any one of the sciences
is handed over to them for experimentation, even though it should not
attract the rest of the people. What strikes the fancy of the nation as
a whole is adopted as the map and guide of the future; it is the sacred
book of the time, and the citizens study it daily for the purpose of
reaching the goal it sets before their life.
But every new age antiquates one or more of these sacred books. For
the region they have mapped out in the future is reached and travelled
over, the advance they anticipate is made, the ideal they paint is
realised and rapidly becoming commonplace. It puzzled me for a time
to guess what they did with their superseded books, knowing as I did
how superfluous they counted all researches into the past and all
imaginative pictures of the present. My question as usual was not long
unanswered. I was shown the library of antiquated fiction in the valley
of memories. It was used in the very earliest stages of education.
The children read the books or heard them in order to see, when they
reached years of maturity, what the race had come from and how much
it might yet advance, to gather enthusiasm from the spectacle of the
progress made, and to learn lessons for their own future. Beyond
childhood and early youth every minute was counted lost that was not
spent on the future and its possibilities; and for a man or woman of
mature years all forms of antiquarianism were counted idleness.
They never permitted themselves to lay too much stress on any sacred
book, or to adore it too passionately, however much they might be
guided by it for a time; for they knew from experience that it would
soon be worked into the nature of the race and the system of the
individual, and another would take its place. The sacred book of to-day
was bound to be transcended to-morrow. The foresights and ideals of
this year would be the truisms of next. The real desecration, they
thought, was to rest too many ages over a sacred book, its precepts
unworked into the life, its pictures and ideals unrealised; to adore
its words and deny its spirit by failing to advance beyond its point
of view. A book too long held sacred is a charge of stagnancy and
barbarism against a race and an insult to its intelligence. It proves
that the civilisation has become stereotyped, or worse, retrospective;
to eat, to sleep, to fall prostrate before a dead ideal, to propagate
and die, sum up the ultimate duties of existence at its highest level.
Every book was sacred to the Limanorans which threw light upon the