Limanora the island of progress
track ahead into the darkness; and so long as it still gave light
where light was needed, it remained sacred. Whenever its light became
the common daylight around the race, and especially if they had to
look backwards in order to see its waymarks, then was it promptly
committed to the valley of memories. Not a moment was wasted on its
precepts after they had become the laws of everyday existence. They
had known from their own history what a terrible engine of oppression
a book might be when once it had become antiquated without losing the
adoration of the people; its prophecies, which had become mere tales
of the past, had to be projected again into the future by mystic
interpretation; its precepts, embodying the spirit of a generation long
dead, had to be galvanised into life by casuistry; and innumerable
methods had to be extorted from its overstrained text to prevent the
human mind moving on past its own stage of morality and civilisation.
How many ages in their own history did their ancestors live with their
dead! Into the warmest feelings of their hearts had the grave-clothes
of the past intertwined; and what torture to love and the noblest
feelings, what bloodshed and horrors it cost them to be able to stand
off from their dead authority, and look at it with unprejudiced mind!
It had become a part of their best selves, and it seemed like suicide
to cast it from them, and relegate it to its true home, the graveyard
of the past.
That long experience was burned into their natures; and to lay too much
stress on any new book or idea gave them an instinctive pang. They
could not bear to linger over it, once the light had died out of it
and its leading had become a highway-mark for the passerby. To utter
or admire the obvious or commonplace was counted one of the gravest
offences against the commonweal; it awakened a look of pity in the eyes
of the listener as for one who was smitten with an incurable disease.
A repetition of the offence would lead to drastic measures with the
victim. He was haled before the medicists, and his system was minutely
examined for the source of the malady, and for weeks was he kept under
medical supervision; no labour or watching or remedial pain was spared
till the source of offending was scourged out of the constitution of
the sufferer.
As a rule it was found on investigation that the infection had come
from some book, whose spirit and precepts had become incorporated
in the past of the race and could give no more vitality to it. It
was good enough for children and youth, who were passing through the
primitive stages of development; to them it was fresh and new for a
time, and was even the source of life and vigour. But once out of
the valley of memories the men and women who could read it with any
pleasure were considered unhealthy and atavistic, and were sent to
hospital for treatment. The symptoms of the malady of the commonplace
were well known and most patent,--loquacity, fondness for confidential
communications and mysterious suggestions under solemn conditionings,
or even oaths of silence, bustling idleness, feeble smiles of impotent
superiority, jocular dogmatism, assumption of wisdom, and excessive
vanity. If the disease had not been so infectious and stealthy in its
spread, it would never have been treated so seriously and so promptly;
for it was seldom malignant, in its earlier appearances at least;
only when it became morbid, and took the shape of injured feeling at
unrecognised genius, resulting at times in jealousy and slander, or
conspiracy and rebellion, or when it grew masterful and acquired a
sense of its own infallibility and omnipotence, resulting generally in
petty spite and persecution, was there any deadly virus in it. It was
its epidemic character that made it most formidable, and necessitated
a system of moral quarantine. Special precautions were taken in
permitting the use of the sacred books of the past, and of antiquated
or superseded ideas. They were only useful for teaching the young
reverence for great thoughts and great thinkers, and for leading the
mature to estimate their own achievements modestly, when they saw the
rapid antiquation of even the most striking books.
One evil that arose from the study of past literature, the
over-valuation of literary work, they tried to obviate. They placed
noble deeds on the same footing with noble words and thoughts, and saw
that they were as carefully recorded and described. It was the duty of
the young to report, and give permanent form to, anything that was done
greatly. With their enthusiasm made more glowing by their ignorance
and inexperience, they acted as the historiographers of the race. The
youth of a family went with the elders whenever any difficulty offered
itself, and with their recording instruments, inasans and linasans and
idrosans, they took flying pictures, electrographs, and reports of the
scene for deposit in the valley of memories. If any emergency arose
and was nobly met when the youthful remembrancers were not present,
they wrote the annals of it none the less, and reproduced its scenes in
moving representations after interviewing all who witnessed the deed.
There was as much inspiration, this people held, in a great action as
in a great book, provided it illumined the darkness of the road ahead
of them.
For to them the true test of greatness and inspiration was the power
of fore-illumination or of stimulus to progress. Whatsoever flashed
light over the unknown in front must have come from a higher point of
view than their own immediate surroundings. Word or deed, it was to
them all the same, if it had this divine characteristic; the one was as
worthy of chronicling and preserving as the other. But they ceased to
look upon it as a source of stimulus to action as soon as it failed
to throw light upon their future, or to hold up an ideal that they had
not yet attained. Inspiration, like all other things and beings in the
universe, was progressive. No idea or deed, no word or book could be
permanently inspired. And the quicker a race progressed, the sooner it
sterilised its sacred thoughts and deeds. All noble human advance was a
process of deinspiration; a step upwards makes the climber capable of
looking down upon the previous point of vision, and of looking up for
a still higher, and to gaze downwards is to encourage retrogression.
Whosoever or whatsoever caught the first gleam of a peak above them was
to them inspired. But it was the duty to reach that peak in their march
upwards as soon as possible; and once it was reached, where was the
inspiration? It was itself far below with the age that supplied it.
Some new deed or thought or book was certain to take the place of that
which had for a time been considered sacred. And, if that did not come,
then woe to the race! Progress must stop and darkness must close in on
their purblind leaders, who, in order to retain their dominance, must
elevate the past, immediate or distant, into a divinity, and its best
book into an oracle. After a time so obscured do the pages of this
book become with cobwebs of interpretation that at last they must spin
new cobwebs out of their intestines. The dread of light from without
becomes a horror. If a new teacher or prophet should come, down with
him into the dust; his teachings are false, for they agree not with
the devotion-cobwebbed book. If a reformer sees light above and ahead,
he is banned as a messenger of hell; and what he sees is nothing but a
diabolic marshlight. All through the race spread the awful diseases of
spiritual inbreeding, inability to distinguish the true from the false,
love of delusion, unwholesome and insane pursuits and ends, and the
madness of cruelty and intolerance. Nothing but fierce revolution could
save a race from such a plight. And the germs of revolution must come
from without themselves and without the world.
CHAPTER VII
PIONEERING
IMAGINATION, corrected by racial instinct in the assemblies of all,
was the seeker for foregleams of what was to be. And a people that had
organised its civilisation into a disciplined advance was not likely to
leave its scouts and vanguard unorganised. Its destiny was largely in
the hands of those who went before it into the night, or who ascended
the heights above it, and told of the region to be traversed next, and
the best routes through it. There was no service that needed so much
the best powers of the race and its best organisation.
Into the pioneering families were gathered their most powerful
imaginations. For imagination is the only clairvoyant of the faculties;
it can see what lies below the horizon of knowledge; it can forecast
the world as it might be and as it is to be; and it can draw the human
mind onwards by the splendours of this forecast. This people had early
realised the sibylline character of the faculty, and the great part it
might play in their devotion to progress. And they resolved to save
it from all waste. They refused to have it become the mere slave of
luxury or of popular amusement, such as they saw it was in most other
civilised nations. Even where it conjured up the past in magnificent
literary pictures, what else was it than the pander to tastes and
habits that were overworn, the encomiast of deeds that had better be
buried in oblivion? It frequented the palaces of kings and licked the
dust off their feet, or it played the buffoon to the indolent, sensuous
crowd. At rare times it isolated itself, and, heedless of the babbling
world that offered it so many prizes, it wrestled with the powers of
darkness and ignorance. But what could a poor recluse do against the
infinite night? If it were to help the forward march of humanity, it
must be disciplined and organised to a definite aim.
All other peoples have left imagination to struggle for itself. This
people recognised it as the most unschooled and shiftless of the human
faculties, whilst they felt it to be the most divine and fullest of
promise. They determined that amongst them it should lose its reeling
gait and wandering, aimless eye, and become the pioneer of their march
onwards; instead of fixing its eye on the past or on the favours of the
great, it should skirmish before the main army into the region of the
unknown; it should report on the difficulties and the enemies to be
met, and map out the world as it was to be. What would be thought of
the shipmaster who let the keenest-eyed of his crew lounge round the
ship looking into the pockets of his comrades and making them laugh,
or lean over the stern watching the track left behind, if darkness and
cloud and a broken sea ever lay on the horizon ahead? What else were
the nations doing with their lookout faculty, imagination, but allowing
it to waste itself on providing amusement for the luxurious, or on
figuring the problem of the past?
It was one of the first duties of the Limanoran elders, after the
great series of purgations of the race, to organise and develop the
imagination they had in their midst. They had observed that there were
two great types and uses of the faculty; one was short of vision,
and could see with great distinctness the regions that were hidden
in twilight immediately in front of them; the other was far-sighted,
and could descry the features of wide regions that lay in darkness
under the horizon. There happened to be amongst them two families
distinguished from all others by their great imaginativeness, and from
each other by pre-eminence in one of these two kinds of imagination.
The task therefore was easy. It only needed care in disciplining
the members of these to the main purpose of the race, in developing
the faculty of each, and in recruiting their numbers from the most