Limanora the island of progress
The Limanorans had got rid of some of this indignity inasmuch as the
elders and wise men took command of the instinct of sex, and bent it
in the direction of their own line of advance. In other peoples, and
especially in the West, it stumbled blindly on, led sometimes by the
love of youthful beauty, sometimes by the love of money, sometimes
by the necessities of position and diplomacy, most frequently by
ambition and the love of power or social influence, seldom or never by
the deliberate intent of producing noble posterity. As a consequence
retrogression in health, physique, morality, or intellectual power
was seen in all ranks far oftener than progress. Over the whole
there might be a slight advance in centuries; but in most families
it was one generation forward and the next back. This people had by
their purgations become the assistants of nature; and since the era
of the exilings they had wisely piloted sex to serve the highest
purposes of evolution. The young were still driven half-blindly by
the sting of sex, and might by chance accelerate progress; but the
elders without revealing their art wisely controlled the instinct,
and by the governance of proximity and opportunity, companionship and
circumstances, amongst the immature made it the guardian and keeper of
past advance and the prompter of still renewed advance. The final step
was pictured by this new imaginative book, the supersession of sex and
the deliberate creation of posterity. This would relieve the elders
of their anxious task of match-making, and put into the hands of the
pairs themselves the control of the parental instinct and the power of
improving their posterity.
Even as it was, I could see, from the axioms and postulates of this
book of Asexuality, and the impression it made on my friends and
companions, that the sex-instinct was already to a large extent under
the control of those whom it impelled. It had become, like their
appetite for food, saturated with intellect and deliberation. It was
no mere goad that drove them on in the dark stumbling towards some
object that would gratify the passion. They knew its physiological and
psychological working, and understood how the destinies of the race
waited upon the wisdom or folly of its guidance. Not even the youngest
of them would allow it the caprice and perverse whimsicality that was
considered its native prerogative in the West. The passionate whim of
the moment for “a grey eye or so” was no more to them than toothache
or the pangs of indigestion, an aberrancy from healthy nature, to be
checked and healed as soon as possible. I found that I was far in
the rear of their advance in respect to love. My Western heroics and
amorous transports were discounted and yet curiously watched as the
antiquated manners of an age long gone by. Nothing gave so keen a
shock to my self-approval as the smile that played upon the face of
Thyriel when I first broke into the raptures of adoration for her which
are the natural expression of passionate love in my native Europe.
Romeo-and-Julietism had been consecrated by centuries of the traditions
of Christendom as the true attitude and conduct of lovers. And here
was I, only fulfilling the instinct and bursting into the appropriate
transports of passion, reined in by what I thought at first the
cynicism of my Juliet. The smile would have been cynical on the lips of
a young European inamorata. In Thyriel it was no more than the amused
recognition of manners which she had laughed at in studying the ancient
history and literature of the island, as if I had seen a comrade in the
commonness of European daily life adopting the language and attitude of
Homeric or Ossianic heroes.
I grew ashamed of the amorous ardours of the West, and, when I felt
the tendency to erotic idolatry come upon me, I kept it to myself.
Even then I knew that I was centuries behind my Limanoran coevals in
the rational guidance of the sexual instinct. Nothing brought this so
clearly to my mind as the reception of the book of Asexuality. During
its dramatic publication I looked round to see the shock of unnatural
innovation on the faces of the audience, or the shrinking of modesty,
or the sense of outraged religious or traditional instincts. But there
was none of these to be found there. The ideal was accepted at once as
the proper and possible goal of the race, and the book was treasured
amongst the sacred literature of the time.
It soon flashed upon me, too, as I frequented Loomiefa, that their
art had all a far higher purpose than I had conjectured from my
European experience. It was not meant merely to stir or to satisfy
the sense of beauty and harmony, but to implant in the emotions and
the imagination the love of the future and the passion for rising in
the scale of existence. I grew ashamed to think that I had attributed
to this wonderful people the frivolity and even lowness of aim that I
had so often seen in European art. Here was a drama that the West had
not even a conception of. At its best the stage of Europe professed to
educate by representing heroic scenes from the past, by evolving from
them lessons for the audience, and by stirring their enthusiasm for
great deeds of history or myth. In its commonest mood it reproduced in
mimic form some scene or action from contemporary life. At its worst
it was but a pander to the survivals of a gross and animal past. What
I now thought of as the Limanoran stage was wholly occupied with the
future, so far as it was a possible evolution from the present. The
noblest ideal that the imagination of the race could shape was brought
dramatically before the people that their thoughts and ambitions might
be fixed on something beyond themselves.
For this high purpose and not for luxury or personal enjoyment their
sculpture and painting and music had been developed, and the newest
discoveries and inventions of science had been brought to their aid.
There was no objection to what gave pleasure; but to spend the thought
and effort of the fully developed human mind on that alone was, they
held, a degradation. Strenuous endeavour towards a higher and better
future was the note that characterised their pursuits. But, if they
could add attractiveness to the prosecution of the aim, the task
was all the easier; if they could make the path ahead beautiful and
pleasant so as to decoy the reluctant senses onwards, the pace would be
all the swifter.
Even with this high aim, I could not understand how this people, who
loathed all pretence, could condescend to their dramatic art; for on
this stage of Loomiefa were members of their community representing in
their persons what they were not and could not be for many ages. And I
had heard them often decry the histrionic art as one that encouraged
in the actors a habit of delighting in mere semblance and superficial
show, a habit that is the basis of hypocrisy and deceit; whilst the
love of mimicry and pageantry, I had been led to believe, had vanished
from the island at one of the last purgations of the race.
The seeming contradiction was afterwards explained. As one of the
necessary steps in my initiation into the privileges and duties of
the mature citizen I was led behind the scenes. Through the gorge at
the upper end of the valley I passed into a great hall that seemed to
me a combination of a museum and workshop. Here were the youth of the
Loomiamo and the Fraloomiamo at work upon automata and the elaborate
machinery that would guide their motions. Had I kept at a distance
from them as they worked, I would have thought that the play of human
sculpture was being again enacted, such exact reproductions of the
human system were the figures that grew under their hands. In one
section stood thousands of what I would have called statues, which had
served in the publication of former books. In another the puppets were
going through dramatic scenes by way of experimentation, and in many
the illusion was complete; I should have said that human beings were
talking and acting. In others there was some imperfection, and there
one could see that they were all mere fantoccini galvanised into life.
In a third section the tissues and parts that were to make mimic men
and women were being manufactured; the workers and artists could draw
on Rimla for as much force as they needed, whilst the advice of the
scientific families was at their command. The machinery of the great
workshop was bewildering in its complexity and refinement. The finest
tissue or nerve of the human brain could be here imitated so that under
a microscope I would have said it was part of a living body.
After all it was only the acting of marionettes that I had seen upon
the stage in the valley. But it was greatly aided by another department
where the pioneering families cultivated the art and science of
illusions. They could imitate the human voice at any point in the
valley measured to the fraction of an inch; they could reproduce any
scene of history, of contemporary existence, or of futuritive fiction
so exactly, making it so full of the lights and shadows of life and of
the developments of all advance, that none of the senses unaided by the
reasoning and analytic faculties could assert that the men and women
were not living, and that their actions and words were not real. Even
the electric sense could be deluded by the impulses manufactured by
these machinists and illusionists; it would take the magnetic thrills
it received for genuine enthusiasm and sympathy from the mind of a
man or from a crowd. This department was even more important than the
factory of puppets; for it made the play of the marionettes look still
more human on the stage. After all it was not the puppets themselves
I had watched with such breathless excitement, but a mere illusory
picture of their proceedings; the illusion was far more lifelike than
the play of the marionettes themselves. So much stress did they lay
on stirring the imagination and emotions of the race in favour of the
ideals of the future that half the work of these two families consisted
in the dramatic publication of their books.
The next sacred book I saw produced in Loomiefa would have of itself
persuaded me that this people could have nothing to do with the
histrionic art or any art that would encourage the habit of pretence
and show in the individual nature. It was called the book of Human
Transparency and described the various methods by which the inner
working of the human brain could be made patent to Limanoran senses.
The tissues could be clarified; the significance of every fibre and
nerve could be made familiar to all as an essential part of their
education; the eye, the ear, and the firla could be made more subtle
and acute in their perceptions, till at last they were able to tell
in a moment everything that was proceeding beneath the skull and
within the heart. What was done slowly and painfully by the medical
elders with the help of their instruments, their hypnotic powers,
and the interpretation of dreams, every man would be able to do
instantaneously, and without extraneous aid, exceptional wisdom, or
occult powers. The general drift of a neighbour’s emotions was known to
everyone through his magnetic senses, but not the particular intention
or thought; this would be known only after the long course of training
and development mapped out in the book of Human Transparency.
One of the chief ethical purposes that had in recent times been fixed
in the mind of the community was to eject from the human system all
elements and processes that were offensive to the finer feelings and
senses, everything in fact that a man or woman might be ashamed of
or wish to conceal. The new book of the time aimed at extending this