Limanora the island of progress
with its competitions and ambitions, social, artistic, political,
military, meant the triumph of cunning or force; it meant the
retrogression to the nakedest savagery hidden underneath the gewgaws
of civilisation. No real advance could be made by any form of humanity
so long as its ablest spirits were drawn into the furious struggle for
glory, in which the cruellest and most audacious cunning was bound
to win. The founders of new religions and new philosophies have been
strong spirits who saw the foul imbroglio before them in public life
and shrank back from it. The first aim of the Limanorans, when once
they had rid themselves of their more degenerate brethren, was to
abolish this contest of might and cunning, and turn their stronger
spirits to the true progress of themselves and their race. And little
difficulty was experienced in accomplishing this most fundamental
reform; the island had been purged of the furiously ambitious, of all
who longed for the naked palæstra of civilised savagery. They knew
better than most men how much of the essence of life was competition,
how necessary to all progress was the struggle for existence, how
fundamental was the law of the survival of the fittest. But they
realised vividly that nature unguided often chose false directions,
that the struggle may be in a myriad various arenas that differ greatly
from one another in nobleness or baseness, that the law if left to
itself might lead to the survival of the fiercest or cunningest or
basest according to the conditions that were to be fitted. The will
of man could work on the conditions, so elevating the struggle and
leading the law to a nobler issue. They did not, they could not, put
an end to the struggle. What they did was to withdraw it from false
grounds and false aims, and guard it from any appearance of the lower
nature, sensuality, cunning, or force. The competitive energy in every
Limanoran’s nature was bent towards his own future and the future of
his race, and strove to surpass the past, if it were great and noble,
and to cast it out, if it were base and threatened to reappear. To
strive upwards, to help the whole people to progress, these were the
aims that transformed the everlasting struggle and the ever-working law.
This revolution in existence accomplished, and public life having in
consequence vanished, there ceased all need of social display, of
conversational fireworks, and of tact in managing men either singly
or in masses. The object of gregarious education disappeared at once.
As long as the coarse and selfish struggle called public life was the
highest sphere, they knew the youth had to be trained for it, its
methods and aims had to be adopted, and schools and universities were a
necessity, as miniature reflections of the greater world. In order to
succeed in life they had to be rolled together and tumbled against one
another like pebbles in a stream till they had taken the conventional
smoothness of outline and similarity of sheen; they had to learn to
keep the wild beast in their hearts and the silken courtier in their
manners, to cloak untruth and hypocrisy in an appearance of brilliancy
or wisdom, to make grasping selfishness seem almost divine love, and
brutal cruelty and arrogance the most dazzling refinement. It was
painful to read the flashy lies and stabs in the dark that went for
wit, and the cruel intrigue and showy falsehood that went to the making
of history, in those old times. Even the friendship of the foremost was
but a piece of acting; little trust could be put in it; it served its
purpose and was abandoned as soon as it failed to impress the dupes.
And solitaries then seemed useless, moping self-analysers; they made
no history and they were soon forgotten. No parents could afford to
let any one of their children thus lose his life; and, however gentle
and meditative he might be by nature, he must be thrust into the cruel
struggle of school and university in order to acquire hardness and
brilliancy; however virtuous and noble in purpose, he had to prepare
for the arena of polished scoundrelism.
As soon as these conditions of competition ceased, education in masses
had to cease too; it must be a miniature of the general life and a
preparation for it. At a distance and in a haze it seems as if the
immature in their sports were leading a life of primitive and happy
innocence; but innocence often accompanies untamed passion and fierce
emulation. The appearance of simplicity comes from their ignorance of
the advance of the world. Nothing did the Limanorans so shudder at
as the chance of perpetuating the methods and habits of this early
and undeveloped stage throughout later life. What their associative
education in former times had done for them was to confirm the vices
of savagery under the gloved conventions that civilised life demanded,
and to destroy the simplicity for ever. Solitary training under
the supervision of sages, they soon found, had the reverse effect;
it confirmed the naturalness and spontaneity, and swept out the
inclination to intrigue and arrogance and cruelty.
There was a childlikeness in their natures that gave great beauty to
their faces; and this they retained through the longest life and the
most absorbing work. If there was one quality more than others which
marked them as a race, it was their gentle and trustful outlook upon
life, their naïve candour and transparency of character, their simple
wonder and delight over any new discovery or invention. They never
grudged the quiet admiration any word or action deserved. They never
assumed that tone of superiority or sophistication, which, coming as
it does from envy, jealousy, or malice, mars all praise or blame. They
were children to one another in the limpidity of their life. And so
their features, which had not often the attractions of regularity, had
come to be transfigured by this single-heartedness; however old and
experienced and wise they might be, all possessed this divine beauty of
childhood. Sailors and backwoodsmen, men who have to spend long periods
of their lives in comparative solitude, away from the sophistications
of crowded life, often reveal traces of this childlike beauty of
nature and expression. And it was this peculiar educational system and
its long intervals of solitary meditation that kept the Limanorans
children, simple and ingenuous, till the day each vanished in the ether.
What deprived these isolations of bitterness was that one never felt
lonely nor abandoned by his fellows during them. In a moment, there
could be communication in thought or magnetic sympathy with his dearest
friends, and within a brief space they would be at his side. They often
resisted the associative impulse, through fear that it might be but the
return of the old immaturity in disguise; and they knew that friendship
was ever at call, and that all true solitudes deepened the current of
life.
As I came to feel the spirit of their existence, these arguments grew
self-evident; I saw how all-important to progress were these intervals
of isolation. They had studied with the minutest care and ultimate
shuddering the features of their old civilisation, and they had found
that the worst of them came from the associative principle in the
training of youth. Atavism became their greatest horror; in the breast
of every child born into civilised life an embryo savage is born, and
this had been vitalised and fostered by sympathy with what was savage
in companions and schoolmates. Under their old school and university
systems the age of training was that which corresponded to the military
stage in the development of man; and boys were for ever fighting, girls
ever encouraging to fight; emulation became fierce rivalry and hatred.
A crude stage of the past was confirmed and perpetuated through life
by constant association in the time of life that stood for it. That
was why their leisured classes had so devoted themselves during peace
to the wilder sports of the hunting stage of mankind, whilst they were
ever itching for war that their sons might distinguish themselves.
That was why they had indulged so often in breaches of the marriage
bond, and outraged the monogamy that they professed to revere; the
minds of the youth had been inflamed by the free proximity of the
sexes before the passions had been mastered, before the polygamous and
unmoral stage of their career had been passed through. And education,
instead of checking the perpetuation of these immaturities, encouraged
it. Teachers had come to pride themselves in the development of these
savage stages of boyhood and girlhood, and called the weaknesses
by euphemistic names, pluck, pride, grace. The young men and women
were taught to glory in them. And thus evil became eternal. In more
primitive life, there had been of necessity a wiser method of training.
There were no large centres of population where their youth was massed
in schools and universities. Families wandered or rested by themselves;
and the hardships of existence ensured the survival of the few that
were fittest. These few had from their earliest years to join their
elders in their pursuits, and they learned in such society to pass
rapidly through the primitive stages of man’s development, emulating
the skill of their betters and following them with modesty and
reverence. In the later industrial and centralistic ages the youth had
to be massed educationally, and by the mutual encouragement of sympathy
came to glory in their immaturities as perfections, and desired to
prolong the savage stage of their life into later years. They judged
their elders by false and atavistic standards and so lost their
modesty and reverence. It was only an occasional wave of lofty feeling
issuing from some inspired poet or prophet that raised one generation
above the preceding. For centuries and centuries they stood still or
retrograded. Crimes were sanctified in war and politics; the evil past
became a fetich; impetuosity, anger, hatred, revenge, falsehood, lust,
were tricked out in the apparel of virtues, and made the aims and the
glories of the leisured. It was the associative method of education
that produced such results. And, after the great purgation of the race,
they were amazed to see how blind they had been. Would any civilised
parents agree to send out their child into the wilderness there to
spend the educable period of life amongst savages, primitive in their
instincts and habits, even if the savages had the most persuasive and
influential missionaries amongst them who would change them in a few
years into civilised beings? Yet this was what their ancestors had been
doing when they concentrated youth in schools and universities.
Never before the age of twenty-five were the Limanoran youth allowed
any freedom of social intercourse, and then only for brief periods and
under the supervision of sages. And if there was any sign of atavism
apparent in them at their first draught of social life, back they were
sent into isolation, that their character might be strengthened, and
the stage of peril passed. Even when socially enfranchised, their first
companions had lived beyond their fiftieth year. By that boundary-line,
it was held, all the risk of atavism had passed, and all the chances
and possibilities of the character had been discovered and provided
for. It was not till the seventy-fifth year that anyone was supposed
to be fit for parenthood; for then, though the faculties and powers
still went on improving even till death, most of them had reached the
maturity of self-control and intersubordination; then reason had begun
to be master, and all the stages of the development of man before the
final purgation of the race had been traversed.
Only a few years before this epoch in their lives were they permitted