Chapter XVI.
I have spoken so much of the Vril Staff that my reader may expect meto describe it. This I cannot do accurately, for I was never allowed tohandle it for fear of some terrible accident occasioned by my ignoranceof its use; and I have no doubt that it requires much skill and practicein the exercise of its various powers. It is hollow, and has in thehandle several stops, keys, or springs by which its force can bealtered, modified, or directed--so that by one process it destroys, byanother it heals--by one it can rend the rock, by another disperse thevapour--by one it affects bodies, by another it can exercise a certaininfluence over minds. It is usually carried in the convenient size ofa walking-staff, but it has slides by which it can be lengthened orshortened at will. When used for special purposes, the upper part restsin the hollow of the palm with the fore and middle fingers protruded.I was assured, however, that its power was not equal in all, butproportioned to the amount of certain vril properties in the wearer inaffinity, or 'rapport' with the purposes to be effected. Some were morepotent to destroy, others to heal, &c.; much also depended on the calmand steadiness of volition in the manipulator. They assert that thefull exercise of vril power can only be acquired by the constitutionaltemperament--i.e., by hereditarily transmitted organisation--and thata female infant of four years old belonging to the Vril-ya races canaccomplish feats which a life spent in its practice would not enablethe strongest and most skilled mechanician, born out of the pale of theVril-ya to achieve. All these wands are not equally complicated; thoseintrusted to children are much simpler than those borne by sages ofeither sex, and constructed with a view to the special object on whichthe children are employed; which as I have before said, is among theyoungest children the most destructive. In the wands of wives andmothers the correlative destroying force is usually abstracted, thehealing power fully charged. I wish I could say more in detail of thissingular conductor of the vril fluid, but its machinery is as exquisiteas its effects are marvellous.
I should say, however, that this people have invented certain tubes bywhich the vril fluid can be conducted towards the object it is meantto destroy, throughout a distance almost indefinite; at least I putit modestly when I say from 500 to 1000 miles. And their mathematicalscience as applied to such purpose is so nicely accurate, that onthe report of some observer in an air-boat, any member of the vrildepartment can estimate unerringly the nature of intervening obstacles,the height to which the projectile instrument should be raised, and theextent to which it should be charged, so as to reduce to ashes within aspace of time too short for me to venture to specify it, a capital twiceas vast as London.
Certainly these Ana are wonderful mathematicians--wonderful for theadaptation of the inventive faculty to practical uses.
I went with my host and his daughter Zee over the great public museum,which occupies a wing in the College of Sages, and in which are hoarded,as curious specimens of the ignorant and blundering experiments ofancient times, many contrivances on which we pride ourselves as recentachievements. In one department, carelessly thrown aside as obsoletelumber, are tubes for destroying life by metallic balls and aninflammable powder, on the principle of our cannons and catapults, andeven still more murderous than our latest improvements.
My host spoke of these with a smile of contempt, such as an artilleryofficer might bestow on the bows and arrows of the Chinese. In anotherdepartment there were models of vehicles and vessels worked by steam,and of an air-balloon which might have been constructed by Montgolfier."Such," said Zee, with an air of meditative wisdom--"such were thefeeble triflings with nature of our savage forefathers, ere they hadeven a glimmering perception of the properties of vril!"
This young Gy was a magnificent specimen of the muscular force to whichthe females of her country attain. Her features were beautiful, likethose of all her race: never in the upper world have I seen a face sogrand and so faultless, but her devotion to the severer studies hadgiven to her countenance an expression of abstract thought whichrendered it somewhat stern when in repose; and such a sternness becameformidable when observed in connection with her ample shoulders andlofty stature. She was tall even for a Gy, and I saw her lift up acannon as easily as I could lift a pocket-pistol. Zee inspired me with aprofound terror--a terror which increased when we came into a departmentof the museum appropriated to models of contrivances worked by theagency of vril; for here, merely by a certain play of her vril staff,she herself standing at a distance, she put into movement large andweighty substances. She seemed to endow them with intelligence, and tomake them comprehend and obey her command. She set complicated pieces ofmachinery into movement, arrested the movement or continued it, until,within an incredibly short time, various kinds of raw material werereproduced as symmetrical works of art, complete and perfect. Whatevereffect mesmerism or electro-biology produces over the nerves and musclesof animated objects, this young Gy produced by the motions of herslender rod over the springs and wheels of lifeless mechanism.
When I mentioned to my companions my astonishment at this influenceover inanimate matter--while owning that, in our world, I had witnessedphenomena which showed that over certain living organisations certainother living organisations could establish an influence genuine initself, but often exaggerated by credulity or craft--Zee, who was moreinterested in such subjects than her father, bade me stretch forth myhand, and then, placing it beside her own, she called my attention tocertain distinctions of type and character. In the first place, thethumb of the Gy (and, as I afterwards noticed, of all that race, male orfemale) was much larger, at once longer and more massive, than is foundwith our species above ground. There is almost, in this, as great adifference as there is between the thumb of a man and that of a gorilla.Secondly, the palm is proportionally thicker than ours--the texture ofthe skin infinitely finer and softer--its average warmth is greater.More remarkable than all this, is a visible nerve, perceptible under theskin, which starts from the wrist skirting the ball of the thumb, andbranching, fork-like, at the roots of the fore and middle fingers. "Withyour slight formation of thumb," said the philosophical young Gy, "andwith the absence of the nerve which you find more or less developed inthe hands of our race, you can never achieve other than imperfectand feeble power over the agency of vril; but so far as the nerve isconcerned, that is not found in the hands of our earliest progenitors,nor in those of the ruder tribes without the pale of the Vril-ya. It hasbeen slowly developed in the course of generations, commencing in theearly achievements, and increasing with the continuous exercise, of thevril power; therefore, in the course of one or two thousand years, sucha nerve may possibly be engendered in those higher beings of yourrace, who devote themselves to that paramount science through whichis attained command over all the subtler forces of nature permeatedby vril. But when you talk of matter as something in itself inertand motionless, your parents or tutors surely cannot have left you soignorant as not to know that no form of matter is motionless and inert:every particle is constantly in motion and constantly acted upon byagencies, of which heat is the most apparent and rapid, but vril themost subtle, and, when skilfully wielded, the most powerful. So that,in fact, the current launched by my hand and guided by my will does butrender quicker and more potent the action which is eternally at workupon every particle of matter, however inert and stubborn it may seem.If a heap of metal be not capable of originating a thought of its own,yet, through its internal susceptibility to movement, it obtains thepower to receive the thought of the intellectual agent at work on it; bywhich, when conveyed with a sufficient force of the vril power, it isas much compelled to obey as if it were displaced by a visible bodilyforce. It is animated for the time being by the soul thus infused intoit, so that one may almost say that it lives and reasons. Without thiswe could not make our automata supply the place of servants."
I was too much in awe of the thews and the learning of the young Gyto hazard the risk of arguing with her. I had read somewhere in myschoolboy days that a wise man, disputing with a Roman Emperor, sudden
lydrew in his horns; and when the emperor asked him whether he had nothingfurther to say on his side of the question, replied, "Nay, Caesar, thereis no arguing against a reasoner who commands ten legions."
Though I had a secret persuasion that, whatever the real effects ofvril upon matter, Mr. Faraday could have proved her a very shallowphilosopher as to its extent or its causes, I had no doubt that Zeecould have brained all the Fellows of the Royal Society, one after theother, with a blow of her fist. Every sensible man knows that it isuseless to argue with any ordinary female upon matters he comprehends;but to argue with a Gy seven feet high upon the mysteries of vril,--aswell argue in a desert, and with a simoon!
Amid the various departments to which the vast building of the Collegeof Sages was appropriated, that which interested me most was devoted tothe archaeology of the Vril-ya, and comprised a very ancient collectionof portraits. In these the pigments and groundwork employed were ofso durable a nature that even pictures said to be executed at dates asremote as those in the earliest annals of the Chinese, retained muchfreshness of colour. In examining this collection, two things especiallystruck me:--first, that the pictures said to be between 6000 and 7000years old were of a much higher degree of art than any produced withinthe last 3000 or 4000 years; and, second, that the portraits within theformer period much more resembled our own upper world and European typesof countenance. Some of them, indeed reminded me of the Italian headswhich look out from the canvases of Titian--speaking of ambition orcraft, of care or of grief, with furrows in which the passions havepassed with iron ploughshare. These were the countenances of men who hadlived in struggle and conflict before the discovery of the latent forcesof vril had changed the character of society--men who had fought witheach other for power or fame as we in the upper world fight.
The type of face began to evince a marked change about a thousand yearsafter the vril revolution, becoming then, with each generation, moreserene, and in that serenity more terribly distinct from the faces oflabouring and sinful men; while in proportion as the beauty and thegrandeur of the countenance itself became more fully developed, the artof the painter became more tame and monotonous.
But the greatest curiosity in the collection was that of three portraitsbelonging to the pre-historical age, and, according to mythicaltradition, taken by the orders of a philosopher, whose origin andattributes were as much mixed up with symbolical fable as those of anIndian Budh or a Greek Prometheus.
From this mysterious personage, at once a sage and a hero, all theprincipal sections of the Vril-ya race pretend to trace a common origin.
The portraits are of the philosopher himself, of his grandfather, andgreat-grandfather. They are all at full length. The philosopher isattired in a long tunic which seems to form a loose suit of scalyarmour, borrowed, perhaps, from some fish or reptile, but the feet andhands are exposed: the digits in both are wonderfully long, and webbed.He has little or no perceptible throat, and a low receding forehead, notat all the ideal of a sage's. He has bright brown prominent eyes, a verywide mouth and high cheekbones, and a muddy complexion. According totradition, this philosopher had lived to a patriarchal age, extendingover many centuries, and he remembered distinctly in middle life hisgrandfather as surviving, and in childhood his great-grandfather; theportrait of the first he had taken, or caused to be taken, while yetalive--that of the latter was taken from his effigies in mummy.The portrait of his grandfather had the features and aspect of thephilosopher, only much more exaggerated: he was not dressed, and thecolour of his body was singular; the breast and stomach yellow, theshoulders and legs of a dull bronze hue: the great-grandfather was amagnificent specimen of the Batrachian genus, a Giant Frog, 'pur etsimple.'
Among the pithy sayings which, according to tradition, the philosopherbequeathed to posterity in rhythmical form and sententious brevity, thisis notably recorded: "Humble yourselves, my descendants; the father ofyour race was a 'twat' (tadpole): exalt yourselves, my descendants, forit was the same Divine Thought which created your father that developsitself in exalting you."
Aph-Lin told me this fable while I gazed on the three Batrachianportraits. I said in reply: "You make a jest of my supposed ignoranceand credulity as an uneducated Tish, but though these horrible daubsmay be of great antiquity, and were intended, perhaps, for somerude caracature, I presume that none of your race even in the lessenlightened ages, ever believed that the great-grandson of a Frog becamea sententious philosopher; or that any section, I will not say of thelofty Vril-ya, but of the meanest varieties of the human race, had itsorigin in a Tadpole."
"Pardon me," answered Aph-Lin: "in what we call the Wrangling orPhilosophical Period of History, which was at its height about seventhousand years ago, there was a very distinguished naturalist, whoproved to the satisfaction of numerous disciples such analogical andanatomical agreements in structure between an An and a Frog, as toshow that out of the one must have developed the other. They had somediseases in common; they were both subject to the same parasitical wormsin the intestines; and, strange to say, the An has, in his structure, aswimming-bladder, no longer of any use to him, but which is a rudimentthat clearly proves his descent from a Frog. Nor is there any argumentagainst this theory to be found in the relative difference of size, forthere are still existent in our world Frogs of a size and stature notinferior to our own, and many thousand years ago they appear to havebeen still larger."
"I understand that," said I, "because Frogs this enormous are, accordingto our eminent geologists, who perhaps saw them in dreams, said to havebeen distinguished inhabitants of the upper world before the Deluge; andsuch Frogs are exactly the creatures likely to have flourished in thelakes and morasses of your subterranean regions. But pray, proceed."
"In the Wrangling Period of History, whatever one sage asserted anothersage was sure to contradict. In fact, it was a maxim in that age, thatthe human reason could only be sustained aloft by being tossed to andfro in the perpetual motion of contradiction; and therefore anothersect of philosophers maintained the doctrine that the An was not thedescendant of the Frog, but that the Frog was clearly the improveddevelopment of the An. The shape of the Frog, taken generally, was muchmore symmetrical than that of the An; beside the beautiful conformationof its lower limbs, its flanks and shoulders the majority of the Ana inthat day were almost deformed, and certainly ill-shaped. Again, the Froghad the power to live alike on land and in water--a mighty privilege,partaking of a spiritual essence denied to the An, since the disuseof his swimming-bladder clearly proves his degeneration from a higherdevelopment of species. Again, the earlier races of the Ana seem tohave been covered with hair, and, even to a comparatively recent date,hirsute bushes deformed the very faces of our ancestors, spreading wildover their cheeks and chins, as similar bushes, my poor Tish, spreadwild over yours. But the object of the higher races of the Ana throughcountless generations has been to erase all vestige of connection withhairy vertebrata, and they have gradually eliminated that debasingcapillary excrement by the law of sexual selection; the Gy-ei naturallypreferring youth or the beauty of smooth faces. But the degree of theFrog in the scale of the vertebrata is shown in this, that he hasno hair at all, not even on his head. He was born to that hairlessperfection which the most beautiful of the Ana, despite the culture ofincalculable ages, have not yet attained. The wonderful complication anddelicacy of a Frog's nervous system and arterial circulation were shownby this school to be more susceptible of enjoyment than our inferior, orat least simpler, physical frame allows us to be. The examination ofa Frog's hand, if I may use that expression, accounted for its keenersusceptibility to love, and to social life in general. In fact,gregarious and amatory as are the Ana, Frogs are still more so. Inshort, these two schools raged against each other; one asserting the Anto be the perfected type of the Frog; the other that the Frog was thehighest development of the An. The moralists were divided inopinion with the naturalists, but the bulk of them sided with theFrog-preference school. They said, with much plausibility, that in mo
ralconduct (viz., in the adherence to rules best adapted to the health andwelfare of the individual and the community) there could be no doubtof the vast superiority of the Frog. All history showed the wholesaleimmorality of the human race, the complete disregard, even by themost renowned amongst them, of the laws which they acknowledged to beessential to their own and the general happiness and wellbeing. But theseverest critic of the Frog race could not detect in their manners asingle aberration from the moral law tacitly recognised by themselves.And what, after all, can be the profit of civilisation if superiority inmoral conduct be not the aim for which it strives, and the test by whichits progress should be judged?
"In fine, the adherents of this theory presumed that in some remoteperiod the Frog race had been the improved development of the Human; butthat, from some causes which defied rational conjecture, they had notmaintained their original position in the scale of nature; while theAna, though of inferior organisation, had, by dint less of their virtuesthan their vices, such as ferocity and cunning, gradually acquiredascendancy, much as among the human race itself tribes utterly barbaroushave, by superiority in similar vices, utterly destroyed or reducedinto insignificance tribes originally excelling them in mental giftsand culture. Unhappily these disputes became involved with the religiousnotions of that age; and as society was then administered under thegovernment of the Koom-Posh, who, being the most ignorant, were ofcourse the most inflammable class--the multitude took the whole questionout of the hands of the philosophers; political chiefs saw that theFrog dispute, so taken up by the populace, could become a most valuableinstrument of their ambition; and for not less than one thousand yearswar and massacre prevailed, during which period the philosophers on bothsides were butchered, and the government of Koom-Posh itself was happilybrought to an end by the ascendancy of a family that clearly establishedits descent from the aboriginal tadpole, and furnished despotic rulersto the various nations of the Ana. These despots finally disappeared, atleast from our communities, as the discovery of vril led to the tranquilinstitutions under which flourish all the races of the Vril-ya."
"And do no wranglers or philosophers now exist to revive the dispute; ordo they all recognise the origin of your race in the tadpole?"
"Nay, such disputes," said Zee, with a lofty smile, "belong to thePah-bodh of the dark ages, and now only serve for the amusement ofinfants. When we know the elements out of which our bodies are composed,elements in common to the humblest vegetable plants, can it signifywhether the All-Wise combined those elements out of one form more thananother, in order to create that in which He has placed the capacity toreceive the idea of Himself, and all the varied grandeurs of intellectto which that idea gives birth? The An in reality commenced to existas An with the donation of that capacity, and, with that capacity, thesense to acknowledge that, however through the countless ages his racemay improve in wisdom, it can never combine the elements at its commandinto the form of a tadpole."
"You speak well, Zee," said Aph-Lin; "and it is enough for us shortlivedmortals to feel a reasonable assurance that whether the origin of theAn was a tadpole or not, he is no more likely to become a tadpole againthan the institutions of the Vril-ya are likely to relapse into theheaving quagmire and certain strife-rot of a Koom-Posh."
Chapter XVII.
The Vril-ya, being excluded from all sight of the heavenly bodies, andhaving no other difference between night and day than that which theydeem it convenient to make for themselves,--do not, of course, arrive attheir divisions of time by the same process that we do; but I found iteasy by the aid of my watch, which I luckily had about me, to computetheir time with great nicety. I reserve for a future work on the scienceand literature of the Vril-ya, should I live to complete it, all detailsas to the manner in which they arrive at their rotation of time; andcontent myself here with saying, that in point of duration, their yeardiffers very slightly from ours, but that the divisions of their yearare by no means the same. Their day, (including what we call night)consists of twenty hours of our time, instead of twenty-four, and ofcourse their year comprises the correspondent increase in the number ofdays by which it is summed up. They subdivide the twenty hours of theirday thus--eight hours,* called the "Silent Hours," for repose; eighthours, called the "Earnest Time," for the pursuits and occupations oflife; and four hours called the "Easy Time" (with which what I may termtheir day closes), allotted to festivities, sport, recreation, or familyconverse, according to their several tastes and inclinations.
* For the sake of convenience, I adopt the word hours, days, years,&c., in any general reference to subdivisions of time among the Vril-ya;those terms but loosely corresponding, however, with such subdivisions.
But, in truth, out of doors there is no night. They maintain, bothin the streets and in the surrounding country, to the limits of theirterritory, the same degree of light at all hours. Only, within doors,they lower it to a soft twilight during the Silent Hours. They havea great horror of perfect darkness, and their lights are never whollyextinguished. On occasions of festivity they continue the duration offull light, but equally keep note of the distinction between night andday, by mechanical contrivances which answer the purpose of our clocksand watches. They are very fond of music; and it is by music that thesechronometers strike the principal division of time. At every oneof their hours, during their day, the sounds coming from all thetime-pieces in their public buildings, and caught up, as it were, bythose of houses or hamlets scattered amidst the landscapes without thecity, have an effect singularly sweet, and yet singularly solemn.But during the Silent Hours these sounds are so subdued as to be onlyfaintly heard by a waking ear. They have no change of seasons, and, atleast on the territory of this tribe, the atmosphere seemed to me veryequable, warm as that of an Italian summer, and humid rather than dry;in the forenoon usually very still, but at times invaded by strongblasts from the rocks that made the borders of their domain. But timeis the same to them for sowing or reaping as in the Golden Isles of theancient poets. At the same moment you see the younger plants in blade orbud, the older in ear or fruit. All fruit-bearing plants, however, afterfruitage, either shed or change the colour of their leaves. But thatwhich interested me most in reckoning up their divisions of time was theascertainment of the average duration of life amongst them. I found onminute inquiry that this very considerably exceeded the term allotted tous on the upper earth. What seventy years are to us, one hundredyears are to them. Nor is this the only advantage they have over us inlongevity, for as few among us attain to the age of seventy, so, on thecontrary, few among them die before the age of one hundred; and theyenjoy a general degree of health and vigour which makes life itself ablessing even to the last. Various causes contribute to this result:the absence of all alcoholic stimulants; temperance in food; moreespecially, perhaps, a serenity of mind undisturbed by anxiousoccupations and eager passions. They are not tormented by our avariceor our ambition; they appear perfectly indifferent even to the desire offame; they are capable of great affection, but their love showsitself in a tender and cheerful complaisance, and, while forming theirhappiness, seems rarely, if ever, to constitute their woe. As the Gy issure only to marry where she herself fixes her choice, and as here, notless than above ground, it is the female on whom the happiness of homedepends; so the Gy, having chosen the mate she prefers to all others, islenient to his faults, consults his humours, and does her best to securehis attachment. The death of a beloved one is of course with them, aswith us, a cause for sorrow; but not only is death with them so muchmore rare before that age in which it becomes a release, but when itdoes occur the survivor takes much more consolation than, I am afraid,the generality of us do, in the certainty of reunion in another and yethappier life.
All these causes, then, concur to their healthful and enjoyablelongevity, though, no doubt, much also must be owing to hereditaryorganisation. According to their records, however, in those earlierstages of their society when they lived in communities resembling ours,agitated by fierce competition, their
lives were considerably shorter,and their maladies more numerous and grave. They themselves say thatthe duration of life, too, has increased, and is still on the increase,since their discovery of the invigorating and medicinal properties ofvril, applied for remedial purposes. They have few professional andregular practitioners of medicine, and these are chiefly Gy-ei, who,especially if widowed and childless, find great delight in the healingart, and even undertake surgical operations in those cases required byaccident, or, more rarely, by disease.
They have their diversions and entertainments, and, during the EasyTime of their day, they are wont to assemble in great numbers for thosewinged sports in the air which I have already described. They have alsopublic halls for music, and even theatres, at which are performedpieces that appeared to me somewhat to resemble the plays of theChinese--dramas that are thrown back into distant times for their eventsand personages, in which all classic unities are outrageously violated,and the hero, in once scene a child, in the next is an old man, and soforth. These plays are of very ancient composition, and their storiescast in remote times. They appeared to me very dull, on the whole,but were relieved by startling mechanical contrivances, and a kind offarcical broad humour, and detached passages of great vigour and powerexpressed in language highly poetical, but somewhat overcharged withmetaphor and trope. In fine, they seemed to me very much what the playsof Shakespeare seemed to a Parisian in the time of Louis XV., or perhapsto an Englishman in the reign of Charles II.
The audience, of which the Gy-ei constituted the chief portion, appearedto enjoy greatly the representation of these dramas, which, for sosedate and majestic a race of females, surprised me, till I observedthat all the performers were under the age of adolescence, andconjectured truly that the mothers and sisters came to please theirchildren and brothers.
I have said that these dramas are of great antiquity. No new plays,indeed no imaginative works sufficiently important to survive theirimmediate day, appear to have been composed for several generations. Infact, though there is no lack of new publications, and they have evenwhat may be called newspapers, these are chiefly devoted to mechanicalscience, reports of new inventions, announcements respecting variousdetails of business--in short, to practical matters. Sometimes a childwrites a little tale of adventure, or a young Gy vents her amorous hopesor fears in a poem; but these effusions are of very little merit,and are seldom read except by children and maiden Gy-ei. The mostinteresting works of a purely literary character are those ofexplorations and travels into other regions of this nether world,which are generally written by young emigrants, and are read with greatavidity by the relations and friends they have left behind.
I could not help expressing to Aph-Lin my surprise that a community inwhich mechanical science had made so marvellous a progress, and inwhich intellectual civilisation had exhibited itself in realisingthose objects for the happiness of the people, which the politicalphilosophers above ground had, after ages of struggle, pretty generallyagreed to consider unattainable visions, should, nevertheless, be sowholly without a contemporaneous literature, despite the excellenceto which culture had brought a language at once so rich and simple,vigourous and musical.
My host replied--"Do you not perceive that a literature such as you meanwould be wholly incompatible with that perfection of social or politicalfelicity at which you do us the honour to think we have arrived? We haveat last, after centuries of struggle, settled into a form of governmentwith which we are content, and in which, as we allow no differences ofrank, and no honours are paid to administrators distinguishing them fromothers, there is no stimulus given to individual ambition. No one wouldread works advocating theories that involved any political or socialchange, and therefore no one writes them. If now and then an An feelshimself dissatisfied with our tranquil mode of life, he does not attackit; he goes away. Thus all that part of literature (and to judge by theancient books in our public libraries, it was once a very large part),which relates to speculative theories on society is become utterlyextinct. Again, formerly there was a vast deal written respectingthe attributes and essence of the All-Good, and the arguments for andagainst a future state; but now we all recognise two facts, that thereIS a Divine Being, and there IS a future state, and we all equally agreethat if we wrote our fingers to the bone, we could not throw any lightupon the nature and conditions of that future state, or quicken ourapprehensions of the attributes and essence of that Divine Being. Thusanother part of literature has become also extinct, happily for ourrace; for in the time when so much was written on subjects which no onecould determine, people seemed to live in a perpetual state of quarreland contention. So, too, a vast part of our ancient literature consistsof historical records of wars an revolutions during the times when theAna lived in large and turbulent societies, each seeking aggrandisementat the expense of the other. You see our serene mode of life now; suchit has been for ages. We have no events to chronicle. What more of uscan be said than that, 'they were born, they were happy, they died?'Coming next to that part of literature which is more under the controlof the imagination, such as what we call Glaubsila, or colloquially'Glaubs,' and you call poetry, the reasons for its decline amongst usare abundantly obvious.
"We find, by referring to the great masterpieces in that departmentof literature which we all still read with pleasure, but of which nonewould tolerate imitations, that they consist in the portraiture ofpassions which we no longer experience--ambition, vengeance, unhallowedlove, the thirst for warlike renown, and suchlike. The old poets livedin an atmosphere impregnated with these passions, and felt vividly whatthey expressed glowingly. No one can express such passions now, for noone can feel them, or meet with any sympathy in his readers if he did.Again, the old poetry has a main element in its dissection of thosecomplex mysteries of human character which conduce to abnormal vices andcrimes, or lead to signal and extraordinary virtues. But our society,having got rid of temptations to any prominent vices and crimes, hasnecessarily rendered the moral average so equal, that there are novery salient virtues. Without its ancient food of strong passions, vastcrimes, heroic excellences, poetry therefore is, if not actually starvedto death, reduced to a very meagre diet. There is still the poetry ofdescription--description of rocks, and trees, and waters, and commonhousehold life; and our young Gy-ei weave much of this insipid kind ofcomposition into their love verses."
"Such poetry," said I, "might surely be made very charming; and we havecritics amongst us who consider it a higher kind than that which depictsthe crimes, or analyses the passions, of man. At all events, poetry ofthe inspired kind you mention is a poetry that nowadays commands morereaders than any other among the people I have left above ground."
"Possibly; but then I suppose the writers take great pains with thelanguage they employ, and devote themselves to the culture and polish ofwords and rhythms of an art?"
"Certainly they do: all great poets do that. Though the gift of poetrymay be inborn, the gift requires as much care to make it available as ablock of metal does to be made into one of your engines."
"And doubtless your poets have some incentive to bestow all those painsupon such verbal prettinesses?"
"Well, I presume their instinct of song would make them sing as the birddoes; but to cultivate the song into verbal or artificial prettiness,probably does need an inducement from without, and our poets find it inthe love of fame--perhaps, now and then, in the want of money."
"Precisely so. But in our society we attach fame to nothing which man,in that moment of his duration which is called 'life,' can perform. Weshould soon lose that equality which constitutes the felicitous essenceof our commonwealth if we selected any individual for pre-eminentpraise: pre-eminent praise would confer pre-eminent power, and themoment it were given, evil passions, now dormant, would awake: othermen would immediately covet praise, then would arise envy, and with envyhate, and with hate calumny and persecution. Our history tells us thatmost of the poets and most of the writers who, in the old time, werefavoured with the g
reatest praise, were also assailed by the greatestvituperation, and even, on the whole, rendered very unhappy, partlyby the attacks of jealous rivals, partly by the diseased mentalconstitution which an acquired sensitiveness to praise and to blametends to engender. As for the stimulus of want; in the first place, noman in our community knows the goad of poverty; and, secondly, if hedid, almost every occupation would be more lucrative than writing.
"Our public libraries contain all the books of the past which time haspreserved; those books, for the reasons above stated, are infinitelybetter than any can write nowadays, and they are open to all to readwithout cost. We are not such fools as to pay for reading inferiorbooks, when we can read superior books for nothing."
"With us, novelty has an attraction; and a new book, if bad, is readwhen an old book, though good, is neglected."
"Novelty, to barbarous states of society struggling in despair forsomething better, has no doubt an attraction, denied to us, who seenothing to gain in novelties; but after all, it is observed by one ofour great authors four thousand years ago, that 'he who studies oldbooks will always find in them something new, and he who reads new bookswill always find in them something old.' But to return to the questionyou have raised, there being then amongst us no stimulus to painstakinglabour, whether in desire of fame or in pressure of want, such as havethe poetic temperament, no doubt vent it in song, as you say the birdsings; but for lack of elaborate culture it fails of an audience,and, failing of an audience, dies out, of itself, amidst the ordinaryavocations of life."
"But how is it that these discouragements to the cultivation ofliterature do not operate against that of science?"
"Your question amazes me. The motive to science is the love of truthapart from all consideration of fame, and science with us too is devotedalmost solely to practical uses, essential to our social conversationand the comforts of our daily life. No fame is asked by the inventor,and none is given to him; he enjoys an occupation congenial to histastes, and needing no wear and tear of the passions. Man must haveexercise for his mind as well as body; and continuous exercise, ratherthan violent, is best for both. Our most ingenious cultivators ofscience are, as a general rule, the longest lived and the most free fromdisease. Painting is an amusement to many, but the art is not what itwas in former times, when the great painters in our various communitiesvied with each other for the prize of a golden crown, which gave them asocial rank equal to that of the kings under whom they lived. Youwill thus doubtless have observed in our archaeological department howsuperior in point of art the pictures were several thousand years ago.Perhaps it is because music is, in reality, more allied to science thanit is to poetry, that, of all the pleasurable arts, music is that whichflourishes the most amongst us. Still, even in music the absence ofstimulus in praise or fame has served to prevent any great superiorityof one individual over another; and we rather excel in choral music,with the aid of our vast mechanical instruments, in which we make greatuse of the agency of water,* than in single performers."
* This may remind the student of Nero's invention of a musical machine,by which water was made to perform the part of an orchestra, and onwhich he was employed when the conspiracy against him broke out.
"We have had scarcely any original composer for some ages. Our favoriteairs are very ancient in substance, but have admitted many complicatedvariations by inferior, though ingenious, musicians."
"Are there no political societies among the Ana which are animatedby those passions, subjected to those crimes, and admitting thosedisparities in condition, in intellect, and in morality, which the stateof your tribe, or indeed of the Vril-ya generally, has left behind inits progress to perfection? If so, among such societies perhaps Poetryand her sister arts still continue to be honoured and to improve?"
"There are such societies in remote regions, but we do not admit themwithin the pale of civilised communities; we scarcely even give them thename of Ana, and certainly not that of Vril-ya. They are savages, livingchiefly in that low stage of being, Koom-Posh, tending necessarily toits own hideous dissolution in Glek-Nas. Their wretched existence ispassed in perpetual contest and perpetual change. When they do not fightwith their neighbours, they fight among themselves. They are dividedinto sections, which abuse, plunder, and sometimes murder eachother, and on the most frivolous points of difference that would beunintelligible to us if we had not read history, and seen that we toohave passed through the same early state of ignorance and barbarism. Anytrifle is sufficient to set them together by the ears. They pretend tobe all equals, and the more they have struggled to be so, by removingold distinctions, and starting afresh, the more glaring and intolerablethe disparity becomes, because nothing in hereditary affections andassociations is left to soften the one naked distinction between themany who have nothing and the few who have much. Of course the many hatethe few, but without the few they could not live. The many are alwaysassailing the few; sometimes they exterminate the few; but as soon asthey have done so, a new few starts out of the many, and is harderto deal with than the old few. For where societies are large, andcompetition to have something is the predominant fever, there must bealways many losers and few gainers. In short, they are savages gropingtheir way in the dark towards some gleam of light, and would demand ourcommiseration for their infirmities, if, like all savages, they did notprovoke their own destruction by their arrogance and cruelty. Can youimagine that creatures of this kind, armed only with such miserableweapons as you may see in our museum of antiquities, clumsy iron tubescharged with saltpetre, have more than once threatened with destructiona tribe of the Vril-ya, which dwells nearest to them, because they saythey have thirty millions of population--and that tribe may have fiftythousand--if the latter do not accept their notions of Soc-Sec (moneygetting) on some trading principles which they have the impudence tocall 'a law of civilisation'?"
"But thirty millions of population are formidable odds against fiftythousand!"
My host stared at me astonished. "Stranger," said he, "you could nothave heard me say that this threatened tribe belongs to the Vril-ya; andit only waits for these savages to declare war, in order to commissionsome half-a-dozen small children to sweep away their whole population."
At these words I felt a thrill of horror, recognising much more affinitywith "the savages" than I did with the Vril-ya, and remembering all Ihad said in praise of the glorious American institutions, which Aph-Linstigmatised as Koom-Posh. Recovering my self-possession, I askedif there were modes of transit by which I could safely visit thistemerarious and remote people.
"You can travel with safety, by vril agency, either along the ground oramid the air, throughout all the range of the communities with whichwe are allied and akin; but I cannot vouch for your safety in barbarousnations governed by different laws from ours; nations, indeed, sobenighted, that there are among them large numbers who actually live bystealing from each other, and one could not with safety in the SilentHours even leave the doors of one's own house open."
Here our conversation was interrupted by the entrance of Taee, who cameto inform us that he, having been deputed to discover and destroy theenormous reptile which I had seen on my first arrival, had been on thewatch for it ever since his visit to me, and had began to suspect thatmy eyes had deceived me, or that the creature had made its way throughthe cavities within the rocks to the wild regions in which dwelt itskindred race,--when it gave evidences of its whereabouts by a greatdevastation of the herbage bordering one of the lakes. "And," said Taee,"I feel sure that within that lake it is now hiding. So," (turning tome) "I thought it might amuse you to accompany me to see the way wedestroy such unpleasant visitors." As I looked at the face of the youngchild, and called to mind the enormous size of the creature he proposedto exterminate, I felt myself shudder with fear for him, and perhapsfear for myself, if I accompanied him in such a chase. But my curiosityto witness the destructive effects of the boasted vril, and myunwillingness to lower myself in the eyes of an infant by betrayingapprehensions of per
sonal safety, prevailed over my first impulse.Accordingly, I thanked Taee for his courteous consideration for myamusement, and professed my willingness to set out with him on sodiverting an enterprise.