 Chapter 3 Part 2 of Lymanora, the Island of Progress by Godfrey Swevin. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. DEATH PART II But as the purgation proceeded, every occasion for it naturally disappeared. Ceremonial ceased when the church lapsed and the priestly profession went into exile. Ceremonia vanished with the expulsion of the militant elements and the professional politicians. The Bureau of Fame collapsed with its accursed spawn, unchartableness and evil feeling, servility, adulation, and pretense. The Phariseeism of the whole system stood out in all its offensiveness, and the foulness and injustice that were concealed by this constant masquerade in the robes of greatness. It was meant to overaw the unthinking, to make ignorance grovel at the feet of those in power. It had been useful in far past times of savagery encouling the beast in the human mind and keeping it caged, but a form that has life and meaning and power in the router stages of development becomes a curse, if continued into periods of advanced civilization. They now felt that their elaborate symbolism had been an insult to their intelligence, for they had no brutality in them to be muzzled. To keep up the pretense of greatness or virtue or love or respect or truth, where there was none, was useful as long as most of the community were ignorant or superstitious or fierce and intolerant in disposition. But when the race had grown gentle and humane, and more and more progressive, it was not merely a farce to retain so much deception and murmuring life. It was a gross outrage on all that was just and noble and spiritual. Why should not the reverence or affection of the human spirit be allowed to shine forth from the countenance without such ridiculous trammels, such coarse humiliations? Forms compelling a show of reverence or love where there is none, are but the trappings of slaves, and soon ingrain the thoughts and feelings of slaves on the one side, whilst bringing out and confirming the nature of bullies and tyrants on the other. Every relic of a past that had harbored and perpetuated such a system was painfully ejected from their natures. They would have nothing in them that savored of such a death in life. All mere forms, all ceremonials and ceremonies had to go. Ostentation and parade became abhorrent to them. Pagent and spectacle, pomp and salminity vanished from their lives. All formality of manner or intercourse, even etiquette and salutation, was driven out with contundly. One of the most singular effects of this expulsion of mere symbolism was the disappearance of ridicule and jest. This disappearance was quite unexpected, and yet, when they came to reflect on the phenomenon, they saw how natural it was. The obverse of the passion for applause and influence is necessarily the desire to depreciate possible rivals, to make them seem small, and even to trample them in the dust. And the most successful and least apparently ill-natured method of fulfilling this is to get them laughed at and so contempt. With the ignoble itch for fame went the love of ridicule. The jesters, habitual as well as professional, disappeared with the priests, the soldiers, the lawyers, and the politicians. Not that the Lymanorans abandoned the use of humor. They still saw too clearly the incongruities of existence, cosmic as well as human, to cease bringing them out in startling flashes of vivid expression. They never indulged in that boisterous laughter, which is so often thought in the West the simplest and most primitive guarantee of enjoyment. For that is as much a waste of valuable tissue as uncontrollable grief. Their laughter was of that low, gentle tolerant, almost inward kind, which brightens the nature to its very heart, its only outer mark was perhaps a smile. Never indeed was I amongst a people that looked at existence so cheerfully, or enjoyed its little ironies with so light-hearted geniality. Boyancy, joyousness, was the most constant characteristics of their spirits. Their intercourse with each other was ever sunny and pleasant witted, though never jocular. There was no malice or false sense of superiority in their humor or laughter. But just they came to abhor as an indignity to the human spirit, which was striving to obliterate all traces of its ape ancestry. The jester implied or produced contempt for his topic, for his victim, and generally for himself. He usually adopted mimicry as the easiest method of bringing about his effect. And so he nursed the ape in him and pointed back to the vile type from which he had sprung. It was the other kinship of man, his divine relationship, that the Lymanorans preferred to acknowledge and nurture. Never did they forget it in their conduct. It molded their ideals, it directed their purposes, it created their instincts. And to use ridicule was to outrage it, to call up the beast in them, the element, the ancestry that they did their best to forget. Whenever the sense of mutual sympathy crept through the community, the degradation of jest and ridicule, not for the victim alone, but for the jester, became self-evident. They were felt to be inhumane, if not inhuman, and died an easy death with all the vast system of symbolism. It was a surprise to me, then, to see so large an assemblage winging their way to Dumalona. It seemed as if there was about to be a great ceremonial. And I was not long in doubt as to the occasion. For with music that rose and fell in marvelous rhythm like the waves of the sea, there came across the sky a splendid flight car, more brilliant in an opalescent glow, more majestic in architecture than anything I had ever seen. Its wings flashed fire through the air, and seemed to weave the lightning of heaven into a diaphanous web. It was a car of victory. For a rounded bands of flying youth raised jubilant harmony, and over its rear rose a canopy crowned with fire. As it floated near I could see beneath this a figure resting upon an elevated couch. The music grew more loudly triumphant as it hoovered downwards to the central plateau of the hill of farewells. And then I knew that this was Amherlana on the couch, and all the people, except the few who were needed for the essential services of the island, had assembled to bid him farewell, as he spit in front of them into the land of shadows, whether no I could penetrate. I had, without knowing, it landed close to Thairiel, so absorbed had I been in the wondrous spectacle. She had been busy with the chorus of acclaim, her thoughts bent on this rare scene of farewell, and she had not noticed my approach. Then a sudden silence, as Amherlana stepped from the Felina, startled the great concourse out of their entranced attitude, their thoughts were set free as by the touch of a magic wand. It was at this that Thairiel became conscious of my presence. I knew in a moment that she had recognized the criticism in my mind. Yet she did not answer or explain the anomaly. She remained perfectly still. A burst of jubilant music broke my reverie, as the sudden silence had broken it before. It led me back to the symphony of the spheres to which I had been accustomed to listen with rapt attention. I could recognize the harmonious strain that meant the creation of a world. I could almost see the whirling orb of fire, as it flew off from the parent sun, and swept into its glowing round through heaven. Nothing I had ever heard could match the rapturous melody which expressed the approach of life to the surface of the new star. Quicker and quicker grew the pace, and higher the pitch, as the living creation developed and spread over the world. Then came a wild dithram, as man broke from his bestial surroundings and mastered his fellow beast by cunning, and drew fire from heaven for his purposes. A nobler strain followed, rhythmically measuring the steps by which he rose out of himself and climbed the steep of heaven. Silver-toned harmonies told of his masterpieces of art. Loud Diapason spoke out his marching armies in fierce battles. Soft involved fugues and dulcet chants expressed the struggles and conquests of thought. I stood absorbed in the interpretation of this ravishing music, and failed to observe the progress of events upon the lofty plateau. Amor Lano had taken up an erect position on what might have been called an altar, had the seen been a religious one. His face was towards heaven. He held his right hand as if waving back those whom he forbade to follow him. For close to him stood the partner of his earthly life. Her face said as if she would depart. Around stood his lifelong comrades and counselors, yet at a lower level, so that every act of the departing could be seen by the concourse. Near him were erected two columns, on the higher of which and above his head I could distinguish a psychometer, on the lower a biometer. Behind him had been built into the rock an elaborate piece of machinery, which I recognized as a manana or petrifier. Often had I seen it transfixed almost in a moment a beautiful plant, substituting irlinium for its living tissues, and making every leaf and flower of its translucent crystal. By means of electric currents it sent streams of the atomic constituents of irlinium along the sap channels from rootlet to leaf-tip. It used the living powers of the plant to turn it as it died into undecaying metal. For hundreds of years the flower would live and be a thing of beauty, even if no care was further spent on it. And if cared for it would resist the finger of decay for thousands and thousands of years. At last I was to see the transfiguration of Alimonoran. I had often almost doubted the origin of those lifelike statues that stood in phialume, and death was so rare a thing among this long-lived people, that during my many years amongst them I had never had the opportunity of satisfying the doubt. Curiosity overshadowed my other feelings and made me forget the grief which would keep creeping into my heart at this farewell scene in spite of the jubilant music. I strained every nerve and sense to catch the features of the strange event. Thaeriel, I fell, was as eager as I to see all that would occur, and I could see that the younger half of the concourse had their attention closely riveted upon the scene. The observer of the biometer raised his eyes to the indicator, which had now begun to move in rapid oscillations. Mr. Llano lifted the forefinger of his left hand as if giving a signal. He looked back a moment with longing in his eyes at his life-partner. From the Manana there sprang out an upright groove toward the dying man, and in this he was caught, as his vitality rose to its greatest effort before the final collapse. The indicator of the pterolan shot upwards with great violence and then fell still. Almost at the same moment the guardian who stood on the loftier column beside the psychometer raised himself in agitation. The indicator had begun the same violent oscillations as that of the biometer. There could be little doubt that the individual energy or soul of the vanished Amor Llano had passed near it in his flight upwards. Through the brief and impressive scene the note of creation rang in the music that filled the air, and never that of dissolution. Then burst forth the chorus of freedom, which was the national song, if anything might be so-called. It was the liberation of the energy of their friend and comrade that they united to celebrate, his entrance on a new career untrammeled by lower forms of inert energy. The music rose as if on wings, higher, higher, ever more exilerant. There were in it none of the undertones or deeper notes, or mystic subtleties that mark so many of their sferal harmonies. It was a sound of pure joy, ethereal, supernal, unalloyed by any terrain longings. Who could think of grief, or the bitterness of farewells, as long as it rang through the sky? Courage, self-confidence to climb upwards was the only emotion that could live with joy in its presence. Suddenly the music broke away into a tempest of cosmic melody. Now wailed forth the wild song of dissolution of worlds, again clashing of conflicting systems, followed by the surge of new life in orbs that were to whirl through space and elevate the existence upon them for thousands of thousands of ages. It was the music of mingled creation and disintegration, of development and decay which we heard once more. Our thoughts were recalled from the heights of heaven. Whether the lost personality of our guide and friend had fled, we were absorbed again in the struggle of a mixed existence. We felt again the agonies of the higher active energies bound to lower and merely latent energies. My eyes came down to the scene of the last farewell. There stood the almost living statue of our vanished brother, erect, eager as for flight, as at the moment when his energy had gone forth. But now it had the color of metallic translucence of the thousands I had seen in phialume. The transfiguration was complete. But there was more on the plateau than the figure of what had been. Beside it with wrapped, pleading gaze on her face, stood yet unmoved the life comrade of the vanished, the manana that was again in position, the observers again stood by the biometer and the psychometer. Another scene of departure and transfiguration was to be enacted. The whole consciousness of the community had granted without words the petition of Amarillo's spouse. Nothing seemed to be so fitting as that the two should leave their trampled life together, and within the space of a few hundred beatings of the paltz, partner had followed partner. The two lives, joined for so many centuries, had come to a close together. Out into infinite space had fled the two intertwined energies, only a few heartbeats apart. Perhaps together they would find their new sphere, their new platform for a still higher flight through the diviner stages of existence. The Lymanorans, when they had reached what they considered the limits of their usefulness in corporeal life, gained an instinctive knowledge of the moment when death was certain to come, or perhaps it was an instinctive power of dying. It is a common thing to see amongst savage or half-civilized tribes, a man or woman in full health, deliberately lie down, turn the face away from friends and light, and prepare to die. They seem to know when their destiny is coming upon them, and nothing will persuade them to take measures for driving it off. Strong though the currents of life may be flowing in the veins at the moment, it is not long before they have completely ebbed, and left the body a pulseless mass of inert matter. It was this instinct, whether prophetic or suicidal, that the aged amongst this people seemed to resume when they had weighed the vital powers in their systems against the duties that new ages with their progress would bring, and found them wanting. Many seemed to speak out to them, when they saw the transference of the minus to the wrong side. Their minds were made up, and it needed but a few days or hours to set the imprisoned energy free. In these later and more scientific ages there was some delay, and not uncommonly a postponement of the departure. A careful examination of the system by means of their new scientific instruments revealed some radical mistake in the judgment of the elder as to himself, or the demands of a new age of discovery made the need of more brains and hands imperative. The result was the same in both cases. The reason was persuaded to give up its resolve. Life flowed on in the veins with even power again. All the old duties were resumed, and the day of farewells was put off till a more convenient season. But once they were convinced that they were retarding progress instead of accelerating it, the end they felt was within measurable distance, they straight away relinquished their grasp of life. They withdrew purpose and power of will from all their vital functions, and the moment of the final collapse was practically within their own choice, as soon as they had the consciousness of the whole community with them. Here stood two solid memorials to the working of this prescient or devitalizing power. The beauty of expression on the two faces was very striking. The attitudes were as natural and noble as life itself. That of Amarilano, bidding his partner farewell, hers full of loving petition to follow. That the whole people approved was clear in the hardiness with which they broke into the song of liberation. Everyone was glad that the energies of these two, who had done their full duty by the race, were free to enter other spheres, and follow other than the terrain methods of advance. Reverently, but still with great rejoicing, the family of the departed placed the two life-like statues in the car of victory, and guided it in triumphal flight to the Valley of Memories. Then the people as reverently and joyously bent their way to the duties they had left. I stood in a daydream of the strange but noble ways of life that this people followed, and suddenly awakened to find myself alone on the hill of farewells, overlooking the ocean. Sorrow over the departures I had witnessed well back into my heart. I had not yet got rid of the old attitude of Western civilization towards death. With the sorrow mingled still with the old curiosity, questions sprang into my mind concerning the significance of the ceremony I had seen. Or was it a ceremony? I was startled with the answer in the negative. It came from Thairiel, who, knowing my doubts, had remained to solve them. Soon I knew the whole meaning of the scene. It was not premeditated. There was nothing deliberate about it except the deaths themselves. The dullness of my own inner senses had prevented me from knowing the common impulse of the race towards Dumalona. As soon as Amor Lano had finally resolved to die, the consciousness of his resolve spread over the island, and stirred the people at their duties to common action. They knew that the hill of farewells would be the scene of the departure, and in bands singing them cosmic music of farewell. They made their flight through the air to give at last valediction to the Voyager, into the unknown, and to impart to him in his final effort, on earth, all magnetic power they could spare for him on his journey. Every act of what I had thought was a ceremonial, was the natural and spontaneous impulse of a people united in spirit. Their music and the changes in it were due to no leader or signal, but to the sympathetic inspiration of the moment. Their creational chant was an assertion of their mood of belief that this scene was one of advance, and not of retrogression, of development and not of decay, that the act was as much an act of cosmic life as the creation of a world. Certain portions of the system were about to become manifestly inert, those which were called bodily and material, but which were as truly forms of energy as the individual energy that was being liberated. They were made unchanging, permanent for a time, and so were unable to progress or retrograde. They were to retain their energy in latency for a period long or short, but at least they too, when their immediate purpose of the remembrance of the vanished was served, would be set free to take other forms. Their creational music was intended, if there was any intention in so spontaneous a thing, to keep before their minds the progressive and evolutionary nature of death, and to quell the old and barbarous attitude of grief which might attempt to show itself when they were bidding the final farewell to a comrade. It was meant to bring into prominence the joy of the spirit freed from the bondage to lower forms of energy, and the delight of all who remained in the progress of the cosmos, even though the immediate act should imply a separation of a loved spirit from them. It helped them to repress any sadness at the thought that they might never recognize the energy of their lost comrade again as an individual and personal thing. Enough for them that the sum of existence should be enriched by the change which was occurring to him. But it was not a grief to them that the parting was perhaps eternal, as far as personal recognition went. The question rose spontaneously in my mind, and I was answered almost before I had thought it. The doubt was still unsolved whether as impersonal energy they developed into something new at death, and for ever ceased to bear marks and memories of the phase of existence they had just left, or whether they sallied forth from the bonds of allure and inert energy into the freer scope of infinity, an individual and complete unity. This doubt, they were certain, would be solved someday by scientific experiment. Meantime there were compensating advantages, whichever alternative was true. If they continued the personality they had already developed on earth without breaking in consciousness or memory, then would they recognize their old comrades and partners in limanur and life, and make further progress through existence together? If, on the other hand, there was a break in the continuity, and only as an impersonal energy they passed forth into the interstellar spaces, then would there be the obliteration of all the animal and barbarous past which they abhorred, as well as of the immediate and limanorn past which they loved. Any being that has advanced much to its more recent stages must naturally try to forget the lower stages through which it has gone in a more distant past. They were, by no means proud of their relationship to their exiles, or to the still older and wider humanity existing outside of their archipelago. To remember it was to encourage the lower and less advancing men in them. To forget it was one of the ethical duties which their progress demanded. It was only as a horror, a possible hell into which they might fall, if they retrograded, that it was still brought before them. A racer nation that remains long proud of its past must be imperceptibly progressive, if it is progressive at all. Its ethical point of view is stationary, its morals and religion are stagnant. The history of a people should rapidly come to seem ignoble to it, if it does its duty to itself and its progress. What is the history of other races but a record of wars, of wholesale slaughters, because of the ambition of a man or a section of men? And as long as we are proud of such a past we can never advance. To have an ancestry nobler than ourselves is an undying disgrace, and to suggest such a thing to a man should be considered the grossest insult. Where a people is developing as it ought to develop in the brief period it has upon earth, oblivion should be one of its foremost duties to all, but its immediate past. Man has forgotten his bestial ancestry so effectually that when he comes across the manifest relics of the relationship in his system he is startled and wildly denies it. If he progressed as rapidly as he ought to do, after there has been implanted in him the divine principle of reason, then would he as surely cast into oblivion his savage and semi-civilized ancestry? Out with the ape and all relics and memories of it is the struggle of thinking men. To be done with the crude undeveloped past is the duty of progressive men. The ideal of today should be the common place of tomorrow and the disgrace of next week. It was useful to study the immediate past in order to get perspective for the present and to decide on the rate of progress for the future. But it was becoming doubtful to this people whether they should perpetuate in the valley of memory so much of the past after it had faded into insignificance. They had come to think that to forget was as necessary to the advance of man as to remember, and that a universal rubbish destructor for the now poverty-stricken achievements of their far past would one day become essential. As it was they still persevered records of them lest some historical question might grow to be of importance to their future. It was little wonder then that they had no great abhorrence for the obliteration of the past from their energy at death. If the other alternative were the true, and if, as so many religions teach, they were to be herded with the criminal and besotted and undeveloped souls that have passed from the earth, then might they bid farewell to the true progress beyond death. And what is the meaning of continuity of existence and memory, unless it be the intercourse of terrain souls in the life outside of life? To be rid of the flesh and its inert energies is still to be enslaved to worse evils, and possibility of contact with the foul beings that inhabit the human form, even the noblest and most be lauded human form. The Lyman Horan's would gladly abandon the delight of recognizing and loving again the souls they knew and loved, if only to be free from such a horror. Better almost annihilation than enslavement to the retrogrades of earth in another sphere. When the terror of discontinuity of memory, if the burden of the past were to be lifted off us, and a new and more progressive career given to our energy, the Lyman Horan's believed that when unyolked from the inert forms which had come from their animal past, their higher energy would enter on a progress that would make all they now did seem almost stagnancy, and the power of remembering any past would only mean shame at its having been theirs. It never gave them pause to think that what came after death was still unknown. They had passed a happy bright life upon the earth, free from the pangs and agonies as well as the fierce pleasures, the snaky involvements as well as the passionate amours of other civilizations. But when the effort to live had come to be so great as to overbalance the compensations and utilities of their life, then it was no paying for them to leave it. For they were scientifically sure that death would be no break from the progressive existence. If anything it was certain to be an intensification of the progress which they loved most. One of the last of their great series of exilings had been to cast out of their midst a number of men and women who never did anything but long for death, and advocated early suicide with religious fervor as the true and only panacea for all ills. Their doctrines would have done little harm to the community if they had not been rooted in practice and often led to tragic results. For they came from languid, low-strung temperaments that felt disinclined to face the strain of life or to help the advance of the race. The current of energy in their ancestry had gradually run more and more feebly, till it was in them at its lowest ebb. It was against their grain to work, and they did their share in the tasks of the community with the most potent reluctance. This alone would have been reason enough for their exile, in as much as they gave evil example to the youth around. But they were subtle in the use of the tongue too, and could, with skillful jesuitry, show how indolence was the noblest life. And worse still, when they were left to their own devices, they soon made a violent end to their feeble lives, and gave a tragic and ghastly appearance to death. Out into the thethenasia, or the Isle of Death, they were one and all deported, with enough goods and provisions to keep them and their descendants alive. If only they were industrious, for thousands of years. But none of them would work, or tell the soil, or even cook their food, and one by one they gave themselves up to death. The more ingenious invented a method of leaving life which had a certain grace if not nobility. They erected great funeral pyres and connected them by a slow fuse to a huge battery that send up its rod into the heavens. When a tempest threatened, they laid themselves out on these, and when the lightning began to flash, the electricity ran along the wires, let their faggots, and in a few moments swept them out of existence. It was not long before the Isle of Death was again left to its silences, nothing but the ashes of its former inhabitants upon the tops of numerous mounds being left to tell that human life had once been there. No one from the rest of the Archipelago seemed to care for life upon it, none ever landed there. The only things that marred the martuary stillness of the Isle were the screaming seabirds, and the tempests which drove them thither. Better for the cosmos that these emasculate weaklings should as soon as possible submit the relics of energy in them to other conditions of being. But it was not well for Lymonauron in maturity to have the spectacle of self-slaughter before them, or the contagion of their death pyre, romance, and eloquence touch of the spirit of youth. Moreover they took some time to resolve on death, and in the process of forming their resolution it was the natural habit of these tame triflers with death to put all the energy they had into their tongues. As long as they could talk heroics to any one about the deed they contemplated, they were certain not to accomplish it. And Romantic chatter is catching where youth is still embrittle by reason, and in the young who had robustor wills the results might be more prompt. It was deferent with the death scenes of men and women who had done their duty by the race and by human progress, and had worked out the best possible results from the yoking of higher and lower energies. There's was a true liberation from exhausted lower forms. It was not the langer of the loftier elements in them, but the exhaustion of the lower that brought the nausea of their hybrid life. They could feel, as they look back, how far their higher or spiritual energy had risen since their entrance into earthly existence. Every year had seen them climb upwards, nearer and nearer to their inner energy come towards touch with that divine medium which was in and yet above all life and which in youth they were conscious of only in lofty moments of inspiration. Such were the supreme ascensions of life, when they were capable of the noblest actions and the noblest moral resolves. These moments became more and more frequent, as they grew older and more progressive, tailed towards the close of life they were almost habitual. Limonor and youth snatched at these supernal moments by help of imagination. Limonor and age dwelt habitually in these moral altitudes that lay far above mere passion or instinct. It was the old amongst them who were alone capable of great creative spiritual life. They seemed to feel the tidying of the subtlest energy in the universe and gave the impulses to most spiritual advance. Here and there in other civilizations was bred a nature that had fitful consciousness of this divine medium, at times through great creative imagination, but oftener through noble life. Such a nature is spoken of as inspired and so far it is true in that it has come into communication with the most refined and most creative medium in the universe, that through which what we call the divine seems to work, but only through patient self-molding and development has it reached such a height of nobleness. Oftenest in past ages these natures have found shelter in religion, for in the world ambition must make use of the coarsest tools and the grossest energies to reach its aim, and the growth of a loftier spirit is at once checked and noble aspirations stifled. Peace and the shadow of devotional thought were the only conditions allowing such a nature any scope in a world based upon war and guided in its search for the right by might alone. It was different with limonore and civilization. There it was the rule, and not the exception, to raise the spiritual energies to sympathy with the diviner media of the cosmos, and every condition favored its pursuit. Life began with but a fitful consciousness of it, but it grew more continuous and sureer. The young could scarcely distinguish its impulses from those of their own lower energies, but the old had seldom any hesitation as to when they were inspired. They seemed to keep in touch with all that is divine in the world. They needed no retreat, no religious shelter, to nurse the magnetic sympathy with the divine. Their affinity to it grew more and more the essence of their being, without ever having to leave their daily routine of duties. It was this that gave them their wisdom and character, and that made the young feel them to be almost a type apart from the ordinarily human. They became more distinct in striking in their personality as they grew older and felt this affinity. It had become to be common observation of daily life, that the nobler, the aspirations, and the closer the intercourse with ethical media of the cosmos, the stronger and more distinctive was the character, and science was not far from the conclusion that on this intercourse depended persistence of individuality, and that the higher they reached in their sympathies with the more refined media of the universe, the less need there was of change in their personality at death, of making alliance with lower energies when they shed their inferior and earthly forms of energy. There was, they felt, a noble isolation or apartness of spirit in the old men and women which raised them above common humanity, and made the human body seem an incongruous garment for their soul. They lived above the demands of their corporeal energies, rather than in them or by them. In the young the two seemed blended together. It was difficult often to distinguish in them the movements of the two types of energy. But in the old, though the corporeal had been raised and etherealized, it seemed to hang on the skirts of the spiritual and try to drag it down. It bore its earthly origination more manifestly on it in comparison with the nobler refinement of the spiritual. And the longer they lived, the stronger the contrast became. Till at last nature herself seemed to demand their internal divorce. Euthanasia at a certain age in the development of Lymanoran life came to be not so much a privilege as a holy duty. To liberate the higher energy from its alliance with the lower, to die, was but the next and most natural stage in the evolution of the life. Even the family who would feel the bereavement most in the loss of their wise help and guidance acquiesced gladly, feeling that the liberation must mean a nobler career for the release spiritual energy. Thus it was that on Dumalona they used the music of creation. They gave utterance to their feeling that death was not dissolution but creation, that the retrogression of the body was in advance for the higher energy, the truer self. The sense of decay or degeneration was quite absent from their thoughts. It was a triumphal farewell, for they were convinced that for the liberated it was the noblest deed of all to die, the very crown of all their life. An Epidemic I thought I ejected my old view of death from my mind. I could not forget the scene of triumph which had been enacted on the hill of farewells, and the chanting that reeled through it haunted my imagination, bringing a sense of satisfaction, if not joy. I got into the habit of winging my exercise flights towards Dumalona. I was there with Thyrielle when Don struck the world into gladness and music. There we were, together to see the flaming picture the set of sun drew on Lylaroma. No platform on the island so caught the inspiration of the coming or departing orb. None, I came to feel, was so fitted for the hygera of earth weary souls. No such launching-ground was there for the voyage through infinity. As I frequented it in my leisure moments, there grew into my system the sense that death was not so much an end as a beginning, not a dissolution, but a birth and perhaps a forgetting. More and more was the idea of it a nucleus of delight, and the old melancholy and sorrow, making it a burden and a terror for the mind, disappeared. As a proselyte to the new feeling I was eager to talk of it and make much of its surprises. Not with Thyrielle and my pro-parents alone did I discuss its varied aspects. I could listen by the hour to their teachings. But it brought me into intercourse with many whom I had scarcely seen before except in the course of my education, as I wandered through the various halls. I was astonished to find how often they sawed opportunity to talk to me. They drew me aside as if they had important business with me, and confidentially imparted their views of death, which I had heard a hundred times from others, until I drew weary of their chatter, for I wished to talk myself. But they would not allow me to break in on their everlasting torrent of babble. Even Thyrielle could not endure my interruptions. Though I never grew weary of her talk, I could not restrain the desire to have my say, too. There was no subject on which we could not soliloquise by the hour, but we preferred to talk of death, the freshest and most joyous of topics. And every other youth was just as eager to deliver his opinions to me and to everybody else. However busy they might be with the task in hand, off they would break from it for colloquy, which soon spun itself into soliloquy of the stronger lungs and the most enduring tongue. Every one seemed to comport himself as if his views were of the utmost importance to the world. They all seemed bursting with the obvious. Out it must come, or they would die. In every other corner I would find two or three debating with faces all aglow, sometimes in the most confidential whispers. Approaching to listen I would find their topic tried and stale as last year's gossip. The speaker was pressing home on his hairs in a voice of pretentious awe that no one would think of disputing. The elders interfered and tried by patient advice to stop his tempest of locustity. Hurrying from post to post they tried to keep the young at their work, but it was an endless task. On would go the glib current as soon as their attention was turned elsewhere. Matters began to look serious, for the work of the community was being neglected. The ordinary services of life were barely performed. Little or no progress could be made in such a state of affairs. Indeed, it became manifest that the main aim of the race, progress, would soon be forgotten and retrogression supervene. The faces of the elders became graver every day. Their advice was unheeded, their example unfollowed. Babel, babel, babel unrolled the fluent river of talk, as if the island had been in the midst of western civilization. When I closed my eyes so loud and empty sounded the magpie babel that I could easily fancy myself back again in my native land, and believe that I had dreamt my recent years and wakened again in Christendom. The ominous gravity of the elders dispelled the fancy. They looked as if doomsday were near, and were often heard to say that something must be done. For the talkativeness was bringing other vices in its train, vanity, flippancy, carelessness, and want of reason. The torrent of eloquence was spreading wider every day, and seemed to have broken down the pales of their long centuries of civilization. No one was capable of stopping it either, by precept or example. At last in their despair the elders appealed to the Medicans. Nothing like the phenomenon had occurred within the memory of the oldest. Nothing in the records could be found that in the least resembled it since the series of exilings had been completed. At the periodical inspection the Medicans made a more minute investigation of the systems of the youth and turned their attention especially to the left side of the brain, which is the great originator and controller of speech. In a few they could see evidences of inflammation and morbid secretion in the brain tissue of this region. In most cases nothing out of the common revealed itself to their most recent lava lands. So they took careful electrographs of the left side of the brain of most of them, and when they put these under their strongest chlirolans it became plain that all of them were in a diseased condition. The elders were now convinced that they were on the right track of investigation, and all the young people who had shown symptoms of the passion for eloquence were isolated and brought hourly under the inspection of the Medicans. Moving electrographs of the thought processes in the diseased parts were taken daily, by means of modifications of the lava land, and under still more powerful chlirolans, made for the purpose, these revealed a microbe of extraordinary minuteness at work in the tissue. Having found the source of the mischief, they set themselves to remove it. At first they put the patient into profound sleep, and, trefining the skull, they cleansed away under the chlirolans all traces of the parasite and its debris. What they removed they carefully preserved and analyzed, then, having found the chemical elements of the mischievous spawn in their debris, they reproduced the mixture as a cure of the new and singular disease. For a time this was administered as an internal medicine, but finding that it injured other nerve centers besides those that they intended to affect, they resolved to apply it only locally, and soon learned how to avoid the necessity of trefining the skull. They invented an electric syringe and injector, which caused the mixture to penetrate through the skull into the part of the brain affected, thus sterilizing the tissues that had to do with speech, and making them unattractive as a feeding-ground for the microbe of locustity. The plague soon vanished and the babble ceased. There was comparative silence throughout the island. Only such words were spoken as were essential and relevant to the business in hand. It was, indeed, accepted as the surest mark of the sanity of a nature that it was never betrayed into speech unless that which conveyed necessary information, forceful reasoning or fresh thought. The trite was avoided as mephetic vapors or an exhausted atmosphere would be. The utterance of truisms immediately led to microscopic examinations of the brain of the speaker in expectation of finding disease there. The habit of expression merely for its own sake, and not for what it expressed, for its beauty or wit or pungency, was considered a sure indication of a diseased or morbid condition of the brain tissue, and the sufferer was at once isolated for treatment, lest he should spread the contagion. For the whole phenomenon was scientifically investigated, and precautions were carefully taken against the return of the plague. It had been noticed that, after any age of exceptional progress, there generally occurred some epidemic conducted with the brain tissues or nerve centers, sometimes appearing in excess of emotion, sometimes in various forms of feebleness of thought. It was due, they found, to the comparative exhaustion of the brain and nerves by exceptional strain upon them. As long as the enthusiasm of the new ideas and rapid advance inspired the people, they worked with the will, nor ever thought of sparing any part of their system. The more mature amongst them knew how to bridle this passion for work, and took the necessary precautions against its evil effects. From experience they had found out that they needed more sustenance and more sleep in such periods, and they knew almost by instinct when to rest and how often, and what halls of sustenance and medication they should frequent. The young had not their instincts checked or confirmed by experience, and carried even the best of movements and impulses to abuse. In spite of inspection, and superintendence, they ignored the rules laid down for their guidance, and took their inspiration to work as better than the wisdom of their elders, knowing that progress was the ideal and law of the race, and thinking that everything done for progress was right. It was thus the young and immature who generally suffered from these epidemics. The impulse of their enthusiasm carried them far beyond the limits of fertility of their tissues, and the ambulance of their delight, as they saw the work grow before their eyes, obscured from them the gradual exhaustion of their powers. They grew oblivious to everything, but the end they had immediately in view, and thus became short-sighted in their enthusiasm for progress. They sacrificed the demands of the future for the sake of the present, and it was difficult for even the elders at the medical inspection to get at the real state of the cause. Such an appearance of new vigour did the impetuosity of their passion and the tumult of their blood give to their systems. Only when the wandering germs of emotional disease had fixed on the exhausted tissue did the result become apparent. The wide area and serious effects of the plague of verbosity awakened the medical elders to the necessity of special precautions. A section of them was organized as a medical police to guard against the invasion of such pestilences, and to prevent such exhaustion of youthful tissues as would invite the vagrant germs or fail to repel their attacks. A science was specialized for this purpose, the pathology of epidemic emotions, and a special art grew up to correspond the hygiene and therapeutics of emotional infection. The elders who attended to this periodically made careful examination of all the tissue of the immature that had to do with emotion or with any crude spiritual moods in-app to the control of reason and will, and it was astonishing how rapid was the growth of the new science and art in their hands. Delicate instruments were invented responding to the presence, even in the air of deleterious germs that tended to settle in the nerve centers. Still finer instruments revealed the state of the tissues underneath the skull. The symptoms of every disease of the emotions were classified, and the means of checking each was investigated scientifically. Before the next period of exceptional fluorescence and harvest arrived, the hygiene of all the epidemics had been known to follow on ages of great exertion was completely organized, and it was chiefly in art of prevention rather than of cure. Precautions were taken by the new section of the medecans against the abuse of the enthusiasm natural to such a period. They examined the nerve tissues of the immature almost daily, and pointed out every one that was getting overworked, and the remedies that should be adopted for checking the evil. The result was that no abuse could proceed for longer than a day, and no moral or emotional epidemic, unless of the mildest type, could settle in the community. What roused them to such a step as the foundation of a new science and art was the seriousness with which they viewed the last plague, that of loquacity. In the series of exilings no evil had given them such trouble as that of oratory, and they were afraid lest it was about to return in all its virulence. At first they feared this plague to be a case of atavism, for those whom it attacked earliest were descendants of ancestors, or closely related to families that had been famous in the far past for power of expression. But it soon spread to strains of blood that had been marked by great reticence, if not as eternity, and ultimately it was completely impartial in his choice of victims. It was manifest, however, that those who had ancestral oratory in the blood were first opened to the attacks of the plague, and were most difficult to cure, and the phenomenon sent alarm to the very heart of the community. All the mature citizens, and especially the elders, looked graver than I had ever seen them look, even at the prospect of Chaktru's invasion. They came nearer to the appearance of dejection than I had imagined they could come. The whole matter drove my thoughts to work. When I reflected on the occasion, the attitude my mind had been accustomed to in my forgotten life returned, and it seemed to me that as if there had been a storm over nothing. Talkitiveness had been one of the commonest features of the men and women I had known in Europe, and loquacity was as little noticed as a redhead or a pugnose. Indeed the chatterbox was ranked among the innocents who did little harm except to their own reputations. It became a complete puzzle to me, when I saw the whore with which the Lyman Orans looked on oratory. Had it not been one of the greatest of the arts of Christendom? Were not the great orators of my own nation looked upon as little short of inspired, and their statues placed in the noblest niche of our temple of fame? Did we not rush by the thousand to hear any one of them, when he was about to perform, and stand breathless by the hour, laying up for ourselves fatigued fateness and asphyxia merely for the delight of hanging on his lips? In life he roused hurricanes of enthusiasm, and when he died thousands who had never known him personally followed him mourning to the tomb, and on the most reverent page of our literature was his name written. What could be the meaning of so hardy a detestation of so noble an art on the part of this progressive race? As usual I had not longed to wait for a solution. My bewilderment had already stirred the curiosity of my pro-parents in Thairiel, and they had been watching my thoughts for some time before I put my questions, simply enough for my young comrade and betrothed to answer. She spent a whole afternoon that was devoted to flight exercise, in discussing and solving my difficulties, and the struggle ended in strengthening my admiration of this noble people. Their abhorrence of the voice of oratory was not the growth of any sudden revolution, or the unreasoning prejudice often originating amongst the long-established nation in some great personal hatred or fear now buried in noblivion. It was the result of ages of the most patient scientific investigation, and it found its way into practice so slowly that the steps up to the final one are scarcely noticeable on the pages of their history. It had an inborn prejudice in favor of oratory to combat, all the deeper that it could not explain itself or its origin. The reputation of some of the ablest and most influential sections of the community was based upon the art. The orators of the nation had acquired a fame almost greater than that of the soldiers. They had been its leaders and founders. They had developed and mastered its politics. They had molded the people at certain crises in their history into a unity. Their art had been enrolled for ages amongst the noblest they had. It was the only civilized force which could move great masses to enthusiasm, or fuse their varied purposes and thoughts together to form a single ideal and aim. It was the only means their statesmen had for accomplishing their schemes, the only stepping-stones by which their lawyers and preachers and politicians could rise to fame. It seemed for ages a hopeless task to unseat it from its place in their civilization, or eradicate the prejudice in its favor from the people's minds. The wisest Lymanorans had watched its evil influence through many ages, although they had often themselves to make use of it for their purposes of reform, and although some of the best men had been successful in its employment, yet they were certain that it sapped the finer sense of truth. So easily could the orator persuade a crowd to accept all he said as true and noble that he came to think there was little difference between the true and the false, the noble and the ignoble. His own aim was all that was of significance, and was, however selfish or mean, just as good as anybody else's aim. He needed as little to persuade himself of the justice of an evil cause, provided it was his own, as to persuade an assembly. He had but to isolate certain facts and phrases, and what were antagonistic to them fell into shadow. The unjust course began to appear just, and those who opposed it were the enemies of justice and of the orator. It mattered not what sight he took. If only a stirred his interest, he could rouse thousands to enthusiasm for it by touching their emotions and awakening the passions that were connected with their own self-interest. This power of moving great masses to whatever tune he pleased gave the orator a sense of omnipotence. After a stirring speech he felt like a jove who held in his hand the destinies of the world. Happily for the welfare of the state, the tongue doubt he and hopelessly incapable when he turned to practice. He could not organize the crusade he had preached. Everything he did with his crowd of followers stumbled to pieces as soon as he had to do anything further than speak. A few days or even hours of cool action revealed the hollowness of his cause or his power. The omnipotent jove of yesterday appeared the sulking slave of today. The only crusades that ever prospered under his influence were those which aimed at destruction. For the work of destruction is brief and sharp. It needs but the passion of the moment to accomplish it, and the love of demolition is the most primitive of all savage desires, and the most unbridled when let loose. Its own action as it proceeds kindles into conflagration the fires that give it strength. Creation is a calm and gradual process, the last conquest of the human mind, and it is the highest function of the energy of the cosmos. The wrecking omnipotence of oratory is parted from this by the eternity of cosmic development. It is kin with the clashing of worlds and systems that may come before the birth of a universe, but it is as opposite in nature to the slow building up of a world and the slow evolution of life energy as hell is to heaven. The barrenness of the art in all that would develop humanity struck even the less mature minds of limonora forcibly as soon as vast schemes of reform like socialism began to be discussed. These schemes meant the devastation or the dismantling of existing institutions and systems of life. A plague of demagogues spread throughout the nation. Either to orator had neutralized orator as in a debate. Now it was the idol and indolent who grew most tongue-valiant. They, who had before been so discredited, now found themselves on the way to fame. They, who had before been able to gather only a few embeggered discontents at the street corners to listen, and perhaps to sniff at their eloquence, could now stir masses to action. They had been despised even by their out-at-elbows followers for their impotence in face of the problem of making a bare living for themselves. Now they saw before them place and power, fortune and fame, and all through this poor member of theirs that had not been able to earn enough to lick. Beggarly grovelers, done so poor as not to scorn them, they were now omnipotent, with all the work of devastation before them that these new vast political schemes implied. When the revolution was in full blaze, they were at the best, they thought. But it was just at this point they found their limit. The conflagration they had kindled their eloquence failed to control or even guide. It swept past them through institutions and sections of the community that they specially favored. And at last even they, many of them, fell themselves victims to its undiscriminating ravage. And when it had burned itself out, not one of them but sculpt away in fear, unable to face the task of building up again. Then it was the man of action that stepped in. The silent, masterful disciplinarian, molded in war and accustomed to no other means of solving human problems than war. He it was who reaped the dragon's teeth harvest sown by tongue bravery. He seized all the glory in place and fortune that the mob spaniels had thought within their grasp. Some of their ancient folk maxims embodied this experience. The breath of the demagogue blows the warrior to his fortune. The mouth of the orator is the banqueting chamber of the soldier. Tempests of eloquence and torrents of blood, spout, vain tongue, you invite your tyrant. Sew a country with the teeth of harangers and they will come up the swords of despots. Loquacity is eaten up by her son, Pognacity. In spite of the fear of the art indicated in such folklore, it continued to flourish. For the upper classes, who delighted in war, flattered themselves that they would ever be the best orators, and it is the inevitable tendency of human nature to run to tongue. Not to the age of unbridled freedom of speech did they begin to change their opinions. They were easily outfaced and outharangued by any idler of the poverty-stricken districts. Even in their own assemblies they were no match for the spouters from the slums. With all their high-toned irony and scornful superiority they were beaten into silence at the public palavers. They were the mere stammerers beside the glib orators of the unwashed. This age of tongue exploits was naturally an age of single ideas, too. When their energy had gone into speech they had none left for thoughts. One idea crusades became the order of the day. Every tongue-kihodi had a scheme wherewith he would sweep all evils out of life. He was so enamored of his own that he could not bear to listen to any other. And therein lay safety. But there came a time when the word ebravos joined forces. One vast socialistic scheme included all theirs. The institutions of the island were to be wiped out, and something undefined was to make men equal and prosperous and happy was to be put in their place. Their tongues now wagged in unison with wonderful velocity. Each was still for his own special, constructive scheme, but they were at one in their scheme of demolition. They must have a clear space to build on, and their ideal was the same, to make all equal and happy. The babel of eloquence drowned the sounds of other industry. Another revolution was almost within air-shot. Some of the wiser hearts of Lymanora anticipated the danger, and saw that it would be better to give the discontented all then to let destruction ravage unmuscled again. The whole of the property of the island was estimated, land, houses, furniture, and luxuries, and money equivalent to its full value was handed over to the malcontent socialists to divide amongst themselves, provided they migrated to another island. The offer was readily accepted, for it was clear that nothing would then be left in Lymanora worth plundering. The ships landed in raptured equalizers of human goods with their belongings on the shore of their new Eden, and returned. When the decks were cleared and a census was taken of all that remained, it was found that the island in purging out the socialists was rid of the plague of orators. The price they paid for their deliverance was small indeed, they felt. They soon recreated the wealth they had surrendered. Everyone grew ashamed and afraid of anything that approached to oratory. Elegance became a word of evil omen. To pray was now the greatest offence against the common wealth, and for generations there reigned comparative silence and complete peace over the land. In the series of purgations every remaining trace of tongue ambition was swept out. Much of the flattering kind was found to have migrated with the lecherous, much of the haughty kind with the aristocratic warriors, but most of it went with the liars. There remained a horror of all prading and tongue valiance, and this repressed every adivistic tendency in that direction that appeared. End of Chapter 4 Chapter 5 of Lymanora, the Island of Progress by Godfrey Swevin This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Literature All mere word-mongering was to this people an immoral thing, a shameless waste of the tissue and energy that were needed by the evolution of the race, an offence against its aim and ideal, its progress upwards through the cosmic grades. They were persuaded that it was a base substitution of the shows of life for the reality to make an art of words which should absorb the imagination and skill of hundreds for their whole lifetime. They would have nothing to do with attention to the appearance and ornamentation of a subject to the neglect of its true spirit. Into the very hard and purpose of life every worker must penetrate. His relation to the progress of the race must clearly be shown. No work that took up any of the time or energy of any one of the community was to be useless or unfertil. But this did not mean that language was allowed to take care of itself. It was one of the most diligently tended blossoms of human capacity. No word or phrase, whether spontaneous or invented, was allowed to take root without the fiat of the mature community. Language was more a public institution than even government or justice in a people whose every member was able to be a law to himself. It was not only the great channel of communication, it was the medium and garment of every thought. If it became corrupt, how could the mind itself be saved from its contagion? If it acquired a false tone, how could the falsity fail to enter into the very spirit of the men and women? It was the guardian of law and truth. It was the key to the human heart. It was the ether, the medium in which the human mind lived, moved, and had its being. How could such a potent factor in human progress be left to the caprices of accident or of single persons or even of a family? It had more influence over the spirit than all their sciences put together, for it was more universal in its use than any one of them, and it suddenly tinged all of them, whilst it was almost the breath of the mind which dealt with them. It might be the life or the poison of the whole race. He who was the sole guide of language would be the master of Lymanora, not in the shallow sense of a ruler, but in that of the complete arbiter of its destinies. He would be the despot of the Lymanoran mind and might subtly throw it back centuries, if it pleased him. A people so experienced and wise as this would have ruined the whole ideal of their existence, if they had allowed the most public of the functions of their civilization to move at the caprice of individuals. As soon as the purgation of the race had been completed, it became plain that their language must be purified too. Hundreds of words and phrases and idioms had had soaked into them the infiltrations of the evil minds which were now banished. Worse than all, language had been the commonest and safest ambush of malignity and deceit. It had been a perpetual trap for the innocent and unwary. It had been a labyrinth in which even the ablest and purest-minded often lost their way when following the lead of some great and noble thought. The first aim of the elders was to clear it of course or vulgar suggestion, but as they proceeded they found their horizon widened, and the intricacies, ambiguities, and pitfalls showed themselves the most serious evils of all. It became absolutely necessary, if they were to have a clear and unrefractive medium of expression, to give a definite meaning to every word, and to have one word for every meaning or shade of meaning. The task extended itself through years, but then they knew that, until it was thoroughly done, their science would be like shifting clouds, and the progress would be over quicksands. If their language was treacherous, their civilization was but a mirage. So they toiled on, sustained by the hope that they were making sure their footsteps in the pursuit of truth. When their work was done, they found it was only begun, for it took a generation to make the new and purified language the natural medium of the whole people, and by that time new sub-meanings had crept into most of the common words, and new shadings had discolored most of the everyday phraseology. The new and less used words, and the purely technical and scientific words stood where they were. Everything that lived had shifted ground. Everything that was purely artificial, and had taken no root, had remained as it began, had been, in short, petrified. It was clear that with living language there must be perpetual vigilance and superintendence, and the whole people had to become a council for the preservation of its purity and translucence. Every citizen set a watch upon his words, as he used them from day to day, or as he heard them used, and reported any drift in the sense and any new shade of meaning. And after deliberation in council and careful consideration by the elders, a new form was molded for each new signification. This form had to pass the ordeal of universal use for some time, and if it stood the test, it was finally accepted as part of the language. Nor was it ever forgotten that the ear and the sense of harmony had as much to do with the acceptance of a word as its fitness to express an idea. Harsh sounds wasted valuable tissue, as much as unmeaning syllables. The verbal atrocities of Western science would have made the Lymanorans shudder. Dissonance was an offense against the spirit of harmony, which pervaded the cosmos. It was as easy to form a melodious word or phrase as one that was grating or stridulous. Euphony, it seemed to them, was one of the first essentials of a language, and it was much pleasanter to be silent than to talk unmusically. There had grown up an instinct in them that molded their sentences into what Europeans would have called poems. The bare statement of fact ran with the liquid sweetness that drew the ear like a piece of beautiful music. The strictest scientific discourse sounded to me as majestic and melodious as some of the greatest passages in our Western poets. Their most ordinary conversation had the liquid harmony of our finest lyrics without the monotonous rhythm, the jingling rhyme, or the mincing-gate. It never struck them that there should be a special art of words apart from that skill which all had by instinct whenever there was a thought to express. If it were a perfectly new thought, a discovery or invention that was still unnamed, then it was the duty of the whole people to make or approve of a word which would exactly fit it. Loose-fitting language soon meant loose, shambling thought, and it was one of their foremost responsibilities as a race, to see that no one of them was driven into that. The appearance of a special literary art, for which some were specially gifted, would have told them at once that their language was disorganized, and that the first great public need was its reform. For a time after my arrival in the island, I was accustomed to speak with admiration of the great literatures of Europe, one of the few features of our Western civilization which I felt it no shame to mention. I would launch into glowing praises of the beauty and aptness of the expression, the nobleness of the music, and the majesty and harmony of each work. When I spoke of Homer and Escalus, of Dante and Milton, of Shakespeare and Goethe, I was unabounded in my admiration of their lofty genius in the management of their material. Questioned as to the character of their thoughts, I contended that there was no need for these to be absolutely new. The greatest merit of such poets was that they took the wisdom of their age or country, or the wisdom of all ages and countries, and expressed them in a way that was inimitable. Their material they had gathered from books or from the experience of their time, and most of their great poems have been analyzed by admiring commentators into their original elements, the source from which almost every idea had been taken could be pointed out. But this was only to enhance the value of their work, to increase their greatness. It was one of the commonest observations amongst literary men in the West, when defending themselves against the charge of plagiarism, that there was no such thing as absolute originality of idea or material. The great merit in literature, the test of its lastingness, was the originality or freshness of expression. The rest belonged to the age or people in which it was produced, or to mankind of all ages and nations. And young men and women were encouraged to learn foreign languages, and especially the classical tongues, at all hazards, because translations missed what was distinctive in the great authors. If they would enjoy the true flavor of their originality, they must learn and study the language of the great books for themselves. I found my efforts to communicate my enthusiasm all in vain. I was met by a look of pity in the eyes of my listeners, and soon came to know the source and meaning of the emotion. They were sorry that I should continue to admire that which was the symptom of a diseased condition, and they commonstrated the retrograde state of so many millions of the inhabitants of the globe, who would spend some of the best moments and feelings of their lives on what was merely superficial. They sympathized with the effort to live in a world of thought, a spiritual world, a nobler existence than that of eating and drinking. This was a sign of yearning for advance. But they grieved that it should take such a mistaken direction, that their fellow men in the West should glory in what was evidence of disease. Language was singularly disordered, when only a few could be found throughout the ages with the capacity to use it aptly and musically. Where was the wisdom that guided the people? If it could let this great instrument and medium of thought remain so chaotic, and infirm that whosoever was skilled in fit and melodious use of it was held to be inspired? Surely it was the first care of the elders and governors to see that the universal means of communication was at least unambiguous and explicit. The highway of thought was left jungle, primeval and inarticulate, as the intercourse of animals, and one who made a clear track through any part of the Lambrinth was lauded as divine. The literature of Europe was evidently but the outcome of the incapacity of its people for proper self-government. That only a few should be able to write or speak in so clear and fitting way was a disgrace to the civilization. To honor them so greatly as the people did revealed the depths of incapacity into which all had fallen, and the corrupt state of the language. I urged the marvelous power of suggestion that European words had in the hands of the poets. They bore so many sub-meanings and branches of meaning that the full depths of a poem or great prose work were never sounded. Age after age of students could go on studying it and still find in it new significance, new inspiration. Commentary after commentary had been written on the Iliad, the Divine Comedy, and Shakespeare's plays, without exhausting all the meaning they had in them. Vast libraries of interpretation of them had accumulated, and yet every new age found opportunity for additions to them. This was due to the subtle under-meanings which had touched innumerable keys in the soul, and played upon a vast variety of emotions. An able writer could bring words together so aptly as to affect different minds in different ways. A nebulous significance gathered round his phrases and sentences, and out of this a hundred scholars would make each his own discovery. Mystically lay the thoughts in the depths of his words, ready for the profounder students to thfathom. And so every great poem inspired age after age in a thousand different directions. Would this have been the case if every word had been made to serve but one purpose, if every phrase had been unequivocal in meaning, and every sentence unshaded and perceptuous? It was the play of meaning, the opalescent glimmer of light in language that rendered European poetry so beautiful and undinely suggestive. It was the twilight of words that gave such majestic and shadowy forms to the ideas and characters and scenes of the great poems of the past. And what would the generations of scholars and teachers have done without these hidden meanings to reveal in their literature, without these demilusions and ad-embrations of sense to make clear? Where would our youth have found their intellectual training if all our great literature had been transparent and precise in meaning? I thought I had made out a special case for our European tongues, but a glance at the face of my queries served to scatter my vanity to the winds. There was the same inscrutable look of pity in the eyes. Everything I had pleaded, as I thought, so eloquently, had only deepened the limonora view of shameful waste of talent which done defined and perpetually shifting sense of European words produced in the West. There must the ablest minds of most generations wrestle all their lives with those loose-jointed languages they had to employ, and try to get their benediction and inspiration into form for the ages to wrestle with. There must thousands of capable men and women waste their best years in searching for recondite meanings in the words these have produced. There must all the immature minds bend their youth on the hatred, bare in task of trying to grasp the mirage of sense in the books they learn. What progress would there not have been in Europe if all this talent and energy and time had been saved for the real work of life, if all the best thinkers she produced had been set to the labour of true discovery? It was little wonder that her civilization was practically unprogressive when so much of it was built on the quicksands of her language. All the shades and suggestions of meaning were but pitfalls wherein most of her men and women foundered on the journey of life. It was with mere shadows and shoals that her greatest minds fought. They were not conquering the unknown and undiscovered that their fellow men might advance in their footsteps. The night encircled them as deeply as before, their pertinentural efforts. How could the blind lead the blind in a land covered with mists and full of pitfalls? I had still a few arrows in my quiver, I thought. No one could deny the beauty of the literary art and the training it gave to the sense of what was fair and noble. Where will one find anything so melodious as our great poems? Where anything so harmonious as the prose of our finest stylists? A beautiful lyric can hold a nation entranced. A fine piece of prose can stir thousands to admiration. What could be more nobler than the effect of our greatest poems on the youth of our nations? What more refining than the study of our great prose writers? Again I knew how far beside the mark I had shot. Style was but the effort of a language to throw off its diseases, an acknowledgement of the gross imperfections that burdened it, and made it a clog on the progress of thought. If a language were what it ought to be, a precise means of intercourse between soul and soul, a true medium of intellectual energy, then ought the race that uses it to be completely unconscious of anything like style. We never know we breathe, or how we breathe, till some stoppage makes breathing difficult. We never realize we have a heart whose pulsations are essential to life, till it beats irregularly, and alarms us with the prospect of disease in it. So it is with speech, the instrument of communication among the men, the ether of thought. Did it perform all its functions in a healthy and perfect way? Should we pay little or no attention to it? Were words unambiguous and precise, every man would speak and write in the best of all styles, that natural and transpicuous method of expression which fixes the whole mind of the listener or reader, not the means of conveyance, but on the energy that passes through it. Speech should be no more than one of the unpremeditated, unguided functions of our system. As soon as it calls for attention, it is deranged. As long as we are unconscious of it, it is healthful and strong, acting in every way as it should, without shadow or broken light, without indefiniteness of meaning or mistaken suggestion. Nor should a language even in its commonest thoroughfares be devoid of music? How false must be the rendering of a thought, if for the sake of melody he who is called a poet should have to reject all but musical expressions in a language which has little music in it? How artificial must be the labours of this professional wordmonger, when he must sit amongst the debris of his vocabulary, and pick and choose with weary exertion the words that will fit into his poem? With most of his language unsuited to his purpose, as being invented or molded by unmusical people, he is like a mosaic worker who has to make his work out of common stone, or out of fragments of pottery thrown into the rubbish heap of the ages. Most languages sound like the rasping of a file over iron, or the shooting of debris over a precipice, or at best the cackle and hiss of fireworks. And it is not surprising, for their individual words are made out of anything that is ready to hand by man who care nothing for the sound of them, whether it is harsh or melodious. Now and again, if a word or phrase becomes current out of the range of literary products, it will get its harsh grading syllables ground off, or rounded and polished in the torrent of common speech. Thus are prepared the only elements of the language that are fit for the fine mosaic work of Western poets. They rescue these time-smoothed pebbles from their gross or vulgar surroundings, and place them in a setting that will make them seem beautiful for a time. It is only for a time, again, the fair structure they have made falls into ruin, and fragments are whirled into the eddies of everyday speech, and abandon their beauty of form and meaning for something their original maker would never recognize. Then begins the old process, the debris of forgotten works, rounded and smoothed in the current of time, serves as the rubble to be concreted into the artistic works of a new age. Alas for the artists who have such a task before them! Out of the rubby sheep of the past they must mold what will please the new times. And where is their room for true harmony in the result of such a process? The materials depend on their form on the caprice of chance. The artists depend for the form they give on the caprice of the age in which they work, certain to be antiquated by the next new fashion. As long as a literary product depends on its form for its lasting effect, it must be comparatively ephemeral, for a form is nothing if it does not suit the fancy of the age to which it appeals, and the fancy of one age conflicts with most others. Artificial means may seem to keep it alive, an ecclesiastical or political movement, the aid of an extraneous art, or the ambition of scholars and critics, but the life is only galvanic, and not from the heart of the people. No true music can come out of that which is essentially unmusical. End of Chapter 5