Limanora

CHAPTER IV
HERMITRY

FLIGHT was one of their best methods too of achieving complete solitude. One of the early discoveries of this people in the art of progress was that, where men are too much or too long together, they confirm each other’s faults and clog advance; the weaker and more superficial ambitions get the mastery and force energy into mistaken directions. The risk of this grew less as the individual grew older; for he receded farther and farther from the ancestral stages of life through which he must pass in youth and early manhood; and he came to have less desire and less need for intercourse with his fellows. Complete love of solitude and capacity for solitude were two of the signs of the perfecting of the individual life; thereafter death, the rending of the veil that divides the seen from the unseen, was the most natural step in development, and scarcely needed effort. They held solitude as much one of the essentials of noble life as society; and the latter needed no stimulus; by nature and beginnings man was a social animal, but only some strong impulse would make him seek the companionship of his own thoughts. The final triumph of life was to be able to be confidently alone, to stand with the highest man can think and feel against the herded universe. Under the stimulus of the more physical and primary passions it is the universal instinct to flock together. The baser, the more destructive feelings are gregarious.

To ensure periods of solitude for each member of the community, every man and every woman had a separate house, as soon as the powers were mature. One of the horrors of the past out of which they had come was the intrusion of friends and relatives every hour of the day, and the irritating sense of the continually watchful eyes of servants or slaves. Only by seeking the wilds could one find real solitude. In all human communities there are endless opportunities for social intercourse; opportunities for solitude are artificial. Life was arranged in Limanora with a view to allowing and securing as frequent and as long solitudes as were consonant with the progress of the race. On the most prominent point of every house there was the representation of two climbing flowers; and if these hung drooping, colourless, and apart, everyone knew that the occupant desired seclusion; if they flushed with rose, stood up to the sun, and twined round each other, then was it known that human converse was permissible, if not desired.

There was indeed sufficient magnetic communion of spirit among all the people to touch into life at intervals the love of that definite and open intercourse so native to the human system. This inborn social faculty might be trusted to prevent the love of loneliness from severing all ties. There were daily public duties that brought everyone into the knowledge and sight of his fellow-men, the rota of physical exercise at the centre of force, the flight-drill, the general meeting of the community, and the medical review. And every day and almost every hour of the day communion of spirit could go on in the magnificent baths, in the halls of recuperation, and in the valley of memories. There was no lack of occasion to draw the Limanorans together.

But the other duty to the higher self was sacredly guarded and fostered, especially in the earlier stages of life. One of the greatest blunders they had to correct in their former civilisation had been gregarious education. Large families had been one of the consequences of a half-developed humanity, more kin to the animal world than to the spiritual. The lower a living thing is in the scale of life the more prolific it is, the more devoted to the mere function of keeping its species alive. Unicellular organisms perpetuate their existence by continual fission. Microbes become massive in their effects by the countless myriads each is capable of producing. The higher the organisation, the less is the energy that can be spared for generation, and the more capable is the offspring when matured of ensuring its own survival, of rising above and managing the laws of nature. Civilisation has not advanced far when it acts by masses and needs masses to keep it going. Then mere subsistence and procreation are the only purposes and functions of most life. To feed, to reproduce, to die, that is their history.

The Limanorans looked back to that stage of their development with a shudder, so far in the mists and darkness of animalism did it seem. Now one man of them was more able to do battle with nature and her fecundity and her catastrophes than a hundred thousand of that olden time, and not one hundred-thousandth of the generative power was needed. Then but a poor fraction of the life-energy could be given up to education. The offspring had to be trained in masses or have no training at all. The parents were too busy earning the means of life to mould their families, and had too many children to give heed to the character of the individual. All the offspring were handed over to professional trainers, who managed them in the mass, and who had to work by the methods of nature with its myriad children through the law of the survival of the fittest. They had to be handled like armies, and the stricter the discipline, the better the result was supposed to be; and where the people were counted in masses and moved in masses the better it undoubtedly was for the survival of the state. Schools and universities were a necessity of that far-back stage of civilisation; they were the drill-sergeants of civil life, dragooning the young and their ideas into accordance with the prevailing and accepted type. Too much independence of character or thought or manner would have broken the ranks and endangered the existence of the commonweal. But the chief purpose of life on the world, the progress of the species, was ignored in this devotion to mere persistence of the species. All variant germs and elements that nature supplies in every individual it brings forth were smoothed down or annihilated into uniformity. The type persisted from century to century unchanged. Only by stealth or by audacity did any new or alien element succeed in modifying the species; and when it did succeed the modification was as often retrograde as progressive. Therefore, in order to be secure from variation, public opinion punished all habits that would lead to independence of character or thought or feeling.

As soon as the great exilings had been completed, the Limanorans recognised that the best chance of swift progress was the selection and preservation of the finest variants in their character and thoughts. They therefore abolished the profession of teacher, that manufacturer of uniformity, and all schools and universities, hot-beds of convention, worship of antiquity, and retrogression. They by no means abolished education; they recreated it, intensified it, and made it the chief function of the community. The whole time and energies of the parents, or, as the case might be, of the proparents, were given up for a period of from fifty to seventy years to the training and moulding of each child. Nothing was left to nature or haphazard. And every new tendency or faculty that was discovered in the pupil was recorded and reported to the council of sages. It was discussed by them, and, if judged to be hostile to the progress of the race, the parents were assisted in eradicating it; if manifestly progressive, every means was taken to make it grow; if doubtful in its results, it was submitted to the community, and their instincts soon brought them to a decision. Thus it was that their world was being continually renovated. Never was an idea or method of action rejected simply because it was new. Every opportunity of advance was seized and tested. Every suggestion of a new direction of progress was investigated and followed out till it was seen to be impracticable.

And, to prevent emphasising the old and outworn or reviving the past, the young were isolated from one another; for, as the embryo records in its growth the stages of animalism through which terrestrial life passed upwards from the unicellular to the complex human organisation, so the immature periods that come between infancy and full manhood record human development, prehistoric as well as historic. The long ages of primitive futility in presence of the powers of nature are abbreviated into the helpless years of infancy. Prehistoric savagery shows itself in various traces in the rebellious, adventure-loving, omnivorous phase of boyhood. The first stages of civilisation appear in the early years of puberty; its later stages in the approach to full manhood. The imperfect past ever springs up like weeds amid the growth of the new life, and will choke it if encouraged. And nothing, they held, gave such persistence to the evils and imperfections of the past, thus appearing in early life, as the gregariousness of youth. Nothing had done so great a wrong to the race, or had so hindered its progress, as their former education system with its schools and universities. To throw men in the immature stages of their life into close intercourse was to confirm their immaturities, to encourage atavism, to make the past tyrannise over the future. As long as their old system continued, their civilisation was enslaved to the times that were gone, and imagination deified the world as it had been.

Next to their exiling policy, their educational reform was one of the most important starting-points of their new and swiftly progressive civilisation. I was astonished at the length and frequency of my isolations during the period of my training. For years I saw few or none but the two proparents to whose care I had been handed over, even after I had been introduced to other sections of the community. In the process of my advance towards Limanoran habits and powers, I was often left for days together to my own thoughts, and yet in the presence of some supervising power that seldom made itself definite to any of my senses or even to my mind. Throughout these intervals of solitude, I felt continual suggestion of noble thought and emotion come to me from my surroundings, the divine music that rang so softly and variedly amid the silences, the deep meaning of the arts that filled every corner of my life, the magnetic energy that rayed forth from unknown centres upon my spirit. The finest impulses of my nature became dominant in me at these times and grew in strength. I came to recognise the power that such solitude gave to character. Without it I should have inclined to become the echo of my tutors, even though they were ever impressing upon me the necessity of thinking and acting for myself. They were so noble, so far above the men and women I had met or heard of or read of that it was a hard task not to fall down and worship them.

Once I had the misfortune to question the benefits of prolonged seclusion. I urged the praises of friendship so common in the literature of my country, and spoke with great fervour of the pleasures of social intercourse, the keen emulation on the path of development it stirred, and the wide influence which the finest characters had. I painted in glowing colours all that refined society might become,—the witty Parisian salons of the eighteenth century, the artistic circles in the fifteenth-century Italian republics, the brilliant association of thoughtful men in some of the London literary sets of the nineteenth century. What could be nobler than such intellectual brilliancy of intercourse as is recorded in the biographies of the great men and beautiful and refined women of the West! Then I turned to the happiness of children and youth together in the gardens or woods or on the shores of the ocean, and their sadness when they moped alone in their rooms or at their books. Companionship was the very life of childhood and youth. Did not solitary musings even in maturity produce morbid self-introspection? The intercourse, even with superiors and elders, was somewhat unwholesome for the young spirit,—it crushed spontaneity and naturalness and confidence in one’s inner self.

I worked myself up to a climax of eloquence, and thought that I had demolished all possibility of defence of their system. But I had succeeded only by ignoring the vices and weaknesses of society. These wise men quietly and almost unconcernedly took me behind the gaudy theatrical curtain of the world, and smiled to think how like their old social ideals had been to those I had described, and to see the same vanity and posturing in European refinement as in their own evil past. They mourned over my blindness of mind in failing to look through the gorgeous transparency at the tawdry vulgarities behind. Following it through many forms and stages of life, animal and human, they showed me the law of social intercourse; not the highest but the lowest emotional and moral level of a herd or circle do the natures and minds of its members ultimately reach, however lofty the aspirations of some of them may be. A company in which free utterance is the rule is soon mastered by base interpretation of the noblest lives, and it is to guard against the effects of this hydrostatic law of ethics that churches and temples have been erected. There the awe of a higher power and the conventions of worship conceal the inevitability of the law, and save the shyer natures for brief periods from the evil influence of the bold. The most masterful religions have always provided permanent refuges for the finer spirits who dread conflict with the unscrupulous wit or power of the world, and who know how in a struggle of speech or action or even pure thought the wielder of the fouler weapons wins. It has been the rule throughout civilised history that the greatest characters, if they cling to moral principle, at last withdraw into solitude partial or complete, and become the sages of the world; if they remain in action and succeed, the necessity for further success drives them to accept the moral level of the lowest they have to struggle with; for if immoral men of less intellectual power overcome them, defeat means to them ultimate exhaustion of the soul; nothing bleaches the faculties and reduces them to the common level like failure after failure. However great a hero may be to begin with, success in action closes his moral career, whilst failure closes his intellectual. To die in his first great victory is the truest happiness that can befall him.

In fact the Limanorans came ages before to see that all public life with its competitions and ambitions, social, artistic, political, military, meant the triumph of cunning or force; it meant the retrogression to the nakedest savagery hidden underneath the gewgaws of civilisation. No real advance could be made by any form of humanity so long as its ablest spirits were drawn into the furious struggle for glory, in which the cruellest and most audacious cunning was bound to win. The founders of new religions and new philosophies have been strong spirits who saw the foul imbroglio before them in public life and shrank back from it. The first aim of the Limanorans, when once they had rid themselves of their more degenerate brethren, was to abolish this contest of might and cunning, and turn their stronger spirits to the true progress of themselves and their race. And little difficulty was experienced in accomplishing this most fundamental reform; the island had been purged of the furiously ambitious, of all who longed for the naked palæstra of civilised savagery. They knew better than most men how much of the essence of life was competition, how necessary to all progress was the struggle for existence, how fundamental was the law of the survival of the fittest. But they realised vividly that nature unguided often chose false directions, that the struggle may be in a myriad various arenas that differ greatly from one another in nobleness or baseness, that the law if left to itself might lead to the survival of the fiercest or cunningest or basest according to the conditions that were to be fitted. The will of man could work on the conditions, so elevating the struggle and leading the law to a nobler issue. They did not, they could not, put an end to the struggle. What they did was to withdraw it from false grounds and false aims, and guard it from any appearance of the lower nature, sensuality, cunning, or force. The competitive energy in every Limanoran’s nature was bent towards his own future and the future of his race, and strove to surpass the past, if it were great and noble, and to cast it out, if it were base and threatened to reappear. To strive upwards, to help the whole people to progress, these were the aims that transformed the everlasting struggle and the ever-working law.

This revolution in existence accomplished, and public life having in consequence vanished, there ceased all need of social display, of conversational fireworks, and of tact in managing men either singly or in masses. The object of gregarious education disappeared at once. As long as the coarse and selfish struggle called public life was the highest sphere, they knew the youth had to be trained for it, its methods and aims had to be adopted, and schools and universities were a necessity, as miniature reflections of the greater world. In order to succeed in life they had to be rolled together and tumbled against one another like pebbles in a stream till they had taken the conventional smoothness of outline and similarity of sheen; they had to learn to keep the wild beast in their hearts and the silken courtier in their manners, to cloak untruth and hypocrisy in an appearance of brilliancy or wisdom, to make grasping selfishness seem almost divine love, and brutal cruelty and arrogance the most dazzling refinement. It was painful to read the flashy lies and stabs in the dark that went for wit, and the cruel intrigue and showy falsehood that went to the making of history, in those old times. Even the friendship of the foremost was but a piece of acting; little trust could be put in it; it served its purpose and was abandoned as soon as it failed to impress the dupes. And solitaries then seemed useless, moping self-analysers; they made no history and they were soon forgotten. No parents could afford to let any one of their children thus lose his life; and, however gentle and meditative he might be by nature, he must be thrust into the cruel struggle of school and university in order to acquire hardness and brilliancy; however virtuous and noble in purpose, he had to prepare for the arena of polished scoundrelism.

As soon as these conditions of competition ceased, education in masses had to cease too; it must be a miniature of the general life and a preparation for it. At a distance and in a haze it seems as if the immature in their sports were leading a life of primitive and happy innocence; but innocence often accompanies untamed passion and fierce emulation. The appearance of simplicity comes from their ignorance of the advance of the world. Nothing did the Limanorans so shudder at as the chance of perpetuating the methods and habits of this early and undeveloped stage throughout later life. What their associative education in former times had done for them was to confirm the vices of savagery under the gloved conventions that civilised life demanded, and to destroy the simplicity for ever. Solitary training under the supervision of sages, they soon found, had the reverse effect; it confirmed the naturalness and spontaneity, and swept out the inclination to intrigue and arrogance and cruelty.

There was a childlikeness in their natures that gave great beauty to their faces; and this they retained through the longest life and the most absorbing work. If there was one quality more than others which marked them as a race, it was their gentle and trustful outlook upon life, their naïve candour and transparency of character, their simple wonder and delight over any new discovery or invention. They never grudged the quiet admiration any word or action deserved. They never assumed that tone of superiority or sophistication, which, coming as it does from envy, jealousy, or malice, mars all praise or blame. They were children to one another in the limpidity of their life. And so their features, which had not often the attractions of regularity, had come to be transfigured by this single-heartedness; however old and experienced and wise they might be, all possessed this divine beauty of childhood. Sailors and backwoodsmen, men who have to spend long periods of their lives in comparative solitude, away from the sophistications of crowded life, often reveal traces of this childlike beauty of nature and expression. And it was this peculiar educational system and its long intervals of solitary meditation that kept the Limanorans children, simple and ingenuous, till the day each vanished in the ether.

What deprived these isolations of bitterness was that one never felt lonely nor abandoned by his fellows during them. In a moment, there could be communication in thought or magnetic sympathy with his dearest friends, and within a brief space they would be at his side. They often resisted the associative impulse, through fear that it might be but the return of the old immaturity in disguise; and they knew that friendship was ever at call, and that all true solitudes deepened the current of life.

As I came to feel the spirit of their existence, these arguments grew self-evident; I saw how all-important to progress were these intervals of isolation. They had studied with the minutest care and ultimate shuddering the features of their old civilisation, and they had found that the worst of them came from the associative principle in the training of youth. Atavism became their greatest horror; in the breast of every child born into civilised life an embryo savage is born, and this had been vitalised and fostered by sympathy with what was savage in companions and schoolmates. Under their old school and university systems the age of training was that which corresponded to the military stage in the development of man; and boys were for ever fighting, girls ever encouraging to fight; emulation became fierce rivalry and hatred. A crude stage of the past was confirmed and perpetuated through life by constant association in the time of life that stood for it. That was why their leisured classes had so devoted themselves during peace to the wilder sports of the hunting stage of mankind, whilst they were ever itching for war that their sons might distinguish themselves. That was why they had indulged so often in breaches of the marriage bond, and outraged the monogamy that they professed to revere; the minds of the youth had been inflamed by the free proximity of the sexes before the passions had been mastered, before the polygamous and unmoral stage of their career had been passed through. And education, instead of checking the perpetuation of these immaturities, encouraged it. Teachers had come to pride themselves in the development of these savage stages of boyhood and girlhood, and called the weaknesses by euphemistic names, pluck, pride, grace. The young men and women were taught to glory in them. And thus evil became eternal. In more primitive life, there had been of necessity a wiser method of training. There were no large centres of population where their youth was massed in schools and universities. Families wandered or rested by themselves; and the hardships of existence ensured the survival of the few that were fittest. These few had from their earliest years to join their elders in their pursuits, and they learned in such society to pass rapidly through the primitive stages of man’s development, emulating the skill of their betters and following them with modesty and reverence. In the later industrial and centralistic ages the youth had to be massed educationally, and by the mutual encouragement of sympathy came to glory in their immaturities as perfections, and desired to prolong the savage stage of their life into later years. They judged their elders by false and atavistic standards and so lost their modesty and reverence. It was only an occasional wave of lofty feeling issuing from some inspired poet or prophet that raised one generation above the preceding. For centuries and centuries they stood still or retrograded. Crimes were sanctified in war and politics; the evil past became a fetich; impetuosity, anger, hatred, revenge, falsehood, lust, were tricked out in the apparel of virtues, and made the aims and the glories of the leisured. It was the associative method of education that produced such results. And, after the great purgation of the race, they were amazed to see how blind they had been. Would any civilised parents agree to send out their child into the wilderness there to spend the educable period of life amongst savages, primitive in their instincts and habits, even if the savages had the most persuasive and influential missionaries amongst them who would change them in a few years into civilised beings? Yet this was what their ancestors had been doing when they concentrated youth in schools and universities.

Never before the age of twenty-five were the Limanoran youth allowed any freedom of social intercourse, and then only for brief periods and under the supervision of sages. And if there was any sign of atavism apparent in them at their first draught of social life, back they were sent into isolation, that their character might be strengthened, and the stage of peril passed. Even when socially enfranchised, their first companions had lived beyond their fiftieth year. By that boundary-line, it was held, all the risk of atavism had passed, and all the chances and possibilities of the character had been discovered and provided for. It was not till the seventy-fifth year that anyone was supposed to be fit for parenthood; for then, though the faculties and powers still went on improving even till death, most of them had reached the maturity of self-control and intersubordination; then reason had begun to be master, and all the stages of the development of man before the final purgation of the race had been traversed.

Only a few years before this epoch in their lives were they permitted to look into the deeper mysteries of existence. They thought it one of the strangest pieces of inversion, if not desecration, to place religious ideas, as we did, before the youngest. Nothing but evil could come of such an attempt. With the Limanorans it was the final initiation into life to acquaint their grown men and women with the sublimest thoughts and doubts and emotions on the purpose of existence; it was the copestone of their education; after all the field of knowledge had been traversed by them and all the reverences had been instilled into them, the last reverence was revealed to them. Then and not till then were they capable of realising its fulness. Communicated in childhood or early youth, before the powers were mature, before the animal and savage stages of development had been gone through, it could end only in gross familiarity or gross superstition; the noblest and most inward of thoughts and emotions would be misunderstood. What was it that had made their old religions so stagnant, so obstructive to all advance, but this mistaken principle of attempting to teach the holiest and deepest ideas to the young! It made their ancestors cleave to crude superstitions as if divine and refuse to give up any item of their childish ideas of them. So thoroughly are the sources of our youthful impressions lost in the mists of the past that any connected with reverence seem to come from the divine eternity beyond birth.