The Coming Race - Edward Bulwer, Lord Lytton (free ereaders txt) 📗

it, all details as to the manner in which they
arrive at their rotation of time; and content myself here
with saying, that in point of duration, their year differs
very slightly from ours, but that the divisions of their year
are by no means the same. Their day, (including what we call
night) consists of twenty hours of our time, instead of
twenty-four, and of course their year comprises the
correspondent increase in the number of days by which it is
summed up. They subdivide the twenty hours of their day
thus- eight hours,* called the "Silent Hours," for repose;
eight hours, called the "Earnest Time," for the pursuits and
occupations of life; and four hours called the "Easy Time"
(with which what I may term their day closes), allotted to
festivities, sport, recreation, or family converse, according
to their several tastes and inclinations.

* For the sake of convenience, I adopt the word hours, days,
years, &c., in any general reference to subdivisions of time
among the Vril-ya; those terms but loosely corresponding,
however, with such subdivisions.

But, in truth, out of doors there is no night. They maintain,
both in the streets and in the surrounding country, to the
limits of their territory, the same degree of light at all
hours. Only, within doors, they lower it to a soft twilight
during the Silent Hours. They have a great horror of perfect
81darkness, and their lights are never wholly extinguished. On
occasions of festivity they continue the duration of full
light, but equally keep note of the distinction between night
and day, by mechanical contrivances which answer the purpose of
our clocks and watches. They are very fond of music; and it is
by music that these chronometers strike the principal division
of time. At every one of their hours, during their day, the
sounds coming from all the time-pieces in their public
buildings, and caught up, as it were, by those of houses or
hamlets scattered amidst the landscapes without the city, have
an effect singularly sweet, and yet singularly solemn. But
during the Silent Hours these sounds are so subdued as to be
only faintly heard by a waking ear. They have no change of
seasons, and, at least on the territory of this tribe, the
atmosphere seemed to me very equable, warm as that of an
Italian summer, and humid rather than dry; in the forenoon
usually very still, but at times invaded by strong blasts from
the rocks that made the borders of their domain. But time is
the same to them for sowing or reaping as in the Golden Isles
of the ancient poets. At the same moment you see the younger
plants in blade or bud, the older in ear or fruit. All
fruit-bearing plants, however, after fruitage, either shed or
change the colour of their leaves. But that which interested
me most in reckoning up their divisions of time was the
ascertainment of the average duration of life amongst them. I
found on minute inquiry that this very considerably exceeded
the term allotted to us on the upper earth. What seventy years
are to us, one hundred years are to them. Nor is this the only
advantage they have over us in longevity, for as few among us
attain to the age of seventy, so, on the contrary, few among
them die before the age of one hundred; and they enjoy a
general degree of health and vigour which makes life itself a
blessing even to the last. Various causes contribute to this
result: the absence of all alcoholic stimulants; temperance in
82food; more especially, perhaps, a serenity of mind undisturbed
by anxious occupations and eager passions. They are not
tormented by our avarice or our ambition; they appear perfectly
indifferent even to the desire of fame; they are capable of
great affection, but their love shows itself in a tender and
cheerful complaisance, and, while forming their happiness,
seems rarely, if ever, to constitute their woe. As the Gy is
sure only to marry where she herself fixes her choice, and as
here, not less than above ground, it is the female on whom the
happiness of home depends; so the Gy, having chosen the mate
she prefers to all others, is lenient to his faults, consults
his humours, and does her best to secure his attachment. The
death of a beloved one is of course with them, as with us, a
cause for sorrow; but not only is death with them so much more
rare before that age in which it becomes a release, but when it
does occur the survivor takes much more consolation than, I am
afraid, the generality of us do, in the certainty of reunion in
another and yet happier life.

All these causes, then, concur to their healthful and enjoyable
longevity, though, no doubt, much also must be owing to
hereditary organisation. According to their records, however,
in those earlier stages of their society when they lived in
communities resembling ours, agitated by fierce competition,
their lives were considerably shorter, and their maladies more
numerous and grave. They themselves say that the duration of
life, too, has increased, and is still on the increase, since
their discovery of the invigorating and medicinal properties of
vril, applied for remedial purposes. They have few
professional and regular practitioners of medicine, and these
are chiefly Gy-ei, who, especially if widowed and childless,
find great delight in the healing art, and even undertake
surgical operations in those cases required by accident, or,
more rarely, by disease.

They have their diversions and entertainments, and, during the
Easy Time of their day, they are wont to assemble in great
numbers for those winged sports in the air which I have already
83described. They have also public halls for music, and even
theatres, at which are performed pieces that appeared to me
somewhat to resemble the plays of the Chinese- dramas that are
thrown back into distant times for their events and personages,
in which all classic unities are outrageously violated, and the
hero, in once scene a child, in the next is an old man, and so
forth. These plays are of very ancient composition, and their
stories cast in remote times. They appeared to me very dull,
on the whole, but were relieved by startling mechanical
contrivances, and a kind of farcical broad humour, and detached
passages of great vigour and power expressed in language highly
poetical, but somewhat overcharged with metaphor and trope. In
fine, they seemed to me very much what the plays of Shakespeare
seemed to a Parisian in the time of Louis XV., or perhaps to an
Englishman in the reign of Charles II.

The audience, of which the Gy-ei constituted the chief portion,
appeared to enjoy greatly the representation of these dramas,
which, for so sedate and majestic a race of females, surprised
me, till I observed that all the performers were under the age
of adolescence, and conjectured truly that the mothers and
sisters came to please their children and brothers.

I have said that these dramas are of great antiquity. No new
plays, indeed no imaginative works sufficiently important to
survive their immediate day, appear to have been composed for
several generations. In fact, though there is no lack of new
publications, and they have even what may be called newspapers,
these are chiefly devoted to mechanical science, reports of new
inventions, announcements respecting various details of
business- in short, to practical matters. Sometimes a child
writes a little tale of adventure, or a young Gy vents her
amorous hopes or fears in a poem; but these effusions are of
very little merit, and are seldom read except by children and
maiden Gy-ei. The most interesting works of a purely literary
character are those of explorations and travels into other
regions of this nether world, which are generally written by
84young emigrants, and are read with great avidity by the
relations and friends they have left behind.

I could not help expressing to Aph-Lin my surprise that a
community in which mechanical science had made so marvellous a
progress, and in which intellectual civilisation had exhibited
itself in realising those objects for the happiness of the
people, which the political philosophers above ground had, after
ages of struggle, pretty generally agreed to consider
unattainable visions, should, nevertheless, be so wholly
without a contemporaneous literature, despite the excellence to
which culture had brought a language at once so rich and
simple, vigourous and musical.

My host replied- "Do you not percieve that a literature such as
you mean would be wholly incompatible with that perfection of
social or political felicity at which you do us the honour to
think we have arrived? We have at last, after centuries of
struggle, settled into a form of government with which we are
content, and in which, as we allow no differences of rank, and
no honours are paid to administrators distinguishing them from
others, there is no stimulus given to individual ambition. No
one would read works advocating theories that involved any
political or social change, and therefore no one writes them.
If now and then an An feels himself dissatisfied with our
tranquil mode of life, he does not attack it; he goes away.
Thus all that part of literature (and to judge by the ancient
books in our public libraries, it was once a very large part),
which relates to speculative theories on society is become
utterly extinct. Again, formerly there was a vast deal written
respecting the attributes and essence of the All-Good, and the
arguments for and against a future state; but now we all
recognise two facts, that there IS a Divine Being, and there IS
a future state, and we all equally agree that if we wrote our
fingers to the bone, we could not throw any light upon the
nature and conditions of that future state, or quicken our
apprehensions of the attributes and essence of that Divine
85Being. Thus another part of literature has become also
extinct, happily for our race; for in the time when so much was
written on subjects which no one could determine, people seemed
to live in a perpetual state of quarrel and contention. So,
too, a vast part of our ancient literature consists of
historical records of wars an revolutions during the times when
the Ana lived in large and turbulent societies, each seeking
aggrandisement at the expense of the other. You see our serene
mode of life now; such it has been for ages. We have no events
to chronicle. What more of us can be said than that, 'they
were born, they were happy, they died?' Coming next to that
part of literature which is more under the control of the
imagination, such as what we call Glaubsila, or colloquially
'Glaubs,' and you call poetry, the reasons for its decline
amongst us are abundantly obvious.

"We find, by referring to the great masterpieces in that
department of literature which we all still read with pleasure,
but of which none would tolerate imitations, that they consist
in the portraiture of passions which we no longer experience-
ambition, vengeance, unhallowed love, the thirst for warlike
renown, and suchlike. The old poets lived in an atmosphere
impregnated with these passions, and felt vividly what they
expressed glowingly. No one can express such passions now, for
no one can feel them, or meet with any sympathy in his readers
if he did. Again, the old poetry has a main element in its
dissection of those complex mysteries of human character which
conduce to abnormal vices and crimes, or lead to signal and
extraordinary virtues. But our society, having got rid of
temptations to any prominent vices and crimes, has necessarily
rendered the moral average so equal, that there are no very
salient virtues. Without its ancient food of strong passions,
vast crimes, heroic