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

excellences, poetry therefore is, if not
actually starved to death, reduced to a very meagre diet.
There is still the poetry of description- description of rocks,
and trees, and waters, and common household life; and our young
Gy-ei weave much of this insipid kind of composition into their
love verses."
86
"Such poetry," said I, "might surely be made very charming; and
we have critics amongst us who consider it a higher kind than
that which depicts the crimes, or analyses the passions, of
man. At all events, poetry of the inspired kind you mention is
a poetry that nowadays commands more readers than any other
among the people I have left above ground."

"Possibly; but then I suppose the writers take great pains with
the language they employ, and devote themselves to the culture
and polish of words and rhythms of an art?"

"Certainly they do: all great poets do that. Though the gift
of poetry may be inborn, the gift requires as much care to make
it available as a block of metal does to be made into one of
your engines."

"And doubtless your poets have some incentive to bestow all
those pains upon such verbal prettinesses?"

"Well, I presume their instinct of song would make them sing as
the bird does; but to cultivate the song into verbal or
artificial prettiness, probably does need an inducement from
without, and our poets find it in the love of fame- perhaps,
now and then, in the want of money."

"Precisely so. But in our society we attach fame to nothing
which man, in that moment of his duration which is called
'life,' can perform. We should soon lose that equality which
constitutes the felicitous essence of our commonwealth if we
selected any individual for pre-eminent praise: pre-eminent
praise would confer pre-eminent power, and the moment it were
given, evil passions, now dormant, would awake: other men would
immediately covet praise, then would arise envy, and with envy
hate, and with hate calumny and persecution. Our history tells
us that most of the poets and most of the writers who, in the
old time, were favoured with the greatest praise, were also
assailed by the greatest vituperation, and even, on the whole,
87rendered very unhappy, partly by the attacks of jealous rivals,
partly by the diseased mental constitution which an acquired
sensitiveness to praise and to blame tends to engender. As for
the stimulus of want; in the first place, no man in our
community knows the goad of poverty; and, secondly, if he did,
almost every occupation would be more lucrative than writing.

"Our public libraries contain all the books of the past which
time has preserved; those books, for the reasons above stated,
are infinitely better than any can write nowadays, and they are
open to all to read without cost. We are not such fools as to
pay for reading inferior books, when we can read superior books
for nothing."

"With us, novelty has an attraction; and a new book, if bad, is
read when an old book, though good, is neglected."

"Novelty, to barbarous states of society struggling in despair
for something better, has no doubt an attraction, denied to us,
who see nothing to gain in novelties; but after all, it is
observed by one of our great authors four thousand years ago,
that 'he who studies old books will always find in them
something new, and he who reads new books will always find in
them something old.' But to return to the question you have
raised, there being then amongst us no stimulus to painstaking
labour, whether in desire of fame or in pressure of want, such
as have the poetic temperament, no doubt vent it in song, as
you say the bird sings; but for lack of elaborate culture it
fails of an audience, and, failing of an audience, dies out, of
itself, amidst the ordinary avocations of life."

"But how is it that these discouragements to the cultivation of
literature do not operate against that of science?"

"Your question amazes me. The motive to science is the love of
truth apart from all consideration of fame, and science with us
too is devoted almost solely to practical uses, essential to
our social conversation and the comforts of our daily life. No
88fame is asked by the inventor, and none is given to him; he
enjoys an occupation congenial to his tastes, and needing no
wear and tear of the passions. Man must have exercise for his
mind as well as body; and continuous exercise, rather than
violent, is best for both. Our most ingenious cultivators of
science are, as a general rule, the longest lived and the most
free from disease. Painting is an amusement to many, but the
art is not what it was in former times, when the great painters
in our various communities vied with each other for the prize
of a golden crown, which gave them a social rank equal to that
of the kings under whom they lived. You will thus doubtless
have observed in our archaeological department how superior in
point of art the pictures were several thousand years ago.
Perhaps it is because music is, in reality, more allied to
science than it is to poetry, that, of all the pleasurable
arts, music is that which flourishes the most amongst us.
Still, even in music the absence of stimulus in praise or fame
has served to prevent any great superiority of one individual
over another; and we rather excel in choral music, with the aid
of our vast mechanical instruments, in which we make great use
of the agency of water,* than in single performers."

* This may remind the student of Nero's invention of a musical
machine, by which water was made to perform the part of an
orchestra, and on which he was employed when the conspiracy
against him broke out.

"We have had scarcely any original composer for some ages. Our
favorite airs are very ancient in substance, but have admitted
many complicated variations by inferior, though ingenious,
musicians."

"Are there no political societies among the Ana which are
animated by those passions, subjected to those crimes, and
admitting those disparities in condition, in intellect, and in
morality, which the state of your tribe, or indeed of the
Vril-ya generally, has left behind in its progress to
perfection? If so, among such societies perhaps Poetry and her
sister arts still continue to be honoured and to improve?"
89
"There are such societies in remote regions, but we do not
admit them within the pale of civilised communities; we
scarcely even give them the name of Ana, and certainly not that
of Vril-ya. They are savages, living chiefly in that low stage
of being, Koom-Posh, tending necessarily to its own hideous
dissolution in Glek-Nas. Their wretched existence is passed in
perpetual contest and perpetual change. When they do not fight
with their neighbours, they fight among themselves. They are
divided into sections, which abuse, plunder, and sometimes
murder each other, and on the most frivolous points of
difference that would be unintelligible to us if we had not
read history, and seen that we too have passed through the same
early state of ignorance and barbarism. Any trifle is
sufficient to set them together by the ears. They pretend to
be all equals, and the more they have struggled to be so, by
removing old distinctions, and starting afresh, the more
glaring and intolerable the disparity becomes, because nothing
in hereditary affections and associations is left to soften the
one naked distinction between the many who have nothing and the
few who have much. Of course the many hate the few, but
without the few they could not live. The many are always
assailing the few; sometimes they exterminate the few; but as
soon as they have done so, a new few starts out of the many,
and is harder to deal with than the old few. For where
societies are large, and competition to have something is the
predominant fever, there must be always many losers and few
gainers. In short, they are savages groping their way in the
dark towards some gleam of light, and would demand our
commiseration for their infirmities, if, like all savages, they
did not provoke their own destruction by their arrogance and
cruelty. Can you imagine that creatures of this kind, armed
only with such miserable weapons as you may see in our museum
of antiquities, clumsy iron tubes charged with saltpetre, have
more than once threatened with destruction a tribe of the
90Vril-ya, which dwells nearest to them, because they say they
have thirty millions of population- and that tribe may have
fifty thousand- if the latter do not accept their notions of
Soc-Sec (money getting) on some trading principles which they
have the impudence to call 'a law of civilisation'?"

"But thirty millions of population are formidable odds against
fifty thousand!"

My host stared at me astonished. "Stranger," said he, "you
could not have heard me say that this threatened tribe belongs
to the Vril-ya; and it only waits for these savages to declare
war, in order to commission some half-a-dozen small children to
sweep away their whole population."

At these words I felt a thrill of horror, recognising much more
affinity with "the savages" than I did with the Vril-ya, and
remembering all I had said in praise of the glorious American
institutions, which Aph-Lin stigmatised as Koom-Posh.
Recovering my self-possession, I asked if there were modes of
transit by which I could safely visit this temerarious and
remote people.

"You can travel with safety, by vril agency, either along the
ground or amid the air, throughout all the range of the
communities with which we are allied and akin; but I cannot
vouch for your safety in barbarous nations governed by
different laws from ours; nations, indeed, so benighted, that
there are among them large numbers who actually live by
stealing from each other, and one could not with safety in the
Silent Hours even leave the doors of one's own house open."

Here our conversation was interrupted by the entrance of Taee,
who came to inform us that he, having been deputed to discover
and destroy the enormous reptile which I had seen on my first
arrival, had been on the watch for it ever since his visit to
me, and had began to suspect that my eyes had deceived me, or
that the creature had made its way through the cavities within
91the rocks to the wild regions in which dwelt its kindred race,-
when it gave evidences of its whereabouts by a great
devastation of the herbage bordering one of the lakes. "And,"
said Taee, "I feel sure that within that lake it is now hiding.
So," (turning to me) "I thought it might amuse you to accompany
me to see the way we destroy such unpleasant visitors." As I
looked at the face of the young child, and called to mind the
enormous size of the creature he proposed to exterminate, I
felt myself shudder with fear for him, and perhaps fear for
myself, if I accompanied him in such a chase. But my curiosity
to witness the destructive effects of the boasted vril, and my
unwillingness to lower myself in the eyes of an infant by
betraying apprehensions of personal safety, prevailed over my
first impulse. Accordingly, I thanked Taee for his courteous
consideration for my amusement, and professed my willingness to
set out with him on so diverting an enterprise.


Chapter XVIII.


As Taee and myself, on quitting the town, and leaving to the
left the main road which led to it, struck into the fields, the
strange and solemn beauty of the landscape, lighted up, by
numberless lamps, to the verge