Flatland - Edwin A. Abbott (early reader books .TXT) 📗

even in our best regulated and most approximately Circular families I cannot say that the ideal of family life is so high as with you in Spaceland. There is peace, in so far as the absence of slaughter may be called by that name, but there is necessarily little harmony of tastes or pursuits; and the cautious wisdom of the Circles has ensured safety at the cost of domestic comfort. In every Circular or Polygonal household it has been a habit from time immemorial⁠—and now has become a kind of instinct among the women of our higher classes⁠—that the mothers and daughters should constantly keep their eyes and mouths towards their husband and his male friends; and for a lady in a family of distinction to turn her back upon her husband would be regarded as a kind of portent, involving loss of status. But, as I shall soon show, this custom, though it has the advantage of safety, is not without its disadvantages.

In the house of the working man or respectable tradesman⁠—where the wife is allowed to turn her back upon her husband, while pursuing her household avocations⁠—there are at least intervals of quiet, when the wife is neither seen nor heard, except for the humming sound of the continuous peace-cry; but in the homes of the upper classes there is too often no peace. There the voluble mouth and bright penetrating eye are ever directed towards the master of the household; and light itself is not more persistent than the stream of feminine discourse. The tact and skill which suffice to avert a woman’s sting are unequal to the task of stopping a woman’s mouth; and as the wife has absolutely nothing to say, and absolutely no constraint of wit, sense, or conscience to prevent her from saying it, not a few cynics have been found to aver that they prefer the danger of the death-dealing but inaudible sting to the safe sonorousness of a woman’s other end.

To my readers in Spaceland the condition of our women may seem truly deplorable, and so indeed it is. A male of the lowest type of the Isosceles may look forward to some improvement of his angle, and to the ultimate elevation of the whole of his degraded caste; but no woman can entertain such hopes for her sex. “Once a woman, always a woman” is a decree of Nature; and the very laws of Evolution seem suspended in her disfavour. Yet at least we can admire the wise prearrangement which has ordained that, as they have no hopes, so they shall have no memory to recall, and no forethought to anticipate, the miseries and humiliations which are at once a necessity of their existence and the basis of the constitution of Flatland.

V Of Our Methods of Recognizing One Another

You, who are blessed with shade as well as light, you, who are gifted with two eyes, endowed with a knowledge of perspective, and charmed with the enjoyment of various colours, you, who can actually see an angle, and contemplate the complete circumference of a circle in the happy region of the Three Dimensions⁠—how shall I make clear to you the extreme difficulty which we in Flatland experience in recognizing one another’s configuration?

Recall what I told you above. All beings in Flatland, animate or inanimate, no matter what their form, present to our view the same, or nearly the same, appearance, viz. that of a straight Line. How then can one be distinguished from another, where all appear the same?

The answer is threefold. The first means of recognition is the sense of hearing; which with us is far more highly developed than with you, and which enables us not only to distinguish by the voice our personal friends, but even to discriminate between different classes, at least so far as concerns the three lowest orders, the Equilateral, the Square, and the Pentagon⁠—for of the Isosceles I take no account. But as we ascend in the social scale, the process of discriminating and being discriminated by hearing increases in difficulty, partly because voices are assimilated, partly because the faculty of voice-discrimination is a plebeian virtue not much developed among the aristocracy. And wherever there is any danger of imposture we cannot trust to this method. Amongst our lowest orders, the vocal organs are developed to a degree more than correspondent with those of hearing, so that an Isosceles can easily feign the voice of a Polygon, and, with some training, that of a Circle himself. A second method is therefore more commonly resorted to.

Feeling is, among our women and lower classes⁠—about our upper classes I shall speak presently⁠—the principal test of recognition, at all events between strangers, and when the question is, not as to the individual, but as to the class. What therefore “introduction” is among the higher classes in Spaceland, that the process of “feeling” is with us. “Permit me to ask you to feel and be felt by my friend Mr. So-and-so”⁠—is still, among the more old-fashioned of our country gentlemen in districts remote from towns, the customary formula for a Flatland introduction. But in the towns, and among men of business, the words “be felt by” are omitted and the sentence is abbreviated to, “Let me ask you to feel Mr. So-and-so”; although it is assumed, of course, that the “feeling” is to be reciprocal. Among our still more modern and dashing young gentlemen⁠—who are extremely averse to superfluous effort and supremely indifferent to the purity of their native language⁠—the formula is still further curtailed by the use of “to feel” in a technical sense, meaning, “to recommend-for-the-purposes-of-feeling-and-being-felt”; and at this moment the “slang” of polite or fast society in the upper classes sanctions such a barbarism as “Mr. Smith, permit me to feel Mr. Jones.”

Let not my reader however suppose that “feeling” is with us the tedious process that it would be with you, or that we find it necessary to feel right round all the sides of