CHAPTER XI
THE BUREAU OF FAME
I WAS evidently as far astray on this point as I had been on the employment of convicts in the church. And when the full significance of the functions of state had been laid before me, I had to acknowledge that there was much in their prejudice in favour of the enslavement of genius and talent—the most capricious of human things.
As soon as the organisation of fame became a function of government, it was an essential that national genius and talent, the arbiters of fame, should be robbed of their caprice and yoked to the will of a single responsible man. What would be the use of spreading one rumour if the press and the church, which could creep into the very heart of the nation, were able to contradict it or render it fangless? What would all other means avail for planting a reputation, if the reasoning, imaginative, and rhetorical ability of the nation were not bound to water and foster it?
It seemed to them as natural as breathing that the literary and oratorical power of the nation should be fenced in to the service of the nation. And no one ever thought of complaining that it was entrapped as early in life as possible into lifelong slavery to the state. Where would the reputations of all of them be if this were not done? They would be as safe as the lives of their children with a jungle of wild beasts let loose amongst them. Who could control these irresponsible madmen we call geniuses if it were not the representative of the force of the nation—the state?
Trained from youth by the strong hand, they might be of great service in moulding the national future; but if left from the first to follow their own caprice, nothing could result but the wildest confusion of principles and beliefs, and the sacrifice of the reputation of every average citizen to their unslakable thirst for fame. There was indeed no alternative left for any self-respecting community but the enslavement of all the capricious power of imagination born in its midst. They might train it to do their behests and serve their destiny; if left uncaged, they would have to do its behests and serve its destiny.
The amalgamation of the Bureau of Fame with the department of public worship and public opinion was a policy of self-preservation. The church made ready the soil, the press sowed the seed, and the bureau watered and weeded and reaped. It would have been a national folly to allow any disagreement or collision amongst these processes. Better almost to have left the national genius to its old internecine conflict.
Now the Bureau of Fame was the pivot of the government; and it was the greatest ambition of an Aleofanian to rise to its administration. Its minister for the time being was arbiter of all for which the ablest men lived; he could make or mar careers; he could raise whom he would to immortality, or damn him to everlasting execration, or, what was worse, oblivion; he was far more powerful than any pope and any monarch combined could be; it was indeed the chance of heaven or hell he could deal out.
There was, of course, a price-list for various kinds and periods of reputation; and a citizen with a large fortune could buy what was for human life immortality. But the chief business of the office was political, to enforce the privileges and enhance the fame of the marble citizens, and especially of those in power—a great noble, a child of the monarch, or one whom the court and the minister delighted to honour.