If the new protégé of fame was a commoner, the first proceeding of the bureau was to confer on him one of the noble titles which it had within its prerogative; for it was the guardian and creator of all orders and titles. Next it set one or more of its most imaginative criminals to invent an ancestry for him and a life-history; a few well-known dates and facts were supplied as the skeleton; but round the skeleton grew a living form that no one would have recognised who knew the original, so romantic, so striking, so sublime did it become. Into every historical event a progenitor was thrust and a large share was assigned to him. Marvellous incidents were interwoven with historical facts and the new name introduced as the centre of them. Back to the heroes the family story went until it was lost in the mists of the origin of all things. There was not a link left broken or weak, not an opening left for destructive criticism; for the most hypercritical of the journalistic criminals were let loose upon the result of the heraldic fictionists’ work; they found every weak spot and tore the art to pieces. With this analysis and criticism attached to it, it was returned to the original authors for repairs. Again and again it went through the criticism factory, and again and again, after submitting to every test that could be thought of, it returned to the hands of the regenerators. Having reached the final form that withstood the scepticism of the subtlest critics, it was intermingled with the annals of the country and, being printed in a form that could easily be read, it was distributed amongst a section of the people who were unlearned yet not uninterested in the national history. If they failed to find the seams of the patchwork and accepted the newly intruded portions as genuine, the work was finally passed as ready for the second process of the bureau.
A staff of poets—epic, lyric, and dramatic—were turned on to the new episodes, and, being left to their individual tastes, picked out one this and another that. They each worked their theme into brilliant verse. The result in one case would be a long romance fit for recitation during the nights of the dimmer half of the year; in another it would be a rattling ballad or song that would, when sung through the streets or villages, catch the ear of the people; in a third it would be a dramatic scene or complete play that could be staged either by the church or by the bands of strolling actors who perambulated the country districts in the pay of the state.
Having thus got a brand-new literature manufactured for its protégé’s life and ancestry, the office set its staff of musicians to work on the legend and its poetry, and gorgeous pieces were composed for the ecclesiastical and other orchestras and choirs upon its various themes; and short catches and glees and songs were composed for the common people and their ballad-singers. These were sent out through the length and breadth of the island on the fingers and lips of itinerant players and singers and in the mechanical automata that were manufactured by the hundred to repeat any tune of a fixed number. The whole country was soon jigging and singing to the popular chorus that enshrined the new name and the new deed or that by a new genealogy linked the name with the gods or the national history. And all the marble citizens and the people of the city were trying to whistle or hum or reproduce on their private tinkling instruments the more melodious passages or the orchestral or choral celebration of the new fame.
Meantime the journals had been playing battledore with the topic and the various sections of it; they introduced it in paragraphs, in articles, in verses, in romances; there was mysterious gossip about the new name and loud, brazen-voiced eulogy; there were subtle inquiries about its fame and as subtle answers. And these were all adapted in method and tone to the two great kinds of journals. For there were journals for the common people and journals for the marble city. The one inculcated due regard to the station into which a man was born and reverence for all notabilities. The other fitted the idiosyncrasies of high-born society, describing its splendours, its wit, its genius, its lofty origin, its generosity. The one was didactic, the other descriptive and eulogistic. The one was tedious and thoroughgoing; the other was imaginative and sparkling. And by each the topic was treated in its own peculiar way.
The church did its duty too. It never failed to inculcate the fatalism of class and birth, even when it was floating some new man into fame, although he had but recently changed his class and had his ancestry manufactured. “Each man to the station God has given him,” was the watchword of its prayers and its prelections. How pathetically the preachers dwelt on the fearful results of attempts to reverse the commands of nature! They could point to their own cases as the ruin of ill-weaved ambition. What could be a better proof of the evil of contravening the divine arrangement of classes than their own career? They had tried to rise above their fellows and the place God had given them, and, to accomplish this, had been impelled to break the laws; the consequences their hearers might see with their own eyes. And often the tears would roll down the orator’s cheeks, and the audience would weep with him, as he painted the horrors of transgressing the divine order of society, and appealed to them to abstain from all such transgression and to be content with the station God had assigned them.
Yet the next part of the service would be a recitation of the mythical ancestry of some new man and of their great deeds, or a dramatic representation of his heroic efforts for the state, or a hymn in his honour with full choral or orchestral effects. Once the transgression of the divine order of the universe was accomplished, it was accepted as a portion of that order. However obscure the birth of the favourite, however base his nature, it was at once transfigured by his successful breach of the social laws of nature. And, when the Bureau of Fame adopted him as protégé, he was within less than a generation washed pure as snow, the noblest of the noble in personality, in ancestry, in posterity; all his life and character and origin were consecrated in the national consciousness; and it would have been treason, nay sacrilege, to doubt the divine sanction or the truth of the story or to give a hint of the poor facts that had been buried in oblivion. The name was interwoven with the holiest feelings of reverence; the splendid fiction in song and drama, in prayer and pulpit oration, stirred the deepest enthusiasm of worship, and wound itself into the most sacred memories. And the whole process had begun and gone on so impalpably, so subtly, that it was accomplished before anyone could awaken himself to criticism; and then it was past remedy. It was the great act of regeneration. The character and manners and morality of the man and his family might be as unclean and repulsive as before; his name—the true living principle of a man according to this people—was raised to the level of heroes and gods, was launched upon the career of immortality.
Alas! there were conditions and limits, as there are to everything human. The negative business of the bureau, though kept in subordination, still existed. If any man offended the minister or his patrons or satellites, then was his name first dropped, “quick as a falling star,” from the heaven of all public services and performances; the literature and music and art that enshrined his deeds and the performances of his ancestry vanished no one knew how. For a time vague and derogatory rumours concerning him crept through the journals; they hinted at something base, if not criminal, and yet the hints could not be charged with any definite meaning. At last there was complete and unbroken silence. The man was buried better than if he were dead without tombstone or memorial.
I marvelled that a nation that so worshipped reputation could have allowed the concentration of this power in the hands of any man. But I was assured that it was used with great wisdom and caution. The negative function was rarely set to work, and then in the most underground manner; it was felt but never seen. The bureau employed no organised band of slanderers as the company had attempted to do. In fact it doubted the prudence or effectiveness of such a course. Continual and open-mouthed detraction of any man would probably produce the opposite effect; it would make the neutral suspect some plot against him and stir their innate sympathy for the oppressed. Nay, many would court the notoriety of organised criticism and derogation as a cheap method of keeping their names in the mouths of the nation. What the bureau did in the negative way was truly negative. Its policy was the inculcation of complete silence; and oblivion was the result—a result so telling amongst the Aleofanians that the marble citizens almost grovelled before the court and the minister of fame, and even before their parasites.
With the common people the bureau and its power of heaven and hell had no influence; to condemn to everlasting oblivion was no threat for them; to raise them to immortality was no reward. It was the main engine of discipline in the marble city. And never was there so effective a discipline amongst an aristocracy. A frown from the minister was enough to cow the boldest spirit. Never was a nobility so meek, so free from turbulence and rebellious self-seeking; they were willing to take whatever colour the court delighted in; they changed their opinions, their manners, their principles, their morality, their life to the subtlest changes in the court and the bureau; human chameleons, they would change their hue even from hour to hour, as the court changed. No group of beings in heaven or earth surpassed the discipline of these Aleofanians.