Riallaro: The Archipelago of Exiles

by Godfrey Sweven

This outline of the socialistic religion came on me with the surprise of one who should see wine flowing in the bed of a torrent instead of water. I began to have a certain respect for this eternal talker whose verbal bubbles had suddenly turned to pearls. He stopped just when I had wished him to go on; and, to tap the same vein, I asked him how his countrymen worshipped their god.

He came dangerously near to winding up his eloquence clockwork, for he pointed to the sky and then to the snowy bulwark that loomed along the horizon; and he straightened himself out and cleared his throat. I feared the complacent glitter of his eye, and I rushed to the water-vat and drank. The interruption seemed to switch off his energy from his almost automatic word machine. He had grown meditative and rested his head on his hands as he looked over the rail into the sea.

I approached him when I saw his new attitude, and he began in a soft, reluctant voice: “We are all priests as we are all kings in our community. To have a hierarchy or even an intermediary who should be supposed to be in more direct sympathy and communication with the gods than the rest is the worst of insults to the divine energy of the soul. To make a special profession of that which is the aim of embodied life is but to commercialise the divine and embrute the human. The priests place their feet on the necks of the ignorant, and it is their interest to reduce all to ignorance. Instead of the equality, which is the true principle of life, we should have a double tyranny; we should grovel before our gods, whose superstitions would weigh us to the ground; and we should have their professional agents introducing the caprice and imperfection of the human into their yoke. I know not which is the worse: the purely spiritual slavery of timid, startled worship, or the mingled slavery of priestcraft that makes the divine mysterious and terrible in order that the worshippers may bow before it body and soul.

“It was a question with our ancestors when they were apportioning the wealth they had brought with them to general purposes, whether they should build temples to their new and universal god or take the dome of immensity as his shrine. They had brought with them a love of art devoted to divine service, and a traditionary love of temples as the symbols of the divine dwelling-place. And yet temples would imply attendants who would soon raise themselves into a spiritual tyranny. Whilst there around them was the free ether wherein dwelt members of the godhead; there above them was the marvellous roof of night frescoed with worlds. Surely it was better that the chrysalids of gods should live in the same temple as the gods. There was no sanctuary like that which the divine had chosen and made for itself. To set apart any portion of it as a holy of holies would sully the nobleness of its workmanship. Fane there was none but the universe; and any poor chantry erected by man, however stupendous it seemed to him with his span of life to build it in, would be a mockery of the Infinite. How pigmean it would seem beneath the vault of night, wherein distance was fenced by the penetrative impotence of human eyes, how atomic when gauged by thought, the true instrument of worship!

“At first schism threatened over this burning question. But at last yon steaming censer of the mountains gave the solution. The first night fell, and they saw a strange glow above the ranges as if it were a fire amongst the clouds. Superficial thought would fain explain it as the after-sheen of sunset. But the hours advanced and still the radiance flushed and faded, flushed and faded, and often with fuliginous and lurid glare. At times a pillar as of smoke and flame seemed to unite earth and heaven. Every eye was fixed on the turbid glimmer as it enhaloed the sombre beauty of the night. The still lingering superstitions that lurked in the graveyards of many minds took it as a sign from the world beyond death. In the dusky aisles of night, as they discussed the theme in low and reverent voices, there spread the magnetic power of resurgent superstition in a crowd touched with the mystery of the universe; and before the dawn suffused the sky or flooded the ancestral recesses of the mind, it was resolved to take this fiery peak as the altar of their worship.

“But the elements had decided otherwise; the searing, blinding power of its everlasting snows, the torrid ebullience of its great cup, and the ruthless fury of the clouds that so often blotted out its heaven, drove the worshippers to the lowlands; and there the frequent austerity of the elements, aided by the old love of art, compelled the erection of the temples you see beginning to fleck the dusky background of the rocks and forests. But the more progressive section of the community, who favoured no temple but the open heaven, had their fears as to the future allayed by a written agreement signed by all that it should be a penal offence to propose a priesthood or a service for them. Everyone may worship where he pleases, within these tabernacles made with hands or without in the pantheon of all men and all gods, in the star-vaulted minster of infinity.”

It was indeed an impressive sight as we approached and the dim sierra grew into a stupendous range that overshadowed us; in its midst rose gigantic the gleaming peak of their fiery monarch dominating all. Above him hung, as if to shade him from the rude fire of the sun, a great tree of smoke whose leafage touched the heaven, and majestically swung in the wind. At its roots the forests and marble fanes were dwarfed. No eloquence of gesture or of word could make me turn my gaze from him to them; but a lower bastion of mountains in front moved upwards and blotted out his serenity. Then I saw the magnitude of the temples, dwarfing as they did the loftiest trees of the forest.

I asked him where the houses were, and with some reluctance he pointed off to the right, where nothing could be distinguished. Then my mind ran on to the symbols of civilised life, and I inquired for the schools and other educational institutions.

“There are none,” he said. “They are only symbols and nurses of inequality. After we had abolished caste and class and social distinctions, we soon came to see that the most offensive of all was culture, and especially scholarship and learning. Who contemns his neighbour so much as the pedagogue that knows a language or a series of facts more than other men? Academic snobbery is the most pernicious, most galling; for it can immediately put in its proofs of the superiority it claims; it can rout all but its equal and rival. It is the most exclusive, most presuming, most irritating. We started with universities and academies and technical schools, under the impression that, by making them free to all, we should give all equal privileges. Before we were through a generation of our new history the fallacy became transparent. We were rapidly manufacturing a class of intellectual peacocks, or at least men and women who sneered at the vulgar herd. By our constitution every citizen was entitled to a certain minimum of food and clothing in the year. The scholar could always live on less than this, and, by offering the surplus as payment, he could get others to perform the mechanical duties of his life. He had what he wanted in free libraries and laboratories and lectures. So he came to have an inordinate share of happiness; and in many cases he had an inordinate scorn for the bulk of the people, who took no advantage of these privileges. A yearning for books and for exercise of the mind is anything but natural to most men, and the nation was rapidly sorting itself out into a small class who were happy and prided themselves on having everything they wanted, and a majority who envied these their content and grumbled at the enormous wealth they had accumulated in their minds. It was true that these men wrote books and made discoveries and inventions; but what good were their books and facts and machines to any but themselves? Nobody else used them or wished to use them. They might talk of the advances of science and the nobleness of art and the glories of literature. But their talk was unreal to all but their own narrow circle; for the rest of the people it was like descanting on colours to the blind.

“The worst was to come; there afterwards grew up a class of sham scholars and æsthetes and critics who learned the shibboleths of the scientists and artists and writers, and used these shibboleths as instruments of offence against what they called outsiders. There were two primitive languages that had, in earlier ages before the migration and before the growth of a native literature, taken deep root in education. These were treated as the marks and symbols of culture; and their rudiments were laboriously shuffled through and promptly forgotten by a large section, who thereupon assumed great airs of superiority to their neighbours. These counterfeit scholars and critics made the two languages into a fence and stockade that would defy the assaults of the mob; within it they fell down and worshipped as the gods of the earth the few who did know them well and could speak them. Most of them had learned by rote some passages from one or two of the favourite books in them; and they were accustomed, when they were worsted in any conversation or discussion, to roll off, relevantly or irrelevantly, one or the other of these, and thus silence their opponents. Only the mock scholars ever did this; the real scholars knew too much of these languages and had too much to occupy their minds otherwise to resort to such trivial weapons. The contemptuous manners of the charlatans of culture became insufferable. You would have thought that there was something divine in these tongues, so fiercely did these bastard scholars bridle up at any disparagement of them or any comparison of them with the vernacular.