Gloria Mundi

by Harold Frederic

At the end of a fortnight Christian found himself able to confront the system, and even look it in the face, with a certain degree of mental composure. He was far from imagining that he had comprehended it all, but the thought of it no longer made his brain whirl by the magnitude of its scope, or frightened him by its daring. The implication that he was expected to do still more with it than Emanuel, its inventor and evangel, had done, possessed its terrors, no doubt, but one is not young for nothing. The buoyancy of youth, expanding genially amid these delightful surroundings, thrust these shadows off into the indefinite future, whenever they approached.

This system need not detain us long, or unnerve us at all. Lord Julius had spoken figuratively of it as the Pursuit of Happiness; perhaps that remains its best definition.

Like other systems, it was capable of explanation by means of formulas; but the most lucid and painstaking presentation of these could not hope to convey complete meaning to the mind. Stated in words, Emanuel’s plan hardly appealed to the imagination. Save for a few innovations, not of primary importance, it proceeded by arguments entirely familiar to everybody, and which indeed none disputes. Most of its propositions were the commonplaces of human speech and thought. The value of purity, of cheerfulness, of loyalty, of mercy—this is not gainsaid by any one. The conception of duty as the mainspring of human action is very old indeed. For this reason, doubtless, Emanuel’s efforts to expound his System by means of books had failed to rivet public attention. He could only insist afresh upon what was universally conceded, and Mr. Tupper before him had done enough of this to last several generations.

Viewed in operation, however, the System was another matter. Our immemorial platitudes, once clothed in flesh and blood, informed with life, and set in motion under the sympathetic control of a master mind, became unrecognizable.

Emanuel as a lad had thought much of the fact that he was of the blood of the Spinozas. When he learned Latin in his early boyhood, the task was sweetened and ennobled to his mind by the knowledge that it would bring him into communion with the actual words of the great man, his kinsman. Later, when he approached with veneration the study of these words, the discovery that they meant little or nothing to him was almost crushing in its effects. Eventually it dawned upon his brain that the philosopher’s abstractions and speculations were as froth on the top of the water; the great fact was the man himself—the serene, lofty, beautiful character which shines out at us from its squalid setting like a flawless gem. To be like Spinoza, but to give his mind to the real rather than the unreal, shaped itself as the goal of his ambitions.

It was at this period that he became impressed by the thought that he was also of the blood of the Torrs. On the one side the poor lens-grinder with the soul of an archangel; on the other the line of dull-browed, heavy-handed dukes, with a soul of any sort discoverable among them nowhere. Slowly the significance of the conjunction revealed itself to him. To take up the long-neglected burden of responsibilities and possibilities of the Torrs, with the courage and pure spirit of a Spinoza—there lay the duty of his life, plainly marked before him.

Ensuing years of reading, travel and reflection gave him the frame, so to speak, in which to put this picture. He had from his childhood been greatly attracted by the glimpses which his father’s library gave him of what is called the Mediaeval period. As he grew older, this taste became a passion. Where predilection ended and persuasion began, it would be hard to say, but when he had arrived at man’s estate, and stood upon the threshold of his life-work, it was with the deeply rooted conviction that the feudal stage had offered mankind its greatest opportunities for happiness and the higher life. That the opportunities had been misunderstood, wasted, thrown away, proved nothing against the soundness of his theory. He had masses of statistics as to wages, rent-rolls, endowments and the like at his fingers’ ends, to show that even on its reverse side, the medieval shield was not so black as it was painted. As for the other side—it was the age of the cathedrals, of the Book of Kells, of the great mendicant orders, of the saintly and knightly ideals. It was in its flowering time that craftsmanship attained its highest point, and the great artisan guilds, proud of their talents and afraid of nothing but the reproach of work ill-done, gave the world its magnificent possessions among the applied arts. Sovereigns and princes vied with one another to do honor to the noblest forms of art, and to bow to the intellect of an Erasmus, who had not even the name of a father to bear. Class caste was the rule of the earth, yet the son of a peasant like Luther could force himself to the top, and compel emperors to listen to him, more readily then than now. The bishop-princes of feudal England were as often as not the sons of swineherds or starveling clerks, whereas now no such thing could conceivably happen to the hierarchy. Above all things, it was the age of human character. Men like Thomas More, with their bewildering circle of attainments and their extraordinary individual force, were familiar products. In a thousand other directions, Emanuel saw convincing proofs that mankind then and there had come closest to the possibilities of a golden age. True, it had wandered off miserably again, into all manner of blind lanes and morasses, until it floundered now in a veritable Dismal Swamp of individualism, menaced on the one side by the millionaire slave-hunter, on the other by the spectral anarchist, and still the fools in its ranks cried out ceaselessly for further progress. Oh, blind leaders of the blind!

No. Emanuel saw clearly that humanity could right itself by retracing its steps, and going back to the scene of its mistaken choice of roads. It had taken the wrong turning when it forsook the path of coherent and interdependent organization—that marvelously intricate yet perfectly logical system called feudalism, in which everybody from king to serf had service to render and service to receive, and mutual duty was the law of the entire mechanism.

Though Christian heard much more than this, enough has been said to indicate the spirit in which Emanuel had embarked upon the realization of his plan. The results, as Christian wonderingly observed them, were remarkable.

The estate over which the System reigned was compact in shape, and enjoyed the advantage of natural boundaries, either of waste moorland or estuaries, which shut it off from the outside world, and simplified the problem of developing its individual character. In area it comprised nearly fifteen square miles, and upon it, as has been said, lived some two thousand people. About half of these were employed in, or dependent upon, the industrial occupations Emanuel had introduced; the others were more directly connected with the soil. Whether artisans or farmers, however, they lived almost without exception in some one of the six little villages on the property.