“But that is only copying,” I said. “How do you create?”
“The process is a little more elaborate, but the principles are exactly the same. Even the classical sculptors had models, had they not? Well, our sculptors also use models; they pose them in thousands of different positions until they have the attitude they want; they have instruments to enable them to fix them in position, and the rest is merely accurate measurement.”
“I should never have imagined that sculpture had been carried to such a point,” I remarked. “Is there much of it in Meccania?”
“Not a great deal of the finer work. Accurate measurement is a slow and costly business even with our improved instruments.”
“Tell me,” I said,—“you see I am very ignorant of Art as understood in Meccania,—has Literature been pursued by the same scientific methods?”
“It depends upon what you mean by Literature,” replied Madame Blobber.
“Broadly speaking,” I said, “I mean the art of expressing ideas in language that satisfies one’s sense of beauty.”
“All our professional writers go through a period of training in the particular department they cultivate. For example, our writers of history are very carefully trained, writers of scientific treatises also.”
“But what of your novelists and poets?” I asked.
“We do not specially encourage the writing of novels. All stories are merely variations of a few themes: all the stories worth writing have been written long ago. We print a certain number of the old novels, and we employ a few specialists to ‘vamp’ up new stories from the old materials, chiefly for the benefit of the lower classes. We Meccanians never really took to novel-writing, except under foreign influence, and that passed away long ago. The theme of almost all novels is domestic life and individual passion: they treat of phases of thought and feeling that our Culture tends more and more to make obsolete. We have developed the Drama much more; in fact, the drama takes the place of the novel with us.”