Freeland: A Social Anticipation

by Theodor Hertzka

'From the circumstance that your greatest master has to-day given the public a gratuitous first performance of his new composition, one might almost conclude that in this country the composers, or at any rate some of them, are also public officials. Is it so?' asked my father.

Mr. Ney said it was not so, and added that composers, poets, authors, and creative artists in general, when they produced anything of value, could with certainty reckon upon making a very good income from the sale of their works. As all Freeland families spent large sums in purchasing books, journals, musical compositions, and works of art of all kinds, the conditions of the art-world could not be correctly measured by Western standards. The artistic productions sold during the previous year had realised £300,000,000. Of this sum, however, the greater part represented the cost of reproductions, particularly in the case of printed works; yet the author of an only tolerably popular composition, book, or essay was sure of a very considerable profit. Editions numbering hundreds of thousands were here not at all remarkable; and editions of millions were by no means rare. For instance, Walter had hitherto composed in all six larger and eighteen smaller works, and for the sale of them the Musical Publishing Association had, up to the end of the last year, paid him £21,000. In fact, it could be positively asserted that an author of any kind, who produced only one exceptionally good work, could live very comfortably upon the proceeds of its sale. It had even happened that the public libraries had bought 50,000 copies of a single book. Freeland possesses 3,050 such institutions, and the larger of them are sometimes compelled to keep many hundred copies of books which are much sought after. When the interest of the reading public diminishes, the libraries withdraw a part of these copies, and there are yearly large auctions of such withdrawn books, without, however, diminishing the sales of the publishing associations. Moreover, the authors of Freeland are continuously and profitably kept busy by thousands of journals of all conceivable kinds which, so far as they offer what is of value, have a colossal sale. Capable architects, sculptors, painters can always reckon upon brilliant successes, for the demand for good and original plans and beautiful statues and pictures is always greater than the supply. The grand art, it is true, finds employment only in public works, but here, as we have seen, it finds it on a most magnificent and most profitable scale. In Freeland they attach extraordinary importance to the cultivation of the beautiful and the noble; they hold the grand art to be one of the most effectual means of ethical culture; and as the community is rich enough to pay for everything that it thinks desirable, the public outlay for monumental buildings and their adornment finds its limits only in the capacities of the creative artists. And the happy organisation of the departments which have these things in charge has--hitherto at any rate--preserved the Freelanders from serious blunders. Not everything that has been produced at the public cost is worthy of being accepted as perfect--many works of art thus produced have been thrown into the shade by better ones; but even those subsequently surpassed creations were at the time of their production the best which the existing art could produce, and to ask for more would be unjust. And I could not avoid perceiving that the population of Freeland are not merely proud of their public expenditure in art, but that they thoroughly enjoy what they pay for; and in this respect they are comparable to the ancient Athenians, of whom we are told that, with solitary exceptions, they all had an intense appreciation of the marvellous productions of their great masters.

'With such a universal taste for the beautiful among your people,' said my father to Mrs. Ney, 'I am surprised that so little attention is given to the adornment of the most beautiful embellishment of Freeland--its queenly women. Certainly their dress is shapely, and I have nowhere noticed such a correct taste in the choice of the most becoming forms and colours; but of actual ornaments one sees none at all. Here and there a gold fastener in the hair, here and there a gold or silver brooch on the dress--that is all; precious stones and pearls seem to be avoided by the ladies here. What is the reason of this?'

'The reason is,' answered Mrs. Ney, 'that the sole motive which makes ornaments so sought after among other nations is absent from us in Freeland. Vanity is native here also, among both men and women; but it does not find any satisfaction in the display of so-called "valuables," things whose only superiority consists in their being dear. Do you really believe that it is the beauty of the diamond which leads so many of our pitiable sisters in other parts of the world to stake happiness and honour in order to get possession of such glittering little bits of stone? Why does the woman who has sold herself for a genuine stone thrust aside as unworthy of notice the imitation stone which in reality she cannot distinguish from the real one? And do you doubt that the real diamond would itself be degraded to the rank of a valueless piece of crystal which no "lady of taste" would ever glance at, if it by any means lost its high price? Ornaments do not please, therefore, because they are beautiful, but because they are dear. They flatter vanity not by their brilliancy, but by giving to the owner of them the consciousness of possessing in these scarcely visible trifles the extract of so many human lives. "See, here on my neck I wear a talisman for which hundreds of slaves have had to put forth their best energies for years, and the power of which could lay even you, who look upon the pretty trifle with such reverent admiration, as a slave at my feet, obedient to all my whims! Look at me: I am more than you; I am the heiress who can squander upon a trifling toy what you vainly crave to appease your hunger." That is what the diamond-necklace proclaims to all the world; and that is why its possessor has betrayed and made miserable perhaps both herself and others, merely to be able to throw it as her own around her neck. For note well that ornaments adorn only those to whom they belong; it is mean to wear borrowed ornaments--it is held to be improper; and rightly so, for borrowed ornaments lie--they are a crown which gives to her who wears it the semblance of a power which in reality does not belong to her.

The power of which ornaments are the legitimate expression--the power over the lives and the bodies of others--does not exist in Freeland. Anyone possessing a diamond worth, for example, £600, would here have at his disposal a year's income from one person's labour; but to buy such a diamond and to wear it because it represented that value would, in view of our institutions, be to make oneself ridiculous; for he who did it would simply be investing in that way the profits of his own labour. Value for value must he give to anyone whose labour he would buy for himself with his stone; and, instead of reverent admiration, he would only excite compassion for having renounced better pleasures, or for having put forth profitless efforts, in order to acquire a paltry bit of stone. It would be as if the owner of the diamond announced to the world: "See, whilst you have been enjoying yourselves or taking your ease, I have been stinting myself and toiling in order to gain this toy!" In everybody's eyes he would appear not the more powerful, but the more foolish: the stone, whose fascination lies purely in the supposition that its owner belongs to the masters of the earth who have power over the labour of others, and therefore can amuse themselves by locking up the product of so much sweating toil in useless trinkets--the stone can no longer have any attraction for him. He who buys such a stone in Freeland is like a man who should set his heart upon possessing a crown which was no longer the symbol of authority.'

'Then you do not admit that ornaments have any real adorning power? You deny that pearls or diamonds add materially to the charms of a beautiful person?' asked my father in reply.

'That I do, certainly,' was the answer. 'Not that I dispute their decorative effect altogether; only I assert that they do not produce the same and, as a rule, not so good an effect as can be produced by other means. But, in general, the toy, which has no essential appropriateness to the human body, does not adorn, but, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, rather disfigures, its proud possessor. That in other parts of the world a lady decked with diamonds pleases you gentlemen better than one decked with flowers is due to the same cause that makes you--though you may be staunch Republicans--see more beauty in a queen than in her rivals, though at the bar of an impartial aesthetics the latter would be judged the more beautiful. A certain something, a peculiar witchery, surrounds her--the witchery (excuse the word) of servility; this it is, and not your aesthetic judgment, which cheats you into believing that the diamond lends a higher charm than the rose-wreath. Let the rose become the symbol of authority to be worn only by queens, and you would without any doubt find that roses were the adornment best fitted to reveal true majesty.'

'But the precious metals'--thus I interposed--'are not so completely abjured in Freeland as precious stones and pearls. Is there no inconsistency here?'

'I think not,' answered Mrs. Ney. 'We make use of any material in proportion to its beauty and suitability. If we find gems or pearls really useful for decorative purposes, and sufficiently beautiful when thus used to compensate in their aesthetic attractiveness for their cost, we make use of them without hesitation. But that does not apply to jewels as personal ornaments: the natural rose is, under all circumstances, a better adornment than its imitation in rubies and diamonds. The precious metals, on the other hand, have certain properties--durability, lustre, and extraordinary malleability--which in many cases make it imperative to employ them for decorative purposes. Nevertheless, even their employment is very limited among us. These studs here, and the fillet in my daughter's hair, are not of pure gold, but are made of an alloy the principal ingredient in which is steel, and which owes its colour and immunity from rust to gold, without being as costly as silver. No one wishes to pass off such steel-gold for real gold; we use this material simply because we think it beautiful and suitable, and would at once exchange it for another which was cheaper and yet possessed the same properties. We use pure gold only exceptionally. Our table-plate, which you perhaps thought to be silver, is made of an alloy which owes to silver nothing but its resistance to most of the acids. If you examine the plate more closely you will see that this silver-alloy differs from pure silver both in being of a lighter colour and in being less weighty. In short, we use the noble metals never because of, but now and then in spite of, their costliness.

'I might say that we women of Freeland are vain, because our desire to please is more pronounced than that of our Western sisters. We are not content with being beautiful; we wish to appear beautiful, and the men do all they can to stimulate us in this endeavour; only I must ask you to make this distinction--we do not wish to make a show, but to please. Therefore to a Freeland woman dress and adornment are never ends in themselves, but means to an end. In Europe a lady of fashion often disfigures herself in the cruellest manner because she cares less about the effect produced by her person than about that produced by her clothes, her adornment; she does not choose the dress that best brings out her personal charms, but the most costly which her means will allow her to buy. We act differently. Our own aesthetic taste preserves us from the folly of allowing a dressmaker to induce us to wear garments different from those which we think or know will best bring out the good points of our figure. Besides, we can always avail ourselves of the advice of artistically cultured men. No painter of renown would disdain to instruct young women how to choose their toilette; in fact, special courses of lectures are given upon this important subject. Naturally there cannot be any uniform fashion among us, since the composition, the draping, and the colours of the clothing are made to harmonise with the individuality of the wearer. To dress the slender and the stout, the tall and the short, the blonde and the brunette, the imposing and the petite, according to the same model would be regarded here as the height of bad taste. A Freeland woman who wishes to please would think it quite as ridiculous if anyone advised her to change a mode of dressing or of wearing her hair which she had proved to be becoming to her, merely because she had been seen too often dressed in this style. We cannot imagine that, in order to please, it is best to disfigure oneself in as many ways as possible; but we hold firmly to the belief--and in this we are supported by the men--that the human form should be covered and veiled by clothing, but not distorted and disfigured.'