The Darkest Hours - 18 Chilling Dystopias in One Edition. Samuel Butler
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our wonderful country. You had all the countries in the world to choose from, and you had the good sense to come to Meccania. You decided well, and I hope you have been profiting by your stay.”
“Yes,” I said; “I have seen a great many things to admire already.”
“For example?” he said.
“The wonderful roof of your Great Central Station,” I said.
“Ah, yes unique, is it not? We have, of course, the finest railway stations in the world, and the finest railway system too. But that is only part of our industrial organisation.”
“You have indeed a wonderful industrial system,” I said, “and no industrial problem.”
“No industrial problem?” he replied. “We have a great many. We do not produce half enough. Of course, compared with other countries, it may seem that we are doing very well, but we are not satisfied.”
“I meant rather that you have no disturbances, no strikes, no Trade Unionism or anything of that sort.”
“Of course, you cannot help thinking of what you have seen in other countries. No, we have no time for nonsense of that kind. But I take no interest in that sort of thing. I have enough to do with my work. The chief Director of the Imperial Porcelain Factory is a busy man, I assure you.”
At this moment Madame Blobber came in and I was introduced to her. She was a great contrast to her husband in many ways. She was tall and rather thin—at any rate for a Meccanian—and would have been graceful but for a certain stiffness and coldness in her manner and bearing. She had a pale face with cold blue eyes. Her mouth was rather large, and her lips thin and flexible. While her husband’s voice was leathery, like that of most Meccanians, hers was thin and penetrating, but not loud. We crossed into the dining-room. A butler in a chocolate-coloured livery saw that all was in order, and left the room. Waiting was unnecessary. The first dishes were on the table, where they were kept hot by electricity, and others on the sideboard were afterwards handed by a woman servant in a grey uniform.
It was a rather silent meal. Mr. Blobber was much occupied with his food, which he evidently enjoyed, and at a later stage he relapsed into a sleepy condition. Madame Blobber then took the lead in the conversation. She was evidently a very well-read woman, especially in all matters relating to Art. I suspected she had no children and had made herself a blue-stocking. She talked like a professor, and with all the dogmatism of one. She said the Chinese had never had any true knowledge of colour. They had merely hit upon some colours which were pleasing to a crude taste. The Meccanians in fifty years had absorbed all the knowledge the Chinese had ever possessed, and much more besides.
I ventured to say that there were still some secrets of artistic production in porcelain that foreigners had not discovered. She laughed at the idea. The ‘secrets,’ she said, were the very things the Meccanian experts had rejected as of no value. I might as well say that the Chinese political constitution was a secret because the Meccanians had not adopted it. When I suggested that scientific knowledge was not a complete equipment for Art, and would not necessarily increase the artistic powers of a nation, she said this was a mere superstition. Art was not a mystery. Every work of art admitted of being analysed; the laws of its production were ascertainable; and it could be reproduced or modified in every conceivable way.
I asked if the same were true of music. I had heard, I said, that for nearly a hundred years even the Meccanians had produced no great musician.
“Another superstition,” she declared. “The great musicians, as they were called, were merely the pioneers of music. Their works were much overrated in foreign countries. We have proved by analysis,” she said, “that they were merely groping for their effects. We know what they wanted to effect, and we have discovered how to get those effects. Musical psychology was an unknown science a hundred years ago. Why, the old composers had simply no means of testing the psychological effects of their works by experiment.”
“I am afraid I am very ignorant of musical science,” I said. “In fact, I did not even know there was such a thing as a science of music.”
“What did you think music was?” she almost snapped.
“Simply one of the Arts,” I said.
“There can be no art in the proper sense without a science.”
“But I thought you Europeans considered that in Sculpture, for example, the Ancients had never been surpassed; and yet they had no science of sculpture.”
“Their science was probably lost: but we have recovered the true science. The basis of all sculpture is accurate measurement. Whatever has bulk, whatever occupies space, can be measured, if your instruments are fine enough. Our instruments are fine enough. We can reproduce any statue ever made by any artist.”
“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.”
“I have heard something of your Drama from Dr. Dodderer,” I said.
“Indeed! Then you understand the fourfold treatment. That in itself would explain why we have discarded the novel. We still keep up the philosophical parable, which is a sort of link between the novel and our modern drama.”
“I am afraid I should find it difficult to appreciate some of your plays,” I said; “Uric Acid, for instance.”
“That is only because our mental environment is in advance of the rest of Europe. Physical science, including of course medical science, is part of our mental furniture: we have assimilated whole masses of ideas that are still unfamiliar to other peoples. Naturally our drama finds its material in the affairs that interest us.”
“And Poetry?” I said. “Is Poetry still cultivated?”
“Naturally! Most of our dramas are in poetry: our language lends itself admirably; it is almost as easy to write poetry as prose in our language.”
“But is there no lyrical poetry?”
“Certainly; we utilise it as one of the