Journey to the Isles of Atlantis and Other Fanciful Excursions

by Brian Stableford

  An abysm of five centuries separated those vestiges from the works that followed them in the museum. A few pallid frescoes announced the birth and presaged the glory of the School of Atlantis. Short individuals and animals copied from antique reliefs, moving in severe landscapes or in front of excessively small architectures, composed scenes full of expression and grandeur. The plasticity of the Greeks was no longer found there, but something unknown to the Greeks was manifest here for the first time: soul; a soul full of tenderness and austerity. It was that sentiment that was to dominate for a long time and form the basis of primitive tradition.

  As we advanced further, following the order of the years, every century showed us its best effort, the modifications to which it had been subject, and the progress that it had accomplished.

  We arrived at the hall where the paintings of the age of Helios the Victorious were. I perceived that that epoch had seen the Art of Atlantis in its finest flower. Every era almost always finds the genus that summarizes it. That one was entirely contained in the painter Ornithion. He is, in my opinion, the greatest man of the entire earth. He combines in his works the purity of antique forms with the sentiment of the primitives. He dominates nature; his humblest characters are as beautiful as gods; his great landscapes have the aspect of lost paradises.

  In the last room, we contemplated the work of the previous century. Some of them were sublime. Three masters, in particular, struck me. The greatest genius of the three was only preoccupied with inventing human forms of an immortal beauty. His virgins and heroes descended directly from those of the Greeks, but he added to them something of the most tender and even of the voluptuous.

  Stauros, the second, a soul slightly troubled by the superstitions of his time, left an oeuvre made with less amour and more passion, but he painted with a color so bright and so forceful that one was forced to deem it good.

  The third, specializing in landscapes, had discovered a new nature, with trees with quivering foliage, blue horizons, gilded skies and nymphs dancing in the twilight.

  When we had contemplated those marvels for a long time, transported with admiration, we quit the Palace of the Kings.

  Then Constantin said to me: “You’ve just seen the painting of our old masters. Now let’s go and admire that of the young ones. Know that many people say today that what we have just seen is very little by comparison with modern works.

  We therefore went to a great market in which more than thirty thousand canvases were being exhibited at that moment. The market was being held in a vast edifice of an architecture in bad taste.

  Constantin explained to me that all those paintings were not hung under the same label. Three enemy groups divided the enormous location between themselves. And it was fortunate, it seemed, if a painter of an adverse party ventured into the neighboring territory without having his throat cut.

  First we passed under a placard which read: Traditional Painters.

  “Good,” I said, “let’s be hopeful. These people want to show me that they have not forgotten the masterpieces that I’ve just seen. Let’s go.”

  And I began examining the walls covered with paintings. At intervals, I only saw a few canvases of a certain merit. The others were as many insults to good taste. It all appeared to me to have a poverty to make one weep, and an insolent pretention. Constantin explained to me that a great many of those colorings were made by persons of quality, not painters at all, but who wanted people to believe that they were artists. Those amateurs, by virtue of their relations and protections, had taken possession of the exhibition, and disposed recompenses in accordance with their competence, which was null. I refused to give the name of works of art to what I saw there, and I passed on.

  As I was about to enter the second section, I perceived an old man struggling in the hands of twenty young men, a very animated group. The old man was begging them to let him go, but one of them was holding him by his collar, another by the back of his coat; two or three were embracing his knees and several were prostrate at his feet. They were all howling: “A medal! I want a medal!”

  “Look,” said Constantin. “That poor fellow is one of the judges of the exhibition that you’ve just quit, one of those who award the prizes. Around him are the candidates; the most obsessive will carry off the plum.”

  We turned our back on that scene and passed under a second placard, on which was inscribed in letters a foot high: Society of Modern Painters.

  “A bizarre title,” I said to Constantin. “How the devil, living in modern times, could one not be a modern painter?”

  “Understand more fully,” said my friend. “The people here only title themselves modern in order to treat the others as fossils. They are informing you, by that epitaph, that you will find among them artists who study their century and who possess personal tendencies, whereas their neighbors only copy old paintings...”

  “Not sufficiently,” I said, “not sufficiently. There are several, from what I can see who have need of it.”

  We were in the second hall. It was impossible for me to differentiate the works I perceived from those I had seen shortly before. The work, in general, seemed to be just as stupid and of the same strength.”

  The true difference between the two sections consisted of the fact that only the first profited from the patronage of the government, which generally bought its vilest specimens.

  We passed through that enclosure distractedly. Finally, we arrived at the limit of the third, where one read: Painters of the Future.

  That engaging subscription gave me courage. I overcame the numbness that the sight of twenty thousand canvases had given me, and I threw myself among the “Painters of the Future.”

  There, my feeble understanding found itself immediately surpassed. I thought at first that the works had been hung backwards; nothing of the sort, but it would have been easier for me to read Hebrew in the text than to discover the slightest intention among those daubers. I dare not say, however, that they were devoid of merit. They reduced nature to a violet fog in which strange objects agitated confusedly. Squares, diamonds and all kinds of geometrical figures collided there. Underneath was written “Portrait” or “Study” or “Landscape,” but as often as not, even the title signified nothing.

  The public in that final hall was composed of two sorts of people. Those of one kind were exclaiming, while laughing: “What filth!” while the others were repeating, in chorus: “That’s admirable.” But none of them were looking at the paintings.

  I emerged from there with my head spinning. I felt ill, and I said to Constantin: “Let’s go have a drink.”

  We went into a beautiful tavern, where I recovered gradually.

  “Oh, my friend,” I sighed, “What does that nonsense signify? Those painters have the same effect on me as loquacious people; they have nothing interesting to say but talk incessantly. Let them put down their brushes for a moment and their ugly inventions, and go to the Palace of the Kings, where I found so few people, and try to understand the significance of masterpieces.”

  “Since when,” said my guide, “Do the loquacious shut up? That’s not common sense. And then, the true guilty party is the public. It has bad taste; it is given works devoid of taste; it likes the strange; here’s the strange. Now, know that there are other painters, but they can’t exhibit, because the three schools reject them. They’re the masters of the situation; whoever isn’t allied with them has to remain in obscurity. That’s what happens to anyone who wants to take up the great tradition, because impostors claim to have sole custody of it. Those impostors are the leaders of the Traditionals. You’ve seen just now how they justify that title.

  “I ought to mention one of those liars, the famous Sideros. Creation has made no man uglier or more pretentious. He’s not the most stupid of painters, but as a courtier, he’s worth his weight in gold. So he’s more covered in ribbons and medals of honor than a standard of hoplite musicians. His works are inept, but people say: ‘The King holds him i
n esteem; important men commission their portraits from him.’ Alas, the important men of today are rich grocers, money merchants and interloper functionaries.

  “The man is powerful. He has a school, only teaches fools, and keeps good minds away. He grows in dignity, tough. He’s seated among the twelve State painters. His paintings are sold very dear. But when he dies, people will hide them in attics and the cellars of provincial museums. And later, exhuming the vile canvases gnawed by rats, our descendants will wonder whether they are really the works of the celebrated Sideros.”

  VII. In which the author makes the acquaintance of

  an illustrious person named Kacos the Prude.

  In the center of Atlantopolis is a public garden where young city-dwellers are taken to play. I know no place more charming. I loved the organization of the trees and the avenues, the perspective of the lawns and the water features, the perfection of the marble statues and the grass speckled with bright flowers, where a population of little children frolicked.

  It was the day after our escapade among the painters. Constantin had asked me to meet him under an old sycamore. Having arrived first, I was respiring voluptuously the odor of the flowering plants suspended over the edge of the lake, watching little boys and girls running and jumping. I imagined that I was back in my homeland, and felt glad to be alive.

  After a few moments a perfectly ugly old man came to sit down next to me. I am not difficult in the matter of the beauty of men, but this one was frightful: a dirty beard, a tremulous nose pierced with holes, asymmetrical wrinkles in which dirt was hiding, a squint, a twisted mouth, sagging lips from which drool was trickling slowly; such as my neighbor. I moved to the extremity of the bench in order to avoid contact with him.

  Visibly swollen with anger, his deplorable visage was crimson in places—to wit, the tip of the nose, one of his cheeks and two or three of the wrinkles in his forehead. The monster was muttering words that I could not hear, but whose tone was one of indignation. Soon, he took me as a witness, and, indicating with his finger a statue of a naked nymph four paces away from us, he cried in a furious voice: “Century without modesty! Lascivious people! Until when will you feast on such obscenities? What has become of you, chastity of our ancestors? A pure man dare not walk through the streets. If he raises his eyes, he sees at every instant images and actions that incite the body and soul to frightful carnal operations. When will these abominable representations, in which brazen workers paint and sculpt the shameful parts of man and woman, be reduced to dust and ashes?”

  I considered the statue and saw nothing in it but the beautiful. The nymph was showing the tops of her thighs without thinking evil. That was what shocked the old man so much.

  I have known people of the same stripe in other places. I know that it is necessary not to contradict them. I therefore left him free rein for his diverting speech.

  “My entire life,” he said, “is one long battle against immodesty. My name is Kacos, and people recognize my virtues by nicknaming me ‘the Prude.’ I sit in the Senate, but that’s not where I deliver my battles. From dawn onwards I roam the city. I introduce myself into houses that I suspect of being clandestine brothels. The valets, bought for a price of silver, hide me under a bed or behind a curtain. I can’t describe what I see there or repeat what I hear there. What debauchery, sir, and what speech! But I’m its irritated judge, and not a day goes by when I don’t signal those criminals to our idle police.

  “Then I prowl the bookshops. I pass myself off as an old sadist, and insist on seeing indecent images. What a harvest I made just now! Just look at this morning’s crop.”

  Then he took a large package out of his pocket, which he unwrapped. He showed me an infinity of prints of the most precise obscenity. He contemplated them at length and analyzed them in detail. All his pockets were bulging with analogous booty, which he scattered all over the bench. It was the richest collection of erotic images that one could see anywhere in the world.

  When he had shown all of them to me, and he had carefully put his documents back in their place, he said: “The authors will be punished, be sure of it. I’ve already had more than a thousand hanged. But there are others, more difficult to attain, whose ruination I’m pursuing. I mean all those who, under the criminal cover of art, dare to exhibit paintings and sculptures in which people are represented stark naked.

  “If the gods lend me life, such things will soon no longer be seen. I also want women to hide their cleavages under high necks, and that they no longer show their legs to all comers under the pretext that it’s raining. All that corrupts and demoralizes youth. It’s necessary that pregnant women remain at home, because of the association of ideas that the sight of them provokes. Enough obscenities, enough filth, enough...”

  He interrupted himself suddenly. His eyes shone. Then he bent down, so far that his head and hands were touching the ground. And I saw then that he was studying from below, with an attentive emotion, a little girl who, in all innocence, was sprinkling the grass.

  VIII. Of the extraordinary education that infants and the young receive in the schools of Atlantis.

  Constantin joined me at that moment. I therefore quit the old man with the obscene soul. Beforehand, I spoke to him in these terms:

  “Sir, I could not admire you more. Continue to fight for virtue. Forge laws against immorality for us; pray to the gods to revoke the deadly gifts that they have given us; ask them to take back from men and women those enraged organs always desirous of coming together. They can give us children by means of an invention more decent and less subject to the passions.”

  But he was scarcely listening to me and seemed to be occupied with something else.

  We had agreed to visit schools that day. I was taken to one of those to which poor people send their children.

  In a large dusty room I saw a young man surrounded by eighty children. The pupils were crammed on benches. The master, seated in a chair, was speaking in a harsh voice. When we came in he was teaching morality.

  “Children,” he said, “render thanks to the mild, great, providential Constitution. All the good things that you enjoy come from it, so you owe yourselves to it entirely. Think about its benefits. Not the least of them is this divine education, which it spreads over your heads.

  “Oh, if you had lived in the ancient times, how you would bless that holy Constitution! Before it, darkness reigned over our isles. The people, less fortunate than beasts of burden, knew neither repose not pleasure. They were poor beings, prey to maladies and miseries that have now disappeared. Crowned brigands governed them cruelly. Commerce, industry and science did not exist. It was night, a night populated by nightmares.

  “But giants with free hearts rose up. They constructed with their hands the noble edifice in which we live. Our nation now has a history. We are the people that has the most worthy government in the world.”

  He fell silent and made a sign to a child, who stood up and repeated the preacher’s words rapidly, without a single omission. I congratulated the latter on his eloquence and the efficient training of his pupils.

  Outside, Constantin said to me: “As you see, that instruction is dogmatic. It presents the new principles as revealed truths. It is as well; otherwise children, even at seven years old, would be unable to believe it.”

  “Where do masters like that come from?” I asked.

  “They’re formed in certain convents,” said Constantin, where they learn exactly what they ought to teach. Their unique occupation is the exercise of their memory. They have to retain word for word, axioms of every sort. When their head is stuffed with all that nonsense, they consider themselves to be scholars and gladly take charge of demonstrating it to anyone. In their class they repeat with authority the speeches that they learned themselves. They whip the children until they know the official catechism by heart. I ought however, to say several things to their glory; they teach their pupils to read, to write and to count to a hundred; all things considered, they a
re excellent, if one compares them to their predecessors.

  “Those schools are called popular schools, and are free. Now come and see those in which the pupils pay. The education is different there, lasts longer, and provides more knowledge.

  We were then transported to a more considerable and better equipped edifice. We went from room to room and took account of what was happening there. All the sciences were studied—or, rather, skimmed. Instead of showing the child the common foundations of various kinds of knowledge, they were given a shadow of knowledge in each area.

  That somewhat superficial instruction was regulated by programs, which divided up knowledge into an infinity of pigeon-holes with no links, a veritably scholarly mosaic rather than an educational enterprise.

  Afterwards it was necessary to visit the great institutions where young people study from the age of eighteen to twenty-one. That instruction seemed to me to be remarkable in several ways, but incomplete and often doctrinaire. I perceived great lacunae therein. There was profound commentary on all the dialects of the Archipelago, but the national language did not have the place that it merited. Great professors, illustrious historians, expressed themselves in bad Greek worthy of water-carriers, cooks and other people of little consequence.

  Quitting the scholars I wanted to see the artists; I was taken to the Institute of Arts. It is a well-constructed palace harmonious decorated with antique marbles and copies of masters. Wandering through the courtyards we saw guards in livery here and there, asleep on chairs. We woke one of them up and asked him to guide us.

  First he took us into a glazed from where young men were painting.

  “You see,” said the warden, “that the studio is not very busy; that’s because the professor never comes here.”

  We went into another similar room. There we saw no one, although there were easels in place and freshly-painted canvases. “If you don’t see anyone working here,” said our guide, it’s because the master, Seigneur Sigeros, is going to come. He’s a nasty fellow who gives bad advice.”