The Humanisphere

by Brian Stableford

  As for the lodgments, I have no need to add that nothing is lacking there, neither comfort nor elegance. They are decorated and furnished with opulence but with simplicity. Walnut, oak, marble, waxed canvas, rush mats, striped cotton curtains in various colors or monochrome twills, oil paintings and varnished paper screens form the furniture and decoration. All the accessories are porcelain, earthenware, sandstone and pewter, and a few in silver.

  For the youngest children, the main room is sanded like training-ring and serves as an arena for their vacillating evolutions. Everything around them is thickly padded and leather-clad, stuffed and framed in varnished wood frames. That takes the place of paneling; above a certain height, in panels divided into compartments, there are frescos representing the scenes judged most capable of awakening the imagination of children. The ceiling is crystal and iron. The daylight comes from above. There are, in addition, openings in the sides. During the night, candlesticks and candelabras spread light.

  In the accommodation of the older children, the floor is covered with waxed cloth, mats or carpets. The decoration of the walls is appropriate to their intelligence. Tables set in the middle of various rooms are laden with albums and books for all ages and all tastes, boxes of games and necessary tools—in sum, a multitude of playthings serving for study and items of study serving for play.

  In our day, many people—especially those who are partisans of large-scale reforms—are inclined to think that nothing can be obtained except by authority, whereas the opposite is true. It is authority that is the obstacle to everything. Progress in ideas is not imposed by decrees; it results from the free and spontaneous education of people and things. Obligatory education is a contradiction in terms; whoever says education says liberty; whoever says obligation says servitude. Politicians and Jesuits might want to impose instruction; that is their business, for authoritarian instruction is the obligatory imposition of stupidity. But socialists can only want anarchist study and information, liberty of education, in order to have the education of liberty.

  Ignorance is the most antipathetic thing there is to human nature. Humans, at all the moments of life, and especially children, ask for nothing better than to learn; it is solicited by all aspirations. But civilized society, like barbaric society and savage society, far from facilitating the development of aptitudes, can only be ingenious in suppressing them. The manifestation of faculties is imputed to crime, for the child by paternal authority and for the adult by governmental authority. Deprived of enlightened care, of the vivifying kiss of Liberty—which makes a race of beautiful and strong intelligences—a child becomes an adult stagnating in original ignorance, allowing in the mire of prejudice, and, dwarfs with regard to the arm, the heart and the brain, reproduce and perpetuate, from generation to generation, the uniformity of deformed cretins who have nothing human about them but the name.

  The child is the ape of humanity, but the perfectible ape. He reproduces all that he sees done, but with varying degrees of servility, depending on whether the intelligence of the man is more or less servile, more or less child-like. The sharpest corners of the virile mask are what strike his understanding first. If a child is born among a warrior people he will play soldier; he will like paper helmets, wooden cannon, petards and drums. If he is among a people of navigators, he will play mariner; he will make boats with nutshells and will push them on the water. Among a people of agriculturalists he will play gardener, amusing himself with forks, rakes and wheelbarrows. If he has a railway before his eyes he will want a little locomotive, carpenter’s tools if he is near a carpentry shop.

  Finally, he will imitate, with a similar ardor, all the vices and all the virtues of which Society gives him the spectacle. He will acquire the habit of brutality if he is among brutes, urbanity if he is among polite people. He will be a boxer with John Bull, utter savage howls with Jonathan. He will be a musician in Italy, a dancer in Spain. He will grimace and gambol at al harmonies, mark his face and his movements with the seal of industrial, artistic and scientific life if he lives with laborers in industry, art or science, or with the imprinted of profligacy and idleness if he is only in contact with idlers and parasites.

  Society acts upon the child and the child then reacts upon society. They move together and not to the exclusion of one another. It is therefore mistaken to say that to reform society it is necessary to commence by reforming childhood; all reforms must march in parallel.

  The child is a mirror that reflects the image of virility; he is the zinc plate on which, under the radiation of physical and moral sensations, the features of the social being are daguerrotyped. And those features are reproduced all the more emphatically in the one if they are in greater relief in the other. A man may say to his child, like the curé to his parishioners: “Do as I say and not as I do,” but the child will take no account of what the man says if what the man says is not in accord with what he does. In his limited logic, he will attach himself above all to following your example, and if you do the opposite of what you say, he will be the opposite of what you have preached to him. You might then succeed in teaching him to be a hypocrite, but you will never make him a good man.

  In the Humanisphere, the child only has good and beautiful examples before his eyes, so he believes in goodness and in beauty. Progress is taught to him by everything that falls under his senses, by voice and by gesture, by sight and by touch. Everything moves and gravitates around him in a perpetual effluvium of knowledge, a stream of enlightenment. Everything exhales the sweetest sentiments, the most exquisite perfumes of the heart and brain. Every contact there is a sensation of pleasure, a kiss fecund in prolific sensuality. The greatest enjoyment of human beings, work, has become there a series of attractions, by virtue of liberty and the diversity of labor, and reverberates from one to another in an immense and incessant harmony.

  How, in such a milieu, could children not be laborious and studious? How could they not love to play at science, the arts, industry, and not try, at the most tender age, to bring their productive forces into play? How could they resist the innate need to know everything, the ever-new charm of education? To respond other than in the affirmative would be willfully to misunderstand human nature.

  Look at the children of the civilized, the children of the hat-maker or the grocer; watch them, as they emerge from their home to go for a walk, when they perceive something of whose existence they were unaware or whose mechanism they do not understand: a windmill, a plow, a balloon, a locomotive. Immediately they interrogate their conductor, they want to know the name and purpose of all objects. But alas, often, in civilization, their conductor, ignorant of all the sciences or preoccupied with mercantile interests, cannot or does not want to give the explanations solicited. If the children insist, they are scolded, threatened with not being taken for a walk another time. Their mouths are closed; they are muzzled; the expansion of their intelligence is violently halted—and when children have been docile all along the way, remaining quiet, and have not annoyed Papa or Maman with importunate questions, having allowed themselves to be led hypocritically and idiotically by the hand like a dog on a leash, they are told that they have been very good, very well-behaved, and to reward them they are bought a gingerbread man or a toy soldier. In bourgeois societies that is known as forming a child’s mind.

  Oh, authority! Oh, the petty family! And there is no one on the heels of that father or that mother to cry: “Murder! Rape! Infanticide!”

  Under the wing of liberty, in the bosom of the great family, in the contrary, children, only finding among their elders, men or women, educators disposed to listen to them and reply to them, quickly learn to know the why and how of things. The notion of the just and the useful thus takes root in juvenile understanding and prepares equitable and intelligent judgments for the future.

  Among the civilized, human beings are slaves, children writ large, rods that lack sap, poles without roots or foliage, aborted intelligences. Among the Humanispherians, the child is a fr
ee human being in miniature, an intelligence that is growing and whose young sap is full of exuberance.

  Very young children naturally have their cradle in their mother’s house, and every mother nurses her child. No woman in the Humanisphere wants to deprive herself of the pleasurable attributions of maternity. If the ineffable love of a mother for the little being to whom she has given birth is insufficient to determine her to be a nurse, concern for her beauty and the instinct of her own self-preservation also bids her to do so. In our day, there are women who die of having dried up the source of their milk, and all of them lose something of their health thereby, something of their ornamentation.

  The woman who causes her teat to abort commits an attempted infanticide that nature reproves as much as the one who causes her organ of generation to abort. The punishment follows not far behind the sin. Nature is inexorable. Soon the woman’s breast becomes etiolated, withers and testifies by a hasty decrepitude against that crime committed against organic function, a crime of lèse-maternity.

  What is more gracious than a young mother giving her breast to her child, lavishing it with caresses and kisses? If only for the sake of coquetry, every woman ought to breast-feed her child. Then again, is it nothing to follow, day by day, the phases of development of that young existence, to aliment with the nipple the sap of that human sprig, to follow its continuous progress, to see that human bud grow and embellish under the rays of maternal tenderness, like the bud of a flower in the rays of the sun, eventually opening more and more, until it blooms on its stem with all the grace of its smile and the purity of its gaze, in all the charming naivety of its first steps? The woman who does not understand such enjoyments is not a woman. Her heart is a lyre whose strings are broken. She might have conserved human appearance, but she no longer has its poetry. Half of a mother will never be more than half of a lover.

  In the Humanisphere, every woman has the vibrations of amour. A mother, like a lover, quivers with sensuality at all the breezes of human passion. Her heart is a complete instrument, a lute in which not one string is missing; and the smile of the infant, like the smile of the beloved man, always awakens sweet emotions there. There, maternity really is maternity, and sexual amours veritable amours.

  In any case, that work of breast-feeding, like all other maternal tasks, is more of a game than a punishment. Science has destroyed the most repugnant aspects of reproduction, and it is steam engines and electricity that take charge of all the heavy work. They wash the linen, clean the cradle and prepare the baths. And those iron slaves always act with docility and promptitude. Their service responds to all needs. It is by their care that all ordure and excrement disappear; it is their indefatigable mechanism that takes possession of them and delivers them as pasture to cast-iron conduits, subterranean boa constrictors that filter them and digest them in their tenebrous circuits, and expel them subsequently on to workable land as a valuable fertilizer.

  It is the same maid-of-all-work that takes charge of everything concerning the household; she it is who makes the beds, sweeps the floors, dusts the apartments. In the kitchens, she it is who washes the dishes, scours the pans, peels or grates the vegetables, carves the meat, plucks and guts the poultry, opens the oysters, scrapes and washes the fish, rotates the turnspit, saws and splits the logs, carries the coal and maintains the fire. She it is who transmits the food to the domicile or the common refectory, who serves and clears the tables. And everything is done by that domestic machinery, by that slave with a thousand arms, the breath of fire and muscles of steel as if by enchantment. Command, she says to humankind, and you will be obeyed. And all the orders she receives are carried out punctually.

  If a Humanispherian wants his dinner to be served in his private dwelling, a signal is sufficient; the service machinery goes into operation; she has understood. If he prefers to go to the refectory, a carriage lowers its footstep, an armchair extends its arms, the rig moves off and transports him to his destination. Having arrived at the refectory, he takes his place wherever he likes, at a large or a small table, and he eats according to his taste. Everything is there in abundance.

  The rooms of the refectory are elegant in their architecture, and have nothing uniform in their decoration. One of the rooms was decorated in embossed leather, framed with an ornamentation in bronze and gold. The doors and casements had oriental curtains with a black background and horizontal stripes in bright colors. The furniture was sculpted walnut wood, garnished with fabric matching the curtains.

  Suspended in the middle of the room, between two arcade, was a large clock. It was both a Bacchante and a Ceres in white marble, lying in a hammock of polished steel mesh. With one hand she was tickling a little child who was standing on her with a sheaf of wheat, and in the other she was holding a cup at arm’s length above her head, as if to dispute it with the mutinous child, who wanted to take possession of both the cup and the sheaf at the same time. The woman’s head, crowned with vine-branches and ears of wheat, was tilted back on a porphyry cask that served her as a pillow; golden sheaves of wheat lay beneath her loins and formed a litter. The cask was the clock-face, on which two ears of wheat marked the hours. In the evening a flame spread from the cup like a burning liquid. Bronze vine-branches climbed up to the vault and along the ceiling darted flames in the form of vine leaves, making a cradle of light above the group and illuminating all its contours. Clusters of crystal grapes hung down through the foliage, scintillating in the midst of that undulating brightness.

  On the table, porcelain and stucco, porphyry and crystal, gold and silver contained the host of dishes and wines, and sparkled with reflected light. Baskets of fruits and flowers offered their taste and scent to everyone. Men and women exchanged words and smiles, and seasoned their repast with witty conversation.

  When the meal is over, everyone passes into other rooms, no less splendidly decorated, but more elegant, in which they take coffee, liqueurs, cigarettes or cigars: salon-cassolettes in which all the aromas of the Orient burns and fumes: all the essences pleasing to the taste, everything that caresses and stimulates the digestive functions, everything that oils the physical gears and, in consequence, accelerates the development of mental functions. Some savor, in groups or alone, the vaporous puffs of tobacco and capricious reveries; others imbibe, in the company of two or three friends, odorous gulps of coffee or cognac, and fraternize, clinking glasses of softly fizzing champagne, using without abusing all those excitations to lucidity. Some talk science or listen, pour out or draw out, in a group, the nutritive distillations of knowledge; others collect artistically, in a little circle, the delicate flowers of conversation, criticize one thing, praise another, and give free rein to all the emanations of their melancholy or cheerful humor.

  If it is after lunch, everyone soon goes, alone or in groups, to their work, some to the kitchens, others to the fields or various workshops. No regulatory constraint weighs upon them, so they go to work as to a pleasure activity. Does not the hunter, lying in a warm bed, get up of his own accord to go ride through woods replete with snow? It is the same attraction that causes them to get up from the sofas and guides them, through fatigues, but in the society of valiant and charming companions to the rendezvous of production. The best workers consider themselves the most fortunate. What distinguishes them among the most laborious is that they furnish the most beautiful strokes of the implement.

  After dinner, one passes from the coffee-rooms to large conversation rooms, either to small intimate meetings or to various scientific courses, or rooms for reading, drawing, music, dancing, etc., etc. And freely, voluntarily, capriciously, for the initiator as for the follower, for study as for instruction, they always find teachers for pupils and pupils for teachers. An appeal always provokes a response; a satisfaction always replies to a need. Man proposes and man disposes. From the diversity of desires, harmony results.

  The rooms for courses in scientific study and those for artistic study, like the spacious meeting rooms, are magnificen
tly ornate. The lecture rooms are constructed as amphitheaters, garnished with velvet-upholstered benches. To each side is a room for refreshments. The decoration of these amphitheaters is in a severe but rich style. In the leisure rooms, luxury sparkles in profusion.

  Those rooms communicate with one another, and could easily contain ten thousand people. One of them was decorated thus: paneling, cornices and pilasters in white marble, which ornamentation in gilded copper. The hangings in the alcoves were in damask silk, solitaire in color, with a silver strip for an interior rim, on which were placed, in the guise of gilded nails, a multitude of fake diamonds. A field of pink satin separated the border from the pilaster. The ceiling was compartmentalized, and from the bosom of the ornaments, jets of flame emerged, which figured designs and completed the decoration while serving for illumination; arabesques of light also sprang from the middle of the pilasters.

  In the middle of the room was a pretty fountain in bronze, gold and white marble; the fountain was also a clock. A bronze and gold cupola served to support a group in white marble representing an Eve lying limply on a bed of leaves and flowers, her head applied to a rock, raising a new-born child in her arms; two doves perched on the rock were pecking one another. The rock served as a clock-face, with two golden hands modeled as serpents making the hours. Behind the rock, a golden banana tree was visible, whose branches, laden with fruit, were leaning toward the group. The bananas were formed by jets of light.

  An artistic fireplace in white marble and gold served as a stand for an immense mirror; mirrors or fine paintings were also suspended in all the panels amid brown silk drapes. The doors and windows in that room, as everywhere in the Humanisphere, did not open by means of hinges or from bottom to top, but by means of grooves and springs; they moved from right to left and left to right into the walls, disposed to that effect. In that fashion the battens did not inconvenience anyone, and doors and windows could be opened as widely or narrowly as one wished.