Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott (books to read to get smarter TXT) 📕

unscientific⁠—call them by what names you will⁠—yet, from an aesthetic point of view, those ancient days of the Colour Revolt were the glorious childhood of art in Flatland⁠—a childhood, alas, that never ripened into manhood, nor even reached the blossom of youth. To live was then in itself a delight, because living implied seeing. Even at a small party, the company was a pleasure to behold; the richly varied hues of the assembly in a church or theatre are said to have more than once proved too distracting for our greatest teachers and actors; but most ravishing of all is said to have been the unspeakable magnificence of a military review.

The sight of a line of battle of twenty thousand Isosceles suddenly facing about, and exchanging the sombre black of their bases for the orange and purple of the two sides including their acute angle; the militia of the Equilateral Triangles tricoloured in red, white, and blue; the mauve, ultramarine, gamboge, and burnt umber of the Square artillerymen rapidly rotating near their vermilion guns; the dashing and flashing of the five-coloured and six-coloured Pentagons and Hexagons careering across the field in their offices of surgeons, geometricians and aides-de-camp⁠—all these may well have been sufficient to render credible the famous story how an illustrious Circle, overcome by the artistic beauty of the forces under his command, threw aside his marshal’s baton and his royal crown, exclaiming that he henceforth exchanged them for the artist’s pencil. How great and glorious the sensuous development of these days must have been is in part indicated by the very language and vocabulary of the period. The commonest utterances of the commonest citizens in the time of the Colour Revolt seem to have been suffused with a richer tinge of word or thought; and to that era we are even now indebted for our finest poetry and for whatever rhythm still remains in the more scientific utterance of these modern days.

IX Of the Universal Colour Bill

But meanwhile the intellectual arts were fast decaying.

The Art of Sight Recognition, being no longer needed, was no longer practised; and the studies of geometry, statics, kinetics, and other kindred subjects, came soon to be considered superfluous, and fell into disrespect and neglect even at our University. The inferior Art of Feeling speedily experienced the same fate at our elementary schools. Then the Isosceles classes, asserting that the specimens were no longer used nor needed, and refusing to pay the customary tribute from the criminal classes to the service of education, waxed daily more numerous and more insolent on the strength of their immunity from the old burden which had formerly exercised the twofold wholesome effect of at once taming their brutal nature and thinning their excessive numbers.

Year by year the soldiers and artisans began more vehemently to assert⁠—and with increasing truth⁠—that there was no great difference between them and the very highest class of Polygons, now that they were raised to an equality with the latter, and enabled to grapple with all the difficulties and solve all the problems of life, whether statical or kinetical, by the simple process of Colour Recognition. Not content with the natural neglect into which Sight Recognition was falling, they began boldly to demand the legal prohibition of all “monopolizing and aristocratic arts” and the consequent abolition of all endowments for the studies of Sight Recognition, mathematics, and Feeling. Soon, they began to insist that inasmuch as Colour, which was a second Nature, had destroyed the need of aristocratic distinctions, the law should follow in the same path, and that henceforth all individuals and all classes should be recognized as absolutely equal and entitled to equal rights.

Finding the higher orders wavering and undecided, the leaders of the Revolution advanced still further in their requirements, and at last demanded that all classes alike, the Priests and the women not excepted, should do homage to colour by submitting to be painted. When it was objected that Priests and women had no sides, they retorted that Nature and Expediency concurred in dictating that the front half of every human being (that is to say, the half containing his eye and mouth) should be distinguishable from his hinder half. They therefore brought before a general and extraordinary Assembly of all the States of Flatland a bill proposing that in every woman the half containing the eye and mouth should be coloured red, and the other half green. The Priests were to be painted in the same way, red being applied to that semicircle in which the eye and mouth formed the middle point; while the other or hinder semicircle was to be coloured green.

There was no little cunning in this proposal, which indeed emanated not from any Isosceles⁠—for no being so degraded would have had angularity enough to appreciate, much less to devise, such a model of statecraft⁠—but from an Irregular Circle who, instead of being destroyed in his childhood, was reserved by a foolish indulgence to bring desolation on his country and destruction on myriads of his followers.

On the one hand the proposition was calculated to bring the women in all classes over to the side of the Chromatic Innovation. For by assigning to the women the same two colours as were assigned to the Priests, the Revolutionists thereby ensured that, in certain positions, every woman would appear like a Priest, and be treated with corresponding respect and deference⁠—a prospect that could not fail to attract the female sex in a mass.

But by some of my readers the possibility of the identical appearance of Priests and women, under the new legislation, may not be recognized; if so, a word or two will make it obvious.

Imagine a woman duly decorated, according to the new code; with the front half (i.e. the half containing eye and mouth) red, and with the hinder half green. Look at her from one side. Obviously you will see a straight line, half red, half green.