A Modern Utopia, H. G. Wells [i like reading books .txt] 📗

a sitting position, with his head on his

wrists, and his wrists on his knees—the simple natural position for

sleep in man…. He said it would be far better if all the world

slept out, and all the houses were pulled down.

 

You will understand, perhaps, the subdued irritation I felt, as I

sat and listened to the botanist entangling himself in the logical

net of this wild nonsense. It impressed me as being irrelevant. When

one comes to a Utopia one expects a Cicerone, one expects a person

as precise and insistent and instructive as an American

advertisement—the advertisement of one of those land agents, for

example, who print their own engaging photographs to instil

confidence and begin, “You want to buy real estate.” One expects to

find all Utopians absolutely convinced of the perfection of their

Utopia, and incapable of receiving a hint against its order. And

here was this purveyor of absurdities!

 

And yet now that I come to think it over, is not this too one of the

necessary differences between a Modern Utopia and those finite

compact settlements of the older school of dreamers? It is not to be

a unanimous world any more, it is to have all and more of the mental

contrariety we find in the world of the real; it is no longer to be

perfectly explicable, it is just our own vast mysterious welter,

with some of the blackest shadows gone, with a clearer illumination,

and a more conscious and intelligent will. Irrelevance is not

irrelevant to such a scheme, and our blond-haired friend is exactly

just where he ought to be here.

 

Still–-

 

Section 3

 

I ceased to listen to the argumentation of my botanist with this

apostle of Nature. The botanist, in his scientific way, was, I

believe, defending the learned professions. (He thinks and argues

like drawing on squared paper.) It struck me as transiently

remarkable that a man who could not be induced to forget himself and

his personal troubles on coming into a whole new world, who could

waste our first evening in Utopia upon a paltry egotistical love

story, should presently become quite heated and impersonal in the

discussion of scientific professionalism. He was—absorbed. I can’t

attempt to explain these vivid spots and blind spots in the

imaginations of sane men; there they are!

 

“You say,” said the botanist, with a prevalent index finger, and the

resolute deliberation of a big siege gun being lugged into action

over rough ground by a number of inexperienced men, “you prefer a

natural death to an artificial life. But what is your definition

(stress) of artificial? …”

 

And after lunch too! I ceased to listen, flicked the end of my

cigarette ash over the green trellis of the arbour, stretched my

legs with a fine restfulness, leant back, and gave my mind to the

fields and houses that lay adown the valley.

 

What I saw interwove with fragmentary things our garrulous friend

had said, and with the trend of my own speculations….

 

The high road, with its tramways and its avenues on either side, ran

in a bold curve, and with one great loop of descent, down the

opposite side of the valley, and below crossed again on a beautiful

viaduct, and dipped into an arcade in the side of the Bristenstock.

Our inn stood out boldly, high above the level this took. The houses

clustered in their collegiate groups over by the high road, and near

the subordinate way that ran almost vertically below us and past us

and up towards the valley of the Meien Reuss. There were one or two

Utopians cutting and packing the flowery mountain grass in the

carefully levelled and irrigated meadows by means of swift, light

machines that ran on things like feet and seemed to devour the

herbage, and there were many children and a woman or so, going to

and fro among the houses near at hand. I guessed a central building

towards the high road must be the school from which these children

were coming. I noted the health and cleanliness of these young heirs

of Utopia as they passed below.

 

The pervading quality of the whole scene was a sane order, the

deliberate solution of problems, a progressive intention steadily

achieving itself, and the aspect that particularly occupied me was

the incongruity of this with our blond-haired friend.

 

On the one hand here was a state of affairs that implied a power of

will, an organising and controlling force, the co-operation of a

great number of vigorous people to establish and sustain its

progress, and on the other this creature of pose and vanity, with

his restless wit, his perpetual giggle at his own cleverness, his

manifest incapacity for comprehensive co-operation.

 

Now, had I come upon a hopeless incompatibility? Was this the

reductio ad absurdum of my vision, and must it even as I sat there

fade, dissolve, and vanish before my eyes?

 

There was no denying our blond friend. If this Utopia is indeed to

parallel our earth, man for man—and I see no other reasonable

choice to that—there must be this sort of person and kindred sorts

of persons in great abundance. The desire and gift to see life whole

is not the lot of the great majority of men, the service of truth is

the privilege of the elect, and these clever fools who choke the

avenues of the world of thought, who stick at no inconsistency, who

oppose, obstruct, confuse, will find only the freer scope amidst

Utopian freedoms.

 

(They argued on, these two, as I worried my brains with riddles. It

was like a fight between a cock sparrow and a tortoise; they both

went on in their own way, regardless of each other’s proceedings.

The encounter had an air of being extremely lively, and the moments

of contact were few. “But you mistake my point,” the blond man was

saying, disordering his hair—which had become unruffled in the

preoccupation of dispute—with a hasty movement of his hand, “you

don’t appreciate the position I take up.”)

 

“Ugh!” said I privately, and lighted another cigarette and went away

into my own thoughts with that.

 

The position he takes up! That’s the way of your intellectual fool,

the Universe over. He takes up a position, and he’s going to be the

most brilliant, delightful, engaging and invincible of gay delicious

creatures defending that position you can possibly imagine. And even

when the case is not so bad as that, there still remains the quality.

We “take up our positions,” silly little contentious creatures

that we are, we will not see the right in one another, we will not

patiently state and restate, and honestly accommodate and plan, and

so we remain at sixes and sevens. We’ve all a touch of Gladstone in

us, and try to the last moment to deny we have made a turn. And so

our poor broken-springed world jolts athwart its trackless destiny.

Try to win into line with some fellow weakling, and see the little

host of suspicions, aggressions, misrepresentations, your approach

will stir—like summer flies on a high road—the way he will try to

score a point and claim you as a convert to what he has always said,

his fear lest the point should be scored to you.

 

It is not only such gross and palpable cases as our blond and

tenoring friend. I could find the thing negligible were it only

that. But when one sees the same thread woven into men who are

leaders, men who sway vast multitudes, who are indeed great and

powerful men; when one sees how unfair they can be, how unteachable,

the great blind areas in their eyes also, their want of generosity,

then one’s doubts gather like mists across this Utopian valley, its

vistas pale, its people become unsubstantial phantoms, all its order

and its happiness dim and recede….

 

If we are to have any Utopia at all, we must have a clear common

purpose, and a great and steadfast movement of will to override all

these incurably egotistical dissentients. Something is needed wide

and deep enough to float the worst of egotisms away. The world is

not to be made right by acclamation and in a day, and then for ever

more trusted to run alone. It is manifest this Utopia could not come

about by chance and anarchy, but by co-ordinated effort and a

community of design, and to tell of just land laws and wise

government, a wisely balanced economic system, and wise social

arrangements without telling how it was brought about, and how it is

sustained against the vanity and self-indulgence, the moody

fluctuations and uncertain imaginations, the heat and aptitude for

partisanship that lurk, even when they do not flourish, in the

texture of every man alive, is to build a palace without either door

or staircase.

 

I had not this in mind when I began.

 

Somewhere in the Modern Utopia there must be adequate men, men the

very antithesis of our friend, capable of self-devotion, of

intentional courage, of honest thought, and steady endeavour. There

must be a literature to embody their common idea, of which this

Modern Utopia is merely the material form; there must be some

organisation, however slight, to keep them in touch one with the

other.

 

Who will these men be? Will they be a caste? a race? an organisation

in the nature of a Church? … And there came into my mind the words

of our acquaintance, that he was not one of these “voluntary

noblemen.”

 

At first that phrase struck me as being merely queer, and then I

began to realise certain possibilities that were wrapped up in

it.

 

The animus of our chance friend, at any rate, went to suggest that

here was his antithesis. Evidently what he is not, will be the class

to contain what is needed here. Evidently.

 

Section 4

 

I was recalled from my meditations by the hand of the blond-haired

man upon my arm.

 

I looked up to discover the botanist had gone into the inn.

 

The blond-haired man was for a moment almost stripped of pose.

 

“I say,” he said. “Weren’t you listening to me?”

 

“No,” I said bluntly.

 

His surprise was manifest. But by an effort he recalled what he had

meant to say.

 

“Your friend,” he said, “has been telling me, in spite of my

sustained interruptions, a most incredible story.”

 

I wondered how the botanist managed to get it in. “About that

woman?” I said.

 

“About a man and a woman who hate each other and can’t get away from

each other.”

 

“I know,” I said.

 

“It sounds absurd.”

 

“It is.”

 

“Why can’t they get away? What is there to keep them together? It’s

ridiculous. I–-”

 

“Quite.”

 

“He would tell it to me.”

 

“It’s his way.”

 

“He interrupted me. And there’s no point in it. Is he–-” he

hesitated, “mad?”

 

“There’s a whole world of people mad with him,” I answered after a

pause.

 

The perplexed expression of the blond-haired man intensified. It is

vain to deny that he enlarged the scope of his inquiry, visibly if

not verbally. “Dear me!” he said, and took up something he had

nearly forgotten. “And you found yourselves suddenly on a mountain

side? … I thought you were joking.”

 

I turned round upon him with a sudden access of earnestness. At

least I meant my manner to be earnest, but to him it may have seemed

wild.

 

“You,” I said, “are an original sort of man. Do not be alarmed.

Perhaps you will understand…. We were not joking.”

 

“But, my dear fellow!”

 

“I mean it! We come from an inferior