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

to tell the truth, I do not formulate acute

curiosities. People, very unrepresentative people, people just as

casual as people in the real world, come into personal relations

with us, and little threads of private and immediate interest spin

themselves rapidly into a thickening grey veil across the general

view. I lose the comprehensive interrogation of my first arrival; I

find myself interested in the grain of the wood I work, in birds

among the tree branches, in little irrelevant things, and it is only

now and then that I get fairly back to the mood that takes all

Utopia for its picture.

 

We spend our first surplus of Utopian money in the reorganisation

of our wardrobes upon more Utopian lines; we develop acquaintance

with several of our fellow workers, and of those who share our

table at the inn. We pass insensibly into acquaintanceships and the

beginnings of friendships. The World Utopia, I say, seems for a time

to be swallowing me up. At the thought of detail it looms too big

for me. The question of government, of its sustaining ideas, of

race, and the wider future, hang like the arch of the sky over these

daily incidents, very great indeed, but very remote. These people

about me are everyday people, people not so very far from the

minimum wage, accustomed much as the everyday people of earth are

accustomed to take their world as they find it. Such enquiries as

I attempt are pretty obviously a bore to them, pass outside their

range as completely as Utopian speculation on earth outranges a

stevedore or a member of Parliament or a working plumber. Even the

little things of daily life interest them in a different way. So

I get on with my facts and reasoning rather slowly. I find myself

looking among the pleasant multitudes of the streets for types that

promise congenial conversation.

 

My sense of loneliness is increased during this interlude by the

better social success of the botanist. I find him presently falling

into conversation with two women who are accustomed to sit at a

table near our own. They wear the loose, coloured robes of soft

material that are the usual wear of common adult Utopian women; they

are both dark and sallow, and they affect amber and crimson in their

garments. Their faces strike me as a little unintelligent, and there

is a faint touch of middle-aged coquetry in their bearing that I do

not like. Yet on earth we should consider them women of exceptional

refinement. But the botanist evidently sees in this direction scope

for the feelings that have wilted a little under my inattention, and

he begins that petty intercourse of a word, of a slight civility, of

vague enquiries and comparisons that leads at last to associations

and confidences. Such superficial confidences, that is to say, as he

finds satisfactory.

 

This throws me back upon my private observations.

 

The general effect of a Utopian population is vigour. Everyone one

meets seems to be not only in good health but in training; one

rarely meets fat people, bald people, or bent or grey. People who

would be obese or bent and obviously aged on earth are here in

good repair, and as a consequence the whole effect of a crowd

is livelier and more invigorating than on earth. The dress is

varied and graceful; that of the women reminds one most of the

Italian fifteenth century; they have an abundance of soft and

beautifully-coloured stuffs, and the clothes, even of the poorest,

fit admirably. Their hair is very simply but very carefully and

beautifully dressed, and except in very sunny weather they do not

wear hats or bonnets. There is little difference in deportment

between one class and another; they all are graceful and bear

themselves with quiet dignity, and among a group of them a European

woman of fashion in her lace and feathers, her hat and metal

ornaments, her mixed accumulations of “trimmings,” would look like a

barbarian tricked out with the miscellaneous plunder of a museum.

Boys and girls wear much the same sort of costume—brown leather

shoes, then a sort of combination of hose and close-fitting trousers

that reaches from toe to waist, and over this a beltless jacket

fitting very well, or a belted tunic. Many slender women wear the

same sort of costume. We should see them in it very often in such

a place as Lucerne, as they returned from expeditions in the

mountains. The older men would wear long robes very frequently, but

the greater proportion of the men would go in variations of much the

same costume as the children. There would certainly be hooded cloaks

and umbrellas for rainy weather, high boots for mud and snow, and

cloaks and coats and furry robes for the winter. There would be no

doubt a freer use of colour than terrestrial Europe sees in these

days, but the costume of the women at least would be soberer and

more practical, and (in harmony with our discussion in the previous

chapter) less differentiated from the men’s.

 

But these, of course, are generalisations. These are the mere

translation of the social facts we have hypotheticated into the

language of costume. There will be a great variety of costume and

no compulsions. The doubles of people who are naturally foppish on

earth will be foppish in Utopia, and people who have no natural

taste on earth will have inartistic equivalents. Everyone will not

be quiet in tone, or harmonious, or beautiful. Occasionally, as I go

through the streets to my work, I shall turn round to glance again

at some robe shot with gold embroidery, some slashing of the

sleeves, some eccentricity of cut, or some discord or untidiness.

But these will be but transient flashes in a general flow of

harmonious graciousness; dress will have scarcely any of that effect

of disorderly conflict, of self-assertion qualified by the fear of

ridicule, that it has in the crudely competitive civilisations of

earth.

 

I shall have the seeker’s attitude of mind during those few days at

Lucerne. I shall become a student of faces. I shall be, as it were,

looking for someone. I shall see heavy faces, dull faces, faces with

an uncongenial animation, alien faces, and among these some with an

immediate quality of appeal. I should see desirable men approaching

me, and I should think; “Now, if I were to speak to you?” Many of

these latter I should note wore the same clothing as the man who

spoke to us at Wassen; I should begin to think of it as a sort of

uniform….

 

Then I should see grave-faced girls, girls of that budding age when

their bearing becomes delusively wise, and the old deception of

my youth will recur to me; “Could you and I but talk together?”

I should think. Women will pass me lightly, women with open and

inviting faces, but they will not attract me, and there will come

beautiful women, women with that touch of claustral preoccupation

which forbids the thought of any near approach. They are private and

secret, and I may not enter, I know, into their thoughts….

 

I go as often as I can to the seat by the end of old Kapelbrucke,

and watch the people passing over.

 

I shall find a quality of dissatisfaction throughout all these days.

I shall come to see this period more and more distinctly as a pause,

as a waiting interlude, and the idea of an encounter with my double,

which came at first as if it were a witticism, as something verbal

and surprising, begins to take substance. The idea grows in my mind

that after all this is the “someone” I am seeking, this Utopian self

of mine. I had at first an idea of a grotesque encounter, as of

something happening in a looking glass, but presently it dawns on me

that my Utopian self must be a very different person from me. His

training will be different, his mental content different. But

between us there will be a strange link of essential identity, a

sympathy, an understanding. I find the thing rising suddenly to a

preponderance in my mind. I find the interest of details dwindling

to the vanishing point. That I have come to Utopia is the lesser

thing now; the greater is that I have come to meet myself.

 

I spend hours trying to imagine the encounter, inventing little

dialogues. I go alone to the Bureau to find if any news has come to

hand from the Great Index in Paris, but I am told to wait another

twenty-four hours. I cease absolutely to be interested in anything

else, except so far as it leads towards intercourse with this being

who is to be at once so strangely alien and so totally mine.

 

Section 4

 

Wrapped up in these preoccupations as I am, it will certainly be the

botanist who will notice the comparative absence of animals about

us.

 

He will put it in the form of a temperate objection to the Utopian

planet.

 

He is a professed lover of dogs and there are none. We have seen no

horses and only one or two mules on the day of our arrival, and

there seems not a cat in the world. I bring my mind round to his

suggestion. “This follows,” I say.

 

It is only reluctantly that I allow myself to be drawn from my

secret musings into a discussion of Utopian pets.

 

I try to explain that a phase in the world’s development is

inevitable when a systematic world-wide attempt will be made to

destroy for ever a great number of contagious and infectious

diseases, and that this will involve, for a time at any rate, a

stringent suppression of the free movement of familiar animals.

Utopian houses, streets and drains will be planned and built to make

rats, mice, and such-like house parasites impossible; the race of

cats and dogs—providing, as it does, living fastnesses to which

such diseases as plague, influenza, catarrhs and the like, can

retreat to sally forth again—must pass for a time out of freedom,

and the filth made by horses and the other brutes of the highway

vanish from the face of the earth. These things make an old story to

me, and perhaps explicitness suffers through my brevity.

 

My botanist fails altogether to grasp what the disappearance of

diseases means. His mind has no imaginative organ of that compass.

As I talk his mind rests on one fixed image. This presents what the

botanist would probably call a “dear old doggie”—which the botanist

would make believe did not possess any sensible odour—and it has

faithful brown eyes and understands everything you say. The botanist

would make believe it understood him mystically, and I figure his

long white hand—which seems to me, in my more jaundiced moments, to

exist entirely for picking things and holding a lens—patting its

head, while the brute looked things unspeakable….

 

The botanist shakes his head after my explanation and says quietly,

“I do not like your Utopia, if there are to be no dogs.”

 

Perhaps that makes me a little malicious. Indeed I do not hate dogs,

but I care ten thousand times more for a man than for all the brutes

on the earth, and I can see, what the botanist I think cannot, that

a life spent in the delightful atmosphere of many pet animals may

have too dear a price….

 

I find myself back again at the comparison of the botanist and

myself. There is a profound difference in our imaginations, and I

wonder whether it is the consequence of innate character or of

training and whether he is really the human type or I. I am not

altogether without imagination, but what imagination I