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

and then a

string of swaying lights, gone with the leap of a camera

shutter.

 

Two hundred miles an hour!

 

We resort to a dignified Chinese steward and secure our berths. It

is perhaps terrestrial of us that we do not think of reading the

Utopian literature that lines the middle part of the train. I

find a bed of the simple Utopian pattern, and lie for a time

thinking—quite tranquilly—of this marvellous adventure.

 

I wonder why it is that to lie securely in bed, with the light out,

seems ever the same place, wherever in space one may chance to be?

And asleep, there is no space for us at all. I become drowsy and

incoherent and metaphysical….

 

The faint and fluctuating drone of the wheels below the car,

re-echoed by the flying track, is more perceptible now, but it is

not unpleasantly loud, merely a faint tinting of the quiet….

 

No sea crossing breaks our journey; there is nothing to prevent a

Channel tunnel in that other planet; and I wake in London.

 

The train has been in London some time when I awake, for these

marvellous Utopians have discovered that it is not necessary to

bundle out passengers from a train in the small hours, simply

because they have arrived. A Utopian train is just a peculiar kind

of hotel corridor that flies about the earth while one sleeps.

 

Section 7

 

How will a great city of Utopia strike us?

 

To answer that question well one must needs be artist and engineer,

and I am neither. Moreover, one must employ words and phrases that

do not exist, for this world still does not dream of the things that

may be done with thought and steel, when the engineer is

sufficiently educated to be an artist, and the artistic intelligence

has been quickened to the accomplishment of an engineer. How can one

write of these things for a generation which rather admires that

inconvenient and gawky muddle of ironwork and Flemish architecture,

the London Tower Bridge. When before this, temerarious anticipators

have written of the mighty buildings that might someday be, the

illustrator has blended with the poor ineffectual splutter of the

author’s words, his powerful suggestion that it amounted simply to

something bulbous, florid and fluent in the vein of the onion, and

L’Art Nouveau. But here, it may be, the illustrator will not

intervene.

 

Art has scarcely begun in the world.

 

There have been a few forerunners and that is all. Leonardo, Michael

Angelo; how they would have exulted in the liberties of steel! There

are no more pathetic documents in the archives of art than

Leonardo’s memoranda. In these, one sees him again and again

reaching out as it were, with empty desirous hands, towards the

unborn possibilities of the engineer. And Durer, too, was a Modern,

with the same turn towards creative invention. In our times these

men would have wanted to make viaducts, to bridge wild and

inaccessible places, to cut and straddle great railways athwart the

mountain masses of the world. You can see, time after time, in

Durer’s work, as you can see in the imaginary architectural

landscape of the Pompeian walls, the dream of structures, lighter

and bolder than stone or brick can yield…. These Utopian town

buildings will be the realisation of such dreams.

 

Here will be one of the great meeting places of mankind. Here—I

speak of Utopian London—will be the traditional centre of one of

the great races in the commonalty of the World State—and here will

be its social and intellectual exchange. There will be a mighty

University here, with thousands of professors and tens of thousands

of advanced students, and here great journals of thought and

speculation, mature and splendid books of philosophy and science,

and a glorious fabric of literature will be woven and shaped, and

with a teeming leisureliness, put forth. Here will be stupendous

libraries, and a mighty organisation of museums. About these centres

will cluster a great swarm of people, and close at hand will be

another centre, for I who am an Englishman must needs stipulate that

Westminster shall still be a seat of world Empire, one of several

seats, if you will—where the ruling council of the world assembles.

Then the arts will cluster round this city, as gold gathers about

wisdom, and here Englishmen will weave into wonderful prose and

beautiful rhythms and subtly atmospheric forms, the intricate,

austere and courageous imagination of our race.

 

One will come into this place as one comes into a noble mansion.

They will have flung great arches and domes of glass above the wider

spaces of the town, the slender beauty of the perfect metal-work far

overhead will be softened to a fairy-like unsubstantiality by the

mild London air. It will be the London air we know, clear of filth

and all impurity, the same air that gives our October days their

unspeakable clarity and makes every London twilight mysteriously

beautiful. We shall go along avenues of architecture that will be

emancipated from the last memories of the squat temple boxes of the

Greek, the buxom curvatures of Rome; the Goth in us will have taken

to steel and countless new materials as kindly as once he took to

stone. The gay and swiftly moving platforms of the public ways will

go past on either hand, carrying sporadic groups of people, and very

speedily we shall find ourselves in a sort of central space, rich

with palms and flowering bushes and statuary. We shall look along an

avenue of trees, down a wide gorge between the cliffs of crowded

hotels, the hotels that are still glowing with internal lights, to

where the shining morning river streams dawnlit out to sea.

 

Great multitudes of people will pass softly to and fro in this

central space, beautiful girls and youths going to the University

classes that are held in the stately palaces about us, grave and

capable men and women going to their businesses, children meandering

along to their schools, holiday makers, lovers, setting out

upon a hundred quests; and here we shall ask for the two we more

particularly seek. A graceful little telephone kiosk will put us

within reach of them, and with a queer sense of unreality I shall

find myself talking to my Utopian twin. He has heard of me, he wants

to see me and he gives me clear directions how to come to him.

 

I wonder if my own voice sounds like that.

 

“Yes,” I say, “then I will come as soon as we have been to our

hotel.”

 

We indulge in no eloquence upon this remarkable occasion. Yet I feel

an unusual emotional stir. I tremble greatly, and the telephonic

mouthpiece rattles as I replace it.

 

And thence the botanist and I walk on to the apartments that have

been set aside for us, and into which the poor little rolls of the

property that has accumulated about us in Utopia, our earthly

raiment, and a change of linen and the like, have already been

delivered. As we go I find I have little to say to my companion,

until presently I am struck by a transitory wonder that he should

have so little to say to me.

 

“I can still hardly realise,” I say, “that I am going to see

myself—as I might have been.”

 

“No,” he says, and relapses at once into his own preoccupation.

 

For a moment my wonder as to what he should be thinking about brings

me near to a double self-forgetfulness.

 

I realise we are at the entrance of our hotel before I can formulate

any further remark.

 

“This is the place,” I say.