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

and they framed directions of the

precisest sort to prevent that uxorious inseparableness, that

connubiality which will reduce a couple of people to something

jointly less than either. That Canon is too long to tell you now. A

man under the Rule who loves a woman who does not follow it, must

either leave the samurai to marry her, or induce her to accept what

is called the Woman’s Rule, which, while it excepts her from the

severer qualifications and disciplines, brings her regimen of life

into a working harmony with his.”

 

“Suppose she breaks the Rule afterwards?”

 

“He must leave either her or the order.”

 

“There is matter for a novel or so in that.”

 

“There has been matter for hundreds.”

 

“Is the Woman’s Rule a sumptuary law as well as a regimen? I

mean—may she dress as she pleases?”

 

“Not a bit of it,” said my double. “Every woman who could command

money used it, we found, to make underbred aggressions on other

women. As men emerged to civilisation, women seemed going back

to savagery—to paint and feathers. But the samurai, both men

and women, and the women under the Lesser Rule also, all have a

particular dress. No difference is made between women under either

the Great or the Lesser Rule. You have seen the men’s dress—always

like this I wear. The women may wear the same, either with the hair

cut short or plaited behind them, or they may have a high-waisted

dress of very fine, soft woollen material, with their hair coiled up

behind.”

 

“I have seen it,” I said. Indeed, nearly all the women had seemed to

be wearing variants of that simple formula. “It seems to me a very

beautiful dress. The other—I’m not used to. But I like it on girls

and slender women.”

 

I had a thought, and added, “Don’t they sometimes, well—take a good

deal of care, dressing their hair?”

 

My double laughed in my eyes. “They do,” he said.

 

“And the Rule?”

 

“The Rule is never fussy,” said my double, still smiling.

 

“We don’t want women to cease to be beautiful, and consciously

beautiful, if you like,” he added. “The more real beauty of form and

face we have, the finer our world. But costly sexualised

trappings–-”

 

“I should have thought,” I said, “a class of women who traded on

their sex would have arisen, women, I mean, who found an interest

and an advantage in emphasising their individual womanly beauty.

There is no law to prevent it. Surely they would tend to counteract

the severity of costume the Rule dictates.”

 

“There are such women. But for all that the Rule sets the key of

everyday dress. If a woman is possessed by the passion for gorgeous

raiment she usually satisfies it in her own private circle, or with

rare occasional onslaughts upon the public eye. Her everyday mood

and the disposition of most people is against being conspicuous

abroad. And I should say there are little liberties under the Lesser

Rule; a discreet use of fine needlework and embroidery, a wider

choice of materials.”

 

“You have no changing fashions?”

 

“None. For all that, are not our dresses as beautiful as yours?”

 

“Our women’s dresses are not beautiful at all,” I said, forced for a

time towards the mysterious philosophy of dress. “Beauty? That isn’t

their concern.”

 

“Then what are they after?”

 

“My dear man! What is all my world after?”

 

Section 6

 

I should come to our third talk with a great curiosity to hear of

the last portion of the Rule, of the things that the samurai are

obliged to do.

 

There would be many precise directions regarding his health, and

rules that would aim at once at health and that constant exercise of

will that makes life good. Save in specified exceptional

circumstances, the samurai must bathe in cold water, and the men

must shave every day; they have the precisest directions in such

matters; the body must be in health, the skin and muscles and nerves

in perfect tone, or the samurai must go to the doctors of the order,

and give implicit obedience to the regimen prescribed. They must

sleep alone at least four nights in five; and they must eat with and

talk to anyone in their fellowship who cares for their conversation

for an hour, at least, at the nearest club-house of the samurai once

on three chosen days in every week. Moreover, they must read aloud

from the Book of the Samurai for at least ten minutes every day.

Every month they must buy and read faithfully through at least one

book that has been published during the past five years, and the

only intervention with private choice in that matter is the

prescription of a certain minimum of length for the monthly book or

books. But the full Rule in these minor compulsory matters is

voluminous and detailed, and it abounds with alternatives. Its aim

is rather to keep before the samurai by a number of sample duties,

as it were, the need of, and some of the chief methods towards

health of body and mind, rather than to provide a comprehensive

rule, and to ensure the maintenance of a community of feeling and

interests among the samurai through habit, intercourse, and a living

contemporary literature. These minor obligations do not earmark more

than an hour in the day. Yet they serve to break down isolations of

sympathy, all sorts of physical and intellectual sluggishness and

the development of unsocial preoccupations of many sorts.

 

Women samurai who are married, my double told me, must bear

children—if they are to remain married as well as in the

order—before the second period for terminating a childless marriage

is exhausted. I failed to ask for the precise figures from my double

at the time, but I think it is beyond doubt that it is from samurai

mothers of the Greater or Lesser Rule that a very large proportion

of the future population of Utopia will be derived. There is one

liberty accorded to women samurai which is refused to men, and that

is to marry outside the Rule, and women married to men not under the

Rule are also free to become samurai. Here, too, it will be manifest

there is scope for novels and the drama of life. In practice, it

seems that it is only men of great poietic distinction outside the

Rule, or great commercial leaders, who have wives under it. The

tendency of such unions is either to bring the husband under the

Rule, or take the wife out of it. There can be no doubt that these

marriage limitations tend to make the samurai something of an

hereditary class. Their children, as a rule, become samurai. But it

is not an exclusive caste; subject to the most reasonable

qualifications, anyone who sees fit can enter it at any time, and

so, unlike all other privileged castes the world has seen, it

increases relatively to the total population, and may indeed at last

assimilate almost the whole population of the earth.

 

Section 7

 

So much my double told me readily.

 

But now he came to the heart of all his explanations, to the will

and motives at the centre that made men and women ready to undergo

discipline, to renounce the richness and elaboration of the sensuous

life, to master emotions and control impulses, to keep in the key of

effort while they had abundance about them to rouse and satisfy all

desires, and his exposition was more difficult.

 

He tried to make his religion clear to me.

 

The leading principle of the Utopian religion is the repudiation of

the doctrine of original sin; the Utopians hold that man, on the

whole, is good. That is their cardinal belief. Man has pride and

conscience, they hold, that you may refine by training as you refine

his eye and ear; he has remorse and sorrow in his being, coming on

the heels of all inconsequent enjoyments. How can one think of him

as bad? He is religious; religion is as natural to him as lust and

anger, less intense, indeed, but coming with a wide-sweeping

inevitableness as peace comes after all tumults and noises. And in

Utopia they understand this, or, at least, the samurai do, clearly.

They accept Religion as they accept Thirst, as something inseparably

in the mysterious rhythms of life. And just as thirst and pride and

all desires may be perverted in an age of abundant opportunities,

and men may be degraded and wasted by intemperance in drinking, by

display, or by ambition, so too the nobler complex of desires that

constitutes religion may be turned to evil by the dull, the base,

and the careless. Slovenly indulgence in religious inclinations, a

failure to think hard and discriminate as fairly as possible in

religious matters, is just as alien to the men under the Rule as it

would be to drink deeply because they were thirsty, eat until

glutted, evade a bath because the day was chilly, or make love to

any bright-eyed girl who chanced to look pretty in the dusk. Utopia,

which is to have every type of character that one finds on earth,

will have its temples and its priests, just as it will have its

actresses and wine, but the samurai will be forbidden the religion

of dramatically lit altars, organ music, and incense, as distinctly

as they are forbidden the love of painted women, or the consolations

of brandy. And to all the things that are less than religion and

that seek to comprehend it, to cosmogonies and philosophies, to

creeds and formulae, to catechisms and easy explanations, the

attitude of the samurai, the note of the Book of Samurai, will be

distrust. These things, the samurai will say, are part of the

indulgences that should come before a man submits himself to the

Rule; they are like the early gratifications of young men,

experiences to establish renunciation. The samurai will have emerged

above these things.

 

The theology of the Utopian rulers will be saturated with that same

philosophy of uniqueness, that repudiation of anything beyond

similarities and practical parallelisms, that saturates all their

institutions. They will have analysed exhaustively those fallacies

and assumptions that arise between the One and the Many, that have

troubled philosophy since philosophy began. Just as they will have

escaped that delusive unification of every species under its

specific definition that has dominated earthly reasoning, so they

will have escaped the delusive simplification of God that vitiates

all terrestrial theology. They will hold God to be complex and of an

endless variety of aspects, to be expressed by no universal formula

nor approved in any uniform manner. Just as the language of Utopia

will be a synthesis, even so will its God be. The aspect of God is

different in the measure of every man’s individuality, and the

intimate thing of religion must, therefore, exist in human solitude,

between man and God alone. Religion in its quintessence is a

relation between God and man; it is perversion to make it a relation

between man and man, and a man may no more reach God through a

priest than love his wife through a priest. But just as a man in

love may refine the interpretation of his feelings and borrow

expression from the poems and music of poietic men, so an individual

man may at his discretion read books of devotion and hear music that

is in harmony with his inchoate feelings. Many of the samurai,

therefore, will set themselves private regimens that will help their

secret religious life, will pray habitually, and read books of

devotion, but with these things the Rule of the order will have

nothing to do.

 

Clearly the God of the