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

stand in the twilight in the midst of

a Utopian township, when my whole being should be taken up with

speculative wonder, this man should be standing by my side, and

lugging my attention persistently towards himself, towards his

limited futile self. This thing perpetually happens to me, this

intrusion of something small and irrelevant and alive, upon my great

impressions. The time I first saw the Matterhorn, that Queen among

the Alpine summits, I was distracted beyond appreciation by the tale

of a man who could not eat sardines—always sardines did this with

him and that; and my first wanderings along the brown streets of

Pompeii, an experience I had anticipated with a strange intensity,

was shot with the most stupidly intelligent discourse on vehicular

tariffs in the chief capitals of Europe that it is possible to

imagine. And now this man, on my first night in Utopia, talks and

talks and talks of his poor little love affair.

 

It shapes itself as the most trite and feeble of tragedies, one of

those stories of effortless submission to chance and custom in which

Mr. Hardy or George Gissing might have found a theme. I do but half

listen at first—watching the black figures in the moonlit roadway

pacing to and fro. Yet—I cannot trace how he conveys the subtle

conviction to my mind—the woman he loves is beautiful.

 

They were boy and girl together, and afterwards they met again as

fellow students in a world of comfortable discretions. He seems to

have taken the decorums of life with a confiding good faith, to have

been shy and innocent in a suppressed sort of way, and of a mental

type not made for worldly successes; but he must have dreamt about

her and loved her well enough. How she felt for him I could never

gather; it seemed to be all of that fleshless friendliness into

which we train our girls. Then abruptly happened stresses. The man

who became her husband appeared, with a very evident passion. He was

a year or so older than either of them, and he had the habit and

quality of achieving his ends; he was already successful, and with

the promise of wealth, and I, at least, perceived, from my

botanist’s phrasing, that his desire was for her beauty.

 

As my botanist talked I seemed to see the whole little drama, rather

clearer than his words gave it me, the actors all absurdly in

Hampstead middle-class raiment, meetings of a Sunday after church

(the men in silk hats, frock coats, and tightly-rolled umbrellas),

rare excursions into evening dress, the decorously vulgar fiction

read in their homes, its ambling sentimentalities of thought, the

amiably worldly mothers, the respectable fathers, the aunts, the

“people”—his “people” and her “people”—the piano music and the

song, and in this setting our friend, “quite clever” at botany and

“going in” for it “as a profession,” and the girl, gratuitously

beautiful; so I figured the arranged and orderly environment into

which this claw of an elemental force had thrust itself to grip.

 

The stranger who had come in got what he wanted; the girl considered

that she thought she had never loved the botanist, had had only

friendship for him—though little she knew of the meaning of those

fine words—they parted a little incoherently and in tears, and it

had not occurred to the young man to imagine she was not going off

to conventional life in some other of the endless Frognals he

imagined as the cellular tissue of the world.

 

But she wasn’t.

 

He had kept her photograph and her memory sweet, and if ever he had

strayed from the severest constancy, it seemed only in the end to

strengthen with the stuff of experience, to enhance by comparative

disappointment his imagination of what she might have meant to

him…. Then eight years afterwards they met again.

 

By the time he gets to this part of his story we have, at my

initiative, left the bridge and are walking towards the Utopian

guest house. The Utopian guest house! His voice rises and falls,

and sometimes he holds my arm. My attention comes and goes.

“Good-night,” two sweet-voiced Utopians cry to us in their

universal tongue, and I answer them “Good-night.”

 

“You see,” he persists, “I saw her only a week ago. It was in

Lucerne, while I was waiting for you to come on from England. I

talked to her three or four times altogether. And her face—the

change in her! I can’t get it out of my head—night or day. The

miserable waste of her….”

 

Before us, through the tall pine stems, shine the lights of our

Utopian inn.

 

He talks vaguely of ill-usage. “The husband is vain, boastful,

dishonest to the very confines of the law, and a drunkard. There

are scenes and insults–-”

 

“She told you?”

 

“Not much, but someone else did. He brings other women almost into

her presence to spite her.”

 

“And it’s going on?” I interrupt.

 

“Yes. Now.”

 

“Need it go on?”

 

“What do you mean?”

 

“Lady in trouble,” I say. “Knight at hand. Why not stop this dismal

grizzling and carry her off?” (You figure the heroic sweep of the

arm that belongs to the Voice.) I positively forget for the moment

that we are in Utopia at all.

 

“You mean?”

 

“Take her away from him! What’s all this emotion of yours worth if

it isn’t equal to that!”

 

Positively he seems aghast at me.

 

“Do you mean elope with her?”

 

“It seems a most suitable case.”

 

For a space he is silent, and we go on through the trees. A Utopian

tram-car passes and I see his face, poor bitted wretch! looking

pinched and scared in its trailing glow of light.

 

“That’s all very well in a novel,” he says. “But how could I go back

to my laboratory, mixed classes with young ladies, you know, after a

thing like that? How could we live and where could we live? We might

have a house in London, but who would call upon us? … Besides, you

don’t know her. She is not the sort of woman…. Don’t think I’m

timid or conventional. Don’t think I don’t feel…. Feel! You

don’t know what it is to feel in a case of this sort….”

 

He halts and then flies out viciously: “Ugh! There are times when I

could strangle him with my hands.”

 

Which is nonsense.

 

He flings out his lean botanising hands in an impotent gesture.

 

“My dear Man!” I say, and say no more.

 

For a moment I forget we are in Utopia altogether.

 

Section 5

 

Let us come back to Utopia. We were speaking of travel.

 

Besides roadways and railways and tramways, for those who go to and

fro in the earth the Modern Utopians will have very many other ways

of travelling. There will be rivers, for example, with a vast

variety of boats; canals with diverse sorts of haulage; there will

be lakes and lagoons; and when one comes at last to the borders of

the land, the pleasure craft will be there, coming and going, and

the swift great passenger vessels, very big and steady, doing thirty

knots an hour or more, will trace long wakes as they go dwindling

out athwart the restless vastness of the sea.

 

They will be just beginning to fly in Utopia. We owe much to M.

Santos Dumont; the world is immeasurably more disposed to believe

this wonder is coming, and coming nearly, than it was five years

ago. But unless we are to suppose Utopian scientific knowledge far

in advance of ours—and though that supposition was not proscribed

in our initial undertaking, it would be inconvenient for us and not

quite in the vein of the rest of our premises—they, too, will only

be in the same experimental stage as ourselves. In Utopia, however,

they will conduct research by the army corps while we conduct it—we

don’t conduct it! We let it happen. Fools make researches and wise

men exploit them—that is our earthly way of dealing with the

question, and we thank Heaven for an assumed abundance of

financially impotent and sufficiently ingenious fools.

 

In Utopia, a great multitude of selected men, chosen volunteers,

will be collaborating upon this new step in man’s struggle with the

elements. Bacon’s visionary House of Saloman [Footnote: In The New

Atlantis.] will be a thing realised, and it will be humming with

this business. Every university in the world will be urgently

working for priority in this aspect of the problem or that. Reports

of experiments, as full and as prompt as the telegraphic reports of

cricket in our more sportive atmosphere, will go about the world.

All this will be passing, as it were, behind the act drop of our

first experience, behind this first picture of the urbanised Urseren

valley. The literature of the subject will be growing and developing

with the easy swiftness of an eagle’s swoop as we come down the

hillside; unseen in that twilight, unthought of by us until this

moment, a thousand men at a thousand glowing desks, a busy

specialist press, will be perpetually sifting, criticising,

condensing, and clearing the ground for further speculation. Those

who are concerned with the problems of public locomotion will

be following these aeronautic investigations with a keen and

enterprising interest, and so will the physiologist and the

sociologist. That Utopian research will, I say, go like an eagle’s

swoop in comparison with the blind-man’s fumbling of our terrestrial

way. Even before our own brief Utopian journey is out, we may get a

glimpse of the swift ripening of all this activity that will be in

progress at our coming. To-morrow, perhaps, or in a day or so,

some silent, distant thing will come gliding into view over the

mountains, will turn and soar and pass again beyond our astonished

sight….

 

Section 6

 

But my friend and his great trouble turn my mind from these

questions of locomotion and the freedoms that cluster about them. In

spite of myself I find myself framing his case. He is a lover, the

most conventional of Anglican lovers, with a heart that has had its

training, I should think, in the clean but limited schoolroom of

Mrs. Henry Wood….

 

In Utopia I think they will fly with stronger pinions, it will not

be in the superficialities of life merely that movement will be wide

and free, they will mount higher and swoop more steeply than he in

his cage can believe. What will their range be, their prohibitions?

what jars to our preconceptions will he and I receive here?

 

My mind flows with the free, thin flow that it has at the end of an

eventful day, and as we walk along in silence towards our inn I rove

from issue to issue, I find myself ranging amidst the fundamental

things of the individual life and all the perplexity of desires and

passions. I turn my questionings to the most difficult of all sets

of compromises, those mitigations of spontaneous freedom that

constitute the marriage laws, the mystery of balancing justice

against the good of the future, amidst these violent and elusive

passions. Where falls the balance of freedoms here? I pass for a

time from Utopianising altogether, to ask the question that, after

all, Schopenhauer failed completely to answer, why sometimes in the

case of hurtful, pointless, and destructive things we want so

vehemently….

 

I come back from this unavailing glance into the deeps to the

general question of freedoms in this new relation. I find myself far

adrift from the case of the Frognal botanist, and asking how far a

modern Utopia will deal with personal morals.

 

As Plato