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The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Modern Utopia, by H. G. Wells

#24 in our series by H. G. Wells

 

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Title: A Modern Utopia

 

Author: H. G. Wells

 

Release Date: September, 2004 [EBook #6424]

[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]

[This file was first posted on December 10, 2002]

 

Edition: 10

 

Language: English

 

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A MODERN UTOPIA ***

 

Produced by Andrew Sly

A MODERN UTOPIA

BY H. G. WELLS

A NOTE TO THE READER

This book is in all probability the last of a series of writings,

of which—disregarding certain earlier disconnected essays—my

Anticipations was the beginning. Originally I intended Anticipations

to be my sole digression from my art or trade (or what you will)

of an imaginative writer. I wrote that book in order to clear up

the muddle in my own mind about innumerable social and political

questions, questions I could not keep out of my work, which it

distressed me to touch upon in a stupid haphazard way, and which

no one, so far as I knew, had handled in a manner to satisfy my

needs. But Anticipations did not achieve its end. I have a slow

constructive hesitating sort of mind, and when I emerged from that

undertaking I found I had still most of my questions to state and

solve. In Mankind in the Making, therefore, I tried to review

the social organisation in a different way, to consider it as an

educational process instead of dealing with it as a thing with

a future history, and if I made this second book even less

satisfactory from a literary standpoint than the former (and this is

my opinion), I blundered, I think, more edifyingly—at least from

the point of view of my own instruction. I ventured upon several

themes with a greater frankness than I had used in Anticipations,

and came out of that second effort guilty of much rash writing, but

with a considerable development of formed opinion. In many matters I

had shaped out at last a certain personal certitude, upon which I

feel I shall go for the rest of my days. In this present book I have

tried to settle accounts with a number of issues left over or opened

up by its two predecessors, to correct them in some particulars, and

to give the general picture of a Utopia that has grown up in my mind

during the course of these speculations as a state of affairs at

once possible and more desirable than the world in which I live. But

this book has brought me back to imaginative writing again. In its

two predecessors the treatment of social organisation had been

purely objective; here my intention has been a little wider and

deeper, in that I have tried to present not simply an ideal, but an

ideal in reaction with two personalities. Moreover, since this may

be the last book of the kind I shall ever publish, I have written

into it as well as I can the heretical metaphysical scepticism upon

which all my thinking rests, and I have inserted certain sections

reflecting upon the established methods of sociological and economic

science….

 

The last four words will not attract the butterfly reader, I know.

I have done my best to make the whole of this book as lucid and

entertaining as its matter permits, because I want it read by as

many people as possible, but I do not promise anything but rage and

confusion to him who proposes to glance through my pages just to see

if I agree with him, or to begin in the middle, or to read without

a constantly alert attention. If you are not already a little

interested and open-minded with regard to social and political

questions, and a little exercised in self-examination, you will find

neither interest nor pleasure here. If your mind is “made up” upon

such issues your time will be wasted on these pages. And even if you

are a willing reader you may require a little patience for the

peculiar method I have this time adopted.

 

That method assumes an air of haphazard, but it is not so careless

as it seems. I believe it to be—even now that I am through with the

book—the best way to a sort of lucid vagueness which has always

been my intention in this matter. I tried over several beginnings of

a Utopian book before I adopted this. I rejected from the outset the

form of the argumentative essay, the form which appeals most readily

to what is called the “serious” reader, the reader who is often no

more than the solemnly impatient parasite of great questions. He

likes everything in hard, heavy lines, black and white, yes and no,

because he does not understand how much there is that cannot be

presented at all in that way; wherever there is any effect of

obliquity, of incommensurables, wherever there is any levity

or humour or difficulty of multiplex presentation, he refuses

attention. Mentally he seems to be built up upon an invincible

assumption that the Spirit of Creation cannot count beyond two, he

deals only in alternatives. Such readers I have resolved not to

attempt to please here. Even if I presented all my tri-clinic

crystals as systems of cubes–-! Indeed I felt it would not be

worth doing. But having rejected the “serious” essay as a form, I

was still greatly exercised, I spent some vacillating months, over

the scheme of this book. I tried first a recognised method of

viewing questions from divergent points that has always attracted me

and which I have never succeeded in using, the discussion novel,

after the fashion of Peacock’s (and Mr. Mallock’s) development of

the ancient dialogue; but this encumbered me with unnecessary

characters and the inevitable complication of intrigue among them,

and I abandoned it. After that I tried to cast the thing into a

shape resembling a little the double personality of Boswell’s

Johnson, a sort of interplay between monologue and commentator; but

that too, although it got nearer to the quality I sought, finally

failed. Then I hesitated over what one might call “hard narrative.”

It will be evident to the experienced reader that by omitting

certain speculative and metaphysical elements and by elaborating

incident, this book might have been reduced to a straightforward

story. But I did not want to omit as much on this occasion. I do not

see why I should always pander to the vulgar appetite for stark

stories. And in short, I made it this. I explain all this in order

to make it clear to the reader that, however queer this book

appears at the first examination, it is the outcome of trial and

deliberation, it is intended to be as it is. I am aiming throughout

at a sort of shot-silk texture between philosophical discussion on

the one hand and imaginative narrative on the other.

 

H. G. WELLS.

CONTENTS

The Owner of the Voice

Chapter the First—Topographical

Chapter the Second—Concerning Freedoms

Chapter the Third—Utopian Economics

Chapter the Fourth—The Voice of Nature

Chapter the Fifth—Failure in a Modern Utopia

Chapter the Sixth—Women in a Modern Utopia

Chapter the Seventh—A Few Utopian Impressions

Chapter the Eighth—My Utopian Self

Chapter the Ninth—The Samurai

Chapter the Tenth—Race in Utopia

Chapter the Eleventh—The Bubble Bursts Appendix—Scepticism of the Instrument A MODERN UTOPIA THE OWNER OF THE VOICE

There are works, and this is one of them, that are best begun with a

portrait of the author. And here, indeed, because of a very natural

misunderstanding this is the only course to take. Throughout these

papers sounds a note, a distinctive and personal note, a note that

tends at times towards stridency; and all that is not, as these

words are, in Italics, is in one Voice. Now, this Voice, and this is

the peculiarity of the matter, is not to be taken as the Voice of

the ostensible author who fathers these pages. You have to clear

your mind of any preconceptions in that respect. The Owner of the

Voice you must figure to yourself as a whitish plump man, a little

under the middle size and age, with such blue eyes as many Irishmen

have, and agile in his movements and with a slight tonsorial

baldness—a penny might cover it—of the crown. His front is convex.

He droops at times like most of us, but for the greater part he

bears himself as valiantly as a sparrow. Occasionally his hand flies

out with a fluttering gesture of illustration. And his Voice (which

is our medium henceforth) is an unattractive tenor that becomes at

times aggressive. Him you must imagine as sitting at a table reading

a manuscript about Utopias, a manuscript he holds in two hands that

are just a little fat at the wrist. The curtain rises upon him so.

But afterwards, if the devices of this declining art of literature

prevail, you will go with him through curious and interesting

experiences. Yet, ever and again, you will find him back at that

little table, the manuscript in his hand, and the expansion of

his ratiocinations about Utopia conscientiously resumed. The

entertainment before you is neither the set drama of the work of

fiction you are accustomed to read, nor the set lecturing of the

essay you are accustomed to evade, but a hybrid of these two. If you

figure this owner of the Voice as sitting, a little nervously, a

little modestly, on a stage, with table, glass of water and all

complete, and myself as the intrusive chairman insisting with a

bland ruthlessness upon his “few words” of introduction before he

recedes into the wings, and if furthermore you figure a sheet behind

our friend on which moving pictures intermittently appear, and if

finally you suppose his subject to be the story of the adventure of

his soul among Utopian inquiries, you will be prepared for some at

least of the difficulties of this unworthy but unusual work.

 

But over against this writer here presented, there is also another

earthly person in the book, who gathers himself together into a

distinct personality only after a preliminary complication with the

reader. This person is spoken of as the botanist, and he is a

leaner, rather taller, graver and much less garrulous man. His face

is weakly handsome and done in tones of grey, he is fairish

and

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