A Modern Utopia by H. G. Wells (i have read the book txt) đź“–
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bedclothes hang airing. You stand at the doorway and realise that
there remains not a minute’s work for anyone to do. Memories of the
foetid disorder of many an earthly bedroom after a night’s use
float across your mind.
And you must not imagine this dustless, spotless, sweet apartment as
anything but beautiful. Its appearance is a little unfamiliar of
course, but all the muddle of dust-collecting hangings and witless
ornament that cover the earthly bedroom, the valances, the curtains
to check the draught from the ill-fitting wood windows, the
worthless irrelevant pictures, usually a little askew, the dusty
carpets, and all the paraphernalia about the dirty, black-leaded
fireplace are gone. But the faintly tinted walls are framed with
just one clear coloured line, as finely placed as the member of a
Greek capital; the door handles and the lines of the panels of the
door, the two chairs, the framework of the bed, the writing table,
have all that final simplicity, that exquisite finish of contour
that is begotten of sustained artistic effort. The graciously shaped
windows each frame a picture—since they are draughtless the window
seats are no mere mockeries as are the window seats of earth—and on
the sill, the sole thing to need attention in the room, is one
little bowl of blue Alpine flowers.
The same exquisite simplicity meets one downstairs.
Our landlord sits down at table with us for a moment, and seeing we
do not understand the electrically heated coffee-pot before us,
shows us what to do. Coffee and milk we have, in the Continental
fashion, and some excellent rolls and butter.
He is a swarthy little man, our landlord, and overnight we saw him
preoccupied with other guests. But we have risen either late or
early by Utopian standards, we know not which, and this morning he
has us to himself. His bearing is kindly and inoffensive, but he
cannot conceal the curiosity that possesses him. His eye meets ours
with a mute inquiry, and then as we fall to, we catch him
scrutinising our cuffs, our garments, our boots, our faces, our
table manners. He asks nothing at first, but says a word or so about
our night’s comfort and the day’s weather, phrases that have an air
of being customary. Then comes a silence that is interrogative.
“Excellent coffee,” I say to fill the gap.
“And excellent rolls,” says my botanist.
Our landlord indicates his sense of our approval.
A momentary diversion is caused by the entry of an elfin-tressed
little girl, who stares at us half impudently, half shyly, with
bright black eyes, hesitates at the botanist’s clumsy smile and nod,
and then goes and stands by her father and surveys us steadfastly.
“You have come far?” ventures our landlord, patting his daughter’s
shoulder.
I glance at the botanist. “Yes,” I say, “we have.”
I expand. “We have come so far that this country of yours seems very
strange indeed to us.”
“The mountains?”
“Not only the mountains.”
“You came up out of the Ticino valley?”
“No—not that way.”
“By the Oberalp?”
“No.”
“The Furka?”
“No.”
“Not up from the lake?”
“No.”
He looks puzzled.
“We came,” I say, “from another world.”
He seems trying to understand. Then a thought strikes him, and he
sends away his little girl with a needless message to her
mother.
“Ah!” he says. “Another world—eh? Meaning–-?”
“Another world—far in the deeps of space.”
Then at the expression of his face one realises that a Modern Utopia
will probably keep its more intelligent citizens for better work
than inn-tending. He is evidently inaccessible to the idea we think
of putting before him. He stares at us a moment, and then remarks,
“There’s the book to sign.”
We find ourselves confronted with a book, a little after the fashion
of the familiar hotel visitors’ book of earth. He places this before
us, and beside it puts pen and ink and a slab, upon which ink has
been freshly smeared.
“Thumbmarks,” says my scientific friend hastily in English.
“You show me how to do it,” I say as quickly.
He signs first, and I look over his shoulder.
He is displaying more readiness than I should have expected. The
book is ruled in broad transverse lines, and has a space for a name,
for a number, and a thumbmark. He puts his thumb upon the slab and
makes the thumbmark first with the utmost deliberation. Meanwhile
he studies the other two entries. The “numbers” of the previous
guests above are complex muddles of letters and figures. He writes
his name, then with a calm assurance writes down his number,
A.M.a.1607.2.ab+. I am wrung with momentary admiration. I follow
his example, and fabricate an equally imposing signature. We think
ourselves very clever. The landlord proffers finger bowls for our
thumbs, and his eye goes, just a little curiously, to our entries.
I decide it is advisable to pay and go before any conversation about
our formulae arises.
As we emerge into the corridor, and the morning sunlight of the
Utopian world, I see the landlord bending over the book.
“Come on,” I say. “The most tiresome thing in the world is
explanations, and I perceive that if we do not get along, they will
fall upon us now.”
I glance back to discover the landlord and a gracefully robed woman
standing outside the pretty simplicity of the Utopian inn, watching
us doubtfully as we recede.
“Come on,” I insist.
Section 8
We should go towards the Schoellenen gorge, and as we went, our
fresh morning senses would gather together a thousand factors for
our impression of this more civilised world. A Modern Utopia will
have done with yapping about nationality, and so the ugly
fortifications, the barracks and military defilements of the earthly
vale of Urseren will be wanting. Instead there will be a great
multitude of gracious little houses clustering in college-like
groups, no doubt about their common kitchens and halls, down and
about the valley slopes. And there will be many more trees, and a
great variety of trees—all the world will have been ransacked for
winter conifers. Despite the height of the valley there will be a
double avenue along the road. This high road with its tramway would
turn with us to descend the gorge, and we should hesitate upon the
adventure of boarding the train. But now we should have the memory
of our landlord’s curious eye upon us, and we should decide at last
to defer the risk of explanations such an enterprise might
precipitate.
We should go by the great road for a time, and note something of the
difference between Utopian and terrestrial engineering.
The tramway, the train road, the culverts, and bridges, the
Urnerloch tunnel, into which the road plunges, will all be beautiful
things.
There is nothing in machinery, there is nothing in embankments and
railways and iron bridges and engineering devices to oblige them to
be ugly. Ugliness is the measure of imperfection; a thing of human
making is for the most part ugly in proportion to the poverty of its
constructive thought, to the failure of its producer fully to grasp
the purpose of its being. Everything to which men continue to give
thought and attention, which they make and remake in the same
direction, and with a continuing desire to do as well as they can,
grows beautiful inevitably. Things made by mankind under modern
conditions are ugly, primarily because our social organisation is
ugly, because we live in an atmosphere of snatch and uncertainty,
and do everything in an underbred strenuous manner. This is the
misfortune of machinery, and not its fault. Art, like some beautiful
plant, lives on its atmosphere, and when the atmosphere is good, it
will grow everywhere, and when it is bad nowhere. If we smashed and
buried every machine, every furnace, every factory in the world, and
without any further change set ourselves to home industries, hand
labour, spade husbandry, sheep-folding and pig minding, we should
still do things in the same haste, and achieve nothing but
dirtiness, inconvenience, bad air, and another gaunt and gawky
reflection of our intellectual and moral disorder. We should mend
nothing.
But in Utopia a man who designs a tram road will be a cultivated
man, an artist craftsman; he will strive, as a good writer, or a
painter strives, to achieve the simplicity of perfection. He will
make his girders and rails and parts as gracious as that first
engineer, Nature, has made the stems of her plants and the joints
and gestures of her animals. To esteem him a sort of anti-artist, to
count every man who makes things with his unaided thumbs an artist,
and every man who uses machinery as a brute, is merely a passing
phase of human stupidity. This tram road beside us will be a triumph
of design. The idea will be so unfamiliar to us that for a time it
will not occur to us that it is a system of beautiful objects at
all. We shall admire its ingenious adaptation to the need of a
district that is buried half the year in snow, the hard bed below,
curved and guttered to do its own clearing, the great arched sleeper
masses, raising the rails a good two yards above the ground, the
easy, simple standards and insulators. Then it will creep in upon
our minds, “But, by Jove! This is designed!”
Indeed the whole thing will be designed.
Later on, perhaps, we may find students in an art school working in
competition to design an electric tram, students who know something
of modern metallurgy, and something of electrical engineering, and
we shall find people as keenly critical of a signal box or an iron
bridge as they are on earth of–-! Heavens! what are they
critical about on earth?
The quality and condition of a dress tie!
We should make some unpatriotic comparisons with our own planet, no
doubt.
The Voice of Nature
Section 1
Presently we recognise the fellow of the earthly Devil’s Bridge,
still intact as a footway, spanning the gorge, and old memories turn
us off the road down the steep ruin of an ancient mule track towards
it. It is our first reminder that Utopia too must have a history. We
cross it and find the Reuss, for all that it has already lit and
warmed and ventilated and cleaned several thousands of houses in the
dale above, and for all that it drives those easy trams in the
gallery overhead, is yet capable of as fine a cascade as ever it
flung on earth. So we come to a rocky path, wild as one could wish,
and descend, discoursing how good and fair an ordered world may be,
but with a certain unformulated qualification in our minds about
those thumb marks we have left behind.
“Do you recall the Zermatt valley?” says my friend, “and how on
earth it reeks and stinks with smoke?”
“People make that an argument for obstructing change, instead of
helping it forward!”
And here perforce an episode intrudes. We are invaded by a talkative
person.
He overtakes us and begins talking forthwith in a fluty, but not
unamiable, tenor. He is a great talker, this man, and a fairly
respectable gesticulator, and to him it is we make our first
ineffectual tentatives at explaining who indeed we are; but his flow
of talk washes that all away again. He has a face of that rubicund,
knobby type I have heard an indignant mineralogist speak of as
botryoidal, and
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