A Modern Utopia by H. G. Wells (i have read the book txt) đ
- Author: H. G. Wells
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He is dressed in leather doublet and knee breeches, and he wears
over these a streaming woollen cloak of faded crimson that give him
a fine dramatic outline as he comes down towards us over the rocks.
His feet, which are large and handsome, but bright pink with the
keen morning air, are bare, except for sandals of leather. (It was
the only time that we saw anyone in Utopia with bare feet.) He
salutes us with a scroll-like waving of his stick, and falls in with
our slower paces.
âClimbers, I presume?â he says, âand you scorn these trams of
theirs? I like you. So do I! Why a man should consent to be dealt
with as a bale of goods holding an indistinctive ticketâwhen God
gave him legs and a faceâpasses my understanding.â
As he speaks, his staff indicates the great mechanical road that
runs across the gorge and high overhead through a gallery in the
rock, follows it along until it turns the corner, picks it up as a
viaduct far below, traces it until it plunges into an arcade through
a jutting crag, and there dismisses it with a spiral whirl. âNo!â
he says.
He seems sent by Providence, for just now we had been discussing how
we should broach our remarkable situation to these Utopians before
our money is spent.
Our eyes meet, and I gather from the botanist that I am to open our
case.
I do my best.
âYou came from the other side of space!â says the man in the crimson
cloak, interrupting me. âPrecisely! I like thatâitâs exactly my
note! So do I! And you find this world strange! Exactly my case! We
are brothers! We shall be in sympathy. I am amazed, I have been
amazed as long as I can remember, and I shall die, most certainly,
in a state of incredulous amazement, at this remarkable world.
Eh? ⊠You found yourselves suddenly upon a mountain top! Fortunate
men!â He chuckled. âFor my part I found myself in the still stranger
position of infant to two parents of the most intractable
dispositions!â
âThe fact remains,â I protest.
âA position, I can assure you, demanding Tact of an altogether
superhuman quality!â
We desist for a space from the attempt to explain our remarkable
selves, and for the rest of the time this picturesque and
exceptional Utopian takes the talk entirely under his controlâŠ.
Section 2
An agreeable person, though a little distracting, he was, and he
talked, we recall, of many things. He impressed us, we found
afterwards, as a poseur beyond question, a conscious Ishmaelite in
the world of wit, and in some subtly inexplicable way as a most
consummate ass. He talked first of the excellent and commodious
trams that came from over the passes, and ran down the long valley
towards middle Switzerland, and of all the growth of pleasant homes
and chalets amidst the heights that made the opening gorge so
different from its earthly parallel, with a fine disrespect. âBut
they are beautiful,â I protested. âThey are graciously proportioned,
they are placed in well-chosen positions; they give no offence to
the eye.â
âWhat do we know of the beauty they replace? They are a mere rash.
Why should we men play the part of bacteria upon the face of our
Mother?â
âAll life is that!â
âNo! not natural life, not the plants and the gentle creatures that
live their wild shy lives in forest and jungle. That is a part of
her. That is the natural bloom of her complexion. But these houses
and tramways and things, all made from ore and stuff torn from her
veinsâ-! You canât better my image of the rash. Itâs a morbid
breaking out! Iâd give it all for oneâwhat is it?âfree and natural
chamois.â
âYou live at times in a house?â I asked.
He ignored my question. For him, untroubled Nature was the best, he
said, and, with a glance at his feet, the most beautiful. He
professed himself a Nazarite, and shook back his Teutonic poetâs
shock of hair. So he came to himself, and for the rest of our walk
he kept to himself as the thread of his discourse, and went over
himself from top to toe, and strung thereon all topics under the sun
by way of illustrating his splendours. But especially his foil was
the relative folly, the unnaturalness and want of logic in his
fellow men. He held strong views about the extreme simplicity of
everything, only that men, in their muddle-headedness, had
confounded it all. âHence, for example, these trams! They are always
running up and down as though they were looking for the lost
simplicity of nature. âWe dropped it here!ââ He earned a living, we
gathered, âsome considerable way above the minimum wage,â which
threw a chance light on the labour problemâby perforating records
for automatic musical machinesâno doubt of the Pianotist and
Pianola kindâand he spent all the leisure he could gain in going to
and fro in the earth lecturing on âThe Need of a Return to Nature,â
and on âSimple Foods and Simple Ways.â He did it for the love of it.
It was very clear to us he had an inordinate impulse to lecture, and
esteemed us fair game. He had been lecturing on these topics in
Italy, and he was now going back through the mountains to lecture in
Saxony, lecturing on the way, to perforate a lot more records,
lecturing the while, and so start out lecturing again. He was
undisguisedly glad to have us to lecture to by the way.
He called our attention to his costume at an early stage. It was the
embodiment of his ideal of Nature-clothing, and it had been made
especially for him at very great cost. âSimply because naturalness
has fled the earth, and has to be sought now, and washed out from
your crushed complexities like gold.â
âI should have thought,â said I, âthat any clothing whatever was
something of a slight upon the natural man.â
âNot at all,â said he, ânot at all! You forget his natural
vanity!â
He was particularly severe on our artificial hoofs, as he called our
boots, and our hats or hair destructors. âMan is the real King of
Beasts and should wear a mane. The lion only wears it by consent and
in captivity.â He tossed his head.
Subsequently while we lunched and he waited for the specific natural
dishes he orderedâthey taxed the culinary resources of the inn to
the utmostâhe broached a comprehensive generalisation. âThe animal
kingdom and the vegetable kingdom are easily distinguished, and for
the life of me I see no reason for confusing them. It is, I hold, a
sin against Nature. I keep them distinct in my mind and I keep them
distinct in my person. No animal substance inside, no vegetable
without;âwhat could be simpler or more logical? Nothing upon me but
leather and allwool garments, within, cereals, fruit, nuts, herbs,
and the like. Classificationâorderâmanâs function. He is here to
observe and accentuate Natureâs simplicity. These peopleââhe swept
an arm that tried not too personally to include usââare filled and
covered with confusion.â
He ate great quantities of grapes and finished with a cigarette. He
demanded and drank a great horn of unfermented grape juice, and it
seemed to suit him well.
We three sat about the boardâit was in an agreeable little arbour
on a hill hard by the place where Wassen stands on earth, and it
looked down the valley to the Uri Rothstock, and ever and again we
sought to turn his undeniable gift of exposition to the elucidation
of our own difficulties.
But we seemed to get little, his style was so elusive. Afterwards,
indeed, we found much information and many persuasions had soaked
into us, but at the time it seemed to us he told us nothing. He
indicated things by dots and dashes, instead of by good hard
assertive lines. He would not pause to see how little we knew.
Sometimes his wit rose so high that he would lose sight of it
himself, and then he would pause, purse his lips as if he whistled,
and then till the bird came back to the lure, fill his void mouth
with grapes. He talked of the relations of the sexes, and loveâa
passion he held in great contempt as being in its essence complex
and disingenuousâand afterwards we found we had learnt much of what
the marriage laws of Utopia allow and forbid.
âA simple natural freedom,â he said, waving a grape in an
illustrative manner, and so we gathered the Modern Utopia did not at
any rate go to that. He spoke, too, of the regulation of unions, of
people who were not allowed to have children, of complicated rules
and interventions. âMan,â he said, âhad ceased to be a natural
product!â
We tried to check him with questions at this most illuminating
point, but he drove on like a torrent, and carried his topic out of
sight. The world, he held, was overmanaged, and that was the root of
all evil. He talked of the overmanagement of the world, and among
other things of the laws that would not let a poor simple idiot, a
ânatural,â go at large. And so we had our first glimpse of what
Utopia did with the feeble and insane. âWe make all these
distinctions between man and man, we exalt this and favour that, and
degrade and seclude that; we make birth artificial, life artificial,
death artificial.â
âYou say We,â said I, with the first glimmering of a new idea,
âbut you donât participate?â
âNot I! Iâm not one of your samurai, your voluntary noblemen who
have taken the world in hand. I might be, of course, but Iâm
not.â
âSamurai!â I repeated, âvoluntary noblemen!â and for the moment
could not frame a question.
He whirled on to an attack on science, that stirred the botanist to
controversy. He denounced with great bitterness all specialists
whatever, and particularly doctors and engineers.
âVoluntary noblemen!â he said, âvoluntary Gods I fancy they think
themselves,â and I was left behind for a space in the perplexed
examination of this parenthesis, while he and the botanistâwho is
sedulous to keep his digestion up to date with all the newest
devicesâargued about the good of medicine men.
âThe natural human constitution,â said the blond-haired man, âis
perfectly simple, with one simple conditionâyou must leave it to
Nature. But if you mix up things so distinctly and essentially
separated as the animal and vegetable kingdoms for example, and ram
that in for it to digest, what can you expect?
âIll health! There isnât such a thingâin the course of Nature. But
you shelter from Nature in houses, you protect yourselves by clothes
that are useful instead of being ornamental, you washâwith such
abstersive chemicals as soap for exampleâand above all you consult
doctors.â He approved himself with a chuckle. âHave you ever found
anyone seriously ill without doctors and medicine about? Never! You
say a lot of people would die without shelter and medical
attendance! No doubtâbut a natural death. A natural death is better
than an artificial life, surely? Thatâsâto be frank with youâthe
very citadel of my position.â
That led him, and rather promptly, before the botanist could rally
to reply, to a great tirade against the laws that forbade âsleeping
out.â He denounced them with great vigour, and alleged that for his
own part he broke that law whenever he could, found some corner of
moss, shaded from an excess of dew, and there sat up to sleep. He
slept, he said, always in
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