A Modern Utopia by H. G. Wells (i have read the book txt) đź“–
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justifiable suspicion. Men of this type, the chairman remarks with
a sudden intrusion of exposition, are romantic with a shadow of
meanness, they seek at once to conceal and shape their sensuous
cravings beneath egregious sentimentalities, they get into mighty
tangles and troubles with women, and he has had his troubles. You
will hear of them, for that is the quality of his type. He gets no
personal expression in this book, the Voice is always that other’s,
but you gather much of the matter and something of the manner of his
interpolations from the asides and the tenour of the Voice.
So much by way of portraiture is necessary to present the explorers
of the Modern Utopia, which will unfold itself as a background
to these two enquiring figures. The image of a cinematograph
entertainment is the one to grasp. There will be an effect of these
two people going to and fro in front of the circle of a rather
defective lantern, which sometimes jams and sometimes gets out of
focus, but which does occasionally succeed in displaying on a screen
a momentary moving picture of Utopian conditions. Occasionally the
picture goes out altogether, the Voice argues and argues, and the
footlights return, and then you find yourself listening again to the
rather too plump little man at his table laboriously enunciating
propositions, upon whom the curtain rises now.
Topographical
Section 1
The Utopia of a modern dreamer must needs differ in one fundamental
aspect from the Nowheres and Utopias men planned before Darwin
quickened the thought of the world. Those were all perfect and
static States, a balance of happiness won for ever against the
forces of unrest and disorder that inhere in things. One beheld a
healthy and simple generation enjoying the fruits of the earth in
an atmosphere of virtue and happiness, to be followed by other
virtuous, happy, and entirely similar generations, until the Gods
grew weary. Change and development were dammed back by invincible
dams for ever. But the Modern Utopia must be not static but kinetic,
must shape not as a permanent state but as a hopeful stage, leading
to a long ascent of stages. Nowadays we do not resist and overcome
the great stream of things, but rather float upon it. We build now
not citadels, but ships of state. For one ordered arrangement of
citizens rejoicing in an equality of happiness safe and assured
to them and their children for ever, we have to plan “a flexible
common compromise, in which a perpetually novel succession of
individualities may converge most effectually upon a comprehensive
onward development.” That is the first, most generalised difference
between a Utopia based upon modern conceptions and all the Utopias
that were written in the former time.
Our business here is to be Utopian, to make vivid and credible,
if we can, first this facet and then that, of an imaginary whole
and happy world. Our deliberate intention is to be not, indeed,
impossible, but most distinctly impracticable, by every scale that
reaches only between to-day and to-morrow. We are to turn our backs
for a space upon the insistent examination of the thing that is,
and face towards the freer air, the ampler spaces of the thing
that perhaps might be, to the projection of a State or city “worth
while,” to designing upon the sheet of our imaginations the picture
of a life conceivably possible, and yet better worth living than
our own. That is our present enterprise. We are going to lay down
certain necessary starting propositions, and then we shall proceed
to explore the sort of world these propositions give us….
It is no doubt an optimistic enterprise. But it is good for awhile
to be free from the carping note that must needs be audible when
we discuss our present imperfections, to release ourselves from
practical difficulties and the tangle of ways and means. It is good
to stop by the track for a space, put aside the knapsack, wipe the
brows, and talk a little of the upper slopes of the mountain we
think we are climbing, would but the trees let us see it.
There is to be no inquiry here of policy and method. This is to be a
holiday from politics and movements and methods. But for all that,
we must needs define certain limitations. Were we free to have our
untrammelled desire, I suppose we should follow Morris to his
Nowhere, we should change the nature of man and the nature of things
together; we should make the whole race wise, tolerant, noble,
perfect—wave our hands to a splendid anarchy, every man doing as
it pleases him, and none pleased to do evil, in a world as good in
its essential nature, as ripe and sunny, as the world before the
Fall. But that golden age, that perfect world, comes out into the
possibilities of space and time. In space and time the pervading
Will to Live sustains for evermore a perpetuity of aggressions. Our
proposal here is upon a more practical plane at least than that.
We are to restrict ourselves first to the limitations of human
possibility as we know them in the men and women of this world
to-day, and then to all the inhumanity, all the insubordination of
nature. We are to shape our state in a world of uncertain seasons,
sudden catastrophes, antagonistic diseases, and inimical beasts and
vermin, out of men and women with like passions, like uncertainties
of mood and desire to our own. And, moreover, we are going to accept
this world of conflict, to adopt no attitude of renunciation towards
it, to face it in no ascetic spirit, but in the mood of the Western
peoples, whose purpose is to survive and overcome. So much we adopt
in common with those who deal not in Utopias, but in the world of
Here and Now.
Certain liberties, however, following the best Utopian precedents,
we may take with existing fact. We assume that the tone of public
thought may be entirely different from what it is in the present
world. We permit ourselves a free hand with the mental conflict of
life, within the possibilities of the human mind as we know it. We
permit ourselves also a free hand with all the apparatus of
existence that man has, so to speak, made for himself, with houses,
roads, clothing, canals, machinery, with laws, boundaries,
conventions, and traditions, with schools, with literature and
religious organisation, with creeds and customs, with everything, in
fact, that it lies within man’s power to alter. That, indeed, is the
cardinal assumption of all Utopian speculations old and new; the
Republic and Laws of Plato, and More’s Utopia, Howells’ implicit
Altruria, and Bellamy’s future Boston, Comte’s great Western
Republic, Hertzka’s Freeland, Cabet’s Icaria, and Campanella’s City
of the Sun, are built, just as we shall build, upon that, upon the
hypothesis of the complete emancipation of a community of men from
tradition, from habits, from legal bonds, and that subtler servitude
possessions entail. And much of the essential value of all such
speculations lies in this assumption of emancipation, lies in that
regard towards human freedom, in the undying interest of the human
power of self-escape, the power to resist the causation of the past,
and to evade, initiate, endeavour, and overcome.
Section 2
There are very definite artistic limitations also.
There must always be a certain effect of hardness and thinness about
Utopian speculations. Their common fault is to be comprehensively
jejune. That which is the blood and warmth and reality of life is
largely absent; there are no individualities, but only generalised
people. In almost every Utopia—except, perhaps, Morris’s “News from
Nowhere”—one sees handsome but characterless buildings, symmetrical
and perfect cultivations, and a multitude of people, healthy, happy,
beautifully dressed, but without any personal distinction whatever.
Too often the prospect resembles the key to one of those large
pictures of coronations, royal weddings, parliaments, conferences,
and gatherings so popular in Victorian times, in which, instead of a
face, each figure bears a neat oval with its index number legibly
inscribed. This burthens us with an incurable effect of unreality,
and I do not see how it is altogether to be escaped. It is a
disadvantage that has to be accepted. Whatever institution has
existed or exists, however irrational, however preposterous, has, by
virtue of its contact with individualities, an effect of realness
and rightness no untried thing may share. It has ripened, it has
been christened with blood, it has been stained and mellowed by
handling, it has been rounded and dented to the softened contours
that we associate with life; it has been salted, maybe, in a brine
of tears. But the thing that is merely proposed, the thing that is
merely suggested, however rational, however necessary, seems strange
and inhuman in its clear, hard, uncompromising lines, its
unqualified angles and surfaces.
There is no help for it, there it is! The Master suffers with the
last and least of his successors. For all the humanity he wins to,
through his dramatic device of dialogue, I doubt if anyone has ever
been warmed to desire himself a citizen in the Republic of Plato; I
doubt if anyone could stand a month of the relentless publicity of
virtue planned by More…. No one wants to live in any community of
intercourse really, save for the sake of the individualities he
would meet there. The fertilising conflict of individualities is the
ultimate meaning of the personal life, and all our Utopias no more
than schemes for bettering that interplay. At least, that is how
life shapes itself more and more to modern perceptions. Until you
bring in individualities, nothing comes into being, and a Universe
ceases when you shiver the mirror of the least of individual
minds.
Section 3
No less than a planet will serve the purpose of a modern Utopia.
Time was when a mountain valley or an island seemed to promise
sufficient isolation for a polity to maintain itself intact from
outward force; the Republic of Plato stood armed ready for defensive
war, and the New Atlantis and the Utopia of More in theory, like
China and Japan through many centuries of effectual practice, held
themselves isolated from intruders. Such late instances as Butler’s
satirical “Erewhon,” and Mr. Stead’s queendom of inverted sexual
conditions in Central Africa, found the Tibetan method of
slaughtering the inquiring visitor a simple, sufficient rule. But
the whole trend of modern thought is against the permanence of any
such enclosures. We are acutely aware nowadays that, however subtly
contrived a State may be, outside your boundary lines the epidemic,
the breeding barbarian or the economic power, will gather its
strength to overcome you. The swift march of invention is all for
the invader. Now, perhaps you might still guard a rocky coast or a
narrow pass; but what of that near to-morrow when the flying machine
soars overhead, free to descend at this point or that? A state
powerful enough to keep isolated under modern conditions would be
powerful enough to rule the world, would be, indeed, if not actively
ruling, yet passively acquiescent in all other human organisations,
and so responsible for them altogether. World-state, therefore, it
must be.
That leaves no room for a modern Utopia in Central Africa, or in
South America, or round about the pole, those last refuges of
ideality. The floating isle of La Cite Morellyste no longer avails.
We need a planet. Lord Erskine, the author of a Utopia (“Armata”)
that might have been inspired by Mr. Hewins, was the first of all
Utopists to perceive this—he joined his twin planets pole to pole
by a sort of umbilical cord. But the modern imagination, obsessed
by physics, must
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