A Modern Utopia by H. G. Wells (i have read the book txt) 📖

that lost and misinterpreted giant, may perhaps

be coming to his own….

 

There is no abiding thing in what we know. We change from weaker to

stronger lights, and each more powerful light pierces our hitherto

opaque foundations and reveals fresh and different opacities below.

We can never foretell which of our seemingly assured fundamentals

the next change will not affect. What folly, then, to dream of

mapping out our minds in however general terms, of providing for

the endless mysteries of the future a terminology and an idiom! We

follow the vein, we mine and accumulate our treasure, but who can

tell which way the vein may trend? Language is the nourishment of

the thought of man, that serves only as it undergoes metabolism, and

becomes thought and lives, and in its very living passes away. You

scientific people, with your fancy of a terrible exactitude in

language, of indestructible foundations built, as that Wordsworthian

doggerel on the title-page of Nature says, “for aye,” are

marvellously without imagination!

 

The language of Utopia will no doubt be one and indivisible; all

mankind will, in the measure of their individual differences in

quality, be brought into the same phase, into a common resonance of

thought, but the language they will speak will still be a living

tongue, an animated system of imperfections, which every individual

man will infinitesimally modify. Through the universal freedom of

exchange and movement, the developing change in its general spirit

will be a world-wide change; that is the quality of its

universality. I fancy it will be a coalesced language, a synthesis

of many. Such a language as English is a coalesced language; it is a

coalescence of Anglo-Saxon and Norman French and Scholar’s Latin,

welded into one speech more ample and more powerful and beautiful

than either. The Utopian tongue might well present a more spacious

coalescence, and hold in the frame of such an uninflected or

slightly inflected idiom as English already presents, a profuse

vocabulary into which have been cast a dozen once separate tongues,

superposed and then welded together through bilingual and trilingual

compromises. [Footnote: Vide an excellent article, La Langue

Francaise en l’an 2003, par Leon Bollack, in La Revue, 15 Juillet,

1903.] In the past ingenious men have speculated on the inquiry,

“Which language will survive?” The question was badly put. I think

now that this wedding and survival of several in a common offspring

is a far more probable thing.

 

Section 6

 

This talk of languages, however, is a digression. We were on our

way along the faint path that runs round the rim of the Lake of

Lucendro, and we were just upon the point of coming upon our first

Utopian man. He was, I said, no Swiss. Yet he would have been a

Swiss on mother Earth, and here he would have the same face, with

some difference, maybe, in the expression; the same physique, though

a little better developed, perhaps—the same complexion. He would

have different habits, different traditions, different knowledge,

different ideas, different clothing, and different appliances, but,

except for all that, he would be the same man. We very distinctly

provided at the outset that the modern Utopia must have people

inherently the same as those in the world.

 

There is more, perhaps, in that than appears at the first

suggestion.

 

That proposition gives one characteristic difference between a

modern Utopia and almost all its predecessors. It is to be a world

Utopia, we have agreed, no less; and so we must needs face the fact

that we are to have differences of race. Even the lower class of

Plato’s Republic was not specifically of different race. But this is

a Utopia as wide as Christian charity, and white and black, brown,

red and yellow, all tints of skin, all types of body and character,

will be there. How we are to adjust their differences is a master

question, and the matter is not even to be opened in this chapter.

It will need a whole chapter even to glance at its issues. But here

we underline that stipulation; every race of this planet earth is

to be found in the strictest parallelism there, in numbers the

same—only, as I say, with an entirely different set of traditions,

ideals, ideas, and purposes, and so moving under those different

skies to an altogether different destiny.

 

There follows a curious development of this to anyone clearly

impressed by the uniqueness and the unique significance of

individualities. Races are no hard and fast things, no crowd of

identically similar persons, but massed sub-races, and tribes

and families, each after its kind unique, and these again are

clusterings of still smaller uniques and so down to each several

person. So that our first convention works out to this, that not

only is every earthly mountain, river, plant, and beast in that

parallel planet beyond Sirius also, but every man, woman, and child

alive has a Utopian parallel. From now onward, of course, the fates

of these two planets will diverge, men will die here whom wisdom

will save there, and perhaps conversely here we shall save men;

children will be born to them and not to us, to us and not to them,

but this, this moment of reading, is the starting moment, and for

the first and last occasion the populations of our planets are

abreast.

 

We must in these days make some such supposition. The alternative is

a Utopia of dolls in the likeness of angels—imaginary laws to fit

incredible people, an unattractive undertaking.

 

For example, we must assume there is a man such as I might have

been, better informed, better disciplined, better employed, thinner

and more active—and I wonder what he is doing!—and you, Sir or

Madam, are in duplicate also, and all the men and women that you

know and I. I doubt if we shall meet our doubles, or if it would be

pleasant for us to do so; but as we come down from these lonely

mountains to the roads and houses and living places of the Utopian

world-state, we shall certainly find, here and there, faces that

will remind us singularly of those who have lived under our

eyes.

 

There are some you never wish to meet again, you say, and some, I

gather, you do. “And One–-!”

 

It is strange, but this figure of the botanist will not keep in

place. It sprang up between us, dear reader, as a passing

illustrative invention. I do not know what put him into my head, and

for the moment, it fell in with my humour for a space to foist the

man’s personality upon you as yours and call you scientific—that

most abusive word. But here he is, indisputably, with me in Utopia,

and lapsing from our high speculative theme into halting but

intimate confidences. He declares he has not come to Utopia to meet

again with his sorrows.

 

What sorrows?

 

I protest, even warmly, that neither he nor his sorrows were in my

intention.

 

He is a man, I should think, of thirty-nine, a man whose life has

been neither tragedy nor a joyous adventure, a man with one of

those faces that have gained interest rather than force or nobility

from their commerce with life. He is something refined, with

some knowledge, perhaps, of the minor pains and all the civil

self-controls; he has read more than he has suffered, and suffered

rather than done. He regards me with his blue-grey eye, from which

all interest in this Utopia has faded.

 

“It is a trouble,” he says, “that has come into my life only for a

month or so—at least acutely again. I thought it was all over.

There was someone–-”

 

It is an amazing story to hear upon a mountain crest in Utopia, this

Hampstead affair, this story of a Frognal heart. “Frognal,” he says,

is the place where they met, and it summons to my memory the word

on a board at the corner of a flint-dressed new road, an estate

development road, with a vista of villas up a hill. He had known

her before he got his professorship, and neither her “people” nor

his—he speaks that detestable middle-class dialect in which aunts

and things with money and the right of intervention are called

“people”!—approved of the affair. “She was, I think, rather easily

swayed,” he says. “But that’s not fair to her, perhaps. She thought

too much of others. If they seemed distressed, or if they seemed to

think a course right–-” …

 

Have I come to Utopia to hear this sort of thing?

 

Section 7

 

It is necessary to turn the botanist’s thoughts into a worthier

channel. It is necessary to override these modest regrets, this

intrusive, petty love story. Does he realise this is indeed Utopia?

Turn your mind, I insist, to this Utopia of mine, and leave these

earthly troubles to their proper planet. Do you realise just where

the propositions necessary to a modern Utopia are taking us?

Everyone on earth will have to be here;—themselves, but with a

difference. Somewhere here in this world is, for example, Mr.

Chamberlain, and the King is here (no doubt incognito), and all the

Royal Academy, and Sandow, and Mr. Arnold White.

 

But these famous names do not appeal to him.

 

My mind goes from this prominent and typical personage to that, and

for a time I forget my companion. I am distracted by the curious

side issues this general proposition trails after it. There will be

so-and-so, and so-and-so. The name and figure of Mr. Roosevelt jerks

into focus, and obliterates an attempt to acclimatise the Emperor of

the Germans. What, for instance, will Utopia do with Mr. Roosevelt?

There drifts across my inner vision the image of a strenuous

struggle with Utopian constables, the voice that has thrilled

terrestrial millions in eloquent protest. The writ of arrest,

drifting loose in the conflict, comes to my feet; I impale the scrap

of paper, and read—but can it be?—“attempted disorganisation? …

incitements to disarrange? … the balance of population?”

 

The trend of my logic for once has led us into a facetious alley.

One might indeed keep in this key, and write an agreeable little

Utopia, that like the holy families of the mediaeval artists (or

Michael Angelo’s Last Judgement) should compliment one’s friends in

various degrees. Or one might embark upon a speculative treatment of

the entire Almanach de Gotha, something on the lines of Epistemon’s

vision of the damned great, when

 

“Xerxes was a crier of mustard.

Romulus was a salter and a patcher of patterns….”

 

That incomparable catalogue! That incomparable catalogue! Inspired

by the Muse of Parody, we might go on to the pages of “Who’s Who,”

and even, with an eye to the obdurate republic, to “Who’s Who in

America,” and make the most delightful and extensive arrangements.

Now where shall we put this most excellent man? And this? …

 

But, indeed, it is doubtful if we shall meet any of these doubles

during our Utopian journey, or know them when we meet them. I doubt

if anyone will be making the best of both these worlds. The great

men in this still unexplored Utopia may be but village Hampdens in

our own, and earthly goatherds and obscure illiterates sit here in

the seats of the mighty.

 

That again opens agreeable vistas left of us and right.

 

But my botanist obtrudes his personality again. His thoughts have

travelled by a different route.

 

“I know,” he says, “that she will be happier here, and that they

will value her better than she has been valued upon earth.”

 

His interruption serves to turn me back from my momentary

contemplation of those popular effigies inflated by old newspapers

and windy report, the earthly great. He