A Modern Utopia by H. G. Wells (i have read the book txt) đ
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and we get a whiff of foul language from two newsboys on the
kerb.
âWe canât go on talking,â the botanist begins, and ducks aside just
in time to save his eye from the ferule of a stupidly held umbrella.
He is going to treat our little tiff about that lady as closed. He
has the air of picking up our conversation again at some earlier
point.
He steps into the gutter, walks round outside a negro hawker, just
escapes the wheel of a hansom, and comes to my side again.
âWe canât go on talking of your Utopia,â he says, âin a noise and
crowd like this.â
We are separated by a portly man going in the opposite direction,
and join again. âWe canât go on talking of Utopia,â he repeats, âin
LondonâŠ. Up in the mountainsâand holiday-timeâit was all right.
We let ourselves go!â
âIâve been living in Utopia,â I answer, tacitly adopting his tacit
proposal to drop the lady out of the question.
âAt times,â he says, with a queer laugh, âyouâve almost made me live
there too.â
He reflects. âIt doesnât do, you know. No! And I donât know
whether, after all, I wantâ-â
We are separated again by half-a-dozen lifted flagstones, a burning
brazier, and two engineers concerned with some underground business
or otherâin the busiest hour of the dayâs traffic.
âWhy shouldnât it do?â I ask.
âIt spoils the world of everyday to let your mind run on impossible
perfections.â
âI wish,â I shout against the traffic, âI could smash the world of
everyday.â
My note becomes quarrelsome. âYou may accept this as the world of
reality, you may consent to be one scar in an ill-dressed compound
wound, but soânot I! This is a dream tooâthis world. Your dream,
and you bring me back to itâout of Utopiaâ-â
The crossing of Bow Street gives me pause again.
The face of a girl who is passing westward, a student girl, rather
carelessly dressed, her books in a carrying-strap, comes across my
field of vision. The westward sun of London glows upon her face. She
has eyes that dream, surely no sensuous nor personal dream.
After all, after all, dispersed, hidden, disorganised, undiscovered,
unsuspected even by themselves, the samurai of Utopia are in this
world, the motives that are developed and organised there stir
dumbly here and stifle in ten thousand futile heartsâŠ.
I overtake the botanist, who got ahead at the crossing by the
advantage of a dust-cart.
âYou think this is real because you canât wake out of it,â I say.
âItâs all a dream, and there are peopleâIâm just one of the first
of a multitudeâbetween sleeping and wakingâwho will presently be
rubbing it out of their eyes.â
A pinched and dirty little girl, with sores upon her face, stretches
out a bunch of wilting violets, in a pitifully thin little fist, and
interrupts my speech. âBunch oâ viâletsâonây a penny.â
âNo!â I say curtly, hardening my heart.
A ragged and filthy nursing mother, with her last addition to our
Imperial People on her arm, comes out of a drinkshop, and stands a
little unsteadily, and wipes mouth and nose comprehensively with the
back of a red chapped handâŠ.
Section 4
âIsnât that reality?â says the botanist, almost triumphantly, and
leaves me aghast at his triumph.
âThat!â I say belatedly. âItâs a thing in a nightmare!â
He shakes his head and smilesâexasperatingly.
I perceive quite abruptly that the botanist and I have reached the
limits of our intercourse.
âThe world dreams things like that,â I say, âbecause it suffers from
an indigestion of such people as you.â
His low-toned self-complacency, like the faded banner of an
obstinate fort, still flies unconquered. And you know, heâs not even
a happy man with it all!
For ten seconds or more I am furiously seeking in my mind for a
word, for a term of abuse, for one compendious verbal missile that
shall smash this man for ever. It has to express total inadequacy of
imagination and will, spiritual anaemia, dull respectability, gross
sentimentality, a cultivated pettiness of heartâŠ.
That word will not come. But no other word will do. Indeed the word
does not exist. There is nothing with sufficient vituperative
concentration for this moral and intellectual stupidity of educated
peopleâŠ.
âErâ-â he begins.
No! I canât endure him.
With a passionate rapidity of movement, I leave his side, dart
between a carriage and a van, duck under the head of a cab-horse,
and board a âbus going westward somewhereâbut anyhow, going in
exactly the reverse direction to the botanist. I clamber up the
steps and thread my swaying way to the seat immediately behind the
driver.
âThere!â I say, as I whack myself down on the seat and pant.
When I look round the botanist is out of sight.
Section 5
But I am back in the world for all that, and my Utopia is done.
It is good discipline for the Utopist to visit this world
occasionally.
But from the front seat on the top of an omnibus on a sunny
September afternoon, the Strand, and Charing Cross corner, and
Whitehall, and the great multitude of people, the great uproar of
vehicles, streaming in all directions, is apt to look a world
altogether too formidable. It has a glare, it has a tumult and
vigour that shouts one down. It shouts one down, if shouting is to
carry it. What good was it to trot along the pavement through this
noise and tumult of life, pleading Utopia to that botanist? What
good would it be to recommend Utopia in this driverâs preoccupied
ear?
There are moments in the life of every philosopher and dreamer when
he feels himself the flimsiest of absurdities, when the Thing in
Being has its way with him, its triumphant way, when it asks in a
roar, unanswerably, with a fine solid use of the current vernacular,
âWhat Good is all thisâRot about Utopias?â
One inspects the Thing in Being with something of the diffident
speculation of primitive man, peering from behind a tree at an angry
elephant.
(There is an omen in that image. On how many occasions must that
ancestor of ours have had just the Utopistâs feeling of ambitious
unreality, have decided that on the whole it was wiser to go very
quietly home again, and leave the big beast alone? But, in the end,
men rode upon the elephantâs head, and guided him this way or
thatâŠ. The Thing in Being that roars so tremendously about Charing
Cross corner seems a bigger antagonist than an elephant, but then we
have better weapons than chipped flint bladesâŠ.)
After all, in a very little time everything that impresses me so
mightily this September afternoon will have changed or passed away
for ever, everything. These omnibuses, these great, stalwart,
crowded, many-coloured things that jostle one another, and make so
handsome a clatter-clamour, will all have gone; they and their
horses and drivers and organisation; you will come here and you will
not find them. Something else will be here, some different sort of
vehicle, that is now perhaps the mere germ of an idea in some
engineer studentâs brain. And this road and pavement will have
changed, and these impressive great buildings; other buildings will
be here, buildings that are as yet more impalpable than this page
you read, more formless and flimsy by far than anything that is
reasoned here. Little plans sketched on paper, strokes of a pen or
of a brush, will be the first materialisations of what will at last
obliterate every detail and atom of these re-echoing actualities
that overwhelm us now. And the clothing and gestures of these
innumerable people, the character of their faces and bearing, these
too will be recast in the spirit of what are now obscure and
impalpable beginnings.
The new things will be indeed of the substance of the thing that is,
but differing just in the measure of the will and imagination that
goes to make them. They will be strong and fair as the will is
sturdy and organised and the imagination comprehensive and bold;
they will be ugly and smeared with wretchedness as the will is
fluctuating and the imagination timid and mean.
Indeed Will is stronger than Fact, it can mould and overcome Fact.
But this world has still to discover its will, it is a world that
slumbers inertly, and all this roar and pulsation of life is no more
than its heavy breathingâŠ. My mind runs on to the thought of an
awakening.
As my omnibus goes lumbering up Cockspur Street through the clatter
rattle of the cabs and carriages, there comes another fancy in my
mindâŠ. Could one but realise an apocalyptic image and suppose an
angel, such as was given to each of the seven churches of Asia,
given for a space to the service of the Greater Rule. I see him as a
towering figure of flame and colour, standing between earth and sky,
with a trumpet in his hands, over there above the Haymarket, against
the October glow; and when he sounds, all the samurai, all who are
samurai in Utopia, will know themselves and one anotherâŠ.
(Whup! says a motor brougham, and a policeman stays the traffic with
his hand.)
All of us who partake of the samurai would know ourselves and one
another!
For a moment I have a vision of this resurrection of the living, of
a vague, magnificent answer, of countless myriads at attention, of
all that is fine in humanity at attention, round the compass of the
earth.
Then that philosophy of individual uniqueness resumes its sway over
my thoughts, and my dream of a worldâs awakening fades.
I had forgottenâŠ.
Things do not happen like that. God is not simple, God is not
theatrical, the summons comes to each man in its due time for him,
with an infinite subtlety of varietyâŠ.
If that is so, what of my Utopia?
This infinite world must needs be flattened to get it on one
retina. The picture of a solid thing, although it is flattened and
simplified, is not necessarily a lie. Surely, surely, in the end, by
degrees, and steps, something of this sort, some such understanding,
as this Utopia must come. First here, then there, single men and
then groups of men will fall into lineânot indeed with my poor
faulty hesitating suggestionsâbut with a great and comprehensive
plan wrought out by many minds and in many tongues. It is just
because my plan is faulty, because it mis-states so much, and omits
so much, that they do not now fall in. It will not be like my
dream, the world that is coming. My dream is just my own poor dream,
the thing sufficient for me. We fail in comprehension, we fail so
variously and abundantly. We see as much as it is serviceable for us
to see, and we see no further. But the fresh undaunted generations
come to take on our work beyond our utmost effort, beyond the range
of our ideas. They will learn with certainty things that to us are
guesses and riddlesâŠ.
There will be many Utopias. Each generation will have its new
version of Utopia, a little more certain and complete and real, with
its problems lying closer and closer to the problems of the Thing
in Being. Until at last from dreams Utopias will have come to be
working drawings, and the whole world will be shaping the final
World State, the fair and great
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