A Modern Utopia by H. G. Wells (i have read the book txt) đź“–
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close and dense in the urban regions and thinning as the population
thins. And running beside these lighter railways, and spreading
beyond their range, will be the smooth minor high roads such as this
one we now approach, upon which independent vehicles, motor cars,
cycles, and what not, will go. I doubt if we shall see any horses
upon this fine, smooth, clean road; I doubt if there will be many
horses on the high roads of Utopia, and, indeed, if they will use
draught horses at all upon that planet. Why should they? Where the
world gives turf or sand, or along special tracts, the horse will
perhaps be ridden for exercise and pleasure, but that will be all
the use for him; and as for the other beasts of burthen, on the
remoter mountain tracks the mule will no doubt still be a
picturesque survival, in the desert men will still find a use for
the camel, and the elephant may linger to play a part in the pageant
of the East. But the burthen of the minor traffic, if not the whole
of it, will certainly be mechanical. This is what we shall see even
while the road is still remote, swift and shapely motor-cars going
past, cyclists, and in these agreeable mountain regions there will
also be pedestrians upon their way. Cycle tracks will abound in
Utopia, sometimes following beside the great high roads, but oftener
taking their own more agreeable line amidst woods and crops and
pastures; and there will be a rich variety of footpaths and minor
ways. There will be many footpaths in Utopia. There will be pleasant
ways over the scented needles of the mountain pinewoods,
primrose-strewn tracks amidst the budding thickets of the lower
country, paths running beside rushing streams, paths across the wide
spaces of the corn land, and, above all, paths through the flowery
garden spaces amidst which the houses in the towns will stand. And
everywhere about the world, on road and path, by sea and land, the
happy holiday Utopians will go.
The population of Utopia will be a migratory population beyond any
earthly precedent, not simply a travelling population, but
migratory. The old Utopias were all localised, as localised as a
parish councillor; but it is manifest that nowadays even quite
ordinary people live over areas that would have made a kingdom in
those former days, would have filled the Athenian of the Laws with
incredulous astonishment. Except for the habits of the very rich
during the Roman Empire, there was never the slightest precedent for
this modern detachment from place. It is nothing to us that we go
eighty or ninety miles from home to place of business, or take an
hour’s spin of fifty miles to our week-end golf; every summer it has
become a fixed custom to travel wide and far. Only the clumsiness of
communications limit us now, and every facilitation of locomotion
widens not only our potential, but our habitual range. Not only
this, but we change our habitations with a growing frequency and
facility; to Sir Thomas More we should seem a breed of nomads. That
old fixity was of necessity and not of choice, it was a mere phase
in the development of civilisation, a trick of rooting man learnt
for a time from his new-found friends, the corn and the vine and
the hearth; the untamed spirit of the young has turned for ever to
wandering and the sea. The soul of man has never yet in any land
been willingly adscript to the glebe. Even Mr. Belloc, who preaches
the happiness of a peasant proprietary, is so much wiser than his
thoughts that he sails about the seas in a little yacht or goes
afoot from Belgium to Rome. We are winning our freedom again once
more, a freedom renewed and enlarged, and there is now neither
necessity nor advantage in a permanent life servitude to this place
or that. Men may settle down in our Modern Utopia for love and the
family at last, but first and most abundantly they will see the
world.
And with this loosening of the fetters of locality from the feet of
men, necessarily there will be all sorts of fresh distributions of
the factors of life. On our own poor haphazard earth, wherever men
work, wherever there are things to be grown, minerals to be won,
power to be used, there, regardless of all the joys and decencies of
life, the households needs must cluster. But in Utopia there will be
wide stretches of cheerless or unhealthy or toilsome or dangerous
land with never a household; there will be regions of mining and
smelting, black with the smoke of furnaces and gashed and desolated
by mines, with a sort of weird inhospitable grandeur of industrial
desolation, and the men will come thither and work for a spell and
return to civilisation again, washing and changing their attire in
the swift gliding train. And by way of compensation there will be
beautiful regions of the earth specially set apart and favoured for
children; in them the presence of children will remit taxation,
while in other less wholesome places the presence of children will
be taxed; the lower passes and fore hills of these very Alps, for
example, will be populous with homes, serving the vast arable levels
of Upper Italy.
So we shall see, as we come down by our little lake in the lap of
Lucendro, and even before we reach the road, the first scattered
chalets and households in which these migrant people live, the upper
summer homes. With the coming of summer, as the snows on the high
Alps recede, a tide of households and schools, teachers and doctors,
and all such attendant services will flow up the mountain masses,
and ebb again when the September snows return. It is essential to
the modern ideal of life that the period of education and growth
should be prolonged to as late a period as possible and puberty
correspondingly retarded, and by wise regulation the statesmen of
Utopia will constantly adjust and readjust regulations and taxation
to diminish the proportion of children reared in hot and stimulating
conditions. These high mountains will, in the bright sweet summer,
be populous with youth. Even up towards this high place where the
snow is scarce gone until July, these households will extend, and
below, the whole long valley of Urseren will be a scattered summer
town.
One figures one of the more urban highways, one of those along which
the light railways of the second order run, such as that in the
valley of Urseren, into which we should presently come. I figure it
as one would see it at night, a band a hundred yards perhaps in
width, the footpath on either side shaded with high trees and lit
softly with orange glowlights; while down the centre the tramway of
the road will go, with sometimes a nocturnal tram-car gliding, lit
and gay but almost noiselessly, past. Lantern-lit cyclists will flit
along the track like fireflies, and ever and again some humming
motor-car will hurry by, to or from the Rhoneland or the Rhineland
or Switzerland or Italy. Away on either side the lights of the
little country homes up the mountain slopes will glow.
I figure it at night, because so it is we should see it first.
We should come out from our mountain valley into the minor road that
runs down the lonely rock wilderness of the San Gotthard Pass, we
should descend that nine miles of winding route, and so arrive
towards twilight among the clustering homes and upland unenclosed
gardens of Realp and Hospenthal and Andermatt. Between Realp and
Andermatt, and down the Schoellenen gorge, the greater road would
run. By the time we reached it, we should be in the way of
understanding our adventure a little better. We should know already,
when we saw those two familiar clusters of chalets and hotels
replaced by a great dispersed multitude of houses—we should see
their window lights, but little else—that we were the victims of
some strange transition in space or time, and we should come down by
dimly-seen buildings into the part that would answer to Hospenthal,
wondering and perhaps a little afraid. We should come out into this
great main roadway—this roadway like an urban avenue—and look up
it and down, hesitating whether to go along the valley Furka-ward,
or down by Andermatt through the gorge that leads to Goschenen….
People would pass us in the twilight, and then more people; we
should see they walked well and wore a graceful, unfamiliar dress,
but more we should not distinguish.
“Good-night!” they would say to us in clear, fine voices. Their dim
faces would turn with a passing scrutiny towards us.
We should answer out of our perplexity: “Good-night!”—for by the
conventions established in the beginning of this book, we are given
the freedom of their tongue.
Section 4
Were this a story, I should tell at length how much we were helped
by the good fortune of picking up a Utopian coin of gold, how at
last we adventured into the Utopian inn and found it all
marvellously easy. You see us the shyest and most watchful of
guests; but of the food they put before us and the furnishings of
the house, and all our entertainment, it will be better to speak
later. We are in a migratory world, we know, one greatly accustomed
to foreigners; our mountain clothes are not strange enough to
attract acute attention, though ill-made and shabby, no doubt, by
Utopian standards; we are dealt with as we might best wish to be
dealt with, that is to say as rather untidy, inconspicuous men. We
look about us and watch for hints and examples, and, indeed, get
through with the thing. And after our queer, yet not unpleasant,
dinner, in which we remark no meat figures, we go out of the house
for a breath of air and for quiet counsel one with another, and
there it is we discover those strange constellations overhead. It
comes to us then, clear and full, that our imagination has realised
itself; we dismiss quite finally a Rip-Van-Winkle fancy we have
entertained, all the unfamiliarities of our descent from the
mountain pass gather together into one fullness of conviction, and
we know, we know, we are in Utopia.
We wander under the trees by the main road, watching the dim
passers-by as though they were the phantoms of a dream. We say
little to one another. We turn aside into a little pathway and come
to a bridge over the turbulent Reuss, hurrying down towards the
Devil’s Bridge in the gorge below. Far away over the Furka ridge a
pallid glow preludes the rising of the moon.
Two lovers pass us whispering, and we follow them with our eyes.
This Utopia has certainly preserved the fundamental freedom, to
love. And then a sweet-voiced bell from somewhere high up towards
Oberalp chimes two-and-twenty times.
I break the silence. “That might mean ten o’clock,” I say.
My companion leans upon the bridge and looks down into the dim river
below. I become aware of the keen edge of the moon like a needle of
incandescent silver creeping over the crest, and suddenly the river
is alive with flashes.
He speaks, and astonishes me with the hidden course his thoughts
have taken.
“We two were boy and girl lovers like that,” he says, and jerks a
head at the receding Utopians. “I loved her first, and I do not
think I have ever thought of loving anyone but her.”
It is a curiously human thing, and, upon my honour, not one I had
designed, that when at last I
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