A Modern Utopia by H. G. Wells (i have read the book txt) đź“–
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a Utopian township, when my whole being should be taken up with
speculative wonder, this man should be standing by my side, and
lugging my attention persistently towards himself, towards his
limited futile self. This thing perpetually happens to me, this
intrusion of something small and irrelevant and alive, upon my great
impressions. The time I first saw the Matterhorn, that Queen among
the Alpine summits, I was distracted beyond appreciation by the tale
of a man who could not eat sardines—always sardines did this with
him and that; and my first wanderings along the brown streets of
Pompeii, an experience I had anticipated with a strange intensity,
was shot with the most stupidly intelligent discourse on vehicular
tariffs in the chief capitals of Europe that it is possible to
imagine. And now this man, on my first night in Utopia, talks and
talks and talks of his poor little love affair.
It shapes itself as the most trite and feeble of tragedies, one of
those stories of effortless submission to chance and custom in which
Mr. Hardy or George Gissing might have found a theme. I do but half
listen at first—watching the black figures in the moonlit roadway
pacing to and fro. Yet—I cannot trace how he conveys the subtle
conviction to my mind—the woman he loves is beautiful.
They were boy and girl together, and afterwards they met again as
fellow students in a world of comfortable discretions. He seems to
have taken the decorums of life with a confiding good faith, to have
been shy and innocent in a suppressed sort of way, and of a mental
type not made for worldly successes; but he must have dreamt about
her and loved her well enough. How she felt for him I could never
gather; it seemed to be all of that fleshless friendliness into
which we train our girls. Then abruptly happened stresses. The man
who became her husband appeared, with a very evident passion. He was
a year or so older than either of them, and he had the habit and
quality of achieving his ends; he was already successful, and with
the promise of wealth, and I, at least, perceived, from my
botanist’s phrasing, that his desire was for her beauty.
As my botanist talked I seemed to see the whole little drama, rather
clearer than his words gave it me, the actors all absurdly in
Hampstead middle-class raiment, meetings of a Sunday after church
(the men in silk hats, frock coats, and tightly-rolled umbrellas),
rare excursions into evening dress, the decorously vulgar fiction
read in their homes, its ambling sentimentalities of thought, the
amiably worldly mothers, the respectable fathers, the aunts, the
“people”—his “people” and her “people”—the piano music and the
song, and in this setting our friend, “quite clever” at botany and
“going in” for it “as a profession,” and the girl, gratuitously
beautiful; so I figured the arranged and orderly environment into
which this claw of an elemental force had thrust itself to grip.
The stranger who had come in got what he wanted; the girl considered
that she thought she had never loved the botanist, had had only
friendship for him—though little she knew of the meaning of those
fine words—they parted a little incoherently and in tears, and it
had not occurred to the young man to imagine she was not going off
to conventional life in some other of the endless Frognals he
imagined as the cellular tissue of the world.
But she wasn’t.
He had kept her photograph and her memory sweet, and if ever he had
strayed from the severest constancy, it seemed only in the end to
strengthen with the stuff of experience, to enhance by comparative
disappointment his imagination of what she might have meant to
him…. Then eight years afterwards they met again.
By the time he gets to this part of his story we have, at my
initiative, left the bridge and are walking towards the Utopian
guest house. The Utopian guest house! His voice rises and falls,
and sometimes he holds my arm. My attention comes and goes.
“Good-night,” two sweet-voiced Utopians cry to us in their
universal tongue, and I answer them “Good-night.”
“You see,” he persists, “I saw her only a week ago. It was in
Lucerne, while I was waiting for you to come on from England. I
talked to her three or four times altogether. And her face—the
change in her! I can’t get it out of my head—night or day. The
miserable waste of her….”
Before us, through the tall pine stems, shine the lights of our
Utopian inn.
He talks vaguely of ill-usage. “The husband is vain, boastful,
dishonest to the very confines of the law, and a drunkard. There
are scenes and insults–-”
“She told you?”
“Not much, but someone else did. He brings other women almost into
her presence to spite her.”
“And it’s going on?” I interrupt.
“Yes. Now.”
“Need it go on?”
“What do you mean?”
“Lady in trouble,” I say. “Knight at hand. Why not stop this dismal
grizzling and carry her off?” (You figure the heroic sweep of the
arm that belongs to the Voice.) I positively forget for the moment
that we are in Utopia at all.
“You mean?”
“Take her away from him! What’s all this emotion of yours worth if
it isn’t equal to that!”
Positively he seems aghast at me.
“Do you mean elope with her?”
“It seems a most suitable case.”
For a space he is silent, and we go on through the trees. A Utopian
tram-car passes and I see his face, poor bitted wretch! looking
pinched and scared in its trailing glow of light.
“That’s all very well in a novel,” he says. “But how could I go back
to my laboratory, mixed classes with young ladies, you know, after a
thing like that? How could we live and where could we live? We might
have a house in London, but who would call upon us? … Besides, you
don’t know her. She is not the sort of woman…. Don’t think I’m
timid or conventional. Don’t think I don’t feel…. Feel! You
don’t know what it is to feel in a case of this sort….”
He halts and then flies out viciously: “Ugh! There are times when I
could strangle him with my hands.”
Which is nonsense.
He flings out his lean botanising hands in an impotent gesture.
“My dear Man!” I say, and say no more.
For a moment I forget we are in Utopia altogether.
Section 5
Let us come back to Utopia. We were speaking of travel.
Besides roadways and railways and tramways, for those who go to and
fro in the earth the Modern Utopians will have very many other ways
of travelling. There will be rivers, for example, with a vast
variety of boats; canals with diverse sorts of haulage; there will
be lakes and lagoons; and when one comes at last to the borders of
the land, the pleasure craft will be there, coming and going, and
the swift great passenger vessels, very big and steady, doing thirty
knots an hour or more, will trace long wakes as they go dwindling
out athwart the restless vastness of the sea.
They will be just beginning to fly in Utopia. We owe much to M.
Santos Dumont; the world is immeasurably more disposed to believe
this wonder is coming, and coming nearly, than it was five years
ago. But unless we are to suppose Utopian scientific knowledge far
in advance of ours—and though that supposition was not proscribed
in our initial undertaking, it would be inconvenient for us and not
quite in the vein of the rest of our premises—they, too, will only
be in the same experimental stage as ourselves. In Utopia, however,
they will conduct research by the army corps while we conduct it—we
don’t conduct it! We let it happen. Fools make researches and wise
men exploit them—that is our earthly way of dealing with the
question, and we thank Heaven for an assumed abundance of
financially impotent and sufficiently ingenious fools.
In Utopia, a great multitude of selected men, chosen volunteers,
will be collaborating upon this new step in man’s struggle with the
elements. Bacon’s visionary House of Saloman [Footnote: In The New
Atlantis.] will be a thing realised, and it will be humming with
this business. Every university in the world will be urgently
working for priority in this aspect of the problem or that. Reports
of experiments, as full and as prompt as the telegraphic reports of
cricket in our more sportive atmosphere, will go about the world.
All this will be passing, as it were, behind the act drop of our
first experience, behind this first picture of the urbanised Urseren
valley. The literature of the subject will be growing and developing
with the easy swiftness of an eagle’s swoop as we come down the
hillside; unseen in that twilight, unthought of by us until this
moment, a thousand men at a thousand glowing desks, a busy
specialist press, will be perpetually sifting, criticising,
condensing, and clearing the ground for further speculation. Those
who are concerned with the problems of public locomotion will
be following these aeronautic investigations with a keen and
enterprising interest, and so will the physiologist and the
sociologist. That Utopian research will, I say, go like an eagle’s
swoop in comparison with the blind-man’s fumbling of our terrestrial
way. Even before our own brief Utopian journey is out, we may get a
glimpse of the swift ripening of all this activity that will be in
progress at our coming. To-morrow, perhaps, or in a day or so,
some silent, distant thing will come gliding into view over the
mountains, will turn and soar and pass again beyond our astonished
sight….
Section 6
But my friend and his great trouble turn my mind from these
questions of locomotion and the freedoms that cluster about them. In
spite of myself I find myself framing his case. He is a lover, the
most conventional of Anglican lovers, with a heart that has had its
training, I should think, in the clean but limited schoolroom of
Mrs. Henry Wood….
In Utopia I think they will fly with stronger pinions, it will not
be in the superficialities of life merely that movement will be wide
and free, they will mount higher and swoop more steeply than he in
his cage can believe. What will their range be, their prohibitions?
what jars to our preconceptions will he and I receive here?
My mind flows with the free, thin flow that it has at the end of an
eventful day, and as we walk along in silence towards our inn I rove
from issue to issue, I find myself ranging amidst the fundamental
things of the individual life and all the perplexity of desires and
passions. I turn my questionings to the most difficult of all sets
of compromises, those mitigations of spontaneous freedom that
constitute the marriage laws, the mystery of balancing justice
against the good of the future, amidst these violent and elusive
passions. Where falls the balance of freedoms here? I pass for a
time from Utopianising altogether, to ask the question that, after
all, Schopenhauer failed completely to answer, why sometimes in the
case of hurtful, pointless, and destructive things we want so
vehemently….
I come back from this unavailing glance into the deeps to the
general question of freedoms in this new relation. I find myself far
adrift from the case of the Frognal botanist, and asking how far a
modern Utopia will deal with personal morals.
As Plato
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