A Modern Utopia - H. G. Wells (best color ebook reader txt) 📗

a vertical position, and the

bedclothes hang airing. You stand at the doorway and realise that

there remains not a minute’s work for anyone to do. Memories of the

foetid disorder of many an earthly bedroom after a night’s use

float across your mind.

 

And you must not imagine this dustless, spotless, sweet apartment as

anything but beautiful. Its appearance is a little unfamiliar of

course, but all the muddle of dust-collecting hangings and witless

ornament that cover the earthly bedroom, the valances, the curtains

to check the draught from the ill-fitting wood windows, the

worthless irrelevant pictures, usually a little askew, the dusty

carpets, and all the paraphernalia about the dirty, black-leaded

fireplace are gone. But the faintly tinted walls are framed with

just one clear coloured line, as finely placed as the member of a

Greek capital; the door handles and the lines of the panels of the

door, the two chairs, the framework of the bed, the writing table,

have all that final simplicity, that exquisite finish of contour

that is begotten of sustained artistic effort. The graciously shaped

windows each frame a picture—since they are draughtless the window

seats are no mere mockeries as are the window seats of earth—and on

the sill, the sole thing to need attention in the room, is one

little bowl of blue Alpine flowers.

 

The same exquisite simplicity meets one downstairs.

 

Our landlord sits down at table with us for a moment, and seeing we

do not understand the electrically heated coffee-pot before us,

shows us what to do. Coffee and milk we have, in the Continental

fashion, and some excellent rolls and butter.

 

He is a swarthy little man, our landlord, and overnight we saw him

preoccupied with other guests. But we have risen either late or

early by Utopian standards, we know not which, and this morning he

has us to himself. His bearing is kindly and inoffensive, but he

cannot conceal the curiosity that possesses him. His eye meets ours

with a mute inquiry, and then as we fall to, we catch him

scrutinising our cuffs, our garments, our boots, our faces, our

table manners. He asks nothing at first, but says a word or so about

our night’s comfort and the day’s weather, phrases that have an air

of being customary. Then comes a silence that is interrogative.

 

“Excellent coffee,” I say to fill the gap.

 

“And excellent rolls,” says my botanist.

 

Our landlord indicates his sense of our approval.

 

A momentary diversion is caused by the entry of an elfin-tressed

little girl, who stares at us half impudently, half shyly, with

bright black eyes, hesitates at the botanist’s clumsy smile and nod,

and then goes and stands by her father and surveys us steadfastly.

 

“You have come far?” ventures our landlord, patting his daughter’s

shoulder.

 

I glance at the botanist. “Yes,” I say, “we have.”

 

I expand. “We have come so far that this country of yours seems very

strange indeed to us.”

 

“The mountains?”

 

“Not only the mountains.”

 

“You came up out of the Ticino valley?”

 

“No—not that way.”

 

“By the Oberalp?”

 

“No.”

 

“The Furka?”

 

“No.”

 

“Not up from the lake?”

 

“No.”

 

He looks puzzled.

 

“We came,” I say, “from another world.”

 

He seems trying to understand. Then a thought strikes him, and he

sends away his little girl with a needless message to her

mother.

 

“Ah!” he says. “Another world—eh? Meaning–-?”

 

“Another world—far in the deeps of space.”

 

Then at the expression of his face one realises that a Modern Utopia

will probably keep its more intelligent citizens for better work

than inn-tending. He is evidently inaccessible to the idea we think

of putting before him. He stares at us a moment, and then remarks,

“There’s the book to sign.”

 

We find ourselves confronted with a book, a little after the fashion

of the familiar hotel visitors’ book of earth. He places this before

us, and beside it puts pen and ink and a slab, upon which ink has

been freshly smeared.

 

“Thumbmarks,” says my scientific friend hastily in English.

 

“You show me how to do it,” I say as quickly.

 

He signs first, and I look over his shoulder.

 

He is displaying more readiness than I should have expected. The

book is ruled in broad transverse lines, and has a space for a name,

for a number, and a thumbmark. He puts his thumb upon the slab and

makes the thumbmark first with the utmost deliberation. Meanwhile

he studies the other two entries. The “numbers” of the previous

guests above are complex muddles of letters and figures. He writes

his name, then with a calm assurance writes down his number,

A.M.a.1607.2.ab+. I am wrung with momentary admiration. I follow

his example, and fabricate an equally imposing signature. We think

ourselves very clever. The landlord proffers finger bowls for our

thumbs, and his eye goes, just a little curiously, to our entries.

 

I decide it is advisable to pay and go before any conversation about

our formulae arises.

 

As we emerge into the corridor, and the morning sunlight of the

Utopian world, I see the landlord bending over the book.

 

“Come on,” I say. “The most tiresome thing in the world is

explanations, and I perceive that if we do not get along, they will

fall upon us now.”

 

I glance back to discover the landlord and a gracefully robed woman

standing outside the pretty simplicity of the Utopian inn, watching

us doubtfully as we recede.

 

“Come on,” I insist.

 

Section 8

 

We should go towards the Schoellenen gorge, and as we went, our

fresh morning senses would gather together a thousand factors for

our impression of this more civilised world. A Modern Utopia will

have done with yapping about nationality, and so the ugly

fortifications, the barracks and military defilements of the earthly

vale of Urseren will be wanting. Instead there will be a great

multitude of gracious little houses clustering in college-like

groups, no doubt about their common kitchens and halls, down and

about the valley slopes. And there will be many more trees, and a

great variety of trees—all the world will have been ransacked for

winter conifers. Despite the height of the valley there will be a

double avenue along the road. This high road with its tramway would

turn with us to descend the gorge, and we should hesitate upon the

adventure of boarding the train. But now we should have the memory

of our landlord’s curious eye upon us, and we should decide at last

to defer the risk of explanations such an enterprise might

precipitate.

 

We should go by the great road for a time, and note something of the

difference between Utopian and terrestrial engineering.

 

The tramway, the train road, the culverts, and bridges, the

Urnerloch tunnel, into which the road plunges, will all be beautiful

things.

 

There is nothing in machinery, there is nothing in embankments and

railways and iron bridges and engineering devices to oblige them to

be ugly. Ugliness is the measure of imperfection; a thing of human

making is for the most part ugly in proportion to the poverty of its

constructive thought, to the failure of its producer fully to grasp

the purpose of its being. Everything to which men continue to give

thought and attention, which they make and remake in the same

direction, and with a continuing desire to do as well as they can,

grows beautiful inevitably. Things made by mankind under modern

conditions are ugly, primarily because our social organisation is

ugly, because we live in an atmosphere of snatch and uncertainty,

and do everything in an underbred strenuous manner. This is the

misfortune of machinery, and not its fault. Art, like some beautiful

plant, lives on its atmosphere, and when the atmosphere is good, it

will grow everywhere, and when it is bad nowhere. If we smashed and

buried every machine, every furnace, every factory in the world, and

without any further change set ourselves to home industries, hand

labour, spade husbandry, sheep-folding and pig minding, we should

still do things in the same haste, and achieve nothing but

dirtiness, inconvenience, bad air, and another gaunt and gawky

reflection of our intellectual and moral disorder. We should mend

nothing.

 

But in Utopia a man who designs a tram road will be a cultivated

man, an artist craftsman; he will strive, as a good writer, or a

painter strives, to achieve the simplicity of perfection. He will

make his girders and rails and parts as gracious as that first

engineer, Nature, has made the stems of her plants and the joints

and gestures of her animals. To esteem him a sort of anti-artist, to

count every man who makes things with his unaided thumbs an artist,

and every man who uses machinery as a brute, is merely a passing

phase of human stupidity. This tram road beside us will be a triumph

of design. The idea will be so unfamiliar to us that for a time it

will not occur to us that it is a system of beautiful objects at

all. We shall admire its ingenious adaptation to the need of a

district that is buried half the year in snow, the hard bed below,

curved and guttered to do its own clearing, the great arched sleeper

masses, raising the rails a good two yards above the ground, the

easy, simple standards and insulators. Then it will creep in upon

our minds, “But, by Jove! This is designed!”

 

Indeed the whole thing will be designed.

 

Later on, perhaps, we may find students in an art school working in

competition to design an electric tram, students who know something

of modern metallurgy, and something of electrical engineering, and

we shall find people as keenly critical of a signal box or an iron

bridge as they are on earth of–-! Heavens! what are they

critical about on earth?

 

The quality and condition of a dress tie!

 

We should make some unpatriotic comparisons with our own planet, no

doubt.