A Modern Utopia - H. G. Wells (best color ebook reader txt) 📗
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wrists, and his wrists on his knees—the simple natural position for
sleep in man…. He said it would be far better if all the world
slept out, and all the houses were pulled down.
You will understand, perhaps, the subdued irritation I felt, as I
sat and listened to the botanist entangling himself in the logical
net of this wild nonsense. It impressed me as being irrelevant. When
one comes to a Utopia one expects a Cicerone, one expects a person
as precise and insistent and instructive as an American
advertisement—the advertisement of one of those land agents, for
example, who print their own engaging photographs to instil
confidence and begin, “You want to buy real estate.” One expects to
find all Utopians absolutely convinced of the perfection of their
Utopia, and incapable of receiving a hint against its order. And
here was this purveyor of absurdities!
And yet now that I come to think it over, is not this too one of the
necessary differences between a Modern Utopia and those finite
compact settlements of the older school of dreamers? It is not to be
a unanimous world any more, it is to have all and more of the mental
contrariety we find in the world of the real; it is no longer to be
perfectly explicable, it is just our own vast mysterious welter,
with some of the blackest shadows gone, with a clearer illumination,
and a more conscious and intelligent will. Irrelevance is not
irrelevant to such a scheme, and our blond-haired friend is exactly
just where he ought to be here.
Still–-
Section 3
I ceased to listen to the argumentation of my botanist with this
apostle of Nature. The botanist, in his scientific way, was, I
believe, defending the learned professions. (He thinks and argues
like drawing on squared paper.) It struck me as transiently
remarkable that a man who could not be induced to forget himself and
his personal troubles on coming into a whole new world, who could
waste our first evening in Utopia upon a paltry egotistical love
story, should presently become quite heated and impersonal in the
discussion of scientific professionalism. He was—absorbed. I can’t
attempt to explain these vivid spots and blind spots in the
imaginations of sane men; there they are!
“You say,” said the botanist, with a prevalent index finger, and the
resolute deliberation of a big siege gun being lugged into action
over rough ground by a number of inexperienced men, “you prefer a
natural death to an artificial life. But what is your definition
(stress) of artificial? …”
And after lunch too! I ceased to listen, flicked the end of my
cigarette ash over the green trellis of the arbour, stretched my
legs with a fine restfulness, leant back, and gave my mind to the
fields and houses that lay adown the valley.
What I saw interwove with fragmentary things our garrulous friend
had said, and with the trend of my own speculations….
The high road, with its tramways and its avenues on either side, ran
in a bold curve, and with one great loop of descent, down the
opposite side of the valley, and below crossed again on a beautiful
viaduct, and dipped into an arcade in the side of the Bristenstock.
Our inn stood out boldly, high above the level this took. The houses
clustered in their collegiate groups over by the high road, and near
the subordinate way that ran almost vertically below us and past us
and up towards the valley of the Meien Reuss. There were one or two
Utopians cutting and packing the flowery mountain grass in the
carefully levelled and irrigated meadows by means of swift, light
machines that ran on things like feet and seemed to devour the
herbage, and there were many children and a woman or so, going to
and fro among the houses near at hand. I guessed a central building
towards the high road must be the school from which these children
were coming. I noted the health and cleanliness of these young heirs
of Utopia as they passed below.
The pervading quality of the whole scene was a sane order, the
deliberate solution of problems, a progressive intention steadily
achieving itself, and the aspect that particularly occupied me was
the incongruity of this with our blond-haired friend.
On the one hand here was a state of affairs that implied a power of
will, an organising and controlling force, the co-operation of a
great number of vigorous people to establish and sustain its
progress, and on the other this creature of pose and vanity, with
his restless wit, his perpetual giggle at his own cleverness, his
manifest incapacity for comprehensive co-operation.
Now, had I come upon a hopeless incompatibility? Was this the
reductio ad absurdum of my vision, and must it even as I sat there
fade, dissolve, and vanish before my eyes?
There was no denying our blond friend. If this Utopia is indeed to
parallel our earth, man for man—and I see no other reasonable
choice to that—there must be this sort of person and kindred sorts
of persons in great abundance. The desire and gift to see life whole
is not the lot of the great majority of men, the service of truth is
the privilege of the elect, and these clever fools who choke the
avenues of the world of thought, who stick at no inconsistency, who
oppose, obstruct, confuse, will find only the freer scope amidst
Utopian freedoms.
(They argued on, these two, as I worried my brains with riddles. It
was like a fight between a cock sparrow and a tortoise; they both
went on in their own way, regardless of each other’s proceedings.
The encounter had an air of being extremely lively, and the moments
of contact were few. “But you mistake my point,” the blond man was
saying, disordering his hair—which had become unruffled in the
preoccupation of dispute—with a hasty movement of his hand, “you
don’t appreciate the position I take up.”)
“Ugh!” said I privately, and lighted another cigarette and went away
into my own thoughts with that.
The position he takes up! That’s the way of your intellectual fool,
the Universe over. He takes up a position, and he’s going to be the
most brilliant, delightful, engaging and invincible of gay delicious
creatures defending that position you can possibly imagine. And even
when the case is not so bad as that, there still remains the quality.
We “take up our positions,” silly little contentious creatures
that we are, we will not see the right in one another, we will not
patiently state and restate, and honestly accommodate and plan, and
so we remain at sixes and sevens. We’ve all a touch of Gladstone in
us, and try to the last moment to deny we have made a turn. And so
our poor broken-springed world jolts athwart its trackless destiny.
Try to win into line with some fellow weakling, and see the little
host of suspicions, aggressions, misrepresentations, your approach
will stir—like summer flies on a high road—the way he will try to
score a point and claim you as a convert to what he has always said,
his fear lest the point should be scored to you.
It is not only such gross and palpable cases as our blond and
tenoring friend. I could find the thing negligible were it only
that. But when one sees the same thread woven into men who are
leaders, men who sway vast multitudes, who are indeed great and
powerful men; when one sees how unfair they can be, how unteachable,
the great blind areas in their eyes also, their want of generosity,
then one’s doubts gather like mists across this Utopian valley, its
vistas pale, its people become unsubstantial phantoms, all its order
and its happiness dim and recede….
If we are to have any Utopia at all, we must have a clear common
purpose, and a great and steadfast movement of will to override all
these incurably egotistical dissentients. Something is needed wide
and deep enough to float the worst of egotisms away. The world is
not to be made right by acclamation and in a day, and then for ever
more trusted to run alone. It is manifest this Utopia could not come
about by chance and anarchy, but by co-ordinated effort and a
community of design, and to tell of just land laws and wise
government, a wisely balanced economic system, and wise social
arrangements without telling how it was brought about, and how it is
sustained against the vanity and self-indulgence, the moody
fluctuations and uncertain imaginations, the heat and aptitude for
partisanship that lurk, even when they do not flourish, in the
texture of every man alive, is to build a palace without either door
or staircase.
I had not this in mind when I began.
Somewhere in the Modern Utopia there must be adequate men, men the
very antithesis of our friend, capable of self-devotion, of
intentional courage, of honest thought, and steady endeavour. There
must be a literature to embody their common idea, of which this
Modern Utopia is merely the material form; there must be some
organisation, however slight, to keep them in touch one with the
other.
Who will these men be? Will they be a caste? a race? an organisation
in the nature of a Church? … And there came into my mind the words
of our acquaintance, that he was not one of these “voluntary
noblemen.”
At first that phrase struck me as being merely queer, and then I
began to realise certain possibilities that were wrapped up in
it.
The animus of our chance friend, at any rate, went to suggest that
here was his antithesis. Evidently what he is not, will be the class
to contain what is needed here. Evidently.
Section 4
I was recalled from my meditations by the hand of the blond-haired
man upon my arm.
I looked up to discover the botanist had gone into the inn.
The blond-haired man was for a moment almost stripped of pose.
“I say,” he said. “Weren’t you listening to me?”
“No,” I said bluntly.
His surprise was manifest. But by an effort he recalled what he had
meant to say.
“Your friend,” he said, “has been telling me, in spite of my
sustained interruptions, a most incredible story.”
I wondered how the botanist managed to get it in. “About that
woman?” I said.
“About a man and a woman who hate each other and can’t get away from
each other.”
“I know,” I said.
“It sounds absurd.”
“It is.”
“Why can’t they get away? What is there to keep them together? It’s
ridiculous. I–-”
“Quite.”
“He would tell it to me.”
“It’s his way.”
“He interrupted me. And there’s no point in it. Is he–-” he
hesitated, “mad?”
“There’s a whole world of people mad with him,” I answered after a
pause.
The perplexed expression of the blond-haired man intensified. It is
vain to deny that he enlarged the scope of his inquiry, visibly if
not verbally. “Dear me!” he said, and took up something he had
nearly forgotten. “And you found yourselves suddenly on a mountain
side? … I thought you were joking.”
I turned round upon him with a sudden access of earnestness. At
least I meant my manner to be earnest, but to him it may have seemed
wild.
“You,” I said, “are an original sort of man. Do not be alarmed.
Perhaps you will understand…. We were not joking.”
“But, my dear fellow!”
“I mean it! We come from an inferior
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