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

CHAPTER THE SIXTH

Women in a Modern Utopia

 

Section 1

 

But though I have come to a point where the problem of a Utopia has

resolved itself very simply into the problem of government and

direction, I find I have not brought the botanist with me. Frankly

he cannot think so steadily onward as I can. I feel to think, he

thinks to feel. It is I and my kind that have the wider range,

because we can be impersonal as well as personal. We can escape

ourselves. In general terms, at least, I understand him, but

he does not understand me in any way at all. He thinks me an

incomprehensible brute because his obsession is merely one of my

incidental interests, and wherever my reasoning ceases to be

explicit and full, the slightest ellipsis, the most transitory

digression, he evades me and is back at himself again. He may have a

personal liking for me, though I doubt it, but also he hates me

pretty distinctly, because of this bias he cannot understand. My

philosophical insistence that things shall be reasonable and hang

together, that what can be explained shall be explained, and that

what can be done by calculation and certain methods shall not be

left to chance, he loathes. He just wants adventurously to feel. He

wants to feel the sunset, and he thinks that on the whole he would

feel it better if he had not been taught the sun was about

ninety-two million miles away. He wants to feel free and strong, and

he would rather feel so than be so. He does not want to accomplish

great things, but to have dazzling things occur to him. He does not

know that there are feelings also up in the clear air of the

philosophic mountains, in the long ascents of effort and design. He

does not know that thought itself is only a finer sort of feeling

than his—good hock to the mixed gin, porter and treacle of his

emotions, a perception of similitudes and oppositions that carries

even thrills. And naturally he broods on the source of all his most

copious feelings and emotions, women, and particularly upon the

woman who has most made him feel. He forces me also to that.

 

Our position is unfortunate for me. Our return to the Utopian

equivalent of Lucerne revives in him all the melancholy distresses

that so preoccupied him when first we were transferred to this

better planet. One day, while we are still waiting there for the

public office to decide about us, he broaches the matter. It is

early evening, and we are walking beside the lake after our simple

dinner. “About here,” he says, “the quays would run and all those

big hotels would be along here, looking out on the lake. It’s so

strange to have seen them so recently, and now not to see them at

all…. Where have they gone?”

 

“Vanished by hypothesis.”

 

“What?”

 

“Oh! They’re there still. It’s we that have come hither.”

 

“Of course. I forgot. But still–- You know, there was an avenue of

little trees along this quay with seats, and she was sitting looking

out upon the lake…. I hadn’t seen her for ten years.”

 

He looks about him still a little perplexed. “Now we are here,” he

says, “it seems as though that meeting and the talk we had must have

been a dream.”

 

He falls musing.

 

Presently he says: “I knew her at once. I saw her in profile. But,

you know, I didn’t speak to her directly. I walked past her seat and

on for a little way, trying to control myself…. Then I turned back

and sat down beside her, very quietly. She looked up at me.

Everything came back—everything. For a moment or so I felt I was

going to cry….”

 

That seems to give him a sort of satisfaction even in the

reminiscence.

 

“We talked for a time just like casual acquaintances—about the view

and the weather, and things like that.”

 

He muses again.

 

“In Utopia everything would have been different,” I say.

 

“I suppose it would.”

 

He goes on before I can say anything more.

 

“Then, you know, there was a pause. I had a sort of intuition that

the moment was coming. So I think had she. You may scoff, of course,

at these intuitions–-”

 

I don’t, as a matter of fact. Instead, I swear secretly. Always this

sort of man keeps up the pretence of highly distinguished and

remarkable mental processes, whereas—have not I, in my own

composition, the whole diapason of emotional fool? Is not the

suppression of these notes my perpetual effort, my undying despair?

And then, am I to be accused of poverty?

 

But to his story.

 

“She said, quite abruptly, ‘I am not happy,’ and I told her, ‘I knew

that the instant I saw you.’ Then, you know, she began to talk to me

very quietly, very frankly, about everything. It was only afterwards

I began to feel just what it meant, her talking to me like that.”

 

I cannot listen to this!

 

“Don’t you understand,” I cry, “that we are in Utopia. She may be

bound unhappily upon earth and you may be bound, but not here. Here

I think it will be different. Here the laws that control all these

things will be humane and just. So that all you said and did, over

there, does not signify here—does not signify here!”

 

He looks up for a moment at my face, and then carelessly at my

wonderful new world.

 

“Yes,” he says, without interest, with something of the tone of an

abstracted elder speaking to a child, “I dare say it will be all

very fine here.” And he lapses, thwarted from his confidences, into

musing.

 

There is something almost dignified in this withdrawal into himself.

For a moment I entertain an illusion that really I am unworthy to

hear the impalpable inconclusiveness of what he said to her and of

what she said to him.

 

I am snubbed. I am also amazed to find myself snubbed. I become

breathless with indignation. We walk along side by side, but now

profoundly estranged.

 

I regard the facade of the Utopian public offices of Lucerne—I had

meant to call his attention to some of the architectural features of

these—with a changed eye, with all the spirit gone out of my

vision. I wish I had never brought this introspective carcass, this

mental ingrate, with me.

 

I incline to fatalistic submission. I suppose I had no power to

leave him behind…. I wonder and I wonder. The old Utopists never

had to encumber themselves with this sort of man.

 

Section 2

 

How would things be “different” in the Modern Utopia? After all it

is time we faced the riddle of the problems of marriage and

motherhood….

 

The Modern Utopia is not only to be a sound and happy World State,

but it is to be one progressing from good to better. But as Malthus

[Footnote: Essay on the Principles of Population.] demonstrated for

all time, a State whose population continues to increase in

obedience to unchecked instinct, can progress only from bad to

worse. From the view of human comfort and happiness, the increase of

population that occurs at each advance in human security is the

greatest evil of life. The way of Nature is for every species to

increase nearly to its possible maximum of numbers, and then to

improve through the pressure of that maximum against its limiting

conditions by the crushing and killing of all the feebler

individuals. The way of Nature has also been the way of humanity so

far, and except when a temporary alleviation is obtained through an

expansion of the general stock of sustenance by invention or

discovery, the amount of starvation and of the physical misery of

privation in the world, must vary almost exactly with the excess of

the actual birth-rate over that required to sustain population at a

number compatible with a universal contentment. Neither has Nature

evolved, nor has man so far put into operation, any device by which

paying this price of progress, this misery of a multitude of starved

and unsuccessful lives can be evaded. A mere indiscriminating

restriction of the birth-rate—an end practically attained in the

homely, old-fashioned civilisation of China by female infanticide,

involves not only the cessation of distresses but stagnation, and

the minor good of a sort of comfort and social stability is won at

too great a sacrifice. Progress depends essentially on competitive

selection, and that we may not escape.

 

But it is a conceivable and possible thing that this margin of

futile struggling, pain and discomfort and death might be reduced to

nearly nothing without checking physical and mental evolution, with

indeed an acceleration of physical and mental evolution, by

preventing the birth of those who would in the unrestricted

interplay of natural forces be born to suffer and fail. The method

of Nature “red in tooth and claw” is to degrade, thwart, torture,

and kill the weakest and least adapted members of every species in

existence in each generation, and so keep the specific average

rising; the ideal of a scientific civilisation is to prevent those

weaklings being born. There is no other way of evading Nature’s

punishment of sorrow. The struggle for life among the beasts and

uncivilised men means misery and death for the inferior individuals,

misery and death in order that they may not increase and multiply;

in the civilised State it is now clearly possible to make the

conditions of life tolerable for every living creature, provided the

inferiors can be prevented