A Modern Utopia - H. G. Wells (best color ebook reader txt) 📗
- Author: H. G. Wells
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precisest sort to prevent that uxorious inseparableness, that
connubiality which will reduce a couple of people to something
jointly less than either. That Canon is too long to tell you now. A
man under the Rule who loves a woman who does not follow it, must
either leave the samurai to marry her, or induce her to accept what
is called the Woman’s Rule, which, while it excepts her from the
severer qualifications and disciplines, brings her regimen of life
into a working harmony with his.”
“Suppose she breaks the Rule afterwards?”
“He must leave either her or the order.”
“There is matter for a novel or so in that.”
“There has been matter for hundreds.”
“Is the Woman’s Rule a sumptuary law as well as a regimen? I
mean—may she dress as she pleases?”
“Not a bit of it,” said my double. “Every woman who could command
money used it, we found, to make underbred aggressions on other
women. As men emerged to civilisation, women seemed going back
to savagery—to paint and feathers. But the samurai, both men
and women, and the women under the Lesser Rule also, all have a
particular dress. No difference is made between women under either
the Great or the Lesser Rule. You have seen the men’s dress—always
like this I wear. The women may wear the same, either with the hair
cut short or plaited behind them, or they may have a high-waisted
dress of very fine, soft woollen material, with their hair coiled up
behind.”
“I have seen it,” I said. Indeed, nearly all the women had seemed to
be wearing variants of that simple formula. “It seems to me a very
beautiful dress. The other—I’m not used to. But I like it on girls
and slender women.”
I had a thought, and added, “Don’t they sometimes, well—take a good
deal of care, dressing their hair?”
My double laughed in my eyes. “They do,” he said.
“And the Rule?”
“The Rule is never fussy,” said my double, still smiling.
“We don’t want women to cease to be beautiful, and consciously
beautiful, if you like,” he added. “The more real beauty of form and
face we have, the finer our world. But costly sexualised
trappings–-”
“I should have thought,” I said, “a class of women who traded on
their sex would have arisen, women, I mean, who found an interest
and an advantage in emphasising their individual womanly beauty.
There is no law to prevent it. Surely they would tend to counteract
the severity of costume the Rule dictates.”
“There are such women. But for all that the Rule sets the key of
everyday dress. If a woman is possessed by the passion for gorgeous
raiment she usually satisfies it in her own private circle, or with
rare occasional onslaughts upon the public eye. Her everyday mood
and the disposition of most people is against being conspicuous
abroad. And I should say there are little liberties under the Lesser
Rule; a discreet use of fine needlework and embroidery, a wider
choice of materials.”
“You have no changing fashions?”
“None. For all that, are not our dresses as beautiful as yours?”
“Our women’s dresses are not beautiful at all,” I said, forced for a
time towards the mysterious philosophy of dress. “Beauty? That isn’t
their concern.”
“Then what are they after?”
“My dear man! What is all my world after?”
Section 6
I should come to our third talk with a great curiosity to hear of
the last portion of the Rule, of the things that the samurai are
obliged to do.
There would be many precise directions regarding his health, and
rules that would aim at once at health and that constant exercise of
will that makes life good. Save in specified exceptional
circumstances, the samurai must bathe in cold water, and the men
must shave every day; they have the precisest directions in such
matters; the body must be in health, the skin and muscles and nerves
in perfect tone, or the samurai must go to the doctors of the order,
and give implicit obedience to the regimen prescribed. They must
sleep alone at least four nights in five; and they must eat with and
talk to anyone in their fellowship who cares for their conversation
for an hour, at least, at the nearest club-house of the samurai once
on three chosen days in every week. Moreover, they must read aloud
from the Book of the Samurai for at least ten minutes every day.
Every month they must buy and read faithfully through at least one
book that has been published during the past five years, and the
only intervention with private choice in that matter is the
prescription of a certain minimum of length for the monthly book or
books. But the full Rule in these minor compulsory matters is
voluminous and detailed, and it abounds with alternatives. Its aim
is rather to keep before the samurai by a number of sample duties,
as it were, the need of, and some of the chief methods towards
health of body and mind, rather than to provide a comprehensive
rule, and to ensure the maintenance of a community of feeling and
interests among the samurai through habit, intercourse, and a living
contemporary literature. These minor obligations do not earmark more
than an hour in the day. Yet they serve to break down isolations of
sympathy, all sorts of physical and intellectual sluggishness and
the development of unsocial preoccupations of many sorts.
Women samurai who are married, my double told me, must bear
children—if they are to remain married as well as in the
order—before the second period for terminating a childless marriage
is exhausted. I failed to ask for the precise figures from my double
at the time, but I think it is beyond doubt that it is from samurai
mothers of the Greater or Lesser Rule that a very large proportion
of the future population of Utopia will be derived. There is one
liberty accorded to women samurai which is refused to men, and that
is to marry outside the Rule, and women married to men not under the
Rule are also free to become samurai. Here, too, it will be manifest
there is scope for novels and the drama of life. In practice, it
seems that it is only men of great poietic distinction outside the
Rule, or great commercial leaders, who have wives under it. The
tendency of such unions is either to bring the husband under the
Rule, or take the wife out of it. There can be no doubt that these
marriage limitations tend to make the samurai something of an
hereditary class. Their children, as a rule, become samurai. But it
is not an exclusive caste; subject to the most reasonable
qualifications, anyone who sees fit can enter it at any time, and
so, unlike all other privileged castes the world has seen, it
increases relatively to the total population, and may indeed at last
assimilate almost the whole population of the earth.
Section 7
So much my double told me readily.
But now he came to the heart of all his explanations, to the will
and motives at the centre that made men and women ready to undergo
discipline, to renounce the richness and elaboration of the sensuous
life, to master emotions and control impulses, to keep in the key of
effort while they had abundance about them to rouse and satisfy all
desires, and his exposition was more difficult.
He tried to make his religion clear to me.
The leading principle of the Utopian religion is the repudiation of
the doctrine of original sin; the Utopians hold that man, on the
whole, is good. That is their cardinal belief. Man has pride and
conscience, they hold, that you may refine by training as you refine
his eye and ear; he has remorse and sorrow in his being, coming on
the heels of all inconsequent enjoyments. How can one think of him
as bad? He is religious; religion is as natural to him as lust and
anger, less intense, indeed, but coming with a wide-sweeping
inevitableness as peace comes after all tumults and noises. And in
Utopia they understand this, or, at least, the samurai do, clearly.
They accept Religion as they accept Thirst, as something inseparably
in the mysterious rhythms of life. And just as thirst and pride and
all desires may be perverted in an age of abundant opportunities,
and men may be degraded and wasted by intemperance in drinking, by
display, or by ambition, so too the nobler complex of desires that
constitutes religion may be turned to evil by the dull, the base,
and the careless. Slovenly indulgence in religious inclinations, a
failure to think hard and discriminate as fairly as possible in
religious matters, is just as alien to the men under the Rule as it
would be to drink deeply because they were thirsty, eat until
glutted, evade a bath because the day was chilly, or make love to
any bright-eyed girl who chanced to look pretty in the dusk. Utopia,
which is to have every type of character that one finds on earth,
will have its temples and its priests, just as it will have its
actresses and wine, but the samurai will be forbidden the religion
of dramatically lit altars, organ music, and incense, as distinctly
as they are forbidden the love of painted women, or the consolations
of brandy. And to all the things that are less than religion and
that seek to comprehend it, to cosmogonies and philosophies, to
creeds and formulae, to catechisms and easy explanations, the
attitude of the samurai, the note of the Book of Samurai, will be
distrust. These things, the samurai will say, are part of the
indulgences that should come before a man submits himself to the
Rule; they are like the early gratifications of young men,
experiences to establish renunciation. The samurai will have emerged
above these things.
The theology of the Utopian rulers will be saturated with that same
philosophy of uniqueness, that repudiation of anything beyond
similarities and practical parallelisms, that saturates all their
institutions. They will have analysed exhaustively those fallacies
and assumptions that arise between the One and the Many, that have
troubled philosophy since philosophy began. Just as they will have
escaped that delusive unification of every species under its
specific definition that has dominated earthly reasoning, so they
will have escaped the delusive simplification of God that vitiates
all terrestrial theology. They will hold God to be complex and of an
endless variety of aspects, to be expressed by no universal formula
nor approved in any uniform manner. Just as the language of Utopia
will be a synthesis, even so will its God be. The aspect of God is
different in the measure of every man’s individuality, and the
intimate thing of religion must, therefore, exist in human solitude,
between man and God alone. Religion in its quintessence is a
relation between God and man; it is perversion to make it a relation
between man and man, and a man may no more reach God through a
priest than love his wife through a priest. But just as a man in
love may refine the interpretation of his feelings and borrow
expression from the poems and music of poietic men, so an individual
man may at his discretion read books of devotion and hear music that
is in harmony with his inchoate feelings. Many of the samurai,
therefore, will set themselves private regimens that will help their
secret religious life, will pray habitually, and read books of
devotion, but with these things the Rule of the order will have
nothing to do.
Clearly the God of the
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