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

us with a momentary speculation,

and we get a whiff of foul language from two newsboys on the

kerb.

 

“We can’t go on talking,” the botanist begins, and ducks aside just

in time to save his eye from the ferule of a stupidly held umbrella.

He is going to treat our little tiff about that lady as closed. He

has the air of picking up our conversation again at some earlier

point.

 

He steps into the gutter, walks round outside a negro hawker, just

escapes the wheel of a hansom, and comes to my side again.

 

“We can’t go on talking of your Utopia,” he says, “in a noise and

crowd like this.”

 

We are separated by a portly man going in the opposite direction,

and join again. “We can’t go on talking of Utopia,” he repeats, “in

London…. Up in the mountains—and holiday-time—it was all right.

We let ourselves go!”

 

“I’ve been living in Utopia,” I answer, tacitly adopting his tacit

proposal to drop the lady out of the question.

 

“At times,” he says, with a queer laugh, “you’ve almost made me live

there too.”

 

He reflects. “It doesn’t do, you know. No! And I don’t know

whether, after all, I want–-”

 

We are separated again by half-a-dozen lifted flagstones, a burning

brazier, and two engineers concerned with some underground business

or other—in the busiest hour of the day’s traffic.

 

“Why shouldn’t it do?” I ask.

 

“It spoils the world of everyday to let your mind run on impossible

perfections.”

 

“I wish,” I shout against the traffic, “I could smash the world of

everyday.”

 

My note becomes quarrelsome. “You may accept this as the world of

reality, you may consent to be one scar in an ill-dressed compound

wound, but so—not I! This is a dream too—this world. Your dream,

and you bring me back to it—out of Utopia–-”

 

The crossing of Bow Street gives me pause again.

 

The face of a girl who is passing westward, a student girl, rather

carelessly dressed, her books in a carrying-strap, comes across my

field of vision. The westward sun of London glows upon her face. She

has eyes that dream, surely no sensuous nor personal dream.

 

After all, after all, dispersed, hidden, disorganised, undiscovered,

unsuspected even by themselves, the samurai of Utopia are in this

world, the motives that are developed and organised there stir

dumbly here and stifle in ten thousand futile hearts….

 

I overtake the botanist, who got ahead at the crossing by the

advantage of a dust-cart.

 

“You think this is real because you can’t wake out of it,” I say.

“It’s all a dream, and there are people—I’m just one of the first

of a multitude—between sleeping and waking—who will presently be

rubbing it out of their eyes.”

 

A pinched and dirty little girl, with sores upon her face, stretches

out a bunch of wilting violets, in a pitifully thin little fist, and

interrupts my speech. “Bunch o’ vi’lets—on’y a penny.”

 

“No!” I say curtly, hardening my heart.

 

A ragged and filthy nursing mother, with her last addition to our

Imperial People on her arm, comes out of a drinkshop, and stands a

little unsteadily, and wipes mouth and nose comprehensively with the

back of a red chapped hand….

 

Section 4

 

“Isn’t that reality?” says the botanist, almost triumphantly, and

leaves me aghast at his triumph.

 

“That!” I say belatedly. “It’s a thing in a nightmare!”

 

He shakes his head and smiles—exasperatingly.

 

I perceive quite abruptly that the botanist and I have reached the

limits of our intercourse.

 

“The world dreams things like that,” I say, “because it suffers from

an indigestion of such people as you.”

 

His low-toned self-complacency, like the faded banner of an

obstinate fort, still flies unconquered. And you know, he’s not even

a happy man with it all!

 

For ten seconds or more I am furiously seeking in my mind for a

word, for a term of abuse, for one compendious verbal missile that

shall smash this man for ever. It has to express total inadequacy of

imagination and will, spiritual anaemia, dull respectability, gross

sentimentality, a cultivated pettiness of heart….

 

That word will not come. But no other word will do. Indeed the word

does not exist. There is nothing with sufficient vituperative

concentration for this moral and intellectual stupidity of educated

people….

 

“Er–-” he begins.

 

No! I can’t endure him.

 

With a passionate rapidity of movement, I leave his side, dart

between a carriage and a van, duck under the head of a cab-horse,

and board a ‘bus going westward somewhere—but anyhow, going in

exactly the reverse direction to the botanist. I clamber up the

steps and thread my swaying way to the seat immediately behind the

driver.

 

“There!” I say, as I whack myself down on the seat and pant.

 

When I look round the botanist is out of sight.

 

Section 5

 

But I am back in the world for all that, and my Utopia is done.

 

It is good discipline for the Utopist to visit this world

occasionally.

 

But from the front seat on the top of an omnibus on a sunny

September afternoon, the Strand, and Charing Cross corner, and

Whitehall, and the great multitude of people, the great uproar of

vehicles, streaming in all directions, is apt to look a world

altogether too formidable. It has a glare, it has a tumult and

vigour that shouts one down. It shouts one down, if shouting is to

carry it. What good was it to trot along the pavement through this

noise and tumult of life, pleading Utopia to that botanist? What

good would it be to recommend Utopia in this driver’s preoccupied

ear?

 

There are moments in the life of every philosopher and dreamer when

he feels himself the flimsiest of absurdities, when the Thing in

Being has its way with him, its triumphant way, when it asks in a

roar, unanswerably, with a fine solid use of the current vernacular,

“What Good is all this—Rot about Utopias?”

 

One inspects the Thing in Being with something of the diffident

speculation of primitive man, peering from behind a tree at an angry

elephant.

 

(There is an omen in that image. On how many occasions must that

ancestor of ours have had just the Utopist’s feeling of ambitious

unreality, have decided that on the whole it was wiser to go very

quietly home again, and leave the big beast alone? But, in the end,

men rode upon the elephant’s head, and guided him this way or

that…. The Thing in Being that roars so tremendously about Charing

Cross corner seems a bigger antagonist than an elephant, but then we

have better weapons than chipped flint blades….)

 

After all, in a very little time everything that impresses me so

mightily this September afternoon will have changed or passed away

for ever, everything. These omnibuses, these great, stalwart,

crowded, many-coloured things that jostle one another, and make so

handsome a clatter-clamour, will all have gone; they and their

horses and drivers and organisation; you will come here and you will

not find them. Something else will be here, some different sort of

vehicle, that is now perhaps the mere germ of an idea in some

engineer student’s brain. And this road and pavement will have

changed, and these impressive great buildings; other buildings will

be here, buildings that are as yet more impalpable than this page

you read, more formless and flimsy by far than anything that is

reasoned here. Little plans sketched on paper, strokes of a pen or

of a brush, will be the first materialisations of what will at last

obliterate every detail and atom of these re-echoing actualities

that overwhelm us now. And the clothing and gestures of these

innumerable people, the character of their faces and bearing, these

too will be recast in the spirit of what are now obscure and

impalpable beginnings.

 

The new things will be indeed of the substance of the thing that is,

but differing just in the measure of the will and imagination that

goes to make them. They will be strong and fair as the will is

sturdy and organised and the imagination comprehensive and bold;

they will be ugly and smeared with wretchedness as the will is

fluctuating and the imagination timid and mean.

 

Indeed Will is stronger than Fact, it can mould and overcome Fact.

But this world has still to discover its will, it is a world that

slumbers inertly, and all this roar and pulsation of life is no more

than its heavy breathing…. My mind runs on to the thought of an

awakening.

 

As my omnibus goes lumbering up Cockspur Street through the clatter

rattle of the cabs and carriages, there comes another fancy in my

mind…. Could one but realise an apocalyptic image and suppose an

angel, such as was given to each of the seven churches of Asia,

given for a space to the service of the Greater Rule. I see him as a

towering figure of flame and colour, standing between earth and sky,

with a trumpet in his hands, over there above the Haymarket, against

the October glow; and when he sounds, all the samurai, all who are

samurai in Utopia, will know themselves and one another….

 

(Whup! says a motor brougham, and a policeman stays the traffic with

his hand.)

 

All of us who partake of the samurai would know ourselves and one

another!

 

For a moment I have a vision of this resurrection of the living, of

a vague, magnificent answer, of countless myriads at attention, of

all that is fine in humanity at attention, round the compass of the

earth.

 

Then that philosophy of individual uniqueness resumes its sway over

my thoughts, and my dream of a world’s awakening fades.

 

I had forgotten….

 

Things do not happen like that. God is not simple, God is not

theatrical, the summons comes to each man in its due time for him,

with an infinite subtlety of variety….

 

If that is so, what of my Utopia?

 

This infinite world must needs be flattened to get it on one

retina. The picture of a solid thing, although it is flattened and

simplified, is not necessarily a lie. Surely, surely, in the end, by

degrees, and steps, something of this sort, some such understanding,

as this Utopia must come. First here, then there, single men and

then groups of men will fall into line—not indeed with my poor

faulty hesitating suggestions—but with a great and comprehensive

plan wrought out by many minds and in many tongues. It is just

because my plan is faulty, because it mis-states so much, and omits

so much, that they do not now fall in. It will not be like my

dream, the world that is coming. My dream is just my own poor dream,

the thing sufficient for me. We fail in comprehension, we fail so

variously and abundantly. We see as much as it is serviceable for us

to see, and we see no further. But the fresh undaunted generations

come to take on our work beyond our utmost effort, beyond the range

of our ideas. They will learn with certainty things that to us are

guesses and riddles….

 

There will be many Utopias. Each generation will have its new

version of Utopia, a little more certain and complete and real, with

its problems lying closer and closer to the problems of the Thing

in Being. Until at last from dreams Utopias will have come to be

working drawings, and the whole world will be shaping the final

World State, the fair and great