land of South Africa and the Mississippi Valley--where if one dreamed
about utopia the apparatus to support it would be a gigantic network
of steel, and huge communities of people would naturally flow together
and coalesce in complicated patterns, somewhat after the fashion of
those which Mr. H. G. Wells describes in When the Sleeper Awakens. It
would be almost impossible, I fancy, to dream of a simple life and of
handfuls of people in those parts of the earth: the simplicity would
be barrenness, and a handful of people would be lost.
It is different with the valley of the Thames, that little stream which
begins a short way above Oxford and meanders between banks of lush
grass and bending willows, down through Marlow, where musty ales have
long been made, past Windsor between the Great Park and the Chiltern
Hills, through Richmond and so down to Hammersmith where one might
perhaps ford the river at low tide if an iron bridge did not carry one
across, till below the city of London the estuary becomes a wide tide
of water and expands proudly to meet the sea. Nature has carved this
valley to the human scale: the houses are not dwarfed by the landscape;
and except for the huge warren of London--for which nature is not
responsible--there is a fitness between the actor and the scene which,
without offering any great Olympian moments, gives the naïve and jolly
and whole-hearted effect that one finds in a good English hunting print
or, let us say, in Pickwick Papers. In such an atmosphere, particularly
as one thinks of it on a day late in June, human nature bubbles
naturally into good nature, and whatever harshness remains, a tankard
of ale will drain away.
It is in this valley of the Thames that William Morris awoke to find
his utopia, after returning to his home in Hammersmith, the last really
urban borough of London as one goes upstream. From that landscape,
sweetened and freshened and ridden of cockney landmarks, Morris evokes
the spirit of the River God, as Socrates and Phædrus, by the banks of
the Ilyssus, call forth the spirit of Pan.
With all the grime and tedium of the dull ’eighties lying upon his
soul, Morris finds himself transported to a world which has been
cleansed by a revolution of a greater part of the nineteenth century
landmarks. In the meanwhile, grass has laid a decent blanket over many
irretrievable ruins. The house in which he has gone to bed is now a
Guest House; and he is first received into this refurbished world by
a boatman who takes him for a morning swim on the Thames, and knows
about the value of money only as a collector of copper curios might. At
breakfast, he finds himself among a group of friendly people, who call
him “Guest”; and he is taken firmly and sweetly and quite serenely in
hand by the comely young women who preside over the house. These women,
like everyone else in the new Thames valley, are healthy, full-blooded,
athletic, sane, and free from the puling maladies which idleness or
overwork gave to the women of the nineteenth century. The other guests
are a weaver who has come down from the north to take a turn at the
boatman’s job while the latter goes up towards Oxford to help gather in
the hay, and a loquacious dustman in marvellous greens and golds.
In this new England, work has become what one would call in the
kindergarten “busy work”: in the simplification of the standard of
living and the release from the pressure of artificially stimulated
wants, the main business of getting a living is easily performed,
and the chief concern of everyone is to do his work under the
pleasantest conditions possible--a demand which brings back many of
the handicrafts, and places a great premium on manual skill. Although
the mechanical arts have been improved in certain directions, for in
his trip up the Thames our guest meets with a barge driven by some
internal engine, let us say by electricity, a good many devices have
been allowed to fall into disuse, because, although the output in goods
might be greater, the work itself and the way of life it promotes
are not so beneficial as the simple methods of hand labor. In every
direction, simplicity and direct action and the immediate supply and
interchange of goods out of local produce, has taken the place of
the monstrously complicated system of traffic that prevailed in the
earlier imperialistic world. Work is given freely, and the proceeds of
work exchanged freely, as a man might give of his goods and services
nowadays when he welcomes a friend within his own house. A great
part of the energy of this new community has gone into building; and
architecture, sculpture, and painting flourish in the townhalls and
common dining halls of which each village boasts.
It follows from this that the big cities have disappeared. London
is again a congeries of villages, mingled in great woodlands and
meadows where in the summer children roam about and camp and pick up
the simple occupations of rural life. Of all the proud monuments of
London that the nineteenth century left, only the Houses of Parliament
remain, as a storage-place for dung. There are shops, where one takes
for the asking, and there are common halls where people eat and have
conversation, as they do now in restaurants--only these new hostels are
beautiful, spacious, and well-served.
Since economic pressure is absent, the people of the Thames valley seem
to live a life of leisure; but this life of leisure is not the aimless
leisure of the country house, with its artificial stimulants, its
artificial exercises, and the like: the life of dignified leisure is
a life of work; in short, the life of the artist. If other people have
talked of the necessity for labor, the dignity of labor, the heroism of
labor, these simple Englishmen have discovered the beauty of leisurely
work--the simple grace that follows when even the practical arts are
pursued as if they were liberal arts. In this utopia the instinct
of workmanship, the creative impulse, has free play; and since the
majority of people are neither scholars nor scientists, as Sir Thomas
More would have had them, they find their fulfillment in adding beauty
to all the necessities of their daily toil. Where the work itself leads
purely to some useful end, as in the growing of wheat or grass, the
joy of work arises out of the comradeship and good-feeling that bind
together those who perform it, and the comparative lightness of the
tasks that find many hands eager almost to the point of competition to
perform them.
One looks at the faces of these people, and the effects of their life
are visible. Their women are ten or fifteen years older than we should
judge by their appearance; and on every face is written the healthy
serenity that follows when people do good work, with a good spirit,
in a good place. There is a candor, a plainness, a wholesomeness, an
absence of furtive repressions in their every gesture; and as far as
men can be satisfied and happy in a good environment, this community
is satisfied and happy. There are grumblers, it goes without saying.
One of them is a crusty old fellow who has read ancient history and who
sighs for the cutthroat practices of the competitive era; and there
is another who complains of the tameness of Utopian literature, as
compared with that which dealt with the miseries and warped passion of
an earlier age.
The only wretchedness in this utopia comes out of the essential human
tragedy--the disparity between one’s aims and one’s attainments,
between one’s desires and the circumstances that clog their
fulfillment. How can unhappiness be altogether wiped out as long as
maids are fickle and sexual passion strong? The boatman, for example,
has been mated with a beautiful girl who leaves him for another
man; but she tires of her new love, and under the eyes of the Guest
her uncle brings the pair together, and the drama of courtship and
mating goes on all over again; for there are no laws to bind people
together when every fibre of their being drives them apart; and in
a civilization that deals kindly even with its adults there is no
difficulty about giving the children all the care they need. For the
most part, those who suffer in love bear their burdens manfully,
without wailing over imaginary wrongs which are associated with the
worship of impossible chastities and reticences; and they turn their
balked impulses into the channels of work and poetry as completely as
they know how.
Is this the arcadian age of innocence all over again? Are brutality
and lust forever wiped out? Not at all. In sudden passion even murders
occur, no matter how good and helpful the social order; but instead of
compounding murder with an additional murder, the guilty person is left
to his own remorse. Use and wont are more powerful than law, and the
whole guild that earns its living from the frictions and dissidences
of our social life has dropt into limbo. By the same token, the game
of the ins and the outs, which we call political government, has
disappeared; for the only matters in which our community is interested
are as to whether a new field is to be laid under the plow or a bridge
thrown over a stream or a townhall built; and about such things the
local community is competent to decide, without lining up in a purely
fictitious antagonism.
5
Sanity and health and good-will and tolerance--as one sculls along the
Thames, above Richmond, on a Sunday morning, between boatloads of gay
picnickers and sauntering people, it is not impossible to imagine a
new social order developing on simple lines and bringing these things
into existence. With five million people in England, and perhaps half a
million in the Thames valley, the thing would not be impossible. Then
the whole countryside would be dressed again in green; then buildings
would arise in the landscape like flowers out of the ground; then the
kindliness and spontaneous co-operation of a happy holiday would be
prolonged into the workaday week. We should know how to spend our time
and with what to occupy our heads and hands, if the great wen of London
were removed from the Thames valley, and all the cheap cockney things
that London has conjured into existence were to be blasted away. We
should know all these things, because William Morris has told us about
them; and we should do all these things, because in our heart of hearts
we realize that they would satisfy.
6
The utopia that remains for consideration is the last important one
in point of time; and it is, curiously enough, the quintessential
utopia, for it is written with a free and critical gesture, and with a
succinct familiarity towards the more important books that came before
it. Mr. H. G. Wells, it is true, has made more than one excursion
into an imaginary commonwealth: The Time Machine is his earliest and
The World Set Free may possibly be considered as his latest. A Modern
Utopia combines the vivid fantasy of the first picture with the more
strict regard for present realities that marks the second; and it is,
altogether, a fine and lucid product of the imagination.
The assumption upon which Mr. Wells gains entrance into his utopia
differs from those shipwrecks and somnambulisms in which our modern
utopias have been stereotyped. He conceives of a modern man, a little
thickset and protuberant, seated at a desk and brooding over the
possibilities of man’s future; and gradually this image comes to
life and defines his views, and his voice rises into narrative in
something like the fashion of a lecturer, throwing from time to time
his illustrations of a New World upon the screen. He enters utopia by
hypothesis; that is, without any other subterfuge than an act of the
imagination; and in the thickening realities of a utopian community,
first discovered in an Alpine pass, he finds himself in the company of
a sentimental botanist, who is sick with a love affair and is maudlin
about dogs, and who again and again wrecks this exploration of utopia
by dragging into the midst of the scene some petty complication--about
his sweetheart or his doggie--that he has acquired on earth!
Where and what is this modern utopia? By hypothesis, it is a globe
identical with the one on which we live; it has the same oceans and
continents, the same rivers and minor land-masses, the same animals
and plants; yes, even the same people, so that each one of us has his
utopian counterpart. Conveniently, this new earth is located beyond
Sirius; and for the most part its history is parallel to ours; except
that it had a critical turn for the better at a not too remote period;
so that, while mechanical invention and science and all that sort of
thing is exactly on the same level as ours, the scale and order is
entirely different.
The scale and order of things is indeed different. Utopia is a world
community; it is a single civilization whose net of monorails and
posts, whose identification bureaux, whose rules of law and order are
the same in England as in Switzerland; and presumably the same in
Asia and Africa as in Europe. In every sense it is a modern utopia.
Machinery plays an important part, and the absence of menial service is
conspicuous from the very first contacts in which our travellers get
the hospitality of an inn, and find that interior decoration has verged
towards the style of the modern lunchroom and subway station, so that
the whole room can be redded, after use, by the guest himself. There
is no harking back to the past in industry, in architecture, or in the
mode of living. All that machinery has to offer has been accepted and
humanized: there is a cleanliness, an absence of squalor and confusion,
in this world-community, which indicates that utopia has not been
purchased by evasion.
The price of this order and spaciousness is not as heavy as that
which Bellamy was willing to pay in Looking Backward. The land and
its natural resources are owned by the community and are in the
custody of regional authorities; and the means of communication and
travel are in the hands of one common administrative body. There are
great socialized enterprises such as the railways, with planetary
ramifications; there are regional industries, and there are a good many
minor affairs which are still undertaken by private individuals and
companies. Farms are worked by a co-operative association of tenant
farmers, upon lines suggested by Dr. Hertzka in Freeland. Perhaps the
most remarkable feature of utopian organization is the registration
of every individual, with his name, numeral, finger-print, changes of
residence and changes in life; all of which is filed in a huge central
filing office, to become part of a permanent file upon the individual’s
death. Utopian registration gets our travellers into hot water, for
they are naturally mistaken for their utopian doubles; but outside of
its use in the story this little device seems strangely beside the
point, and it arose, I believe, out of Mr. Wells’ temperamental regard
for tidiness--tidiness on a planetary scale--the tagging and labelling
of a well-conducted shop....
The people of our Modern Utopia are roughly divided into four classes:
the kinetic, the poietic, the base, and the dull. The kinetic are the
active and organizing elements in the community: as active kinetics
they are the managers, the enterprisers, the great administrators,
as passive kinetics they are the minor officials, the innkeepers,
the shoptenders, farmers, and the like. The poietic are the creative
elements in the community; the “intellectuals” we should perhaps call
them. This follows in general the lines laid down by Comte--chiefs,
people, intellectuals, and emotionals, and perhaps something of the
same classification was outlined by More in his Philarchs, people,
priests, and scholars. This division of classes is a very ancient
one. In that old Indian script, the Bhagavad Gita, we find that the
population is divided into Brahmans, Kshatriyas, Vaisryas, and Sudras,
and that their duties are “determined by the modes that prevail in
their separate natures.” The residual classes of the base and the
dull correspond to the Sudras; they are, of course, the slag of the
community; and the active elements in this class, the criminals, the
habitual drunkards, and the like are exported to various islands in the
Atlantic where they have organized a community of their own in which
they may practice fraud, chicane, and violence to their hearts’ content.
Like Plato, Mr. Wells is concerned to provide for the education,
discipline, and maintenance of people who will be sufficiently
disinterested and intelligent to keep this vast organization a going
concern--no ordinary politician or captain of industry will do. Hence
there arises a class of Samurai. These Samurai are selected by rigorous
mental and physical tests out of youth who are past twenty-five, up to
which time they may be foolish and unsettled and may sow their wild
oats. These Samurai have a high intellectual standard of achievement.
They live a simple life. They are under strict moral discipline, and
follow a minute regimentation of dress and minor details of conduct.
They cannot marry out of their class. Once a year they are sent out
into the forests, the mountains, or the waste places to shift for
themselves; they go “bookless and weaponless, without pen or paper,
or money”; and they come back again with a new hardness and fineness
and fortification of spirit. It is such an organization as might have
been evolved at the time of the Reformation had the Order of Jesuits
been able to effect a dictatorship of Christendom. I say this without
disparagement of either the Jesuits or the Samurai, in order to point
out that these guardians of A Modern Utopia are plausible historic
characters. All the important economic and political enterprises of
the state, and important vocations like that of the physician, are in
the hands of Samurai. They are as necessary to the social organization
of A Modern Utopia as the research laboratories, which are provided by
charter with each factory, are necessary to its industrial organization.
7
The glimpses that one gets of this utopia are full of color and light
and movement; there are finely contained cities, surrounded by wide
suburban territories, cities that are not built of paper and alabaster.
Lovers pass arm in arm through the streets in the twilight; and there
is a soft dignity in the women, with their gay, sexually unemphatic
dresses, that charms. There are electric trains weaving silently on
rails over the landscape of Europe, crossing under the English Channel
by tube, and emerging in London with none of the bustle, the grinding,
or the dirt of a modern railway ride. There are well-cultivated
fields and adequate inns. There are no obstreperous patriotisms, as
one suspects in Looking Backward; there is none of the shirking one
might fear in News from Nowhere. (While our travellers are waiting to
be identified they stay for a while in a residential quadrangle at
Lucerne, and are given employment in a toy workshop.) There is less
dogmatism about creeds than in Christianopolis, and an entire absence
of menialism which contrasts with More’s Utopia.
This modern utopia brings together, compares, and criticizes important
points that all the other utopias have raised; and it does all this
with a deftness and a turn of humor that speaks for Mr. Wells at his
best. Above all, A Modern Utopia strikes a new note, the note of
reality, the note of the daily world from which we endeavor in vain to
escape. More or less, all the other utopias assume that a change has
come over the population; that it has been diminished; that the blind,
the lame, and the deaf have been cured; that the mean sensual man has
been converted and is ready to flap his wings and sing Hallelujah!
There is a minimum of these assumptions in A Modern Utopia. It is above
all other things an accounting and a criticism; and so it forms a
fitting prelude to the remainder of this book.
CHAPTER TEN
How the Country House and Coketown became the utopias of the
Modern Age; and how they made the world over in their image.
CHAPTER TEN
1
Now that we have ransacked the literature of ideal commonwealths for
examples of the utopian vision and the utopian method, there remains
another class of utopias which has still to be reckoned with, in order
to make our tally complete.
All the utopias that we have dealt with so far have been filtered
through an individual mind, and whereas, like any other piece of
literature, they grew out of a certain age and tradition of thought,
it is dangerous to overrate their importance either as mirrors of the
existing order or as projectors of a new order. While again and again
the dream of a utopian in one age has become the reality of the next,
as O’Shaughnessy sings in his famous verses, the exact connection
between the two can only be guessed at, and rarely, I suppose, can it
be traced. It would be a little foolish to attempt to prove that the
inventor of the modern incubator was a student of Sir Thomas More.
Up to the present the idola which have exercised the most considerable
influence upon the actual life of the community are such as have been
partly expressed in a hundred works and never perhaps fully expressed
in one. In order to distinguish these idola from those that have
occupied us till now, we should perhaps call them collective utopias or
social myths. There is a considerable literature that relates to these
myths in French, one of the best known works being M. George Sorel’s
Reflections on Violence; and in practice it is sometimes rather hard to
tell where the Utopia leaves off and the social myth begins.
The history of mankind’s social myths has still in the main to be
written. There is a partial attempt at this over a limited period
in Mr. Henry Osborn Taylor’s The Mediæval Mind; but this is only a
beginning, and other ages are almost untouched. The type of myth
that concerns us here is not the pure action myth which M. Sorel has
analyzed; we are rather interested in those myths which are, as it
were, the ideal content of the existing order of things, myths which,
by being consciously formulated and worked out in thought, tend to
perpetuate and perfect that order. This type of social myth approaches
very closely to the classic utopia, and we could divide it, similarly,
into myths of escape and myths of reconstruction. Thus the myth of
political freedom, for example, as formulated by the writers of the
American revolution, frequently serves as an excellent refuge for
disturbed consciences when the Department of Justice or the Immigration
Bureau has been a little too assiduous in its harassment of political
agitators.
Unfortunately, it has become a habit to look upon our idola as
particularly fine and exalted, and as representing the better side of
human nature. As a matter of fact, the myths which are created in a
community under religious, political, or economic influences cannot be
characterized as either good or bad: their nature is defined by their
capacity to help men to react creatively upon their environment and
to develop a humane life. We have still to recognize that a belief
in these idola is not by itself a creditable attitude. Even quite
base and stupid people are frequently governed by ideals; indeed, it
is the ideals that are in many cases responsible for their baseness
and stupidity. Neither is the habit of responding to idola any
evidence of rational thought. People respond to “ideas”--that is,
to word-patterns--as they respond to the stimulus of light or heat,
because they are human beings and not because they are philosophers,
and they respond to projections, to idola, for the same reason, and
not because they are saints. Our myths may be the outcome of rational
thought and practice or not; but the response to these myths is not
perhaps more than ten times in a hundred the result of following the
processes of reason from beginning to end.