A MODERN UTOPIA

A MODERN UTOPIA
BY H. G. WELLS [pic] A NOTE TO THE READER This book is in all probability the last of a series of writings, of which-
disregarding certain earlier disconnected essays-my Anticipations was the
beginning. Originally I intended Anticipations to be my sole digression
from my art or trade (or what you will) of an imaginative writer. I wrote
that book in order to clear up the muddle in my own mind about innumerable
social and political questions, questions I could not keep out of my work,
which it distressed me to touch upon in a stupid haphazard way, and which
no one, so far as I knew, had handled in a manner to satisfy my needs. But
Anticipations did not achieve its end. I have a slow constructive
hesitating sort of mind, and when I emerged from that undertaking I found I
had still most of my questions to state and solve. In Mankind in the
Making, therefore, I tried to review the social organisation in a different
way, to consider it as an educational process instead of dealing with it as
a thing with a future history, and if I made this second book even less
satisfactory from a literary standpoint than the former (and this is my
opinion), I blundered, I think, more edifyingly-at least from the point of
view of my own instruction. I ventured upon several themes with a greater
frankness than I had used in Anticipations, and came out of that second
effort guilty of much rash writing, but with a considerable development of
formed opinion. In many matters I had shaped out at last a certain personal
certitude, upon which I feel I shall go for the rest of my days. In this
present book I have tried to settle accounts with a number of issues left
over or opened up by its two predecessors, to correct them in some
particulars, and to give the general picture of a Utopia that has grown up
in my mind during the course of these speculations as a state of affairs at
once possible and more desirable than the world in which I live. But this
book has brought me back to imaginative writing again. In its two
predecessors the treatment of social organisation had been purely
objective; here my intention has been a little wider and deeper, in that I
have tried to present not simply an ideal, but an ideal in reaction with
two personalities. Moreover, since this may be the last book of the kind I
shall ever publish, I have written into it as well as I can the heretical
metaphysical scepticism upon which all my thinking rests, and I have
inserted certain sections reflecting upon the established methods of
sociological and economic science....
The last four words will not attract the butterfly reader, I know. I have
done my best to make the whole of this book as lucid and entertaining as
its matter permits, because I want it read by as many people as possible,
but I do not promise anything but rage and confusion to him who proposes to
glance through my pages just to see if I agree with him, or to begin in the
middle, or to read without a constantly alert attention. If you are not
already a little interested and open-minded with regard to social and
political questions, and a little exercised in self-examination, you will
find neither interest nor pleasure here. If your mind is "made up" upon
such issues your time will be wasted on these pages. And even if you are a
willing reader you may require a little patience for the peculiar method I
have this time adopted.
That method assumes an air of haphazard, but it is not so careless as it
seems. I believe it to be-even now that I am through with the book-the best
way to a sort of lucid vagueness which has always been my intention in this
matter. I tried over several beginnings of a Utopian book before I adopted
this. I rejected from the outset the form of the argumentative essay, the
form which appeals most readily to what is called the "serious" reader, the
reader who is often no more than the solemnly impatient parasite of great
questions. He likes everything in hard, heavy lines, black and white, yes
and no, because he does not understand how much there is that cannot be
presented at all in that way; wherever there is any effect of obliquity, of
incommensurables, wherever there is any levity or humour or difficulty of
multiplex presentation, he refuses attention. Mentally he seems to be built
up upon an invincible assumption that the Spirit of Creation cannot count
beyond two, he deals only in alternatives. Such readers I have resolved not
to attempt to please here. Even if I presented all my tri-clinic crystals
as systems of cubes-! Indeed I felt it would not be worth doing. But having
rejected the "serious" essay as a form, I was still greatly exercised, I
spent some vacillating months, over the scheme of this book. I tried first
a recognised method of viewing questions from divergent points that has
always attracted me and which I have never succeeded in using, the
discussion novel, after the fashion of Peacock's (and Mr. Mallock's)
development of the ancient dialogue; but this encumbered me with
unnecessary characters and the inevitable complication of intrigue among
them, and I abandoned it. After that I tried to cast the thing into a shape
resembling a little the double personality of Boswell's Johnson, a sort of
interplay between monologue and commentator; but that too, although it got
nearer to the quality I sought, finally failed. Then I hesitated over what
one might call "hard narrative." It will be evident to the experienced
reader that by omitting certain speculative and metaphysical elements and
by elaborating incident, this book might have been reduced to a
straightforward story. But I did not want to omit as much on this occasion.
I do not see why I should always pander to the vulgar appetite for stark
stories. And in short, I made it this. I explain all this in order to make
it clear to the reader that, however queer this book appears at the first
examination, it is the outcome of trial and deliberation, it is intended to
be as it is. I am aiming throughout at a sort of shot-silk texture between
philosophical discussion on the one hand and imaginative narrative on the
other.
H. G. WELLS. CONTENTS . The Owner of the Voice
. Chapter the First-Topographical
. Chapter the Second-Concerning Freedoms
. Chapter the Third-Utopian Economics
. Chapter the Fourth-The Voice of Nature
. Chapter the Fifth-Failure in a Modern Utopia
. Chapter the Sixth-Women in a Modern Utopia
. Chapter the Seventh-A Few Utopian Impressions
. Chapter the Eighth-My Utopian Self
. Chapter the Ninth-The Samurai
. Chapter the Tenth-Race in Utopia
. Chapter the Eleventh-The Bubble Bursts
. Appendix-Scepticism of the Instrument A MODERN UTOPIA
THE OWNER OF THE VOICE There are works, and this is one of them, that are best begun with a
portrait of the author. And here, indeed, because of a very natural
misunderstanding this is the only course to take. Throughout these papers
sounds a note, a distinctive and personal note, a note that tends at times
towards stridency; and all that is not, as these words are, in Italics, is
in one Voice. Now, this Voice, and this is the peculiarity of the matter,
is not to be taken as the Voice of the ostensible author who fathers these
pages. You have to clear your mind of any preconceptions in that respect.
The Owner of the Voice you must figure to yourself as a whitish plump man,
a little under the middle size and age, with such blue eyes as many
Irishmen have, and agile in his movements and with a slight tonsorial
baldness-a penny might cover it-of the crown. His front is convex. He
droops at times like most of us, but for the greater part he bears himself
as valiantly as a sparrow. Occasionally his hand flies out with a
fluttering gesture of illustration. And his Voice (which is our medium
henceforth) is an unattractive tenor that becomes at times aggressive. Him
you must imagine as sitting at a table reading a manuscript about Utopias,
a manuscript he holds in two hands that are just a little fat at the wrist.
The curtain rises upon him so. But afterwards, if the devices of this
declining art of literature prevail, you will go with him through curious
and interesting experiences. Yet, ever and again, you will find him back at
that little table, the manuscript in his hand, and the expansion of his
ratiocinations about Utopia conscientiously resumed. The entertainment
before you is neither the set drama of the work of fiction you are
accustomed to read, nor the set lecturing of the essay you are accustomed
to evade, but a hybrid of these two. If you figure this owner of the Voice
as sitting, a little nervously, a little modestly, on a stage, with table,
glass of water and all complete, and myself as the intrusive chairman
insisting with a bland ruthlessness upon his "few words" of introduction
before he recedes into the wings, and if furthermore you figure a sheet
behind our friend on which moving pictures intermittently appear, and if
finally you suppose his subject to be the story of the adventure of his
soul among Utopian inquiries, you will be prepared for some at least of the
difficulties of this unworthy but unusual work.
But over against this writer here presented, there is also another earthly
person in the book, who gathers himself together into a distinct
personality only after a preliminary complication with the reader. This
person is spoken of as the botanist, and he is a leaner, rather taller,
graver and much less garrulous man. His face is weakly handsome and done in
tones of grey, he is fairish and grey-eyed, and you would suspect him of
dyspepsia. It is a justifiable suspicion. Men of this type, the chairman
remarks with a sudden intrusion of exposition, are romantic with a shadow
of meanness, they seek at once to conceal and shape the