A Modern Utopia - H. G. Wells

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He has a horror of waste, war, dirt, cruelty, cowardice, incompetency, vagueness of mind, dissipation of energy, inconvenience of households, and all friction, mental or physical. But yet his ineradicable realization of the concrete will not allow him to escape from these disagreeables by taking refuge in such artificial paradises as Fourier's phalanx or Morris' idyllic anarchism. Wells is a Socialist, yet he finds not merely the Marxians, but even the Fabians, too dogmatic and straitlaced for him. His Modem Utopia is, I think, the first to mar the perfection of its picture by admitting a rebel, a permanently irreconcilable, antagonistic individuality, a spirit that continually denies. Yet we know that if a Utopia is to come on earth it must have room for such. Wells would never make a leader in any popular movement. He has the zeal of the reformer, but he has his doubts, and, what's worse, he admits them. In the midst of his most eloquent passages he stops, shakes his head, runs in a row of dots, and adds a few words, hinting at another point of view. He has what James defined as the scientific temperament, an intense desire to prove himself right coupled with an equally intense fear lest he may be wrong.

      Your true party man must be quite color blind. He must see the world in black and white; must ignore tints and intermediate shades. Wells as Socialist could not help seeing—and saying—that there were many likable things about the Liberals. As a Liberal he must admit that the Tories have the advantage in several respects. He professes to view religion rationistically, yet there are outbursts of true mysticism to be found in his books, passages which prove that he has experienced the emotion of personal religion more clearly than many a church member. He has the courage of his convictions, but it does not extend much beyond putting them into print. I doubt whether, if he were given autocratic power, he would inaugurate his Modern Utopia or any other of his visions. At least he has hitherto resisted all efforts to induce him to carry them into effect. For instance, one of the most original and interesting features of his Modern Utopia was the Samurai, the ruling caste, an order of voluntary noblemen; submitting to a peculiar discipline; wearing a distinctive dress; having a bible of their own selected from the inspiring literature of all ages; spending at least a week of every year in absolute solitude in the wilderness as a sort of spiritual retreat and restorative of self-reliance. A curious conception it was, a combination of Puritanism and Bushido, of Fourier and St. Francis, of Bacon's Salomon's House, Plato's philosophers ruling the republic, and Cecil Rhodes's secret order of millionaires ruling the world. One day a group of ardent young men and women, inspired by this ideal, came to Wells and announced that they had established the order, they had become Samurai, and expected him to become their leader, or at least to give them his blessing; instead of which Wells gave them a lecture on the sin of priggishness and sent them about their business. I have no doubt he was right about it, nor does his disapproval of this premature attempt to incorporate the Samurai in London prove that there was not something worth while in the idea. But it shows that Wells knew what his work was in the world and proposed to stick to it, differing therein from other Utopians; Edward Bellamy, who because his fantastic romance, Looking Backward, happened to strike fire, spent the rest of his life in trying to bring about the cooperative commonwealth by means of clubs, papers and parties; Dr. Hertzka, who wasted his substance in efforts to found a real Freeland on the steppes of Kilimanjaro.

      His early training in dynamical physics and evolutionary biology furnished him with the modern scientific point of view when he entered upon the old battlegrounds of sociology and metaphysics. He therefore never could believe in a static state, socialistic or other, and he saw clearly that much of what passes for sound philosophical reasoning is fallacious because the world cannot be divided up into distinct things of convenient size for handling, each done up in a neat package and plainly labeled as formal logic requires. Here he is extremely radical, going quite as far as Bergson in his anti-intellectualism though attacking the subject in a very different way. He denies the categories, the possibility of number, definition and classification. He brings two charges against our Instrument of Knowledge: first, that it can work only by disregarding individuality and treating uniques as identically similar objects in this respect or that; and, second, that it can only deal freely with negative terms by treating them as though they were positive; and, third, that the sort of reasoning which is valid for one level of human thought may not work at another. No two things are exactly alike and when we try to define a class of varied objects we get a term which represents none of them exactly and may therefore lead to an erroneous conclusion when brought back again to a concrete case. Or, as Wells puts it in his laboratory language: "The forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps and crush "the truth a little in taking hold of it." "Of everything we need to say this is true, but it is not quite true." What the artist long ago taught us, that there are no lines in nature, the scientist has come to believe and perhaps in time the logicians will come to see it too. At present, however, they are, as Wells says, in that stage of infantile intelligence that cannot count above two. This is amusingly illustrated in a defense of logic by Mr. Jourdain in which he says:

      To these strictures of Mr. Wells on logic we may reply, it seems to me, that either they are psychological—in which case they are irrelevant to logic—or they are false. Thus the principle that "no truth is quite true," implying as it does that itself is quite true, implies its own falsehood, and is therefore false.

      This sort of thing might have past as a good joke in the days of Epimenides, the Cretan, when logic was a novelty and people amused themselves, like boys learning to lasso, in tripping each other up with it. But it is funny to see this ancient weapon of scholasticism brought out to ward off the attacks of modernism, such attacks from without the ramparts as Wells's essay and from within as F. C. S. Schiller's big volume, Formal Logic. Wells has not only the sense of continuity in space, but, what is rarer, the sense of continuity in time. "The race flows thru us, the race is the drama and we are the incidents. This is not any sort of poetical statement: it is a statement of fact." "We are episodes in an experience, greater than ourselves."

      Wells made his first hit with The Time Machine, written under high pressure of the idea within a fortnight by keeping at his desk almost continuously from nine in the morning to eleven at night. It is based upon the theory that time is a fourth dimensions of space, and by a suitable invention one may travel back and forth along that line. Having once got his seat in his time machine Wells has never abandoned it. He uses it still in his novels, in Tono-Bungay, The New Machiavelli and the latest, The Passionate Friends, telling the story partly in retrospect, partly in prospect, flying back and forth in the most mystifying manner, producing thereby a remarkable effect of the perpetual contemporaneity of existence though some readers are dizzied by it.

      There is a desperate sincerity about the man that I like. He seems always to be struggling to express himself with more exactness than language allows, to say neither more nor less than he really believes at the time. I do not think that he takes delight in shocking the bourgeoisie as Shaw does. Wells would rather, I believe, agree with other people than disagree. He is not a congenital and inveterate nonconformist. But he insists always on "painting the thing as he sees it." His later novels have come under the ban of the British public libraries because, conceiving sex as a disturbing element in life, he put it into his novels as a disturbing element, thus offending both sides, those of puritanical temperament who wanted it left out altogether and those of profligate temperament who wanted to read of amorous adventure with no unpleasant facts obtruded. His sociological works, in which, while insisting on permanent monogamy as the ideal, he prophesied that the future would show greater toleration toward other forms of marital relationship, aroused less criticism than the frank portrayal of existing conditions in his novels. Wells is a futurist in the true sense of the word, appraising all things by what shall come out of them. This led him to a realization ' of the importance of eugenics long before the fad came in. In Mankind in the Making he formulated his test of civilization in these words:

      Any collective human enterprise, institution, party or state, is to be judged as a whole and completely, as it conduces more or less to wholesome and hopeful births and according to the qualitative and quantitative advance due to its influence toward a higher and ampler standard of life.

      But when it comes to practical measures for securing these advantages Wells shows a characteristic timidity. He condemns certain obvious dysgenic measures, such as the action

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