"In heaven there is laid up a pattern of such
a city, and he who desires may behold this, and beholding, govern himself accordingly. But whether there really is, or ever will be, such an one is of no importance to him ; for he will act according to the laws of that city and of no other." Such is the sublime passage with which the author of the first and most famous of all -Utopias concludes the strictly definitive and operative part of his account of his ideal commonwealth. It is his apologia, and it is the apologia of all Utopias. They are in their nature ideal. Much they may contain that is unreal, unpractical, impracticable ; but if they have not been and never can be realised, they have still their value, and they suggest laws and inner counsels in the light and spirit of which life may be lived even in the imperfect world in which the idealist finds himself to-day.
Such is pre-eminently the defence, if any were needed, of this interesting and original volume. It is not exactly a great book, though a very clever one. In some ways it seems as if it might have been better on its own lines. It is certainly not an easy book to apprehend, but it is filled by a lofty and elevating spirit. We must be grateful to Mr. Wells for the effort and time which be has devoted to it, time and effort which he might readily have spent—and must often have been tempted to spend—on much easier and more lucrative writing and easier reading. In his very interesting prefatory note to the reader, and his equally interesting "Philosophical Appen- dix," both highly autobiographic, he hints something of its genesis, though not all. His "art or trade," he says, is that of an imaginative writer. How successful he has been in this every one knows. But he desires to be something more. He desires not merely to amuse or entertain, even in a semi- serious way, but to instruct and educate, to enlighten the thought and lift the ideals of himself and his fellows. He will write not merely for money or for fame, but for love and for truth's sake. He attempted this in Anticipations and in Mankind in the Making. He attempts it again here. And this is the most serious attempt of all. A very serious attempt it is, more so than might at first sight appear. The book, both in matter and in form, has been carefully studied and thought out.
A comparative history of Utopias would be a very interest- ing work to write. It would "look before and after," and throw much light alike on the history and the aspirations of mankind. It would not perhaps suit Mr. Wells to write it himself, but he has evidently gone some way in the prepara- tion necessary, and in suggesting how it might be written. He has studied most, if not all, of the famous Utopias of the past, from Plato and Sir Thomas More and St. Augustine, through Bacon and Campanella. Harrington and Lord Erskine, to Cabet and William Morris and Bellamy. He has noted, too, the experiments that have actually been tried, such as Utah and Oneida Creek. He has dipped, nay, more than dipped, into political economy and many allied subjects. He is further a man of science, and at first of almost * A Modern Utopia. By H. G. Wong. London: Cbspnian and Hall. [7a. 6da exclusively scientific training, who, following the imperious instinct of a rich and versatile and sincere nature, has made himself a man of letters and a philosopher. He is no mere "idle singer of an empty day " ; no trifling novelist with a little more than the usual imagination and scientific information; not even a Jules Verne, delightful and educating as Jules Verne was, telling "fairy-tales of science" to amuse children, old and young, suggesting the marvellous and delightful possibilities which its Aladdin lamFs and magic carpets have placed in our hands. His purpose is more deep and severe than this. The result is that the book is by no means an easy one, and may daunt many of his ordinary readers. But it is a book well worth reading, and reading carefully, if only for the spirit which it engenders.
The difficulty of all Utopias is at once to give the outer picture with sufficient naturalness and concreteness, and to convey the apprehension of the inner spirit which is to be the secret of this outer life. Mr. Wells's method of attacking this difficulty is highly ingenious. He imagines a new planet, the exact counterpart of our own, excepting that, by a certain alteration in what we call and think of as the chance, or the alterable elements, in the course of human history, the race has developed quite differently, has acquired far greater command than even our own in its most modern hour, of material science, has escaped from many of the grinding drudgeries and limitations of our physical condition, and reached, too, a higher social and moral plane. It is—and this is of its essence—a world still in progress. "Mankind" is still "in the making" in Utopia, but man's present condition there is far in advance of ours, and, moreover, discovers a still further promise and potency. Into this world two tourists, after a good lunch, enjoyed on the top of a Swiss pass just before they descend again, find themselves, whether in "the body or out of the body," whether in a waking or sleeping dream, as Plato would say, suddenly projected. They retain their own individuality—that ie a large part of the interest—and it is here that Mr. Wells's skill as a novelist comes in. They go through a variety of experiences, a good deal of time beiug spent in a Utopian Lucerne ; and finally they come back, if they ever really went away, to a Utopian London, where the iridescent bubble of their vision is rudely broken in Trafalgar Square, and the story ends. The method as handled by Mr. Wells has one great merit,—it produces illusion, that effect so hard to achieve. We are transported out of this world into its twin star in the most natural and easy way. We feel the new to be unlike the old, yet not so unlike but that the old might have grown, might yet grow, to be some- what thus. We are not troubled with the slow processes of development, and ever so many factors which require elimina- tion to give the hypothesis a chance are, ipso facto, quietly eliminated. Yet Utopia is not so strange that an intelligent Englishman of to-day could not live there, and even by degrees feel himself almost at home.
Science, it need hardly be said, plays a very prominent part in Mr. Wells's Utopia. Plato, he says truly enough, thought little of machinery, though it must be remembered that Hephaestus and Daedalus were Greek ideals as well as Zeus and Solon, and that to Homer, at any rate, the conception of automaton tables and ships self-propelled and self-steering was present. But even Bacon developed the idea of mechanical appliances very little. Yet, as Mr. Wells excellently points out, it is the gradual application of science which has relieved mankind of slavery, professional and unprofessional ; and even now, he says, "Science stands a too competent servant behind her wrangling, underbred masters, holding out resources, devices, and remedies they are too stupid to use." And on its material aide a modern Utopia must needs present these gifts as taken, and show a world that is really abolishing the need of labour, abolishing the "last base reason for any one's servitude or inferiority."
This is one of Mr. Wells's main themes. Another, as those who know his works will expect to bear, is the position of women and the question of "eugenics," or the possibility of improving the race by the methods of the horse-breeder and the pigeon-fancier. He introduces it with a deft Platonic indirectness by means of his character—a most ingenious creation, by the way—the sentimental "botanist.?' Here he is partly Platonic, but still more Darwinian, preferring the Le.letn Longmans and Co. fiGe. meta natural selection by mutual affection to "compulsory pairing" by the State, and in some ways, as elsewhere, comes near to the hedging audacity shown by Professor Jowett in dealing with this question, in that, while recognising the greatest possible theoretical freedom, he proposes, or anticipates, that in practice this license will be limited by regulations in detail. His central suggestion is the rewarding of motherhood by State endow- ment, and the consequent reduction of infantile disease and mortality. In the same way, in dealing with the immemorial question of private property it is not in any sweeping method of communism or abolition that he finds a panacea. He shows Utopia proceeding—by increased limitation and taxation, by extension and multiplication of State rights, by frequent revision of endowments, and other very prosaic and humdrum methods—to rob property, not of all its pleasures, but of most of its terrors. One feature he avowedly borrows from Plato. His " Republic " turned on the institution of the Guardians ; in other words, the rule of the wise. Mr. Wells's State turns, like, and as certainly as, a door on its hinges, on the institution of the "Samurai," the superior race. They are, as Matthew Arnold might have said—and Mr. Wells will evidently not resent the comparison—though their name is borrowed from the fighting nobles of Japan, a race of President noose- velts living the strenuous life, vowing themselves to the public service, and bound by a " Rule " with a capital "R." More Platcraico, there is much about their education and selection, and the minutiae of their discipline : how they must read a new book once a month, and bathe in cold water, keep in perfect health and hard condition, and also talk at the club to any other Samurai, who want to talk, for an hour three days a week, and once a year for seven days go out into the wilds and, like Tennyson at Boscastle, alone with God, be "alone with Nature, necessity, and their own thoughts." Like Plato's Guardians, they are forbidden to act, sing, or recite, though they may "lecture authoritatively" (as they evidently do) or debate. Much of this is picturesque and suggestive reading, and so, of course, is a great deal of the book. Specially graphic—pathetic too—is the meeting of the hero with his Utopian "double." For we all have doubles in Utopia, ourselves, as we might have been in a more perfect world.
It is not easy within the limits of an article like this to give an adequate idea of a book of large scope, of much originality, above all, with a very subtle and elusive, yet very real, individuality of its own. While we recognise the difficulties of presenting a Utopia at all, adequate to the complexity of the modern world, we still think the old-fashioned simpler method of Plato or More was better. Mr. Wells's book seems hardly likely to rank as, or to remain, a classic Utopia. But if the reader will take him in his own way, and read him with patience, he will find more and more meaning in what is a very notable and generous essay on topics wide, deep, and difficult, yet of the most simple and natural interest to us all. We hope that this will not be, as Mr. Wells warns us it may, his last excursion of the kind from fiction to philosophy, but that be will still continue to give us his thoughts, and show us how, in his own eloquent language, we may attempt, "not to rob life of incentives, but to change their nature, to make life not less energetic, but less panic- stricken and violent and base, to shift the incidence of the struggle for existence from our lower to our higher emotions, and so to anticipate and neutralise the motives of the cowardly and bestial, that the ambitious and energetic imagi- nation which is man's finest quality may become the incentive and determining factor in survival."
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