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 and fruitful world state, that will only not be a utopia because it will be this world. so surely it must be ——
the policeman drops his hand. “come up,” says the ‘bus driver, and the horses strain; “clitter, clatter, cluck, clak,” the line of hurrying hansoms overtakes the omnibus going west. a dexterous lad on a bicycle with a bale of newspapers on his back dodges nimbly across the head of the column and vanishes up a side street.
the omnibus sways forward. rapt and prophetic, his plump hands clasped round the handle of his umbrella, his billycock hat a trifle askew, this irascible little man of the voice, this impatient dreamer, this scolding optimist, who has argued so rudely and dogmatically about economics and philosophy and decoration, and indeed about everything under the sun, who has been so hard on the botanist and fashionable women, and so reluctant in the matter of beer, is carried onward, dreaming dreams, dreams that with all the inevitable ironies of difference, may be realities when you and i are dreams.
he passes, and for a little space we are left with his egoisms and idiosyncrasies more or less in suspense.
but why was he intruded? you ask. why could not a modern utopia be discussed without this impersonation — impersonally? it has confused the book, you say, made the argument hard to follow, and thrown a quality of insincerity over the whole. are we but mocking at utopias, you demand, using all these noble and generalised hopes as the backcloth against which two bickering personalities jar and squabble? do i mean we are never to view the promised land again except through a foreground of fellow-travellers? there is a common notion that the reading of a utopia should end with a swelling heart and clear resolves, with lists of names, formation of committees, and even the commencement of subscriptions. but this utopia began upon a philosophy of fragmentation, and ends, confusedly, amidst a gross tumult of immediate realities, in dust and doubt, with, at the best, one individual’s aspiration. utopias were once in good faith, projects for a fresh creation of the world and of a most unworldly completeness; this so-called modern utopia is a mere story of personal adventures among utopian philosophies.
indeed, that came about without the writer’s intention. so it was the summoned vision came. for i see about me a great multitude of little souls and groups of souls as darkened, as derivative as my own; with the passage of years i understand more and more clearly the quality of the motives that urge me and urge them to do whatever we do. . . . yet that is not all i see, and i am not altogether bounded by my littleness. ever and again, contrasting with this immediate vision, come glimpses of a comprehensive scheme, in which these personalities float, the scheme of a synthetic wider being, the great state, mankind, in which we all move and go, like blood corpuscles, like nerve cells, it may be at times like brain cells, in the body of a man. but the two visions are not seen consistently together, at least by me, and i do not surely know that they exist consistently together. the motives needed for those wider issues come not into the interplay of my vanities and wishes. that greater scheme lies about the men and women i know, as i have tried to make the vistas and spaces, the mountains, cities, laws, and order of utopia lie about my talking couple, too great for their sustained comprehension. when one focuses upon these two that wide landscape becomes indistinct and distant, and when one regards that then the real persons one knows grow vague and unreal. nevertheless, i cannot separate these two aspects of human life, each commenting on the other. in that incongruity between great and individual inheres the incompatibility i could not resolve, and which, therefore, i have had to present in this conflicting form. at times that great scheme does seem to me to enter certain men’s lives as a passion, as a real and living motive; there are those who know it almost as if it was a thing of desire; even for me, upon occasion, the little lures of the immediate life are seen small and vain, and the soul goes out to that mighty being, to apprehend it and serve it and possess. but this is an illumination that passes as it comes, a rare transitory lucidity, leaving the soul’s desire suddenly turned to presumption and hypocrisy upon the lips. one grasps at the universe and attains — bathos. the hungers, the jealousies, the prejudices and habits have us again, and we are forced back to think that it is so, and not otherwise, that we are meant to serve the mysteries; that in these blinkers it is we are driven to an end we cannot understand. and then, for measured moments in the night watches or as one walks alone or while one sits in thought and speech with a friend, the wider aspirations glow again with a sincere emotion, with the colours of attainable desire. . . .
that is my all about utopia, and about the desire and need for utopia, and how that planet lies to this planet that bears the daily lives of men.
