A Modern Utopia | Page 5

blood and warmth and reality of life is largely
absent; there are no individualities, but only generalised people. In
almost every Utopia--except, perhaps, Morris's "News from
Nowhere"--one sees handsome but characterless buildings, symmetrical
and perfect cultivations, and a multitude of people, healthy, happy,
beautifully dressed, but without any personal distinction whatever. Too
often the prospect resembles the key to one of those large pictures of
coronations, royal weddings, parliaments, conferences, and gatherings
so popular in Victorian times, in which, instead of a face, each figure
bears a neat oval with its index number legibly inscribed. This burthens
us with an incurable effect of unreality, and I do not see how it is
altogether to be escaped. It is a disadvantage that has to be accepted.
Whatever institution has existed or exists, however irrational, however
preposterous, has, by virtue of its contact with individualities, an effect
of realness and rightness no untried thing may share. It has ripened, it
has been christened with blood, it has been stained and mellowed by
handling, it has been rounded and dented to the softened contours that
we associate with life; it has been salted, maybe, in a brine of tears. But
the thing that is merely proposed, the thing that is merely suggested,
however rational, however necessary, seems strange and inhuman in its
clear, hard, uncompromising lines, its unqualified angles and surfaces.
There is no help for it, there it is! The Master suffers with the last and
least of his successors. For all the humanity he wins to, through his
dramatic device of dialogue, I doubt if anyone has ever been warmed to
desire himself a citizen in the Republic of Plato; I doubt if anyone

could stand a month of the relentless publicity of virtue planned by
More.... No one wants to live in any community of intercourse really,
save for the sake of the individualities he would meet there. The
fertilising conflict of individualities is the ultimate meaning of the
personal life, and all our Utopias no more than schemes for bettering
that interplay. At least, that is how life shapes itself more and more to
modern perceptions. Until you bring in individualities, nothing comes
into being, and a Universe ceases when you shiver the mirror of the
least of individual minds.
Section 3
No less than a planet will serve the purpose of a modern Utopia. Time
was when a mountain valley or an island seemed to promise sufficient
isolation for a polity to maintain itself intact from outward force; the
Republic of Plato stood armed ready for defensive war, and the New
Atlantis and the Utopia of More in theory, like China and Japan
through many centuries of effectual practice, held themselves isolated
from intruders. Such late instances as Butler's satirical "Erewhon," and
Mr. Stead's queendom of inverted sexual conditions in Central Africa,
found the Tibetan method of slaughtering the inquiring visitor a simple,
sufficient rule. But the whole trend of modern thought is against the
permanence of any such enclosures. We are acutely aware nowadays
that, however subtly contrived a State may be, outside your boundary
lines the epidemic, the breeding barbarian or the economic power, will
gather its strength to overcome you. The swift march of invention is all
for the invader. Now, perhaps you might still guard a rocky coast or a
narrow pass; but what of that near to-morrow when the flying machine
soars overhead, free to descend at this point or that? A state powerful
enough to keep isolated under modern conditions would be powerful
enough to rule the world, would be, indeed, if not actively ruling, yet
passively acquiescent in all other human organisations, and so
responsible for them altogether. World-state, therefore, it must be.
That leaves no room for a modern Utopia in Central Africa, or in South
America, or round about the pole, those last refuges of ideality. The
floating isle of La Cite Morellyste no longer avails. We need a planet.
Lord Erskine, the author of a Utopia ("Armata") that might have been
inspired by Mr. Hewins, was the first of all Utopists to perceive this--he
joined his twin planets pole to pole by a sort of umbilical cord. But the

modern imagination, obsessed by physics, must travel further than that.
Out beyond Sirius, far in the deeps of space, beyond the flight of a
cannon-ball flying for a billion years, beyond the range of unaided
vision, blazes the star that is our Utopia's sun. To those who know
where to look, with a good opera-glass aiding good eyes, it and three
fellows that seem in a cluster with it--though they are incredible
billions of miles nearer--make just the faintest speck of light. About it
go planets, even as our planets, but weaving a different fate, and in its
place among them