News From Nowhere, Or, an Epoch of Rest, Being Some Chapters From a Utopian Romance

“Well, sir, I am happy to see a man from over the water; but I really must appeal to you to say whether on the whole you are not better off in your country; where I suppose, from what our guest says, you are brisker and more alive, because you have not wholly got rid of competition.  You see, I have read not a few books of the past days, and certainly they are much more alive than those which are written now; and good sound unlimited competition was the condition under which they were written,—if we didn’t know that from the record of history, we should know it from the books themselves.  There is a spirit of adventure in them, and signs of a capacity to extract good out of evil which our literature quite lacks now; and I cannot help thinking that our moralists and historians exaggerate hugely the unhappiness of the past days, in which such splendid works of imagination and intellect were produced.”

Clara listened to him with restless eyes, as if she were excited and pleased; Dick knitted his brow and looked still more uncomfortable, but said nothing.  Indeed, the old man gradually, as he warmed to his subject, dropped his sneering manner, and both spoke and looked very seriously.  But the girl broke out before I could deliver myself of the answer I was framing:

“Books, books! always books, grandfather!  When will you understand that after all it is the world we live in which interests us; the world of which we are a part, and which we can never love too much?  Look!” she said, throwing open the casement wider and showing us the white light sparkling between the black shadows of the moonlit garden, through which ran a little shiver of the summer night-wind, “look! these are our books in these days!—and these,” she said, stepping lightly up to the two lovers and laying a hand on each of their shoulders; “and the guest there, with his over-sea knowledge and experience;—yes, and even you, grandfather” (a smile ran over her face as she spoke), “with all your grumbling and wishing yourself back again in the good old days,—in which, as far as I can make out, a harmless and lazy old man like you would either have pretty nearly starved, or have had to pay soldiers and people to take the folk’s victuals and clothes and houses away from them by force.  Yes, these are our books; and if we want more, can we not find work to do in the beautiful buildings that we raise up all over the country (and I know there was nothing like them in past times), wherein a man can put forth whatever is in him, and make his hands set forth his mind and his soul.”

She paused a little, and I for my part could not help staring at her, and thinking that if she were a book, the pictures in it were most lovely.  The colour mantled in her delicate sunburnt cheeks; her grey eyes, light amidst the tan of her face, kindly looked on us all as she spoke.  She paused, and said again:

“As for your books, they were well enough for times when intelligent people had but little else in which they could take pleasure, and when they must needs supplement the sordid miseries of their own lives with imaginations of the lives of other people.  But I say flatly that in spite of all their cleverness and vigour, and capacity for story-telling, there is something loathsome about them.  Some of them, indeed, do here and there show some feeling for those whom the history-books call ‘poor,’ and of the misery of whose lives we have some inkling; but presently they give it up, and towards the end of the story we must be contented to see the hero and heroine living happily in an island of bliss on other people’s troubles; and that after a long series of sham troubles (or mostly sham) of their own making, illustrated by dreary introspective nonsense about their feelings and aspirations, and all the rest of it; while the world must even then have gone on its way, and dug and sewed and baked and built and carpentered round about these useless—animals.”

“There!” said the old man, reverting to his dry sulky manner again.  “There’s eloquence!  I suppose you like it?”

“Yes,” said I, very emphatically.

“Well,” said he, “now the storm of eloquence has lulled for a little, suppose you answer my question?—that is, if you like, you know,” quoth he, with a sudden access of courtesy.

“What question?” said I.  For I must confess that Ellen’s strange and almost wild beauty had put it out of my head.

Said he: “First of all (excuse my catechising), is there competition in life, after the old kind, in the country whence you come?”

“Yes,” said I, “it is the rule there.”  And I wondered as I spoke what fresh complications I should get into as a result of this answer.

“Question two,” said the carle: “Are you not on the whole much freer, more energetic—in a word, healthier and happier—for it?”

I smiled.  “You wouldn’t talk so if you had any idea of our life.  To me you seem here as if you were living in heaven compared with us of the country from which I came.”

“Heaven?” said he: “you like heaven, do you?”