What remains in Looking Backward is the honest passion that inspired the man; the play of generous impulses; the insistence that there is no fun for an ordinarily imaginative person in dining with Dives whilst Lazarus hangs around the table. Bellamy wanted everyone to be equally educated, so that everyone might be his companion; he wanted everyone to be decently fed and sheltered; he wanted to take his share in the dirty work and to see that accidents of wealth did not keep other people from taking theirs. He wanted private life to be simple and public life to be splendid. He wanted men and women to mate with each other without permitting this relationship to be compromised by obligations to a father, a mother, or the butcher, the baker, and the grocer. He wanted the generous, the just, and the tenderhearted to be as well endowed as the cold-hearted, the greedy, and the self-seeking. He pleaded for an absence of artificiality and restraint in the relations of the sexes; for such a candor as has perhaps come into fashion again—thank heaven!—today, a candor which permits women physical freedom in dress, and a spiritual freedom in exhibiting their love, and giving it freely. All this is to the good. I do not question Bellamy’s fine motives; I question only the outlets he imagined for them. There is a breach between Bellamy’s conception of the good life and the structure he erected to shelter it. This breach is due, I believe, to an overemphasis of the part that wholesale mechanical organization, directed by a handful of people, would play in such a reconstruction. If Bellamy sometimes exaggerated the bad in modern society, with its muddle of competitive privileges, he likewise overestimated the good that it contained; and he was more than fair to the present order of things when he made the future so closely in its image.
IX
How William Morris and W. H. Hudson renew the classic tradition of utopias; and how, finally, Mr. H. G. Wells sums up and clarifies the utopias of the past, and brings them into contact with the world of the present.
I
It would be a pretty sad thing if the Utopias of the nineteenth century were all of a piece with those of Buckingham and Bellamy. In general we may say that all the utopias of reconstruction had a deadly sameness of purpose and a depressing singleness of interest; and although they saw society whole, they saw the problem of reconstructing society as a simple problem of industrial reorganization. Fortunately, the utopias of escape have something to contribute which the utopias of reconstruction lack; and if William Morris, for example, seems too remote from Manchester and Minneapolis to be of any use, he is by that token a little nearer the essential human realities: he knows that the chief dignity of man lies not in what he consumes but in what he creates, and that the Manchester ideal is—devastatingly consumptive.
Before I go into these utopias of escape, I wish to point out the strange way in which the three utopias we shall examine return as it were upon their classic models, each of the returns being, it is fairly plain, without the consciousness of the writer. Mr. W. H. Hudson returns upon More; and in A Crystal Age the farmstead and the family is the ultimate unit of social life. In News from Nowhere the city of workers, such as Andreae dreamed of, comes again into being; and in A Modern Utopia, with its order of Samurai, we are ruled once more by a highly disciplined class of Platonic guardians. Mr. Hudson is a naturalist with a deep sympathy for the rural life of England; William Morris was a craftsman who knew what the English town was like before it had been blighted by industrialism; and with both of these men we feel close to the essential life of man and the essential occupations.
II
As the clouded vision of the traveller to the Crystal Age clears, he finds himself received in a great Country House, which is inhabited by a large group of men and women who till the land and perform the simple operations of weaving and stonecutting and the like. All over the world, one gathers, these great country houses dot the landscape. Each of them is no weekend center of social life but a permanent home; indeed their permanence is almost past believing; for in each house traditions are carried back thousands of years. The great cities and the complicated metropolitan customs that they produced have long been wiped away, as one might wipe away mold. The world has been stabilized; the itch for getting and spending has disappeared. Our traveller must bind himself to work for a whole year in order to pay for the garments his housemates weave for him, garments whose texture and cut have a classic turn.
This household, I say, is the social unit of the Crystal Age: the housefather administers the laws and customs, and he dispenses the punishment of seclusion when the visitor trespasses upon the code of the house. The housemates work together, eat together, play together, and listen together to the music of a mechanical instrument called the musical sphere. At night they sleep in separate little cubicles which can be opened to the night air. The horses and dogs of the Crystal Age have a degree of intelligence which our common breeds do not possess, so that the horses all but harness themselves to the plow, and the dog teaches the traveller when to leave off working the animals. Each household has not merely its laws and traditions: it has its literature; its written history; and
