The secret of our Crystal Age Utopia is the secret of the beehive: a queen bee. The Crystallites have done away with the difficulties of mating by appointing one woman, in every house, to be the housemother, the woman whose capital duty is to carry on the family: the entire burden of each generation falls upon her shoulders, and in return for the sacrifice she is treated with the respect due to divinity, like the young man who was chosen in the Kingdom of Montezuma, as the tales have it, to represent the chief deity until at the end of a year he was disembowelled. The wish of a housemother is a command; the word of the housemother is law. For a year before her retirement as mother she is put into communion with the sacred books of the house, and has at her command a store of knowledge which the rest of the hive are not permitted to share. It is she who keeps burning the fires of life.
For all except the housemother sex is a matter of purely physical appearance. The Crystallites, if we may speak irreverently, are “content with a vegetable love—which would certainly not suit me” nor, it appears, did it suit our traveller to the Crystal Age, when he discovers that his passion could never be reciprocated by his beloved, even if she so far transgressed the laws of the household as to give way to him. Against the appearance of passion and all the mortal griefs that it carries with it, the housemother possesses a remedy. When in the murk of despair our traveller turns to her for advice and consolation, she gives him a phial of liquid. He drinks it in the belief that it will make him as free from passion as his housemates; and he is not deceived; for—he dies.
The social life of the household is not to be wrecked by the storms and stresses of the individual’s passions. The engines of life are no longer dangerous: the fuel has been taken away! A “chill moonlight felicity” is all that remains.
III
There are times when one may look upon the whole adventure of civilized life as a sort of Odyssey of domestication; and in this mood the Crystal Age marks a terminus upon that particular aspect of the adventure. To the objection that this sort of utopia requires that we change human nature, the answer, in terms of modern biology, is that there is no apparent scientific reason why certain elements in human nature should not be selected and brought to the front, or why certain others should not be reduced in importance and eliminated. So, for all practical purposes, there is no apparent reason why human nature should not be changed, or why we should not be prepared to believe that in times past it has been changed—communities which selectively bred for pugnacity and aggression committing suicide and opening the way for communities which socially selected other traits that made for survival. It is possible that in times past man has done a great deal to domesticate himself and fit himself for harmonious social life; and a utopia which rests upon the notion that there should be a certain direction in our breeding is not altogether loony; indeed, is nowadays less so than ever before, for the reason that it is possible to separate romantic love from physical procreation without, as the Athenians did, resorting to homosexuality.
If A Crystal Age opens our minds to these possibilities it is not to be counted purely as a romance; in spite of the fact that as a romance it has passages that rival Green Mansions. Between the individual households and common marriages, the utopia of the beehive is a third alternative which possibly remains to be explored.
IV
There are regions in the world—I am thinking perhaps of the table land of South Africa and the Mississippi Valley—where if one dreamed about utopia the apparatus to support it would be a gigantic network of steel, and huge communities of people would naturally flow together and coalesce in complicated patterns, somewhat after the fashion of those which Mr. H. G. Wells describes in When the Sleeper Awakens. It would be almost impossible, I fancy, to dream of a simple life and of handfuls of people in those parts of the earth: the simplicity would be barrenness, and a handful of people would be lost.
It is different with the valley of the Thames, that little stream which begins a short way above Oxford and meanders between banks of lush grass and bending willows, down through Marlow, where musty ales have long been made, past Windsor between the Great Park and the Chiltern Hills, through Richmond and so down to Hammersmith where one might perhaps ford the river at low tide if an iron bridge did not carry one across, till below the city of London the estuary becomes a wide tide of water and expands proudly to meet the sea. Nature has carved this valley to the human scale: the houses are not dwarfed by the landscape; and except for the huge warren of London—for which nature is not responsible—there is a fitness between the actor and the scene which, without offering any great Olympian moments, gives the naive and jolly and wholehearted effect that one finds in a good English hunting print or, let us say, in Pickwick Papers. In such an atmosphere, particularly as one thinks of it on a day late in June, human nature bubbles naturally into good nature, and whatever harshness remains, a tankard of ale will drain away.
It is in this valley of
