i ceased to listen to the argumentation of my botanist with this apostle of nature. the botanist, in his scientific way, was, i believe, defending the learned professions. (he thinks and argues like drawing on squared paper.) it struck me as transiently remarkable that a man who could not be induced to forget himself and his personal troubles on coming into a whole new world, who could waste our first evening in utopia upon a paltry egotistical love story, should presently become quite heated and impersonal in the discussion of scientific professionalism. he was — absorbed. i can’t attempt to explain these vivid spots and blind spots in the imaginations of sane men; there they are!
“you say,” said the botanist, with a prevalent index finger, and the resolute deliberation of a big siege gun being lugged into action over rough ground by a number of inexperienced men, “you prefer a natural death to an artificial life. but what is your definition (stress) of artificial? . . . ”
and after lunch too! i ceased to listen, flicked the end of my cigarette ash over the green trellis of the arbour, stretched my legs with a fine restfulness, leant back, and gave my mind to the fields and houses that lay adown the valley.
what i saw interwove with fragmentary things our garrulous friend had said, and with the trend of my own speculations. . . .
the high road, with its tramways and its avenues on either side, ran in a bold curve, and with one great loop of descent, down the opposite side of the valley, and below crossed again on a beautiful viaduct, and dipped into an arcade in the side of the bristenstock. our inn stood out boldly, high above the level this took. the houses clustered in their collegiate groups over by the high road, and near the subordinate way that ran almost vertically below us and past us and up towards the valley of the meien reuss. there were one or two utopians cutting and packing the flowery mountain grass in the carefully levelled and irrigated meadows by means of swift, light machines that ran on things like feet and seemed to devour the herbage, and there were many children and a woman or so, going to and fro among the houses near at hand. i guessed a central building towards the high road must be the school from which these children were coming. i noted the health and cleanliness of these young heirs of utopia as they passed below.
the pervading quality of the whole scene was a sane order, the deliberate solution of problems, a progressive intention steadily achieving itself, and the aspect that particularly occupied me was the incongruity of this with our blond-haired friend.
on the one hand here was a state of affairs that implied a power of will, an organising and controlling force, the co-operation of a great number of vigorous people to establish and sustain its progress, and on the other this creature of pose and vanity, with his restless wit, his perpetual giggle at his own cleverness, his manifest incapacity for comprehensive co-operation.
now, had i come upon a hopeless incompatibility? was this the reductio ad absurdum of my vision, and must it even as i sat there fade, dissolve, and vanish before my eyes?
there was no denying our blond friend. if this utopia is indeed to parallel our earth, man for man — and i see no other reasonable choice to that — there must be this sort of person and kindred sorts of persons in great abundance. the desire and gift to see life whole is not the lot of the great majority of men, the service of truth is the privilege of the elect, and these clever fools who choke the avenues of the world of thought, who stick at no inconsistency, who oppose, obstruct, confuse, will find only the freer scope amidst utopian freedoms.
(they argued on, these two, as i worried my brains with riddles. it was like a fight between a cock sparrow and a tortoise; they both went on in their own way, regardless of each other’s proceedings. the encounter had an air of being extremely lively, and the moments of contact were few. “but you mistake my point,” the blond man was saying, disordering his hair — which had become unruffled in the preoccupation of dispute — with a hasty movement of his hand, “you don’t appreciate the position i take up.”)
“ugh!” said i privately, and lighted another cigarette and went away into my own thoughts with that.
the position he takes up! that’s the way of your intellectual fool, the universe over. he takes up a position, and he’s going to be the most brilliant, delightful, engaging and invincible of gay delicious creatures defending that position you can possibly imagine. and even when the case is not so bad as that, there still remains the quality. we “take up our positions,” silly little contentious creatures that we are, we will not see the right in one another, we will not patiently state and restate, and honestly accommodate and plan, and so we remain at sixes and sevens. we’ve all a touch of gladstone in us, and try to the last moment to deny we have made a turn. and so our poor broken-springed world jolts athwart its trackless destiny. try to win into line with some fellow weakling, and see the little host of suspicions, aggressions, misrepresentations, your approach will stir — like summer flies on a high road — the way he will try to score a point and claim you as a convert to what he has always said, his fear lest the point should be scored to you.
it is not only such gross and palpable cases as our blond and tenoring friend. i could find the thing negligible were it only that. but when one sees the same thread woven into men who are leaders, men who sway vast multitudes, who are indeed great and powerful men; when one sees how unfair they can be, how unteachable, the great blind areas in their eyes also, their want of generosity, then one’s doubts gather like mists across this utopian valley, its vistas pale, its people become unsubstantial phantoms, all its order and its happiness dim and recede. . . .
if we are to have any utopia at all, we must have a clear common purpose, and a great and steadfast movement of will to override all these incurably egotistical dissentients. something is needed wide and deep enough to float the worst of egotisms away. the world is not to be made right by acclamation and in a day, and then for ever more trusted to run alone. it is manifest this utopia could not come about by chance and anarchy, but by co-ordinated effort and a community of design, and to tell of just land laws and wise government, a wisely balanced economic system, and wise social arrangements without telling how it was brought about, and how it is sustained against the vanity and self-indulgence, the moody fluctuations and uncertain imaginations, the heat and aptitude for partisanship that lurk, even when they do not flourish, in the texture of every man alive, is to build a palace without either door or staircase.
i had not this in mind when i began.
somewhere in the modern utopia there must be adequate men, men the very antithesis of our friend, capable of self-devotion, of intentional courage, of honest thought, and steady endeavour. there must be a literature to embody their common idea, of which this modern utopia is merely the material form; there must be some organisation, however slight, to keep them in touch one with the other.
who will these men be? will they be a caste? a race? an organisation in the nature of a church? . . . and there came into my mind the words of our acquaintance, that he was not one of these “voluntary noblemen.”
at first that phrase struck me as being merely queer, and then i began to realise certain possibilities that were wrapped up in it.
the animus of our chance friend, at any rate, went to suggest that here was his antithesis. evidently what he is not, will be the class to contain what is needed here. evidently.
