A Modern Utopia Part 6

He signs first, and I look over his shoulder.

He is displaying more readiness than I should have expected. The book is ruled in broad transverse lines, and has a s.p.a.ce for a name, for a number, and a thumbmark. He puts his thumb upon the slab and makes the thumbmark first with the utmost deliberation. Meanwhile he studies the other two entries. The "numbers" of the previous guests above are complex muddles of letters and figures. He writes his name, then with a calm a.s.surance writes down his number, A.M.a.1607.2.ab+. I am wrung with momentary admiration. I follow his example, and fabricate an equally imposing signature. We think ourselves very clever. The landlord proffers finger bowls for our thumbs, and his eye goes, just a little curiously, to our entries.

I decide it is advisable to pay and go before any conversation about our formulae arises.

As we emerge into the corridor, and the morning sunlight of the Utopian world, I see the landlord bending over the book.

"Come on," I say. "The most tiresome thing in the world is explanations, and I perceive that if we do not get along, they will fall upon us now."

I glance back to discover the landlord and a gracefully robed woman standing outside the pretty simplicity of the Utopian inn, watching us doubtfully as we recede.

"Come on," I insist.

Section 8

We should go towards the Schoellenen gorge, and as we went, our fresh morning senses would gather together a thousand factors for our impression of this more civilised world. A Modern Utopia will have done with yapping about nationality, and so the ugly fortifications, the barracks and military defilements of the earthly vale of Urseren will be wanting. Instead there will be a great mult.i.tude of gracious little houses cl.u.s.tering in college-like groups, no doubt about their common kitchens and halls, down and about the valley slopes. And there will be many more trees, and a great variety of trees--all the world will have been ransacked for winter conifers. Despite the height of the valley there will be a double avenue along the road. This high road with its tramway would turn with us to descend the gorge, and we should hesitate upon the adventure of boarding the train. But now we should have the memory of our landlord's curious eye upon us, and we should decide at last to defer the risk of explanations such an enterprise might precipitate.

We should go by the great road for a time, and note something of the difference between Utopian and terrestrial engineering.

The tramway, the train road, the culverts, and bridges, the Urnerloch tunnel, into which the road plunges, will all be beautiful things.

There is nothing in machinery, there is nothing in embankments and railways and iron bridges and engineering devices to oblige them to be ugly. Ugliness is the measure of imperfection; a thing of human making is for the most part ugly in proportion to the poverty of its constructive thought, to the failure of its producer fully to grasp the purpose of its being. Everything to which men continue to give thought and attention, which they make and remake in the same direction, and with a continuing desire to do as well as they can, grows beautiful inevitably. Things made by mankind under modern conditions are ugly, primarily because our social organisation is ugly, because we live in an atmosphere of s.n.a.t.c.h and uncertainty, and do everything in an underbred strenuous manner. This is the misfortune of machinery, and not its fault. Art, like some beautiful plant, lives on its atmosphere, and when the atmosphere is good, it will grow everywhere, and when it is bad nowhere. If we smashed and buried every machine, every furnace, every factory in the world, and without any further change set ourselves to home industries, hand labour, spade husbandry, sheep-folding and pig minding, we should still do things in the same haste, and achieve nothing but dirtiness, inconvenience, bad air, and another gaunt and gawky reflection of our intellectual and moral disorder. We should mend nothing.

But in Utopia a man who designs a tram road will be a cultivated man, an artist craftsman; he will strive, as a good writer, or a painter strives, to achieve the simplicity of perfection. He will make his girders and rails and parts as gracious as that first engineer, Nature, has made the stems of her plants and the joints and gestures of her animals. To esteem him a sort of anti-artist, to count every man who makes things with his unaided thumbs an artist, and every man who uses machinery as a brute, is merely a pa.s.sing phase of human stupidity. This tram road beside us will be a triumph of design. The idea will be so unfamiliar to us that for a time it will not occur to us that it is a system of beautiful objects at all. We shall admire its ingenious adaptation to the need of a district that is buried half the year in snow, the hard bed below, curved and guttered to do its own clearing, the great arched sleeper ma.s.ses, raising the rails a good two yards above the ground, the easy, simple standards and insulators. Then it will creep in upon our minds, "But, by Jove! This is designed!"

Indeed the whole thing will be designed.

Later on, perhaps, we may find students in an art school working in compet.i.tion to design an electric tram, students who know something of modern metallurgy, and something of electrical engineering, and we shall find people as keenly critical of a signal box or an iron bridge as they are on earth of----! Heavens! what _are_ they critical about on earth?

The quality and condition of a dress tie!

We should make some unpatriotic comparisons with our own planet, no doubt.

CHAPTER THE FOURTH

The Voice of Nature

Section 1

Presently we recognise the fellow of the earthly Devil's Bridge, still intact as a footway, spanning the gorge, and old memories turn us off the road down the steep ruin of an ancient mule track towards it. It is our first reminder that Utopia too must have a history. We cross it and find the Reuss, for all that it has already lit and warmed and ventilated and cleaned several thousands of houses in the dale above, and for all that it drives those easy trams in the gallery overhead, is yet capable of as fine a cascade as ever it flung on earth. So we come to a rocky path, wild as one could wish, and descend, discoursing how good and fair an ordered world may be, but with a certain unformulated qualification in our minds about those thumb marks we have left behind.

"Do you recall the Zermatt valley?" says my friend, "and how on earth it reeks and stinks with smoke?"

"People make that an argument for obstructing change, instead of helping it forward!"

And here perforce an episode intrudes. We are invaded by a talkative person.

He overtakes us and begins talking forthwith in a fluty, but not unamiable, tenor. He is a great talker, this man, and a fairly respectable gesticulator, and to him it is we make our first ineffectual tentatives at explaining who indeed we are; but his flow of talk washes that all away again. He has a face of that rubicund, k.n.o.bby type I have heard an indignant mineralogist speak of as botryoidal, and about it waves a quant.i.ty of disorderly blond hair.

He is dressed in leather doublet and knee breeches, and he wears over these a streaming woollen cloak of faded crimson that give him a fine dramatic outline as he comes down towards us over the rocks.

His feet, which are large and handsome, but bright pink with the keen morning air, are bare, except for sandals of leather. (It was the only time that we saw anyone in Utopia with bare feet.) He salutes us with a scroll-like waving of his stick, and falls in with our slower paces.

"Climbers, I presume?" he says, "and you scorn these trams of theirs? I like you. So do I! Why a man should consent to be dealt with as a bale of goods holding an indistinctive ticket--when G.o.d gave him legs and a face--pa.s.ses my understanding."

As he speaks, his staff indicates the great mechanical road that runs across the gorge and high overhead through a gallery in the rock, follows it along until it turns the corner, picks it up as a viaduct far below, traces it until it plunges into an arcade through a jutting crag, and there dismisses it with a spiral whirl. "_No_!"

he says.

He seems sent by Providence, for just now we had been discussing how we should broach our remarkable situation to these Utopians before our money is spent.

Our eyes meet, and I gather from the botanist that I am to open our case.

I do my best.

"You came from the other side of s.p.a.ce!" says the man in the crimson cloak, interrupting me. "Precisely! I like that--it's exactly my note! So do I! And you find this world strange! Exactly my case! We are brothers! We shall be in sympathy. I am amazed, I have been amazed as long as I can remember, and I shall die, most certainly, in a state of incredulous amazement, at this remarkable world.

Eh? ... You found yourselves suddenly upon a mountain top! Fortunate men!" He chuckled. "For my part I found myself in the still stranger position of infant to two parents of the most intractable dispositions!"

"The fact remains," I protest.

"A position, I can a.s.sure you, demanding Tact of an altogether superhuman quality!"

We desist for a s.p.a.ce from the attempt to explain our remarkable selves, and for the rest of the time this picturesque and exceptional Utopian takes the talk entirely under his control....

Section 2

An agreeable person, though a little distracting, he was, and he talked, we recall, of many things. He impressed us, we found afterwards, as a poseur beyond question, a conscious Ishmaelite in the world of wit, and in some subtly inexplicable way as a most consummate a.s.s. He talked first of the excellent and commodious trams that came from over the pa.s.ses, and ran down the long valley towards middle Switzerland, and of all the growth of pleasant homes and chalets amidst the heights that made the opening gorge so different from its earthly parallel, with a fine disrespect. "But they are beautiful," I protested. "They are graciously proportioned, they are placed in well-chosen positions; they give no offence to the eye."

"What do we know of the beauty they replace? They are a mere rash.

Why should we men play the part of bacteria upon the face of our Mother?"

"All life is that!"

"No! not natural life, not the plants and the gentle creatures that live their wild shy lives in forest and jungle. That is a part of her. That is the natural bloom of her complexion. But these houses and tramways and things, all made from ore and stuff torn from her veins----! You can't better my image of the rash. It's a morbid breaking out! I'd give it all for one--what is it?--free and natural chamois."

"You live at times in a house?" I asked.

He ignored my question. For him, untroubled Nature was the best, he said, and, with a glance at his feet, the most beautiful. He professed himself a Nazarite, and shook back his Teutonic poet's shock of hair. So he came to himself, and for the rest of our walk he kept to himself as the thread of his discourse, and went over himself from top to toe, and strung thereon all topics under the sun by way of ill.u.s.trating his splendours. But especially his foil was the relative folly, the unnaturalness and want of logic in his fellow men. He held strong views about the extreme simplicity of everything, only that men, in their muddle-headedness, had confounded it all. "Hence, for example, these trams! They are always running up and down as though they were looking for the lost simplicity of nature. 'We dropped it here!'" He earned a living, we gathered, "some considerable way above the minimum wage," which threw a chance light on the labour problem--by perforating records for automatic musical machines--no doubt of the Pianotist and Pianola kind--and he spent all the leisure he could gain in going to and fro in the earth lecturing on "The Need of a Return to Nature,"

and on "Simple Foods and Simple Ways." He did it for the love of it.

It was very clear to us he had an inordinate impulse to lecture, and esteemed us fair game. He had been lecturing on these topics in Italy, and he was now going back through the mountains to lecture in Saxony, lecturing on the way, to perforate a lot more records, lecturing the while, and so start out lecturing again. He was undisguisedly glad to have us to lecture to by the way.

He called our attention to his costume at an early stage. It was the embodiment of his ideal of Nature-clothing, and it had been made especially for him at very great cost. "Simply because naturalness has fled the earth, and has to be sought now, and washed out from your crushed complexities like gold."

"I should have thought," said I, "that any clothing whatever was something of a slight upon the natural man."

"Not at all," said he, "not at all! You forget his natural vanity!"