How the Country House and Coketown became the utopias of the Modern Age; and how they made the world over in their image. Now that we have ransacked the literature of ideal commonwealths for examples of the utopian vision and the utopian method, there remains another class of utopias which has still to be reckoned with, in order to make our tally complete. All the utopias that we have dealt with so far have been filtered through an individual mind, and whereas, like any other piece of literature, they grew out of a certain age and tradition of thought, it is dangerous to overrate their importance either as mirrors of the existing order or as projectors of a new order. While again and again the dream of a utopian in one age has become the reality of the next, as O’Shaughnessy sings in his famous verses, the exact connection between the two can only be guessed at, and rarely, I suppose, can it be traced. It would be a little foolish to attempt to prove that the inventor of the modern incubator was a student of Sir Thomas More. Up to the present the idola which have exercised the most considerable influence upon the actual life of the community are such as have been partly expressed in hundred works and never perhaps fully expressed in one. In order to distinguish these idola from those that have occupied us till now, we should perhaps call them collective utopias or social myths. There is a considerable literature that relates to these myths We must think of our idola as a sort of diffused environment or atmosphere, which differs in "chemical content" and in extension with each individual. Some of these idola have so uniformly taken possession of men's minds in a particular age that they are as much a part of the environment a baby is born into as the furniture of his house. The sociologists who follow Emile Durkheim have called a certain part of these idola collective representations but they are wrong, I believe, when they limit these "representations" to savage or ignorant groups for they are an important part of every civilized person's luggage. Parallel with The Story of Mankind and with The Story of Utopias, which I have just told, it would be amusing to write The story of Mankind's Myths. This work, however, would require the scholarship and industry of another Leibniz, and all that I wish to do here is to put together the chief social myths that have played a part in Western To understand the utopia of the Country House we must jump back a few centuries in history. Anyone who has ranged through the European castles that were built before the fourteenth century will realize that they were no more built for comfort than is a modern battleship. They were essentially garrisons of armed men whose main occupation was theft, violence, and murder; and every feature of their environment reflected the necessities of their life. These castles would be found beetling a cliff or a steep hill; their walls and their buttresses would be made of huge, rough hewn stones; their living arrangements would resemble those of a barracks with an almost complete lack of what we now regard as the normal decencies and privacies, except possibly for the lord and his lady; We do not know the Country House until we realize, to begin with, what its physical characteristics are like. There are a great many descriptions which the reader may consult if he does not happen to live in the neighborhood of a great Country House: but perhaps instead of examining the contemporary Country House it will be well to go back to its beginnings, and see how it was pictured in all its encrusted splendor at the first movement of the Renascence—in the setting which François Rabelais, in one of the few downright serious passages in his great work, Gargantua, sought to provide for the good life. Gargantua purposes to build a new Abbey which he calls the Abbey of Theleme. This Abbey is to be in every respect what the mediæval Abbey was not. Hence to begin with, the Abbey, unlike the castle, is to lie in the midst of the open country; and unlike the monastery, it is to have no walls. Every member is to be furnished with a generous apartment, consisting of a principal room, a withdrawing room, a handsome closet, a wardrobe, and an oratory; and the house itself is to contain not merely libraries in every language, but fair and spacious galleries of paintings. Besides these lodgings there is to be a tilt-yard, a riding court, a theatre, or public playhouse, and a natatory or place to swim. By the river, for the Abbey is to be situated on the Loire, there is to be a Garden of Pleasure, and between two of the six towers of the hexagon, in which form the building is arranged, there are courts for tennis and other games. Add to this orchards full of fruit trees, parks abounding with venison, and an archery The women who are admitted to Theleme must be fair, well-featured, and of sweet disposition; the men must be comely and well-conditioned. Everyone is to be admitted freely and allowed to depart freely; and instead of attempting to practice poverty, chastity, and obedience, the inmates may be honorably married, may be rich, and may live at liberty. The liberty of Theleme is indeed complete; it is such a liberty as one enjoys at a Country House to this day, under the care of a tactful hostess; for everyone does nothing except follow his own free will and pleasure, rising out of his bed whenever he thinks good, and eating, drinking, and laboring when he has a mind to it. In all their rule and strictest tie of their order, as Rabelais puts it, there is but one clause to be observed "Do what you please." When we turn our attention from Rabelais’ conceit of an anti-monastic order, we discover that he has given us an excellent picture of the Country House, and of what I shall take the liberty of calling Country House culture. We see pretty much the same outlines in the introduction to Boccaccio's Decameron; it is elaborately described in terms of that most complete of Country Houses, Hampton Court, in Pope's Rape of the Lock; it is vividly pictured by Meredith in his portrait of The Egoist; and it is analyzed in Mr. H. G. Wells' cruel description of Bladesover in Tono-Bungay, as well as by Mr. Bernard Shaw in Heartbreak House. Whether Mr. W. H. Mallock holds the pattern of Country House culture up to us in The New Republic or Anton Chekhov penetrates its aimlessness and futility in The Cherry Orchard, The Country House is one of the recurrent themes of literature. This renascence idolum of the Country House, then, is powerful and complete: I know no other pattern which has imposed its standards and its practices with such complete success upon the greater part of European civilization. While the Country House was in the beginning an aristocratic institution, it has penetrated now to every stratum of society; and although we may not immediately see the connection, it is responsible, I believe, for the particular go and direction which the industrial revolution has taken. The Country House standards of consumption are responsible for our Acquisitive Society. Perhaps the shortest way to suggest the character underlie this limited and partial good life are political power and economic wealth; and in order for the life to flourish, both of these must be obtained in almost limitless quantities. The chief principles that characterize this society are possession and passive enjoyment. Now, in the Country House possession is based upon privilege and not upon work. The title to land which was historically obtained for the most part through force and fraud is the economic foundation of the Country House existence. In order to keep the artisans and laborers who surround the Country House at their work, it is necessary to keep them from having access to the land on their own account, provision always being made that the usufruct of the land shall go to the owner and not to the worker. This emphasis upon passive ownership points to the fact that in the Country House there is no active communion between the people and their environment. Such activities as remain in the Country House—the pursuit of game, for instance—rest upon imitating in play activities which once had a vital use or prepared for some vital function, as a child's playing with a doll is a preparation for motherhood. The Country House ideal is that of a completely functionless existence; or at best, an existence in which all the functions that properly belong to a civilized man shall be carried on by functionaries. Since this ideal cannot be realized in the actual world, Observe the architecture of our Country House. If it has been built in England during the last three hundred years, the style is probably that bastard Greek or Roman which we call Renascence architecture; if the Country House was built in America during the last thirty years, it is as likely as not a Tudor residence with traces of castle fortification left here and there on the facade. On the walls there will be plenty of Let us admit what is valid in the utopia of the Country House. Enjoyment is a necessary element in achievement, and by its regard for the decent graces of life, for such things as an ease in manners and a fine flow of conversation and the clash of wits and a sensitiveness to beautiful things, the Country House was by all odds a humanizing influence. In so far as the Country House fostered a belief in contemplation and a desire for the arts apart from any uses that might be made of them by way of civic advertisement; in so far as it urged that all our pragmatic activities must be realized in things that are worth having or doing for themselves, the Country House was right, eminently right. It was no snobbery on the part of Russian soviet officialism when it opened up some of its Country Houses as rest houses for the peasants and workers, and then insisted that some of the airs of the Country House should be acquired there, to replace the rough usages of the stable, the dungpile, and the The industrial bearing of the Renascence ideal is of capital importance. During the Middle Age the emphasis in industry was upon the production of tangible goods: the craft guilds What is the chief economic outcome of this ideal? The chief outcome, I think, is to exaggerate the demand for goods, and to cause an enormously wasteful duplication of the apparatus of consumption. If the limit to one's possessions should be simply the extent of one's purse; if happiness is to be acquired through obtaining the comforts and luxuries of life; if a man who possesses a single house is considered fortunate, and a man who possesses five houses five times as fortunate; if there are no standards of living other than the insatiable The chief difference between the individual utopias of the nineteenth century and the "collective representation" of Coketown is that these individual utopias were concerned to repair certain points where Manchester, Newark, Pittsburgh, and Elberfeld-Barmen fell short of the ideal. In repairing these points, Bellamy and Hertzka were ready to alter the conventional arrangements by which property and land were held, and capital was accumulated. The final end however was the same; and the differences are therefore more apparent than real. If the illustrative example of the Country House is in the Abbey of Theleme, that of Coketown is in the sharp picture of industrialism which Charles Dickens presents in Hard Times. Coketown, as Dickens sees it, is the quintessence of the industrial age. It is perhaps one of the few idola of the modern world which has no parallel in any earlier civilization that we have been able to explore. In order to understand what Coketown brought into the world, we must realize that before Coketown came into existence the center of every important European city consisted of a marketplace, shadowed over by a Cathedral, a Market Court, and a Guildhall; and frequently there What are the outward physical aspects of Coketown? To begin with, the city is laid out by an engineer; it is laid out with a mathematical correctness and with a complete disregard for the amenities. If there are hills where Coketown ought to stand, the hills are leveled; if there are swamps, the swamps are filled; if there are lakes, the lakes are drained away. The pattern to which Coketown's activities are fitted is that of the gridiron; there are no deviations and no allowances in the working out of this plan; never will a street swerve as much as a hair's breadth to save a stand of trees or open up a vista. In the matter of transportation and intercourse, the aim of Coketown is to "get The factory is the center of Coketown's social life; and it is here that the greater part of the population spend their days. At its purest, that is to say, during the first half of the nineteenth century, and in a great many centers to this day, the factory is the only institution that provides anything like a social life, in spite of the fact that the unremitting toil which accompanies its routine reduces the graces of social intercourse to such a minimum that drunkenness and copulation are the only amusements which the inhabitants can engage in as a relief from their noble duty of providing the rest of the world with necessities, comforts, luxuries, and nullities. The Coketown idolum has been disintegrating a little during the last two decades, under the influence of the garden cities movement, and I am aware that in certain departments I am celebrating a lost cause and an abandoned idealism; but there still remain in acres and acres of workingmen's dwellings, such as one finds in Battersea and Philadelphia, and in old-fashioned railway stations, and in buildings like the Mechanics Halls of There is one phenomenon still to be accounted for in the economy of Coketown; one monumental instrument without which the wheels of Coketown would become clogged and the very breath of Coketown be extinguished. I refer to the rubbish heaps. The aim of production in Coketown is naturally more Up to a certain point—but what point? The answer is, up to the point at which the cultivation of a humane life in a community of humane people becomes difficult or impossible. Men come together, says Aristotle, to live; they remain together in order to live the good life. This determination of the good life is the only check and balance that we can have upon Coketown; and it is perhaps because we have been so little concerned with it that the practical effect of the Coketown idolum has been so devastating. "Invention and organization," as Mr. George Santayana admirably points out, "which ought to have increased leisure by producing the necessaries of life with little labor, have only increased the population, degraded labor, and diffused luxury." William Morris conceived that men in the future might By what means can the Country House keep Coketown working for it? The idolum of the Country House, which was built up during the Renascence, and the idolum of Coketown, which was formed in the early part of the nineteenth century, are obviously two separate worlds; and in order that each might be realized in our daily life, it was necessary that some connecting tissue be manufactured to keep them together. This tissue was the social myth, the collective utopia, of the National State. There is a sense in which we may look upon the National State as a fact; but that great philosopher of the National State, Mazzini, realized that the National State had continually to be willed; and its existence lies plainly, therefore, on a different plane from the existence of a bit of territory, a building, or a city. In fact, it is only by the persistent projection of this utopia for the last three or four hundred years that its existence has become credible; for all the minute descriptions which the political historian gives to the The earth that the geographer surveys is divided into five great land masses. These land masses in turn can be broken up into a number of natural regions, each of which has within its rough and approximate frontiers a certain complex of soil, climate, vegetation, and, arising out of these, certain primitive occupations which the inhabitants of the region originally practiced and later, through the advance of trade and invention, elaborated. Between these natural regions there are occasionally frontiers, such as the barrier of the Pyrenees which separates "France" from "Spain"; but these barriers have never altogether prevented movements of population from one area to another. In order to have a more faithful knowledge of regional groupings in certain important areas, the reader might with profit consult Professor Fleure's Human Geography in Western Europe. (London: Williams and Norgate.) These natural regions are the groundwork of human regions; that is, the non-political grouping of population
In the utopia of the National State there are no natural regions; and the equally natural grouping of people in towns, villages and cities, which, as Aristotle points out, is perhaps the chief distinction between man and the other animals, is tolerated only upon the fiction that the State hands over to these groups a portion of its omnipotent authority, or "sovereignty" as it is called, and permits them to exercise a corporate life. Unfortunately for this beautiful myth, which generations of lawyers and statesmen have labored to build up, cities existed long before states—there was a Rome on the Tiber long before there was a Roman Imperium—and the gracious permission of the state is simply a perfunctory seal upon the accomplished fact. Instead of recognizing natural regions and natural groups of people, the utopia of nationalism establishes, by the surveyor's line, a certain realm called national territory, and makes all the inhabitants of this territory the members of a single, indivisible group, the nation, which is supposed to be prior in claim and superior in power to all other groups. This is the only social formation that is officially recognized within the national utopia. What is common to all the inhabitants of this territory is thought to be of far greater importance than any of the things that bind men together in particular civic or industrial groups. Let us look at this world of national utopias. The contrast between the politician's map and the geographer's would be little less than amazing were our eyes not used to it, and were we not taught in modern times The chief instrument of the National State is Megalopolis, its biggest city, the place where the idolum of the National Utopia was first created, and where it is perpetually willed into existence. In order to grasp the quintessential character of Megalopolis we must shut our eyes to the palpable earth, with its mantle of vegetation and its tent of clouds, and conceive what might be made of the human landscape if it could be entirely fabricated out of paper; for the ultimate aim of the Megalopolis is to conduct the whole of human life and intercourse through the medium of paper. The early life of a young citizen in Megalopolis is spent in acquiring the tools by which paper may be used. The names of these tools are writing, reading, and arithmetic; and once upon a time these constituted the main elements in every Megalopolitan's education. There was, however, a good deal of dissatisfaction, on paper, against this somewhat barren curriculum, and so at a fairly early date in the history of Megalopolis, various other subjects, such as literature, science, gymnastics, and manual training were added to the curriculum—on paper. It is indeed possible for a Megalopolitan student to know the atomic formula of clay without ever having seen it in the raw earth, to handle pine wood in the workshop without having walked through a pine forest, and to go through the The end of this period of paper tutelage is but a prelude to its continuation in another form; for the religious care of paper is the Megalopolitan's life work. The daily newspaper, the ledger, the card index are the means by which he now makes contact with life, whilst the fiction magazine and the illustrated paper are the means by which he escapes from it. Through the translucent form of paper known as celluloid, it has been possible to do away on the stage with flesh-and-blood people; and therefore the drama of life, as the Megalopolitan story writers tell it, can be enacted at one remove from actuality. Instead of his travelling, the world moves before the Megalopolitan, on paper; instead of his venturing forth on the highways of the world, adventure comes to him, on paper; instead of his getting him a mate, his bliss may be all but consummated—on paper. In fact, so accustomed does the Megalopolitan become to experiencing all his emotions on paper that he can be entertained by the representation of a static bowl of flowers on a moving picture screen; while his cockney ignorance of nature is so vast that a certain vaudeville performer, seeking to amuse By its traffic in Coketown's multifarious goods and by its command over certain kinds of paper known as mortgages or securities, Megalopolis ensures a supply of real foods and real staples from the countryside. Through incessant production of hooks, magazines, newspapers, boilerplate features, and syndicated matter, Megalopolis ensures that the idolum of the National Utopia shall be kept alive in the minds of the underlying inhabitants of the country. Finally, by the devices Working in connection with the Machine Process of Coketown, the Megalopolis erects a standard of life which can be expressed in commercial terms, on paper, even if it does not offer any tangible satisfaction in goods and services and perfections. The chief boast of this standard is its uniformity; that is, its equal applicability to every person in the community without respect to his history, his circumstances, his needs, his actual rewards. Hence such goods as Megalopolis creates in profusion are for the most part in the line of plumbing and sanitary devices which, if they do not exactly heighten the joy of living, at any rate make the routine of Megalopolitan life a little less formidable. The total result of these standards and uniformities is that what was originally a fiction in time becomes a fact. Whereas the inhabitants of the national utopia may originally have been as diverse as the trees in a forest, they tend to become, under the influence of education and propaganda, as similar as telegraph It should be plain that in describing the National Utopia and Megalopolis I have been trying to outline what Plato would call the pure form. It is equally clear, I trust, that the pure form is an idolum to which any existing national state or metropolis approximates only so far as the idolum does not conflict too grossly with the real men and women, the real communities, the real regions, the real workaday occupations which continue, despite the reign of these idola, to exist, and to occupy our main attention. Formal education has not altogether taken the place of vital education; loyalty to the state has not altogether succeeded as a substitute for deeper allegiances and affiliations: occasionally, here and there, people meet each other face to face, they eat real food, dig in real earth, smell real flowers instead of coal tar perfumes that arise from paper bouquets, and embark quite madly on real love affairs. It is true that these realities are a disturbing influence: they are always threatening to undermine the idola which the politicians and journalists and academic handymen unite so valiantly to build up; but there they The picture of the National Utopia that I have drawn is perhaps a little too black to stand out clearly; and I must now add a few high lights for definition. As in Coketown, there was a point up to which efficiency in mechanical production was a good thing, so in the national utopia there is a point up to which1
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