and to evade, initiate, endeavour, and overcome.


Section 2

There are very definite artistic limitations also.

There must always be a certain effect of hardness and thinness about
Utopian speculations. Their common fault is to be comprehensively
jejune. That which is the blood and warmth and reality of life is
largely absent; there are no individualities, but only generalised
people. In almost every Utopia--except, perhaps, Morris's "News from
Nowhere"--one sees handsome but characterless buildings, symmetrical
and perfect cultivations, and a multitude of people, healthy, happy,
beautifully dressed, but without any personal distinction whatever.
Too often the prospect resembles the key to one of those large
pictures of coronations, royal weddings, parliaments, conferences,
and gatherings so popular in Victorian times, in which, instead of a
face, each figure bears a neat oval with its index number legibly
inscribed. This burthens us with an incurable effect of unreality,
and I do not see how it is altogether to be escaped. It is a
disadvantage that has to be accepted. Whatever institution has
existed or exists, however irrational, however preposterous, has, by
virtue of its contact with individualities, an effect of realness
and rightness no untried thing may share. It has ripened, it has
been christened with blood, it has been stained and mellowed by
handling, it has been rounded and dented to the softened contours
that we associate with life; it has been salted, maybe, in a brine
of tears. But the thing that is merely proposed, the thing that is
merely suggested, however rational, however necessary, seems strange