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Updated: June 22, 2025
I hate to think of the resentment we would incur were we to reveal that, far from being the mere dogs we seem to be, we are capable of mentally transmuting natural resources into virtually anything from a key to a concert hall, and I hate even more to think of the resentment we would incur were we to reveal that, for all our ability in the inanimate field, we have never been able to materialize so much as a single blade of grass in the animate field, and that our reason for coincidentalizing the planet Earth and creating our irresistible little utopias stems not from a need for companionship but from a need for gardeners.
His Utopias cheat him in the end, if indeed the barbarous taste he has indulged in clinging to them does not itself lapse before the dream is half formed. So men have feverishly conceived a heaven only to find it insipid, and a hell to find it ridiculous.
And, moreover, we are going to accept this world of conflict, to adopt no attitude of renunciation towards it, to face it in no ascetic spirit, but in the mood of the Western peoples, whose purpose is to survive and overcome. So much we adopt in common with those who deal not in Utopias, but in the world of Here and Now.
But Balzac's fiction has, too, its pocket Utopias, less attractive and less invigorating than Madame Dudevant's, and in his most realistic portrayals there are not infrequently dream-scapes of the fancy. The truth that we can most readily perceive in his work is one which, after all, embraces the ideally potential in man as well as his most material manifestations.
But the voice of the demagogues carried farther than that of the clergy; and such revolutionary notions as crossed the Alps had more to do with the founding of future Utopias than with the remedy of present evils. Even in France the temperate counsels of the clergy were being overruled by the sentimental imprudences of the nobles and by the bluster of the politicians.
The people have a confused idea of this providential progress when, in their dreams of fortune and in their legends, they speak continually of gold and royalty; and the philosophers only do homage to universal reason when, in their so-called moral homilies and their socialistic utopias, they thunder with equal violence against gold and tyranny. Auri sacra fames!
Any new Utopias lately?" "No, I'm house-hunting, Mr. Wilcox, as I've already told you once. Do you know of any houses?" "Afraid I don't." "Well, what's the point of being practical if you can't find two distressed females a house? We merely want a small house with large rooms, and plenty of them." "Evie, I like that! Miss Schlegel expects me to turn house agent for her!" "What's that, Father?
All these ideas, and many others which were only hinted at in his work on "War and Peace," were developed by Proudhon in his subsequent publications, one of which has for its motto, "Reforms always, Utopias never." The thinker had evidently finished his evolution.
And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias. Now, I have said that the community by means of organisation of machinery will supply the useful things, and that the beautiful things will be made by the individual.
It is this sense of the struggle of humanity out of which have been born Utopias of every order, from the "Republic" of Plato to the dream in "Looking Backward." Not one of these can be spared; and that they exist and find a following larger and larger, is the surest evidence of the soul at the bottom of each.
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