Herbert Wells - First and Last Things

Finally came the things they had to do. Their Rule contained:—

"many precise directions regarding his health, and rules that would aim at once at health and that constant exercise or will that makes life good. Save in specified exceptional circumstances, the Samurai must bathe in cold water and the men shave every day; they have the precisest directions in such matters; the body must be in health, the skin and nerves and muscles in perfect tone, or the Samurai must go to the doctors of the order and give implicit obedience to the regimen prescribed. They must sleep alone at least four nights in five; and they must eat with and talk to anyone in their fellowship who cares for their conversation for an hour at least, at the nearest club-house of the Samurai, once on three chosen days in every week. Moreover they must read aloud from the Book of the Samurai for at least five minutes every day. Every month they must buy and read faithfully through at least one book that has been published during the past five years, and the only intervention with private choice in that matter is the prescription of a certain minimum of length for the monthly book or books. But the full rule in these minor compulsory matters is voluminous and detailed, and it abounds with alternatives. Its aim is rather to keep before the Samurai by a number of simple duties, as it were, the need of and some of the chief methods towards health of body and mind rather than to provide a comprehensive rule, and to ensure the maintenance of a community of feeling and interests among the Samurai through habit, intercourse and a living contemporary literature. These minor obligations do not earmark more than an hour in the day. Yet they serve to break down isolations of sympathy, all sorts of physical and intellectual sluggishness and the development of unsocial preoccupations of many sorts...

"So far as the Samurai have a purpose in common in maintaining the State and the order and discipline of the world, so far, by their discipline and denial, by their public work and effort, they worship God together. But the ultimate fount of motives lies in the individual life, it lies in silent and deliberate reflections, and at this the most striking of all the rules of the Samurai aims. For seven consecutive days of the year, at least, each man or woman under the Rule must go right out of all the life of men into some wild and solitary place, must speak to no man or woman and have no sort of intercourse with mankind. They must go bookless and weaponless, without pen or paper or money. Provision must be taken for the period of the journey, a rug or sleeping sack—for they must sleep under the open sky—but no means of making a fire. They may study maps before to guide them, showing any difficulties and dangers in the journey, but they may not carry such helps. They must not go by beaten ways or wherever there are inhabited houses, but into the bare, quiet places of the globe—the regions set apart for them.

"This discipline was invented to secure a certain stoutness of heart and body in the Samurai. Otherwise the order might have lain open to too many timorous, merely abstemious men and women. Many things had been suggested, sword-play and tests that verged on torture, climbing in giddy places and the like, before this was chosen. Partly, it is to ensure good training and sturdiness of body and mind, but partly also, it is to draw the minds of the Samurai for a space from the insistent details of life, from the intricate arguments and the fretting effort to work, from personal quarrels and personal affections and the things of the heated room. Out they must go, clean out of the world..."

These passages will at least serve to present the Samurai idea and the idea of common Rule of conduct it embodied.

In the "Modern Utopia" I discuss also a lesser Rule and the modification of the Rule for women and the relation to the order of what I call the poietic types, those types whose business in life seems to be rather to experience and express than to act and effectually do. For those things I must refer the reader to the book itself. Together with a sentence I have put in italics above, they serve to show that even when I was devising these Samurai I was not unmindful of the defects that are essential to such a scheme.

This dream of the Samurai proved attractive to a much more various group of readers than the New Republican suggestion, and there have been actual attempts to realise the way of life proposed. In most of these cases there was manifest a disposition greatly to over-accentuate organization, to make too much of the disciplinary side of the Rule and to forget the entire subordination of such things to active thought and constructive effort. They are valuable and indeed only justifiable as a means to an end. These attempts of a number of people of very miscellaneous origins and social traditions to come together and work like one machine made the essential wastefulness of any terrestrial realization of my Samurai very clear. The only reason for such an Order is the economy and development of force, and under existing conditions disciplines would consume more force than they would engender. The Order, so far from being a power, would be an isolation. Manifestly the elements of organization and uniformity were overdone in my Utopia; in this matter I was nearer the truth in the case of my New Republicans. These, in contrast with the Samurai, had no formal general organization, they worked for a common end, because their minds and the suggestion of their circumstances pointed them to a common end. Nothing was enforced upon them in the way of observance or discipline. They were not shepherded and trained together, they came together. It was assumed that if they wanted strongly they would see to it that they lived in the manner most conducive to their end just as in all this book I am taking it for granted that to believe truly is to want to do right. It was not even required of them that they should sedulously propagate their constructive idea.

Apart from the illumination of my ideas by these experiments and proposals, my Samurai idea has also had a quite unmerited amount of subtle and able criticism from people who found it at once interesting and antipathetic. My friends Vernon Lee and G.K. Chesterton, for example, have criticized it, and I think very justly, on the ground that the invincible tortuousness of human pride and class-feeling would inevitably vitiate its working. All its disciplines would tend to give its members a sense of distinctness, would tend to syndicate power and rob it of any intimacy and sympathy with those outside the Order...

It seems to me now that anyone who shares the faith I have been developing in this book will see the value of these comments and recognize with me that this dream is a dream; the Samurai are just one more picture of the Perfect Knight, an ideal of clean, resolute and balanced living. They may be valuable as an ideal of attitude but not as an ideal of organization. They are never to be put, as people say, upon a business footing and made available as a refuge from the individual problem.

To modernize the parable, the Believer must not only not bury his talent but he must not bank it with an organization. Each Believer must decide for himself how far he wants to be kinetic or efficient, how far he needs a stringent rule of conduct, how far he is poietic and may loiter and adventure among the coarse and dangerous things of life. There is no reason why one should not, and there is every reason why one should, discuss one's personal needs and habits and disciplines and elaborate one's way of life with those about one, and form perhaps with those of like training and congenial temperament small groups for mutual support. That sort of association I have already discussed in the previous section. With adolescent people in particular such association is in many cases an almost instinctive necessity. There is no reason moreover why everyone who is lonely should not seek out congenial minds and contrive a grouping with them. All mutual lovers for example are Orders of a limited membership, many married couples and endless cliques and sets are that. Such small and natural associations are indeed force-giving Orders because they are brought together by a common innate disposition out of a possibility of mutual assistance and inspiration; they observe a Rule that springs up and not a Rule imposed. The more of such groups and Orders we have the better. I do not see why having formed themselves they should not define and organize themselves. I believe there is a phase somewhere between fifteen and thirty, in the life of nearly everybody, when such a group is sought, is needed and would be helpful in self-development and self-discovery. In leagues and societies for specific ends, too, we must all participate. But the order of the Samurai as a great progressive force controlling a multitude of lives right down to their intimate details and through all the phases of personal development is a thing unrealizable. To seek to realize it is impatience. True brotherhood is universal brotherhood. The way to that is long and toilsome, but it is a way that permits of no such energetic short cuts as this militant order of my dream would achieve.