Upton Sinclair, ed. (1878–1968). rn The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest. 1915.
Love in Utopia(From “News from Nowhere”)
Morris, William
William Morris
(English poet and artist, 1834–1896; founder of the “Arts and Crafts” movement, and a lifelong Socialist. A famous English Socialist romance; the dream of a poet made heartsick by the sights and sounds of a machine civilization, and yearning for beauty, simplicity, and peace)“A
“Then you suppose nonsense,” said he. “I know that there used to be such lunatic affairs as divorce courts; but just consider, all the cases that came into them were matters of property quarrels; and I think, dear guest, that though you do come from another planet, you can see from the mere outside look of our world that quarrel about private property could not go on among us in our days.”
Indeed, my drive from Hammersmith to Bloomsbury, and all the quiet, happy life I had seen so many hints of, even apart from my shopping, would have been enough to tell me that “the sacred rights of property,” as we used to think of them, were now no more. So I sat silent while the old man took up the thread of the discourse again.…
“You must understand once for all that we have changed these matters; or rather, that our way of looking at them has changed within the last two hundred years. We do not deceive ourselves, indeed, or believe that we can get rid of all the trouble that besets the dealings between the sexes. We know that we must face the unhappiness that comes of man and woman confusing the relations between natural passion and sentiment, and the friendship which, when things go well, softens the awakening from passing illusions; but we are not so mad as to pile up degradation on that unhappiness by engaging in sordid squabbles about livelihood and position, and the power of tyrannizing over the children who have been the results of love or lust.”…
He was silent for some time, and I would not interrupt him. At last he began again: “But you must know that we of these generations are strong and healthy of body, and live easily; we pass our lives in reasonable strife with nature, exercising not one side of ourselves only, but all sides, taking the keenest pleasure in all the life of the world. So it is a point of honor with us not to be self-centered,—not to suppose that the world must cease because one man is sorry; therefore we should think it foolish, or if you will, criminal, to exaggerate these matters of sentiment and sensibility; we are no more inclined to eke out our sentimental sorrows than to cherish our bodily pains; and we recognize that there are other pleasures besides love-making. You must remember, also, that we are long-lived, and that therefore beauty both in man and woman is not so fleeting as it was in the days when we were burdened so heavily with self-inflicted diseases. So we shake off these griefs in a way which perhaps the sentimentalist of other times would think contemptible and unheroic, but which we think necessary and manlike. As on the one hand, therefore, we have ceased to be commercial in our love-matters, so also we have ceased to be artificially foolish. The folly which comes by nature, the unwisdom of the immature man, or the older man caught in a trap, we must put up with that, nor are we much ashamed of it; but to be conventionally sensitive or sentimental—my friend, I am old and perhaps disappointed, but at least I think that we have cast off some of the follies of the older world.”