PREFACE TO VOLUME IX
"A Modern Utopia" was an experiment in form. It was done while I was completing "Kipps." The intentions of the experiment I tried to make clear in my preface to the first edition, and from that preface I will repeat here as much as will still interest the patient reader.
The method assumes an air of haphazard, but it is not so careless as it seems. I believe it to be the best way to the sort of lucid vagueness which has been my intention in this matter. I tried over several beginnings of a Utopian book before I adopted this. I rejected from the outset the form of the argumentative essay, the form which appeals most readily to what is called the "serious" reader, the reader who is often no more than the solemnly impatient parasite of great questions. He likes everything in hard, heavy lines, black and white, yes and no, because he does not understand how much there is that cannot be presented at all in that way; wherever there is any effect of obliquity, of incommensurables, wherever there is any levity or humour or difficulty of multiplex presentation, he refuses attention. Mentally he seems to be built up upon an invincible assumption that the Spirit of Creation cannot count beyond two, he deals only in alternatives. Such readers I have resolved not to attempt to please here. Even if I presented all my triclinic crystals as systems of cubes—! Indeed I felt
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