The Scranton tribune. [volume] (Scranton, Pa.) 1891-1910, 1898-05-27
e dward BeIlamy.

Edward BelIamy.
The death of Mr.. Edward Bellamy
at the comparatively early age of
forty-nine years is loss to American
literature and journalism in no ordi-
nary sense. Bellamy possessed the
highest and rarest Of intellectual gifts,
the gift of pure and exalted idealsm.
He took man out of his sordid environ
ment, out of his selfish existence for
self, and placed him in a high mountain
which looked out upon a broad inheri-
tance where there existed a unity Of
peace, love and universal brotherhood.
The mental, analytical and imagina-
tive qualities which enabled Bellamy
to create those altruistic scenes in
Looking Backward" which are so
ravishing in their harmonious COM
pleteness Of detail, have fallen to few
men. Sir Thomas More presented three
hundred years ago a picture Of univer-
sal brotherhood in his Utopia" which
has been the model Of all subsequent
efforts in the same direction. Literary
Utopas have not been wanting in any
generation. To Platos Republic" we
owe the original conception of a fiC-
tltious commonwealth. 1t was the first
systematic effort to develop an ideal
form Of government. Plato's "Repub-
lie" was purely political. The sacrl-
flee of the individual for the good of
the state was the ruthless logic of
it's constitution. Sir Thomas More's
utopia" like Bellamy's Looking
Backward" was the eXaltation OF the
individual in the annihilation of the
politico-economic condition Of society in
its material and competitive aspects.
No one who has read Looking Back
ward" will easily forget the entranc-
ing scenes of industrial and social CO.
operation which it conjured up. 1t
was like walking in a pleasant dream,
amid sylvan cottages, charming pleas
antries, rustic bowers, ripping brooks
and unalloyed innocence. The white
heat of the competitive struggle for
bare existence, the avariciousness of
the few and the headlOng folly of the
many, the rush and grind of the cog
wheels of industrial life were shut out
from its elysan repose. Rassalas in
the Happy Valley had everything to
| satisfy the instructive craving of his
nature but freedom; even this was
not eliminated from Mr.. Bellamy's par
| adse
How far literary works like Look
| ing Backward" tend to exalt the moral
and material we'll being of human
| ity it is of course impossible to say.
| DR.. johnson wrote "Rassalas in the
| Happy Valley" TO pay the expenses of
his mothers funeral. Bellamy's Look
! ing Backward" is an adaptation of Ras-
salas' existence in his happy valley to
| one of our own times, if we could be
| transplanted to the earthly paradise
| where the unfortunate Eastern prince
! found life intolerably burdensome
with all its desires satisfied. Humani-
tarians who write in this strain are
saturated consciously or unConsciously
with Rosseau's idealism of the natural
man, what he had been i'm a state Of
nature, and what he would be when
| relieved of the unnatural and artifi-
| Nldl ItSlldlllS NnlNn are pluttu upon
his development through the stress of
modern industrialismL That Edward
| Bellamy believed in the possibility Of
the accomplishment of his idealisms,
we cannot doubt. Only a man imbued
with belief in the practical fruition
| OF the pseudO-econOmic theories which
he scattered broadcast could attract
such attention and hold it.
If it is true that the emperor of Ger
many purchased ten thousand copies of
Looking Backward" and distributed
them among those whom he thought
their perusal was most likely to affect,
there is nothing strange in that,
Looking Backward" is a prose poem
which like all good poetry responds 70
an instructive craving of our subjec-
tive consciousness and temporarily
satisfies il. No book Of the present
century with such a socialstic basis has
done less to propagate the tenets OF
socialism. 1t described an ideal city
in the midst of the material world
and the reader took Looking Back,
ward" in hand as he might take a
Badecker, 10 traverse the highways
and byways OF this phantasmal place
so unlike anything he knew. As a
Journalist Edward Railauy was n~isi-