The Republic
eyes.’ Or again: ‘If you had been with me in Utopia, and had presently
seen their fashions and laws as I did which lived there five years and
more, and would never have come thence, but only to make the new land
known here,’ etc. More greatly regrets that he forgot to ask Hythloday
in what part of the world Utopia is situated; he ‘would have spent no
small sum of money rather than it should have escaped him,’ and he begs
Peter Giles to see Hythloday or write to him and obtain an answer to
the question. After this we are not surprised to hear that a Professor
of Divinity (perhaps ‘a late famous vicar of Croydon in Surrey,’ as the
translator thinks) is desirous of being sent thither as a missionary by
the High Bishop, ‘yea, and that he may himself be made Bishop of
Utopia, nothing doubting that he must obtain this Bishopric with suit;
and he counteth that a godly suit which proceedeth not of the desire of
honour or lucre, but only of a godly zeal.’ The design may have failed
through the disappearance of Hythloday, concerning whom we have ‘very
uncertain news’ after his departure. There is no doubt, however, that
he had told More and Giles the exact situation of the island, but
unfortunately at the same moment More’s attention, as he is reminded in
a letter from Giles, was drawn off by a servant, and one of the company
from a cold caught on shipboard coughed so loud as to prevent Giles
from hearing. And ‘the secret has perished’ with him; to this day the
place of Utopia remains unknown.
The words of Phaedrus, ‘O Socrates, you can easily invent Egyptians or
anything,’ are recalled to our mind as we read this lifelike fiction.
Yet the greater merit of the work is not the admirable art, but the
originality of thought. More is as free as Plato from the prejudices of
his age, and far more tolerant. The Utopians do not allow him who
believes not in the immortality of the soul to share in the
administration of the state (Laws), ‘howbeit they put him to no
punishment, because they be persuaded that it is in no man’s power to
believe what he list’; and ‘no man is to be blamed for reasoning in
support of his own religion (‘One of our company in my presence was
sharply punished. He, as soon as he was baptised, began, against our
wills, with more earnest affection than wisdom, to reason of Christ’s
religion, and began to wax so hot in his matter, that he did not only
prefer our religion before all other, but also did despise and condemn
all other, calling them profane, and the followers of them wicked and
devilish, and the children of everlasting damnation. When he had thus
long reasoned the matter, they laid hold on him, accused him, and
condemned him into exile, not as a despiser of religion, but as a
seditious person and a raiser up of dissension among the people’).’ In
the public services ‘no prayers be used, but such as every man may
boldly pronounce without giving offence to any sect.’ He says
significantly, ‘There be that give worship to a man that was once of
excellent virtue or of famous glory, not only as God, but also the
chiefest and highest God. But the most and the wisest part, rejecting
all these, believe that there is a certain godly power unknown, far
above the capacity and reach of man’s wit, dispersed throughout all the
world, not in bigness, but in virtue and power. Him they call the
Father of all. To Him alone they attribute the beginnings, the
increasings, the proceedings, the changes, and the ends of all things.
Neither give they any divine honours to any other than him.’ So far was
More from sharing the popular beliefs of his time. Yet at the end he
reminds us that he does not in all respects agree with the customs and
opinions of the Utopians which he describes. And we should let him have
the benefit of this saving clause, and not rudely withdraw the veil
behind which he has been pleased to conceal himself.
Nor is he less in advance of popular opinion in his political and moral
speculations. He would like to bring military glory into contempt; he
would set all sorts of idle people to profitable occupation, including
in the same class, priests, women, noblemen, gentlemen, and ‘sturdy and
valiant beggars,’ that the labour of all may be reduced to six hours a
day. His dislike of capital punishment, and plans for the reformation
of offenders; his detestation of priests and lawyers (Compare his
satirical observation: ‘They (the Utopians) have priests of exceeding
holiness, and therefore very few.); his remark that ‘although every one
may hear of ravenous dogs and wolves and cruel man-eaters, it is not
easy to find states that are well and wisely governed,’ are curiously
at variance with the notions of his age and indeed with his own life.
There are many points in which he shows a modern feeling and a
prophetic insight like Plato. He is a sanitary reformer; he maintains
that civilized states have a right to the soil of waste countries; he
is inclined to the opinion which places happiness in virtuous
pleasures, but herein, as he thinks, not disagreeing from those other
philosophers who define virtue to be a life according to nature. He
extends the idea of happiness so as to include the happiness of others;
and he argues ingeniously, ‘All men agree that we ought to make others
happy; but if others, how much more ourselves!’ And still he thinks
that there may be a more excellent way, but to this no man’s reason can
attain unless heaven should inspire him with a higher truth. His
ceremonies before marriage; his humane proposal that war should be
carried on by assassinating the leaders of the enemy, may be compared
to some of the paradoxes of Plato. He has a charming fancy, like the
affinities of Greeks and barbarians in the Timaeus, that the Utopians
learnt the language of the Greeks with the more readiness because they
were originally of the same race with them. He is penetrated with the
spirit of Plato, and quotes or adapts many thoughts both from the
Republic and from the Timaeus. He prefers public duties to private, and
is somewhat impatient of the importunity of relations. His citizens
have no silver or gold of their own, but are ready enough to pay them
to their mercenaries. There is nothing of which he is more contemptuous
than the love of money. Gold is used for fetters of criminals, and
diamonds and pearls for children’s necklaces (When the ambassadors came
arrayed in gold and peacocks’ feathers ‘to the eyes of all the Utopians
except very few, which had been in other countries for some reasonable
cause, all that gorgeousness of apparel seemed shameful and
reproachful. In so much that they most reverently saluted the vilest
and most abject of them for lords—passing over the ambassadors
themselves without any honour, judging them by their wearing of golden
chains to be bondmen. You should have seen children also, that had cast
away their pearls and precious stones, when they saw the like sticking
upon the ambassadors’ caps, dig and push their mothers under the sides,
saying thus to them—“Look, though he were a little child still.” But
the mother; yea and that also in good earnest: “Peace, son,” saith she,
“I think he be some of the ambassadors’ fools.”’)
Like Plato he is full of satirical reflections on governments and
princes; on the state of the world and of knowledge. The hero of his
discourse (Hythloday) is very unwilling to become a minister of state,
considering that he would lose his independence and his advice would
never be heeded (Compare an exquisite passage, of which the conclusion
is as follows: ‘And verily it is naturally given...suppressed and
ended.’) He ridicules the new logic of his time; the Utopians could
never be made to understand the doctrine of Second Intentions (‘For
they have not devised one of all those rules of restrictions,
amplifications, and suppositions, very wittily invented in the small
Logicals, which here our children in every place do learn. Furthermore,
they were never yet able to find out the second intentions; insomuch
that none of them all could ever see man himself in common, as they
call him, though he be (as you know) bigger than was ever any giant,
yea, and pointed to of us even with our finger.’) He is very severe on
the sports of the gentry; the Utopians count ‘hunting the lowest, the
vilest, and the most abject part of butchery.’ He quotes the words of
the Republic in which the philosopher is described ‘standing out of the
way under a wall until the driving storm of sleet and rain be
overpast,’ which admit of a singular application to More’s own fate;
although, writing twenty years before (about the year 1514), he can
hardly be supposed to have foreseen this. There is no touch of satire
which strikes deeper than his quiet remark that the greater part of the
precepts of Christ are more at variance with the lives of ordinary
Christians than the discourse of Utopia (‘And yet the most part of them
is more dissident from the manners of the world now a days, than my
communication was. But preachers, sly and wily men, following your
counsel (as I suppose) because they saw men evil-willing to frame their
manners to Christ’s rule, they have wrested and wried his doctrine,
and, like a rule of lead, have applied it to men’s manners, that by
some means at the least way, they might agree together.’)
The ‘New Atlantis’ is only a fragment, and far inferior in merit to the
‘Utopia.’ The work is full of ingenuity, but wanting in creative fancy,
and by no means impresses the reader with a sense of credibility. In
some places Lord Bacon is characteristically different from Sir Thomas
More, as, for example, in the external state which he attributes to the
governor of Solomon’s House, whose dress he minutely describes, while
to Sir Thomas More such trappings appear simple ridiculous. Yet, after
this programme of dress, Bacon adds the beautiful trait, ‘that he had a
look as though he pitied men.’ Several things are borrowed by him from
the Timaeus; but he has injured the unity of style by adding thoughts
and passages which are taken from the Hebrew Scriptures.
The ‘City of the Sun’ written by Campanella (1568-1639), a Dominican
friar, several years after the ‘New Atlantis’ of Bacon, has many
resemblances to the Republic of Plato. The citizens have wives and
children in common; their marriages are of the same temporary sort, and
are arranged by the magistrates from time to time. They do not,
however, adopt his system of lots, but bring together the best natures,
male and female, ‘according to philosophical rules.’ The infants until
two years of age are brought up by their mothers in public temples; and
since individuals for the most part educate their children badly, at
the beginning of their third year they are committed to the care of the
State, and are taught at first, not out of books, but from paintings of
all kinds, which are emblazoned on the walls of the city. The city has
six interior circuits of walls, and an outer wall which is the seventh.
On this outer wall are painted the figures of legislators and
philosophers, and on each of the interior walls the symbols or forms of
some one of the sciences are delineated. The women are, for the most
part, trained, like the men, in warlike and other exercises; but they
have two special occupations of their own. After a battle, they and the
boys soothe and relieve the wounded warriors; also they encourage them
with embraces and pleasant words. Some elements of the Christian or
Catholic religion are preserved among them. The life of the Apostles is
greatly admired by this people because they had all things in common;
and the short prayer which Jesus Christ taught men is used in their
worship. It is a duty of the chief magistrates to pardon sins, and