Part 6

Chapter 63,808 wordsPublic domain

On the whole it does not look as if More went in any very great fear of the old king’s wrath. Mr. Colte would not have been in a hurry to bestow his daughter in marriage on a young man whom Henry was seeking occasion to slay: and probably More himself would have hesitated to give hostages to fortune under those conditions.

III

THE EARLY YEARS OF HENRY VIII

Whatever reason he may have had to fear ill-will from Henry VII.--who seldom wasted vindictive sentiments on people whose punishment could not be substantially expressed in terms of hard cash--More could count on the goodwill of his young successor. More than one of the princes of those days ranked among the most accomplished men of their times; and like his brother-in-law of Scotland, Henry would have more than held his own in any company, intellectual or athletic. As yet, the world did not know that his abilities were matched by a ruthless selfishness. He seemed a brilliant and charming boy, frank-hearted and open-handed, with just the carelessness becoming to his age: the very reverse of the old king as men thought of him in his later years, sordid, crafty, griping. The reign of Empsons and Dudleys was at an end; the approach to the new king’s favour was to be through very different avenues. To have been in the black books of Henry VII. was no reason for fearing Henry VIII.

More prospered rapidly in his profession, and had no desire to be drawn to Court or into the whirl of politics. He was very soon appointed to the important office of Under-Sheriff in the City, and his private practice was ere long bringing him a very substantial income. Also, to his great satisfaction, the expectation of a more cheerful _régime_ in England was bringing Erasmus back again--there had been one flying visit in the interval--to write the _Encomium Moriae_ under More’s own roof, and still further to enrich and stimulate that congenial intellectual society in which More himself had been living ever since Colet had taken up his duties as Dean of St. Paul’s.

But however little ambitious More might be, his talents were too conspicuous to permit of his being left alone. In 1515, the commercial war with Flanders--an outcome of the foreign complications in which Henry VIII. had become involved--was embarrassing both countries so much that there was a strong desire for adjustment. An embassy was to be sent, with Cuthbert Tunstall at its head. The merchants of London desired to be represented; they wanted More to represent them; Wolsey, now supreme, acceded; More was attached to the embassy, and the abilities he displayed marked him out as a man fitted for the king’s service. For a time More resisted; but his masterly conduct of a case in which he was appointed as counsel for the Pope (in respect of a ship which the Crown claimed as forfeit) caused Henry to put renewed pressure on him. In 1518, he had become a courtier in his own despite. This, by the way, may have some bearing on the fact that in that year his father was elevated to the judicial Bench.

Some years earlier, More’s domestic life had suffered: his first wife dying in 1512 and leaving him with four little children on his hands. To provide the orphans with a mother, he took to himself a second wife, some years older than himself; a kindly conventional soul, as it would seem, who quite understood that her husband was a very clever man, but was eternally puzzled by his disregard of worldly considerations, and hopelessly confused by the whimsical irony with which he loved to meet her “Tilly vally, Sir Thomas,” when he had been doing something peculiarly exasperating from her point of view. She mothered his children, and himself as much as he would let her; and never succeeded in disturbing his humorous equanimity, though her own must have been everlastingly ruffled.

The embassy to the Netherlands sealed More’s fate, by forcing him into political life. It is also intimately associated with the one great original literary work produced in England in the first half of the sixteenth century: a work which established the fame of its author as a political thinker of the highest rank, in spite of the intentionally fantastic form in which it was cast.

THE UTOPIA

Throughout More’s life, revolutionary forces had been at work in the political, the intellectual, and the religious world; but as yet they had not concentrated in any volcanic explosion. At present, More’s most intimate associates stood in the very forefront of the most advanced school, and his “Utopia” was to make his position beside them as conspicuous to the world as it was assured in fact. He had taken to Greek, in spite of his anxious parent, like a duck to water: his affinity to the Platonic Socrates is obvious. John Colet was his guide, philosopher and friend; and the downright reactionaries, like the Bishop of London, had vain hankerings to suppress Colet as a dangerous heretic. He was the chosen intellectual mate of Erasmus, who had done or was doing more than any man living, to rid men’s minds of the shackles of the old scholastic formalism. The grosser popular superstitions, the worship of the letter and neglect of the spirit, the pursuit of worldly advancement by the successors of the apostles, were constant subjects for pulpit castigations by the one friend, and the lively and scathing mockery of the other. The mediæval theory that war is a pastime for the ambitions of princes was vigorously denounced by both. In all these things More was with them heart and soul; and he had already given audacious indication of his belief that the function of government is to seek the good not of the governors but of the governed, when he incurred the displeasure of Henry VII. in 1504. This progressive attitude of mind found its complete expression in the fantasy of Utopia.

The notion of constructing an imaginary Commonwealth under ideal conditions on ideal lines was of course derived straight from Plato’s Republic. That any existing State could be reformed into the semblance of such a Commonwealth by the fiat of legislators, neither Plato nor More ever dreamed. Neither the Republic nor the Utopia is in the nature of one of those paper Constitutions whose devisers would fain impose them in all their logical perfection upon recalcitrant nations. They aim at setting forth those fundamental principles which must indeed lie at the root of all healthy forms of government, but must also inevitably materialise into different shapes under differing conditions. The reproach that such schemes are not practical, which is damning to a paper Constitution, is here wholly irrelevant. They were never meant to be practical. Sir Galahad is not a practical model for the British citizen, who would take warning from the career of the Knight of La Mancha. Yet the conception of Sir Galahad is worthy of serious contemplation by the British citizen, who may therefrom derive not a little practical direction in the conduct of his life. To condemn the presentation of avowed ideals as unpractical, is merely to display a complete misapprehension of the meaning and use of ideals.

More, however, did not derive his method from Plato. The Athenian started by looking for the logical principles on which a State should be constructed, and built it, storey by storey. The Englishman imagined his State already complete and expounded the finished structure; taking example by other myths than the Republic. With happy ingenuity, he made use of a suggestion from the records of the voyages of Amerigo Vespucci to locate his dream-city in realms which some of that eminent traveller’s company might have visited, alone of Europeans. In similarly happy vein, he utilised his embassy to the Netherlands to provide an introduction, the form of which was doubtless suggested by Platonic precedent, though it is in no sense an imitation. The characterisation of the persons whose conversation is reported is not unworthy of the master.

The work is in two parts: the account of Utopia itself, and this preliminary book, which introduces the traveller Hythloday, with his criticisms on European politics in general, and the state of England in particular. This, More would have us believe, is the way in which a foreign Odysseus having “viewed the cities and marked the ways of many a People” would judge the institutions on which the Englishman prided himself. The suggestion that he wished to make himself safe by attributing those criticisms to some one else is hardly tenable. It does not appear that any one ever suspected Hythloday of having had a more material existence than Lemuel Gulliver after him. The intention is simply to dispose the reader’s mind so as to accept the verisimilitude of what he knows to be a fiction; the intention of every dramatic artist. Reason tells you that you are sitting in a theatre and watching actors behind the footlights. Imagination tells you that real events are going on before your eyes. If imagination fails, tragedy becomes burlesque, and comedy silliness. The description of Utopia appeals with tenfold force when your imagination accepts it as a place which a real human traveller has seen; and the illusion is only possible when the real human traveller has been convincingly presented. Raphael Hythloday is as real as Robinson Crusoe. But there is no reason to suppose that More wanted any one to think that Hythloday had an address in Antwerp--as Peter Giles says, “Some ... for that his minde and affection was altogether set and fixed upon Utopia, say that he hathe taken his voyage thetherwards agayne.” “No-where land” is the unsubstantial resting-place of the non-material but convincing traveller.

Similarly, by putting his criticisms on English affairs into the mouth of a foreign observer, from whose lips they come with a perfect fitness, the artist procures for them an attention and consideration which would be refused if they were being thought of as the criticisms of an Englishman vilifying his own country. Again, the illusion is needed only till the required effect is produced, namely, recognition of the validity of the criticism.

The illusion is created with subtle skill. More relates how he was sent on the Netherlands embassy, with various references to his associates, and the actual facts of that episode in his career, and tells how his (real) friend, Peter Giles of Antwerp, introduced the traveller Hythloday--an interesting person who had voyaged to those lands of which Europeans as yet knew exceedingly little and imagined an infinite deal. More draws him out, and extracts from him his impression of England, where he had visited Cardinal Morton, of the state of Europe in general, and finally, by way of contrast, of that remote and unknown State of Utopia, which has opened his eyes to what lies at the root of so much that is unsatisfactory in the realms of Christendom. Thus More is enabled to win interested attention to his own criticism of the social and political conditions prevalent, and his own political philosophy. Whatever the latter may be, the former is as practical as possible.

The picture given of the world in which men were actually living and moving, and pursuing their business or their pleasure, is vivid and impressive. Moreover, its truth is borne out by all other evidence. It is the work of a keen and humorous observer; and the analysis of the causes of the pervading evils is unerring. It was no doubt wise of More to antedate the description by a score or so of years, referring it to Cardinal Morton’s days; but in 1515, every evil depicted had become even more marked--and, it may be said, continued to increase progressively until the reign of Elizabeth, the same causes continuing to operate, with the addition of others which intensified the effects. Every rising in the reigns of Henry VIII., of Edward VI., and of Mary, whatever its ostensible ground, bears unmistakeable signs that the agricultural depression with its attendant evils was a secondary, if not the primary cause.

It would be too much to expect that the remedies More recommended should have been equally above criticism. Economic science was in its earliest infancy; in spite of experience, no one had begun to suspect the inefficacy of legislation in certain directions, and there are plenty of people who still believe that natural forces can be regulated by statute. In no single respect was any thinker of his times in advance of Sir Thomas More in these matters. But in many respects he was in advance not only of the foremost of his contemporaries, but even of current opinion and practice three hundred years later.

Thus, after describing the prevalence of thieving and robbery, he points to idleness as its cause, but dwells emphatically on the distinction between the idleness which is of choice and that which is enforced by lack of employment. Half the thieves would be honest labourers if they had the chance. The maintenance or development of industries which provide employment would be an effective cure; but instead of seeking a cure, the authorities fall back on punishment. But the severity of the law, instead of checking the minor misdemeanours, converts the pickpocket into a dangerous robber who--having no worse penalty to fear for the graver offence--resorts to violence without hesitation: so that the system regularly manufactures the worst ruffianism.

The instability and disorganisation of industry produced by what we now call “corners,” has its prototype in the “engrossing” and “forestalling,” by which wealthy men make themselves monopolists. The inevitable tendency of capital to flow in dividend-producing, not philanthropic, channels, is foreshadowed by the steady conversion by wealth-seeking landlords of arable land into sheep-runs; a process which left much of the rural population without work, wages, food, or home. Incidentally it may be noted that, while modern historians are disposed rather to dwell on the substitution of greedy laymen for the monasteries as landlords as one of the later causes of this particular trouble, More expressly includes “certeyn abbottes, holy men no doubt,” in his denunciation thereof. He may, however, mean no more than that even the Church was not exempt from this reproach. In dealing with this economic tendency for capital to seek the most lucrative channel, More made the universal mistake of his day in believing that it could be effectively restrained by Acts of Parliament.

In a vein no less practical, and no less opposed to the conventional ideas of the time, and with a still more playful seriousness, the traveller discourses of high politics and finance as they were debated in the Cabinets of Europe, with the aggrandisement and enrichment of monarchs as the one end in view. “‘This myne advyce, maister More,’ says he, ‘how think you it would be harde and taken?’ ‘So God helpe me, not very thankefully’ quod I.’”

By this discussion, the way is prepared for Hythloday to favour his company with an account of the remarkable polity which he found in Utopia (a State as to the whereabouts of which More subsequently writes in anxious inquiry to Peter Giles, who answers in the like vein of pretended regret at being unable to answer the question). This account occupies the second book, forming about two-thirds of the whole work.

In this fantasy, practicality vanishes at the outset. Such are the defences, natural or artificial, of this most favoured island, that any would-be invader is doomed to certain destruction, while the country produces everything that man requires for comfort. It needs no army and no navy, self-defence and self-assertion being equally superfluous: its relations with foreign States are purely complimentary. The Utopians make no foreign leagues. Where the bonds of goodwill are not sufficient to maintain friendly relations, nations enter upon leagues, but only to desert them at the first call of interest. Such is the strange conviction of the Utopians, though they had not themselves experienced the kaleidoscopic permutations and combinations of Ferdinand the Catholic, Maximilian, Louis XII., Henry VII., Julius II., and the Venetians. If by any chance they find it necessary to go to war, there is a convenient breed of fighting men in a country not too far away, who can always be hired for the purpose.

Being thus preserved from the creation of a military caste, while universal education has prevented knowledge from being concentrated in a priestly caste, it has been easy to prevent the development of any sort of privileged class through the accumulation of private property, which is prohibited. Hence, in Utopia, communism is practicable, and the whole system is as a matter of course communistic, though the principle is not extended to the relations between the sexes. Having arrived at their religion not through the Christian Revelation, but by Reason, any religious views are tolerated which are not manifestly anti-social. It is a corollary of these conditions that government is in the hands of elected magistrates, who have neither class interests nor personal interests to deflect them from their proper function of ruling with a single eye to the interests of the whole people. The possibility that sectarian interests might have developed as a disturbing factor does not seem to have presented itself; perhaps, where no religious views might be aggressively expressed or repressed, no strife of sects was to be feared.

In every direction, of course, the manners and customs of the Utopians suggest that the manners and customs of the English are susceptible of improvement. They take a philosophic view of the pleasures of life, reckoning the gratification of animal appetites exceedingly low in practice as well as in theory. They have no lust of gold and jewels. They have no craving for display, for gambling, for the baser forms of sport. On the other hand, they appreciate the value of sanitation. There is no idleness, since every one is required to do his share of work, but there is ample leisure for all; instead of one half of the population having too much, and the other half too little, to do. Thus they can enjoy in abundance those rational pleasures in which they take a true delight, abiding in health and wealth.