To the eye of More the whole world was in dissolution and decay, and side by side with the misery and oppression which he has described in the first book of the “Utopia,” he places in the second book the ideal State which by the help of Plato he had constructed. The times were full of stir and intellectual interest. The distant murmur of the Reformation was beginning to be heard. To minds like More’s, Greek literature was a revelation: there had arisen an art of interpretation, and the New Testament was beginning to be understood as it had never been before, and has not often been since, in its natural sense. The life there depicted appeared to him wholly unlike that of Christian commonwealths, in which “he saw nothing but a certain conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of the Commonwealth.” He thought that Christ, like Plato, “instituted all things common,” for which reason, he tells us, the citizens of Utopia were the more willing to receive his doctrines.[1] The community of property is a fixed idea with him, though he is aware of the arguments which may be urged on the other side.[2] We wonder how in the reign of Henry VIII., though veiled in another language and published in a foreign country, such speculations could have been endured.
He is gifted with far greater dramatic invention than anyone who succeeded him, with the exception of Swift. In the art of feigning he is a worthy disciple of Plato. Like him, starting from a small portion of fact, he founds his tale with admirable skill on a few lines in the Latin narrative of the voyages of Amerigo Vespucci. He is very precise about dates and facts, and has the power of making us believe that the narrator of the tale must have been an eye-witness. We are fairly puzzled by his manner of mixing up real and imaginary persons; his boy John Clement and Peter Giles, the citizen of Antwerp, with whom he disputes about the precise words which are supposed to have been used by the (imaginary) Portuguese traveller, Raphael Hythloday. “I have the
- ↑ “Howbeit, I think this was no small help and furtherance in the matter, that they heard us say that Christ instituted among his, all things common, and that the same community doth yet remain in the Tightest Christian communities.”—“Utopia,” English Reprints, p. 144.
- ↑ “These things (I say), when I consider with myself, I hold well with Plato, and do nothing marvel that he would make no laws for them that refuse those laws, whereby all men should have and enjoy equal portions of riches and commodities. For the wise man did easily foresee this to be the one and only way to the wealth of a community, if equality of all things should be brought in and established.”—“Utopia,” English Reprints, pp. 67, 68.
