About Sir Thomas More - Page 2

One may question if such scepticism is in itself
unusual, whether any large proportion of great statesmen, great
ecclesiastics and administrators have escaped phases of destructive
self-criticism of destructive criticism of the principles upon which
their general careers were framed. But few have made so public an
admission as Sir Thomas More. A good Catholic undoubtedly he was, and
yet we find him capable of conceiving a non-Christian community
excelling all Christendom in wisdom and virtue; in practice his sense
of conformity and orthodoxy was manifest enough, but in his "Utopia" he
ventures to contemplate, and that not merely wistfully, but with some
confidence, the possibility of an absolute religious toleration.

The "Utopia" is none the less interesting because it is one of the most
inconsistent of books. Never were the forms of Socialism and Communism
animated by so entirely an Individualist soul. The hands are the hands
of Plato, the wide-thinking Greek, but the voice is the voice of a
humane, public-spirited, but limited and very practical English
gentleman who takes the inferiority of his inferiors for granted,
dislikes friars and tramps and loafers and all undisciplined and
unproductive people, and is ruler in his own household. He abounds in
sound practical ideas, for the migration of harvesters, for the
universality of gardens and the artificial incubation of eggs, and he
sweeps aside all Plato's suggestion of the citizen woman as though it
had never entered his mind. He had indeed the Whig temperament, and it
manifested itself down even to the practice of reading aloud in company,
which still prevails among the more representative survivors of the Whig
tradition. He argues ably against private property, but no thought of
any such radicalism as the admission of those poor peons of his, with
head half-shaved and glaring uniform against escape, to participation in
ownership appears in his proposals. His communism is all for the
convenience of his Syphogrants and Tranibores, those gentlemen of
gravity and experience, lest one should swell up above the others. So
too is the essential Whiggery of the limitation of the Prince's
revenues. It is the very spirit of eighteenth century Constitutionalism.
And his Whiggery bears Utilitarianism instead of the vanity of a
flower. Among his cities, all of a size, so that "he that knoweth one
knoweth all," the Benthamite would have revised his sceptical theology
and admitted the possibility of heaven.

Like any Whig, More exalted reason above the imagination at every point,
and so he fails to understand the magic prestige of gold, making that
beautiful metal into vessels of dishonour to urge his case against it,
nor had he any