THE ENGLISH UTOPIA
THE
ENGLISH UTOPIA
By
A. L. MORTON
“Ihe land where the sun shines on both sides of the hedge.”
Wes/ Couniry Proverb,
19Z2
LAWRENCE & WISHART LTD
LONDON
Prinitil tn Crteat Dr t tain by 'T'he Camelot Press JLtd.y London and Southamp\,on.
TO
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
INTRODUCnON 9
I. POOR man’s heaven II
1. The Land of Cokaygne z. The History of Cokaygne
ri. THE ISLAND OF TIIF. SAINTS 35
1. More the Humanist
2. Mote the Communist
III. REVOI.tJTION AND COtINTER -RKVOI.UTION 60
I. New Atlantis
2. The Real and the Ideal Commonwealth
3. Utopia and the Reaction
IV. REASON IN DESPAIR 86
1. The End of Cokaygne
2. The Bourgeois Hero reaches Utopia
3. Gulliver’s Progress
4. Berington and Paltock
V. REASON IN REVOLT II4
1. Political Justice
2. The Utopian Socialists
3. The Book of the Machines
VI. THE DREAM OF WILLIAM MORRIS I49
1. News from Boston
2. News from Nowhere
3. Laying the Spectre
VII. YESTERDAY AND TO-MORROW 1 83
1. Cellophane Utopia
2. The Machine-wrfeckers
3. The Last Phase
|
TAIUJIECE. COKAYGNE |
FANTASY |
214 |
|
APPENDIX. THE LAND |
OF COKAYGNE |
217 |
|
BIBLIOGRAPHY |
223 |
|
|
INDH4 |
227 |
INTRODUCTION
This book is a story of two islands — ^the Island of Utopia and the Island of Britain. These islands have parallel histories which help to explain each other, and that is what I have tried to make thenj do. For Utopia is really the island which people thought or hoped or sometimes feared that the Britain of their day might presently become, and their thou ire affected not only by the books they had read and the ideas with which they were familiar, but by what was going on in the real world about them, by the class they belonged to and by the part that class was playing and wanted to play in relation to other classes.
I have called it the hnslish^ and not the British, Utopia merely because the Utopias that have come my way have in fact been English and not Scottish, Irish or Welsh. Swift is only a partial exception to this generalisation. And I have been happy to con- fine myself to the Utopia of this one country because our literature is peculiarly rich in such books. This, I think, is mainly because of the very early development of bourgeois society here, and the classic form which that development took, so that linglish political thinkers had a peculiar pride in our history and felt a special duty to the world. This English pride sometimes takes the form of an odious smugness, and wc shall discover that smugness is one of the vices which Utopia was least successful in elimin- ating, but sometimes it is large and generous, the desire of a man who is on to a good thing to share it with his neighbours. So here, one of the main motives of the makers of utopias is the desire to present their con<'eptions of democracy, of social living, of a true commonwealth, in the most popular, most acceptable way. I have “delivered my conception in a fiction, as a mote mannerly way,” wrote Samuel Hartlib of his Macaria.
A second reason for the richness of the English Utopia is the simple one that England is an island. For it is always easier to imagine anything in proportion as it resembles what wc arc or know, and it is as an island that we always think of Utopia. The fact that ijn island is self-contained, finite, and may be remote, gives it just the qualities we require to set our imagination to work. True we shall find utopias underground, under the sea, surrounded by mountains in the heart of Africa or Asia, even on another planef or perh^s remote in time rather than space.
lO THE ENGLISH UTOPIA
nevertheless the vast majority of utopias are still to be found on islands.
The English Utopia is so vast a field that I have not often been tempted to stray beyond it. But here and there I have done so, when this seemed necessary in the interests of perspective. 1 could not, for example, discuss Morris properly without saying some- thing of Bellamy, nor could the French Utopian Socialists be altogether ignored.
Similarly, k"* not felt mjself too strictly bound by my definition of Uto^... as an imaginary country described in a work of fiction with the object of criticising existing s(^ciety. Some such definition was necessary to keep my book within reasonable bounds, and it excludes from consideration both attempts to found Utopian communities and works in which the clement of fiction is absent. Yet something had to be said of CJocKvin, Owen and Winstanley, and in some of the books 1 discuss tlic element of social criticism has been reduced to very small proportions. Samuel Butler once defined definition as “the enclosing of a wilderness of ideas within a wall of words,*’ and it would be a poor thing if 1 could not now and again turn my back on my wilderness to take a look over the wall at other men’s gardens. All ihe same, a discussion of such figures as \V instanlcy and Owen at a length at all ))rop(^rtionatc to their importance would haAc turned this book into something quite different from cither the tiling I planned or the thing it has grown into. So I have contented myself wilh, in the one case, a bare reference, and, in the other, an outline cut down to the minimum, though 1 am fully aw are that this course will satisfy nobody.
]\*rhaps a note on the wT)fd Utojna might be helpful. It comes from two Cireek words meaning “No place” and w^as adopted by Sir Thomas More as the name of his ideal commonwealth. From this it has been extended to cover all imaginary countries as well as books written about them. Here 1 use Utopia when I refer to the book by Mcjre, Utopia wdicn I am referring to an imaginary country, and utopia when 1 am referring to a book about such a country. The distinction between the second- and third uses is convenient, but not always easy to draw m practice, and anyone who took the trouble to look for them woulcl prob- ably find inconsistencies on tliis matter in the following pages. Clare, A. L, Morton.
CIIAPIIR T
POOR MAN^S IIEAVFN
0 see VC not \on nariow road.
So thick beset ^1* thorns and briers?
1 hat IS the Path of Kit^htcousncss,
Ihcmt^h after it but tew incjuircs. 4
And see not >on hi aid, braid load,
'I hat lies across the lily k\tn^
That IS the Path i>t ^ ickcdncss.
Though some call it the Road to llc.ucn.
And see not ^on botin\ road 'J hat winds ahou* the tcrnic Lac-^
*I hit Is the Hold to tail I Ifland,
\\ here thou and I this nit»hi maun gac
Old Ballad Fiomas the Khymtr,
T. The lutU'l of Cokavffte
IN the beginning Utopia is an image of dcsiie. Later it grows more comj)lcx and \aiious, and may become an elaborate means of expressing social eriticism and satire, but it will always be based on something that somebody actually wants. The history of Utopia, therefore, wilJ reflext the conditions of life and the social aspirations of classes and itidividuals at different times. The specific character of the land is reported varyingly according to the taste of the indivieiual writer, but behind these vrariations is a continued modification that follows the normal course of historical development: the Irnglisli Ulcjpia is, as it were, a mirror image, more or less distorted, of the historical England. Poets, prophets and philosophers have made it a vehicle for delight and instruction, but before the poets, tlie prophets and the philoso- phers there were the common people, with their wrongs and their pleasures, their memories and their hopes. It is just, therefore, that the first chapter of this book should be given to the Utopia of the folk. It is the first in time, the most universally current and the most enduring, and it gives us a standard of values against which all its Successors can be judged.
The Utopia of the folk has many names and disguises. It is the EnglishXIokaygne and the French Coquaigne. It is Pomona and Hy Brasil, Venusb«rg and the Country of the Young. It is Lubbcrland
12
THE ENGLISH UTOPIA
and SchlaraflFcnland, Poor Man’s Hea^xn and the Rock Candy Mountains. Brueghel, who of all the world’s great artists comes nearest to the common mind, has even painted it in a picture that has many of the most characteristic features: the roof of cakes, the roast pig running round with a knife in its side, the mountain of dumpling and the citizens who lie at their ease waiting for all good things to drop into their mouths. The ginger- bread house which Hansel and Gretel find in the enchanted wood belongs to the^ t ountry, and so, at the other end of the scale, does Rabelais’ Auuuyc de Theleme, whose motto is “Do what you will.” It reaches back into myth, it colours romance, there is hardly a corner of Europe in which it does not appear. It would be idle, therefore, to attempt to look for its origins in any single place or period, much less in any one poem or story. Instead, I propose to discuss one version, the early Fourteenth Qmtury English poem The J^nd of Cok^ygne^ and to work backward and forward from that point, finding parallels in myth and romance and tracing the development of the Cokaygne theme towards our own time.
This treatment is all the more suitable because this folk Utopia has preserved through the ages a remarkably constant character and all its main features arc to be found at their clearest in The Land of Cokaygne. It is a poem of nearly two hundred lines which describes an earthly and earthy paradise, an island of magical abundance, of eternal youth and eternal summer, of joy, fellow- ship and peace.
Literary textbooks, when they mention tliis poem at all, treat it cither as an anti-clerical satire or as a pleasant yyke at the expense of those who want everything for nothing. Anti-clcrical it certainly is, and no doubt it does intend to ridicule monastic gluttony and evil-living. Perhaps it may even be that the writer set out to use a familiar theme as a means of attacking current abuses. But if so, the theme quickly got out of hand, and the satire was swallowed up in the Utopia. After opening with a comparison between Cokaygne and Paradise very much to the advantage of the former:
“Though Paradis be miri and bright,
Cokaygne is of fairir sight.
What is ther in Paradis
Bot grasse and Sure and grene ris? .
POOR man’s heaven
^3
Ther nis halle, bure, no bcnchc,
Bot watir, manis thurst to qucnchc/’^
whereas in Cokaygne,
“Watir servitli thcr to no thing Bot to sight and to waiissing”^
the poet is quickly carried away w'ith the delights to be found. Only towards the end does he appear to remember his ostensible subject, in an amusing passage describing/ '"At sports, and even here one feels that condemnation is coii^idcrably tempered with something like admiration.
The first point of interest is the situation of the island:
“Fur in sec bi wxst of Spayngne Is a lond iJiote Cokaygne.”®
This westward placing clearly connects CoLaygne with the earthly paradise of Celtic mythology. Throughout the Middle Ages the existence of such a paradise was iirmly believed in, but the church always placed its paradise in the lust and strongly opposed the belief in a western paradise as a heathen superstuion. In vSpitc of this ecclesiastical opposition the belief persisted, kept alive by the frequent washing ashore on tlie Atlantic coasts of foreign wood, nuts and even, in a few cases, of canoes of Indian or Esquimau construction, driven to sea by utifavourable weather. So strong were these beliefs that in the form t>f St. Branden’s Isle the western paradise liacl ro be christianised and adopted by the Church itself, and t number of expeditions were sent out from Ireland and elsewhere in search of the Isle. Nevertheless, the fact that Cokaygne is a nr^/en/ island is an indication that the Cokaygne theme is of popular and pre-christian character, and the western placing may in itself be taken as one of the specifically anti- clerical features.
Further, Cokaygne has many of the characteristics of the pagan Island of Apples, or Pomona, where, as Baring-Gould says —
“all is plenty and the golden age ever lasts. Cows give tlieir
milk in such abundance that they fill large ponds in milking.
^ Though Paradise is merry and bright, Cokaygne is more beautiful. What is there in Paradise but grass and flowets and green boughs? , . . There is neither hall nor chamber nor bench, and nothing but water to quench man's thnst.
® VC atef serves there for no purpose except sight and washing.
® Far in the sea, fo the VC'cst of Spam, is a land called Cokaygne.
14
THE ENGLISH UTOPIA
There, too, is a palace all of glass, floating in the air and rccciv- * ing within its transparent walls the souls of the blessed.”
Or, to quote from an Irish description:
“milk flows from some of the rivulets, others gush with wine;
undoubtedly there are also streams of whisky and porter.”
These descriptions may be compared not only with th^ abundance to be found in C^’-aygne, but also with the pillars that —
* turned of criitale.
With har bas and capital e
(^f grene jaspc and rede corale,” ^
with the richness of precious stones and the windows of glass which turn into crystal whenever they ate needed. The palace or hill of glass, is, indeed, a regular feature of the earthly paradise in all mythologies.
Above all else, however, Cokaygne is the land where everything conics true. It is the Utopia of the hard-driven serf, the man for whom things are too difficult, for whom the getting of a bare living is a constant struggle. If this aspect j^redominates to the exclusion, with one exception to which I shall come presently, of any clear sense of the class stiuggle, this is not unnatural consider- ing the circumstances of the time. Of course there was a class struggle in the Middle Ages. There was oppression and exploit- ation, c>f an extremely harsh and naked character. There was a glaring contrast between the lives of the serfs and the lives of the gentry and rich clergy, and it is quite possible that part of the object of this poem was to point the contrast between serf and monk. Nevertheless we have also to remember the general poverty of the Middle Ages, the result of an extremely poor technique of production, which made available only a relatively small surplus after the bare needs had been provided for the working population.
Consequently, men were much more directly aware than they arc today of the tyranny of necessity, the essential hardness in the nature of things. Man was so far from being the master of his environment that he was always prone to feel ihat^it his master. He depended on the weather not only because bad weather is unpleasant, but because a bad season might mean absolute
^ The pillars are fashioned of cr\'stal, with their bases and capitals of gieen jasper and led coial.
POOR man’s HEAVtN I5
famine. And, under the very best conditions, long hours and a bare living were still a necessity from which he could see no possible way of escape. Even the overthrow of his masters, supposing that to have been possible, would not have released the serf from this compulsion to any appreciable extent. It was probably an advance that by the Fourteenth Century men were becoming const tous of this burden. By this time the period of migration ai*^ invasions, with its consequent breaking of society into small, self-contained units, was well over ^Co-opcrati(»n and the division of labour were extending to wi* ' ’} and, with
the growth of trade, towns were also growing and were winning a measure of local self-government. There was a slow but in the aggregate quite considerable ad\ancL in technique, and, in England at any rate, serfdom was in decline and its harsher features were becoming modified. As a result, what had fc^rmcrly been so universally endured without question or hope was at last beginning to be Iclt as a burden: the serf was beconung aware of his servitude and the Fourteenth (xntury was the great period of peasant insurrection.
C^ut of this situation, this begmnih^ of hope, springs 77v Land of Cokaygne. >X'ith<iut die hope h could scatcely ha\e arisen at all. If the hope had been stronger or better giounded it would not have taken shape as a fantasy, a grotesvjuc dream of a society wished for but not seen as an actual possibility, It is this fantastic quality which has led to it being rcgareled as a clumsy joke, and, indeed, it is easy enough (o ridicule the vision of the great abbey:
“Fleurcn cakes both the schinglcs alle.
Of chciehe, cloister, boure, and halle.
The pinnes both fat podinges.
Rich met to prLice^: and to kinges,”^
or the
‘‘rivers gret and fine Of oilc, mclk, honi, and wine,”** the
“gees irostid on the spitte Fleez to that abbai, God hit wot,
And gredith, ‘Gees al hote, al hotl’”®
1 AJl th» shiAgles of the church, the cloister, the chamljcr and hall arc made of flour cakes. The pinnacles aic of fat puddings, gland food for princes and kings.
2 Gtcat and splendid nvers of oil, milk, honey and wine.
® RoastccLgccse on spits, by God’s truth, fly to tha^ abbey crying out, “Ciecsc all hot, aU hot.”
l6 THE ENGLISH UTOPIA
and
“The levcrokcs that beth cuth,
Lightith adun to manis muth,
Idight in stu ful swithe wel,
Pudrid with gilofre and caneL”i
But is this, apart from the simplicity of its language, any more laughable than Malory’s account of the first appearance of the Grail:
“Then tA. . itercd into the hall the Holy Grail covered with white samite, and there was none might sec it, nor who bare it. And there was all the hall fulfilled with good odours, and every knight had such meats and drinks as he best loved in the world.”
In fact, in this side of Cokaygne we can see the fusion of the pre-chrisrian nature cults of abundance with the very practical needs and desires of the people, into a picture of a land whose happiness is none the less material and earthy for the grotesque form in which it is presented.
An especially interesting aspect of this abundance is the spice tree:
“The rote is gingevir and galingale The siouns beth al sedwale Trie maces belli the flure.
The rind, canel of swet odur,
'The frutc, gilofre of gode smakke.”^
This is not merely a pretty fancy. Spices were specially prized in the Middle Ages and even later because of the monotonous and unpalatable diet, especially in the winter. Owing to the difficulties of trade with the liast, they fetched prices which put them out of the reach of all but the rich, so that a plentiful supply of spices growing ready to hand would be a most desirable object to find in the I.and of Cokaygne.
This abundance of spices also, together with the four wells of “triaclc and halwei, of baum and ek piement”,® connect Cokaygne
^ Tasty larks fly down into men's mouths dressed in most exeq^ent stew and sprinkled with gillyflo>^cr and cinnamon.
^ I’he root is ginger and sweet cyperus, the shoots arc valetian, the ll<^wcrs choice nutmegs, the bark odorous cinnamon and the fruit sweet scented ‘gillyflower.
3 '1 riacle is medicine, halwci is healing water and piement is^ kind of wine.
POOR man's heaven
17
with yet another mythological feature, the Well of Youth or of Life, which flows through so many Earthly Paradises, eastern as well as western, and of which Sir John Mandeville writes:
*'And under that citie is an hyll that men call Polombe [Q)lombo] and thereof taketh the citie his name. And so at the fote of the same hill is a right faire and clere well, that hath a full good and sweete savoure, and it smelleth of all manner of sortes of spyce, and also at eche hour^' of the daye it changeth his savour diversely, and who d. on the daye
of that well, he is made hole of all manner sickness that he hathe. I have sometime dronke of that well, and methinketh yet that I fare the better; some call it the well of youth, for they that drinke thereof seme to be yong alway, and live without great sicknesse, and they say this well cometh from Paradise terreste, for it is so vertuous, and in this land groweth ginger, and thither come many good merchaunts for spaces.”
Not only is Cokaygne a land of plenty, it is a land where this plenty can be enjoyed without effort, and it is perhaps this characteristic more than any other which has infuriated the moral- ist and which was responsible for the disrepute into which Cokaygne presently fell. Yet it is clear that in a world where endless and almost unrewarded labour was the lot of the over- whelming majority, a Utopia which did not promise rest and idleness would be sadly imperfect. Idleness is, indeed, rather less stressed in The Land of Cokaygne than in some other versions, that of Brueghel, for example, and the modern Kock Candy Mountain. While, indeed, the larks alight ready dressed in the mouth, what is really insisted upon is that meat and drink can be had ‘‘withoute care, how, and swink”, that is, without the grinding and excessive labour that filled the whole life of the medieval serf.
And there is very much more in Cokaygne than gluttony and idleness. What is specially insisted on and most morally im- pressive is that it is a land of peace, happiness and social justice:
“A1 is dai, nis ther no nighte,
•Ther nis baret nother strif,
Nis ther no deth, ac ever lif;
Ther nis lac of met no cloth,
Thei^ nis man no womman wroth
i8
THE ENGLISH UTOPIA
A1 is commune to yung and old,
To stoute and sterne, mek and bold.”i
It is this social feeling, this sense of fellowship, which lifts Cokaygne out of the realm of the grotesque, or, rather, makes it one of those rare yet characteristic popular testaments in which the grotesque and the sublime unite to give a true and living picture of the mind of the common man. One is conscious here, as elsewhere, that the class feeling that is never directly voiced lies only just^^ the surface.
This feeling is Strengthened by the curious and ironical closing lines:
“Whose wyl com that lond to,
Ful gret penance he mot do:
Seven ycre in swin-is dritte He mote wade, wol ye i-witte,
A1 anon up to the chynne So he schal the londe winne.
Lordinges godc and hendc Mot ye never of world wend Fort ye stond to yure cheance.
And fulfil that penance.
That yc mote that lond ise And never more turne a-ghe.
Pray yc God, so mote it be Amen, per scinte charitc.”^
The meaning is clear enough: Cokaygne is, like the Kingdom of Heaven, harder for a rich man to enter than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. Only by seven years spent up to the chin in swine’s dirt — only, that is, by living the life of tlic most wretched and exploited serf, can a man find his way thither. And the specific address to the “Lordinges gode and hende,” though such dedications were, of course, common form, gives the point additional emphasis.
1 All is day, there is no night there, there is neither quarrelling nor strife, there is no death, but eternal life; there is no lack of food and clothes, and ncithi r man nor woman is angry. . . . All is common to young and old, to strong and seem, to meek and bold.
2 The man who wishes to come to that land must do very great penance. He must wade for seven years, no doubt about it, right up to the chin in swinc*s dirt to win his way there, Aly good, kind Lords, you will never go from the world unless you are prepared to endure and to fulfil that penance, so that you may see that land and never more return. Pray to God that it may be so, by holy charity.
POOR man’s heaven
19
This linking of social justice with abundance in Cokaygnc suggests an interesting parallel with the ancient tradition of classical stoicism, the most radical philosophy of the Greek and Roman world. Benjamin Farrington, in his essay on Diodorus Siculus, a Greek historian of the first century b.c., cites the passage in his Universal History which contains an account of the Stoic Utopia, “The Islands of the Sun”, a Utopia which certainly influenced Campanella’s City of the Sun (1623) and most probably More’s Utopia. i
Farrington points out that the sun “who dispenses his light and warmth equally upon all”, was closely connected in classical thought with the conception of justice:
“There is abundant evidence that in many circles, where the religion of the stars had blended with aspirations after a juster society, the sun was looked upon in a special sense as the dispenser of justice, the guarantor of fair-play, ihc redresser of grievances, the one who held the balance straight. ... In the third century B.C., the sun had become the centre of the millennial aspirations of the dispossessed among mankind. It was believed that at recurrent periods the sun-king would descend from heaven to earth to re-establish justice and make all men participators in a happiness without alloy.”
Such beliefs were especially encouraged by the Stoics. In the account of their Islands of the Sun given by Diodorus, apparently in the belief that he was describing a real country, we can recog- nise a number of the features we have already found to be characteristic of Cokaygnc. There is the magical abundance and perfect climate:
“The air of their land is perfectly tempered, for they live on the equinoctial line and are troubled neither by heat nor cold. Their fruits are in season all the year. . . . Their life is passed in the meadows, the land supplying abundant sustenance: for by reason of the excellence of the soil and the temperate air crops spring up of themsch^es bejond their needs.”
The sea round the islands is sweet to the taste, thus recalling the sweet springs of Cokaygne, and
“The water of their hot springs, which is sweet and whole- some, keeps its heat and never grows cold, unless cold water or wine is added.”
20
THE ENGLISH UTOPIA
The element of magical healing is present, too, in the form of an animal whose blood
“has a wonderful property. It immediately glues together a cut in any living body, and a hand or other part that has been cut off can be fastened on again by it while the cut is fresh.”
All this is combined with an unbreakable social solidarity:
“Since thjgj*" is no jealousy among them there is no civil strife, and fll \ iteep their love of unity and concord throughout life.”
What I am suggesting is not, of course, any direct or conscious borrowing by the medieval folk-poets, but the persistence of a tradition, and, perhaps, of a common stock of legend upon which they and the Stoics all ultimately drew.
In the same stream of thought were the political thc(')ries widely held in the earlier Middle Ages, even by those in authority, that a right society was one with goods held in common and with- out classes or oppressive state apparatus. Government and private property was considered to have been the inevitable result of the Fall and of man’s sinful state. Such ideas were related to those about a Golden Age and perhaps embody memories of primitive communism. After the thirteenth century, and with the growing influence of Aquinas the official theorists began to argue that private property and class divisions were a natural feature of human society. Nevertheless, the old ideas about communism being the true form of society persisted, and, among the masses, took a form very diflerent from those official theories which had placed upon the sinfulness of man the blame for his inability to realise the ideal. We can see something of this in the preaching of John Ball and in the social character of the Land of Cokaygne.
There is a further development in the Cokaygne theme, not found in this particular version, though possibly hinted at in its closing lines, which is of peculiar sociological interest. This feature, pointed out by R. J. E. Tiddy in TAe Mummers* P/r/y, is the regular juxtaposition of the abundance theme wdth the theme of the reversal of the normal, of topsy-turveydom, as he calls it. This topsy-turveydom is another familiar topic of medieval popular art and literature, which delighted in such situations as the hawk being pursued by the heron, the sack dragging the ass to the mill or the fish hooking the fisherman. Often, too, it»takes the form of
POOR man’s heaven
21
rough verbal nonsense. In the Western-sub-Edge Mummers’ Play, for example, Beelzebub makes a long speech of this kind: *
went up a straight crooked lane. I met a bark and he
dogged at me. I went to the stick and cut a hedge I went of
the morroe about nine days after, picks up this jeid (dead) dog, romes my arm down his throat, turned him inside outwards, sent him c^own Buckle Street barking ninety yards long, and 1 followed after him.”
He is followed immediately by Jack Finney Wiiv>'procceds:
“Now my lads we come to the land of plenty, rost stones, plum puddings, houses thatched with pancakes, and little pigs running about with knives and forks stuck in their backs crying ^Who’ll eat me?’”
Similarly in the Ampleford Sword Dance:
“Fve travelled all the way fromIttiTitti, where there’s neither town nor city, wooden chimes, leather bells,^ black puddings for bell ropes, little pigs running up and down the streets, knives and forks stuck in their backsides crying ‘God save the King.’ ”
Once again, the essentially significant point has to be looked for beneath the jest, and wc have a clue that leads straight to the rebellious core of the popular thought of the time. Two strands, formally opposed but in practice complementary, run through the revolutionary thought of the Mid^c Ages. One is that of equality: “When Ad^’m delved and Eve span, who then was the gentleman?” The other is that of upheaval and reversal, of the world turned upside down: “He hath put down the mighty from their seats and hath exalted the liumblc and meek.” It is the second of these strands which historically has naturalised itself in the Land of Cokaygne,
The connection here shows itself in the various popular festivals of which the Feast of Fools may be taken as the type. Strictly, the Feast of Fools was a religious affair in which the subdcacoris and others in minor orders in certain churches took control of the ceremonies for a day, while the usual authorities were relegated to a subordinate position. There can be no doubt, hovrever, that this was also a time of more general licence and merry-making, atid that there were other similar festivals of a more exclusively •secular nature like the crowning of the Lord of
22
THE ENGLISH UTOPIA
Misrule, referred to by Philip Stubbes in his Anatonm of Abuses (1583). Usually the Feast of Fools began on the eve of the Feast of the Circumcision (New Yearns Day — ^in itself a significant detail, since the New Year has always been a time when the idea of making a change or a new start is powerful). ^ The signal was the reaching at evensong of the verse from the Magnificat already quoted — He hath put down the mighty. At this point the choir and the minor orders would take the bit between their teeth. The verse, always ^an of revolt, was repeated over and over again. A master of ccfemonics, known by varying titles such as the King of Fools, the Lord of Misrule or the Boy Bishop, was elected. Mass was celebrated with all sorts of ludicrous additions: an ass would be led into the church with a rider facing its tail, and braying take the place of the responses at the most solemn parts: censing was parodied with black puddings: the clergy turned their garments inside out, changed garments with women or adopted animal disguises: soon the excitement and licence would spread beyond the church throughout the town or city.
The higher ecclesiastical authorities tried for centuries without great success to suppress or even tone down these proceedings. Professor R. K. Chambers quotes a letter from the Theological Faculty of the l^niversity of Paris which both expresses the ofTicial view and gives a lively picture of what happened:
^‘Priests and clerks may be seen wearing masks and mons- trous visages at the hours of office. They dance in the choir, dressed as women, pandars or minstrels. The) sing wanton songs. They cat black puddings at the horn of the altar while the celebrant is saying mass. They play at dice there. They cense with stinking smoke from the soles of old shoes. They run and leap through the church without shame. Finally they drive about the town and its theatres in shabby traps and carts; and rouse the laughter of their fellows and the bystanders in infamous performances, with indecent gestures and verses scurrilous and unchaste.^’
Professor Chambers summarises the general character of the Festival by saying:
“The ruling idea of the feast is the inversion of status, and the performance, invariably burlesque, by the inferior clergy of
^ It IS worth noting that the ofhcial New Year at this time — Mai chi 5 th — brings us close to another similar Festival, that of All Fools’ Day. '
POOR MAN^S HEAVEN
23
functions properly belonging to their betters. . . . Now I would point out that this inversion of status so characteristic of the Feast of Fools is equally characteristic of folk festivals. What is Dr. Frazer’s mock king but one of the meanest of the people chosen out to represent the real Idng as the priest victim of a divine sacrifice, and surrounded, for the period of the feast, in a naive attempt to outwit heaven, with all the paraphernalia of kingship?”
When we remember that these folk-rites were ^jranned to ensure favourable weather and an abundance of food, their connection with the Cokaygne theme is easily explained. They link similarly with the Roman Kalends and Saturnalia, 1 themselves relics of the pre-classical religious practices of the country people, in which there was in the same way a time of general licence, and whose most striking feature was the temporary equality of slaves with their masters. Once njore, rites and customs possibly prehistoric survive because they still correspond to existing realities, and supply the mould in which the revolutionary feeling of a later age expresses itself.
It may be argued that in these fantasies, Cokaygne dreams and symbolic festivals, this revolutionary feeling was canalised, diverted and rendered harmless. It would be truer to say that this was a period in which revolution was not objectively possible though popular riots were, of course frequent, and that they were the means of keeping alive hopes and aspirations that might otherwise have dic^^ away, and which at a later date would prove of immcnvsc value. The same may be said about the closely related witch cult. Here, also wc have a surviving pre-christian religion, driven underground and forced to exist secretly, yet claiming countless adherents. The cult appears to have been highly organised and at times to have served as a focus for move- ments of political revolt, though, in the nature of things, the direct evidence here must be cxtremJy meagre. V^liat is certain is that periodical meetings or Sabbats were held, at which the main features were an clabotate and lavish, if rude, feast and ceremonies that were a deliberate reversal of the normal, as, for example* in the dances performed anti-clockwise and in the inverted mimicry of Christian ritual. It should be remembered,
^ Saturn was the ancient ruler of the Gods, whose reign was a time of peace and UJiiveisal abundance Sefoie the development of classes^
24 THE ENGLISH UTOPIA
also, that dancing of any kind was discouraged by the priests as something devilish and pagan, and but for the wide di&sion of the witch cult might have been stamped out altogether. It is by no means impossible that the account of Cokaygne may be in part at any rate a veiled description of the Sabbat, which was probably not, in the earlier times at least, the horrific and diabolical affair which it was represented as being by ecclesiastical writers. Such speculations lead us far into the land of conjecture, however. We must remembiP^^tat nothing survives to give us the point of view of the witches except a few chance answers in cross-examination which have found their way into the accounts of their trials.
2. The History of Cokaygie
Summing up the account given in the last section, we can say that the Land of Cokaygne embodies the profoundest feelings of the masses, expresses them in an extremely concrete and earthy fashion, and is related to the main theme of popular mythology on the one hand and the main stream of popular revolt on the other. It is really quite central, and could hardly have failed to receive much more attention than has been given to it, if it had not from the start been constantly ridiculed or ignored by the learned and respectable. The literary references to it are few and indirect, and always it is treated as something too childish or too disgusting to be worthy of serious attention. Even Shakespeare, whose broad human understanding brings him so close to the mind of the people, and who puts into the mouth of Gonzalo (Tewpes^y Act II, Scene i) what appears to be a sympathetic if rather classicised account of Cokaygne, hardly treats it as a serious matter and allows Gonzalo to be laughed out of countenance for a pedlar of old wives’ tales. Ben Johnson in Bartholomew Fair is openly contemptuous: and we should note that Cokaygne has now become Lubberland — the country of idle good-for-nothings — an attitude that may be connected with the new respect for diligence and the accumulation of wealth that accompanied the rise of the bourgeoisie. Dame Purecraft, in the authentic accents of Mr. Bumble, rebukes Littlewit for wanting pork, to which he replies:
‘‘Good Mother, how shall we find a pig if we don’t look about for’t? Will it run off o’ the spit into our mouths, think you? as in Lubberland and cry we we^^
POOR man’s heaven
25
Two other examples of this contemptuous attitude may be given from the utopian writers of the seventeenth century. The fest is from Mundus Alter et Idem, written by Bishop Hall, probably about 1600, and published in 1607. Though in Latin, it was a popular work which had more than one imitator and which was translated by John Heeley in 1608. It is from this translation that I shall quote. The book itself is of interest as being the first of the negative or satirical utopias, books in wliich the social criticism takes the form of describing in countries
those vices and follies the author would have lis avoid. It des- cribes a voyage to Terra Australia and the discovery there of Crapulia, the land of excess. It is divided into five provinces: Pamphagoia, or Gluttons’ Land, Yvronia, or Drunkards’ Land, Viraginia, where women rule, Moronia, or Fools’ Land — said to be the largest, the least cultivated and the most populous of all — and Lavernia, the Land of Rogues, most of 'v^hose inhabitants find a dishonest living at the expense of their neighbf^urs the Moron- ians. Nearby is situated Terra Sancta, marked on the accompany- ing map as ‘‘non adliuc satis cogiiita.”
In the main no doubt, Bishop Hail intended to satirise the fail- ings of his age, but there are also clear indications that a part of his intention was to portray a sort of anti-Cokaygne, to express the disgust felt by the cultivated mind of the comfortable churchman at the grossness of pojiuUr delusions, Tliis is evident in the chapters describing Pamphagoia, whose god is the great Omasius Gorgut or Gorbelly. Here:
“There arc ccrtainc creatures grown out of the earth in the shape of Lambes, which, being fast joyned unto the stalke they grow upon do notwiths^'anding cat up all the grassc about them . . . the fishes ... are naturally so ravenous and greedy that you can no sooner cast out your angle-hook among them but immediately . . . you shall have hundreds about the line, some hanging on the hooke, and rome on the string besides it, such is their pleasure to goe to the pot, such their delight to march in pompe from the dresser.”
There follows a series of revolting descriptions of the manners of the people, and the condition to which they arc brought by over-indulgence. So in Idleberg, which is but another name for Lubberland,
z6
THE ENGLISH UTOPIA
‘*The richest sort have attendants: one to open the master^s eyes gently when he awaketh: one to fanne a code ayre whilest he eateth, a third to put in his viands when he gapeth, a fourth to girdle his belly as it riseth and falleth, the master onley excr- ciseth but eating, digesting and laying out*”
And there is a real touch of horror in the account of the city of Marchpane, which:
“hath but vejp^few inhabitants of any years that have any teeth left: but all^^n^m i8 to the ^ravc, are the naturale heirs of stinking breaths.”
Mundus Alter et Idem is a vigorous and entertaining work which ranks quite high in the peculiarly English genre of the satirical utopia. Samuel Gott’s Nova Solyma^ on the other hand, is perhaps the most dreary and repellent utopia ever written. i Yet it does contain one passage that is really striking, the fable of Philomela. It describes a palace of pleasure, where guests are invited to a perpetual banquet, in the midst of which they arc suddenly precipitated into a sewer:
“There the remains of the banquets and the vomit of over- charged stomachs and other filthy excrements lay rotting, and with them the skeletons of those who by violence or disease had come to an untimely end or by hunger and cold had l^cen the victims of the cruellest usage. There was a horrid noise, too, of rattling chains, and the roar of wild beasts seizing their prey, and at your feet was a great, steep precipice, and below that a huge, impassable river, into which many of the wretched captives willingly drowned themselves, rather than suffer the prolonged torture of so horrible a fate, and the lacerations of the wild beasts.”
So, for the middle-class Puritan, ends the Earthly Paradise, in disgust, in unspeakable misery and in death.
TTiis kind of moral reprobation can be seen, too, at a much later date in Charles Kingsley’s The Water 'Babies (1863). He tells of the sad fate of the Doasyoulikes, who lived in the land of Readymade at the foot of the Happy-go-lucky Mountains:
“They sat under the flapdoodle-trees, and let the flapdoodle drop into their mouths; and under the vines, and squeezed the 1 See Chapter III, Section a..
POOR MAN*S HEAVEN
27
grapt juice down their throats; and, if any little pigs ran about ready roasted, crying, ‘Come and cat me,* as was their fashion in that country, they waited till the pigs ran against their mouths, and then took a bite, and were content, just as so many oysters would have been/*
For which shameful disregard of the Victorian Gospel of Work they arc visited with a progressive series of catastrophes and with ultimate extinction.
The people themselves have never share |;^tiese opinions. Whatever their betters might say they have continued to cherish the dream of Cokaygne. In song, in story and in play, the theme persisted, breaking only rarely into printed literature and then only in broadsheets and chapbooks circulating among the half- literate. The frequent references in the folk plays have been men- tioned already. Another appearance, for knowledge of which I am indebted to Jack Lindsay, is in a volume of Songs oj ihe hards of the Tjney published in 1849 bat containing poems written considerably earlier and sometimes cmployiilg themes obviously traditional. One poem has die foUowing passage:
“Aw gat in to sec Robin Hood,
Had two or three quairts wi John Nipcs, man;
And Wesley, that yence preached sac good.
Sat smokin’ and praisin’ the swipes, man:
“I.egs of mutton here grows on each tree,
Jack Nipcs said, and wasn’t mistaken —
When rainin’ tlierc’s such a bit spree.
For there comes down great fat sides o’ bacon.”
Whether Wesley had reaches ^ Cokaygne because or in spite of the excellence of his preaching is by no means clear. Another poem from the same collection says:
“As aw cam doon, aw passed the mcun,
An’ her greet burning t>iountains —
Her turnpike tc'xM aw found out seun,
Strang beer runs there in fountains.”
It is interesting to note that both these poems have as their subject the theme of the magical cure, especially since it is always in the part of tiie folk-plays dealing with the cure and the res- toration to life »f the dead hero that the Cokaygne passages occur.aN
28
THE ENGLISH UTOPIA
Here once more we find the link between the Cokaygne of popular tradition and the mythological Fortunate Isles with their fountain or well of perpetual youth. The same connection can be seen in one of the very few modern literary Cokaygne references, W. B. Yeats’ poem The Happy Townland. Here:
‘‘Boughs have their fruit and blossom At all times of the year;
Rivers arc running over Wli|!^'ed beer and brown beer.”
And, while the inhabitants enjoy themselves by fighting, every night:
“All that are killed in battle Awaken to life again.
It is lucky that their story Is not known among men.
For (), the strong farmers That would let the spade lie,
Their hearts would be like a cup That somebody had drunk dry.”
Yeats, who commonly looked for subject-matter to his native mythology, naturally approaches Cokaygne indirectly through the Celtic Earthly Paradise. Far more direct and definitely work- ing class in origin, and for both reasons more important for our purpose, are the numerous references in modem American folk songs and tales. The most complete Cokaygne pictures are in two songs. The Brg Rock Candy Mountains and Toor Man's Heaven. Superficially similar, these songs contain most of the usual Cokaygne features: the abundance of food, the miraculous streams, the eternal summer and the delight of idleness. Thus:
“In the Big Rock Candy Mountains All the cops have wooden legs,
And the bulldogs all have rubber teeth.
And the hens lay soft boiled eggs.^
1 In Bnieghers Schlaraffenland there is a boiled egg in a cup, runnihg about icady opened, with a spoon sticking out of the top. Obviously the makers of this song knew nothing of Brueghel, but the persistence of all these minute details is an indication of a clear and continuous verbal tradition of which we have'only acci- dental and disconnected evidence.
POOR man’s heaven
29
The farmers’ trees are full of fruit And the barns are full of hay,
Oh I’m bound to go, where there ain’t no snow.
Where the rain don’t fall, where the wind don’t blow.”
There:
“The little streams of alcohol Come ^-trickling down the rocks. . . .
There’s a lake of stew and of whisky too ” and: ^ -
‘‘There ain’t no short-handled shovels,
No axes, saws or picks,
I’m bound to stay where they sleep all day.
Where they hung the Turk that invented work,
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.”
Similarly:
“In Poor Man’s Heaven we’ll have our own way,
There’s nothing up there but good luck.
There’s strawbciry pie That’s twenty feet liigh
And whipped cream they bring in a truck. . . .
We’ll eat all wc please Off ham and egg trees.
That grow by the lake full of beer.”
The Cokaygne theme crops up in a variety of other forms and places. Among th(* Negroes, for example in one of the stories about John Henry, that mythological hero of so many legends in which the bounds of human possibility arc miraculously enlarged. In this one he find . a tree made of honey and another of flitter jacks:
“Well, John Henry set there an’ ct honey an’ flitterjacks, an’ after while when he went to git up to go, button pop off’n his pants an’ kill a rabbit mo’ ’n hundred ya’ds on other side o’ de tree. An’ so up jumped brown baked pig wid sack o’ biscuits on his back, an’ John Hciiry et him too.
“So John Henry gits up to go through woods to camp for supper, 'cause he ’bout to be late an’ he mighty hongry for his supper. John Henry sees lake down hill an’ thinks he’ll git him a iink o’ water, ’cause he’s thirsty, too, after eatin’ honey an’ flitterjacks ail’ brown roast pig an’ biscuits, still he’s hungry
30 THE ENGLISH UTOPIA
yet. An’ so he goes down to git drink water an’ finds lake ain’t nothin’ but lake o’ honey, an’ out in middle dat lake ain’t nothin’ but tree full o’ biscuits too.”
Again, there is the story of Jack*s Hunting Tr/ps^ a composite version made by Richard Chase from the narrations of a number of mountain story-tellers in Virginia. In the course of the tale, Jack (who is indeed our old friend Jack of Beanstalk) goes hunting along a river of honey, shaded by fritter trees, and little pigs coni^j^ut of the brush with a knife and iotk stuck in there backs, squealing to be eaten. ^
Here, I think, we can see something of the kind of way in which the Cokaygne theme crossed the Atlantic, and A. J^. Lloyd, to whom I am heavily indebted for information about its American versions, has suggested that the immediate ancestor of Tbe Big Kock Candy Mountains is a popular Norwegian song, with a very similar tune, which first appeared in print in 1853 and became a popular classic throughout Norway. In it the legendary character (Me Bull invites one and all to leave their miserable lives for the freedom of Oleana. Some of the verses of this song run roughly as follows:
“In Oleana, that’s where I’d like to be, and not dragging the chains of slavery in Norway.
“In Oleana they give you land for nothing, and the grain just pops out of the ground— it’s money for jam!
“The grain threshes itself in the granary, while I stretch at case in my bunk.
“And Munich beer, as good as Yetteborg can brew, runs in the creeks for the poor man’s delight.
“And brown roasted pigs leap about so prettily, asking politely if anyone would like ham.”
To the Norwegian peasant and fisherman the Earthly Paradise lay in America, to which thousands were emigrating throughout the Nineteenth Century: when the emigrant arrived he quickly found that this Utopia had existed only in the imaging tio.n. In life
^ Honey, another echo of the Middle Ages, \thcn sugar almost unktn>wii and honey greatly prized as the one substance available for sweetening. Perhaps the same kind of conditions utre found in outlying parts of the U.S.A. where die pioneers were largely self-supporting and imported sugar would also ht a luxury.
POOR man’s heaven 31
it was somclhing that had to be fought for or pushed away into a distant, fantastic. Never-never Land.i
It is startling to find the same thoughts and desires expressed in almost the same words in a new continent and after six cen- turies, in fourteenth century England and in the United States of the early twentieth, or, more probably in the late nineteenth century,'-* the one feudal, decentralised and almost entirely agricultural, die other a highly organised, industrial country with an advanced technique and with capitalism alrep^?^ reaching the stage of monopoly. Nevertheless, the U.S.A. altiiough the Fron- tier in the old sense had disappeared by the last decades of the nineteenth century, still contained vast areas incompletely opened up, Ginsequently there was a mass of migratory, unskilled labour, building railways and roads, digging canals and irrigation works, attached to no particular job but prepared to leave at short notice for any point in the Union uhcre there were n ports of good wages and plenty of work. And, at the same time, the battle with nature had not yet been won. While there was intense class exploitation, it was still often possible to feel, in the primitive hardness of the conditions of life, that the mass of the people were not only up against the rule of the rich but also against the inevitable oppression of natural forces. This is the common factor which may account for the reappearance in so many new forms of the Cokaygne theme.
Nevertheless, time does not stand still, and the theme reappears with significant modifications, which account not only for the differences between otlj Poor Man's Heaven and The Big Rock Candy Mountains and the medieval iMfid of Cokaygne^ but between these tw'o songs themselves. The Big Rock Cand)i Mountains is closer in feeling to the origir-^l. It is fantastic and passive, and, indeed, for all its surface gaiety, has an underlying weariness and cynicism born of a fuller realisation that Cokaygne under modern conditions is no more than a dream. It is a song of the bum, the more demoralised element among the migratory workers It is a decadent Utopia, as any Utopia must be in our time which turns away from the class struggle.
^ Lloyd also suggests that Oleana ma) have suggested to Ibsen the Utopia of Gyiitiana, la Act IV of Veer Cynf. Ibsen is perhaps an even more unexpected person than Wesley to meet m the Land of CokaygntI
* Like most folk song^ and talcs these aie hard to da«^e, but there seems to be a reference in *Poor Alan's Heaven to the Populist anti-trust and cheap money agitation that culminated m Bryan’s election campaign of 1896.
32
THE ENGLISH UTOPIA
Poor Man's Heaven is active and positive where The Big Rock Candj Mountains is passive and negative. It is Cokaygne with some of the old fantastic elements, but with the addition to them of the class struggle, even if in a somewhat anarchist form. Thus, for example, whereas:
*Tn tlie Big Rock Candy Mountains The jails are made of tin.
And you can walk right out again As you are in,**
in Poor Man's Heaven:
“We*ll take an iron rail And open the jail.
And let all the poor men out quick.**
And again, while in the first case:
‘^The brakemen have to tip their caps And the railroad bulls are blind,’*
in the second:
‘‘Vfe’ll ride in a train.
And sleep in a pullman at night.
And if someone should dare to ask for our fare Wc’ll hold up and put out his light.**
In Poor Man's Heaven^ also, the conception of idleness takes a new and more revolutionary form with the addition of the idea of class reversal;
“And we will be fed With breakfast in bed.
And served by a fat millionaire.”
Most striking of all is the contrast of the concluding lines, where in place of the rather pathetic jauntiness of:
“I’ll see you all this coming Fall,
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains,”
we have:
“In Poor Man’s Heaven wc’ll own our ownvhomes And we won’t have to sweat like a slave.
But we will be proud to sing right out loud.
The land of the free and the brave.”
POOR man’s heaven 53
Wliercas in the hand of the bum, the idea of Cokaygne loses even the implication of class revolt which it originally had, among the genuine migratory workers, the men who built up the LW.W. with its unsurpassed record of fearless militancy, these impli- cations, always present, are developed and enriched by their contact with modern socialism.
And, indeed, fantastic as its form may have been, Cokaygne does anticipate some of the most fundamental conceptions of modern socialism. Socialism, if it is to be anything but an ica- demic fabrication of blueprints, must take its rise f _V)m the desires and hopes of the people. It is from this that it derives its life, its actuality and its assurance of final victory. The classless society is Cokaygne made practical by scientific knowledge. Socialism is in agreement with Cokaygne, above all, in the belief that abund- ance is possible without the burden of unending and soul-destroy- ing toil: the naive and pictorial expression in which this perfectly correct belief found expression in the Cokaygne literature was a result of the impossibility of finding any pracrical realisation in view of the low level of the technique of production in the Middle Ages. The conquest of nature was then only beginning, and so the final triumph of man over nature could c)nly be expressed magic- ally and symbolically. In this way Tk L^md cf Cokaygne is the beginning of a dialectical growtli of the conception of Utopia, which has its culmination in the greatest and the most tully socialist work of this type, illiam Morris^ News from Nowhere, a book which gathers up all the riches and experiences of the philosophical Utopias of the intervening period and relates them once again to the neglertcd but undying hopes of the people. It is the tracing of this basic pattern in the history of the English Utopia which is one of the u ain objects of this book.
There is one other important point that must be touched on: the conception in Cokaygne of the relation between man and nature. Medieval man was, as we have seen, strongly aware of his struggle against his environment. He felt deeply the hostility of the world, the briefness and uncertainty of life. Man was a stranger and a sojourner, passing from .'^.*rkncss to twilight and thence into darkness again, a darkness only slightly alleviated by the church’s promisesi, o£ heaven and rendered even more impenetrable and horrifying by its threats of hell. This was the source of the sense of the limitation of n.an which round its theological expression in the dogma of original sin. The church saw man and nature as
34 the ENGLISH UTOPIA
separate and opposed forces, and the duty of man to resist both the world and the worldly within himself. The struggle between man and the world was the only means of avoiding a collapse into brutishness, and, the nature of man being what it was, the mere avoidance of such a collapse, and the salvation of the individual soul, was the very most that could reasonably be looked for.
In Cokaygne there is implicit the rejection of this pessimistic and reactionary outlook. Here, happiness and the enjoyment of plenty in fellowship is the outcome of the establishment of a harmony between man and his surroundings, of the conquest of nature by man, but a conquest possible because man is a part of nature instead of being in opposition to it. In this way, Cokaygne can be seen as a rough and early foreshadowing of Humanism, the philosophy of the bourgeois revolution. About Humanism more will have to be said in relation to More and Bacon; what must be noted here is that, in spite of its narrow and mechanical conception of the nature of progress. Humanism was a necessary and valuable belief with its insistence on the possibility and fact of progress, as against the static world picture of Medieval philo- sophy, and on the goodness and dignity rather than on the sinful- ness and helplessness of man. Humanism made it possible to believe that man could mould the world in accordance with his desires, whereas the church taught him that he could only save himself from the world. Without such a belief the very conception of Utopia is impossible, and this is why we find no conscious and fully developed utopian thought between the philosophers of the classical world and those of the dawn of the bourgeois revo- lution.
CHAPTER II
THR ISLAND OF THE SAINTS
Quick-witted Sir Th<^mas More travcld in a clcane contrarie province, tor he seeing ino|]t commonwealths corrupted by ill customc, and that princip- alities were nothing but gicat piracies, which gotten by violence and murther were maintained by private undermining and bloudshed, that in the chccfcst flourishing kingdomes there was no couall or well devided wcalc one with another, but a manifest conspiracic*of tichc men against poore men, procuring their owne unlawful commodities under the name and interest of the commonwealth, hee concluded with himself to lay down a perfect plot of a common-wealth government, which he would iniitlc his Utopia.
Thom\s Nashf, Ihe Vniortmate Traveller, 1594.
I. More the lluwanist
Between the writing of The hand of Cokaygne and the * writing of Utopia lie two hundred years, and in that time a great transformation had taken place. A rapid process of differ- entiation was taking place among the peasantry, and the feudal, subsistence economy of the middle ages was giving place to a modern economy based on the production of goods for sale in the market. In the fourteenth century, as we have seen, serfdom was already undergoing profound modifications: in the fifteenth it had almost disappeared and the serf had become a free culti- vator. It would be V, rong to cherish any illusions about this time, but it is not altogether without reason that it has been described as a golden age. Yet in the very nature of tilings, such a state of affairs was onlv partial and transitory, and if England ,was ever merry the merriment was but short-lived. The breaking up of the medieval village commune emancipated the serf, but it also destroyed the very basis of his security: in freeing liim from his attachment to the soil it created the conditions under which he could be driven off the soil altogether.
The creation of a free peasantry implies the development of an economy based on simple commodity pr(>duction, and this in its turn iffiplics the creation of a new kind of landowner, whose power was not based on the multitude of liis dependants but on the amount of cash profit he could extract from his estates. In England this process was specially marked because England was
THE ENGLISH UTOTIA
the main producer of wool, and wool was the article which more than any other could always be turned into money. At the same time, the wool industry, and the enclosures which it involved, was only the most outstanding example of a general tendency, so that when More wrote —
*‘Your sheep that were wont to be so meek and tame, and so small eaters, now, as I heare saye, be become so great devowrers and so wylde, that they eate up, and swallow downe the very men themselvtP,”
he was only describing in particular terms this general process, the replacement of a subsistence agriculture by an agriculture based on the production of goods for the market and the develop- ment of a purely money relation between the dilferent classes drawing their living from the soil.
This process, together with the corresponding growth of merchant capital, of trade and of urban industry, which, though still on a handicraft basis, catered more and more for a national and even an international market, involved the birth of a new class, the proletariat. And, as More was one of the first to see, it was accompanied by the greatest amount of suffering and dis- location since the dispossession of the peasantry and the discharge of many of the retaificrs and other parasites of the old nobility whom the ending of internal wars among the nobility for the control of the state apparatus now rendered superfluous, ran far ahead of the absorption of the unemployed into industry. This was, indeed, the inevitable consequence of the fact that in Eng- land capitalism developed first in agriculture and trade and only afterwards and more slowly in industry, wliich remained on a petty, scattered and individual basis. In one of the best known passages in Utopia More describes the sufferings of this new, disinherited class.
‘‘Therefore that one covetous and unsatiable cormaurante and very plague of his native contrey maye compassc about and inclose many thousand of akers of grounde together within one pale or hedge, the husbandmen be thrust owte of their owne, or else either by coveyne and fraude, t>r violent oppression they are put besydes it ... by one meanes therefore or by another, either by hooke or crooke they must needes depart awaye, poore, silly, wretched soules, men, women, husbands, wives.
THE ISLAND OF THE SAINTS 37
fatherlessc children, widows, wocfull mothers, with their yonge babes. . . . Away they trudge, I say, out of their knowen and accustomed houses, fyndynge no place to rest in, . . . And when they have wandered abroad tyll fall] be spent, what then can they else doo but stcale, and then justly pardy be hanged, or els go about a-beggyng.”
The early jiixteenth century was a black enough time: en- closures, widespread unemployment and beggary, prices rising far more rapidly than wages, savage repressive laws against the exploited, constant wars between the national states springing up out of the ruins of feudal society, corruption, if not greater than before, at least enjoying fuller opportunity. And out of it all there arose a general sense of bewilderment and despair. Everything known and secure seemed to be in question: the static, self- contained feudal world where the lord ruled over the mai»or and the Pope at Rome reigned over a univ^ersal and undivided Church was passing and there seemed nothing to take its place. Yet in fact, all this suffering and uncertainty, real as it was, was still rather a symptom of growth than of decay, though, as often in an age of rapid transitii^n, it was the decay lather than the growth which was most apparent. Ov^er and against the misery and as it were complementary to it, was a new growth, the rise of a great mer- chant class, strong and confident, mapping and parcelling the world, of great cities and new industries, and, to make this possible, of new powerful states governed by dynasties like the Tudors who had seizca power over the bodies of the old nobility and had established an absolutism, which, for all its oppressive- ness, was not without a genuii popular basis, since it stood for order, for national as opposcu to local organisation, and for an internal stability and a secure and considerable market without which the position of the bourgeois could not be consolidated.
Such was the world in which Thomas More grew to manhood: a world of despair and hope, of conflict and contrast, of increas- ing wealth and increasing pov.^tiy, of idealism and corruption, of the decline at once of the local and international societies in face of the national state which was to provide the frame withia which bourgeois society could develop.
More liimsclf belonged to a body which welcomed the new order, to the class of rich London merchants who were one of the principal stays ofThe Tudor monarchy. His father was a prominent
38 THE ENGLISH UTOPIA
lawyer, later a Judge — a member of the upper civil service which was increasingly being drawn from the ranks of the upper bourgeoisie. More was brought up in the household of Archbishop Morton, the chief minister of Henry VII, and, rather against his will, since he was strongly attracted by the life of scholarship, became himself a lawyer. Quite early he was elected to Parliament and he acted as the spokesman of the Londoners on a number of important occasions. In this way he wis brought into close touch with national affairs, and finally, as we shall see, was drawn into the service of the crown, unwillingly and with tragic results. In 1529 he became Lord Chancellor, holding office with considerable distinction but with increasing discomfort till he resigned, in 1532, on account of his reluctance to carry out Henry VIIPs church policy. Shortly after he was sent to the Tower, and, in July 1 53 5, he was beheaded on a charge of treason. It will be necessary to discuss some parts of his career in greater detail in relation to the views he expressed in JJiopia^ but first of all it will be well to say something of his character and intellectual background.
Perhaps the fullest and most intimate picture of More is that given by his friend Pkasmus in a letter to Hutten. Erasmus speaks of his “kind and friendly cheerfulness, with a little air of raillery,’* of the simplicity of his tastes, his capacity for friendship and his affection for his family. This was the impression More gave to all who knew him, and even today it is scarcely possible to read either his writings or those of his biographers without arriving at a sense of peculiar intimacy such as we receive from few other historical characters. We admire the man for his courage and honesty, for the simplicity which he combined with his learning and his capacity for affairs. More, like Swift, though not altogether for the same reasons, was one of those figures around whom an apocrypha gathers — a body of anecdotes which may not be true but which are valuable because they are in keeping with a brilliant personality vividly felt. And yet, behind it all, there is something else, something a little withdrawn and a little contemptuous of common life, which comes out most plainly in More’s patronising treatment of his wives. We are constantly reminded that More was strongly drawn to the extreme austerity of life of the Carthusian order. We feel that though he would have been a delightful companion, equally prepared to discuss philosophy or to indulge in a gentle kind of practical joking, only a part of him would
THE ISLAND OF THE SAINTS 59
have been engaged. At bottom it is the typical conflict between old and new, between the humanist and the medieval ascetic,' which made him write of the married and celibate orders of labour monks that
*‘the Utopians countc this secte the wiser, but the other the holier.”
Perhaps it \frould be truer to say that Humanism itself, especially in England, was the field of such a conflict. Humanism, though it was a new doctrine, and the belief of a new historic class, still arose out of the dogmatic and scholastic thinking of the Middle Ages, and was shot through with the very things against which it was in revolt. So that we get at the one time, and even in the one person, the sceptical and pagan thought of the Renaissance and the puritan and dogmatic thought of the Reformation. Even in Italy, where Humanism vas first established and most firmly rooted, this was so. Humanism reflected the boundless optimism of a new class which saw the world opening bcYr^re it. It discarded the dogma of original sin and the cf)iiviction that Satan is the Lord of this world for the dogma that both man and world are only hindered by external checks from infinite improvement:
‘‘You get at this time the appearcnce of a new attitude which can be most broadly described as an attitude of accept- ance to life, as opposed to an attitude of renunciation. As a consequence of this there emerges a new interest in man and liis relationship tc -is environment. With this goes an increas- ing interest in character and personality for its own sake” (T. E. Hulme, Speculations^ p. 25).
This new attitude was not only the result of the emergence of a new progressive class but of a new conception of history. Up to this time men had been living in the shadow of the past. They looked back from the squalor of feudalism to the real and imagined glories of the ancient world as to a golden age. But at the close of the fifteenth ccni • / it would be roughly true to say that civilisation had reached and in some respects passed the level attained in the Graeco-Roman world. And, consequently, instead of looking back to a past more glorious than the present, it was possible to look forward to a future more glorious than cither. This growth of civilisation transformed man’s whole outlook:
40 THE ENGLISH UTOPIA
**It was likely that as prosperity and stability of civilisation gradually increased, the istinction between nature and super- nature would become less and less harsh. The doctrines of *grace’ and "original sin* may, as has been suggested, have arisen out of the despair accompanying the disintegration of the ancient world; "but as life became more secure man became less otherwordly* ** (Basil Willey, The Seventeenth Century 'Back- ground, p. 33).
This future happiness was to be attained by the removal of all artificial and external checks, that is, by the exercise of reason, which meant in practice the adoption by princes and statesmen of the views of the Humanists.
“For whereas your Plato,** wrote More, ""judgeth that weale publiques shall by this means atteyn perfect felicitie, eyther if philosophers be kynges or else if kynges give themselves to the studie of Philosophic, how farre, I prayc you, shall commen wcalthes then be from thys felicitie if philosophers wyll vouchsaufe to cnstruct kinges with their good councell?**
And finally, though the common people had no part to play in this transformation of the world, Humanism at its best, in the hands of men like More, did look beyond the immediate future and the narrow class interests of the bourgeoisie towards the happiness of man as a whole.
Consequently, again, there was an internal contradiction and conflict. Humanism could not but be conscious of increasing misery as well as of progress, and the individual Humanists reacted either towards a superficial and hedonistic paganism or towards a moral earnestness and desire for social and religious reform. It was this latter aspect that was most strongly marked in England and Northern liurope, where Humanism never became very firmly rooted but remained, outside a group of intellectuals, a generalised and diffused influence which finally made its contribution, in a modified form, to the Revolution of the seventeenth century. And Colct, through whom more than through any other one man Humanism reached this country, had made his contact with it in Italy at a time when it was in its most highly Christian and serious phase, when the influence of Savanarola and of Pico della Mirandola was at its height.
Freed to a certain extent from the theological absolutes of
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41
scholasticism, the Humanists felt the need for a new set of absolute values. These they found partly in a more rational Christianity, but even more, perhaps, in the works of Plato and theneo-platonists. Greek philosophy came to them afresh through the study of the original texts instead of the imperfect Latin summaries that had had to serve throughout the middle ages. And Plato, above all, with his conceptions of ideal truth, beauty and justice, discoverable by the exercise of the reason, and to which man and his institutions — churches, states, cities and universities — could be made to conform, appealed irresistibly to men who saw in history not a development towards new forms of society but towards their own form of society. The urban life of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had a sufficient superficial resemblance to that of the Greek city 'Jtates to allow of the drawing of all sorts of parallels, some valuable and some, to our way of thinking, fantastic enough. Plato’s Kepuhlic had been known, at second hand, throughout the middle ages, and it was inevitable that it should serve as the starting point for ahy draft of a model commonwealth.
Such a commonwealth was entirely static in character. Plato believed that w’hat w'^as necessary was to devise city state with a sufficient hinterland and a fixed C)ptimum population, to give it a finished and perfect constitution, regulating the relations of classes, the nature and scope of industry, the type and extent of the education necessary for the various classes, the religion best calculated to serve its social stability. The foundation-stone was justice— which meant the due subordination of classes and the recognition by all of their respective duties and rights. Such a state, he supposed, if it ( • aid once be established, might en- dure unchanged for ever.
These assumptions, in some cases modified, constitute the starting point of More’s Utopia^ but, to a large extent, they remain unstated. More was not concerned to repeat what had already been done in the Republic^ to build logically, step by sti‘p, the principles upon which a < mmonwealth should be based. Instead, he takes the principles for granted and presents us with a living picture of such a Commonwealth already discovered in full working order. The result is a book that is narrower but far more lively and vivid than the Republic^ the picture of a society so fully realised that More feels able to answ^er all doubts by saying, as it were, “Butlt really is so, I have seen it, and in fact it works,”
42 THE ENGLISH UTOPIA
And in some important respects More goes far beyond Plato. Utopia is not a city state, self-sufficient and self-contained, but a nation-state covering an area roughly that of England and having a full national life in relation to other states. Further, Plato’s state was a small aristocratic community living on the labour of a large number of slaves and serfs, and its communism was confined to its ruling class. Plato advocated communism not because this is the only means of securing the abolition of class exj5loitation, but because he thought that a preoccupation with worldly goods was bad for the morals of his philosopher ‘guardians’. More’s Utopia was an approximation to a classless society, and was necessarily communist because he believed that
“where possessions be private, where money beareth all the stroke, it is harde and almoste impossible but there the wcale publique maye justelye be governed and prosperouslye floryshc. Unless you thinke thus: that justyce is there executed where all thinges come into the handcs of evill men, or that prosperctye there floryshethe where all is divided amonge a fewc.”
More had too great an experience of the world to believe that any class, however well intentioned and carefully educated, can possess state power without oppressing and exploiting the propertyless majority. Through the whole of his book the ques- tions of the state, of class and of property are continually being raised, and, in the main, are answered in a strikingly modern way. It is to More’s treatment of these fundamental questions that any serious and socialist analysis of Utopia must be directed, since it is its treatment of them v hich makes the book a landmark along the road towards scientific socialism. It is the link between the social theory of the ancient world and that of the present day.
This does not mean, of course, that it was not a book of its own time, written with a very close and deliberate attention to the contemporary situation. It is perhaps because of this close attention to what actually was, and to the tendencies and direction of his age, that More was able to look so far into the future. It was because he understood more clearly than those around him the changes that were then taking place that he was able to* forecast the society which those changes were ultimately to make possible. He wrote Utopia at the turning point of his life and in the full maturity of his powers. In i j i j More wa3 thirty-sdven. He was the
THE ISLAND OF THE SAINTS 43
honoured friend of the greatest scholars of his time, of Erasmus and Colet, of Linacre and of Grocyn. He had already sat in Parlia- ment where he had distinguished himself by his opposition to the demands of the crown. He was an outstanding lawyer and a recognised leader and spokesman of the London merchants. And, though he had refused to enter the roval service, he was sent upon an important diplomatic mission to Flanders.
It was at Antwerp, in the cour<!e of this mission, that Utopia was begun, and it is in Antwerp that the machinery of the tale is laid. There, says More, in the house of one Peter Giles, he met Raphael Hythloclay, just home after having set out upon a voyage with Amerigo Vespucci, in the course of which he had been separated from his companions and had spent five years in Utopia. Ilythloday is described with a vividness recalling Swift and Defoe, and the substance of the book is what he told More and Giles in the course of an afternoon and evening. In a letter published at the end of tlie book Giles expresses his wonder at More\s
“perfect and suer 0101010^*10, wnich could wclniegh worde by wordc rehearse so many thmges once onely heard.’’
Only in one respect was this nicmory at fault — over the situation of the island:
“For when Raphael was speaking thereof, one of Master More’s servauntes came to him, and whispered in his eare. Wherefore I being then of purpose more earnestly addict to hcare, one of the company, by reason of cold taken, I thiiike, a shippeborde, coughed out so loude, that he took from my hearinge certen of his woi Jes.”
In this way the great secret was lost, “for wc heare very uncerten newes” of Hythloday after this time.
An account of the voyage of Vespucci, in which Hythloday is supposed to have taken part, v as printed in 1 507 and was certainly well known to More. In it is rribed the simple, pre-class societ)^ of the Indian tribes encountered. H. W. Donner, in Introduction to Utopia^ writes of this account:
“They' despised gold, pearls and jewelry, and their most coveted treasure s consisted in brightly coloured birds’ feathers. They neither sell, he says, nor buy, nor barter, but are content with what na'ture freely gives out of her abundance. They live
44
THE ENGLISH UTOPIA
in perfect liberty, and have neither king nor lord. They observe no laws. They hold their habitations in common, as many as six hundred sharing one building.*^
In 1 5 1 1 Peter Martyr’s De orhe novo appeared, giving an even more idealised account of the natives of the West Indies. Clearly these reports form part of the material that went to the making of U/opia, as More in effect acknowledges by making Mythloday the narrator. This picture of primitive innocence, as interpreted by the Humanists with their belief in the classical Golden Age and reinforcing the still unforgotten communist ideas of the Middle Ages, made an important contribution towards More’s conception of a just society that looks at once backwards and forward.
Actually, the second book of Utopia^ in which a detailed description of the country was given, was written in Antwerp in the autumn of 1515. The first book, which contains a long dis- cussion on the nature of kings and the social condition of England, was added in the spring of the next year. The whole was published in Latin at Louvain towards the end of the yea*r and between then and 1519 was republished in a number of European cities. It is curious that, in spite of the great success and popu- larity of JJtopia^ no edition was published in England in More’s lifetime, nor was any English translation printed till Robinson’s edition appeared in 1551, It is from Robinson’s revised edition of 1556 that I quote, modernising the spelling to a certain extent. Since then a number (^f new and in some respects more accurate translations have appeared, but Robinson’s has a warmth and a quality of style that seems to bring it closest to the original, and it is in this translation that More’s book has passed into English literature.
It may seem strange that a book by so distinguished an author, and one that had such a wide and immediate influence, should have had to wait so long for publication both in the author’s own country and in his native language. For this there were several reasons. After More’s death liis memory was proscribed so long as Henry VIII was alive. The Tudors maintained a strict control of the press and it would have required very great courage to issue a book by a man who had been executed as a traitor.' And while More was alive he had probably no great interest in its appearance in English. He was a member of the international of scholars, among whom Latin was the common and familiar mbdium of com-
THE ISLAND OF THE SAINTS
45
munication. So long as his friends in all countries could read his work he was satisfied, for, as we shall sec, More was no revolu- tionary in the sense of wishing to arouse the people to a sense of their wrongs or to start any kind of movement among the mass of the exploited. But, more important still, the book sailed far too close to the wind for its immediate publication in English to be altogether safe. Not only did it advocate commujiism: that might have been p;:ssed over as the pleasant conceit of a pUtonic philosopher, but it contained the most savage criticism, explicit as well as implied, of the actual government of England. As Erasmus said:
‘‘He published his Utopia for the purpose of showing what are the things that occasion mischiefs in commonwealths; having the English constitution espeiJally in view, which he so thcjrougMy knows and under ^tands.”
It was far wiser to leave such a book in a learned tongue and to allow it to be published unostentatiously in Louvain or Paris.
«
2. More the Conwmnist
No one could possibly doubt that I Hopia was a j’)icturc of an England in which money did not “bear all the stroke’^ and with its criticism of the power and corruption of v/ealth went an equally devastating picture of the abuse of royal power. The Utopians certainly had a prince and a magistracy who, while they were in office, were given 'bso^ute authority wnthin the limits of the constitution. But they were elected autcjcrats whose power was derived from the people and who were lemovable if that power was abused. In practice, moreover, the main work of the magis- trate was to control and organise the economic h’fe of the country:
“The chiefe and almooste the onely ofFyee of the Sypho- grauntes is to see and take hcede, that- no manne sit idle: but that everye one applye hys owne craft with earnest diligence.”
The obligation upon all to w*»rk (except for a small number of scholars who were deliberately set free to specialise in the pursuit of learniiig)L had as its counterpart the right of all to enjoy the products of this social labour:
“In the myddest of every quarter there is a market place of all manner of thinges. Thither the workes of every familie be
46
THE ENGLISH UTOPIA
brought into certeyne houses. And everye kynde of thing is layde up severall in barnes or store-houses. From hence the father of everye familie, or everye householder fetcheth what- soever he and his have need of, and carrieth it away with him without money, without exchange, without any gage, pawne or pledge. For whye shoulde anything be denyed him? seeing there is abundance of all things, and it is not to be feared, lesle any man wyll aske more than he necdeth. For why should it be thoughte that any man woulde aske more than enough, which is sure never to lacke?”
This communism of the Utopians, based upon abundance and security, passes far beyond the vulgar equalitarianism of the petty bourgeois socialists who failed to see that equality could be nothing but the abolition of classes, and approaches the con- ception of the ^higher phase of communist society’, where, as Marx said in the Criiique of the Gotha Programme,
‘‘when the productive forces of society have expanded pro- portionally with the multiform development of the individuals of whom society is made up —then will the narrow bourgeois outlook be utterly transcended, and then will society inscribe upon its banners; ‘From everyone according to his capacities, to everyone according to his ncedsl’”
More understood, what Morris understood later, but what many even among socialists still fail to understand, that this principle is not an idle fantasy but the only practical basis for the organi- sation of a classless society. Reason led the learned Humanist to the same conclusions as those already instinctively grasped by the simple men who had depicted The Laud of Cokajgne.
In some ways it was easier for them and for More to reach this conception than it has been for others who had to live in a fully capitalist society. England in the sixteenth century, in spite of the development of commodity production, still retained much of the primitive agrarian collectivism that had persisted under cover of feudalism. Though the family had an individual tenement, this land lay scattered with those of the other members of the town- ship throughout the common fields and its working depended on the joint plough team and involved a considerable co-operation at certain times. And even in More’s day, when the gap between town and country was widening, even quite cotisiderable towns
THE ISLAND OF THE SAINTS 47
had Still theif common fields, and when More writes of the Utopians that:
“When their harvest day draweth ncare, and is at hand, then the Philarches, which be the head officers and bailiffs of husbandrie, send worde to the magistrates of the citie what number of harvest men is ncedfull to be sent to them outc of the citie. The whiche companye of harvest men being ready at the day appoynted, almost in one fayre day dispacheth all the harvest worke.”
he had in his mind a picture not very different from what might still have been seen in the England of bis own time. More’s communism, that is to say, is not merely an iniaginative picture of something that might happen in the future, but even more the extension and transformation of something already existing to the conditions of a society different from his own but nevertheless related to it and arising out of it.
The most difficult question was that of the' means by which this transformation could be effected, and hert More, in common with most of the Utopian<-, was at his weakest. Certainly he had not, and could not have had, any conception of the long, painful and still far from completed historical process by which capital- ism was to create its antithesis. Consequently the picture of Utopia is touched with melancholy, rising to die conclusion:
*‘So must I needs confessc and graunte that many thinges be in the Utopian wcai. publique, which in our cidcs I may rather wishc for, than hope after.”
The least attractive feature >f the Utopian life is its lack of trust in the ordinary activities of common people. Even in the communal dining-rooms the old must sit with the young, to “keep the youngers from wanton licence of wordes and be- havioure”. There are to be “no lurkinge corners, no places of wycked counsels or unlawfu’ 'issemblcs. But they be in the presente sighte and under the eyes of every man”. No citizen may travel about the country, much less go abroad, without special leave from the magistrates, and, though this leave is easily obtained, “no man goeth out alone but a companie is sente forth”. And, though laws are few and punishments merciful by the standard of More’s time, we have to infer that in spite of the
4^ THE ENGLISH UTOPIA
abolition of private property and of classes, crime is still common enough to provide a considerable number of bondmen. Man, in fact, is changed much less than his surroundings, and it is clear that this aspect of Utopia reflects Morels own lack of confidence in the common man. This arises both from his own class position and that of the Humanists generally and from the whole relation of class forces at that time.
More came from the upper section of the London merchants, a class which always suffered in periods of disorder and which had just passed through the dislocati’>n caused by a prolonged civil war. The memory of Cade’s Rebellion, of which Shakespeare gives us the typical upper-class view, was still fresh and was reinforced by more recent disturbances. And More, who, as we have seen, frequently acted as the spokesman of the city, shared much of its outlook in spite of his genuine concern for the suffer- ings of the people. As Kautsky says:
“Now More was in a practical respect the representative of their interests, although in his theoretical outlook he was more advanced. Capital has always called for ‘order’, only occasionally for ‘freedom’. Order was its most vital element; More, who had become great in the minds of the London middle class, was therefore a ‘man of order’ who disliked nothing more than the independent action of the people. All for the people but nothing by the people was his watchword.”
He was not the man to lead a revolution, even if revolution had been possible, and later he looked with horror at the Peasant War in Germany, seeing in it a natural consequence of Luther’s error in encouraging the masses to concern themselves in matters which they had not the capacity to understand.
It must also be remembered that the suffering masses in More’s time were very far from being a proletariat in the modern sense of the word. They were expropriated peasants, servants turned adrift, or, at best, handicraftmen exploited by the rich merchants — ^More’s own class. In any case they were individuals^ just losing their accustomed occupations and social groupings and not yet reintegrated by the education of large scale machine industry. Such a class was capable of outbursts of revolt, -dangerous in proportion to their sufferings and their despair. It did not afford the basis on which a new social order could be established. Yet, if Utopia was to be more than a dream, such«a basis had to be
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sought. This search gives us the key, not only to the under- standing of Utopia but also to More’s whole career, and it involves some consideration of the role of the state in the sixteenth century.
The modern state is one of the consequences of the rise of capitalism. Production for the market demands a larger unit than the medieval village or even the small town springing up around some castle oy abbey. The state provides a national basis for production and distribution and a greater security for inter- national trade. It ensures more efficient policing, better com- munications, uniform laws and customs and common standards of measurement. For all these things a strong central govern- ment is necessary, capable of^ reducing the nobilitv to order. Heiice the king, who under feudalism in the form in which it existed in the Middle Ages is no more than the strongest land- owner, now becomes the pivot of the state apparatus. It was this fact, together with the fact that the bourgeoisie is still in a state of transition, not strong enough to rule independently but ready to lend its support to a government which was capable of giving It the conditions necessary tor its continued progress, which determined the form taken by the Tudor monarchy.
But the Tudor state had a double nature. The state was progres- sive because society was ready to emerge from feudal atomism: the state stood for social stability and organisation as against anarchy. And so the bourgeoisie, and therefore More and the Humanists, were bound to appro Vi, and support the growth of the state. On the oti^^r hand the state was clearly and openlv predatory and oppressive and its rulers were obviously corrupt and selfish, so that any man ' ho genuinely cared, as More did about social justice, could n^t but find himself frequently in opposition both to the state and to its rulers. Hence More's bitter inner conflict, which finds expression in the first book of Utopia and colours his whole life. The only hope of progress was for the Humanists to secure the ear of piinces, to guide and mould their policies. But was this po' '.ible in view of the knowm charac- ter of the actually existing princes? ‘‘From the prince, as from a perpetual wel sprynge, commethe amonge the people the floode of al tha^is good or evell”, without the prince nothing could be done, but did not this mean that the case was hopeless? So the argument develops between More and Hythloday.
Kautsky, I think, fails to understand the point of it:
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THE ENGLISH UTOPIA
“In estimating the book,” he writes, “we must no more be misled by the homage paid to the King than we should judge the materialists of the eighteenth century by the reverence they occasionally accorded to Christianity. . . . More assigned the championship of his ideas to Ilythloday, while he introduces himself as the critic of his ideas. . , . The whole passage is a scorching satire on the contemporary monarchy. It constitutes More’s political confession of faith, and his justification for holding aloof from the Court.”
Kautsky, consequently, finds it hard to understand More’s subsequent action in entering the royal service and has some difficulty in defending him against the charge of inconsistency. I think it would be far truer to say that the dialogue, while it certainly voices a ruthless criticism of contemporary government, is an expression of More’s argument with himself. Hythloday’s criticisms certainly ring true, but so does More’s reply:
“^'hat part soever you have taken upon you, playe that as well as you can and make the best of it . . . you mustc not forsake the shippe in the tempest, because you cannot rule and keep downc the winds. ... But you mast with a crafty wile and a subtell trainc study and endeavour youre selfe . . . and that which you can not turne to good, so to order that it be not verye badde.”
There could but be one outcome to such an argument. More did not wish to remain a mere satirist, isolated and ineffective. The chance that somctlung could be done tlirough the crown might be small, but there was no other chance. And so, regretfully and heavy with misgivings. More entered the royal service. His state of mind is mirrored in the speech which he made upon taking office as Lord (Chancellor:
“I ascend this seat as a post full of troubles and dangers and without any real honour. The higher the post of honour the greater the fall, as the example of my predecessor fVv olscy] proves.”
His misgivings were only too well justified. Henry had no use for a servant who wanted to help the people or remould society according to the dictates of philosophy. He wished to use More’s
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51
reputation for learning and sanctity and his powerful influence in the City as a cover for his own selfish policies. For nearly three years More attempted to reconcile conscience and policy, but in 1 532 he felt himself bound to resign because of his opposition to Henry’s divorce and to his attitude to church questions. Out of office he immediately became dangerous because his known integrity was a standing argument against what the king was set upon doing. Jt became necessary to win him over or to silence him. The former proved impossible: More was therefore sent to the Tower and in 1 5 3 5 beheaded on a manifestly absurd charge of treason. He was the first, as he has been the last, philosopher to attempt to engage directly in the government of ["aigland.i His tragedy was none the less moving because he made his attempt with such faint hopes and v ith his eyes so fully opened to the realities of the situation. He knew well what forces were at work, and how strong they were, as is well shc^wn in the famous passage in U/opia on the state, a passage strikingly in agreement with the view reached centuries later bv Marx, hngcls and Lenin, and as strikingly at variance with that of every kind of liberal and social-democratic political theorist from his time to ours.
“The riche men,” he wrote, “not only by private fraud, but also by common laws do every day pluck and snatche away from the poore some part of their daily living. So whereas it seemed before unjustc to recompense with unkindness their pains that have been bencficiall to the publique weale, nowc they have to this their wrong and unjustc dcalinge (which is yet a much worse pointe) given the name of justice, yea and that by force of a law. Therefore when I consider and weigh in my mind all these commonwealthes, wdiich now-a-dayes any where do flourish, so good help me, 1 can perceavc nothing but a certcin conspiracy of riche men procuring their ownc commodities under the name and title of the commonwealth. They invent and devise all meanes and craftes, first how to keep safely, without fearc of losing, that they have unjustly gathered together, and next how to hire and abuse the workc and laboure of the poore for as little money as may be. These device's, \^hen the riche men have decreed to be kept and observed under the coloure of the commonaltie, that is to saye, also of the poor people, then they be made laws.”
1 With the exception of Bacon and the possible exception of Arthur Balfour!
THE ENGLISH UTOPIA
5^
The quotation that stands at the head of 'this chapter shows that in Morels own time, or shortly after, this was recognised as one of the central ideas in the Utopia^ for the importance of Nashe is that he was one of the acutest journalists of his time, a man with no new or profound ideas of his own, but with a remarkable aptitude for seeing upon whatever ideas were then current in intellectual circles.
This conception of the state differs in one important respect from that of modern socialism. It is imhistorical, allowing no place for growth and development. Consequently the estab- lishment of a model commonwealth could only be a kind of accident or miracle, the work of a prince, who is imagined as something apart from the class forces which normally dominate the state. Utopia has very little history, but what we are told of its origin bears this out: the island was conquered by, and took its name from, the great King Utopus,
^‘which also broughtc the rude and wild people to that excellent perfection in all good fashions, humanityc and civile gentil- ness.”
Utopia had to be a miracle. More could sec what was wrong and what was needed, but he would have been more than human to see at that time the historical process by which socialism could be realised.
There is a further deduction to be drawn from More’s theory of the state. England was, as we have seen, a country of increasing wealth and increasing poverty. More was one of the first to sec the relation between these facts, to understand that the rich were becoming richer because they were finding new and more effective ways of robbing the poor. Hence we find in his work what Morris calls
“an atmosphere of asceticism, which has a curiously blended savour of Cato the Censor and a medieval monk.”
Kautsky, too, speaks of the frugality of Utopia as a feature con- tradictory to modern socialism. This is indeed the case. The Utopians rejected all luxury and display. Their houses, though made of the best material and carefully designed, were plain and simple, their clothes uncoloured and all cut to the same pattern, their meals ample and certainly far more balanced than those of the England of the time, but plain and moderate. Jewels were
THE ISLAND OF THE SAINTS J}
playthings of children, and, as a lesson in the vanity of riches, gold was employed to make chains for bondmen, and for chamber pots.^
For this there were several reasons. To a certain extent it was a part of the common heritage of classicism of the Humanists, who, like the theoreticians of the French Revolution later, loved to insist on the stern frugality of the republican heroes of ancient Rome. But in*the case of More there were other reasons, more personal and more important. The first was the connection, just mentioned, between wealth and poverty. More was revolted by the luxury of the ruling class of his time because he saw that this luxury was the result of the surrounding poverty. If poverty was to be banished from Utopia, the luxury wluch produced it must be banished also. The tlfird reason was more positive.
The Utopians were no killjoys, opposed to pleasure and recreation in themselves:
“They be muche inclined to this opinion: to thinke no kind of pleasure forbydden whereof commeth no harme.”
More looked around at the ceaseless labour of the people which was necessary to provide the luxuries of the rich, and concluded that the most important end to be secured in Utopia was an abun- dance of leisure in which human faculties could be developed to the full, so that people could become real men and women and not mere drudges:
“The magistrates do not exercise theire citi2ens againste theire willes in unneedful laboures ... so that what time may possibly be spared from the unnccessarye occupations and affayres of the common wealth, all that the citizens shoulde withdrawe from the bodily service of the same. For herein they suppose the fclicitie of this life to consiste.’*
To any socialist society at some point or another a choice may present itself: more leisure or more production. In the modern world, with all the great and increasing resources of science and technique, this point would certainly not be reached till long after
all the reasonable needs and desires of men have been satisfied.
• •
Indeed, it is possible that the problem may never really arise at all, that under socialism we really have our cake and eat it. But
^ Lenin has also suggested that gold should be used for the construction of public lavatories!
54
THE ENGLISH UTOPIA
for More, living in a world based on handicraft production, it arose very sharply, and he solved it by insisting for his Utopians upon a maximum Avorking day of six hours. This, as he shows in some detail, was ample for the provision of all necessaries as well as for the comfort and pleasure needed to ensure that the best use was made of the ample leisure so secured.
One result of this ample leisure is the great importance of education in Utopia. Education was neither a mystery confined to a small literate class as in More’s Imgland, nor something doled out in carefully measured packets to children during a certain number of years and then forgotten because it had little or no relation to life, as in our own, but a continuous attempt to under- stand the world in which the whole people took part, and in which, though there were specialists in learning, these were not a sect isolated from the people, but the advance guard of the whole, the leaders of an enterprise in which all could participate. And learning was valued and respected, not as a thing in itself nor yet as an indication of a certain social standing, but as a means of developing man’s capacities to their fullest.
For the rest, their leisure hours were spent by the Utopians mainly in some form of social recreation, conversation, music or games. More mentions two games not unlike chess, but all sports involving cruelty were forbidden and nothing is said of any form of physical exercises, probably because in that time these were the pastimes of the ruling class and there was not then the present large proportion of the population employed at cramping or sedentary tasks for whom some such active form of recreation is a necessary relaxation. Altogether it was a quiet, dignified and uneventful life which went on in Utopia, a land almost without history, a land with a constant population and a constitution and economy that had remained unchanged since the time of Utopus the Good. And there is little reason to think that the Utopians were not extremely happy in the same way that More liimself was happy when at home with his family and his friends, and not vexed with the insoluble problems of social justice. It was, in fact, the life that More would have liked to be able to live, and one which could reasonably have been expected to tend to produce men like More.
It was further, as we have seen, a society without exploitation and therefore without classes. A few words should be said about the apparent exceptions to this. First were the magistrates, rising
THE ISLAND OF THE SAINTS
55
in various grades to the king. But these were in no sense a class or caste. They were chosen freely from among the most able of the philosophers, as these were in turn chosen from the people, for their capacity. They had no special privileges and were subject to frequent re-election. Their children had the same education, upbringing and opportunities as those of the rest of the citizens, and no office was in any sense hereditary.
At the other end of the scale were the bondmen. These appear in Utopia for two reasons. First as Mote’s solution to the problem of crime. In his time death was the normal penalty for most sorts of crime and hundreds of men were hanged every year for petty thefts and similar offences. Minor offences were punished by flogging, branding or exposuie in the storks or pillory. This, More saw, was not only inhuman, but, because of its inhumanity, actually helped to increase crime, which in any case sprang rather from the nature of society than from the inherent wickedness of the criminal. Rather illogically, he anticipated that crime would continue to exist oti a cc nsiderablc scale in Ut*)piai and he pro- posed as a remedy to employ criminals to do all the uixpleasant and degrading jobs which he supposed his free citizens (whose free- dom included the right to choose their own trades) would not willingly undertake, or which he was unwilling to allow them to undertake because of the moral dangers involved. I’his system of bondage, if it seems out of place in a classless society, was at least far more humane and far more practical than an\ thing that existed in the sixteenth centu y. And sccondl}, this system was a positive solution of the problem, with which socialists arc always being faced, of who will do the uiij leasant work in a socialist society. It is a problem which is now ^'easing to exist as the development of technique reduces the amount of such work, but it is (me with which many of the Utopian writers have been faced and which they have solved in a variety of ways. It was a very real problem for More, who had to construct a soci.dist society on the basis of hand production. He solved it as we have seen, partly by reducing wants through the abolition of luxury and partly by this system of bondsmen. It must be noticed, however, that the bondsmen do not constitute a class, any more than convicts constitute a class in modern 'so(:iety. They were cf>ndemned to their tasks partly as punishment but more with the hope of reformation. In many
^ Or perhaps he avowed himself to be a little illot'ical in order i<> have the oppor- tunity of preaching his sermon on the proper way to deal with criminal^
56 THE ENGLISH UTOPIA
cases their bondage was temporary. But in no case did it affect the position of their families, who had all the normal rights of citi2enship.
A similar problem is that of the relation of town and country. In the Middle Ages the country was dominant, the town, with a few exceptions, no more than an enlarged village. But the de- velopment of capitalism created a continually widening gulf, the town became more and more a centre of independent life with a distinctive urban culture, the country more and more its tribut- ary and the country workers more and more sunk in what Marx rather harshly calls ‘‘rural idiocy*^ The town and the new class of capitalists became identified with what was thought of as progress, the country identified with stagnation. It would be hard to say whether town or country has suffered the greater loss by this separation, and it is one of the tasks of socialism to restore the unity of town and country on the higher plane of a common social life. More had his own solution, based, again, on the existing level of technique and transport, within the conditions of which life in the country could not but be ruder and more iso- lated than that of the towns.
Agriculture was carried on by large households and all citizens had the obligation to spend at least two years in the country, each city having its rural area which it supplied with labour and from which it received its food. In this way everyone learnt the rudiments of agriculture and a much larger labour force could be mobilised on special occasions. This was done
“to the intent that no man shall be constrayned againste his will to contynew long in that harde and sharpe kynd of lyfe, yet manye of them have such a pleasure and delyte in husbandrye that they obteyne a longer space of yeares.”
In this way the feeding of Utopia was secured without cutting off any of the people from the civilised life which More regarded as proper to man: at the same time the townsmen were not cut off from the simpler and more primitive life of the countryside.
One more detailed point requires consideration, especially as it has led to some dispute and misunderstanding. This is the religion of Utopia and the religious toleration practised there. Unlike England and all other countries known to More, Utopia was able to accommodate a variety of religions. These were all mono- theistic and sufficiently similar and undogmatic to allow of a
THE ISLAND OF THE SAINTS 57
common form of worship which did not offend the followers of any. Priests were of exceeding holiness “and therefore very few”. Hythloday began the conversion of the Utopians to Christianity^ with which their pre-existing religions did not greatly conflict. The peculiarity of the Utopians, however, was that the principle of toleration was fully recognised. King Utopus having made a decree that “it should be lawfull for everie man to favoure and folow what religion he would”. Even atheists were tolerated, though they were forbidden to advocate their views publicly and were not eligible for any public office.
This undoubtedly represents More’s view of what is desirable, and it is often argued that when he became Chancellor his conduct in attacking and even persecuting Lutherans was at variance with and a descent from, the doctrines he had preached in Utopia. More, in fact, is held to have sinned against the Light. Such a view is, I think, mistaken. Se^-ting aside the question of how far More actually was a persecutor, about which there is some doubt, it can only arise from a failure to understand what he really says in Utopia. His position is perfectly clear. After referring to the decree of Utopus which I have quoted above, he goes on to say that everyone had the right to persuade others to his belief, so long as this was done peaceably, “without displeasant and seditious words,”
“To him that would vehemently and ferventlye in this cause
strive and contende, was decreed banishment or bondage.”
This was More’s own principle of action. We have seen that he distrusted and feared any popular movement or any violent over- turning of the existing order, and to him Lutheranism, with its appeal to the masses and its apparent responsibility for the risings of the peasantry in Germany, was such a movement. With indi- vidual Lutherans he was able to enjoy friendly relations, but against the movement, which seemed to him to threaten ruin and chaos, he could not but struggle. T am not here concerned with the right or wrong of this attitude: what I am trying to show is that this attitude was logical and self-consistent, arising from the limitations inyosed upon him by his class and age, limitations which no-onc, however talented, can wholly escape.
And, after aU, what is remarkable about More is not his limi- tations but the extent to which they were transcended, not the fact that his tolerance had limits but that the principle of toleration
58 THE ENGLISH UTOPIA
was SO plainly set forth, not the occasionally reactionary features of his Utopia but its broadly communist economy, not his fear of popular action but his understanding of the causes of poverty and his real desire to remove them. And if, as I have tried to show, his life and writings form a logical and consistent whole, it is in the Utopia that these essential features show most clearly. Here the thought is most luminous, the passion most evident, and here, in the nature of things, the socialism which could not but be obscured in the practical difficulties that beset the statesman was able to find its fullest expression. And it is as a pioneer of socialism rather than as a saint or a philosoj^her that More is enduringly important.
Utopia is at once a landmark and a connecting link. It is one of the great works of controlled and scientific imagination in which the classless society is visualised and mapped out. And at the same time it is the link connecting the aristocratic communism of Plato, and the instinctive, primitive communism of the Middle Ages, with the scientific communism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This modern communism has two main strands or legs, and More, with his successors among utopian socialists, prov ides one of them. But even in More's day there was another socialism, that of Mun^icr and the peasant revolution- aries, which in its turn passes through a clearly defined channel: through the Levellers, the left wing in the French Revolution, the Luddites and the (.'hartists, till it too is ready to find its place in the structure of Marxism. More could not understand this other socialism, and what he saw of it he hated and feared. This was natural, for the synthesis of the philosophic and the popular socialism could not take place before the creation of the revo- lutionary class, the proletariat, for which it was the appropriate theory. It is enough that More was More without our needing to regret that he was not also Marx.
It does, however, follow from this that it is not till modern times that his Utopia could be properly understood. Until the birth of scientific socialism it was no more than 'a dream, a pretty fantasy. Readers could admire this commonwealth in which peace and justice were the ruling principles, but could only conclude regretfully, with More, that such a commonwealth was more to be wished than hoped after. Today, when the power to establish such a commonwealth lies ready to our hands, it is possible to see how exactly, within the -limits imposed on him by the narrow
THE ISLAND OF THE SAINTS
59
handicraft technique of his age. More anticipates the most essential features of a modern, classless society. It is fitting, therefore, to quote in conclusion the words of the first great English Marxist, William Morris, who is also the writer of the only book* of its class which is worthy of a place beside Utopia:
socialists cannot forget that these qualities and excel- lencies meet tj) produce a steady expression of the longing for a society of equality of conditions; a society in which the individual man can scarcely conceive his existence apart from the Commonwealth of which he forms a portion. This, which is the essence of his book, is the csst^nce also of the struggle in which we are engaged. Though doubtless it was the pressure of circumstances in his own days that made More what he was, yet that pressure forced him to give us, not a \ision of the triumph of the new-born eapitahstic society, the elements in which lived the new learning and the new freedom of thought of his epoch; but a picture (his own indeed, nor ours) of the real New Birth which many men before him had desired, and which now indeed \vc may well hojK* is drawing near to realisa- tion, though after such a long series of events whicli at the time of their happening seemed to nullify his own completely.’’
CHAPTER m
REVOLUTION AND COUNTER-REVOLUTION
Iret&n: All the main thing that I speak for, is because I would have an eye to property. I hope we do not come here to contend for victory — but let cvejy man consider with himself that he do not go that way to take away all property. For here is the most fundamental part of the constitution of the kin^^dom, which if you take away, yovi take away all by that. . . .
Katnborough' Sir, I see that it is impossible to have liberty but all property must be taken away. If it bt laid down for a rule, and >ou will say ir, it must be so. But 1 would fain know what the soldier hath fought for all this uhile? lie hath fought to enslave himself, to give pouei to men of riches
Debate of the General Comal o] the Army. Putney, October 29th, 1647.
I. New Atlantic
AT no other time is there such a wealth of Utopian speculation ijL in England as in the seventeenth century. And at no time is this speculation at once so bold and practical and so dry and narrow. In this age of revolution Utopia comes closest to immediate politics and the everyday problems of government, and in doing so it loses as \Kell as gains. More, as we have seen, was concerned with the relation of wealth and poverty, with the abolition of classes, and, ultimately, with the questions of human happiness and social justice. The typical Utopian writers of the seventeenth century are concerned with political questions in the narrow sense, with the framing of a model constitution and with its working machinery, with the formation and character of governments and the perfection of parliamentary representation. They are concerned, in short, not so much with justice as with power.
As a result, there is a complete change in temper and style. We find nothing to correspond to More’s breadth of vision, his pity and anger, his doubts and the wry humour with which these doubts are expressed. Everything now is dry, precise and lawyer- like. There is a cool confidence, a bright, hard certamty that here, in Macaria or Oceana, is the one true light, that here is a practical programme that need only be adopted to carry the revolution to its full perfection. And, to a very large extent, this confidence was justified, for the problem which had baffled ancl tormented More
REVOLUTION AND COUNTER-REVOLUTION 6l
had been solved, the bourgeoisie had won power, had the means of making their desires effective. Hence, as this Qiapter will try to show, there was a close relationship between the Utopian writings and the active framing of constitutions which went on throughout the Commonwealth period.
This change in the climate of Utopia corresponds exactly to the change in the English political climate. We have seen some- thing of the beginnings of the development of capitalism; of the growth and decline of classes, the transfer of wealth and the peculiar relations which existed between the bourgeoisie and the House of Tudor. The Tudor absolutism gave the men of the new wealth the necessary shelter and breathing space in which to grow strong: ample advantage was taken of this opportunity, till, by the end of the century, the protection had ceased to be a necessity and the protector had become a burden. In alliance with the crown the bourgeoisie had decimated the peasantry, humbled the church, crushed Spain, traversed oceans and explored new con- tinents. Now, appearing for the first time in history as an indepen- dent force, they attacked the monarchy itself, deposed and beheaded a king and established a republic. For a brief space Utopia ceased to be a fiction but was felt by thousands to be just round the corner. If there were any limits to the power of this brave new class, they were not immediately apparent.
Before the confident morning of the revolution there was a rather bleak dawn period, the generation in which the alliance between crown and br>urgeoisie w^as breaking, when the tension of events created bewilderment, weariness and disillusion. It was the period of Shakespeare’s trag( lies, the age when the bounding extravagance of Tawburlaine had given place to the extravagant psychological horrors of Webster. To this period belongs Francis Bacon’s Nen^ Atlantic ^ and in the history of the English Utopia Bacon is the link connecting More with the utopian writers of the revolutionary period.
Like More, Bacon was a member of a family which was prominent in the service of the crown, was trained as a lawyer but combined the profession of law with a continuing passion for philo- sophy, became Lord Chancellor of England, and, at the height of his fortune, was disgraced and driven from office. Here, however, the parallel ends, for few men have ever been more dissimilar in their interests or character. There is perhaps no great English writer whose persfinality is less attractive than Bacon’s, and all the
62
THE ENGLISH UTOPIA
elaborate apologias of his many admirers and the power and magnificence of his prose only increase the distaste we feel in the presence of the man. Never was such a subtle and splendid intellect employed to serve meaner or more trivial ends, and neither pride nor gratitude nor loyalty to friends were allowed to brake his climb to wealth and influence. Grasping timidity and profuse display seemed continually to deny the austere impersonality of the philosopher’s creed.
Yet this is only a part of the trutl:. about Bacon: it would be quite wrong, I believe, to imagine that the philosophy was not both sincere and profoundly felt. Partly, it may be, the very subtlety of the intellect deceived itself, but more than that, Bacon’s character expresses in a new form the essential contradiction within Humanism, the contradiction that lies al the very heart of the bourgeois revolution. Humanism fought to liberate mankind from superstition and ignorance, but also to liberate capitalist production from the restraints of feudal economy: the bourgeois revolution was waged for the ultimate advantage of mankind as a whole but also to secure for a new exploiting class power to rob and to become rich, and in this revolution meanness and nobilitv, cruel oppression and generosity are inextricably tangled. The pursuit of truth' and the pursuit of wealth often seemed the same thing, and, whatever Bacon’s faults may ha\c been, about the pursuit of truth he was always passionately in earnest.
And truth for Bacon meant power, not indeed political power, since he was a loyal servant of the crown and well content with the existing order, but power o\ er nature througli the understanding of natural law. This is the core of all his wx;)rk, and not least of the Atlantic ^ which, under cover of describing a utopian commonwealth is really a prospectus for a state-endowed college of experimental science. It was the work of hts old age, written when, over sixty, he was dismissed and ruined, but still hoping against all reason that he -might be restored to power. It was a fragment only, begun and laid aside unfinished, and never pub- lished in his life-time. He began it in the hope that James 1 would adopt and subsidise his proposals: its incomplete state is the proof of the final abandonment of his hopes, and therefore of his interest in the work, since that interest was confined solely to its possible practical outcome.
Bacon, unlike More, was not concerned with social justice. He, too, was a Humanist, but by the beginning 6£ the seventeenth
REVOLUTION AND COUNTER-REVOLUTION 6}
century Humanism had run cold: the difference between V tophi and Nw Atlantis is not so much a difference of content as a differ- ence of purpose, a shift of interest and a lowering of temperature. The earlier Humanists believed in reason and in the possibility of the attainment of happiness by the unfettered exercise of reason. Bacon and his contemporaries, while not denying the power of reason had gradually shifted the weight of emphasis away from reason to experiment. As Bacon wrote:
“Our method is continually to dwell among things soberly. . . to establish for ever a true and legitimate union between the experimental and rational faculty.'’
And elsewhere:
“For the wit and mitid of man, if it woik upon matter, which is the contemplation of the creatures of God, uorLcl It according to the stuff and is limited thereby; but if it work upon itself, as the spider worketh its web, then it is endless, ahd brings forth indeed cobwebs of learning, admirable for the fineness of the thread and work, but of no substance or profit.’’
Bacon stood at the beginning of the first period of maUrialism, in which it was confidently beli^^ved that the whole universe^ from the solar system to the mind of man, was a \ ast and complex machine and could be mastered absolutely by a sulficknt under- standing of the laws of mechanics. He saw il as his task to use his prestige and his incomparable control over language to urge upon his contemporaries the undertaking of this ijnal assault upon the mysteries of nature. As Bas Willey sa\s in his admirable book, The Scvintccnth Cvhtuyy LacLgronmL
“Bacon’s role was to indicate with fine magniloquence the path by which alone ‘science’ c<u]kl advance. This he did, while other men, such as Galileo, Harvey or Gdbert, in whom he took comparatively little interest, W'. re achieving great discoveries on the principles which he taught. Bacon’s great service to ‘science’ was that he gave it an incomparable advertisement.”
The information which wx are given about the social and economic and political organisation of Bensalem, the utopian island o*f New Atlantis, is naturally, therefore, meagre and indirect, since Bacon only intends the fiction to provide an interesting
64 THE ENGLISH UTOPIA
background for the pamphlet. But one cannot but be struck with the remarkable decline from the standpoint reached in Utopia^ and, since Bacon had obviously read More’s book, this may be taken as an implied criticism in the points where they differ. Bcnsalem is a monarchy of an orthodox type, with the inevitable fixed constitution handed down from the founder-king Salomona. It has private property and classes, as wc have to infer from a passage which says that on certain ceremonial occasions
‘‘if any of the family be distressed or decayed, order is taken for their relief, and competent means to live.”
That is to say, that while the necessities of the poor are provided for, this is done as a charity and not as of right, and the need for such charity appears normally to arise. Correspondingly there are marked social gradations and inequalities, and the officials and leading citizens are distinguished by magnificent clothes and lavish display and have numbers of personal servants. > There is a strongly patriarchal family, quite unmarked by any trace of the communism with which More tempered family life, and great power is enjoyed by the heads of these families and by the old generally.
Chance voyagers, like the narrator of the story, were welcomed in Bensalem and received hospitably, but intercourse with foreign lands was discouraged because King Salomona,
“recalling into his memory the happy and flourishing estate wherein his land then was, so as it might be a thousand ways altered to the worse, but scarce any one way to the better; thought nothing wanted to his noble and heroical intentions, but only, as far as human foresight might reach, to give per- petuity to that which was in his time so happily established; therefore ... he did ordain the interdicts and prohibitions which we have touching the entrance of strangers.”
At the same time, as was fitting for a people given up to the search for knowledge, every effort was made to discover and import all that was known in other lands, and vdtb this object
1 We are reminded that Aubrey sa>s of Bacon: ‘None of his servants durst appeare before him without Spanish leather boots; for he would smelle the neates leather, which ofiendea him.” ^
REVOLUTION AND COUNTER-REVOLUTION 65
secret missions were sent out at regular intervals to visit all civilised lands and bring back reports.
To Salomona, also, was credited the cstablishn-ient of Salomon’s (or Solomon’s) House, whose ‘fellows’ were the object almost of veneration among the Bensalemites. Here we come to Bacon’s real point: like Bensalcm itself, exists only for the
sake of it. And in nothing more than in his ideas about educa- tion does Bac-f)n differ from More. For More, as we have seen education was a social and co-operative pursuit, with its object the increasing of the happiness and the enrichment of the person- alities of the whole people: for Bacon it was the affair of a body of specialists, lavishly endowed by the state and carrying on their work in complete isolation from the masses (we are told that the visit of one of the fathers of Salomon’s House to the capital city was the first for a d()?:en years). Its object was not happiness but power:
“The end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes and secret motions of things and the enlarging of ^‘he bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible.”
There is a kind of holy simplicity in this unbounded belief in man’s powers that is the mf)st attractive side of Bacon and which makes him the truly re})rcsentativc man of his time, but this same simplicity limits his objectives to the quantitative and the empirical . There is little in Bacon of the desire to pass beyond catalogue to synthesis, and he was a superb gencraliscr with a deep distrust of generalisation.
For this reason the method' of Salomon’s House were purely experimental, and to the caialogifing of experiments Bacon devotes the ten happiest pages of Nni^ Atlantis^ describing a great variety of metallurgical, biological, astrotiomical and chemical marvels, as well as the practical application of science to the making of new substances and fabrics, to medicine and even to engineering:
imitate also the flights of birds: for wc have some degree of flying in the air: we have ships and boats for going under water,*. . .'We have divers curious clocks and other like motions of return, and some perpetual motions. We imitate also the motions of living things by images of men, beasts, birds, fishes and serpents.”
66
THE ENGLISH UTOPIA
Bacon hoped to interest King James, who prided himself upon his virtuosity and delighted to be called the modern Solomon, in his scheme, and, no doubt, dreamed that the foundation of such a college of science might lead to his return to public life and favour. In this he was disappointed, for James had little interest in science for its own sake and already the political struggle was curtailing the resources of the crown. ^ It was not till 1645, under the rule of the Long Parhament, that Bacon’s scheme assumed a modest practical form as the “College of Philosophy”. Its founders, Samuel HartUb, author ot the utopian essay Macaria, and the Czech scholar Comenius, both admitted that their scheme was inspired by Nw Atlantis. Similarly, when the College of Philosophy developed into the Royal Society in 1662, Sprat, Boyle, Glanville and others declared that this was only the carry- ing into effect of Bacon’s outline of Salomon’s House. J^ater still, it was among the main influences which determined the form to be taken by the work of the French Encyclopedists. Diderot, in the Prospectus, stated specifically:
“If wc have come at it successfully, we shall owe most to the Chancellor Bacon, who threw out the plan of an universal dictionary of sciences and arts, at a time when, so to say, neither arts nor sciences existed. That extraordinary genius, when it was impossible to write a historj of what was known, wrote one of what it was necessary to learn.”
Nen^ Atlantis y therefore, belongs to the history of science as much as to the history of Utopia or to the history of politics. Neverthe- less, the development of science and industrial technique was an essential part of the advance of the bourgcf>isic, and, as I have said. Bacon’s preoccupation with applied science as a form of pomr links him with the extremely political utopian writers of the Commonwealth with whom the next section will have to deal.
2. The R£al and the Ideal Commonwealth
The revolution in England was rich in heroic achievement: it was rich also in heroic illusion. This is a necessary .feature of all bourgeois revolutions, since their promises arc far removed from
1 James is said to have remarked, upon the publication cif the Not>um Organum that ‘it is hke the peace of God — it passes all understanding*.
REVOLUTION AND COUNTER-REVOLUTION 67
their results, and their real meaning is often obscured even from those most actively engaged in them. They promise freedom for all, and, more often than not, the promises are sincerely made, but the freedom they actually secure is always the freedom for a particular class to pursue its own ends, while for the masses, whose support is enlisted and whose hopes are aroused, the ad- vantages arc indirect and often dubious, and always fall far short of what was anticipated. In seventeenth-century England as in eighteenth-century France the wild expectations of universal brotherhood and prosperity were cruelly disappointed and the defeat and consequent widespread disillusionment of the un- privileged led in the end to a partial restoration of the old regime, to a compromise between the different sections of the exploiting classes which left many questions unsolved but left also the road clear for future advances.
In England especially the religious forms in which the revolu- tion found expression caused the dreams of the niasses to take the most extravagant shapes. The wJiole period is' one of fantastic speculation, human power and divine power ran side by side and become at times almost interchangeable. Men felt everywhere that they were doing God’s work and God theirs. Tlic overthrow of the royal jiower was not merely e political change but the usher- ing in of the rule of the Saints and the sign of the coming Millenn- ium in which Christ would appear in person to put the seal of his approval upon the work his people were doing. For a time the Fifth Monarchy Men became a powerful political force and the Kingdom of God on earth seemed a practical possibility.
As early as 1641, with the calling of the Long Parliament, such visions were abroad. Hanserd Imollvs wrote in that year:
‘This is the wc^rk that is in hand. As soon as ever this is done, that Antichrist is down, Babylon fallen, then comes in Jesus Christ reigning gloriously; then c'omcs in this Hallelujah^ the l^ord God Omnipotent reigneth, ... It is the work of the day to cry down Babylon, that it may f ti more and more; and it is the work of the day to give God no rest till he sets up Jerusalem as the praise of the whole world. - . - God uses the common pc*.)plo and the multitude to proclaim that the Lord God Omnipotent rc^gjiCth. As when Christ came at first the poor received the Gospel — not many noble, not many rich, but the poor — so in the reformation of religion, after Antichrist began
68
THE ENGLISH UTOPIA
to be discovered, it was the common people that first came to look after Christ.” i
Nor was it only the poor, nameless and ignorant enthusiasts, who expected this Millenium. Their expectation was shared by many of the finest minds of the time. Milton, in the same year, was declaring his belief that England would be
“found the soberest, wisest and most Christian people at that day, when Thou, the eternal ai-d shortly expected King, shall open the clouds to judge the several Kingdoms of the world, and distributing national honours and rewards to religious and just commonwealths, shalt put an end to all earthly tyrannies, proclaiming Thy universal and mild monarchy through heaven and earth.”
We might almost say that the Eden of Panidise host was Milton’s Utopia, a Utopia which contains many of the traditional features of the Earthly Paradise‘s described in Chapter T, and which, ill the first enthusiasm of the revolution he had hoped to see realised on earth. Later, after the slow fading of hopes under the Commonwealth and the final blow of the Restoration, he transferred his Eden to the distant past and the distant future, but, “because he was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it”, there was a time when he had indeed thought that men might cat of the forbidden fruit and become as gods, know- ing good and evil. For Milton the tragedy of the Fall was not that man was wrong to desire this knowledge of good and evil but that the promises of the serpent were false promises (like the
1 It is interesting lo sec liow Jerusalem and bahvj«>n develop fiDni mainly rclij»i<>us intti social and p(>litiral s^inb(jls. KoIktI Button i^lhe Anatomy of Melancholy yGiiy l^art ITT, Seelitm i) quotes August inc: “'fVo cities make two knes, Jenisdlcm and Babylon, the love of Cjod the one, the love (jf the world the other; of these two cities we all arc c]ti/<‘ns, as, by examination of ourselves, we may soon find, and of which.”
An army hymn of the Civil War {x^riod has the lines:
“The Lord begins to honour us,
'J’hc Saints are marching on;
Ihe sword is sharp, the arrows swift T<j destroy Babylon.”
Blake carries the process much further, for which sec p. 124, below.
2 It may be argued that it is rather the case that Cokaygne contains piany of the features of the Biblical Eden. Perhaps this is then the case: the important thing is. that Eden and Cokaygne both contain a number of traditional features common to a number of mythologies in various parts of the wiuld. And the thing that has to be explained is not really the diffusion of these myths but their abiding popularity in the minds of the people.
REVOLUTION AND COUNTER-REVOLUTION 69
promises of the bourgeois revolution itself) and that this know- ledge and the power it could give were proved in the event to be something to which man was not able to attain. The paradise which Milton lost, then, was the early promise of the revolution.
If Milton was the supreme religious Utopian of the English revolution, his Utopia was so concealed that he himself was probably unaware of it as such. There arc, however, religious Utopias of this.period of a more conventional pattern though on an incomparably lower level. One of these is Samuel Gott’s Nova Solyma^ already referred to. This was published in Latin in 1648 and republished in 1649. It does not seem to have attracted much attention and was forg(>ttcn till it was discovered and translated in 1902 by the Rev. \X alter Begley, who attributed it to Milton for no better reason tlian that he could think of no one else capable of creating so sublime a masterpiece. In fjci, as I have said, it is a book of a dullness and inci->titudc scarcely to be imagined.
The framework of fictj<./n is of the usual type. Nova Solyma is discovered and visited by two young gentlemen from Cambridge, Eugenius and Poliian, who are entertained and instructed in the customary hospitable manner. Its inhabitants, without exception, exhibit all the worst chaructcristtcs (jf the Purttan of hostile tradi- tion, narrow-minded and iiystcrical piety, sjnugness and intol- erance. A good deal of the book is taken up with descriptions of their educational arrangements, which have neither the Humanist breadth of More nor he passionate scientific interest of Bacon. The book also discusses, to quote its editor,
“the master passion of love, which is considered philosophic- ally, Platonically and rcalisticty ... the Romance has also much to say on Religk)n, on Conversion, Salvation, the Beginning and End of the World, the Fatherhood of Ciod, the Brother- hood of Man, of Almsgiving, of Self-Control, of Angels and the Fall of Man, and Man’s Eternal Pate.”
It is perhaps hardly to be expected that in addition to all this Samuel Gott should have much to say about the economic and political organisation of the Nova Solymnians, and, in fact, these questions arc virtually ignored. Wc are allowed to deduce that there are classes and private property, wealth and poverty side by side, very much as they were to be found in the non- utopian lands of the time.
70 THE ENGLISH UTOPIA
INom Solynm is, however, by no means the most extreme example of what the Puritan writer could do when he really let himself go. For this we must turn to John Sadler's Olbia: The New Island 'Lately Discovered^ first published in 1660 and never, so far as I can discover, republished. The title page promises a description of ‘‘Religion and Rites of Worship; Laws, Customs and Govern- ment; Character and Lan^age", and the book opens well enough with a pilgrim whose ship is driven out of its coiirse by a storm. On page 3, however, he is wrecked on a rocky islet and rescued by a hermit whom he barely thanks before starting to complain that he is “the wretched object of the Creator’s wrath”. The hermit then consoles and exhorts him through 380 pages. Much of his discourse is devoted to an exposition of numerical mysticism, of which the last paragraph of the book is a fair sample:
“And they lie dead (as we saw before) for 3 days and a half; or 84 hours: vdiich end in hour 324; the Morning Sacrifice^ of the 14th Day: whose Evening Minha beginnctli in hour 333; which added to 1352 (the other two Moeds^ or twice 666;) comes just to 1666; the Evening before the Feast of Tahermicle^^ when also. The Tabernacle of God shall he with mein if we have reckoned right. 'VC hicK may yet be more cleared by our Tables and Qiaracters, if God so please.”
The 'book breaks off, obviously unfinished, but whether Sadler ever did complete it and describe the Laws, Customs and Government of the Olbians it is impossible to say. It is conceiv- able, though unlikely, that a utopian masterpiece lies awaiting discovery in some old library or cupboard. Probably the political atmosphere of 1660 was unfavourable for the publication of millennial speculations. I’he real interest of this curious book is as an example of the wild extravagance of such speculations at the close of the Commonwealth period and its illustration of the way in which such speculations tended to be linked up with the utopian form. The decadence of these speculations parallels exactly the political disintegration and bankruptcy of the left-wing political parties and movements in the last years of the Republic.
Besides divine power working through men there was also human power working directly upon events, and it would be as great a mistake to imagine that all the men of the English Revolution were religious fanatics as to underestimate the part
REVOLUTION AND COUNTER-REVOLUTION 7I
played by religious fanaticism in this period. Along with the Fifth Monarchy Men and the millenary enthusiasts, and sometimes co-operating with them, were sober and secular-minded political theorists, men like Walwyn, Petty, ireton and Vane, and, among the utopian writers, Samuel I lartUb and James Harrington. Their Utopias, Macaria and Oceana^ are entirely matter of fact and political, and illustrate some of the fundamental tendencies of e period.
In both of them the element of fiction has been cut down to the barest framework. Where More, and to a much smaller extent Bacon, were interested not only in the formal structure of their imaginary commonwealths but also in the qualtiy of the living of their peoples, Hartlib and Harrington only used the fictional form as a convenient peg upon which to hang uiodel constitutions. There are no people in these Utopias, only institutions. Marana and Oceana belong, as it were, half-wav between Utopia and such essays in cc^nstitution-making as Agreement the People^ and like The Agreement^ were seriously advanced by their authors as practical schemes which could piofitably and immcdiaiely be put into operation in England. This absence f)f the element of fiction is, perhaps, the main reason why these Utopias are now so seldom read, since, once the circumstances to which they were a response have ceased to exist, it must be confessed that they are somewhat devoid of life and colour.
It is only to be expected, of course, that at a time of revolution, when great changes in the air, the Utopias wt>uld be more practical and less imaginative than at times when their authors saw little hope of their realisat* m. And the English Revolution, like all bourgeois revolutions, v as specially marked by the endless elaboration of paper constitutions, some of which were actually adopted in practice. The reason for this elaborate constitution- making in the bourgeois revolution, which was also marked in America and France, is its double and ambiguous character. The bourgeois revolution is always the work of a combination of class forces, the bourgeoisie drawing into the struggle, under the banner of freedom from privilege, big sections of the lower classes. As a result, when once the first stage has been passed, a further struggle tends to develop between those sections which want to limit the revolution to the ending of feudal privilege and royal absolutism and those determined to proceed to destroy or limit the power *of the men of property, without which, as is
7^
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quickly discovered, the democracy for which the masses supposed themselves to have been fighting is unattainable.
The result is an attempt to strike a balance and stabilise the actual situation in a written and irrevocable constitution. Usually the constitution-making is done by the men of property, who see in it a barrier against further democratic inroads, though sometimes, as in the case of The Agreement of the People^ it is the left wing who want to establish themselves at ji point which they have reached but which it appears likely to be difficult to hold without such support. In the main however, it is the right and centre parties who seek to establish an absolute and un- challenged law^ preventing further changes from either dire ction. And in practice, as in England, a number of such balances are arrived at temporarily until one is reached which really reflects the actual relation of class Agrees.
The key question was that of property. The bourgeoisie fought to establish the absolute right to private property against royal claims and the less clear-cut but more restrictive conceptions of feudalism: in the first period of the revolution, therefore, the claim of the bourgeoisie to an absolute right to enjoy and use their property was objectively progressive. In the second stage, when the lower middle classes were pressing for a fuller democracy to complete the revolution, the rights of property became a barrier behind which the rich entrenched themselves to resist the demands of the l^evellers. In the Putney Debates, quoted at the head of this Chapter, Ireton, the most conscious theoretician of the men of property argued:
‘‘The objection docs not lie in that, the making of the representatives more equal, but in introducing of man into an equality (tf interest in diis government who have no properly in this kingdom. . . . You may have such men chosen, or at least a major part of them, as have no local or permanent interest. Why may not these men vote against all property^”
Against this argument Rainborough replied with a clear statement of human rights:
“I do very well remember that the gentleman iti the window said that if it were so, that there were no propriety to be had, because five parts of the nation, the poor people, arc now pxcluded and would then come in. So one on the other side
REVOLUTION AND COUNTER-REVOLUTION 73
said that if it were otherwise, then rich men only shall be chosen. Then, I say, the one part shall make hewers of wood and drawers of water of the other five, and so the greatest part of the nation be enslaved.”
And Sexby similarly:
“There are many thousand of us soldiers that have ventured our lives; we jjiavc had little propriety in the kingdom as to our estates, yet we have had a birthiight. But it seems now, except a man hath a fixed estate in this kingdom he hath no right in this kingdom. I wonder wc were so much deceived.”
It w'as this internal struggle which led to the degeneration of the Commonwealth and made the Rcsto^-ation possible. It was to prevent such conflicts and to give the republic a firm and perma- nent basis that ilarringti^n wrote Oieana^ and it u to such argu- ments and passions as these that vx must look for the background of that least passionate of books Before discussing it, however, something must be said of the earlier and less iinpt>rtant Macaria, A Descr/ptiofi of the Kiniidom oj Macaria was oublished in
l^ondon in 1641,^ when the Long Parliament had met and had already won its first imp(Utant \ictorics. It is to that Parliament that it is dedicated:
“Whereas T am confident, that this honourable court will lay the corncr-stotie of the world’s happiness, before the first recess thereof, I have advc ircvl to cast in my widr)w’s mite into the treasury; not as an instructor 01 councclk>r to this honourable assembly, but having delivered my concejRion in a fiction, as a more mannerly way; having i.s my j'>attern Sir Thomas More and Sir Francis B^con, once Lord C,hancellor of Imgland.”
It is in the form of a dialogue between a Scholar and a Traveller, and the latter begins:
“In a kingdom called Macaria, the King and the governors do live in great honour and r.' ncs, and the people do live in great plenty, prosperity, peace and happiness.
"^Scholar: That seemeth to me impossible. . .
Macaria, as is suitable for a Utopia of the dawning bourgeois revolution, is organised on state capitalist rather than communist
^ Macaria means ‘blpsscd’ and according to More was a country not far from Utopia-
74 the ENGLISH UTOPIA
lines. “All traffick is lawful which may enrich the kingdom’^ but all is controlled by a great Council, under which are Councils of Husbandry, Fishing, Trade by Land, Trade by Sea and New Plantations. The last of these organised state-aided emigration.
What is quite new in Utopian literature is the method by which the institutions of Macaria are to be introduced into England. For the first time, this is not the w^ork of a benevolent Prince but is the result of convincing the people of the be^icfits of such a change. To bring this about the Scholar promises that in his next sermon he
“will make it manifest that those that are against this honour- able design, are first enemies of God and goodness; secondly enemies to the Commonwealth; thirdly enemies to themselves and their posterity.
*^Traveller: Why should not all the inhabitants of England join with one consent to make this country to be like Mac-
aria. . . .
Scholar: None but fools or madmen will be against it.”
So Utopia begins its second phase, that of belief in the power of persuasion and enlightened self-interest. The time is still far distant when the real nature of the problem of class power will be clearly understood.
Macaria belongs to the first stage of the Revolution, the stage of easy confidence and hope. Oceana^ which was not published till 1656, though much of it had probably been written consider- ably earlier, belongs to the closing years of doubt and exhaustion. Already a whole series of experimental constitutions had been tried and had failed. Harrington believed that he knew why, and hoped, not perhaps very confidently, that his plan would be ado])ted in time to save the republic.
Elarrington was a characteristic but isolated figure. Born in 1 61 1, he was a member of a powerful landowning family. As a young man he showed a great interest in political problems, but, instead of taking part in the struggles of the time, he travelled abroad, studying the institutions of foreign states, especially those of the great aristocratic merchant republics of Elolland and Venice. He had also a considerable knowledge of Greek and Roman history, and, as a result, became a convinced republican at a time when even the most advanced of the practical politicians had no thought of doing more than bringing* the royal power
REVOLUTION AND COUNTER-REVOLUTION 75
under the control of Parliament. Yet, with this strong, academic republicanism, he had an equally strong personal attachment to King Charles, and, when Charles was in the hands of the Army, he became Groom of the Bedchamber, a post that required someone who possessed the confidence of both parties. John Aubrey, his close friend, writes that
‘‘King Charles loved his company; only he could not endure to heare of a Commonwealth.’’
In the actual struggle of the Civil War he took no part and he deeply deplored the king’s execution. Once the Commonwealth bad been established, however, lus republican ccmvictifjns made him desire its success, and it was to Oomwell that his Oceana was dedicated.
In spite of this he had some difliculty in obtaining permission to publish it. Olphacus Mcgalator, wbi> stands for (iromwell in Oceana^ is made to resign his olfice at tlie height of his power, setting up a free republic (ions.^quently ihe book remained lor some time in the hands of the censijr, and Toland, who edited Harrington’s works with a shor+ biography, records Cromwell’s characteristic commem:
“The Gentleman had like to trepan him out of his power, but what he got by the sword he would not quit for a Uttle paper shot: adding in his usual cant, that he approv’d the Govern- ment by a single pen i little as any of ’em, but he was forced to take upon him the office of a High Constable, to preserve the Peace amemg the several Part\ ^ in the Nation, since he saw that being left to themselves they Nvould never agree to any certain form of Government.”
In this there is no reason to think Cromwell insincere. He under- stood to the full the weaknesses of the O^mmonwealth, if not their rof^t cause, and, in his last vears, w^ote and spoke as a man without real hope.
And, indeed, the class contradiction at the root of the Common- wealth was so profound that no artificial constitution, however subtly contrived, could have prevented its fall. Nevertheless, Harrington’s .scheme was based on the appreciation of a great truth, whose clear enunciation gives him an important place in the development of the conception of historical materialism. The character of a society will depend, he believed, upon the
76 THE ENGLISH UTOPIA
distribution of property among the classes within it. By property he meant landed property, but in the seventeenth century land was still the most important form of property, and he was ready to admit that in certain states, such as Holland and Venice, where this was not the position, his generalisation could bear a wider application. He crystallises it in the dictum:
“As is the proportion or balance of Dominion or Property in Land, such is the nature of the Empire. he continues, “one man be the sole Landlord of a territory, or overbalance the People . . . the Empire is absolute Monarchy.
“If the Few, or a nobility with the Clergy be landlords or overbalance the People . . . the Empire is mix’d Monarchy, as that of Spain, P(jland and late of Oceana [England).
“If the whole people be Landlords, or hold the Lands so divided among them that no one Man or number of Men, within the compass of the Few or Aristocracy, overbalance them, the Empire (without the interposition of Force) is a Commonwealth. ’ ’
The foundation stone of Oceana, therefore, was an Agrarian Law, dividing the land, not indeed among the whole people, since Harrington was by no means a believer in complete democracy, but among a large number. This was done by a decree that no-one might hold land valued at more than £2,000. This, he argued, would ensure that the number of landowners would never be less than 5,000 and would in practice be far more, since it was un- likely that all woidd have the maximum holding. In order to break up estates still further he proposed to abolish primo- geniture, so that all estates were to be divided equally between the sons of the owner. Such an Agrarian Law would give the Commonwealth a firm basis, in much the same way as the Refor- mation settlement in England was assured by the number of people who had an interest in retaining the lands taken from the church. It is worth noting in this connection the firm basis that the French Revolution did secure later by its wide division of the land among the peasantry. Political power in Oceana was not confined to the landowners but was so distributed that they had a decisive influence. What was being proposed in effect was that England should become a country of small landlords and solid freeholders.
Once the foundations of the Commonwealth of Oceana had
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been secured by this division of the land, Megalator was able to introduce Harrington’s other proposals for the reform of the machinery of Government. These were the secret ballot, both in the election of representatives and in the Parliament itself, indirect election, a system of rotation by which one third of the members of Parliament and of all elected bodies resigned each year and so the w'hole membership was changed every three years, and a two chamber Parlian^ent in which the upper and smaller house, with a higher property qualilication, debated but did not vote, while the lower house voted but did not debate. Harrington seems to have regarded this lower house as a kind of indirect referendum.
None of these proposals was absolutely new. Harrington’s method was historical rather than empirical and he adopted devices he knew to ha\c been used in the ancient world and in modern states, especially in Venire, for which he had always die greatest admiration. W hat was new v^as their combination and the proposal to apply them to the government of a great nation state instead of to the dtics and close corporations to which they had liitherto been confined. W'h.it he aimed at was a democracy that would avoid corruption and buicaucrac) on the one side and, on the other, the irresponsibility of the common people, in whom, like most gendemanly political thinkeis, he had little confidence.
Under the Commonwealth corrujition had by no means been destroyed. Winstanlcy, in a vivid passage in his Imw of freedom PI a Platform ^ had remarked:
water stands long ii (orruj>ts. . . . Some olficers of the Commonwealth have grown so mossy for want of moving that they will hardly speak to an o'd acquaintance.’’’^
Harrington proposed to avoid this by allowing the greatest possible number of people to participate in the actual work of government. By the indirect ballot and the property qualification, as well as by his double chamber system, he hoped to avoid the “excesses” of democracy.
Much of Oceana is taken up with speeches in the Senate and with
1 Quoted from H. F. R. Smith’s Warrington and hts Oceana. Smith points out that Harrington must have been acuuaintcd with the wiitings and activities of Win- stanlcv and the Diggers, wh(' also made a redi vision of the land essential to the establishment o£ a frue Commonwealth. The Diggers, who were mainly proletarian, proposed a n'uch more radical and communist re-division than did Harrington. Winstanlcy’s I.umf of freedom, though it is direct propaganda and not in the form of fiction, might well be reckoned among the Utopias of the seventeenth century.
78 THE ENGLISH UTOPIA
a variety of detailed projects that are now of minor interest. Some of these are fantastic, as the, probably not very serious, proposal to plant Panopea (Ireland) with the Jews, to whomit could become a new national home. Others, like the scheme for a sort of People’s Army, were quite practical in the conditions then existing. Few Utopias have attracted more immediate attention. A gigantic pamphlet literature, for and against, sprang up around Oceana^ while in the last years of the Commonwealth^ a definite Party developed, whose members were drawn chiefly from the more secular wing of the Republicans. Among Harrington’s followers or close associates can be reckoned Henry Nevile, Marten, Algernon Sidney and John Wildman, formerly a leader of the Levellers. In the Parliament that met in January, 1659, there were ten or a dozen avowed Harringtonians who lost no opportunity of advancing his constitutional proposals.
In the same year Harrington founded the Rota Club, perhaps the first purely political debating society, whose business was conducted strictly according to Oceanic principles. It was a remarkable platform for completely free discussion and many of the most distinguished men of the day took part in its proceedings cither as members or visitors. With the Restoration the Rota, like all other forms of republican activity, was proscribed, and Harrington, with Wildman and others, was imprisoned. He was afterwards released, his health broken by close confinement, and, Toland says, by overdoses of Guaiacum, prescribed to him as a cure for the scurvy. In his last years he was troubled with a
"‘deep conceit and fancy that his perspiration turned into flies
and sometimes into bees,”
but apart from this obsession he was c|uitc rational and lived quietly in the country till his death in 1677.
With the Restoration the political influence of Oceana came to an end in England, but in the American and French Revolutions, when attention was turned once more to the shaping of con- stitutions, its influence again became important. John Adams and James Gtis, among others in America, were enthusiastic admirers of Harrington’s work, and the constitution of Massachusetts embodied so many of his ideas that it was actually formally pro- posed to change the name of the State to Oceana*. The influence of Harrington’s ideas can also be seen in the original constitutions of Carolina, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and it was probably as
REVOLUTION AND COUNTER-REVOLUTION 79
a disciple of Harrington that Adams insisted so strongly upon a two-chamber Congress for the Union.
In France the Abbe Sicyes included in the constitution which he drafted, and which was adopted in 1800, some of Harrington’s most important proposals, notably indirect election and the division of the legislature into two chambers, one of which debated and the other made decisions. The scheme was a failui because the secogd chamber became a quite formal body ratifying decisions which in fact had been reached elsewhere, and because, as always, the inner logic of the bourgeois revolution was too powerful to be arrested bv any constitutional expedients, however carefully worked out. Nevertheless, tlic fact that in both the American and the French Revolutions Harrington’s Utopia uas the one to which the acutest political theorists turned, is a proof of its close relation to the actual problems of a revolutionat) age.
3. \J tophi and ili Reaction
It might have been expected that the Restoration peri xl would have little or nothing to show in the way of Utopiaij literature: that this is not the case is a strong proof of the popularity and unfailing appeal that books of this kind have had. The Restt)ration Utopias arc of low qualit} and contribute little of pc^sitive value to the development of the Utopian conception. They are of considerable interest, however, because of the closeness with which they reflect the ch ngf in the regime and the new political atmosphere. In this connection it is highly significant that two ot the four books to be considered h^'rc are continuations of Bacon’s unfinished Nev' A.tlaniis, since ol all the major Utopias this is the least radical and politically advanced.
The first of these continuations. New A.tlattfis. Begun hy the Lord Verulam, Viscount St Albans: and Continued hj R. H. Esquire. Wherein is set forth a Piat/orni of MonarchuJ Governmenty was pub- lished in London in September, 1 . ' , in the first flush of royalist enthusiasm. It is dedicated, with unconscious irony to
“My most Sacred Sovereign Charles II. If in the ensuing character of* a puissant and most accomplished Monarch all your Majesfie’s Princely Vertues are not fully portraid (for I am sensible the picture may seem drawn with too much shadow) 1 shall humbly beg your gracious pardon; this being
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THE ENGLISH UTOPIA
only the first draught of that immense beauty a more deliberate liand perhaps could have delineated in more lively colours.”
Like Qiarles, Salomona was pleased to regard himself as the father of his people and was accustomed to call them his children, but wc are told that:
“His chastity was singular, he never being seen to converse with any woman but his Princely Spouse or some of his nearest relations.”
He was equally noted for his abstemiousness, his usual drink being a little sugared water. He did, however, take pleasure in watching horse-racing, which in Bensalem was managed without jockeys!
Many of the incidental details are plagiarised from More, but all More’s specifically progressive features are omitted. Most of the narrative is in the form of a dialc'guc between the imaginary narrator and a Bcnsalemite magivStrate or Alcaldorem. The author obviously does not understand the real nature of the Restoration settlement, but naively imagines that lingland had now returned to the state of affairs which existed before the Revolution. The Alcaldorem, asked how Bensalem can be governed without a Parliament, replies:
“The people of Bensalem have it as a received maxim among them that their Salomona neither can nor will do them any injury, they being the members of the body whereof lie is the head,”
and adds that in England it is to be doubted if Parliaments will long continue, at any rate in tlicir present power. He goes on to expound the theoretical basis of the constitution:
“We conceive Monarchy the nearest to perfection, that is, to God, the wise Governor ot the Universe, and therefore best.”
The nobility depend on the Monarch for their advancement and the people are loyal, peaceful and virtuous.
As befits a monarchy, the government and social structure throughout is entirely patriarchal, and many of their features look back to the Middle Ages. Every man mu§t hTave a trade which he is forbidden to change, magistrates have the power to regulate industry and the quality of all goods produced, to keep the public granaries stocked and to enclose commons and
REVOLUTION AND COUNTER-REVOLUTION 8l
wastes. Landlords are obliged to let land on long leases and at fixed and reasonable rents. The advance of technology and science in the seventeenth century is reflected, however, in the obligation of tenants to plant half their pastures with lucerne or one of the other artificial grass crops then coming into fashion in lingland, and in the great variety of manures used. In gcncraf though, this Utopia is a simple-minded attempt to go back, not only to tiic period before th^ revolution, but beyond that to wipe away many of the ccomnnic and social changes whieli led up to it.
The second continuafion of New was the work of
Joseph Cjlanvill, a much more considerable writer and public figure than the anonymous R.II. Glanvill was closely associated with the Cambridge Platotiists, the list ofFshoc»t in Lngland of renaissance Humanism. The Cambridge Platonists, Henry More, Cudworth, John Smith and cabers, were a u ell- defined school who attempted to tutn the tables both on the mechanical material- ists and the enthusiasts of the Puritan sects by deVnonstrating the reasonableness of rebgion, and cspcciaPy of the \nglican Church, In this way they met w'ilh considerable success in an age which was attaching more and more importance to rea^t^n but which still wished to reconcile teason with revealed religion. Cdanvill himself was both an Anglican clergyman and a bePow of ihc Royal Society. In his own daj he was accused oi atheism on account of his early book. The Vanity of DognnUisingy and later has been regarded as a credulous fanatic for liis Sudiu ismus Triumpbatus in which he tried to piw\c the reality of witchcraft. Neither of these accusations is really just, for what he w^as actually trying to do was to link the cxj^crimenta* materialism of Bacon with the rational mysticism of the Cambi-idge PlaN>nhts.
In his continuation of New A.tlantis he dcsctibcs Bensalem in the throes of revolution, although this revc/lution is looked at almost entirely from the standpoint of the theological struggle. He secs the revolution, therefore, as a conflict between right reason and irrational fanaticisn When the Bcnsalemites had deposed and murdered their ‘Pious Prince^ the way was opened for every form of extravagance and unreason. The Ataxites, the Puritan Party
“all cried up their own class as the only Saints^ and People of God: all vilified Keason as Carnal^ and Incompetent, and an enemy to the things of the Spirit. . . . All talk’d of their extraordinary Communion with God, their special Experience^
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THE ENGLISH UTOPIA
Illuminations and Discoveries; and accordingly all demeaned themselves with much saweiness and irreverence towards God, and contempt of those that were not of the same phan- tastical Fashion.”
Against them Glanvill set up a rival school, drawn from the Cambridge Platonists, who restore to religion reason, moderation, simplicity and dignity- in short, bring about an Anglican revival: '
‘"They told the Ataxites that though they talk’d much of Closing with Christy Getting in to Christy Kolling upon Christy and having an interest in Christ; and made silly people believe there was something of Divine Mystery or extraordinary spirituality under the sound of these words; that yet, in good earnest, cither they understood not what they said and mean’d nothing at all by them; or else the sense oi them was but believing Christ's DoctrineSy obeying his lawSy and depending upon his promises; plain and known things.”
As a result of their efforts the Ataxite Party was discredited and overthrown and Bcnsalem returned to reasonable religion and monarchical government. (jlanvilPs interests were not really political, but, so far as I can discover, his is certainly much the earliest Utopia in which an actual revolutionary struggle is des- cribed. The Revolution had brought with it the understanding that societies are constantly developing and being transformed through man’s conscious efforts. For tliis reason, in spite of his very slight interest in politics as such, Glanvill’s is an important contribution to the history of the English Uti>pia. It should be added that the work, as published in 1676, is itself incom]')lcte. It is a part only of a much longer book in continuation of New Atlantis which is known to have existed in manuscript but which has now been lost.
The third of our Restoration Utopias has, strictly speaking, possibly no place in this b(>ok, since it was probably the work of a French writer, Denis Vairasse d’Allais. But it was actually published in an linglish translation in London (1675-9) ^^o years before the French edition appeared. In this English version it is attributed to an imaginary Captain Siden. It illustrates both the set of opinions we have noted already in the two continuations of New Atlantis and some other interests characteristic of the period botli in England and France.
REVOLUTION AND COUNTER-REVOLUTION 83
There is the same marked decline in political interest, and in its place there is a lively curiosity about the doings and manners of a strange people, an interest that can almost be described as anthropological and which is clearly the cflFect of the active exploration of the remoter parts of the earth and their opening to' European intercourse and commerce.
The History of the Sevan tes or Sevarawbi tells how after the Flood the KartWy Paradise was transported to a region South- East of the Cape of Good Hope and peopled WTth a new creation, resembling men but not identical with them. It has many of the characteristics of the Earthly Paradise of Cokaygne described in Chapter I, such as limitless abundance and a complete absence of poverty. On the other hand, Severambe, being a seventeenth- century Utopia, has a society based on reason and natural law, and, inevitably, is ruled by a hereditary, despotic and quasi-divine king. In this respect, and like the other Utc^pias of tl*c time, its organisation has a close likeness to that outlined by Hobbes in his iMnathan^ though it is not possible to^^ay whether this was due to a direct influence or to the gcticral effect of the absolutism existing in France and the struggle of Charles li to re-establish absolutism in England.
There is no indication that the writer was very iatcrc*‘tedinsuch political questions, once he had paid his tribute of flattery ti> the prevailing orthodoxy. This done, he proceeds to deal in detail and real animation with all sorts of sexual and miscellaneous customs of Severambe, and with the various marvels to be ffmnd there. There was, for example, a special kind of temporary marriage for travellers:
“Because many among us arc sometimes (obliged to travel and leave their wives at home, we keep in all cities a number of women slaves appointed to their use, so that wt do not only give to every traveller Meat, Drink and J-,odging, but also a Woman to lye with as openly and lawfully as if she were his wife.”
This VI as doubtless a reflection of some Eastern modes of hospit- ality, news of which was becoming current in Europe.
The treatment of crime also receives some attention, and among criminals the Severambi seem to have reckoned lawyers. This is partly the normal hostile reaction of simple people to the law, but the passage suggests that it may also be the result of
84 the ENGLISH UTOPIA
the considerable part that lawyers in England had played during the Civil War:
“On both sides were the lawyers’ Cells or little Closets. These are a certain number of men, who are locked up as Prisoners in their place, and not suffered to range up and down the city, for fear they should infect the rest of men with their idle notions and Quirks. They are all kept, the Judges only excepted, as our mal and craftie men in Europe, arc confined to Bedlams, and as the wild I'easts to their dens; for by this policy they preserve the city in quiet.”
In spite of the stress placed upon reason in Severambe, this Utopia shows none of Bacon’s enthusiasm for scient'e. Its place is taken by a great variety of magical talismans, by which wonders arc worked, especially the unnatural changing and distortion of the shapes of animals, in which the people appear to have taken a peculiar delight.
It is indeed, the political and cultural innocence of the author of this Utopia which gives it its main interest, showing how much the prevailing political atmosphere could affect w^hat is really only meant to be read as a wonder tale. As a wemder tale it has close connections wdth the type of Utopian romance which became more widely current in the ntxt century. It is a forerunner of the JRousseauesque glorification of the simj-)le aborigine and of Didcr(;t’s Supplement to Boupimwi lie's ‘1 ^oyage" in iTance, and, in Imgland, ot the work of such different though related writers as Swift, Uefoe, Beringtijn and Paltock.
A similar innocence marks a tale that deserves at least a mention here both for its authorship and its remarkable anticipation of 'Robinson Crusoe. Tbe Isle of Pines (1668) was the work of Henry Nevile, v/it, republican and closest associate of Harrington. Nevile w’as widely credited with a share in the production of Oceana^ though nothing could less resemble that ponderous book than his owm acknowledged work. Ncvilc’s hero, George Pine, like Crusoe, w^as wrecked (^n an island which,
“being a large island, and disjoined and out of sight of any other land, was w^holly uninhabited by any people, neither was there any hurtful beast to annoy us. But on the contrary, tnc country was so very pleasant, being always clothed in green, and full of pleasant fruits, and variety of birds, ever warm, and never colder than in England in September; so that this place, had it
REVOLUTION ^MD COUNTER-REVOLUTION 85
the culture that skilful people might bestow on it, would prove a paradise.”
Ill this paradise Pine, like Crusoe, had the blessing of securing all the stores of the wrecked ship, and, unlike Crusoe, of the company of four women saved from the wreck with him. Such use did he make of all this that he and they lived in the greatest ease, pros- perity and happiness, and, when eighty years old, and after fifty nine years *upon the island, he was able to count his descen- ants to the number of one +housand seven hundred and eighty- nine. It is the secular and a-moral character of tliis little utopia that is most striking. Nevilc like Harringlf)n and Marten, was an outstanding representative of the rationalist element in the Pmglish Revolution: in the Parliament of 1659, in which he was the leader of the Harrington Ian group, an attempt was made to unseat him on the ground ol his alleged atheism. And on their island Pine and his woracti-lolk live according to thtir natuul inclinations w’ilhout the slightest regard to moral laws or any external prohibitioiug with results that appe.ir satisfactoiy to all concerned. It is the triumph of natural human goodness left to assert itself. 11 the setting here anticipates that of (itusoe’s island the spirit is rather that (jf Diderot and the Preiich 1 hilightcnmcnt.
CHAPTER IV
RhASOM IN DESPAIR
Fades the Republic; faint as Roland’s horn,
Her Tiumpcts taunt us with a sacred scoin^ . .
Then silence fell and Mr Long was born.
CHEST1.RTON.
I. 1/je End of Coknygm
WHEN Church ill’s In^opers triumphed at Sedgemoor they rode down tlic last defenders of Cokaygne, the Utopia of all jolly fellows, of the proud, independent man, neither exploiting nor exploited, eating and drinking of his own abundance. For this was (me half of the Levellers’ dream, and, I think, more than half of the Ixvcllers’ strength. On the one side they were modern, rational, civilised in a measure above that of their time. On the other, they were medieval, traditional, appealing to the deep-lying desires and perpctuiilly thwarted hopes of the people. Their power lay in the synthesis of the past and the future: their weak- ness and the inevitability of their defeat lay in its incompleteness and in the gap which existed between it and the objective reality of historical development - a gap far deeper and wider than that Bussex Rhine on Sedgemoor in which Monmouth’s army met its defeat.
But if it was a peasant army and a peasant Utopia vrhich went down, the ultimate victory did not rest with the Catholic-feudal counter-revolution. This was not merely another of the long series of peasant insurrections crushed by feudal power; it was the final defeat of the plebeian element in the Bourgeois Revolution, and, with that defeat, the necessity for the upper bourgeoisie to compromise with the remnants of feudal society also came to an end. Churchill might indeed ride to Sedgemoor as James Stuart’s man: he rode home already beginning to think that William Nassau might pay a better price for his services. The ultimate victors at Sedgemoor were the Whigs, the men who three years later organised the so-called “Glorious” Revolution of 1688.
The events of 1688, wliilc not a revolution in the true sense.
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87
consolidated the victory won by the bourgeoisie forty years earlier. Advances far beyond what the bourgeoisie either needed or desired, alternating with partial and temporary successes of reaction, had filled the intervening period. Now a compromise, corresponding^ roughly with the objective balance of class forces, had been reacned — the time had come for the victors to gather the fruits. So 1688 established the power of the great merchants and financiers, allied with the Whig nobility who ha ! trans- formed themselves into capitalist landowners. This combination, irresistibly strong, made politics a closed shop and created the apparatus needed for the rapid accumulation of capital leading to the agricultural and industrial revolution of the latter part c^f the eighteenth century.
The great epoch of the seventeenth century Revolution had been an age of enthusiasm and wild hopes, of bold speculation^ and the clash of ideas. All this now ended: hen /ism, self-sacrificc, disinterestedness, passed so clean out of fashion that the very words acquired a slight flav(>ur of impropriety. Lvery thing and every man now had its known price ai»d honour became a commodity like all the others Instead of Laud we find Sachever- cll, instead of Cromwell, Walpole, w’hile the nearest the eighteenth century could come to Lilbutne was John Wilkes. '"Silence fell, and Mr. Long was born.’’ Men felt that the wars had brought nothing about, but tliis was far from the trutli: what had been created was the condition for a rapid expansion of trade and industry, the establishment wilh the Bank of Lngland and the National Debt c/^ a 'modern’ financial system, a long senes of colonial wars in which English capitalism established its riglit to exploit vast new territory s. In the eighteenth century the bour- geoisie, which had emerged out of and in contradiction to feudal society, and had fought for and won political power, transformed itself into modern capitalism and, breaking the last links wliich had bound it to the old feudal order, established itself and its specific mode of production as a part of the recognised order of things.
And of all this a young man who had fought at Sedgemoor on the losing side, and, three years later, had been on the winning side with William of Orange, was the first prophet. Daniel Defoe, in his pamphlet An Appeal to Honour and Justice (1715), defined both his own standpoint and that of the new order with singular exactness: •
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*‘I was for my first entering into the knowledge of Public Matters, and have ever been to this day, a sincere lover of the Constitution of my country, zealous for Liberty and the Protest- ant Interest; but a constant follower of Moderate Principles, a vigorous opposer of Hot Measures of all Parties. I never once changed my opinions, my principles, or my Party: and let what will be said of changing sides, this I maintain, that I have never once deviated from the Revolution Principles, nor from the doctrine of IJberty and Property on wliich they were founded.”
For Defoe, as for Churchill, 'Liberty and Property’, or, more accurately, ‘Liberty for Property’, came to be identified with the House of Orange and the Protestant Succession, and, indeed, as things were, no real alternative existed after 1685. h\>r Churchill, to whom changes of allegiance came as easily as they have to other members of his familj% no difficulty was presented — but Defoe? Defoe who has at least the hom)ur of having fought in the last battle of Fnglish libcrtj? Did he never feel that his new prin- ciples were a betrayal of wliat Ins comrades had fought and died for under tlie sea-green banner that Monmouth had inherited from the Levellers?
If he did, he certainlv never said so except perhaps indirectly. When Robinson Ousoe csca])cd from Sallee he took with him a negro slave boy, Xury, whom he promised ‘to make a great man’, and for whom he professed a lively affection. When at the end c^f their voyage they were picked up by a Portugese ship, the captain
“offered me also sixty pieces of eight more for my boy Xury, which I was loth to take, not but what 1 was not willing to let the captain have him, but I was very loth to sell the poor boy’s liberty, who had assisted me so faitlifully in procuring my own. However, when I let him know my reason, he owned it to be just, and offered me this medium, that he would-^ give the boy an obligation to set him free in ten years, if he turned Christian, and Xury saying he was willing to go with him, I let the captain have him.”
The only real regret Crusoe ever expressed over this transaction was when he found that he could profitably have made use of Xury’s labour himself. Is it fanciful to see in this negro slave boy
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89
Defoe^s old comrades of the Left, and in the captain, perhaps, William of Orange? Possibly, though Defoe expressly invites us to interpret Kobinson Crusoe in just this kind of way:
‘‘The adventures of Robinson Crusoe are one whole scene of real life of eight-and-twenty years, spent in the most wandering desolate and afflicting circumstances that ever a man went through, and in which I lived a life of w(^ndcr, in continual storms ... in worse slavery than Turkish, escaped by as exquisite management as in the story of Xury and the bc»at of Sallee, been taken up at sea in distress ... in a word there is not a circumstance in the imaginary story but has its just allusion to a real story.’’
\X"hcther Defoe had any intention of drawing it, the parallel is certainly there, and the whole episode i* entirely in keeping with the times: that is why Defoe is the characteristic writer and Kobhmn Crusoe the charactcristi"* Utopia of the early eighteenth century, just as Cliurchill is its characteiistic public figure. It was this horrifying combination of the objectively progressive with the morally squalid in the Revolutif>n of 1688 which bewil- dered so many of the best men of the day: it w^as this perhaps which turned the incorruptible Ferguson into a Jacobite, it was this which created an agimising and insoluble pniblcni for those who had more old-fashioned ideas of loyalty than Churchill and greater intellectual subtlety tlian Defoe.
Among the former was an Irish soldier, as great perhaps if less fortunate than Cuarchill, who was alsi> willi the victorious army at Sedgemoor. Among the latter a young man who in 1685 was an unsatisfactory student .t what he regarded as a most unsatis- factory university — Trinity College, Dublin. If Churchill and Defoe arc typical figures on the one side, Sarsfield and Swift can stand f('r tlic best on the other, and it is perhaps significant that we have to go to Ireland to find them. In Ihigland the ‘Revo- lution’ stood, in however debased a wav, for the Good Old Cause: Ireland could offer no Go^hI Old Cause, since, whoever won, the Irish people were certain to be enslaved and exploited. Sarsfield was no politician but a simple and honourable soldier. He took what seemed to him the inevitable course under the circumstances, and, after his famous defence of Limerick, migrated to Europe with many of his men and was killed at Landen in 1693. Swift’s fate was more complex and will detain us longer, since he was to
90 THE ENGLISH UTOPIA
write the second and the greatest utopian work of the age — Gulliver s Travels,
Swift came from a family traditionally Royalist; liis grandfather had been ruined for the support he gave to Charles I in the Civil War. His father and uncles came to Ireland to try to restore the family fortune. So Swift was veritably born into contradiction: neither English nor Irish he seemed at times to hate equally the lands of his origin and his adoption: often he insists that he is an English gentleman who happened to be born in Ireland, but it was in Ireland that he became a national figure, respected and loved as few have been before or after him.
Yet his career as an Irish patriot was the result of little more than an accident. When he left the University it was to England that he turned as a matter of course to make his name in politics and letters. While acting as personal secretary to Sir William Temple, that admirable nonentity, he published his first brilliant satires. The 'Tale of a Tub and The hafile of I he Book Later he took orders, rather unwillingly, and divided his time between Jiis Irish parish of Laracor and the polite literary world of London. Presently he made himself the indispensable pamphleteer of the Tories. His savage wit, his brilliance in pok mic, his arrogance and the overwhelming force of his personality made him, for some years, an outstanding figure in English politics.
Yet, it may be said, what was he after all but a Tory hack writer? I think that Swift’s Toryism needs a few words of explanation. Swift accepted, albeit regretfully, the 'Revolution’ of 1688. Yet he could not but observe that it had strengthened a new sort of oppression and a new breed of exploiter.
“With these measures,” he wrote, “fell in all that Sett of People, who are called the Monied Men: such as had raised vast Sums by Trading with Stocks and Funds, and Lending upon great Interest and Praemiums; whose perpetual Harvest is War, and whose beneficial way of Traffic must very much decline by a Peace.”
Swift had, as we shall see, a deep hatred of war, of colonial exploitation, of the depression of agriculture by the money-lender and stock-jobber. He saw (rightly) in the Whigs the Pkrty which stood for all these things: he saw (wrongly) in the Tories the Party which opposed them and stood for what he felt to be the older and saner way of life.
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In a sense. Swift’s hatred of the new forces was reactionary, but it was neither dishonest nor ignoble. The fcjrm which his hatred took was the only one which seemed open to him. A generation, two generations earlier he might have become a l.cvcllcr, and the duality of the Leveller outlook, based on a confused antagonism to both feudal and bourgeois exploitation, had much in common with liis own. It is interesting, if no more, to find that in one of his letters he refars to Stephen College, '‘the Protestant Joiner’' and a martyr of the Left as "a noble person”. And a century later William Godwin, the oracle of the 1 English Jacobins, declared that Swift showed “a more profound insight into the true prijiciplcs of political justice than any preceding or contemporary author”. Swift was born in an evil time w’heii there were neither Le\Lllcrs nor Jacobins, and in practice if on« was pot a \X hig the only altcr- nathc was to he a 'Lory,
Swift may be icckoned the first in that curious succession of Tory radicals wlio expressed in a more or less distorted form an opposition to those features of cajutalis^ development which bore most opjircssivi ly u] on the masses. In the direct succession, Cobbett was perhaps the last and greatest figure; but the line reappears in tht nineteenth century, touching the fringes of Chartism in the persons c»f Oastler, J. R. Stephens and Charles Kingsley. Finally, through Ruskin, tliis Tory radicalism was not wnthout influence on William Morris and the modern working class movement in Britain.
How far he vas fnjni the common Tory beliefs in Divine Right and Non-resistance both his life and his works bear full witness. There is hardly a reference anywhere to any monarch wliich IS not one of dcris. jn and comempt and he was never so happily cmploved as wlien thwarting the ministers who governed in their name. Nor should we forget how Gulliver, visiting the island of Glubbdubdrib, whose inhabitants had the power to recall the dead, used his opportunities:
'T had the honour to nave much conversation with Brutus; and was told that his Ancestor Junius^ Socrates, lipaminondas^ Cato the Younger^ Sir Thomas More and himself were per- petually* together: A Sextimvirate to which all the Ages of the NX'orld cannot add a Seventh. ... I chiefly fed my eyes with beholding the Destroyers of Tyrants and Usurpers, and the Restorers of Liberty to oppressed and injured Nations, But it
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is impossible to express the Satisfaction which I received in my own Mind, after such a Manner as to make it a suitable Enter- tainment to the Reader.”
So if, as we shall see presently. Swift’s Brobdingnag was a Tory utopia, his Toryism would no more have qualified him for membership of the Carlton Club to-day than it did in his lifetime for the bishopric to which his talents and services certainly entitled him. have seen how he attacked the Whigs as the war party. In GuUmr^s Travels the theme of war is approached again and again. Gulliver offers to the King of Brobdingnag the secret of gunpowder, and when this offer is rejected with horror, comments ironically:
“A strange effect of narrow Principles and shan't \^iews! that a Prince, possessed of every Quality which procures Veneration, Love and Esteem; of strong Parts, great wisdom and profound Learning; endued with admirable Talents for Government, and almost adored by his subjects; should from a nici unnecessary Scruple^ whereof in hurope we can have no Conception, let slip an Opportunity put into his hands, that would have made him absolute Master of the Uves, the Liberties, and the I'ortunes of Ills People.”
Few Tories indeed have been burdened with such nice un- necessary Scruples, nor with these to which Gulliver confesses at the end of his voyages, when he considers whether he should not have annexed his discoveries to the Imglish crown:
‘‘To say the Truth, I had conceived a few Scruples with relation to the distributive Justice of Princes upon these Occasions. hVir Instance, a Crew of Pirates arc driven by a Storm they know not whither; at length a Boy discovers Land from the Top-mast; they go on Shore to rob and plunder; they sec an harmless People, are entertained with Kindness, they give the Country a new Name, they take formal Possession of it for the King, they set up a rotten Plank or a Stone for a Memorial, they murder two or three Dozen of the Natives, bring away a Couple more by Force for a Sample, return home, and get their Pardon. Here commences a new Dominion, acquired with a Title by Divine Right, Ships are sent with the first Opportunity; the Natives driven out or destroyed, their Princes tortured to discover their Gold; a free Licence given to all Acts of Inhumanity and Lust; the Earth reeking with the Blood
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of its Inhabitants: And this execrable Crew of Butchers em- ployed in so pious an Expedition, is a Modern Colony sent to
convert and civilize an idolatrous aiid barbarous People/’
Svift had every reason to know what he was talking about, since, before this passage was written, a sudden turn of political events had led to his finding himself, from 1714, settled perman- ently in Ireland, lingland’s oldest and most exploited colony. For a time he was stwnned, and the ‘English’ siilc of him held him aloof. But Swift, with his passionate hatred of oppression and injustice and his equally passionate desire to dominate Ids environ- ment, could not long be still. Step by step he was drawn into a struggle in which all the odds were against him, a struggle which in (^nc sense was doomed to failure because he was fighting the battles of the future with the weapons of the past. The struggle ended, for him, in madness and despair, vet he did succeed in blowing up the almost dying fires of Irish nationality into a fresh blaze, and out of that struggle wc iiavc lodav, among other things, those three master- works. The Drupier^ [ jeflcrT^ A Modes/ Proposal and Gulliver's T ravels.
Gulliver's Travels is not merely Swift’s masterpiece. It is the heart and centre of all his w(»rk, lying clear acrots the most fruitful jears of liis life. Begun in 1714 and not finished till shortly before its publication in 1726, there is good evidence to show that it was seldom far fn^m his thoughts in these years. It was constantly being rewritten and added to, so that it reflects tlie growth and development of hi*' idcris, his first, second and final thoughts about man and society.
The Adventures of Kobinson Crusoe and Gulhver's Travels^ then, arc tlie utopias of the two greatest writers of the last phase of the English Revedution, twin and coaiplcmcntary utopias whose authors, like their heroes, arc the twin and complementary rep- resentatives of their age. Their similarities and their differences arc alike significant and the next section of tliis chapter must begin by examining botli the similarities and the differences.
2. The Bourgeois Hero Reaches V/opia
At first *it is the similarities which strike us. Both Gulliver's Travels and Robinson Crusoe belong to a new world which is entirely different from that reflected in any previous utopia. In the first place, the cletfjent of pure fiction is enormously increased. For
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THE ENGLISH UTOPIA
More, Bacon, Harrington, in varying degrees, the fiction was a mere framework, a convenient device for getting their utopia introduced, never intended to carry any real conviction: one can think away the fiction and what is left would stand up well enough. It is impossible to think of Gulliver's Travels or Kobinson Crusoe in this sort of way. Swift, and Defoe still more, produce novels, "‘present for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” There is a fundamental difference in approach, in temper and in style. And it is perhaps in their style that the difference is most fully disclosed.
For the first time we have a style which is fully bourgeois, which avoids exccvss and pays dividends, and this is just as true of the frustrated aristocrat. Swift, as of the optimistic bourgeois, Defoe. Iwen More, the most vivid and human of the earlier Utopians only descends from the general to the particular for special reasons and with an almost apologetic air of deliberately unbending, as in the little episode of the outburst of coughing in which the exact situation of Utopia was for ever kist. But for Swift and Defoe the general is only built up of an infinitude of minute particulars and tlie particular has now become the normal. By the accumulation of exact detail Defoe comtuced us that the probable really happened. Swift forces us to suspend for a time our disbelief in the impossible.
And tlicir imaginary gardens do not contain only real toads, they also contain real people around whom the whole action turns. The individual hero, tlic full-scale bourgeois man, having trans- formed Iingland, has now reached the shores of Utopia. The difference is clear from the very title of these books: instead of Utopia and Oceana wc are offered The Straap^e and Surprising A.dvenhires of Kohinson Crusoe of York, Mariner^ and 'travels into Several Ren/oti Nations of the World by l^mul Gulliver^ First a Surgeon and then a Captain of Several Ship^, It is not only wliat Crusoe and Gulliver see which is important, but what they do, and their Utopias arc presented not in the abstract but very much through the eyes of the visitors: further, they are not mere observers but actors and their actions change and modify the Utopias which they describe. It is significant that this development is far more marked in the case of Crusoe than of Gulliver.
At the outset the social background of each is firmly sketched in. Each came from the “middle state” of life, which Crusoe’s father “had found by long experience was the best state in the
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95
world, the most suited to human happiness, not exposed to the miseries and hardships, the labour and sufferings of the mechanical part of mankind, and not embarrass’d with the pride, luxury, ambition and envy of the upper part of mankind/’ liach was a younger son. Here we have the classic bourgeois hero who has held the stage of fiction ever since, the young man of respectable family and good parts, w'lio has been given a fair (or, as some would say, an ui^air) start and has his way to make in th^ world. His adventures arc the counterpart of those of the knight cirant of medieval romances, except that they are undertaken not for their own sake but for some solidly material benefit. Instead of riding through the Hnehanted Forest tf) the Well at the World’s lind the bourgeois hero sails prosaically by compass and star around a well charted world. However fantastic f iuDivor’s adventures may turn out to be, he sets out sobcrl) from the Pool of J.ondon and it is possible to determine the latitude and kmgitudc ot his wildest fantasies with fair accuracy: Gw liver' ^ I'ravJs is the first utopia to be equipped with maps, and if V\ohinsonXj um is not similarly prenided it is only because all the places he visited are sufficiently well known to make them unnecessary.
Fot by 1700 the world was already faiily mapped, was ceasing to be a place of woiidcr and v'as becoming a place “where there is a great deal of money nude” by capable and self-reliant young men in the middle stale of life. And Britain and Holland, the countries of the first victories of the bourgeoisie, led the field in the hunt to ransack tlic world. It was natural, therefore, that the travel talc should enjoy an immense vogue in both countries, but it was a travel tale that hatl changed much since the days of Hakluyt. There, the emph.. is had been on the conflict with Spain, the sacking of rich cities, aiid the capture, against fantastic odds, of galleons loaded with gold and silver plate: it was after all but one generation removed from the old romances. But this early exuberance had passed with the other exuberances of the bour- geoisie in its “knight errant stage”, the concern for trade and for trading opportunities, whir* had always been latent, now came uppermost. Apart from some odd corners the world seemed sufficiently known and Crusoe’s object was to use his knowledge to profitable effect.
And here we strike the first, and probably the most important, difference between Defoe and Swift. Both take as ‘hero’ the new bourgeois man sefcking his profits at the ends of the earth; but
96 THE ENGLISH UTOPIA
where Defoe completely identifies himself with Crusoe, Swift deliberately creates Gulliver as a mask behind which his criticism may be delivered with more telling effect, just as earlier he had done with M.B. the Dublin Drapier. Behind all the similarities there is the most profound difference: Swift and Defoe did, indeed, look at the same world, and each in his own fashion saw it with exceptional clarity, but they looked with different eyes and drew different conclusions. Defoe accepted and rejoiced in his age, its achievements and its order: Swift rejected them with bitter- ness, with contempt and with hc*rror. So, while Kobinson Crusoe is a book single-minded almost to the point of naivety, Gtilliver*s Travels contains a vast and fascinating contradiction between its form and its content, a contradiction without which it could never have become a nursery classic. As Professor H. Davis says:
‘‘We may regard Gulliver's Travels as, both in form and shape,
wholly the product of the eighteenth century, wliile being at
the same time the most violent satire of its hopes and dreams
and a repudiation of much that it most valued.” ,
Where Ousoc, like Defoe, is the man of his age, the represen- tative (jf the all-conqucring bourgeoisie, Gulliver is the lost and defeated man. The irony of liis fate is only underlined by the commonplace clothes in which Swift has chosen to dress hirVi. Crusoe travels because there arc never enough worlds for him to conquer, Gulliver in search of a substitute for the lost (and of course largely fictitious) world that the bouigcois revolution has destroyed. Crusoe finds what he is looking for, because it is only the replica of the w^orld from which he sails. Gulliver can never find his vanished world because he must take with him wherever he goes the essence of the real world of which he is the unwilling representative.
1‘here is nothing in Robinson Crusoe but its genius to warn the reader that it is not what it claims to be, an authentic work of travel and adventure. Not even the most stupid reader (for I can- not believe the unnamed Irish bishop who according to Swift declared that “the book was full of improbable lies, and for his part he hardly believed