THOMAS MORE

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXII, Issue 22130, 8 June 1935, Page 1 (Supplement)

THOMAS MORE

11Y KOTARE

DREAMER OF UTOPIA

The elevation of Thomas More to a place in the Canon Sanctorum is of interest to all that have English blood in their veins. For More has been considered by many the perfect embodiment of the special qualities that make up the typical Englishman, and there was a fragrance of personality about him that has persisted through all the chances and changes of four centuries. The virtues in him that have led to his canonisation by his Church may not be always the qualities for which his fellow countrymen have praised him and loved liim; but naturally they judge him on more commonplace levels of simple and kindly humanity. More was fortunate in his friends, tie deserved to be, for he himself had a genius for friendship. Chief in the select company of his most intimate friends was the great Dutch scholar Frasmus. Erasmus had spent some time in England, and the young Englishman, aflame with the passion tor knowledge created by the Revival of Learning, naturally tried to meet the great continental champion of the new culture. Before religious conflict darkened the sky it seemed that England was to take a prominent place in the eager search for truth stimulated throughout the West by the Renaissance. From the first, Erasmus looked with favour on the enthusiastic young Englishman. " Nature never formed a sweeter and happier disposition," he wrote at the time, recording his impressions of his first association with young More, then only twenty years* old. That friendship lasted till More ended his days on the scaffold, and time only deepened the affection and understanding between them. Erasmus some years later wrote an account of More for a continental friend who had heard of him but could learn nothing of his personal qualities. This picture of More is creditable alike to Erasmus and to his friend. It is on the basis of this description, and of course the life that justified it, that More has been called the expression of the best elements in the English character. His Appearance

There is first his physical appearance. " He is of middle height, well-shnped, complexion pale without a touch of colour save when the skin flushes. The hair is yellow shot with black, or black shot with yellow. Eyes are grey with dark spots —an eye supposed in England to indicate genius, and never to be found except in remarkable men. The expression is pleasant and cordial, easily passing into a. smile, for he has the quickest sense of the ridiculous of any man 1 ever met. He was vigorous and healthy, very abstemious —a waterdrinker Erasmus calls him —his voice low and unmusical but clear and penetrating. He hated all display. Simplicity pleased him in others and was the keynote of his own living. He disliked the Court because ceremony wearied him, and he loved the freedom to do and be what his own personal tastes dictated. But he loved the society of his friends, people that knew him and liked him and with whom he could be without reservations himself. "He is wise with the wise and jests with fools —with women specially and his wife among them," says Erasmus with that cynical appraisement of the feminine mind that always somehow co-existed with the exaggerated devotion to woman inherited from the age of chivalry.

His Character

More was devoted to animals and had a sort of tame menagerie always on hand which he studied with careful. affection". When he married he set about forming liis wife's mind, taught her music, and as far as might he developed in her tastes kindred to his own. For his second wife he chose a widow who, he frankly admitted, was far from comely, but she was a capable housekeeper and More was very happy with her. " His whole house breathes happiness, and no one enters it who is not the better for the visit." Money he set no value on; his treasure was otherwhere. He made money out of the law, but after paying expenses of his simple household, and making some small provision for his family's future, he gave the rest away. " He is PalronGeneral to all poo:- devils," writes Erasmus. The quiet life he would have chosen was made impossible to him by his master, Henry VIII., who knew his value to the State and insisted on having him at Court. In the tragic days that followed. More was for long still the friend of Henry, and his own sweet nature was embittered by the stress of religious conflict. In the end lie took his own way in spite of the king and his reverence for him, and he ended on the scaffold.

More is remembered to-day in literary history for the picture of the ideal State he gave the world in his " Utopia." At the time he wrote it England was coming into the full stream of the Renaissance impulse. In fact, " Utopia " is the one great contribution to Renaissance thought made by an Englishman. There was to be nearly a century of tumult and controversy over religion when England's culture was practically submerged. But, before the deluge, More had expressed what perhaps many Englishmen had been thinking. The discovery of ancient Greek literature had given a new turn to men's minds. Plato had sketched an ideal republic, and under the impulse to question the established and to seek new and better ways men like More were asking whether the State as the -fifteenth century knew it was the most perfect form of the body politic the genius of man could devise. Could not the evils of contemporary society be remedied by a reconstruction of society in which the good of all would take the place of the privileges of the few? Utopia

The discovery of America meant an extraordinary enlargement of human horizons. More wrote his " Utopia " within a few years of Columbus' voyage, and he placed his ideal Stato somewhere in the vast new world that had just been revealed to the eager minds of Renaissance Europe. More opens his book with an account of a mission to Flanders undertaken by himself on behalf of Henry. At Antwerp he meets Raphael Hythloday, a Portuguese navigator who had sailed three times to the West with Vespucci. There he had come across the island state of Utopia, where all men were equal, where all worked for the welfare of all, where there was no private property. All the things that seemed to him to cause crime and misery in the old world were here eliminated. There was no poverty and no wealth, for all had an equal right to whatever they needed. There was no rivalry in houses or clothing, for all the houses were of a pattern and all clothes had to conform to the regulation material and design. " In Utopia, where every man has a right to everything, they all know that if care is taken to keep the public stores full no private man can want anything; for among them there is no unequal distribution, so that no man is poor, none in necessity. And, though no man has anything, yet they are all rich. For what can make a man so rich as to lead a serene and cheerful life, free from anxieties?" " Utopia " has proved a rich storehouse from which many later theorists have borrowed.