SIR THOMAS ABANDONS UTOPIA

...resurrecting Kautsky, but only that he may attempt to demolish him...

...Their failure is historic...

...It overlooks certain factors that are not to be disregarded...

...Samuel Putnam It a tpecialltt in the ReMietance period...

...Another is the changing character of the age, marked by the disillusionment of the early Humanists with the fruits of the Protestant Reformation of which they had expected so much...

...he is dealing here with the human element, the experiences of a .soul, and there are no ideological formulas of which he may avail himself...

...The'student must show that he has learned his lesson and knows how to apply it to a cherished literary masterpiece...

...his interpreters have seized upon on* or another aspect of the man ori, his career in accordance with their fewn ideological leanings and preconceptions and the point they were ou*t to prove...

...At times there is a certain sense of compulsion: the philosopher must round out his logical, ethical, and aaatfeatte systems, his theory of value, by gray of demonstrating their apptiatbttty--in the realm, of theory soil—Ao the world ef human experieoet, its socioeconomic problems, and the science of government...

...The author begins by...

...and it should be stressed that these interpretations are by no means mutually -'exclusive— practically every one of them may have something to contribute to our understanding of a highly complex individual and his correspondingly far from simple reflections on the communal life of the species...

...Only the artist can give the dream a finished, aesthetically satisfying form, make it seem plausible if not real...

...His correspondence with Erasmus shows as much...

...Sir Thomas was a lawyer, merchant, court wit, chancellor c ! the realm, man of letters, would-be- hank, and finally, in the eyes of the G UTfih, a martyr...

...The best one can do is to venture a carefully considered surmise...

...Utopia, land of nowhere, land of never was...

...Came then Marx and Engels and scientific socialism, the Paris Commune, and all the struggles that followed...

...and the philosopher (e.g...

...it is a kind of compensatory game that we play with ourelves by way of revenge for the tragic wrongs and shortcomings of terrestrial...

...3.50...

...f, As might have been expected...

...Ames, who clearly has read everything of importance bearing on the matter, supplies an abundance of data...

...and although the Utopia is supposed to be a work of literature, that fact is lost sight of amid all the talk of feudalism and the bourgeoisie, merchant capital, usury capital, commodities, use value, exchange value, etc...

...When he comes to explain More's seeming later defections, Mr...

...That is just the troubldwith More's innumerable commentsioai past and present: they have failed 9 see and grasp the tohole man that h< rwas...

...Above all he deliberately disregards any1 aesthetic considerations, aft attitude that can only lead to a dismemberment, a mutilation, both of Sir Thomas and of his work...

...yet wholeness, universality, cath licity is the very essence of the Renal sance type...

...Such an approach takes no account of those other Sir Thomases—the court wit, the devout Catholic, the poet, the disciple of Plato and Augustine, the playful Humanist...

...My own belief is that Sir Thomas was not 'a "tired radical," nor was he a victim of the proverbial creeping conservatism* of age...

...Augustine's City of God, and Sir Thomas More's Utopia...

...ft is natural that the men of the ReneJefanee, Sir Thomas More among t heart, should have been particularly attracted to the question of an ideal social order...

...What makes the task of the commentator particularly hard, anno...

...As a matter of fact, while revising some of his previous doctrinaire concepts, More was still engaged in fighting the day-to-day battle t>f the poor and downtrodden, especially the peasants, in the name of justice and according to the dictates of his conscience...

...Throughout the pages of the Humanist writers will be found passages descriptive of an idyllic folk or state, and ofterf these are obviously little if anything more than academic exercises on the part of the devotees of the New Learning...

...The poet in the prianal sense of maker must predominate...

...And finally, there is the point made^ljy'Chambers, that More's views are in nowise incompatible with a social trend and doctrine trtat has existed within the body of Christianity from the earliest tin?es, taking on a renewed intensity with St...

...While the popular conception of it stands in need of considerable revision in the light of recent,'medieval studies, the era was none the less one of break-up and change and re-alignment, of reformation and counter-reformation, of rapidly expanding geographical, astronomical, Intellectual, and spiritual horizons, all of which lent a special zest to such speculations...

...In short, the Utopia has been, literally, all things to aN men...

...Ames , has to admit that it is all very "hard to understand...

...He has translated she works of Aretine and Rehelali, and has written biographies of Rabelata and Marguerite ef Navarre...

...To mention three great examples, we have Plato's Republic, St...

...The founder of Utopia has given up his citizenship in that mythical realm, and ^f or this men called him a reactionary even as he fought for those elemental decencies which they In the name of idealism were flouting...

...In support of his thesis Mr...

...Francis of Assisi...

...One may recall what Smirnov did to Shakespeare, Novitsky to Cervantes...

...or the artist's attempt to create out of the materials of his imagination a shape of things "nearer to the heart's desire...

...I think, rather, that his situation was in a way comparable to that of many of us today who have seen a revolutionary movement (in the sixteenth century it was the Reformation) converted into a new-old form of tyranny and oppression...

...In the light of all this, it may be well to turn back •to the writer who first gave us the term and see what manner of man he was and what light this may have to throw upon the nature of his work...

...for that is what happened in England under Henry VIII...

...He tells us that among the persons to whom he submitted his manuscript tor criticism -was Howard Selsam, who teaches philosophy (sic) at the Jefferson School...

...Came Lenin and the "dictatorship of the proletariat," culminating in the bloodiest, most tyrannical, most absolute form of human slavery the world has ever known...

...After h iwing given expression in the Utopia to some very modern and revolutionary-s winding ideas, he afterward becomes (defender of private property...

...As for Mr...

...The only thing is that, like all the others, he picks" his evidence, being careful to omit any pieces that do not fit...

...Who can say what goes on, all that goes on, in another's intellectual and spiritual life...

...Especially those of the poet, the philosopher, and the saint...

...At other times there Is a compulsion of a different sort, that of poet or saint (they ore not too far apart), and then we have somehing in the nature of an apocalypse, an ecstatic vision of a world beyond this one we know: the city four-square" which is the Christian's heaven, admittedly not realizable on earth...

...Thus, in his Thomas More of thirteen years ago, R. W. Chambers presents the Catholic view, while Karl Kautsky, in Thomas More and His Utopia, published back in 1890, portrays his subject as the foe of a capitalism that was scarcely, born as yet, an early sixteenth century socialist...

...Some three centuries later, in the period of the French Revolution, a group of men who were thinkers as well as dreamers and who cane to be called after Sir Thomas's book—the Utopian Socialists—sought to bring the vision down to earth and make it a reality...

...Plato) must become an artist or permit the 'artist in him to take the ascendancy if the result is to be something more than another treatise on human betterment, a soul saver's or society saver's propaganda tract...

...But to picture him solely, or even primarily as a representative of the merchant class to which he belonged, the rising bourgeoisie, explains nothing and is, moreover, a palpable distortion...

...Is it, also, the land of never will be, never can be...

...And so it goes...

...TO SIR THOMAS MORE belongs the credit for having minted the word for this variety of social wish-fulfillment of day-dreaming and by so doing he rendered an invaluable service to the language...

...In other words, the element of creatlye fantasy must enter into the process if the work is not to molder on the learned shelf hut is to have an enduring life among those masterpieces that ere read and re-read by subsequent generations...

...Sir Thomas has been seen in turn as a dreamer, an escapist, a social planner, a medievalist, a primitive or primitive-Christian communist, a herald of modern socialism, a rationalist philosopher, a Humanist dilettante, an imitator of Plato, a Christian humanist, a British imperialist before liis time, a critic of contemporary English society, etc., etc., etc...

...existence...

...One is the large element of the medieval that is to be found persisting in Renaissance man, even in a figure like Erasmus...

...fngly hard for the one who is fond of ^Versimplication, is the seeminglj t inconsistent, contradictory patterr juts which More's life falls...

...That More was painfully aware- of social injustices in the England of his day and hoped his book might bavo some effect in remedying them, is not to be denied...

...PROBABLY ALL OF US, more or less, are dream-state world builders now and then...

...NO BOOK IN ALL LITERATURE, perhaps, with the exception of the Bible, has been subjected to a greater number of widely varying interpretations than has More's Utopia...

...Difi he mean what he said in the first Alace, was he even then in reality advocating a return to medievalism, f>r is it merely a case of the tired radical in his eldering years...

...Reviewed by SAMUEL PUTNAM THE VISION OF AM IDEAL OOt«lfOinreALTH, an ideal city or state, is one that for ages, probably ever since the rise of organized society, has haunted the dreams of mankind...

...With a grim determination he sets out to prove,, that More's attack was leveled, not, as Kautsky believed, at capitalism, but at the surviving remnants of feudalism in England, and was aimed at righting • certain specific abuses...

...Ames, of the English department of Queens College, he is, without ever frankly admitting it, an exponent of the so-called Marxist school of literary criticism as practiced with horrendous results by followers of the Stalinist party line...

...The author of the volume under review here lists fourteen such explanations and there are more that might foe found...

...The dream dies hard...

...Nevertheless for many a liberal during the last thirty years and for many a fuzzy-minded fellow-traveler of today, the Stalinist hell on earth has spelled and continues to spell Utopia...

...And still we have n< L.exhausted the multiple facets o i his personality...

...How familiar it all sounds...

...Meanwhile, under the guise of a benevolent resurrection, Mr...

...His translation ef Cervantes' "Don Quixote" Is to be published soon...

...Ames has succeeded to his own satisfaction in refuting Kautsky, old-time arch-enemy of the Bolshevik theoreticians, and would have us believe that Sir Thomas was a kind of Henry Wallace "progressive" born four centuries too soon...