Amenities of Literature Part 26

MORE, however skilful as a Latin scholar, to promulgate his opinions aimed at popularity, and cultivated our vernacular idiom, till the English language seems to have enlarged the compa.s.s of its expression under the free and copious vein of the writer. It is only by the infelicity of the subjects which const.i.tute the greater portion of this mighty volume, that its author has missed the immortality which his genius had else secured.

MORE has been fortunate in the zeal of his biographers; but we are conscious, that had there been a Xenophon or a Boswell among them, they could have told us much more. The conversations of Sir THOMAS MORE were racy. His was that rare gift of nature, perfect presence of mind, deprived of which the fullest is but slow and late. His conversancy with public affairs, combined with a close observation of familiar life, ever afforded him a striking apt.i.tude of ill.u.s.tration; but the levity of his wit, and the luxuriance of his humour, could not hide the deep sense which at all times gave weight to his thoughts, and decision to his acts. Of all these we are furnished with ample evidence.

Domestic affection in all its nave simplicity dictated the artless record of Roper, the companion of More, for sixteen years, and the husband of his adored daughter Margaret.[3] The pride of ancestry in the pages of his great-grandson, the ascetic Cresacre More, could not borrow the charm of that work whence he derived his enlarged narrative.[4] More than one beadsman, the votaries of their martyr, have consecrated his memory even with their legendary faith;[5] while recent and more philosophical writers have expatiated on the wide theme, and have repeated the story of this great Chancellor of England.[6]

"The child here waiting at table, whomever shall live to see it, will prove a marvellous man." It was thus that the early patron of More, Cardinal Morton, sagaciously contemplated on the precocity of More's boyhood. His prompt natural humour broke out at the Christmas revels, when the boy, suddenly slipping in among the players, acted an extempore part of his own invention. Yet this jocund humour, which never was to quit him to his last awful minute, at times indulged a solemnity of thought, as remarkable in a youth of eighteen. In the taste of that day, he invented an allegorical pageant. These pageants consisted of paintings on rolls of cloth, with inscriptions in verse, descriptive of the scenical objects. They formed a series of the occupations of childhood, manhood, the indolent liver, "a child again," and old age, thin and h.o.a.r, wise and discreet. The last scenes exhibited more original conceptions. The image of DEATH, where under his "misshapen feet" lay the sage old man; then came "the Lady FAME," boasting that she had survived death, and would preserve the old man's name "by the voice of the people." But FAME was followed by TIME, "the lord of every hour, the great destroyer both of sea and land," deriding simple "Fame;" for "who shall boast an eternal name before me?" Yet was there a more potent destroyer than TIME; Time itself was mortal! and the eighth pageant revealed the triumph of ETERNITY. The last exhibited the poet himself, meditating in his chair--he "who had fed their eyes with these fictions and these figures." The allegory of Fame, Time, and Eternity, is a sublime creation of ideal personifications. The conception of these pageants reminds one of the allegorical "Trionfi" of Petrarch; but they are not borrowed from the Italian poet. They were, indeed, in the taste of the age, and such pageants were exhibited in the streets; but the present gorgeous invention, as well as the verses, were the fancies of the youthful More.

MORE in his youth was a true poet; but in his active life he soon deserted these shadows of the imagination.

A modern critic has regretted, that, notwithstanding the zeal of his biographers, we would gladly have been better acquainted with MORE'S political life, his parliamentary speeches, his judicial decrees, and his history as an amba.s.sador and a courtier.

There is not, however, wanting the most striking evidence of MORE'S admirable independence in all these characters. I fix on his parliamentary life.

As a burgess under Henry the Seventh, he effectually opposed a royal demand for money. When the king heard that "a beardless boy had disappointed all his purpose," the malice of royalty was wreaked on the devoted head of the judge his father, in a causeless quarrel and a heavy fine. When MORE was chosen the Speaker of the Commons, he addressed Henry the Eighth on the important subject of _freedom of debate_. There is a remarkable pa.s.sage on the heat of discussion, and the diversity of men's faculties, which displays a nice discrimination in human nature.

"Among so many wise men, neither is every one wise alike; nor among so many alike well-witted, every man alike well-spoken; and it often happeneth, that likewise as much folly is uttered with painted polished speeches, so many boisterous and rude in language see deep, indeed, and give right substantial counsel. And since also in matters of great importance the mind is so often occupied in the matter, that a man rather studies what to say than how, by reason whereof the wisest man and best-spoken in a whole country fortuneth, while his mind is fervent in the matter, somewhat to speak in such wise as he would afterward wish to have been uttered otherwise; and yet no worse will had he when he spake it, than he had when he would gladly change it."

Once the potent cardinal, irritated at the free language of the Commons, to awe the House, came down in person, amid the blazonry of all the insignia of his multiform state. To check his arrogance, it was debated whether the minister should be only admitted with a few lords. MORE suggested, that as WOLSEY had lately taxed the lightness of their tongues, "it would not be amiss to receive him in all his pomp, with his (silver) pillars, emblems of his ecclesiastical power, as a pillar of the church, his maces, his pole-axes, his crosses, his hat, and his great seal too, to the intent that if he find the like fault with us hereafter, we may the more boldly lay the blame on those his grace brings with him." The cardinal made a solemn oration; and when he ceased, behold the whole House was struck by one unbroken and dead silence! The minister addressed several personally--each man was a mute: discovering that he could not carry his point by his presence, he seemed to recollect that the custom of the House was to speak by the mouth of their Speaker, and WOLSEY turned to him. MORE, in all humility, explained the cause of the universal silence, by the amazement of the House at the presence of so n.o.ble a personage; "besides, that it was not agreeable to the liberty of the House to offer answers--that he himself could return no answer except every one of the members could put into his head their several wits." The minister abruptly rose and departed _re infecta_. Shortly after, WOLSEY in his gallery at Whitehall told MORE, "Would to G.o.d you had been at Rome, Mr. More, when I made you Speaker!" "So would I too!" replied MORE; and then immediately exclaimed, "I like this gallery much better than your gallery at Hampton Court;" and thus, talking of pictures, he broke off "the cardinal's displeasant talk."

This was a customary artifice with MORE. He withdrew the mind from disturbing thoughts by some sudden exclamation, or broke out into some facetious sally, which gave a new turn to the conversation. Of many, to give a single instance. On the day he resigned the chancellors.h.i.+p, he went after service to his wife's pew; there bowing, in the manner and with the very words the Lord Chancellor's servant was accustomed to announce to her, that "My lord was gone!" she laughed at the idling mockery; but when a.s.sured, in sober sadness, that "My lord was gone!"

this good sort of lady, with her silly exclamation of "Tillie vallie!

Tillie vallie! will you sit and make goslings in the ashes?" broke out into one of those domestic explosions to which she was very liable. The resigned chancellor, now resigned in more than one sense, to allay the storm he had raised, desired his daughters to observe whether they could not see some fault in their mother's dress. They could discover none.

"Don't you perceive that your mother's nose stands somewhat awry?" Thus by a stroke of merriment, he dissipated the tedious remonstrances and perplexing inquiries which a graver man could not have eluded.

At the most solemn moments of his life he was still disposed to indulge his humour. When in the Tower, denied pen and ink, he wrote a letter to his beloved Margaret, and tells her that "This letter is written with a coal; but that to express his love a peck of coals would not suffice."

His political sagacity equalled the quickness of his wit or the flow of his humour. He knew to rate at their real value the favours of such a sovereign as Henry VIII. The king suddenly came to dine at his house at Chelsea, and while walking in the garden, threw his arm about the neck of the chancellor. Roper, his son-in-law, congratulated More on this affectionate familiarity of royalty. More observed, "Son, the king favours me as (much as) any subject within the realm; howbeit I have no cause to be proud thereof, for if my head would win him a castle in France, it should not fail to go!"

MORE seems to have descried the speck of the Reformation, while others could not view even the gathering cloud in the political horizon. He and Roper were conversing on their "Catholic prince, their learned clergy, their sound n.o.bility, their obedient subjects, and finally that no heretic dare show his face." More went even beyond Roper in his commendation; but he proceeded, "And yet, son Roper, I pray G.o.d that some of us, as high as we seem to sit upon the mountains, treading heretics under our feet like ants, live not the day that we would gladly be at league and composition with them, to let them have their churches quietly to themselves, so that they would be contented to let us have ours quietly to ourselves." Roper, somewhat amazed, alleged his reasons for not seeing any cause which could produce such consequences. The zeal of the juvenile Catholic broke out into "a fume," which More perceiving, with his accustomed and gentle artifice exclaimed merrily, "Well, son Roper, it shall not be so! it shall not be so!"

No one was more sensible than MORE that to gain over the populace it is necessary to descend to them. But when raillery pa.s.sed into railing, and sarcasm sunk into scurrility, in these unhappy polemical effusions, our critics have bitterly censured the intolerance and bigotry of Sir THOMAS MORE. All this, however, lies on the surface. The antagonists of MORE were not less free, nor more refined. MORE wrote at a cruel crisis; both the subjects he treated on, and the times he wrote in, and the distorted medium through which he viewed the new race as the subverters of government, and the eager despoilers of the ecclesiastical lands, were quite sufficient to pervert the intellect of a sage of that day, and throw even the most genial humour into a state of exacerbation.

Our sympathies are no longer to be awakened by the wors.h.i.+p of images and relics--prayers to saints--the state of souls in purgatory--and the unwearied blessedness of pilgrimages--nor even by the subtle inquiry, Whether the church were before the gospel, or the gospel before the church?--or by the burning of Tyndale's Testament, and "the confutation of the new church of Frere Barnes:" all these direful follies, which cost Sir Thomas More many a sleepless night, and bound many a harmless heretic to the stake, have pa.s.sed away, only, alas! to be succeeded by other follies as insane, which shall in their turn meet the same fate.

Those works of MORE are a voluminous labyrinth; but whoever winds its dark pa.s.sages shall gather many curious notices of the writer's own age, and many exquisite "merrie tales," delectable to the antiquary, and not to be contemned in the history of the human mind.

The impending Reformation was hastened by a famous invective in the form of "The Supplication of Beggars." Its flagrant argument lay in its arithmetic. It calculated all the possessions of the clergy, who though but "the four-hundredth part of the nation, yet held half of the revenues."

MORE replied to "The Supplication of the Beggars" by "The Supplications of the Souls in Purgatory." These he represented in terror at the sacrilegious annihilation of the ma.s.ses said for their repose; and this with the Romanist was probably no weak argument in that day.

MORE more reasonably ridicules the extravagance of the estimates. Such accounts, got up in haste and designed for a particular purpose, are necessarily inaccurate; but the inaccuracy of a statement does not at all injure the drift of the argument, should that be based on truth.

With MORE "the heretics" were but ordinary rebels, as appears by the style of his narrative. "A rabble of heretics at Abingdon did not intend to lose any more labour by putting up bills (pet.i.tions) to Parliament, but to make an open insurrection and subvert all the realm, to kill the clergy, and sell priests' heads as good and cheap as sheep's heads--three for a penny, buy who would! But G.o.d saved the church and the realm. Yet after this was there one John Goose roasted at Tower-hill, and thereupon some other John Goose began to make some gaggling awhile, but it availed him not. And now we have this gosling with his 'Supplication of Beggars.' He maketh his bill in the name of the beggars. The bill is couched as full of _lies_ as the beggar swarmeth full of _lice_. We neither will nor shall need to make much business about this matter; we trust much better in the goodness of good men."

The marriage of the clergy was no doubt at first abused by some. MORE describes one Richard Mayfield, late a monk and a priest, and, it may be added, a martyr, for he was burned. Of this man he says, "His holy life well declares his heresies, when being both a priest and a monk he went about two wives, one in Brabant, another in England. What he meant I cannot make you sure, whether he would be sure of the one if t'other should happen to refuse him, or that he would have them both, the one here, the other there; or else both in one place, the one because he was priest, the other because he was monk."[7]

Such is the ludicrous ribaldry which runs through the polemical works of Sir THOMAS MORE: the opposite party set no better example, and none worse than the redoubtable Simon Fish, the writer of the "Supplication of Beggars." Oldmixon expresses his astonishment that "the famous Sir Thomas More was so hurried by his zeal that he forgot he was a gentleman, and treated Mr. Fish with the language of a monk."

Writers who decide on other men and on other times by the spirit of their own, try human affairs by a false standard. MORE was at heart a monk. He wore a p.r.i.c.kly hair-s.h.i.+rt to mortify the flesh; he scourged himself with the knotted cord; he practised the penance; and he appeals to miraculous relics as the evidences of his faith! I give his own words in alluding to the Sudarium, that napkin sent to king Abgarus, on which Jesus impressed the image of his own face: "And it hath been by like miracle in the thin corruptible cloth kept and preserved these 1500 years fresh and well preserved, to the inward comforts, spiritual rejoicing, and great increase of fervour in the hearts of good Christian people." To this he joins another similar miraculous relic, "the evangelist Luke's portrait of our blessed Lady, his mother."[8]

Such were considered as the evidences of the true faith of the Romanists; but MORE with his relics was then dealing in a damaged commodity. Lord Herbert has noticed the great fall of the price of relics at the dissolution of the monasteries: some which had been left in p.a.w.n no one cared to redeem.

"The History of King Richard the Third," which first appeared in a correct state in this folio, has given rise to "historic doubts" which led to some paradoxes. The personal monster whom MORE and SHAKSPEAKE exhibited has vanished, but the deformity of the revolting parricide was surely revealed in the bones of the infant nephews. This, the earliest history in our vernacular literature, may still be read with delight. As a composition the critical justice of Lord Orford may be cited. "Its author was then in the vigour of his fancy, and fresh from the study of the Greek and Roman historians, whose manner he has imitated." The details in this history of a prince of the house of York, though they may be tinged with the gall of the Lancastrian Cardinal Morton, descend to us with the weight of contemporary authority. It is supposed that MORE may have derived much of the materials of his history from his early patron, but the charms which still may retain us are the natural yet dramatic dialogue--the picturesque touches--and a style, at times, whose beauty three centuries have not wrinkled--and the emotions which such vital pages leave in the reader's mind.[9]

The "UTOPIA" of Sir THOMAS MORE, which being composed in Latin is not included in this great volume of his "Workes," may be read by the English reader in its contemporary spirited translation,[10] and more intelligibly in Bishop Burnet's version. The t.i.tle of his own coinage has become even proverbial; and from its cla.s.sical Latinity it was better known among foreigners even in Burnet's day than at home. This combination of philosophy, politics, and fiction, though borrowed from the ideal republic of Plato, is worthy of an experienced statesman and a philosopher who at that moment was writing not only above his age, but, as it afterwards appeared, above himself. It has served as the model of that novel cla.s.s of literature--political romances. But though the "Utopia" is altogether imaginary, it displays no graces of the imagination in an ingeniously constructed fable. It is the dream of a good citizen, and, like a dream, the scenes scattered and unconnected are broken into by chimerical forms and impracticable achievements. In times of political empiricism it may be long meditated, and the "Utopia"

may yet pa.s.s through a million of editions before that new era of the perfectibility of the human animal, the millennium of political theorists, which it would seem to have antic.i.p.ated.

This famous work was written at no immature period of life, for MORE was then thirty-six years of age. The author had clear notions of the imperfections of governments, but he was not as successful in proposing remedies for the disorders he had detected. A community where all the property belongs to the government, and to which every man contributes by his labour, that he may have his own wants supplied; a domestic society which very much resembles a great public school, and converts a citizen, through all the gradations of his existence, from form to form; and where every man, like an automatical machine, must be fixed in his proper place,--supposes a society of pa.s.sionless beings which social life has never shown, and surely never can. The art of carrying on war without combating, by the wiliness of stratagems; or procuring a peace by offering a reward for the a.s.sa.s.sination of the leaders of the enemy, with whom rather than with the people all wars originate; the injunction to the incurable of suicide; the paucity of laws which enabled every man to plead his own cause; the utmost freedom granted to religious sects, where every man who contested the religion of another was sent into exile, or condemned to bondage; the contempt of the precious metal, which was here used but as toys for children, or as fetters for slaves;--such fanciful notions, running counter to the experience of history, or to the advantages of civilised society, induced some to suspect the whole to be but the incoherent dreams of an idling philosopher, thrown down at random without much consideration. It is sobriety indulging an inebriation, and good sense wandering in a delirium. Burnet, in his translation, cautiously reminds his readers that he must in nowise be made responsible for the matter of the work which "he ventured" to translate. Others have conceived "the Utopia"

dangerous for those speculators in politics who might imagine the author to have been serious. MORE himself has adjudged the book "no better worthy than to lye always in his own island, or else to be consecrated to Vulcan."

But a.s.suredly many of the extraordinary principles inculcated in "the Utopia" were not so lightly held by its ill.u.s.trious author. The sincerity of his notions may be traced in his own simple habits, his opinions in conversation, and the tenor of his invariable life. His contempt of outward forms and personal honours, his voluntary poverty, his fearlessness of death--all these afford ample evidence that the singularity of the man himself was as remarkable as the work he produced. The virtues he had expatiated on, he had contemplated in his own breast.

This singular, but great man, was a sage whose wisdom lay concealed in his pleasantry; a politician without ambition; a lord chancellor who entered into office poor, and left it not richer. When his house was to be searched for treasure, which circ.u.mstance had alarmed his friends, well did that smile become him when he observed that "it would be only a sport to his family," and he pleasantly added, "lest they should find out my wife's gay girdle and her gold beads." When the clergy, in convention, had voted a donation amounting to no inconsiderable fortune, "not for services to be performed, but for those which he had chosen to do," More rejected the gift with this n.o.ble confession--"I am both over-proud, and over-slothful also, to be hired for money to take half the labour and business in writing that I have taken since I began." And when accused by Tyndale and others for being "the proctor of the clergy," and richly fed, how forcible was his expression! "He had written his controversial works only that G.o.d might give him thanks."

It happened, however, that his after-conduct in life, in regard to that religious toleration which he had wisely maintained in his ideal society, was as opposite as night to noon. Could he then have ever been earnest in his "Utopia?"--he who exults over the burning of a heretic, who "could not agree that before the day of doom there were either any saint in heaven or soul in purgatory, or in h.e.l.l either," for which horrible heresy he was delivered at last into the secular hands, and "burned as there was never wretch I ween better worth."[11] This harmless and hapless metaphysical theologian did not disagree with More on the existence of saints, of souls, nor of h.e.l.l. The heretic conceived--and could he change by volition the ideas which seemed to him just?--that no reward or punishment could be inflicted before the final judgment. A conversation of five minutes might have settled the difference, for they only varied about the precise time!

In that great revolution which was just opening in his latter days, MORE seems sometimes to have mistaken theology for politics. A strange and mysterious change, such as the history of man can hardly parallel, occurred in the mind of MORE, by what insensible gradations is a secret which must lie in his grave.

This great man laid his head on the block to seal his conscience with his blood. Protestants have lamented this act as his weakness, the Romanists decreed a martyrdom. In a sudden change of system in the affairs of a nation, when even justice may a.s.sume the appearance of violence, the most enlightened minds, standing amidst their ancient opinions and their cherished prejudices subverted, display how the principle of integrity predominates over that of self-preservation.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] "Sir Thomas More's Workes," 127.

[2] "The Workes of Sir Thomas More in the English Tongue, 1557, fo.,"

a venerable folio of nearly 1500 pages in double columns, is closely printed in black-letter.

[3] Roper's "Life of Sir Thomas More," which had been suppressed through the reign of Elizabeth, only first appeared in 1626, at Paris, when a Roman Catholic princess in the person of Henrietta, the queen of Charles the First, had ascended the throne of England; it was republished in 1729. There is also an elegant modern reprint by Mr. Singer.

[4] The Life by his great-grandson was printed in 1627, and republished in 1726. This biography is the one usually referred to.

Though with a more lucid arrangement, and a fuller narrative, than Roper's life, the writer inherited little of the family genius, except the bigotry of his great ancestor.

[5] _Tres Thomae._ The three Thomases are, Aquinas, a Becket, and More--by Dr. Thomas Stapleton. Another Life by J. H. is an abridgment, 1662. These writers, Romanists, as well as the great-grandson, have interspersed in their narrative more than one of those fabulous incidents and pious frauds, visions, and miracles, which have been the opprobrium of Catholic biographers.

[6] Macdiarmid, in his "Lives of British Statesmen," has chiefly considered the political character of this Lord-Chancellor. Others have written lives merely as accompaniments to the editions of some of his works.

[7] Works, fo. 346.

[8] "Works of Sir Thomas More," 113, col. 2.

[9] Mr. Singer has furnished us with a correct reprint of this history. More's "Life of Richard the Third" had been given by our chroniclers from copies mutilated or altered. A work whose merits arise from the beauty of its composition admits of neither.

[10] The old translation, "by Raphe Robinson, 1551," has been republished by Dr. Dibdin, accompanied by copious annotations. Almost everything relating to the family, the life, and the works of the author may be found in "the biographical and literary introduction."

It is the first specimen of an edition where the diligence of the editor has not been wasted on trivial researches or nugatory commentaries.

[11] "Sir Thomas More's Workes," 348.