Read Online The Life of Thomas More by Peter Ackroyd - Free Book Online

extent to which it has confused critics and commentators is an indication of the extent to which they have forgotten the rules of demonstrative oratory.
    In an oratorical exercise of this kind, where a case is being made, it was customary for formal arguments to be advanced on the opposite side. Raphael Hythlodaeus seems, however, to have been given the opportunity to extol the virtue of the Utopians without any challenge. But herein lies the achievement of
Utopia
—an achievement that has a great deal to do with More’s command of rhetoric but also, as in all works of art, with the forces of More’s own temperament and personality.
Utopia
is an ambivalent and ambiguous work in which various absurdities, for example, are paraded in the most apparently innocent and unsatirical manner. But it also harbours various contradictions which render the account of Hythlodaeus very suspect indeed. The counter-argument, the case against
Utopia
in effect, is internalised within the narrative itself.
    Consider the role and status of Raphael Hythlodaeus, this sunburnt voyager from another land. Raphael is the name of the guiding angel in the Book of Tobit, but Hythlodaeus, derived from the Greek, means one who is cunning in nonsense or idle gossip. His connection with the journeys of Amerigo Vespucci has always been taken as the token of a real traveller; by the time
Utopia
was being composed, however, the voyages of Vespucci to the New World were dismissed as fabrication or as mendacious attempts to acquire glory. It is now generally accepted that the
Mundus Novus
and
Four Voyages
of Vespucci were indeed forgeries, but that the Portuguese pilot had nothing to do with them; 21 in the first and second decades of the sixteenth century, however, the manifold inconsistencies and incoherencies in Vespucci’s supposed account led most people to suppose that he was a boastful liar. (RalphWaldo Emerson, some centuries later, described him as ‘a thief’ and a ‘pickle dealer’ who had managed to ‘baptise half of the earth with his own dishonest name’.) So for Hythlodaeus to be described as the constant companion on his travels 22 was in no sense a compliment. It might even imply that the island of Utopia was his own invention; it is, perhaps, significant that in those spurious accounts of the New World by ‘Vespucci’ it is revealed that the natives have no concept of private property. One of the marginal annotations, composed by Peter Gillis (or perhaps Erasmus), even addresses Hythlodaeus as ‘O
artificem’
(‘You artful man’) 23 when he claims once more that he has witnessed all the things which he describes. More distrusted pure or abstract philosophising and yet
Utopia
is an island governed entirely by theoretical principles. Hythlodaeus claims to have located a Platonic society in the real world but, with his elaborate and perhaps crazed monologue, he himself is turned into a caricature of the philosopher. With his long beard, and face burned by the sun, he might almost have provided a model for Coleridge’s ancient mariner, who has ‘strange power of speech’ and who is mistaken for the ‘Devil’. 24
    It is hard to believe that Hythlodaeus ever saw the island upon which he reports in such detail. The dimensions which he gives it form an impossible shape and there are problems of size as well as distance. Utopia itself means literally ‘no-place’; the principal river, Anydros, is again literally ‘river without water’; the name of the city of Amaurotum is derived from the Greek for dark or dimly seen; the governor of the island is called Ademus, or one who has no people. Kierkegaard remarked of Socratic irony that it cannot fashion a picture of the absolute except as a form of nothingness; the same consideration applies here. There are also more practical contradictions. The Utopians are praised as a peaceful race but they engage in savage warfare; they are said to despise gold and silver, yet they hoard it to pay