We shall not stay long in the City of the Sun. After we have become familiar with the outward color and form of the landscape, we discover, alas! that it is not a foreign country we are exploring, but a sort of picture puzzle put together out of fragments from Plato and More. As in the Republic, there is a complete community of property, a community of wives, and an equality of the sexes; as in Utopia, the younger people wait upon the elders; as in Christianopolis, science is imparted, or at least hinted at, by demonstration. When one subtracts what these other Utopian countries have contributed, very little indeed remains.
But we must not neglect to observe two significant passages. One of them is the recognition of the part that invention might play in the ideal commonwealth. The people of the City of the Sun have wagons that are driven by the wind, and boats “which go over the waters without rowers or the force of the wind, but by a marvelous contrivance.” There is a very clear anticipation of the mechanical improvements which began to multiply so rapidly in the eighteenth century. At the tale end of the sea-captain’s recital, the Grand Master exclaims: “Oh, if you knew what our astrologers say of the coming age, that has in it more history within a hundred years than all the world had in four thousand years before! Of the wonderful invention of printing and guns, and the use of the magnet. …” With the mechanical arts in full development, labor in the City of the Sun has become dignified: it is not the custom to keep slaves. Since everyone takes his part in the common work, there is not more than four hours’ work to be done per day. “They are rich because they want nothing; poor because they possess nothing; and consequently they are not slaves to circumstances, but circumstances serve them.”
The other point upon which Campanella’s observation is remarkably keen is his explanation of the relation of private property and the private household to the commonwealth. Thus:
“They say that all private property is acquired and improved for the reason that each one of us by himself has his own home and wife and children. From this self-love springs. For when we raise a son to riches and dignities, and leave an heir to much wealth, we become either ready to grasp at the property of the state, if in any case fear should be removed from the power which belongs to riches and rank; or avaricious, crafty, and hypocritical, if any is of slender purse, little strength, and mean ancestry. But when we have taken away self-love, there remains only love for the state.”
How shall the common Utopia keep from being neglected through each one’s concern for his little private utopia?
This is the critical problem that our utopians have all to face; and Campanella loyally follows Plato in his solution. It is perhaps inevitable that each utopian’s personal experience of life should enter into his solution, and overwhelmingly give it color; and here the limitations of our utopians are plain. More and Andreae are married men, and they stand for the individual family. Plato and Campanella were bachelors, and they proposed that men should live like monks or soldiers. Perhaps these two camps are not so far away as they would seem. If we follow the exposition of that excellent anthropologist, Professor Edward Westermarck, we shall be fairly well convinced, I believe, that marriage is a biological institution, and thorough promiscuity is, to say the least, an unusual form of mating. Plato perhaps recognized this when he left us in doubt as to whether a community of wives would be practiced by his artisans and husbandmen. So he perhaps paves the way for a solution by which the normal life for the great majority of men would be marriage, with its individual concerns and loyalties, whilst for the active, creative elements in the community a less secluded form of mating would be practiced. The painter, Van Gogh, has given us a kernel to chew on when he says that the sexual life of the artist must be either that of the monk or the soldier, for otherwise he is distracted from his creative work.
We may leave this question in the air, as long as we realize that all our utopias rest upon our ability to discover some sort of a solution.
II
Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis is not a utopia in the sense that I have explained our principle of selection in the preface to the bibliography. It is only a fragment, and not very good as fragments go; and it would drop out altogether from our survey were it not for the hugely overrated reputation that Bacon has as a philosopher of natural science—indeed, as the philosopher after Aristotle.
The greater part of Bacon’s ideas are anticipated and more amply expressed by Andreae. When we have deleted Bacon’s multitudinous prayers and exhortations, when we have disposed of his copious descriptions of jewels and velvets and satins and ceremonial regalia, we find that the core of his commonwealth is Salomon’s House, sometimes known as the College of the Six Days’ Works; which he describes as the noblest foundation that ever was upon earth, and the lantern of the kingdom.
The purpose of this foundation is the “knowledge of the causes and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible.” The material resources of this foundation are manifold. It has laboratories dug into the sides of hills, and observatories with towers half a mile high; it has great
