For that which other people think is the proper characteristic of a few
(and yet if you consider the stuffing of inexperience by learning, the
characteristic of too many already) this, the inhabitants argue, should
be attained by all individuals. They say that neither the substance of
letters is such, nor yet the difficulty of work, that one man, if given
enough time, cannot master both.”
“Their work, or as they prefer to hear it called, ‘the employment of
their hands,’ is conducted in a certain prescribed way, and all things
are brought into a public booth. From here every workman receives out
of the stock on hand whatever is necessary for the work of the coming
week. For the whole city is, as it were, one single workshop, but of
all different sorts and crafts. The ones in charge of these duties
are stationed in the small towers at the corners of the wall; they
know ahead of time what is to be made, in what quantity, and of what
form, and they inform the mechanics of these items. If the supply of
material in the work booth is sufficient, the workmen are permitted to
indulge and give free play to their inventive genius. No one has any
money, nor is there any use for any private money; yet the republic has
its own treasury. And in this respect the inhabitants are especially
blessed, because no one can be superior to the other in the amount of
riches owned, since the advantage is rather one of power and genius,
and the highest respect that of morals and piety. They have very few
working hours, yet no less is accomplished than in other places, as it
is considered disgraceful by all that one should take more rest and
leisure time than is allowed.”
In addition to the special trades, there are “public duties to which
all citizens have obligation, such as watching, guarding, harvesting
of grain and wine, working roads, erecting buildings, draining ground;
also certain duties of assisting in the factories which are imposed
upon all in turn according to age and sex, but not very often nor for
a long time. For even though certain experienced men are put in charge
of all the duties, yet when men are asked for, no one refuses the state
his services and strength. For what we are in our homes, they are in
their city, which they not undeservedly think a home. And for this
reason it is no disgrace to perform any public function.... Hence all
work, even that which is considered rather irksome, is accomplished in
good time, and without much difficulty, since the promptness of the
great number of workmen permits them easily to collect or distribute
the great mass of things.”
In this Christianopolis, as Mr. Bertrand Russell would put it, the
creative rather than the possessive impulses are uppermost. Work is the
main condition of existence, and this good community faces it. It is a
pretty contrast to the attitude of the leisured classes who, as Andreæ
says, with an entirely mistaken sense of delicacy shrink from touching
earth, water, stones, coal, and things of that sort, but think it grand
to have in their possession to delight them “horses, dogs, harlots and
other similar creatures.”
5
The place of commerce in this scheme of life is simple. It does not
exist for the sake of individual gain. Hence no one engages in commerce
on his own hook, for such matters are put in the hands of “those
selected to attend to them,” and the aim of commerce is not to gain
money but to increase the variety of things at the disposal of the
local community; so that--and again Andreæ steps in for emphasis--“we
may see the peculiar production of each land, and so communicate with
each other that we may seem to have the advantages of the universe in
one place, as it were.”
6
The constitution of the family in Christianopolis follows pretty
definitely upon the lines dictated by urban occupations; for Andreæ
is a city man, and since he does not despise the advantages city life
can give, he does not shrink from their consequences. One of these
consequences is, surely, the restriction of domesticity, or rather, the
projection in the city at large of the functions that in a farmstead
would be carried on within the bosom of the family.
When a lad is twenty-four and a lass is eighteen, they are permitted to
marry, with the benefit of Christian rites and services, and a decorous
avoidance of drunkenness and gluttony after the ceremony. Marriage is
a simple matter. There are no dowries to consider, no professional
anxieties to face, no housing shortage to keep one from finding a home,
and above all, perhaps, no landlord to propitiate with money, since
all houses are owned by the city and are granted and assigned to
individuals for their use. Virtue and beauty are the only qualities
that govern a marriage in Christianopolis. Furniture is provided with
the house out of the public store. If in Utopia the families are
grouped together in a patriarchal household, such as More himself
maintained at Chelsea, in Christianopolis they consist of isolated
couples, four, at most six people in all, a woman, a man, and such
children as are not yet of school age.
Let us visit a young couple in Christianopolis. We reach the house
by way of a street, twenty feet broad, faced by houses with a wide
frontage on the street, some forty feet in length, and of from fifteen
to twenty-five feet in depth. In our crowded towns, today, where people
pay for land by the front foot, the frontage is narrow and the houses
are deep; and as a result there is a dreadful insufficiency of light
and air; but in Christianopolis, as in some of the older European
towns, the houses are built to get a maximum of air and sunlight. If
it is raining when we make our visit, a covered walk, five feet wide,
supported by columns twelve feet high, will shelter us from the rain.
Our friends live, we shall say, in one of the average apartments;
so they have three rooms, a bathroom, a sleeping apartment, and a
kitchen. “The middle part within the tower has a little open space with
a wide window, where wood and the heavier things are raised aloft by
pulleys”--in short, a dumbwaiter. Looking out from the window in the
rear, we face a well-kept garden; and if our host is inclined to give
us wine, he may let us take our pick from among the cobwebs of a small
private cellar in the basement, where such things are kept. If it is a
cold day, the furnace is going; or if we happen to make our visit in
the summer time, the awnings are drawn.
Our host makes apologies, perhaps, for a litter of wood and shavings
that occupies a corner of the kitchen, for he has just been putting up
a few shelves in his spare time, and has borrowed a kit of tools from
the public supply house. (Since he is not a carpenter, he has no need
for these tools the rest of the year; and other people can have their
turn at them.) Coming from Utopia, one of the things that strikes us is
the absence of domestic attendance; and when we ask our hostess about
it, she tells us that she will not have anyone to wait upon her until
she is confined.
“But isn’t there a lot of work for you to do all by yourself?” we shall
ask.
“Not for anybody with a college training,” she will answer. “You see
that our furnishings are quite simple; and since there are no gimcracks
to be dusted, no polished tables to be oiled, no carpets to be swept,
and nothing in our apartment that is just for show to prove that we can
afford to live better than our neighbors, the work is scarcely more
than enough to keep one in good health and temper. Of course, cooking
meals is always something of a nuisance; and washing up is worse. But
my husband and I share the work together, in everything but sewing and
washing clothes, and you would be surprised how quickly everything
gets done. Work is usually galling when somebody else is taking his
ease while one is doing it; but where husband and wife share alike, as
in Christianopolis, there is really nothing to it. If you’ll stay to
dinner, you’ll find out how easily it goes. Since you haven’t brought
your rations, my husband will get some cooked meats in the public
kitchen, and that will do for all of us.”
“No one need be surprised at the rather cramped quarters,” Andreæ
hastens to interject. “People who house vanity ... can never live
spaciously enough. They burden others and are burdened themselves, and
no one measures their necessities, nay even their comforts, easily
otherwise than by an unbearable and unmovable mass. Oh, only those
persons are rich who have all of which they have real need, who admit
nothing else, merely because it is possible to have it in abundance.”
Carried to its extreme, you will find this philosophy put once for all
in Thoreau’s Walden. We have got our bearings in Utopia, I believe,
when we have determined what a life abundant consists of, and what will
suffice for it.
7
Suppose that our friends have children. During the early years of
their life they are in the care of their mother. When they have
completed their sixth year, the children are given over to the care of
the community, and both sexes continue in school through the stages
of childhood, youth, and early maturity. “No parent gives closer or
more careful attention to his children than is given here, for the
most upright preceptors, men as well as women, are placed over them.
Moreover,” the parents “can visit their children, even unseen by them,
as often as they have leisure. As this is an institution for the public
good, it is managed agreeably as a common charge for all the citizens.
They see to it that the food is appetizing and wholesome, that the
couches and beds are clean and comfortable, and that the clothes and
attire of the whole body are clean.... If diseases of the skin or body
are contracted, the individuals are cared for in good time; and to
avoid the spreading of infection, they are quarantined.”
There is scarcely need to examine the program of study except in its
broad outlines. It is enough to observe that “the young men have their
study period in the morning, the girls in the afternoon, and matrons as
well as learned men are their instructors.... The rest of their time
is devoted to manual training and domestic art and science, as each
one’s occupation is assigned to his natural inclination. When they
have vacant time they are permitted to engage in honorable physical
exercises either in the open spaces of the town or in the field.”
Two points, however, deserve our attention. The first is that the
school is run as a miniature republic. The second is the calibre of the
instructors. “The instructors,” says our zealous humanist, “are not
men from the dregs of human society nor such as are useless for other
occupations, but the choice of all the citizens, persons whose standing
in the Republic is known and who very often have access to the highest
positions of the state.”
The last phrase again transports me back to the modern world. I see
this fine humanist ideal budding in another place. This time it is
a summer school in the hills of New Hampshire, where the children
govern themselves in the classroom, where there is no punishment
except temporary exclusion from the group, and where, above all, each
instructor is chosen because of his creative practice in the subject
which he teaches: a highly gifted composer teaches music, an athlete
teaches gymnastics, a poet teaches literature. Then I think of all the
casual and wasted talents of people who for little more than the asking
would share their love of the arts and sciences with little children,
if only those who are in charge of little children were not too blind
or too fearful to make use of them. Faraday’s classic lectures on
the physics of the candle, and Ruskin’s addresses to a young ladies’
boarding school on the function of literature--such things might be
multiplied. It is not the creation of this utopian method that is
difficult; for the thing has already been done: what we need is its
extension. Then children might come to school as gaily as they do in
Peterborough, N. H., on the lush summer mornings; and people would
not turn their backs on learning any more than they would turn their
backs on life. If anyone thinks that Johann Andreæ’s prescription for
a teaching staff is an impossible one, let him visit the Peterborough
School, and examine its records and achievements.
It remains to record the further stages of learning. The halls of the
central citadel are divided into twelve departments, and except for the
armory, the archives, the printing establishment, and the treasury,
these halls are devoted entirely to the arts and sciences.
There is, to begin with, a laboratory of physical science. “Here the
properties of metals, minerals, and vegetables, and even the life of
animals, are examined, purified, increased, and united for the use of
the human race and in the interests of health.... Here men learn to
regulate fire, make use of air, value the water, and test the earth.”
Next to this laboratory is a Drug Supply House, where a pharmacy is
scientifically developed, for the curing of physical disease, and
adjoining this is a school of medicine, or as Andreæ reports, “a place
given over to anatomy.... The value of ascertaining the location of
the organs and of assisting the struggles of nature no one would deny,
unless he be as ignorant of himself as are the barbarians.... The
inhabitants of Christianopolis teach their youth the operations of life
and the various organs, from the parts of the physical body.”
We come now then to a Natural Science laboratory which is in effect a
Museum of Natural History, an institution founded in Utopia a century
and a half before a partial and inadequate substitute--a mere extension
of the curio chamber of a Country House--was presented to an admiring
world as the British Museum. “This,” as Andreæ says, “cannot be too
elegantly described,” and I heartily agree with him; for he paints the
picture of a museum which the American Museum at New York or South
Kensington in London has only begun to realize within the last decade
or two of their existence.
“Natural history is here seen painted on the walls in detail, and
with greatest skill. The phenomena of the sky, views of the earth in
different regions, the different races of men, representations of
animals, the forms of growing things, classes of stones and gems, are
not only on hand and named, but they even teach and make known their
nature and qualities.... Truly is not recognition of things of the
earth much easier of competent demonstration if illustrative materials
are at hand and if there is some guide to the memory? For instruction
enters altogether more easily through the eyes than through the ears,
and much more pleasantly in the presence of refinement than among the
base. They are deceived who think it is impossible to teach except in
dark caves and with a gloomy brow. A liberal minded man is never so
keen as when he has his instructors on confidential terms.”
Going farther, we find a mathematics laboratory and a department of
mathematical instruments. The first is “remarkable for its diagrams of
the heavens, as the hall of physics for its diagrams of the earth....
A chart of the star-studded heavens and a reproduction of the whole
shining host above were shown,” ... and also “different illustrations
representing tools and machines, small models, figures of geometry;
instruments of the mechanical arts, drawn, named, and explained.” I
cannot help expressing my admiration here for the concrete imagination
of this remarkable scholar: he deliberately anticipated, not in
the vague, allegorical form that Bacon does, but as lucidly as an
architect or a museum curator, the sort of institute which South
Kensington, with its Departments of Physical and Natural Science,
or perhaps the Smithsonian in America, has just begun to resemble.
If our museums had begun with the ideal Andreæ had in mind, instead
of with the miscellaneous rubbish which was the nucleus of their
collections--and still remains the nucleus in many of the less advanced
institutions--the presentation of the sciences would be a more adequate
thing than it is.
Does Andreæ leave the fine arts out of his picture? By no means.
“Opposite the pharmacy is a very roomy shop for pictorial art, an art
in which the city takes the greatest delight. For the city, besides
being decorated all over with pictures representing the various phases
of the earth, makes use of them especially in the instruction of youth
and for rendering learning more easy.... Besides, pictures and statues
of famous men are to be seen everywhere, an incentive of no mean value
to the young for striving to imitate their virtue.... At the same time
also, the beauty of forms is so pleasing to them that they embrace with
a whole heart the inner beauty of virtue itself.”
At the summit of art and science we naturally find in Christianopolis
the temple of religion. Alas! the hand of Calvin has been busy in
Christianopolis--recollect that Andreæ once lived in Geneva and admired
its ordinances--and attendance at prayers is compulsory. In order to
get an idea of this great circular temple, three hundred sixteen feet
in circumference and seventy feet high, we must think of a colossal
moving picture theater in a modern metropolis. The comparison is not
essentially sacrilegious; and I believe that those who will take
the trouble to look below the surface will find without difficulty
the common denominator between the profane and the ecclesiastical
institution. (Attendance at motion pictures, I must quickly add for the
benefit of the future historian, has not yet been made compulsory in
the modern metropolis.)
One-half of the temple is where the public gatherings take place; and
the other is reserved for the distribution of the sacraments and for
music. “At the same time, the sacred comedies, by which they set so
much store, and are entertained every three months, are shown in the
temple.”
8
We have discussed folk, work, and place in Christianopolis; and we have
dealt in an admittedly sketchy fashion with culture and art. We must
now turn attention to the polity; and here we must note that Andreæ’s
description shifts for once to an allegorical plane, and departs not a
little from the realism of his treatment of science and the arts.
At the bottom of the polity there are glimpses of a local industrial
association, meeting in the common halls that are provided in the
towers of each of the industrial quarters; and we gather that to
represent the city at large twenty-four councilmen are chosen, while
as the executive department there is a triumvirate consisting of a
Minister, a Judge, and a Director of Learning, each of whom is married,
for metaphorical point, to Conscience, Understanding, and Truth,
respectively. “Each one of the leaders does his own duty, yet not
without the knowledge of others; all consult together in matters that
concern the safety of the state.”
In the censorship of books, Christianopolis reminds us of the Republic;
in the exclusion of lawyers it calls up nearly every other utopia; and
in its attitude towards crime it has a temperance and leniency that
is all its own, for “the judges of this Christian city observe this
custom especially, that they punish most severely those misdeeds which
are directed straight against God, less severely those which injure
men, and lightest of all those who harm only property. As the Christian
citizens are always chary of spilling blood, they do not willingly
agree upon the death sentence as a form of punishment.... For anyone
can destroy a man but only the best can reform.”
How shall we sum up this government? Let Andreæ speak his own words;
for he has reached the innermost shrine of Christianopolis and
perceives the center of activity in the state.
“Here religion, justice, and learning have their abode, and theirs
is the control of the city.... I often wonder what people mean who
separate and disjoint their best powers, the joining of which might
render them blessed as far as may be on earth. There are those who
would be considered religious, who throw off all things human; there
are some who are pleased to rule, though without any religion at all;
learning makes a great noise, flattering now this one, now that, yet
applauding itself most. What finally may the tongue do except provoke
God, confuse men, and destroy itself? So there would seem to be a need
of co-operation which only Christianity can give--Christianity which
conciliates God with men and unites men together, so that they have
pious thoughts, do good deeds, know the truth, and finally die happily
to live eternally.”
There are some who might object to this statement on the ground that it
smacked too heartily of supernatural religion; but it remains just as
valid if we translate it into terms whose theological reactions have
been neutralized. To have a sense of values, to know the world in which
they are set, and to be able to distribute them--this is our modern
version of Andreæ’s conception of religion, learning, and justice. A
little search might uncover another expression of the Humanist ideal
as complete and magnificent as this; but I doubt if it would find a
better one. In essence, this blunt and forthright German scholar is
standing shoulder to shoulder with Plato: his Christianopolis is as
enduring as the best nature of men.
CHAPTER FIVE
How Bacon and Campanella, who have a great reputation as
utopians, are little better than echoes of the men who went
before them.
CHAPTER FIVE
1
A Genoese sea-captain is the guest of a Grand Master of the Knights
Hospitaller. This sea-captain tells him of a great country under the
equator, dominated by the City of the Sun. The outward appearance of
this country is a little strange--the city with its seven rings named
after the seven planets, and its four gates that lead to the four
quarters of the earth, and the hill that is topt by a grand temple,
and the walls covered with laws and alphabets and paintings of natural
phenomena, and the Rulers--Power, Wisdom, and Love--with the learned
doctors, Astrologus, Cosmographus, Arithmeticus, and their like: it
is an apparition such as never yet was seen on land or sea. Small
wonder, for this City of the Sun existed only in the exotic brain of a
Calabrian monk, Tommaso Campanella, whose Utopia existed in manuscript
before Andreæ wrote his Christianopolis.
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: