Erfurt, remaining Catholic in a Protestant region, declined more rapidly and permanently. In the year 1520-21 there were 311 matriculations, in the following year 120, in the next year 72, and five years later only 14. Between 1521 to 1530 the number of students fell at Rostock from 123 to 33, at Frankfort-on-the-Oder from 73 to 32. Rostock, however, recovered after a reorganization in 1532. The number of students at Greifswald declined so that no lectures were given during the period 1527-39, after which it again began to pick up. Koenigsberg, starting with 314 students later fell off. Cologne declined in numbers, and so did Mayence until the Jesuits founded their college in 1561, which, by 1568, had 500 pupils recognized as members of the university. Vienna, also, having sunk to the number of 12 students in 1532, kept at a {671} very low ebb until 1554, when the effects of the Jesuit revival were felt. Whereas, during the fifteen years 1508-22 there were 6485 matriculations at Leipzig, during the next fifteen years there were only 1935. By the end of the century, however, Leipzig had again become, under Protestant leadership, a large institution.

[Sidenote: British universities]

Two new universities were founded in the British Isles during the century, Edinburgh in 1582 and Trinity College, Dublin, in 1591. In England a number of colleges were added to those already existing at Oxford and Cambridge, namely Christ Church (first known, after its founder, Wolsey, as Cardinal's College, then as King's College), Brasenose, and Corpus Christi at Oxford and St. John's, Magdalen, and Trinity at Cambridge. Notwithstanding these new foundations the number of students sank. During the years 1542-8, only 191 degrees of B.A. were given at Cambridge and only 172 at Oxford. Ascham is authority for the statement that things were still worse under Mary, when "the wild boar of the wood" either "cut up by the root or trod down to the ground" the institutions of learning. The revenues of the universities reached their low-water mark about 1547, when the total income of Oxford from land was reckoned at L5 and that of Cambridge at L50, per annum. Under Elizabeth, the universities rose in numbers, while better Latin and Greek were taught. It was at this time that a college education became fashionable for young gentlemen instead of being exclusively patronized by "learned clerks." The foundation of the College of Physicians in London deserves to be mentioned. [Sidenote: 1528]

A university was founded at Zurich under the influence of Zwingli. Geneva's University opened in 1559 with Beza as rector. Connected with it was a preparatory school of seven forms, with a rigidly prescribed {672} course in the classics. When the boy was admitted to the university proper by examination, he took what he chose; there was not even a division into classes. The courses offered to him included Greek, Hebrew, theology, dialectic, rhetoric, physics and mathematics.

[Sidenote: French universities]

The foundation of the College de France by Francis I represented an attempt to bring new life and vigor into learning by a free association of learned men. It was planned to emancipate science from the tutelage of theology. Erasmus was invited but, on his refusal to accept, Bude was given the leading position. Chairs of Greek, Hebrew, mathematics and Latin were founded by the king in 1530. Other institutions of learning founded in France were Rheims 1547, Douai 1562, Besancon[1] 1564, none of them now in existence. Paris continued to be the largest university in the world, with an average number of students of about 6000.

Louvain, in the Netherlands, had 3000 students in 1500 and 1521; in 1550 the number rose to 5000. It was divided into colleges on the plan still found in England. Each college had a president, three professors and twelve fellows, entertained gratis, in addition to a larger number of paying scholars. The most popular classes often reached the number of 300. The foundation of the Collegium Trilingue by Erasmus's friend Jerome Busleiden in 1517 was an attempt, as its name indicates, to give instruction in Greek and Hebrew as well as in the Latin classics. A blight fell upon the noble institution during the wars of religion. Under the supervision of Alva it founded professorships of catechetics and substituted the decrees of the Council of Trent for the Decretum of Gratian in the law school. Exhausted by the hemorrhages caused by the Religious War and starved by the Lenten diet of Spanish Catholicism, it gradually decayed, while its {673} place was taken in the eyes of Europe by the Protestant University of Leyden. [Sidenote: 1575] A second Protestant foundation, Franeker, [Sidenote: 1585] for a time flourished, but finally withered away.

Spanish universities were crowded with new numbers. The maximum student body was reached by Salamanca in 1584 with 6778 men, while Alcala passed in zenith in 1547 with the respectable enrollment of 1949. The foundation of no less than nine new universities in Spain bears witness to the interest of the Iberian Peninsula in education.

Four new universities opened their doors in Italy during the year 1540-1565. The Sapienza at Rome, in addition to these, was revived temporarily by Leo X in 1513, and, after a relapse to the dormant state, again awoke to its full power under Paul III, when chairs of Greek and Hebrew were established.

[Sidenote: Contribution to progress]

The services of all these universities cannot be computed on any statistical method. Notwithstanding all their faults, their dogmatic narrowness and their academic arrogance, they contributed more to progress than any other institutions. Each academy became the center of scientific research and of intellectual life. Their influence was enormous. How much did it mean to that age to see its contending hosts marshalled under two professors, Luther and Adrian VI! And how many other leaders taught in universities:—Erasmus, Melanchthon, Reuchlin, Lefevre, to mention only a few. Pontiffs and kings sought for support in academic pronouncements, nor could they always force the doctors to give the decision they wished. In fact, each university stood like an Acropolis in the republic of letters, at once a temple and a fortress for those who loved truth and ensued it.

[1] Besancon was then an Imperial Free City.

{674}

SECTION 4. ART

[Sidenote: Art the expression of an ideal]

The significant thing about art, for the historian as for the average man, is the ideal it expresses. The artist and critic may find more to interest him in the development of technique, how this painter dealt with perspective and that one with "tactile values," how the Florentines excelled in drawing and the Venetians in color. But for us, not being professionals, the content of the art is more important than its form. For, after all, the glorious cathedrals of the Middle Ages and the marvellous paintings of the Renaissance were not mere iridescent bubbles blown by or for children with nothing better to do. They were the embodiments of ideas; as the people thought in their hearts so they projected themselves into the objects they created.

The greatest painters the world has seen, and many others who would be greatest in any other time, were contemporaries of Luther. They had a gospel to preach no less sacred to them than was his to him; it was the glad tidings of the kingdom of this world: the splendor, the loveliness, the wonder and the nobility of human life. When, with young eyes, they looked out upon the world in its spring-tide, they found it not the vale of tears that they had been told; they found it a rapture. They saw the naked body not vile but beautiful.

[Sidenote: Leonardo, 1452-1519]

Leonardo da Vinci was a painter of wonder, but not of naive admiration of things seen. To him the miracle of the world was in the mystery of knowledge,—and he took all nature as his province. He gave his life and his soul for the mastery of science; he observed, he studied, he pondered everything. From the sun in the heavens to the insect on the ground, nothing was so large as to impose upon him, nothing too small to escape him. Weighing, measuring, experimenting, {675} he dug deep for the inner reality of things; he spent years drawing the internal organs of the body, and other years making plans for engineers.

When he painted, there was but one thing that fascinated him: the soul. To lay bare the mind as he had dissected the brain; to take man or woman at some self-revealing pose, to surprise the hidden secret of personality, all this was his passion, and in all this he excelled as no one had ever done, before or since. His battle picture is not some gorgeous and romantic cavalry charge, but a confused melee of horses snorting with terror, of men wild with the lust of battle or with hatred or with fear. His portraits are either caricatures or prophecies: they lay bare some trait unsuspected, or they probe some secret weakness. Is not his portrait of himself a wizard? Does not his Medusa chill us with the horror of death? Is not Beatrice d'Este already doomed to waste away, when he paints her?

[Sidenote: The Last Supper]

The Last Supper had been treated a hundred times before him, now as a eucharistic sacrament, now as a monastic meal, now as a gathering of friends. What did Leonardo make of it? A study of character. Jesus has just said, "One of you will betray me," and his divine head has sunk upon his breast with calm, immortal grief. John, the Beloved, is fairly sick with sorrow; Peter would be fiercely at the traitor's throat; Thomas darts forward, doubting, to ask, "Lord, is it I?" Every face expresses deep and different reaction. There sits Judas, his face tense, the cords of his neck standing out, his muscles taut with the supreme effort not to betray the evil purpose which, nevertheless, lowers on his visage as plainly as a thunder cloud on a sultry afternoon.

Throughout life Leonardo was fascinated with an enigmatic smile that he had seen somewhere, perhaps in Verocchio's studio, perhaps on the face of some {676} woman he had known as a boy. His first paintings were of laughing women, and the same smile is on the lips of John the Baptist and Dionysus and Leda and the Virgin and St. Anne and Mona Lisa! What was he trying to express? Vasari found the "smile so pleasing that it was a thing more divine than human to behold"; Ruskin thought it archaic, Muentz "sad and disillusioned," Berenson supercilious, and Freud neurotic. Reymond calls it the smile of Prometheus, Faust, Oedipus and the Sphinx; Pater saw in it "the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie of the Middle Ages with its spiritual ambitions and imaginary loves, the return to the pagan world, the sins of the Borgias." Though some great critics, like Reinach, have asserted that Mona Lisa [Sidenote: Mona Lisa] is only subtle as any great portrait is subtle, it is impossible to regard it merely as that. It is a psychological study. And what means the smile? In a word, sex,—not on the physical side so studied and glorified by other painters, but in its psychological aspect. For once Leonardo has stripped bare not the body but the soul of desire,—the passion, the lust, the trembling and the shame. There is something frightening about Leda caught with the swan, about the effeminate Dionysus and John the Baptist's mouth "folded for a kiss of irresistible pleasure." If the stories then told about the children of Alexander VI and about Margaret of Navarre and Anne Boleyn were true, Mona Lisa was their sister.

Everything he touched acquires the same psychological penetration. His Adoration of the Magi is not an effort to delight the eye, but is a study, almost a criticism, of Christianity. All sorts of men are brought before the miraculous Babe, and their reactions, of wonder, of amazement, of devotion, of love, of skepticism, of scoffing, and of indifference, are perfectly recorded.

{677} [Sidenote: The Venetians]

After the cool and stormy spring of art came the warm and gentle summer. Life became so full, so beautiful, so pleasant, so alluring, that men sought for nothing save to quaff its goblet to the dregs. Venice, seated like a lovely, wanton queen, on her throne of sparkling waters, drew to her bosom all the devotees of pleasure in the whole of Europe. Her argosies still brought to her every pomp and glory of vestment with which to array her body sumptuously; her lovers lavished on her gold and jewels and palaces and rare exotic luxuries. How all this is reflected in her great painters, the Bellinis and Giorgione and Titian and Tintoretto! Life is no longer a wonder to them but a banquet; the malady of thought, the trouble of the soul is not for them. Theirs is the realm of the senses, and if man could live by sense alone, surely he must revel in what they offer. They dye their canvasses in such blaze of color and light as can be seen only in the sunset or in the azure of the Mediterranean, or in tropical flowers. How they clothe their figures in every conceivable splendor of orphrey and ermine, in jewels and shining armor and rich stuff of silk and samite, in robe of scarlet or in yellow dalmatic! Every house for them is a palace, every bit of landscape an enchanted garden, every action an ecstasy, every man a hero and every woman a paragon of voluptuous beauty.

The portrait is one of the most characteristic branches of Renaissance painting, for it appealed to the newly aroused individualism, the grandiose egotism of the so optimistic and so self-confident age. After Leonardo no one sought to make the portrait primarily a character study. Titian and Raphael and Holbein and most of their contemporaries sought rather to please and flatter than to analyse. [Sidenote: Titian, c. 1490-1576] But withal there is often a truth to nature that make many {678} of the portraits of that time like the day of judgment in their revelation of character. Titian's splendid harmonies of scarlet silk and crimson satin and gold brocade and purple velvet and silvery fur enshrine many a blend of villainies and brutal stupidities. What is more cruelly realistic than the leer of the satyr clothed as Francis, King of France; than the bovine dullness of Charles V and the lizard-like dullness of his son; or than that strange combination of wolfish cunning and swinish bestiality with human thought and self-command that fascinates in Raphael's portrait of Leo X and his two cardinals? On the other hand, what a profusion of strong and noble men and women gaze at us from the canvases of that time. They are a study of infinite variety and of surpassing charm.

The secularization of art proceeded even to the length of affecting religious painting. Susanna and Magdalen and St. Barbara and St. Sebastian are no longer starved nuns and monks, bundled in shapeless clothes; they become maidens and youths of marvellous beauty. Even the Virgin and Christ were drawn from the handsomest models obtainable and were richly clothed. This tendency, long at work, found its consummation in Raphael Sanzio of Urbino.

[Sidenote: Raphael, 1483-1520]

It is one of those useful coincidences that seem almost symbolic that Raphael and Luther were born in the same year, for they were both the products of the same process—the decay of Catholicism. When, for long ages, a forest has rotted on the ground, it may form a bed of coal, ready to be dug up and turned into power, or it may make a field luxuriant in grain and fruit and flowers. From the deposits of medieval religion the miner's son of Mansfeld extracted enough energy to turn half Europe upside down; from the same fertile swamp Raphael culled the most exquisite {679} blossoms and the most delicious berries. To change the metaphor, Luther was the thunder and Raphael the rainbow of the same storm.

[Sidenote: Religious art]

The chief work of both of them was to make religion understanded of the people; to adapt it to the needs of the time. When faith fails a man may either abandon the old religion for another, or he may stop thinking about dogma altogether and find solace in the mystical-aesthetic aspect of his cult. This second alternative was worked to its limit by Raphael. He was not concerned with the true but with the beautiful. By far the larger part of his very numerous pictures have religious subjects. The whole Bible—which Luther translated into the vernacular—was by him translated into the yet clearer language of sense. Even now most people conceive biblical characters in the forms of this greatest of illustrators. Delicacy, pathos, spirituality, idyllic loveliness—everything but realism or tragedy—are stamped on all his canvases. "Beautiful as a Raphael Madonna" is an Italian proverb, and so skilfully selected a type of beauty is there in his Virgins that they are neither too ethereal nor too sensuous. Divine tenderness, motherhood at its holiest, gazes calmly from the face of the Sistine Madonna, "whose eyes are deeper than the depths of waters stilled at even." The simple mind, unsophisticated by lore of the pre-Raphaelite school, will worship a Raphael when he will but revel in a Titian. Strangely touched by the magic of this passionate lover both of the church and of mortal women, the average man of that day, or of this, found, and will find, glad tidings for his heart in the very color of Mary's robe. "Whoever would know how Christ transfigured and made divine should be painted, must look," says Vasari, on Raphael's canvases.

The church and the papacy found an ally in Raphael, {680} whose pencil illustrated so many triumphs of the popes and so many mysteries of religion. In his Disputa (so-called) he made the secret of transubstantiation visible. In his great cartoon of Leo I turning back Attila he gave new power to the arm of Leo X. His Parnassus and School of Athens seemed to make philosophy easy for the people. Indeed, it is from them that he has reaped his rich reward, for while the Pharisees of art pick flaws in him, point out what they find of shallowness and of insincerity, the people love him more than any other artist has been loved. It is for them that he worked, and on every labor one might read as it were his motto, "I will not offend even one of these little ones."

If Raphael's art was safe in his own hands there can be little doubt that it hastened the decadence of painting [Sidenote: Decadence of religious art] in the hands of his followers. His favorite pupil, Giulio Romano, caught every trick of the master and, like the devil citing Scripture, painted pictures to delight the eye so licentious that they cannot now be exhibited. Andrea del Sarto sentimentalized the Virgin, turning tenderness to bathos. Correggio, the most gifted of them all, could do nothing so well as depict sensual love. His pictures are hymns to Venus, and his women, saints and sinners alike, are houris of an erotic paradise. Has the ecstasy of amorous passion amounting almost to mystical transport ever been better suggested than in the marvellous light and shade of his Jupiter and Io? These and many other contemporary artists had on their lips but one song, a paean in praise of life, the pomps and glories of this goodly world and the delights and beauties of the body.

But to all men, save those loved by the gods, there comes some moment, perhaps in the very heyday of success and joy and love, when a sudden ruin falls upon the world. The death of one loved more than self, {681} disease and pain, the betrayal of some trust, the failure of the so cherished cause—all these and many more are the gates by which tragedy is born. And the beauty of tragedy is above all other beauty because only in some supreme struggle can the grandeur of the human spirit assert its full majesty. In Shakespeare and Michelangelo it is not the torture that pleases us, but the triumph over circumstance.

[Sidenote: Michelangelo, 1475-1564]

No one has so deeply felt or so truly expressed this as the Florentine sculptor who, amidst a world of love and laughter, lived in wilful sadness, learning how man from his death-grapple in the darkness can emerge victor and how the soul, by her passion of pain, is perfected. He was interested in but one thing, man, because only man is tragic. He would paint no portraits—or but one or two—because no living person came up to his ideal. All his figures are strong because strength only is able to suffer as to do. Nine-tenths of them are men rather than women, because the beauty of the male is strength, whereas the strength of the woman is beauty. Only in a few of his early figures does he attain calm,—in a Madonna, in David or in the Men Bathing, all of them, including the Madonna with its figures of men in the background, intended to exhibit the perfection of athletic power.

But save in these early works almost all that Michelangelo set his hand to is fairly convulsed with passion. Leda embraces the swan at the supreme moment of conception; Eve, drawn from the side of Adam, is weeping bitterly; Adam is rousing himself to the hard struggle that is life; the slaves are writhing under their bonds as though they were of hot iron; Moses is starting from his seat for some tremendous conflict. Every figure lavished on the decoration of the Sistine Chapel reaches, when it does not surpass, the limit of human physical development. Sibyl and Prophet, {682} Adam and Eve, man and God are all hurled together with a riot of strength and "terribilita."

The almost supernatural terror of Michelangelo's genius found fullest scope in illustrating the idea of predestination that obsessed the Reformers and haunted many a Catholic of that time also. In the Last Judgment [Sidenote: The Last Judgment] the artist laid the whole emphasis upon the damnation of the wicked, hurled down to external torment by the sentence, "Depart from me, ye cursed," uttered by Christ, not the meek and gentle Man of Sorrows, but the rex tremendae majestatis, a Hercules, before whom Mary trembles and the whole of creation shudders. A quieter, but no less tragic work of art is the sculpture on the tomb of Lorenzo de' Medici at Florence. The hero himself sits above, and both he and the four allegorical figures, two men and two women, commonly called Day and Night, Morning and Evening, are lost in pensive, eternal sorrow. So they brood for ever as if seeking in sleep and dumb forgetfulness some anodyne for the sense of their country's and their race's doom.

But it is not all pain. Titian has not made joy nor Raphael love nor Leonardo wonder so beautiful as Michelangelo has made tragedy. His sonnets breathe a worship of beauty as the symbol of divine love. He is like the great, dark angel of Victor Hugo:

Et l'ange devint noir, et dit:—Je suis l'amour. Mais son front sombre etait plus charmant que le jour, Et je voyais, dans l'ombre ou brillaient ses prunelles, Les astres a travers les plumes de ses ailes.

The contrast between the fertility of Italian artistic genius and the comparative poverty of Northern Europe is most apparent when the northern painters copied most closely their transalpine brothers. The taste for Italian pictures was spread abroad by the many {683} travelers, and the demand created a supply of copies and imitations. Antwerp became a regular factory of such works, whereas the Germans, Cranach, Duerer and Holbein were profoundly affected by Italy. Of them all Holbein [Sidenote: Hans Holbein the Younger, 1497-1543] was the only one who could really compete with the Italians on their own ground, and that only in one branch of art, portraiture. His studies of Henry VIII, and of his wives and courtiers, combine truth to nature with a high sense of beauty. His paintings of More and Erasmus express with perfect mastery the finest qualities of two rare natures.

[Sidenote: Albert Duerer, 1471-1528]

Duerer seldom succeeded in painting pictures of the most beautiful type, but a few of his portraits can be compared with nothing save Leonardo's studies. The whole of a man's life and character are set forth in his two drawings of his friend Pirckheimer, a strange blend of the philosopher and the hog. And the tragedy is that the lower nature won; in 1504 there is but a potential coarseness in the strong face; in 1522 the swine had conquered and but the wreck of the scholar is visible.

As an engineer and as a student of aesthetics Duerer was also the northern Leonardo. His theory of art reveals the secret of his genius: "What beauty is, I know not; but for myself I take that which at all times has been considered beautiful by the greater number." This is making art democratic, bringing it down from the small coterie of palace and mansion to the home of the people at large. Duerer and his compeers were enabled to do this by exploiting the new German arts of etching and wood-engraving. Pictures were multiplied by hundreds and thousands and sold, not to one patron but to the many. Characteristically they reflected the life and thoughts of the common people in every homely phase. Pious subjects were numerous, because religion bulked large in the common thought, {684} but it was the religion of the popular preacher, translating the life of Christ into contemporary German life, wholesome and a little vulgar. The people love marvels and they are very literal; what could be more marvellous and more literal than Duerer's illustrations of the Apocalypse in which the Dragon with ten horns and seven heads, and the Lamb with seven horns and seven eyes are represented exactly as they are described? Duerer neither strove for nor attained anything but realism. "I think," he wrote, "the more exact and like a man a picture is, the better the work. . . . Others are of another opinion and speak of how a man should be . . . but in such things I consider nature the master and human imaginations errors." It was life he copied, the life he saw around him at Nuremberg.

But Duerer, to use his own famous criterion of portraiture, [Sidenote: 1513-14] painted not only the features of Germany, but her soul. Three of his woodcuts depict German aspirations so fully that they are the best explanation of the Reformation, which they prophesy. The first of these, The Knight, Death and the Devil, shows the Christian soldier riding through a valley of supernatural terrors. "So ist des Menchen Leben nichts anderes dann eine Ritterschaft auf Erden," is the old German translation of Job vii, 1, following the Vulgate. Erasmus in his Handbook of the Christian Knight had imagined just such a scene, and so deeply had the idea of the soldier of Christ sunk into the people's mind that later generations interpreted Duerer's knight as a picture of Sickingen or Hutten or one of the bold champions of the new religion.

In the St. Jerome peacefully at work in his panelled study, translating the Bible, while the blessed sun shines in and the lion and the little bear doze contentedly, is not Luther foretold? But the German study, {685} that magician's laboratory that has produced so much of good, has also often been the alembic of brooding and despair. More than ever before at the opening of the century men felt the vast promises and the vast oppression of thought. New science had burst the old bonds but, withal, the soul still yearned for more. The vanity of knowledge is expressed as nowhere else in Duerer's Melancholia, one of the world's greatest pictures. Surrounded by scientific instruments,—the compass, the book, the balance, the hammer, the arithmetical square, the hour-glass, the bell—sits a woman with wings too small to raise her heavy body. Far in the distance is a wonderful city, with the glory of the Northern Lights, but across the splendid vision flits the little bat-like creature, fit symbol of some disordered fancy of an overwrought mind.

[Sidenote: The Grotesque]

Closely akin to the melancholy of the Renaissance is the love of the grewsome. In Duerer it took the harmless form of a fondness for monstrosities,—rhinoceroses, bearded babies, six-legged pigs and the like. But Holbein and many other artists tickled the emotions of their contemporaries by painting long series known as the Dance of Death, in which some man or woman typical of a certain class, such as the emperor, the soldier, the peasant, the bride, is represented as being haled from life by a grinning skeleton.

Typical of the age, too, was the caricature now drawn into the service of the intense party struggles of the Reformation. To depict the pope or Luther or the Huguenots in their true form their enemies drew them with claws and hoofs and ass's heads, and devil's tails, drinking and blaspheming. Even kings were caricatured,—doubly significant fact!

[Sidenote: Architecture]

As painting and sculpture attained so high a level of maturity in the sixteenth century, one might suppose that architecture would do the same. In truth, {686} however, architecture rather declined. Very often, if not always, each special art-form goes through a cycle of youth, perfection, and decay, that remind one strongly of the life of a man. The birth of an art is due often to some technical invention, the full possibilities of which are only gradually developed. But after the newly opened fields have been exhausted the epigoni can do little but recombine, often in fantastic ways, the old elements; public taste turns from them and demands something new.

[Sidenote: Churches]

So the supreme beauty of the medieval cathedral as seen at Pisa or Florence or Perugia or Rheims or Cologne, was never equalled in the sixteenth century. As the Church declined, so did the churches. Take St. Peter's at Rome, colossal in conception and enormously unequal in execution. With characteristic pride and self-confidence Pope Julius II to make room for it tore down the old church, and other ancient monuments, venerable and beautiful with the hoar of twelve centuries. Even by his contemporaries the architect, Bramante, was dubbed Ruinante! He made a plan, which was started; then he died. In his place were appointed San Gallo and Raphael and Michelangelo, together or in turn, and towers were added after the close of the sixteenth century. The result is the hugest building in the world, and almost the worst proportioned. After all, there is something appropriate in the fact that, just as the pretensions of the popes expanded and their powers decreased, so their churches should become vaster and yet less impressive. St. Peter's was intended to be a marble thunderbolt; but like so many of the papal thunders of that age, it was but a brutum fulmen in the end!

The love for the grandiose, carried to excess in St. Peter's, is visible in other sixteenth century ecclesiastical buildings, such as the Badia at Florence. Small {687} as this is, there is a certain largeness of line that is not Gothic, but that goes back to classical models. St. Etienne du Mont at Paris is another good example of the influence of the study of the ancients upon architecture. It is difficult to point to a great cathedral or church built in Germany during this century. In England portions of the colleges at Oxford and Cambridge date from these years, but these portions are grafted on to an older style that really determined them. The greatest glory of English university architecture, the chapel of King's College at Cambridge, was finished in the first years of the century. The noble fan-vaulting and the stained-glass windows will be remembered by all who have seen them.

[Sidenote: Ecclesiastic architecture]

After the Reformation ecclesiastical architecture followed two diverse styles; the Protestants cultivated excessive plainness, the Catholics excessive ornament. The iconoclasts had no sense for beauty, and thought, as Luther put it, that faith was likely to be neglected by those who set a high value on external form. Moreover the Protestant services necessitated a modification of the medieval cathedral style. What they wanted was a lecture hall with pews; the old columns and transepts and the roomy floor made way for a more practical form.

The Catholics, on the other hand, by a natural reaction, lavished decoration on their churches as never before. Every column was made ornate, every excuse was taken for adding some extraneous embellishment; the walls were crowded with pictures and statues and carving to delight, or at least to arrest, the eye. But it happened that the noble taste of the earlier and simpler age failed; amid all possible devices to give effect, quiet grandeur was wanting.

[Sidenote: Castles]

What the people of that secular generation really built with enthusiasm and success were their own {688} dwellings. What are the castles of Chambord and Blois and the Louvre and Hampton Court and Heidelberg but houses of play and pleasure such as only a child could dream of? King and cardinal and noble vied in making tower and gable, gallery and court as of a fairy palace; banqueting hall and secret chamber where they and their playmates could revel to their heart's content and leave their initials carved as thickly as boys carve them on an old school desk. And how richly they filled them! A host of new arts sprang up to minister to the needs of these palace-dwellers: our museums are still filled with the glass and enamel, the vases and porcelain, the tapestry and furniture and jewelry that belonged to Francis and Catharine de' Medici and Leo X and Elizabeth. How perfect was the art of many of these articles of daily use can only be appreciated by studying at first hand the salt-cellars of Cellini, or the gold and silver and crystal goblets made by his compeers. Examine the clocks, of which the one at Strassburg is an example; the detail of workmanship is infinite; even the striking apparatus and the dials showing planetary motions are far beyond our own means, or perhaps our taste. When Peter Henlein invented the watch, using as the mainspring a coiled feather, he may not have made chronometers as exact as those turned out nowadays, but the "Nuremberg eggs"—so called from their place of origin and their shape, not a disk, but a sphere—were marvels of chasing and incrustation and jewelry.

[Sidenote: Love of beauty]

The love of the beautiful was universal. The city of that time, less commodious, sanitary, and populous than it is today, was certainly fairer to the eye. Enough of old Nuremberg and Chester and Siena and Perugia and many other towns remains to assure us that the red-tiled houses, the overhanging storeys, the high gables and quaint dormer windows, presented a {689} far more pleasing appearance than do our lines of smoky factories and drab dwellings.

[Sidenote: Music]

The men so greedy of all delicate sights and pleasant, would fain also stuff their ears with sweet sounds. And so they did, within the limitations of a still undeveloped technique. They had organs, lutes, viols, lyres, harps, citherns, horns, and a kind of primitive piano known as the clavichord or the clavicembalo. Many of these instruments were exquisitely rich and delicate in tone, but they lacked the range and volume and variety of our music. Almost all melodies were slow, solemn, plaintive; the tune of Luther's hymn gives a good idea of the style then prevalent. When we read that the churches adopted the airs of popular songs, so that hymns were sung to ale-house jigs and catches from the street, we must remember that the said jigs and love-songs were at least as sober and staid as are many of the tunes now expressly written for our hymns. The composers of the time, especially Palestrina [Sidenote: Palestrina, 1526-94] and Orlando Lasso, [Sidenote: Lasso, c. 1530-1594] did wonders within the limits then possible to introduce richness and variety into song.

[Sidenote: Art and religion]

Art was already on the decline when it came into conflict with the religious revivals of the time. The causes of the decadence are not hard to understand. The generation of giants, born in the latter half of the fifteenth century, seemed to exhaust the possibilities of artistic expression in painting and sculpture, or at least to exhaust the current ideas so expressible. Guido Reni and the Caracci could do nothing but imitate and recombine.

And then came the battle of Protestant and Catholic to turn men's minds into other channels than that of beauty. Even when the Reformation was not consciously opposed to art, it shoved it aside as a distraction from the real business of life. Thus it has come {690} about in Protestant lands that the public regards art as either a "business" or an "education." Luther himself loved music above all things and did much to popularize it,—while Erasmus shuddered at the psalm-singing he heard from Protestant congregations! Of painting the Reformer spoke with admiration, but so rarely! What could art be in the life of a man who was fighting for his soul's salvation? Calvin saw more clearly the dangers to the soul from the seductions of this world's transitory charm. Images he thought idolatrous in churches and he said outright: "It would be a ridiculous and inept imitation of the papists to fancy that we render God more worthy service in ornamenting our temples and in employing organs and toys of that sort. While the people are thus distracted by external things the worship of God is profaned." So it was that the Puritans chased all blandishments not only from church but from life, and art came to be looked upon as a bit immoral.

[Sidenote: Counter-Reformation]

But the little finger of the reforming pope was thicker than the Puritan's loins; where Calvin had chastised with whips Sixtus V chastised with scorpions. Adrian VI, the first Catholic Reformer after Luther, could not away with "those idols of the heathen," the ancient statues. Clement VII for a moment restored the old regime of art and licentiousness together, having Perino del Vaga paint his bathroom with scenes from the life of Venus in the manner of Giulio Romano. But the Council of Trent made severe regulations against nude pictures, in pursuance of which Daniel da Volterra was appointed to paint breeches on all the naked figures of Michelangelo's Last Judgment and on similar paintings. Sixtus V, who could hardly endure the Laocoon and Apollo Belvidere, was bent on destroying the monuments of heathendom. The ruin was complete when to her cruel hate the church added {691} her yet more cruel love. Along came the Jesuits offering, like pedlars, instead of the good old article a substitute guaranteed by them to be "just as good," and a great deal cheaper. Painting was sentimentalized and "moralized" under their tuition; architecture adopted the baroque style, gaudy and insincere. The church was stuffed with gewgaws and tinsel; marble was replaced by painted plaster and saintliness by sickliness.

SECTION 5. BOOKS

[Sidenote: Numbers of books published]

The sixteenth was the first really bookish century. There were then in Germany alone about 100,000 works printed, or reprinted. If each edition amounted to 1000—a fair average, for if many editions were smaller, some were much larger—that would mean that about a million volumes were offered to the German public each year throughout the century. There is no doubt that the religious controversy had a great deal to do with the expansion of the reading public, for it had the same effect on the circulation of pamphlets that a political campaign now has on the circulation of the newspaper. The following figures show how rapidly the number of books published in Germany increased during the decisive years. In 1518 there were 150, in 1519 260, in 1520 570, 1521 620, in 1522 680, 1523 935, and 1524 990.

Many of these books were short, controversial tracts; some others were intended as purveyors of news pure and simple. Some of these broadsides were devoted to a single event, as the Neue Zeitung: Die Schlacht des tuerkischen Kaisers, [Sidenote: 1526] others had several items of interest, including letters from distant parts. Occasionally a mere lampoon would appear under the title of Neue Zeitung, corresponding to our funny papers. But these substitutes for modern journals were both rare and irregular; the world then got along with much {692} less information about current events than it now enjoys. Nor was there anything like our weekly and monthly magazines.

The new age was impatient of medieval literature. The schoolmen, never widely read, were widely mocked. The humanists, too, fell into deep disgrace, charged with self-conceit, profligacy and irreligion. They still wandered around, like the sophists in ancient Greece, bemoaning their hard lot and deploring the coarseness of an unappreciative time. Their real fault was that they were, or claimed to be, an aristocracy, and the people, who could read for themselves, no longer were imposed on by pretensions to esoteric learning and a Ciceronian style.

Even the medieval vernacular romances no longer suited the taste of the new generation. A certain class continued to read Amadis of Gaul or La Morte d'Arthur furtively, but the arbiters of taste declared that they would no longer do. The Puritan found them immoral; the man of the world thought them ridiculous. Ascham asserts that "the whole pleasure" of La Morte d'Arthur, "standeth in two special points, in open manslaughter and bold bawdry." The century was hardly out when Cervantes published his famous and deadly satire on the knight errant.

[Sidenote: Poetry]

But as the tale of chivalry decayed, the old metal was transmuted into the pure gold of the poetry of Ariosto, Tasso and Spenser. The claim to reality was abandoned and the poet quite frankly conjured up a fantastic, fairy world, full of giants and wizards and enchantments and hippogryphs, and knights of incredible pugnacity who rescue damsels of miraculous beauty. Well might the Italian, before Luther and Loyola came to take the joy out of life, lose himself in the honeyed words and the amorous adventures of the hero who went mad for love. Another generation, and {693} Tasso must wind his voluptuous verses around a religious epic. Edmund Spenser, the Puritan and Englishman, allegorized the whole in such fashion that while the conscience was soothed by knowing that all the knights and ladies represented moral virtues or vices, the senses were titillated by mellifluous cadences and by naked descriptions of the temptations of the Bower of Bliss. And how British that Queen Elizabeth of England should impersonate the principal virtues!

Poetry was in the hearts of the people; song was on their lips. The early spring of Italy came later to the northern latitudes, but when it did come, it brought with it Marot and Ronsard in France, Wyatt and Surrey in England. More significant than the output of the greater poets was the wide distribution of lyric talent. Not a few compilations of verses offer to the public the songs of many writers, some of them unknown by name. England, especially, was "a nest of singing birds," rapturously greeting the dawn, and the rimes were mostly of "love, whose month is always May." Each songster poured forth his heart in fresh, frank praise of his mistress's beauty, or in chiding of her cruelty, or in lamenting her unfaithfulness. There was something very simple and direct about it all; nothing deeply psychological until at the very end of the century Shakespeare's "sugared sonnets" gave his "private friends" something to think about as well as something to enjoy.

[Sidenote: Wit]

If life could not be all love it could be nearly all laughter. Wit and humor were appreciated above all things, and Satire awoke to a sense of her terrible power. Two statues at Rome, called Pasquino and Marforio, were used as billboards to which the people affixed squibbs and lampoons against the government and public men. Erasmus laughed at everything; {694} Luther and Murner belabored each other with ridicule; a man like Peter Aretino owed his evil eminence in the art of blackmailing to his wit.

[Sidenote: Rabelais, c. 1490-1553]

But the "master of scoffing," as Bacon far too contemptuously called him, was Rabelais. His laughter is as multitudinous as the ocean billows, and as wholesome as the sunshine. He laughed not because he scorned life but because he loved it; he did not "warm both hands" before the fire of existence, he rollicked before its blaze. It cannot be said that he took a "slice of life" as his subject, for this would imply a more exquisite excision than he would care to make; rather he reached out, in the fashion of his time, and pulled with both hands from the dish before him, the very largest and fattest chunk of life that he could grasp. "You never saw a man," he said of himself, "who would more love to be king or to be rich than I would, so that I could live richly and not work and not worry, and that I might enrich all my friends and all good, wise people." Like Whitman he was so in love with everything that the mere repetition of common names delighted him. It took pages to tell what Pantagruel ate and still more pages to tell what he drank. This giant dressed with a more than royal lavishness and when he played cards, how many games do you suppose Rabelais enumerated one after the other without pausing to take breath? Two hundred and fourteen! So he treated everything; his appetite was like Gargantua's mouth. This was the very stamp of the age; it was gluttonous of all pleasures, of food and drink and gorgeous clothes and fine dwellings and merry-making without end, and adventure without stint or limit. Almost every sixteenth-century man was a Pantagruel, whose lust for living fully and hotly no satiety could cloy, no fear of consequences {695} dampen. The ascetic gloom and terror of the Middle Ages burned away like an early fog before the summer sun. Men saw the world unfolding before them as if in a second creation, and they hurled themselves on it with but one fear, that they should be too slow or too backward to garner all its wonder and all its pleasure for themselves.

[Sidenote: Tales of vagabonds]

And the people were no longer content to leave the glory of life to their superiors. They saw no reason why all the good things should be preserved like game for the nobles to hunt, or inclosed like commons, for the pasturage of a few aristocratic mutton-heads. So in literature they were quite content to let the fastidious gentry read their fill of poetry about knights wandering in fairy-lands forlorn, while they themselves devoured books about humbler heroes. The Picaresque novel in Spain and its counterparts, Till Eulenspiegel or Reinecke Vos in the north, told the adventures of some rascal or vagabond. Living by his wits he found it a good life to cheat and to gamble, to drink and to make love.

[Sidenote: Plays]

For those who could not concentrate on a book, there was the drama. From the Middle Ages, when the play was a vehicle of religious instruction, it developed in the period of the Renaissance into a completely secular mirror of life. In Italy there was an exquisite literary drama, turning on some plot of love or tale of seduction, and there was alongside of this a popular sort of farce known as the Commedia dell' Arte, in which only the outline of the plot was sketched, and the characters, usually typical persons as the Lover, his Lady, the Bragging Captain, the Miser, would fill in the dialogue and such comic "business" as tickled the fancy of the audience.

Somewhat akin to these pieces in spirit were the {696} Shrovetide Farces written in Germany by the simple Nuremberger who describes himself in the verses, literally translatable:

Hans Sachs is a shoe- Maker and poet, too.

The people, always moral, delighted no less in the rough fun of these artless scenes than in the apothegms and sound advice in which they abounded.

[Sidenote: The spirit of the Sixteenth Century]

The contrast of two themes much in the thought of men, typifies the spirit of the age. The one motiv is loud at the beginning of the Reformation but almost dies away before the end of the century; the other, beginning at the same time, rises slowly into a crescendo culminating far beyond the boundaries of the age. The first theme was the Prodigal Son, treated by no less than twenty-seven German dramatists, not counting several in other languages. To the Protestant, the Younger Son represented faith, the Elder Son works. To all, the exile in the far country, the riotous living with harlots and the feeding on husks with swine, meant the life of this world with its pomps and vanities, its lusts and sinful desires that become as mast to the soul. The return to the father is the return to God's love here below and to everlasting felicity above. To those who can believe it, it is the most beautiful story in the world.

[Sidenote: Faust]

And it is a perfect contrast to that other tale, equally typical of the time, the fable of Faust. Though there was a real man of this name, a charlatan and necromancer who, in his extensive wanderings visited Wittenberg, probably in 1521, and who died about 1536-7, his life was but a peg on which to hang a moral. He became the type of the man who had sold his soul to the devil in return for the power to know everything, to do everything and to enjoy everything in this world.

{697} The first printed Faust-book (1587) passed for three centuries as a Protestant production, but the discovery of an older and quite different form of the legend in 1897 changed the whole literary problem. It has been asserted now that the Faust of this unknown author is a parody of Luther by a Catholic. He is a professor at Wittenberg, he drinks heartily, his marriage with Helena recalls the Catholic caricature of Luther's marriage; his compact with the devil is such as an apostate might have made. But it is truer to say that Faust is not a caricature of Luther, but his devilish counterpart, just as in early Christian literature Simon Magus is the antithesis of Peter. Faust is the man of Satan as Luther was the man of God; their adventures are somewhat similar but with the reverse purpose.

And Faust is the sixteenth century man as truly as the Prodigal or Pantagruel. To live to the full; to know all science and all mysteries, to drain to the dregs the cup crowned with the wine of the pleasure and the pride of life: this was worth more than heaven! The full meaning of the parable of salvation well lost for human experience was not brought out until Goethe took it up; but it is implied both in the German Faust-books and in Marlowe's play.

[Sidenote: Greatness of the Sixteenth Century]

Many twentieth-century men find it difficult to do justice to the age of the Reformation. We are now at the end of the period inaugurated by Columbus and Luther and we have reversed the judgments of their contemporaries. Religion no longer takes the place that it then did, nor does the difference between Catholic and Protestant any longer seem the most important thing in religion. Moreover, capitalism and the state, both of which started on their paths of conquest then, are now attacked.

Again, the application of any statistical method makes the former ages seem to shrink in comparison {698} with the present. In population and wealth, in war and in science we are immeasurably larger than our ancestors. Many a merchant has a bigger income than had Henry VIII, and many a college boy knows more astronomy than did Kepler. But if we judge the greatness of an age, as we should, not by its distance from us, but by its own achievement, by what its poets dreamed and by what its strong men accomplished, the importance of the sixteenth century can be appreciated.

[Sidenote: An age of aspiration]

It was an "experiencing" age. It loved sensation with the greediness of childhood; it intoxicated itself with Rabelais and Titian, with the gold of Peru and with the spices and vestments of the Orient. It was a daring age. Men stood bravely with Luther for spiritual liberty, or they gave their lives with Magellan to compass the earth or with Bruno to span the heavens. It was an age of aspiration. It dreamed with Erasmus of the time when men should be Christ-like, or with More of the place where they should be just; or with Michelangelo it pondered the meaning of sorrow, or with Montaigne it stored up daily wisdom. And of this time, bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh, was born the world's supreme poet with an eye to see the deepest and a tongue to tell the most of the human heart. Truly such a generation was not a poor, nor a backward one. Rather it was great in what it achieved, sublime in what it dreamed; abounding in ripe wisdom and in heroic deeds; full of light and of beauty and of life!



{699}

CHAPTER XIV

THE REFORMATION INTERPRETED

The historians who have treated the Reformation might be classified in a variety of ways: according to their national or confessional bias, or by their scientific methods or by their literary achievement. For our present purpose it will be convenient to classify them, according to their point of view, into four leading schools of thought which, for want of better names I may call the Religious-Political, the Rationalist, the Liberal-Romantic, and the Economic-Evolutionary. Like all categories of things human these are but rough; many, if not most, historians have been influenced by more than one type of thought. When different philosophies of history prevail at the same time, an eclecticism results. The religious and political explanations were at their height in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, though they survived thereafter; the rationalist critique dominates the eighteenth century and lasts in some instances to the nineteenth; the liberal-romantic school came in with the French Revolution and subsided into secondary importance about 1859, when the economists and Darwinians began to assert their claims.

SECTION 1. THE RELIGIOUS AND POLITICAL INTERPRETATIONS. (SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES)

[Sidenote: Early Protestants]

The early Protestant theory of the Reformation was a simple one based on the analogy of Scripture. God, it was thought, had chosen a peculiar people to serve him, for whose instruction and guidance, particularly in view of their habitual backsliding, he raised up a {700} series of witnesses to the truth, prophets, apostles and martyrs. God's care for the Jews under the old dispensation was transferred to the church in the new, and this care was confined to that branch of the true church to which the particular writer and historian happened to belong.

[Sidenote: The name "Reformation"]

The word "Reformation," far older than the movement to which it applies par eminence, indicates exactly what its leaders intended it should be. "Reform" has been one of the perennial watchwords of mankind; in the Middle Ages it was applied to the work of a number of leaders like Rienzi, and was taken as the program of the councils of Constance and Basle. Luther adopted it at least as early as 1518, in a letter to Duke George stating that "above all things a common reformation of the spiritual and temporal estates should be undertaken," and he incorporated it in the title of his greatest German pamphlet. The other name frequently applied by Luther and his friends to their party was "the gospel." In his own eyes the Wittenberg professor was doing nothing more nor less than restoring the long buried evangel of Jesus and Paul. "Luther began," says Richard Burton, "upon a sudden to drive away the foggy mists of superstition and to restore the purity of the primitive church."

It would be easy but superfluous to multiply ad libitum quotations showing that the early Protestants referred everything to the general purposes of Providence and sometimes to the direct action of God, or to the impertinent but more assiduous activity of the devil. It is interesting to note that they were not wholly blind to natural causes. Luther himself saw, as early as 1523, the connection between his movement and the revival of learning, which he compared to a John the Baptist preparing the way for the preaching of the gospel. Luther also saw, what many of his {701} followers did not, that the Reformation was no accident, depending on his own personal intervention, but was inevitable and in progress when he began to preach. "The remedy and suppression of abuses," said he in 1529, "was already in full swing before Luther's doctrine arose . . . and it was much to be feared that there would have been a disorderly, stormy, dangerous revolution, such as Muenzer began, had not a steady doctrine intervened."

English Protestant historians, while fully adopting the theory of an overruling Providence, were disposed to give due weight to secondary, natural causes. Foxe, while maintaining that the overthrow of the papacy was a great miracle and an everlasting mercy, yet recognized that it was rendered possible by the invention of printing and by the "first push and assault" given by the ungodly humanists. Burnet followed Foxe's thesis in a much better book. While printing many documents he also was capable, in the interests of piety, of concealing facts damaging to the Protestants. For his panegyric he was thanked by the Parliament. The work was dedicated to Charles II with the flattering and truthful remark that "the first step that was made in the Reformation was the restoring to your royal ancestors the rights of the crown and an entire dominion over all their subjects."

The task of the contemporary German Protestant historian, Seckendorf, was much harder, for the Thirty Years War had, as he confesses, made many people doubt the benefits of the Reformation, distrust its principles, and reject its doctrines. He discharged the thankless labor of apology in a work of enormous erudition, still valuable to the special student for the documents it quotes.

[Sidenote: Catholics]

The Catholic philosophy of history was to the Protestant as a seal to the wax, or as a negative to a {702} photograph; what was raised in one was depressed in the other, what was light in one was shade in the other. The same theory of the chosen people, of the direct divine governance and of Satanic meddling, was the foundation of both. That Luther was a bad man, an apostate, begotten by an incubus, and familiar with the devil, went to explain his heresy, and he was commonly compared to Mohammed or Arius. Bad, if often trivial motives were found for his actions, as that he broke away from Rome because he failed to get a papal dispensation to marry. The legend that his protest against indulgences was prompted by the jealousy of the Augustinians toward the Dominicans to whom the pope had committed their sale, was started by Emser in 1519, and has been repeated by Peter Martyr d'Anghierra, by Cochlaeus, by Bossuet and by most Catholic and secular historians down to our own day.

Apart from the revolting polemic of Dr. Sanders, who found the sole cause of the Reformation in sheer depravity, the Catholics produced, prior to 1700, only one noteworthy contribution to the subject, that of Bossuet, Bishop of Meaux. [Sidenote: Bossuet] His History of the Variations of the Protestant Churches, written without that odious defamation of character that had hitherto been the staple of confessional polemic, and with much real eloquence, sets out to condemn the Reformers out of their own mouths by their mutual contradictions. Truth is one, Bossuet maintains, and that which varies is not truth, but the Protestants have almost as many varieties as there are pastors. Never before nor since has such an effective attack been made on Protestantism from the Christian standpoint. With persuasive iteration the moral is driven home: there is nothing certain in a religion without a central authority; revolt is sure to lead to indifference and atheism in opinion, and to the overthrow of all established order in civil {703} life. The chief causes of the Reformation are found in the admitted corruption of the church, and in the personal animosities of the Reformers. The immoral consequences of their theories arc alleged, as in Luther's ideas about polygamy and in Zwingli's denial of original sin and his latitudinarian admission of good heathens to heaven.

[Sidenote: Secular historians]

A great deal that was not much biassed by creed was written on the Reformation during this period. It all goes to show how completely men of the most liberal tendencies were under the influence of their environment, for their comments were almost identical with those of the most convinced partisans. For the most part secular historians neglected ecclesiastical history as a separate discipline. Edward Hall, the typical Protestant chronicler, barely mentions religion. Camden apologizes for touching lightly on church history and not confining himself to politics and war, which he considers the proper subject of the annalist. Buchanan ignores the Reformation; De Thou passes over it with the fewest words, fearing to give offence to either papists or Huguenots. Jovius has only a page or two on it in all his works. In one place he finds the chief cause of the Reformation in a malignant conjunction of the stars; in another he speaks of it as a revival of one of the old heresies condemned at Constance. Polydore Vergil pays small attention to a schism, the cause of which he found in the weakness of men's minds and their propensity to novelty.

The one valuable explanation of the rise of Protestantism contributed by the secular historians of this age was the theory that it was largely a political phenomenon. That there was much truth in this is evident; the danger of the theory was in its over-statement, and in its too superficial application. How deeply the Reformation appealed to the political needs {704} of that age has only been shown in the nineteenth century; how subtly, how unconsciously the two revolutions often worked together was beyond the comprehension of even the best minds of that time. The political explanation that they offered was simply that religion was a hypocritical pretext for the attainment of the selfish ends of monarchs or of a faction. Even in this there was some truth, but it was far from being the larger part.

[Sidenote: 1527]

Vettori in his History of Italy mentions Luther merely to show how the emperor used him as a lever against the pope. Guicciardini [Sidenote: Guicciardini] accounts for the Reformation by the indignation of the Germans at paying money for indulgences. From this beginning, honest or at least excusable in itself, he says, Luther, carried away with ambition and popular applause, nourished a party. The pope might easily have allowed the revolt to die had he neglected it, but he took the wrong course and blew the tiny spark into a great flame by opposing it.

A number of French writers took up the parable. Brantome says that he leaves the religious issue to those who know more than he does about it, but he considers a change perilous, "for a new religion among a people demands afterwards a change of government." He thought Luther won over a good many of the clergy by allowing them to marry. Martin Du Bellay found the cause of the English schism in Henry's divorce and the small respect the pope had for his majesty. Davila, de Mezeray and Daniel, writing the history of the French civil wars, treated the Huguenots merely as a political party. So they were, but they were something more. Even Hugo Grotius could not sound the deeper causes of the Dutch revolt and of the religious revolution.

[Sidenote: Sleidan]

The first of all the histories of the German Reformation {705} was also, for at least two centuries, the best. Though surpassed in some particulars by others, Sleidan united more of the qualities of a great historian than anyone else who wrote extensively on church history in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries: fairness, accuracy, learning, skill in presentation. In words that recall Ranke's motto he declared that, though a Protestant, he would be impartial and set forth simply "rem totam, sicut est acta." "In describing religious affairs," he continues, "I was not able to omit politics, for, as I said before, they almost always interact, and in our age least of all can they be separated." Withal, he regards the Reformation as a great victory for God's word, and Luther as a notable champion of the true religion. In plain, straightforward narrative, without much philosophic reflection, he sets forth,—none better,—the diplomatic and theological side of the movement without probing its causes or inquiring into the popular support on which all the rest was based.

[Sidenote: Sarpi]

Greater art and deeper psychological penetration than Sleidan compassed is found in the writings of Paul Sarpi, "the great unmasker of the Tridentine Council," as Milton aptly called him. This friar whose book could only be published on Protestant soil, this historian admired by Macaulay as the best of modern times and denounced by Acton as fit for Newgate prison, has furnished students with one of the most curious of psychological puzzles. Omitting discussion of his learning and accuracy, which have recently been severely attacked and perhaps discredited, let us ask what was his attitude in regard to his subject? It is difficult to place him as either a Protestant, a Catholic apologist or a rationalist. The most probable explanation of his attacks on the creed in which he believed and of his favorable presentation of the acts of the {706} heretics he must have anathematized, is that he was a Catholic reformer, one who ardently desired to purify the church, but who disliked her political entanglements. It is not unnatural to compare him with Adrian VI and Contarini who, in a freer age, had written scathing indictments of their own church; one may also find in Doellinger a parallel to him. Whatever his bias, his limitations are obviously those of his age; his explanations of the Protestant revolt, of which he gave a full history as introductory to his main subject, were exactly those that had been advanced by his predecessors: it was a divine dispensation, it was caused by the abuses of the church and by the jealousy of Augustinian and Dominican friars.

[Sidenote: Harrington]

A brilliant anticipation of the modern economic school of historical thought is found in the Oceana of Harrington, who suggested that the causes of the revolution in England were less religious than social. When Henry VIII put the confiscated lands of abbey and noble into the hands of scions of the people, Harrington thought that he had destroyed the ancient balance of power in the constitution, and, while leveling feudalism and the church, had raised up unto the throne an even more dangerous enemy.

SECTION 2. THE RATIONALISTIC CRITIQUE. (THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY)

While the "philosophers" of the enlightenment were not the first to judge the Reformation from a secular standpoint, they marked a great advance in historical interpretation as compared with the humanists. The latter had been able to make of the whole movement nothing but either a delusion or a fraud inspired by refined and calculated policy. The philosophers saw deeper into the matter than that; though for them, also, religion was false, originating, as Voltaire put it, when {707} the first knave met the first fool. But they were able to see causes of religious change and to point out instructive analogies.

[Sidenote: Montesquieu]

Montesquieu showed that religions served the needs of their adherents and were thus adapted by them to the prevailing civil organization. After comparing Mohammedanism and Christianity he said that the North of Europe adopted Protestantism because it had the spirit of independence whereas the South, naturally servile, clung to the authoritative Catholic creed. The divisions among Protestants, too, corresponded, he said, to their secular polity; thus Lutheranism became despotic and Calvinism republican because of the circumstances in which each arose. The suppression of church festivals in Protestant countries he thought due to the greater need and zest for labor in the North. He accounted for the alleged fact that Protestantism produced more free-thinkers by saying that their unadorned cult naturally aroused a less warm attachment than the sensuous ritual of Romanism.

[Sidenote: Voltaire]

One of the greatest of historians was Voltaire. None other has made history so nearly universal as did he, peering into every side of life and into every corner of the earth. No authority imposed on him, no fact was admitted to be inexplicable by natural laws. It is true that he was not very learned and that he had strong prejudices against what he called "the most infamous superstition that ever brutalized man." But with it all he brought more freedom and life into the story of mankind than had any of his predecessors.

For his history of the Reformation he was dependent on Bossuet, Sarpi, and a few other general works; there is no evidence that he perused any of the sources. But his treatment of the phenomena is wonderful. {708} Beginning with an enthusiastic account of the greatness of the Renaissance, its discoveries, its opulence, its roll of mighty names, he proceeds to compare the Reformation with the two contemporaneous religious revolutions in Mohammedanism, the one in Africa, the other in Persia. He does not probe deeply, but no one else had even thought of looking to comparative religion [Sidenote: Comparative religion] for light. In tracing the course of events he is more conventional, finding rather small causes for large effects. The whole thing started, he assures us, in a quarrel of Augustinians and Dominicans over the spoils of indulgence-sales, "and this little squabble of monks in a corner of Saxony, produced more than a hundred years of discord, fury, and misfortune for thirty nations." "England separated from the pope because King Henry fell in love." The Swiss revolted because of the painful impression produced by the Jetzer scandal. The Reformation, in Voltaire's opinion, is condemned by its bloodshed and by its appeal to the passions of the mob. The dogmas of the Reformers are considered no whit more rational than those of their opponents, save that Zwingli is praised for "appearing more zealous for freedom than for Christianity. Of course he erred," wittily comments our author, "but how humane it is to err thus!" The influence of Montesquieu is found in the following early economic interpretation in the Philosophic Dictionary:

There are some nations whose religion is the result of neither climate nor government. What cause detached North Germany, Denmark, most of Switzerland, Holland, England, Scotland, and Ireland [sic] from the Roman communion? Poverty. Indulgences . . . were sold too dear. The prelates and monks absorbed the whole revenue of a province. People adopted a cheaper religion.

[Sidenote: Scotch historians]

Of the two Scotch historians that were the most faithful students of Voltaire, one, David Hume, imbibed {709} perfectly his skepticism and scorn for Christianity; the other, William Robertson, [Sidenote: Robertson] everything but that. Presbyterian clergyman as was the latter, he found that the "happy reformation of religion" had produced "a revolution in the sentiments of mankind the greatest as well as the most beneficial that has happened since the publication of Christianity." Such an operation, in his opinion, "historians the least prone to superstition and credulity ascribe to divine Providence." But this Providence worked by natural causes, specially prepared, among which he enumerates: the long schism of the fourteenth century, the pontificates of Alexander VI and Julius II, the immorality and wealth of the clergy together with their immunities and oppressive taxes, the invention of printing, the revival of learning, and, last but not least, the fact that, in the writer's judgment, the doctrines of the papists were repugnant to Scripture. With breadth, power of synthesis, and real judiciousness, he traced the course of the Reformation. He blamed Luther for his violence, but praised him—and here speaks the middle-class advocate of law and order—for his firm stand against the peasants in their revolt.

[Sidenote: Hume]

Inferior to Robertson in the use of sources as well as in the scope of his treatment, Hume was his superior in having completely escaped the spell of the supernatural. His analysis of the nature of ecclesiastical establishments, with which he begins his account of the English Reformation, is acute if bitter. He shows why it is that, in his view, priests always find it their interest to practice on the credulity and passions of the populace, and to mix error, superstition and delusion even with the deposit of truth. It was therefore incumbent on the civil power to put the church under governmental regulation. This policy, inaugurated at that time and directed against the great evil done to {710} mankind by the church of Rome, in suppressing liberty of thought and in opposing the will of the state, was one cause, though not the largest cause, of the Reformation. Other influences were the invention of printing and the revival of learning and the violent, popular character of Luther and his friends, who appealed not to reason but to the prejudices of the multitude. They secured the support of the masses by fooling them into the belief that they were thinking for themselves, and the support of the government by denouncing doctrines unfavorable to sovereignty. The doctrine of justification by faith, Hume thought, was in harmony with the general law by which religions tend more and more to exaltation of the Deity and to self-abasement of the worshipper. Tory as he was, he judged the effects of the Reformation as at first favorable to the execution of justice and finally dangerous by exciting a restless spirit of opposition to authority. One evil result was that it exalted "those wretched composers of metaphysical polemics, the theologians," to a point of honor that no poet or philosopher had ever attained.

[Sidenote: Gibbon]

The ablest and fairest estimate of the Reformation found in the eighteenth century is contained in the few pages Edward Gibbon devoted to that subject in his great history of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. "A philosopher," he begins, "who calculates the degree of their merit [i.e. of Zwingli, Luther and Calvin] will prudently ask from what articles of faith, above or against our reason they have enfranchised the Christians," and, in answering this question he will "rather be surprised at the timidity than scandalized by the freedom of the first Reformers." They adopted the inspired Scriptures with all the miracles, the great mysteries of the Trinity and Incarnation, the theology of the four or six first councils, the Athanasian creed with its damnation of all who did {711} not believe in the Catholic faith. Instead of consulting their reason in the article of transubstantiation, they became entangled in scruples, and so Luther maintained a corporeal and Calvin a real presence in the eucharist. They not only adopted but improved upon and popularized the "stupendous doctrines of original sin, redemption, faith, grace and predestination," to such purpose that "many a sober Christian would rather admit that a wafer is God than that God is a cruel and capricious tyrant." "And yet," Gibbon continues, "the services of Luther and his rivals are solid and important, and the philosopher must own his obligations to these fearless enthusiasts. By their hands the lofty fabric of superstition, from the abuse of indulgences to the intercession of the Virgin, has been levelled with the ground. Myriads of both sexes of the monastic profession have been restored to the liberties and labors of social life." Credulity was no longer nourished on daily miracles of images and relics; a simple worship "the most worthy of man, the least unworthy of the Deity" was substituted for an "imitation of paganism." Finally, the chain of authority was broken and each Christian taught to acknowledge no interpreter of Scripture but his own conscience. This led, rather as a consequence than as a design, to toleration, to indifference and to skepticism.

Wieland, on the other hand, frankly gave the opinion, anticipating Nietzsche, that the Reformation had done harm in retarding the progress of philosophy for centuries. The Italians, he said, might have effected a salutary and rational reform had not Luther interfered and made the people a party to a dispute which should have been left to scholars.

[Sidenote: Goethe]

Goethe at one time wrote that Lutherdom had driven quiet culture back, and at another spoke of the {712} Reformation as "a sorry spectacle of boundless confusion, error fighting with error, selfishness with selfishness, the truth only here and there heaving in sight." Again he wrote to a friend: "The character of Luther is the only interesting thing in the Reformation, and the only thing, moreover, that made an impression on the masses. All the rest is a lot of bizarre trash we have not yet, to our cost, cleared away." In the last years of his long life he changed his opinion somewhat for, if we can trust the report of his conversations with Eckermann, he told his young disciple that people hardly realized how much they owed to Luther who had given them the courage to stand firmly on God's earth.

The treatment of the subject by German Protestants underwent a marked change under the influence of Pietism and the Enlightenment. Just as the earlier Orthodox school had over-emphasized Luther's narrowness, and had been concerned chiefly to prove that the Reformation changed nothing save abuses, so now the leader's liberalism was much over-stressed. It was in view of the earlier Protestant bigotry that Lessing [Sidenote: Lessing] apostrophized the Wittenberg professor: "Luther! thou great, misunderstood man! Thou hast freed us from the yoke of tradition, who is to free us from the more unbearable yoke of the letter? Who will finally bring us Christianity such as thou thyself would now teach, such as Christ himself would teach?"

German Robertsons, though hardly equal to the Scotch, were found in Mosheim and Schmidt. Both wrote the history of the Protestant revolution in the endeavor to make it all natural. In Mosheim, indeed, the devil still appears, though in the background; Schmidt is as rational and as fair as any German Protestant could then be.

{713}

SECTION 3. THE LIBERAL-ROMANTIC APPRECIATION. (CIRCA 1794-c. 1860)

At about the end of the eighteenth century historiography underwent a profound change due primarily to three influences: 1. The French Revolution and the struggle for political democracy throughout nearly a century after 1789; 2. The Romantic Movement; 3. The rise of the scientific spirit. The judgment of the Reformation changed accordingly; the rather unfavorable verdict of the eighteenth century was completely reversed. Hardly by its extremest partisans in the Protestant camp has the importance of that movement and the character of its leaders been esteemed so highly as it was by the writers of the liberal-romantic school. Indeed, so little had confession to do with this bias that the finest things about Luther and the most extravagant praise of his work, was uttered not by Protestants, but by the Catholic Doellinger, the Jew Heine, and the free thinkers, Michelet, Carlyle, and Froude.

[Sidenote: The French Revolution]

The French Revolution taught men to see, or misled them into construing, the whole of history as a struggle for liberty against oppression. Naturally, the Reformation was one of the favorite examples of this perpetual warfare; it was the Revolution of the earlier age, and Luther was the great liberator, standing for the Rights of Man against a galling tyranny.

[Sidenote: Condorcet]

The first to draw the parallel between Reformation and Revolution was Condorcet in his noble essay on The Advance of the Human Spirit, written in prison and published posthumously. Luther, said he, punished the crimes of the clergy and freed some peoples from the yoke of the papacy; he would have freed all, save for the false politics of the kings who, feeling instinctively that religious liberty would bring political enfranchisement, banded together against the {714} revolt. He adds that the epoch brought added strength to the government and to political science and that it purified morals by abolishing sacerdotal celibacy; but that it was (like the Revolution, one reads between the lines) soiled by great atrocities.

In the year 1802, the Institute of France announced as the subject for a prize competition, "What has been the influence of the Reformation of Luther on the political situation of the several states of Europe and on the progress of enlightenment?" The prize was won by Charles de Villers [Sidenote: Villers] in an essay maintaining elaborately the thesis that the gradual improvement of the human species has been effected by a series of revolutions, partly silent, partly violent, and that the object of all these risings has been the attainment of either religious or of civil liberty. After arguing his position in respect to the Reformation, the author eulogizes it for having established religious freedom, promoted civil liberty, and for having endowed Europe with a variety of blessings, including almost everything he liked. Thus, in his opinion, the Reformation made Protestant countries more wealthy by keeping the papal tax-gatherers aloof; it started "that grand idea the balance of power," and it prepared the way for a general philosophical enlightenment.

[Sidenote: Guizot]

The thesis of Villers is exactly that maintained, with more learning and caution, by Guizot. According to him:

The Reformation was a vast effort made by the human race to secure its freedom; it was a new-born desire to think and judge freely and independently of all ideas and opinions, which until then Europe had received or been bound to receive from the hands of antiquity. It was a great endeavor to emancipate the human reason and to call things by their right names. It was an insurrection of the human mind against the absolute power of the spiritual estate.

{715} [Sidenote: Romantic Movement]

But there was more than politics to draw the sympathies of the nineteenth century to the sixteenth. A large anthology of poetical, artistic and musical tributes to Luther and the Reformation might be made to show how congenial they were to the spirit of that time. One need only mention Werner's drama on the subject of Luther's life (1805), Mendelssohn's "Reformation Symphony" (1832-3), Meyerbeer's opera "The Huguenots" (1836), and Kaulbach's painting "The Age of the Reformation" (c. 1810). In fact the Reformation was a Romantic movement, with its emotional and mystical piety, its endeavor to transcend the limits of the classic spirit, to search for the infinite, to scorn the trammels of traditional order and method.

[Sidenote: Mme. de Stael]

All this is reflected in Mme. de Stael's enthusiastic appreciation of Protestant Germany, in which she found a people characterized by reflectiveness, idealism, and energy of inner conviction. She contrasted Luther's revolution of ideas with her own countrymen's revolution of acts, practical if not materialistic. The German had brought back religion from an affair of politics to be a matter of life; had transferred it from the realm of calculated interest to that of heart and brain.

[Sidenote: Heine]

Much the same ideas, set forth with the most dazzling brilliancy of style, animate Heine's too much neglected sketch of German religion and philosophy. To a French public, unappreciative of German literature, Heine points out that the place taken in France by belles lettres is taken east of the Rhine by metaphysics. From Luther to Kant there is one continuous development of thought, and no less than two revolutions in spiritual values. Luther was the sword and tongue of his time; the tempest that shattered the old oaks of hoary tyranny; his hymn was the Marseillaise of the spirit; he made a revolution and not with {716} rose-leaves, either, but with a certain, "divine brutality." He gave his people language, Kant gave them thought; Luther deposed the pope; Robespierre decapitated the king; Kant disposed of God: it was all one insurrection of Man against the same tyrant under different names.

Under the triple influence of liberalism, romanticism and the scientific impulse presently to be described, most of the great historians of the middle nineteenth century wrote. If not the greatest, yet the most lovable of them all, was Jules Michelet, [Sidenote: Michelet] a free-thinker of Huguenot ancestry. His History of France is like the biography of some loved and worshipped genius; he agonizes in her trials, he glories in her triumphs. And to all great men, her own and others, he puts but one inexorable question, "What did you do for the people?" and according to their answer they stand or fall before him. It is just here that one notices (what entirely escaped previous generations), that the "people" here means that part of it now called, in current cant, "the bourgeoisie," that educated middle class with some small property and with the vote. For the ignorant laborer and the pauper Michelet had as little concern as he had small patience with king and noble and priest. One thing that he and his contemporaries prized in Luther was just that bourgeois virtue that made him a model husband and father, faithfully performing a daily task for an adequate reward. Luther's joys, he assures us, were "those of the heart, of the man, the innocent happiness of family and home. What family more holy, what home more pure?" But he returns ever and again to the thought that the Huguenots were the republicans of their age and that, "Luther has been the restorer of liberty. If now we exercise in all its fullness this highest prerogative of human intelligence, it is to him we are indebted for it. {717} To whom do I owe the power of publishing what I am now writing, save to this liberator of modern thought?" Michelet employed his almost matchless rhetoric not only to exalt the Reformers to the highest pinnacle of greatness, but to blacken the character of their adversaries, the obscurantists, the Jesuits, Catherine de' Medici.

[Sidenote: Froude]

English liberalism found its perfect expression in the work of Froude. Built up on painstaking research, readable as a novel, cut exactly to the prejudices of the English Protestant middle class, The History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada won a resounding immediate success. Froude loved Protestantism for the enemies it made, and as a mild kind of rationalism. The Reformers, he thought, triumphed because they were armed with the truth; it was a revolt of conscience against lies, a real religion over against "a superstition which was but the counterpart of magic and witchcraft" and which, at that time, "meant the stake, the rack, the gibbet, the Inquisition dungeons and the devil enthroned." It was the different choice made then by England and Spain that accounted for the greatness of the former and the downfall of the latter, for, after the Spaniard, once "the noblest, grandest and most enlightened people in the known world," had chosen for the saints and the Inquisition, "his intellect shrivelled in his brain and the sinews shrank in his self-bandaged limbs."

[Sidenote: Liberals]

Practically the same type of opinion is found in the whole school of middle-century historians. "Our firm belief is," wrote Macaulay, "that the North owes its great civilization and prosperity chiefly to the moral effect of the Protestant Reformation, and that the decay of the Southern countries is to be mainly ascribed to the great Catholic revival." It would be pleasant, {718} were there space, to quote similar enthusiastic appreciations from the French scholars Quinet and Thierry, the Englishman Herbert Spencer and the Americans Motley and Prescott. They all regarded the Reformation as at once an enlightenment and enfranchisement. Even the philosophers rushed into the same camp. Carlyle worshipped Luther as a hero; Emerson said that his "religious movement was the foundation of so much intellectual life in Europe; that is, Luther's conscience animating sympathetically the conscience of millions, the pulse passed into thought, and ultimated itself in Galileos, Keplers, Swedenborgs, Newtons, Shakespeares, Bacons and Miltons." Back of all this appreciation was a strong unconscious sympathy between the age of the Reformation and that of Victoria. The creations of the one, Protestantism, the national state, capitalism, individualism, reached their perfect maturity in the other. The very moderate liberals of the latter found in the former just that "safe and sane" spirit of reform which they could thoroughly approve.

[Sidenote: German patriots]

The enthusiasm generated by political democracy in France, England and America, was supplemented in Germany by patriotism. Herder first emphasized Luther's love of country as his great virtue; Arndt, in the Napoleonic wars, counted it unto him for righteousness that he hated Italian craft and dreaded French deceitfulness. Fichte, at the same time, in his fervent Speeches to the German Nation, called the Reformation "the consummate achievement of the German people," and its "perfect act of world-wide significance." Freytag, at a later period, tried to educate the public to search for a German state at once national and liberal. In his Pictures from the German Past, largely painted from sixteenth-century models, he places all the high-lights on "Deutschtum" and "Buergertum," {719} and all the shade on the foreigners and the Junkers. With Freytag as a German liberal may be classed D. F. Strauss, who defended the Reformers for choosing, rather than superficial culture, "the better part," "the one thing needful," which was truth.

[Sidenote: Scientific spirit]

It is now high time to say something of the third great influence that, early in the nineteenth century, transformed historiography. It was the rise of the scientific spirit, of the fruitful conception of a world lapped in universal law. For two centuries men had gradually become accustomed to the thought of an external nature governed by an unbreakable chain of cause and effect, but it was still believed that man, with his free will, was an exception and that history, therefore, consisting of the sum total of humanity's arbitrary actions, was incalculable and in large part inexplicable. But the more closely men studied the past, and the more widely and deeply did the uniformity of nature soak into their consciousness, the more "natural" did the progress of the human race seem. When it was found that every age had its own temper and point of view, that men turned with one accord in the same direction as if set by a current, long before any great man had come to create the current, the influence of personality seemed to sink into the background, and that of other influences to be preponderant.