The Age of the Reformation Part 45

This is the service by which the ancients have put the moderns in their debt. Another gift of distinct, though lesser value, was that of literary style. So close is the correspondence between expression and thought that it is no small advantage to any man or to any age to sit at the feet of those supreme masters of the art of saying things well, the Greeks. The danger here was from literal imitation. Erasmus, with habitual wit, ridiculed the Ciceronian who spent years in constructing sentences that might have been written {578} by his master, who speaks of Jehovah as Jupiter and of Christ as Cecrops or Iphigenia, and who trans.m.u.tes the world around him into a Roman empire with tribunes and augurs, consuls and allies. It is significant that the English word "pedant" was coined in the sixteenth century.

What the cla.s.sics had to teach directly was not only of less value than their indirect influence, but was often positively harmful. Those who, intoxicated with the pagan spirit, sought to regulate their lives by the moral standards of the poets, fell into the same error, though into the opposite vices, as those who deified the letter of the Bible. Like the Bible the cla.s.sics were, and are, to some extent obstacles to the march of science, and this not only because they take men's interest from the study of nature, but because most ancient philosophers from the time of Socrates spoke contemptuously of natural experiment and discovery as things of little or no value to the soul.

If for the finer spirits of the age a cla.s.sical education furnished a n.o.ble instrument of culture, for all too many it was prized simply as a badge of superiority. Among a people that stands in awe of learning--and this is more true of Europe than of America and was more true of the sixteenth than it is of the twentieth century--a cla.s.sical education offers a man exceptional facilities for delicately impressing inferiors with their crudity.

[Sidenote: Vernaculars]

The period that marked high water in the estimation of the cla.s.sics, also saw the turn of the tide. In all countries the vernacular crowded the cla.s.sics ever backward from the field. The conscious cultivation of the modern tongues was marked by the publication of new dictionaries and by various works such as John Bale's history of English literature, written itself, to be sure, in Latin. The finest work of the kind was {579} Joachim du Bellay's _Defence et Ill.u.s.tration de la langue francaise_ published in 1549 as part of a concerted effort to raise French as a vehicle of poetry and prose to a level with the cla.s.sics.

This was done partly by borrowing from Latin. One of the characteristic words of the sixteenth century, "patrie," was thus formally introduced.

SECTION 2. HISTORY

For the examination of the interests and temper of a given era, hardly any better gauge can be found than the history it produced. In the period under consideration there were two great schools, or currents, of historiography, the humanistic, sprung from the Renaissance, and church history, the child of the Reformation.

[Sidenote: Humanistic school of historiography]

The devotees of the first ill.u.s.trate most aptly what has just been said about the influence of the cla.s.sics. Their supreme interest was style, generally Latin. To clothe a chronicle in the toga of Livy's periods, to deck it out with the rhetoric of Sall.u.s.t and to st.i.tch on a few ant.i.theses and epigrams in the manner of Tacitus, seemed to them the height of art. Their choice of matter was as characteristic as their manner, in that their interest was exclusively political and aristocratic. Save the doings of courts and camps, the political intrigues of governments and the results of battles, together with the virtues and vices of the rulers, they saw little in history. What the people thought, felt and suffered, was beyond their purview. Nor did most of them have much interest in art, science or literature, or even in religion. When George Buchanan, a man in the thick of the Scottish Reformation, who drafted the _Book of Articles_, came to write the history of his own time, he was so obsessed with the desire to imitate the ancient Romans that he hardly mentioned the {580} religious controversy at all. One sarcasm on the priests who thought the _New_ Testament was written by Luther, and demanded their good Old Testament back again, two brief allusions to Knox, and a few other pa.s.sing references are all of the Reformation that comes into a bulky volume dealing with the reigns of James V and Mary Stuart. His interest in political liberty, his conception of the struggle as one between tyranny and freedom, might appear modern were it not so plainly rooted in antique soil.

The prevailing vice of the humanists--to see in the story of a people nothing but a political lesson--is carried to its extreme by Machiavelli. [Sidenote: Machiavelli] Writing with all the charm that conquers time, this theorist altered facts to suit his thesis to the point of composing historical romances. His _Life of Castruccio_ is as fict.i.tious and as didactic as Xenophon's _Cyropaedia_; his _Commentary on Livy_ is as much a treatise on politics as is _The Prince_; the _History of Florence_ is but slightly hampered by the events.

[Sidenote: Guicciardini]

If Guicciardini's interest in politics is not less exclusive than that of his compatriot, he is vastly superior as a historian to the older man in that, whereas Machiavelli deduced history _a priori_ from theory, Guicciardini had a real desire to follow the inductive method of deriving his theory from an accurate mastery of the facts. With superb a.n.a.lytical reasoning he presents his data, marshals them and draws from them the conclusions they will bear. The limitation that vitiates many of his deductions is his taking into account only low and selfish motives. Before idealists he stands helpless; he leaves the reader uncertain whether Savonarola was a prophet or an extremely astute politician.

[Sidenote: Jovius]

The advance that Paul Jovius marks over the Florentines lies in the appeal that he made to the {581} interests of the general public.

History had hitherto been written for the greater glory of a patron or at most of a city; Jovius saw that the most generous patron of genius must henceforth be the average reader. It is true that he despised the public for whom he wrote, stuffing them with silly anecdotes. Both as the first great interviewer and reporter for the history of his own times, and in paying homage to Mrs. Grundy by a.s.suming an air of virtue not natural to him, he antic.i.p.ated the modern journalist.

[Sidenote: Polydore Vergil]

So much more modern in point of view than his contemporaries was Polydore Vergil--whose _English History_ appeared in 1534--that the generalizations about humanist historiography are only partially true of him. Though his description of land and people is perhaps modelled on Herodotus, it shows a genuine interest in the life of the common man, even of the poor. He noted the geography, climate and fauna of the island; his eyes saw London Bridge with its rows of shops on either side, and they admired the parks full of game, the apple orchards, the fat hens and pheasants, the ploughs drawn by mixed teams of horses and oxen; he even observed the silver salt-cellars, spoons and cups used by the poor, and their meals of meat. His description of the people as brave, hospitable and very religious is as true now as it was then.

With an antiquary's interest in old ma.n.u.scripts Vergil combined a philosopher's skepticism of old legends. This Italian, though his patron was Henry VIII, balanced English and French authorities and told the truth even in such delicate matters as the treatment of Joan of Arc. Political history was for him still the most important, although to one branch of it, const.i.tutional history, he was totally blind. So were almost all Englishmen then, even Shakespeare, whose _King John_ contains no allusion to Magna Charta. In his work _On the Inventors {582} of Things_ Vergil showed the depth of his insight into the importance in history of culture and ideas. While his treatment of such subjects as the origin of myths, man, marriage, religion, language, poetry, drama, music, sciences and laws is unequal to his purpose, the intention itself bears witness to a new and fruitful spirit.

[Sidenote: French Memoirs]

Neither France nor England nor Germany produced historians equal to those of Italian or of Scottish birth. France was the home of the memoir, personal, chatty, spicy and unphilosophic. Those of Blaise de Montluc are purely military, those of Brantome are mostly scandalous.

Martin du Bellay tried to impart a higher tone to his reminiscences, while with Hotman a school of pamphleteers arose to yoke history with political theory. John Bodin attempted without much success the difficult task of writing a philosophy of history. His chief contribution was the theory of geography and climate as determinant influences.

[Sidenote: English chronicles]

It is hard to see any value, save occasionally as sources, in the popular English chronicles of Edward Hall, Raphael Hollinshed and John Stow. Full of court gossip and of pageantry, strongly royalist, conservative and patriotic, they reflect the interests of the middle-cla.s.s c.o.c.kney as faithfully as does a certain type of newspaper and magazine today.

[Sidenote: Biographies]

The biography and autobiography were cultivated with considerable success. Jovius and Brantome both wrote series of lives of eminent men and women. Though the essays of Erasmus in this direction are both few and brief, they are notable as among the most exquisite pen-portraits in literature. More ambitious and more notable were the _Lives of the Best Painters, Sculptors and Architects_ by George Vasari, in which the whole interest was personal and practical, with no attempt to write a history or a philosophy of art. Even criticism was confined almost entirely to {583} variations of praise. In the realm of autobiography Benvenuto Cellini attained to the _non plus ultra_ of self-revelation.

If he discloses the springs of a rare artistic genius, with equal navete he lays bare a ruffianly character and a colossal egotism.

[Sidenote: Church history]

One immense field of human thought and action had been all but totally ignored by the humanist historians--that of religion. To cultivate this field a new genre, church history, sprang into being, though the felt want was not then for a rational explanation of important and neglected phenomena, but for material which each side in the religious controversy might forge into weapons to use against the other. The natural result of so practical a purpose was that history was studied through colored spectacles, and was interpreted with strong tendency.

In the most honest hands, such as those of Sleidan, the scale was unconsciously weighted on one side; by more pa.s.sionate or less honorable advocates it was deliberately lightened with suppression of the truth on one side and loaded with suggestion of the false on the other.

If the mutual animosity of Catholic and Protestant narrowed history, their common detestation of all other religions than Christianity, as well as of all heresies and skepticisms, probably impoverished it still more. Orthodox Christianity, with its necessary preparation, ancient Judaism, was set apart as divinely revealed over against all other faiths and beliefs, which at best were "the beastly devices of the heathen" and at worst the direct inspiration of the devils. Few were the men who, like Erasmus, could compare Christ with Socrates, Plato and Seneca; fewer still those who could say with Franck, "Heretic is a t.i.tle of honor, for truth is always called heresy." The names of Marcion and Pelagius, Epicurus and Mahomet, excited a pa.s.sion of hatred hardly comprehensible to us. The {584} refutation of the Koran issued under Luther's auspices would have been ludicrous had it not been pitiful.

In large part this vicious interpretation of history was bequeathed to the Reformers by the Middle Ages. As Augustine set the City of G.o.d over against the city of destruction, so the Protestant historians regarded the human drama as a puppet show in which G.o.d and the devil pulled the strings. Inst.i.tutions of which they disapproved, such as the papacy and monasticism, were thought to be adequately explained by the suggestion of their Satanic origin. A thin, wan line of witnesses pa.s.sed the truth down, like buckets of water at a fire, from its source in the Apostolic age to the time of the writer.

Even with such handicaps to weigh it down, the study of church history did much good. A vast body of new sources were uncovered and ransacked. The appeal to an objective standard slowly but surely forced its lesson on the litigants before the bar of truth. Writing under the eye of vigilant critics one cannot forever suppress or distort inconvenient facts. The critical dagger, at first sharpened only to stab an enemy, became a scalpel to cut away many a foreign growth. With larger knowledge came, though slowly, fairer judgment and deeper human interest. In these respects there was vast difference between the individual writers. To condemn them all to the Malebolge deserved only by the worst is undiscriminating.

[Sidenote: _Magdeburg Centuries_, 1559-74]

Among the most industrious and the most bia.s.sed must certainly be numbered Matthew Flacius Illyricus and his collaborators in producing the _Magdeburg Centuries_, a vast history of the church to the year 1300, which aimed at making Protestant polemic independent of Catholic sources. Save for the acc.u.mulation of much material it deserves no praise. Its critical principles are worse than none, for its only criterion of {585} sources is as they are pro- or anti-papal. The latter are taken and the former left. Miracles are not doubted as such, but are divided into two cla.s.ses, those tending to prove an accepted doctrine which are true, and those which support some papal inst.i.tution which are branded as "first-cla.s.s lies." The correspondence between Christ and King Abgarus is used as not having been proved a forgery, and the absurd legend of the female Pope Joan is never doubted. The psychology of the authors is as bad as their criticism. All opposition to the pope, especially that of the German Emperors, is represented as caused by religion.

[Sidenote: _Annales_ of Baronius, 1583-1607]

However poor was the work of the authors of the Magdeburg Centuries, they were at least honest in arraying their sources. This is more than can be said of Caesar Baronius, whose _Annales Ecclesiastici_ was the official Catholic counterblast to the Protestant work. Whereas his criticism is no whit better than theirs, he adopted the cunning policy, unfortunately widely obtaining since his day, of simply ignoring or suppressing unpleasant facts, rather than of refuting the inferences drawn from them. His talent for switching the attention to a side-issue, and for tangling instead of clearing problems, made the Protestants justly regard him as "a great deceiver" though even the most learned of them, J. J. Scaliger, who attempted to refute him, found the work difficult.

Naturally the battle of the historians waxed hottest over the Reformation itself. A certain cla.s.s of Protestant works, of which Crespin's _Book of Martyrs_, [Sidenote: 1554] Beza's _Ecclesiastical History_ [Sidenote: 1589] and John Foxe's _Acts and Monuments_ (first English edition, 1563), are examples, catered to the pa.s.sions of the mult.i.tude by laying the stress of their presentation on the heroism and sufferings of the witnesses to the faith and the cruelty of the persecutors. For many men the {586} detailed description of isolated facts has a certain "thickness" of reality--if I may borrow William James's phrase--that is found by more complex minds only in the deduction of general causes. Pa.s.sionate, partisan and sometimes ribald, Foxe [Sidenote: Foxe] won the reward that waits on demagogues.

When it came to him as an afterthought to turn his book of martyrs into a general history, he plagiarized the _Magdeburg Centuries_. The reliability of his original narrative has been impugned with some success, though it has not been fully or impartially investigated.

Much of it being drawn from personal recollection or from unpublished records, its solo value consists for us in its accuracy. I have compared a small section of the work with the ma.n.u.script source used by Foxe and have made the rather surprising discovery that though there are wide variations, none of them can be referred to partisan bias or to any other conceivable motive. In this instance, which is too small to generalize, it is possible that Foxe either had supplementary information, or that he wrote from a careless memory. In any case his work must be used with caution.

[Sidenote: Knox]

Much superior to the work of Foxe was John Knox's _History of the Reformation of Religion within the Realm of Scotland_ (written 1559-71). In style it is rapid, with a rare gift for seizing the essential and a no less rare humor and command of sarcasm. Its intention to be "a faithful rehearsal of such personages as G.o.d has made instruments of his glory," though thus equivocally stated, is carried out in an honorable sense. It is true that the writer never harbored a doubt that John Knox himself was the chiefest instrument of G.o.d's glory, nor that "the Roman Kirk is the synagogue of Satan and the head thereof, called the pope, that man of sin of whom the apostle speaketh." If, in such an avowed apology, one does not get impartiality, {587} neither is one misled by expecting it. Knox's honor consists only in this that, as a party pamphleteer, he did not falsify or suppress essential facts as he understood them himself.

[Sidenote: Bullinger]

In glaring contrast to Knox's obtrusive bias, is the fair appearance of impartiality presented in Henry Bullinger's _History of the Reformation_ 1519-32. Here, too, we meet with excellent composition, but with a studied moderation of phrase. It is probable that the author's professions of fairness are sincere, though at times the temptation to omit recording unedifying facts, such as the sacramentarian schism, is too strong for him.

[Sidenote: Sleidan]

Before pa.s.sing judgment on anything it is necessary to know it at its best. Probably John Sleidan's _Religious and political History of the reign of Charles V_ [Sidenote: 1555] was the best work on the German Reformation written before the eighteenth century. Bossuet was more eloquent and acute, Seckendorf more learned, Gilbert Burnet had better perspective, but, none of these writers was better informed than Sleidan, or as objective. For the first and only time he really combined the two genres then obtaining, the humanistic and the ecclesiastical. He is not blind to some of the cultural achievements of the Reformation. One of the things for which he praises Luther most is for ornamenting and enriching the German language. Sleidan's faults are those of his age. He dared not break the old stiff division of the subject by years. He put in a number of insignificant facts, such as the flood of the Tiber and the explosion of ammunition dumps, nor was he above a superst.i.tious belief in the effects of eclipses and in monsters. He cited doc.u.ments broadly and on the whole fairly, but not with painstaking accuracy. He offered nothing on the causes leading up to the Reformation, nor on the course of the development of {588} Protestantism, nor on the characters of its leaders nor on the life and thought of the people. But he wrote fluently, acceptably to his public, and temperately.

On the whole, save for Baronius, the Catholics had less to offer of notable histories than had the Protestants. A _succes de scandale_ was won by Nicholas Sanders' [Sidenote: Sanders 1585] _Origin and Progress of the English Schism_. Among the nasty bits of gossip with which "Dr.

Slanders," as he was called, delighted to regale his audience, some are absurd, such as that Anne Boleyn was Henry VIII's daughter. As the books from which he says he took these anecdotes are not extant, it is impossible to gauge how far he merely copied from others and how far he gave rein to his imagination.

[Sidenote: Loyola]

The one brilliant bit of Catholic church history that was written in the sixteenth century is the autobiography of Ignatius Loyola, dictated by him to Lewis Gonzalez [Sidenote: 1553-6] and taken down partly in Spanish and partly in Italian. The great merit of this narrative is its insight into the author's own character gained by long years of careful self-observation. Its whole emphasis is psychological, on the inner struggle and not on the outward manifestations of saintliness, such as visions. It was taken over in large part verbatim in Ribadeneira's biography of Loyola. Compared to it, all other attempts at ecclesiastical biography in the sixteenth century, notably the lives of Luther by the Catholic Cochlaeus and by the Protestant Mathesius, lag far in the dusty rear.

SECTION 3. POLITICAL THEORY

[Sidenote: Premises]

The great era of the state naturally shone in political thought.

Though there was some scientific investigation of social and economic laws, thought was chiefly conditioned by the new problems to be faced.