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Title: The Thirteenth - Greatest of Centuries
Author: Walsh, James J. (James Joseph), 1865-1942
Language: English
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[Transcriber's notes]
This is derived from these copies on the Internet Archive:
http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924029759630 (1920)
http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924014712875 (1907)
The two editions are combined because of missing pages in
one and missing images in the other.
Page numbers in this book are indicated by numbers enclosed in curly
braces, e.g. {99}. They have been located where page breaks occurred
in the original book.
Obvious spelling errors have been corrected but "inventive" and
inconsistent spelling is left unchanged.
[End Transcriber's notes]
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS SERIES
MAKERS OF MODERN MEDICINE
Lives of the men to whom nineteenth century medical science owes most.
Second Edition. New York, 1910. $3.00 net.
THE POPES AND SCIENCE
The story of Papal patronage of the sciences and especially
medicine. 45th thousand. New York, 1911. $3.00 net.
MAKERS OF ELECTRICITY
Lives of the men to whom important advances in electricity are due. In
collaboration with Brother Potamian, F. S. C, Sc.D. (London),
Professor of Physics at Manhattan College. New York, 1909. $2.50 net.
EDUCATION, HOW OLD THE NEW
Addresses in the history of education on various occasions.
3rd thousand. New York, 1911. $2.50 net.
OLD-TIME MAKERS OF MEDICINE
The story of the students and teachers of the sciences related to
medicine during the Middle Ages. New York, 1911, $2.50 net.
MODERN PROGRESS AND HISTORY.
Academic addresses on how old the new is in Education, Medicine,
Dentistry, Politics, etc. New York, 1912. $2.50 act.
THE CENTURY OF COLUMBUS
The story of the Renaissance $3.50 net.
THE DOLPHIN PRESS SERIES
CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE
First, second and third series, each $1.00 net.
PSYCHOTHERAPY
Lectures on The Influence of the Mind on the Body delivered at Fordham
University School of Medicine. Appletons, New York, 1912. $6.50 net.
{i}
{ii}
[Illustration]
LE BEAU DIEU (AMIENS)
{iii}
THE THIRTEENTH
Greatest of Centuries
BY
JAMES J. WALSH, K.C.St.G., M.D., Ph.D., LL.D,
LITT. D. (Georgetown), Sc.D. (Notre Dame)
MEDICAL DIRECTOR, SCHOOL OF SOCIOLOGY, FORDHAM UNIVERSITY;
PROFESSOR OF PHYSIOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY AT CATHEDRAL COLLEGE,
NEW YORK; LECTURER IN PSYCHOLOGY, MARYWOOD COLLEGE,
SCRANTON AND ST. MARY'S COLLEGE, PLAINFIELD;
TRUSTEE OF THE CATHOLIC SUMMER SCHOOL OF AMERICA;
MEMBER OF THE NEW YORK ACADEMY OF MEDICINE, OF THE GERMAN
AND FRENCH AND ITALIAN SOCIETIES OF THE HISTORY OF
MEDICINE, A.M.A., A.A.A.S., ETC.
_Popular Edition_
_ (Sixtieth Thousand)_
CATHOLIC SUMMER SCHOOL PRESS
New York, 1920
{iv}
_ Copyright 1907_
James J. Walsh
Set up and stereotyped 1907 (first edition 2,000)
Reprinted with Appendix 1909
Georgetown edition enlarged and extra illustrated 1910
Fourth edition reprinted with additions (6th thousand) 1912
Fifth edition, Knights of Columbus, 50,000, 1912-1913.
Made by
THE SUPERIOR PRINTING CO
AKRON, OHIO
{v}
To Right Rev. Monsignor M. J. Lavelle,
Rector of St. Patrick's Cathedral, New York, sometime President of the
Catholic Summer School, to whose fatherly patronage this book is
largely due, and without whose constant encouragement it would not
have been completed, it is respectfully and affectionately dedicated
by the author.
{vi}
PROEM.
(EPIMETHEUS.)
WAKE again, Teutonic Father-ages,
Speak again, beloved primeval creeds;
Flash ancestral spirit from your pages,
Wake the greedy age to noble deeds.
.....
Ye who built the churches where we worship,
Ye who framed the laws by which we move,
Fathers, long belied, and long forsaken,
Oh, forgive the children of your love!
(PEOMETHEUS.)
There will we find laws which shall interpret,
Through the simpler past, existing life;
Delving up from mines and fairy caverns
Charmed blades to cut the age's strife.
_--Rev. Charles Kingsley.--The Saints' Tragedy._
{vii}
PREFACE.
"Why take the style of these heroic times? For nature brings not back
the mastodon--Nor we those times; and why should any man Remodel
models?"
What Tennyson thus said of his own first essay in the Idyls of the
King, in the introduction to the Morte D'Arthur, occurs as probably
the aptest expression of most men's immediate thought with regard to
such a subject as The Thirteenth, Greatest of Centuries. Though
Tennyson was confessedly only remodeling the thoughts of the
Thirteenth Century, we would not be willing to concede--
"That nothing new was said, or else.
Something so said, 'twas nothing,"
for the loss of the Idyls would make a large lacuna in the literature
of the Nineteenth Century, "if it is allowed to compare little things
with great," a similar intent to that of the Laureate has seemed
sufficient justification for the paradox the author has tried to set
forth in this volume. It may prove "nothing worth, mere chaff and
draff much better burnt," but many friends have insisted they found it
interesting. Authors usually blame friends for their inflictions upon
the public, and I fear that I can find no better excuse, though the
book has been patiently labored at, with the idea that it should
represent some of the serious work that is being done by the Catholic
Summer School on Lake Champlain, {viii} now completing nearly a decade
and a half of its existence. This volume is, it is hoped, but the
first of a series that will bring to a wider audience some of the
thoughts that have been gathered for Summer School friends by many
workers, and will put in more permanent form contributions that made
summer leisure respond to the Greek term for school.
The object of the book is to interpret, in terms that will be readily
intelligible to this generation, the life and concerns of the people
of a century who, to the author's mind, have done more for human
progress than those of any like period in human history. There are few
whose eyes are now holden as they used to be, as to the surpassing
place in the history of culture of the last three centuries of the
Middle Ages. Personally the author is convinced, however, that only a
beginning of proper appreciation has come as yet, and he feels that
the solution of many problems that are vexing the modern world,
especially in the social order, are to be found in these much
misunderstood ages, and above all in that culmination of medieval
progress--the period from 1200 to 1300.
The subject was originally taken up as a series of lectures in the
extension course of the Catholic Summer School, as given each year in
Lent and Advent at the Catholic Club, New York City. Portions of the
material were subsequently used in lectures in many cities in this
country from Portland, Me., to Portland, Ore., St. Paul, Minn., to New
Orleans, La. The subject was treated _in extenso_ for the Brooklyn
Institute of Arts and Sciences in 1906, after which publication was
suggested.
The author does not flatter himself that the book adequately
represents the great period which it claims to present. The subject
has been the central idea of studies in leisure moments for a dozen
years, and during many wanderings in Europe but there will doubtless
prove to be errors in detail, for which the author would crave the
indulgence of more serious students {ix} of history. The original form
in which the material was cast has influenced the style to some
extent, and has made the book more wordy than it would otherwise have
been, and has been the cause of certain repetitions that appear more
striking in print than they seemed in manuscript. There were what
seemed good reasons for not delaying publication, however, and leisure
for further work at it, instead of growing, was becoming more scant.
It is intrusted to the tender mercies of critics, then, and the
benevolent reader, if he still may be appealed to, for the sake of the
ideas it contains, in spite of their inadequate expression.
PREFACE.
(GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY EDITION).
This third edition is published under the patronage of Georgetown
University as a slight token of appreciation for the degree of Doctor
of Letters, conferred on the author for this work at the last
Commencement. This issue has been enlarged by the addition of many
illustrations selected to bring out the fact that all the various
parts of Europe shared in the achievements of the time and by an
appendix containing in compendium Twenty-Six Chapters that Might Have
Been. Each of these brief sketches could easily have been extended to
the average length of the original chapters. It was impossible to use
all the material that was gathered. These hints of further sources are
now appended so as to afford suggestions for study to those who may
care to follow up the idea of the Thirteenth as The Greatest of
Centuries, that is, of that period in human existence when man's
thoughts on all the important human interests were profoundly valuable
for future generations and their accomplishments models for all the
after time.
{x}
PREFACE.
(FOURTH EDITION).
Many of the now rather numerous readers and hearers of this book, for
it has been read in the refectories of over 200 religious communities,
have said that the title seemed almost deterring at first because of
the high claim that is set up for a medieval century. To mitigate the
possible initial deterrent effect of the paradox of the Thirteenth as
the Greatest of Centuries, it has seemed worth while in this edition
then to premise a series of quotations from some of the most
distinguished historical writers in English of our own time which
amply justify the claim here set up. Frederic Harrison, Macaulay,
Freeman, and Fiske are sufficiently different in themselves to make
their agreement in supreme admiration for the Thirteenth Century very
striking. In spite of their lack of sympathy with many things in the
period, all of them emphatically declare that it is the source of most
that is great and good since, and that while we have added details, we
have failed to surpass its artistic and intellectual achievement in
all the 700 years that have elapsed.
August 15, 1912.
PREFACE.
(FIFTH EDITION).
After the success of the Knights of Columbus edition of the Popes and
Science of which 40,000 were issued it gives me great pleasure to
accede to the request of the Supreme Officers of the Order to permit
them to issue a correspondingly large edition of the present volume.
The good work which the Knights of Columbus have thus done in
diffusing a knowledge of the true relations of the Church to
science,--generous patronage and encouragement, instead of supposed
opposition,--will, I think, be greatly furthered by the wide
distribution of the information contained in this volume with regard
to the supremely helpful attitude of the Church towards art and
architecture, literature, education and above all the important social
problems, which is so well illustrated during the great period of the
Thirteenth Century. I sincerely hope that brother Knights of Columbus
will find in the book some of that renewal of devotion to Mother
Church that came as the result of my own studies of this glorious
period of her history, when her action was untrammelled by political
considerations and when she was free to express herself in every great
movement for the benefit of humanity.
Feast of the Immaculate Conception, 1912.
{xi}
FREDERIC HARRISON, MACAULAY,
FREEMAN, AND FISKE
ON
THE PLACE OF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY IN HISTORY
Of all the epochs of effort after a new life, that of the age of
Aquinas, Roger Bacon, St. Francis, St. Louis, Giotto, and Dante is the
most purely spiritual, the most really constructive, and indeed the
most truly philosophic. . . . The whole thirteenth century is crowded
with creative forces in philosophy, art, poetry, and statesmanship as
rich as those of the humanist _Renaissance_. And if we are accustomed
to look on them as so much more limited and rude it is because we
forget how very few and poor were their resources and their
instruments. In creative genius Giotto is the peer, if not the
superior of Raphael. Dante had all the qualities of his three chief
successors and very much more besides. It is a tenable view that in
inventive fertility and in imaginative range, those vast composite
creations--the Cathedrals of the Thirteenth Century, in all their
wealth of architectural statuary, painted glass, enamels,
embroideries, and inexhaustible decorative work may be set beside the
entire painting of the sixteenth century. Albert and Aquinas, in
philosophic range, had no peer until we come down to Descartes, nor
was Roger Bacon surpassed in versatile audacity of genius and in true
encyclopaedic grasp by any thinker between him and his namesake the
Chancellor. In statesmanship and all the qualities of the born leader
of men we can only match the great chiefs of the Thirteenth Century by
comparing them with the greatest names three or even four centuries
later.
Now this great century, the last of the true Middle Ages, which as it
drew to its own end gave birth to Modern Society, has a special
character of its own, a character that gives it an abiding and
enchanting interest. We find in it a harmony of power, a universality
of endowment, a glow, an aspiring ambition and confidence such as we
never find in later centuries, at least so generally and so
permanently diffused. . . .
The Thirteenth Century was an era of no special character. It was in
nothing one-sided and in nothing discordant. It had great thinkers,
great rulers, great teachers, great poets, {xii} great artists, great
moralists, and great workmen. It could not be called the material age,
the devotional age, the political age, or the poetic age in any
special degree. It was equally poetic, political, industrial,
artistic, practical, intellectual, and devotional. And these qualities
acted in harmony on a uniform conception of life with a real symmetry
of purpose.
There was one common creed, one ritual, one worship, one sacred
language, one Church, a single code of manners, a uniform scheme of
society, a common system of education, an accepted type of beauty, a
universal art, something like a recognized standard of the Good, the
Beautiful, and the True. One-half of the world was not occupied in
ridiculing or combating what the other half was doing. Nor were men
absorbed in ideals of their own, while treating the ideals of their
neighbors as matters of indifference and waste of power. Men as
utterly different from each other, as were Stephen Langton, St.
Francis, Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon, Dante, Giotto, St. Louis, Edward
I--all profoundly accepted one common order of ideas, equally applying
to things of the intellect, of moral duty, of action, and of the
soul--to public and private life at once--and they could all feel that
they were all together working out the same task. It may be doubted if
that has happened in Europe ever since.--Frederic Harrison, _A Survey
of the Thirteenth Century in the Meaning of History and Other
Historical Pieces_. Macmillan, 1908.
* * *
The sources of the noblest rivers which spread fertility over
continents, and bear richly laden fleets to the sea, are to be sought
in wild and barren mountain tracts, incorrectly laid down in maps, and
rarely explored by travellers. To such a tract the history of our
country during the Thirteenth Century may not unaptly be compared.
Sterile and obscure as is that portion of our annals, it is there that
we must seek for the origin of our freedom, our prosperity, and our
glory. Then it was that the great English people was formed, that the
national character began to exhibit those peculiarities which it has
ever since retained, and that our fathers became emphatically
islanders, islanders not merely in geographical position, but in their
politics, their feelings, and their manners. Then first appeared with
distinctness that constitution which has ever since, through all
changes, preserved its identity; that constitution of which all the
other free constitutions in the world are copies, and which, in spite
of some defects, deserves to be regarded as the best under which any
great {xiii} society has ever yet existed during many ages. Then it
was that the House of Commons, the archetype of all the representative
assemblies which now meet, either in the old or in the new world, held
its first sittings. Then it was that the common law rose to the
dignity of a science, and rapidly became a not unworthy rival of the
imperial jurisprudence. Then it was that the courage of those sailors
who manned the rude barks of the Cinque Ports first made the flag of
England terrible on the seas. Then it was that the most ancient
colleges which still exist at both the great national seats of
learning were founded. Then was formed that language, less musical
indeed than the languages of the south, but in force, in richness, in
aptitude for all the highest purposes of the poet, the philosopher,
and the orator, inferior to the tongue of Greece alone. Then too
appeared the first faint dawn of that noble literature, the most
splendid and the most durable of the many glories of
England.--Macaulay.
* * *
This time of fusion during which all direct traces of foreign conquest
were got rid of, was naturally the time during which the political and
social institutions of the country gradually took on that form which
distinguishes modern England, the England of the last 600 years from
the older England of the first 600 years of English history. ... By
the time of Edward I, though the English tongue had not yet finally
displaced French, it had assumed the main characters which
distinguished its modern from its ancient form. In architecture a
great change had taken place, by which the Romanesque style gave way
to the so-called Gothic. The subordinate arts had taken prodigious
strides. The sculpture of the thirteenth century is parted from that
of the twelfth by a wider gap than any that parts these centuries, in
law or language. _And in the root of the matter in our law and
constitution itself those changes have been made which wrought the
body politic of England into a shape which has left future ages
nothing to do but to improve in detail_. (Italics ours.)
In short the great destructive and creative age of Europe and
civilized Asia passed over England as it passed over other lands. The
age which saw the Eastern Empire fall beneath the arms of the Frank
and the Eastern Caliphate before the arms of the Mogul--the age which
saw the true power and glory of the Western Empire buried in the grave
of the Wonder of the World--the age which ruled that the warriors of
the Cross should work their will in Spain and in Prussia {xiv} and
should not work their Will in the Holy Land itself--the age which made
Venice mistress of the Eastern seas, and bade Florence stand forth as
the new type of democratic freedom--the age which changed the nominal
kingship of the Lord of Paris and Orleans into the mighty realm of
Philip Augustus and Philip the Fair--this age of wonders did its work
of wonder in England also.--Freeman, _The Norman Conquest_, Vol. V,
page 606. Oxford, The Clarendon Press, 1876.
* * *
The moment when this interaction might have seemed on the point of
reaching a complete and harmonious result was the glorious thirteenth
century, the culminating moment of the Holy Roman Empire. Then, as in
the times of Caesar or Trajan, there might have seemed to be a union
among civilized men, in which the separate life of individuals and
localities was not submerged. In that golden age, alike of feudal
system of empire and of Church, there were to be seen the greatest
monarchs, in fullest sympathy with their peoples, that Christendom has
ever known--an Edward I, a St. Louis, a Frederick II. Then when in the
Pontificates of Innocent III and his successors the Roman Church
reached its apogee, the religious yearning of men sought expressions
in the sublimest architecture the world has seen. Then Aquinas summed
up in his profound speculations the substance of Catholic theology,
and while the morning twilight of modern science might be discerned in
the treatises of Roger Bacon, while wandering minstrelsy revealed the
treasures of modern speech, soon to be wrought under the hands of
Dante and Chaucer into forms of exquisite beauty, the sacred fervor of
the apostolic ages found itself renewed in the tender and mystic piety
of St. Francis of Assisi. It was a wonderful time, but after all less
memorable as the culmination of medieval empire and medieval church
than as the dawning of the new era in which we live to-day.
* * *
While wave after wave of Germanic colonization poured over Romanized
Europe, breaking down old boundary lines and working sudden and
astonishing changes on the map, setting up in every quarter baronies,
dukedoms, and kingdoms fermenting with vigorous political life; while
for twenty generations this salutary but wild and dangerous work was
going on, there was never a moment when the imperial sway of {xv} Rome
was quite set aside and forgotten, there was never a time when union
of some sort was not maintained through the dominion which the Church
had established over the European mind. When we duly consider this
great fact in its relations to what went before and what came after,
it is hard to find words fit to express the debt of gratitude which
modern civilization owes to the Roman Catholic Church. When we think
of all the work, big with promise of the future, that went on in those
centuries which modern writers in their ignorance used once to set
apart and stigmatize as the "Dark Ages"; when we consider how the
seeds of what is noblest in modern life were then painfully sown upon
the soil which Imperial Rome had prepared; when we think of the
various work of a Gregory, a Benedict, a Boniface, an Alfred, a
Charlemagne, we feel that there is a sense in which the most brilliant
achievements of pagan antiquity are dwarfed in comparison with these.
Until quite lately, indeed, the student of history has had his
attention too narrowly confined to the ages that have been pre-eminent
for literature and art--the so-called classical ages--and thus his
sense of historical perspective has been impaired.--Fiske, _The
Beginnings of New England, or The Puritan Theocracy in its Relations
to Civil and Religions Liberty_.
{xvi}
{xvii}
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION, THE THIRTEENTH, GREATEST OF CENTURIES. 1
Deeds and men of a marvellous period. Evolution and man. No
intellectual development in historical period. The wonderful medieval
pre-renaissance. Our Gothic ancestors. Education for the classes and
masses. Universities, cathedrals, arts, and crafts. Origins in art.
Supreme literature in every language. Origins in law and liberty.
Beginnings of modern democracy.
CHAPTER II
UNIVERSITIES AND PREPARATORY SCHOOLS. 18
Origins of universities. Triumph of invention. Character unchanged
ever since. University evolution, Salerno, Bologna, Paris, Oxford,
Cambridge, Italian, French and Spanish Universities. Origin of
preparatory schools. Cathedral colleges. Decree of the Council of
Lateran, every cathedral to have a school and metropolitan churches to
have colleges. Attendance at these preparatory schools.
CHAPTER III
WHAT AND HOW THEY STUDIED AT THE UNIVERSITIES. 33
Education of the Middle Ages usually ridiculed. Ignorance of critics.
Scholastics laughed at by those only who know them, but at second
hand. "Logic, ethics and metaphysics owe to scholasticism a precision,
unknown to the ancients themselves" (Condorcet.) Teaching methods.
Scholarly interests quite as in our own day. Magnetism in literature.
A magnetic engine. Aquinas and the indestructibility of matter and the
conservation of energy. Roger Bacon's four grounds of human ignorance.
Prophecy of explosives for motor purposes. Correction of the calendar.
Contributions to optics. Experiment as the basis of scientific
knowledge. Whewell's appreciation. Albertus Magnus and the natural
sciences Humboldt's praise for his physical geography. Contributions
to botany. Declaration with regard to foolish popular notions. The
{xviii} great group of scientific men at the University of Paris.
Robert of Sorbonne's directions how to study. Education of the heart
as well as the head.
CHAPTER IV
THE NUMBER OF STUDENTS AND DISCIPLINE. 58
Largest universities of all time. More students to the population than
at any time since. Discussion as to the numbers in attendance.
Comparative average ages of students. How such numbers were supported.
Working their way through college. Some reasons for false impressions,
as to university attendance. M. Compayré's paragraph on education in
the Middle Ages. Supposed ignorance. The monks at the universities.
How many students clerical. College abuses and discipline. The
"nations," the under-graduate committee on discipline. Teaching
practical democracy.
CHAPTER V
POST-GRADUATE WORK AT THE UNIVERSITIES. 78
Medieval universities and additions to knowledge. Original work done,
their best apology. Extensive writings of professors. Enthusiasm of
students who copied their books. Post-graduate work in theology and in
philosophy. Period of the scholastics. Graduates in law and
collections and digests. Post-graduate work in medicine most
important. Teaching by case histories. The significance of dropsy,
suture of divided nerves, healing by first intention. William of
Salicet and his pupil Lanfranc. The danger of the separation of
surgery from medicine. Red light and smallpox. Mondaville and Arnold
of Villanova. The republication of old texts. The supposed bull
forbidding anatomy. The supposed bull forbidding chemistry. The
encouragement of science in the medieval universities.
CHAPTER VI
THE BOOK OF THE ARTS AND POPULAR EDUCATION. 96
The Gothic Cathedrals, the stone books of medieval arts. St. Hugh of
Lincoln. Wealth of meaning in the Cathedrals. Their power to please.
Gothic architecture everywhere, but no slavish imitation. English,
French, German, and Italian Gothic. Spanish Gothic. Gothic ideas in
modern architecture. Beauty of details. Sculpture. Gothic Statuary,
not stiff, nor ugly. Most affinity with Greek sculpture (Reinach). The
Angel Choir at Lincoln. {xix} The marvellous stained glass of the
period,--Lincoln, York, Chartres, Bourges. Storied windows and their
teachings. Beauty and utility in the arts. Magnificent needlework, the
Cope of Ascoli. The Cathedral as an educator. The Great Stone Book,
which he who ran must read. Symbolism of the Cathedrals. The great
abbeys, the monasteries, municipal and domestic architecture of the
century. Furniture and decorations. Ruskin on Giotto's tower.
CHAPTER VII
ARTS AND CRAFTS--GREAT TECHNICAL SCHOOLS. 124
Solution of problems of social unrest. Blessed is the man who has
found his work. Merrie England. The workman's pleasure in his work.
Influence of the Church in the arts and crafts movement. Rivalry in
building the Cathedrals. Organization of technical instruction.
Correction of optical illusions. The village blacksmith and carpenter.
Comparative perfection of the work done then and now. The trade guilds
and the training of workmen. The system of instruction, apprentice,
journeyman, master. The masterpiece. Social co-operation and
fraternity. Mystery plays and social education.
CHAPTER VIII
GREAT ORIGINS IN PAINTING. 138
Rise of painting. Franciscans and Dominicans, patrons of art. St.
Francis' return to nature, the incentive of art. Cimabue's Madonna.
Gaddi. Guido, Ugolino and Duccio of Siena. Berlinghieri of Lucca,
Giunta of Pisa. Giotto the master. His work at Assisi, Verona, Naples,
Rome. Marvellous universal appreciation of art. Contrast with other
times. False notions with regard to Gothic art. Sadness not a
characteristic. The beauty of the human form divine.
CHAPTER IX
LIBRARIES AND BOOKMEN. 149
Monastic regulations for collecting and lending books. Library rules.
Circulating libraries. The Abbey of St. Victor, the Sorbonne, St.
Germain des Prés, and Notre Dame. Fines for misuse of books. Library
catalogues. Library of La Ste. Chapelle. First medical library at the
Hotel Dieu. How books were collected. Exchange of books. Special
revenue for the libraries in the monasteries. Book collecting and
bequests by ecclesiastics. Cost of books. Franciscan and Dominican
libraries. Richard De Bury's {xx} Philobiblon. How books were valued.
Richard a typical bookman. His place in history. Illuminated books.
The most interesting and original of all time (Humphreys). St. Louis'
beautiful books.
CHAPTER X
THE CID, THE HOLY GRAIL, THE NIBELUNGEN. 166
Literature equal to accomplishment in other lines. Architecture and
literature, and the expression of national feelings. National epics of
three western-most nations informed within the same half century. The
Cid, its unity of authorship and action. Martial interest and spirited
style. Tender domestic scenes. Psychological analysis. Walter Mapes,
and the Arthur Legends. Authorship and place in literature. Launcelot
one of the greatest heroes ever invented. Unity of authorship of
Nibelungen. Place in literature. Modern interest. Influence of these
epics on national poetry.
CHAPTER XI
MEISTERSINGERS, MINNESINGERS, TROUVÈRES, TROUBADOURS. 182
A great century of song. The high character of women, as represented
in these songs. Nature-poetry, and love. Walter Von der Vogelweide,
Hartman Von Aue, Wolfram Von Eschenbach, Conrad Von Kirchberg. The
Troubadours and their love songs. Selections from Arnaud de Marveil,
Arnaud Daniel, Bertrand de Born, William of St. Gregory, and Peyrols.
CHAPTER XII
GREAT LATIN HYMNS. 194
Greatest poetic bequest of the period. Place of rhyme in Latin. Latin
hymns the first native poetry in the language. Influence of their
charm of rhyme and rhythm on the developing languages of Europe.
Supremacy of the Dies Irae, its many admirers. Other surpassing Latin
Hymns. Celtic origin of rhyme. The Stabat Mater, some translations.
Critical faculty in hymn selection. Jerusalem the Golden, its place in
Christian song. Aquinas' hymn, the Pange Lingua, its popularity.
Musical expression of feeling and plain chant. The best examples from
this period. Invention of part music, its adaptation and development
in popular music.
{xxi}
CHAPTER XIII
THE THREE MOST READ BOOKS. 209
A generation and the books it reads. Reynard the Fox, the Golden
Legend, and the Romance of the Rose. "Reynard the most profoundly
humorous book ever written." Powers of the author as observer. Besides
Gulliver's Travels, Don Quixote and Pilgrim's Progress. Its relations
to Uncle Remus and many other animal stories. The place of the Golden
Legend in literature. Longfellow's use of it. The Romance of the Rose
for three centuries the most read book in Europe. The answer to the
charge of dullness. The Rose as a commentary on the morning paper. The
abuse of wealth as the poet saw it in the Thirteenth Century. Praise
of "poverty light heart and gay."
CHAPTER XIV
SOME THIRTEENTH CENTURY PROSE. 221
Prose of the century as great as the poetry. Medieval Latin
unappreciated but eminently expressive. The prose style, simple,
direct and nicely accurate. Saintsbury's opinion as to the influence
on modern literature of the scholastic philosophers' style. The
chroniclers and the modern war correspondent. Villehardouin, Jocelyn
of Brakelond, Joinville, Matthew of Paris. Vincent of Beauvais and the
first encyclopedia. Pagel's opinion of Vincent's style. Durandus'
famous work on symbolism. Examples of his style. The Scriptures as the
basis of style.
CHAPTER XV
ORIGIN OF DRAMA. 238
St. Francis and the first nativity play. Earlier mystery plays.
Chester cycle. Humorous passages introduced. Complete bible story
represented. Actors' wages and costumes. Innocent diversion and
educational influence. Popular interest. Everyman in our own day.
Comparison with the passion play at Oberammergau. The drama as an
important factor in popular education. Active as well as passive
participation in great poetry. Anticipation of a movement only just
beginning again.
CHAPTER XVI
FRANCIS, THE SAINT--THE FATHER OF THE RENAISSANCE. 254
The Renaissance, so-called. Before the Renaissance. Gothic
architecture and art. Francis the father of the real Renaissance.
{xxii} Matthew Arnold and "the poor little man of God." St. Francis as
a literary man. The canticle of the Sun. St. Francis' career. The
simple life. Ruskin on Francis' poverty. St. Francis in the last ten
years. The disciples who gathered around him. A century of
Franciscans. The third order of St. Francis. Kings and queens, nobles
and scholars hail St. Francis as father. What the religious orders
accomplished. St. Clare and the second order.
CHAPTER XVII
AQUINAS, THE SCHOLAR. 270
The nobility and education. Studies at Cologne and Paris. The
distinguished faculty of Paris in his time. _Summa Contra Gentiles_.
Pope Leo XIII. and Aquinas' teaching. Foundations of Christian
apologetics. Characteristic passages from Aquinas. Necessity for
revelation of God's existence. Explanation of Resurrection. Liberty in
Aquinas' writings. Greatness of Aquinas and his contemporaries and the
subsequent decadence of scholasticism. Contemporary appreciation of
St. Thomas. His capacity for work. His sacred poetry.
CHAPTER XVIII
LOUIS, THE MONARCH. 289
The greatest of rulers. His relations as a son, as a husband, as a
father. His passion for justice. Interest in education, in books, in
the encyclopedia. Tribute of Voltaire. Guizot's praise. The righting
of wrongs. Letters to his son. Affection for his children. Regard for
monks. Would have his children enter monasteries. Treatment of the
poor. Attitude towards lepers. One of nature's noblemen. Louis and the
crusades. Bishop Stubbs, on the real meaning of the crusades. Louis'
interest in the crusades not a stigma, but an added reason for praise.
CHAPTER XIX
DANTE, THE POET. 300
Dante not a solitary phenomenon. A Troubadour. His minor poems and
prose works. His wonderful Sonnets. The growth of appreciation for
him. Italian art, great as it kept nearer to Dante. Tributes from
Italy's' greatest literary men. Michael Angelo's sonnets to him. A
world poet. English admiration old and new. Tributes of the two great
English Cardinals. Dean Church's Essay. Ruskin on the Grotesque on
{xxiii} Dante. German critical appreciation. Humboldt's tribute.
America's burden of praise. Dante and the modern thinker. His
wonderful powers of observation. Comparison with Milton. His place as
one of the supreme poets of all times. A type of the century.
CHAPTER XX
THE WOMEN OF THE CENTURY. 319
Women of the century worthy of the great period. St. Clare of Assisi's
place in history. Happiness. The supper at the Portiuncula. Peace, in
the cloister and woman's influence. Equality of sexes in the religious
orders. St. Elizabeth of Hungary, the first settlement worker. "Dear
St. Elizabeth's" influence on women since her time. Blanche of Castile
as Queen and mother. Her influence as a ruler. Difficulties with her
daughter-in-law. Mabel Rich, the London tradesman's wife, and her
sons. Isabella Countess of Arundel and courageous womanly dignity.
Women's work in the century. Service of the sick. Co-education in
Italy. Reason for absence in France and England. Women professors at
Italian universities. Feminine education four times in history.
Reasons for decline. Women in the literature of the century. The high
place accorded them by the poets of every country. Dante's tribute to
their charm without a hint of the physical.
CHAPTER XXI
CITY HOSPITALS--ORGANIZED CHARITY. 337
Charity occupied a co-ordinate place to education. Pope Innocent III.
organized both. His foundations of the City hospitals of the world,
the Santo Spirito at Rome the model. Rise of hospitals in every
country, Virchow's tribute to Innocent III. Care for lepers in special
hospitals and eradication of this disease. The meaning of this for the
modern time and tuberculosis. Special institutions for erysipelas
which prevented the spread of this disease. The organization of
charity. The monasteries and the people. The freeing of prisoners held
in slavery. Two famous orders for this purpose.
CHAPTER XXII
GREAT ORIGINS IN LAW. 350
Legal origins most surprising feature of the century. Significance of
Magna Charta. Excerpts that show its character. The church, widows and
orphans, common pleas, international law, no {xxiv} tax without
consent, rights of freemen. Development of meaning as time and
progress demanded it. Bracton's digest of the common law. Edward I.
the English Justinian. Simon de Montfort. Real estate laws.
CHAPTER XXIII
JUSTICE AND LEGAL DEVELOPMENT. 364
Legal origins in other countries besides England. Montalembert and
France. St. Louis and the enforcement of law. Fehmic courts of Germany
and our vigilance committees. Andrew II., and the "Golden Bull, that
legalized anarchy" in Hungary. Laws of Poland. The Popes and legal
codification; Innocent III, Gregory IX. Commentaries on law at the
universities. Pope Boniface VIII, the canonist. Origin of "no taxation
without representation."
CHAPTER XXIV
DEMOCRACY, CHRISTIAN SOCIALISM AND NATIONALITY. 375
Origins in popular self-government. Representation in the governing
body. German free cities. Swiss declaration of independence. Christian
socialism and "the three eights." Saturday half-holiday, and the
vigils of holy-days. Christian fraternity and the guilds. Organization
of charity. The guild merchant and fraternal solidarity. The guild of
the Holy Cross, Stratford, and its place in town government and
education. Progress of democracy. How the crusades strengthened the
democratic spirit. Their place in the history of human liberty and of
nationality.
CHAPTER XXV
GREAT EXPLORERS AND THE FOUNDATION OF GEOGRAPHY. 392
Geography's wonderful development. Modern problems, Thibet explored,
Lhasa entered. This perhaps the greatest triumph of the century. Marco
Polo's travels. Former mistrust now unstinted admiration. Striking
observations of Polo. John of Carpini's travels in the Near East.
Colonel Yule on the Book of the Tartars. Friar William of Rubruquis'
travels in Tartary. Anticipations of modern opinions as to language.
Some details of description. Friar Odoric and his Irish companion. The
Praemonstratensian Hayton. Franciscan missionary zeal supplied for our
geographical societies. Idle monks.
{xxv}
CHAPTER XXVI
GREAT BEGINNINGS OF MODERN COMMERCE. 415
This is the most interesting phase for our generation. Hanseatic
League and obscurity of its origin. League of Lombard cities and
effect of crusades. Importance of Hansa. Enforcement of its decrees.
Confederation of cities from England to Central Russia. Surprising
greatness of the cities. Beginnings of international law. Commerce and
peace. Origins of coast regulation. Fraternal initiations and their
equivalents in the aftertime. Origins in hazing. Commerce and liberty.
Fostering of democracy. International comity.
APPENDIX I
So-called history. 430
APPENDIX II
TWENTY-SIX CHAPTERS THAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN. 432
I. America in the Thirteenth Century--Papal documents.
II. A representative upper house.
III. The parish, and training in citizenship.
IV. The chance to rise.
V. Insurance--fire, marine, robbery, against injustice.
VI. Old age pensions, disability wages.
VII. Ways and means of charity--organized charity.
VIII. Scientific universities, investigation, writing.
IX. Medical education and high professional status.
X. Magnetism--first perpetual motion inventor--the North Pole.
XI. Biological theories--evolution, recapitulation.
XII. The Pope of the century--Innocent III.
XIII. International arbitration.
XIV. Bible revision.
XV. Fiction of the century.
XVI. Great orators.
XVII. Great beginnings of English literature.
XVIII. Origins of music.
XIX. Refinement and table manners.
XX. Textiles, satins, brocades, laces, needlework.
XXI. Glass-making.
XXII. Inventions.
XXIII. Industry and trade.
XXIV. Fairs and markets.
XXV. Intensive farming.
XXVI. Cartography and the teaching of geography--Hereford Map of the World.
APPENDIX III
CRITICISMS, COMMENTS, DOCUMENTS. 464
Human progress. The century of origins. Education. Technical education
of the masses. How it all stopped. Comfort and poverty. Comfort and
happiness. Comfort and health. Hygiene. Wages and the condition of
working people. Interest and loans. The eighteenth lowest of
centuries.
{xxvi}
{xxvii}
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
1. Le Beau Dieu (Amiens)--Frontispiece (ii)
2. Virgin with the Divine Child (Mosaic, St. Mark's, Venice)--Opposite page 5
3. Pulpit (N. Pisano, Siena)--Opposite page 8
4. Archangel Michael (Giovanni Pisano, Pisa)--Opposite page 13
5. Christ (Andrea Pisano, Florence)--Opposite page 13
6. Sta. Reparata (Andrea Pisano, Florence)--Opposite page 13
7. Paschal Candlestick (Baptistery, Florence)--Opposite page 15
8. Reliquary (Cathedral Orvieto, Ugolino di Vieri)--Opposite page 15
9. The Church in Symbol (Paris)--On page 17
10. Adoration of Magi (Pulpit, Siena, Nic. Pisano)--Opposite page 22
11. Cathedral (Lincoln)--Opposite page 28
12. Cathedral (York)--Opposite page 28
13. Cloister of St. John Lateran (Rome)--Opposite page 32
14. Jacques Coeur's House (Bourges)--On page 32
15. Rathhaus (Tangermünde)--Opposite page 42
16. Cathedral (Hereford)--Opposite page 44
17. Cathedral (York, East)--Opposite page 44
18. Single Flying Buttress--On page 57
19. Christ Driving Out Money Changers (Giotto)--Opposite page 64
20. Bride from Marriage of Cana (Giotto)--Opposite page 64
21. Head (Mosaic, St. Mark's, Venice)--Opposite page 64
22. Head of Blessed Virgin Annunciation--Opposite page 64
23. Petrarch Portraits by Benozzo Gozzoli--Opposite page 71
24. Dante Portraits by Benozzo Gozzoli--Opposite page 71
25. Giotto Portraits by Benozzo Gozzoli--Opposite page 71
26. Screen (Hereford)--Opposite page 87
27. Doorway of Sacristy (Bourges)--Opposite page 87
28. Double Flying Buttress--On page 95
29. Angel Choir (Lincoln)--Opposite page 96
30. Cathedral (Amiens)--Opposite page 105
31. Cathedral (Rheims)--Opposite page 107
32. Cloister of St. Paul's (without the walls, Rome)--Opposite page 112
33. Cathedral (Bourges)--Opposite page 116
34. Cathedral (Chartres)--Opposite page 116
35. Durham Castle and Cathedral--Opposite page 120
36. King John's Castle (Limerick)--Opposite page 120
37. Giotto's Tower (Florence)--Opposite page 122
38. Palazzo Vecchio (Florence) Campanile (Giotto)--Opposite page 122
{xxviii}
39. Fountain (Perugia) [Town Pump]--Opposite page 126
40. Lavatoio (Todi) [Public Wash-House]--Opposite page 126
41. Reliquary (Limoges Museo, Florence)--Opposite page 133
42. Crucifix (Duomo, Siena)--Opposite page 133
43. Madonna, Cimabue (Rucellai Chapel, Santa Maria Novella, Florence)--
Opposite page 136
44. St. Francis' Marriage with Poverty (Giotto, Assisi)--Opposite page 144
45. Espousal of St. Catherine (Gaddi, XIII. Century pupil, Perugia)--
Opposite page 147
46. Group from Visitation (Rheims)--On page 148
47. Monument of Cardinal de Bray (Arnolfo)--Opposite page 156
48. Decoration (XIII. Cent. Psalter MSS.)--On page 165
49. Santa Maria Sopra Minerva (Rome's Gothic Cathedral)--Opposite page 168
50. Crozier (obverse and reverse)--On page 181
51. Tower of Scaligers--On page 193
52. St. Francis Prophesies the Death of Celano
(Giotto, Upper Ch., Assisi)--Opposite page 197
53. Virgin and Child (Pisa, Campo Santo, Giov. Pisano)--Opposite page 200
54. Entombment of Blessed Virgin--On page 208
55. St. Christopher (alto relievo, Venice)--Opposite page 214
56. Madonna and Child (Giov. Pisano, Padua)--Opposite page 214
57. Tower (Lincoln)--On page 220
58. Porta Romana Gate, Florence (N. Pisano)--Opposite page 226
59. Ponte Alle Grazie (Lapo)--Opposite page 226
60. Church and Cloisters, San Antonio (Padua)--Opposite page 232
61. St. Catherine's (Lübeck)--Opposite page 232
62. Stone Carving (Paris)--On page 237
63. The First Nativity Play (Giotto, Upper Church of Assisi)--Opposite page 240
64. Palazzo Buondelmonti (Florence)--Opposite page 248
65. Palazzo Tolomei (Siena)--Opposite page 248
66. Capital (Lincoln)--On page 253
67. The Glorification of St. Francis (Giotto, Lower Church of Assisi)--
Opposite page 256
68. St. Francis (Church of the Frari, Venice, Nic. Pisano)--Opposite page 261
69. St. Clare--Three Franciscans (Giotto)--Opposite page 264
70. St. Louis--Three Franciscans (Giotto)--Opposite page 264
71. St. Elizabeth--Three Franciscans (Giotto)--Opposite page 264
72. Side Capital (Lincoln)--On page 269
73. Notre Dame (Paris)--Opposite page 290
74. La Sainte Chapelle (Paris)--Opposite page 294 [missing]
75. Cathedral (Orvieto)--Opposite page 294 [missing]
{xxix}
76. Apostle (la Sainte Chapelle, Paris)--Opposite page 296
77. Decoration (Queen Mary's Psalter, XIII. Century MS.)--On page 299
78. Portrait of Dante (Giotto, in the Bargello, Florence)--Opposite page 300
79. Torre del Fame (Dante, Pisa)--Opposite page 306
80. Palazzo Pretorio (Todi)--Opposite page 306
81. Angel (Rheims)--On page 318
82. St. Clare Bids the Dead St. Francis Good-bye
(Giotto, Up. Ch. Assisi)--Opposite page 320
83. Church (Doberan, Germany)--Opposite page 322
84. San Damiano (Assisi)--Opposite page 322
85. St. Elizabeth's Cathedral (Marburg)--Opposite page 325
86. Marriage of the Blessed Virgin (Giotto, Padua)--Opposite page 328
87. Mosaic (St. Mark's, Venice, 1220)--Opposite page 333
88. Stone Carving (Amiens)--On page 336
89. Hospital of the Holy Ghost (Lübeck)--Opposite page 341
90. Charity (Giotto)--Opposite page 347
91. Fortitude (Giotto)--Opposite page 347
92. Hope (Giotto)--Opposite page 347
93. Hospital Interior--On page 349
94. Tower (Marburg)--On page 363
95. City Gate (Neubrandenburg)--Opposite page 368
96. Rathhaus (Stralsund)--Opposite page 368
97. Portrait of Pope Boniface VIII. (Giotto, Rome)--Opposite page 372
98. Decoration (XIII. Cent. Psalter)--On page 374
99. Doorway (Lincoln)--Opposite page 381
100. Nave (Durham)--Opposite page 381
101. Broken Arch (St. Mary's, York, Climax of Gothic)--Opposite page 381
102. Animals from Bestiarium (XIII. Cent. MS.)--On page 391
103. Door of Giotto's Tower (Florence)--Opposite page 405
104. Principal Door of Baptistery (Pisa)--Opposite page 405
105. Palazzo dei Consoli (Gubbio)--Opposite page 417
106. Palazzo Zabarella (Padua)--Opposite page 417
107. Rathhaus (Lübeck)--Opposite page 422
108. City Gate (Neubrandenburg)--Opposite page 426
109. Minster (Chorin, Germany)--Opposite page 426
110. Hinge from Schlestadt--On page 429
111. Portion of Letter of Innocent III., Mentioning Greenland--On page 433
112. Double Pivoted Compass Needle--On page 441
113. Peregrinus' Compass--On page 442
114. Portion of MS. of Ormulum--On page 450
115. Key of Map of World (Hereford)--On page 461
116. Map of World (Hereford)--Opposite page 463
{xxx}
{1}
I
INTRODUCTION
THE THIRTEENTH, THE GREATEST OF CENTURIES
It cannot but seem a paradox to say that the Thirteenth was the
greatest of centuries. To most people the idea will appear at once so
preposterous that they may not even care to consider it. A certain
number, of course, will have their curiosity piqued by the thought
that anyone should evolve so curious a notion. Either of these
attitudes of mind will yield at once to a more properly receptive mood
if it is recalled that the Thirteenth is the century of the Gothic
cathedrals, of the foundation of the university, of the signing of
Magna Charta, and of the origin of representative government with
something like constitutional guarantees throughout the west of
Europe. The cathedrals represent a development in the arts that has
probably never been equaled either before or since. The university was
a definite creation of these generations that has lived and maintained
its usefulness practically in the same form in which it was then cast
for the seven centuries ever since. The foundation stones of modern
liberties are to be found in the documents which for the first time
declared the rights of man during this precious period.
A little consideration of the men who, at this period, lived lives of
undying influence on mankind, will still further attract the attention
of those who have not usually grouped these great characters together.
Just before the century opened, three great rulers died at the height
of their influence. They are still and will always be the subject of
men's thoughts and of literature. They were Frederick Barbarossa,
Saladin, and Richard Coeur De Lion. They formed but a suggestive
prelude of what was to come in the following century, when such {2}
great monarchs as St. Louis of France, St. Ferdinand of Spain, Alfonso
the Wise of Castile, Frederick II of Germany, Edward I, the English
Justinian, Rudolph of Hapsburg, whose descendants still rule in
Austria, and Robert Bruce, occupied the thrones of Europe. Was it by
chance or Providence that the same century saw the rise of and the
beginning of the fall of that great Eastern monarchy which had been
created by the genius for conquest of Jenghiz Khan, the Tartar warrior,
who ruled over all the Eastern world from beyond what are now the
western confines of Russia, Poland, and Hungary, into and including
what we now call China.
But the thrones of Europe and of Asia did not monopolize the great men
of the time. The Thirteenth Century claims such wonderful churchmen as
St. Francis and St. Dominic, and while it has only the influence of
St. Hugh of Lincoln, who died just as it began, it can be proud of St.
Edmund of Canterbury, Stephen Langton, and Robert Grosseteste, all men
whose place in history is due to what they did for their people, and
such magnificent women as Queen Blanche of Castile, St. Clare of
Assisi, and St. Elizabeth of Hungary. The century opened with one of
the greatest of the Popes on the throne, Innocent III, and it closed
with the most misunderstood of Popes, who is in spite of this one of
the worthiest successors of Peter, Boniface VIII. During the century
there had been such men as Honorius IV, the Patron of Learning,
Gregory IX, to whom Canon Law owes so much, and John XXI, who had been
famous as a scientist before becoming Pope. There are such scholars as
St. Thomas of Aquin, Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, St. Bonaventure,
Duns Scotus, Raymond Lully, Vincent of Beauvais, and Alexander of
Hales, and such patrons of learning as Robert of Sorbonne, and the
founders of nearly twenty universities. There were such artists as
Gaddi, Cimabue, and above all Giotto, and such literary men as the
authors of the Arthur Legends and the Nibelungen, the Meistersingers,
the Minnesingers, the Troubadours, and Trouvères, and above all Dante,
who is universally considered now to be one of the greatest literary
men of all times, but who was not, as is so often thought and said, a
solitary phenomenon in the period, but only the culmination of a great
literary movement that had to have {3} some such supreme expression of
itself as this in order to properly round out the cycle of its
existence.
If in addition it be said that this century saw the birth of the
democratic spirit in many different ways in the various countries of
Europe, but always in such form that it was never quite to die out
again, the reasons for talking of it as possibly the greatest of
centuries will be readily appreciated even by those whose reading has
not given them any preliminary basis of information with regard to
this period, which has unfortunately been shrouded from the eyes of
most people by the fact, that its place in the midst of the Middle
Ages would seem to preclude all possibility of the idea that it could
represent a great phase of the development of the human intellect and
its esthetic possibilities.
There would seem to be one more or less insuperable objection to the
consideration of the Thirteenth as the greatest of centuries, and that
arises from the fact that the idea of evolution has consciously and
unconsciously tinged the thoughts of our generation to such a degree,
that it seems almost impossible to think of a period so far in the
distant past as having produced results comparable with those that
naturally flow from the heightened development of a long subsequent
epoch. Whatever of truth there may be in the great theory of
evolution, however, it must not be forgotten that no added evidence
for its acceptance can be obtained from the intellectual history of
the human race. We may be "the heirs of all the ages in the foremost
files of time," but one thing is certain, that we can scarcely hope to
equal, and do not at all think of surpassing, some of the great
literary achievements of long past ages.
In the things of the spirit apparently there is very little, if any,
evolution. Homer wrote nearly three thousand years ago as supreme an
expression of human life in absolute literary values as the world has
ever known, or, with all reverence for the future be it said, is ever
likely to know. The great dramatic poem Job emanated from a Hebrew
poet in those earlier times, and yet, if judged from the standpoint of
mere literature, is as surpassing an expression of human intelligence
in the presence of the mystery of evil as has ever come from the mind
of man. We are no nearer the solution of the problem of {4} evil in
life, though thousands of years have passed and man has been much
occupied with the thoughts that disturbed the mind of the ruler of
Moab. The Code of Hammurabi, recently discovered, has shown very
definitely, that men could make laws nearly five thousand years ago as
well calculated to correct human abuses as those our legislators spend
so much time over at present, and the olden time laws were probably
quite as effective as ours can hope to be, for all our well
intentioned purpose and praiseworthy efforts at reform.
It used to be a favorite expression of Virchow, the great German
pathologist, who was, besides, however, the greatest of living
anthropologists, that from the history of the human race the theory of
evolution receives no confirmation of any kind. His favorite subject,
the study of skulls, and their conformation in the five thousand years
through which such remains could be traced, showed him absolutely no
change. For him there had been also no development in the intellectual
order in human life during the long period of human history. Of course
this is comparatively brief if the long aeons of geological times be
considered, yet some development might be expected to manifest itself
in the more than two hundred generations that have come and gone since
the beginning of human memory. Perhaps, then, the prejudice with
regard to evolution and its supposed effectiveness in making the men
of more recent times superior to those of the past, may be considered
to have very little weight as an _a priori_ objection to the
consideration of the Thirteenth Century as representing the highest
stage in human accomplishment. So far as scientific anthropology goes
there is utter indifference as to the period that may be selected as
representing man at his best.
To most people the greater portion of surprise with regard to the
assertion of the Thirteenth as the greatest of centuries will be the
fact that the period thus picked out is almost in the heart of the
Middle Ages. It would be not so amazing if the fifth century before
Christ, which produced such marvelous accomplishments in letters and
art and philosophy among the Greeks, was chosen as the greatest of
human epochs. There might not even be so much of unpreparedness of
mind if that supreme century of Roman History, from fifty years before
Christ to fifty years after, were picked out for such signal notice.
[Illustration]
VIRGIN WITH THE DIVINE CHILD (MOSAIC, ST. MARK'S, VENICE)
{5}
We have grown accustomed, however, to think of the Middle Ages as
hopelessly backward in the opportunities they afforded men for the
expression of their intellectual and artistic faculties, and above all
for any development of that human liberty which means so much for the
happiness of the race and must constitute the basis of any real
advance worth while talking about in human affairs. It is this that
would make the Thirteenth Century seem out of place in any comparative
study for the purpose of determining proportionate epochal greatness.
The spirit breathes where it will, however, and there was a mighty
wind of the spirit of human progress abroad in that Thirteenth
Century, whose effects usually miss proper recognition in history,
because people fail to group together in their minds all the
influences in our modern life that come to us from that precious
period. All this present volume pretends to do is to gather these
scattered details of influence in order to make the age in which they
all coincided so wonderfully, be properly appreciated.
If we accept the usual historical division which places the Middle
Ages during the thousand years between the fall of the Roman Empire,
in the Fifth Century and the fall of the Grecian Empire of
Constantinople, about the middle of the Fifteenth, the Thirteenth
Century must be considered the culmination of that middle age. It is
three centuries before the Renaissance, and to most minds that magical
word represents the beginning of all that is modern, and therefore all
that is best, in the world. Most people forget entirely how much of
progress had been made before the so-called Renaissance, and how many
great writers and artists had been fostering the taste and developing
the intelligence of the people of Italy long before the fall of
Constantinople. The Renaissance, after all, means only the re-birth of
Greek ideas and ideals, of Greek letters and arts, into the modern
world. If this new birth of Greek esthetics had not found the soil
thoroughly prepared by the fruitful labor of three centuries before,
history would not have seen any such outburst of artistic and literary
accomplishments as actually came at the end of the Fifteenth and
during the Sixteenth centuries.
{6}
In taking up the thesis, The Thirteenth the Greatest of Centuries, it
seems absolutely necessary to define just what is meant by the term
great, in its application to a period. An historical epoch, most
people would concede at once, is really great just in proportion to
the happiness which it provides for the largest possible number of
humanity. That period is greatest that has done most to make men
happy. Happiness consists in the opportunity to express whatever is
best in us, and above all to find utterance for whatever is
individual. An essential element in it is the opportunity to develop
and apply the intellectual faculties, whether this be of purely
artistic or of thoroughly practical character. For such happiness the
opportunity to rise above one's original station is one of the
necessary requisites. Out of these opportunities there comes such
contentment as is possible to man in the imperfect existence that is
his under present conditions.
Almost as important a quality in any epoch that is to be considered
supremely great, is the difference between the condition of men at the
beginning of it and at its conclusion. The period that represents most
progress, even though at the end uplift should not have reached a
degree equal to subsequent periods, must be considered as having best
accomplished its duty to the race. For purposes of comparison it is
the amount of ground actually covered in a definite time, rather than
the comparative position at the end of it, that deserves to be taken
into account. This would seem to be a sort of hedging, as if the terms
of the comparison of the Thirteenth with other centuries were to be
made more favorable by the establishment of different standards. There
is, however, no need of any such makeshift in order to establish the
actual supremacy of the Thirteenth Century, since it can well afford
to be estimated on its own merits alone, and without any allowances
because of the stage of cultural development at which it occurred.
John Ruskin once said that a proper estimation of the accomplishments
of a period in human history can only be obtained by careful study of
three books--The Book of the Deeds, The Book of the Arts, and the Book
of the Words, of the given epoch. The Thirteenth Century may be
promptly ready for this judgment of what it accomplished for men, of
{7} what it wrote for subsequent generations, and of the artistic
qualities to be found in its art remains. In the Book of the Deeds of
the century what is especially important is what was accomplished for
men, that is, what the period did for the education of the people, not
alone the classes but the masses, and what a precious heritage of
liberty and of social coordination it left behind. To most people it
will appear at once that if the most important chapter of Thirteenth
Century accomplishment is to be found in the Book of its Deeds and the
deeds are to be judged according to the standard just given of
education and liberty, then there will be no need to seek further,
since these are words for which it is supposed that there is no actual
equivalent in human life and history for at least several centuries
after the close of the Thirteenth.
As a matter of fact, however, it is in this very chapter that the
Thirteenth Century will be found strongest in its claim to true
greatness. The Thirteenth Century saw the foundation of the
universities and their gradual development into the institutions of
learning which we have at the present time. Those scholars of the
Thirteenth Century recognized that, for its own development and for
practical purposes, the human intellect can best be trained along
certain lines. For its preliminary training, it seemed to them to need
what has since come to be called the liberal arts, that is, a
knowledge of certain languages and of logic, as well as a thorough
consideration of the great problems of the relation of man to his
Creator, to his fellow-men, and to the universe around him. Grammar, a
much wider subject than we now include under the term, and philosophy
constituted the undergraduate studies of the universities of the
Thirteenth Century. For the practical purposes of life, a division of
post-graduate study had to be made so as to suit the life design of
each individual, and accordingly the faculties of theology, for the
training of divines; of medicine, for the training of physicians; and
of law, for the training of advocates, came into existence.
We shall consider this subject in more detail in a subsequent chapter,
but it will be clear at once that the university, as organized by
these wise generations of the Thirteenth Century, has come down
unchanged to us in the modern time. We {8} still have practically the
same methods of preliminary training and the same division of
post-graduate studies. We specialize to a greater degree than they
did, but it must not be forgotten that specialism was not unknown by
any means in the Thirteenth Century, though there were fewer
opportunities for its practical application to the things of life. If
this century had done nothing else but create the instrument by which
the human mind has ever since been trained, it must be considered as
deserving a place of the very highest rank in the periods of human
history.
It is, however, much more for what it accomplished for the education
of the masses than for the institutions it succeeded in developing for
the training of the classes, that the Thirteenth Century merits a
place in the roll of fame. This declaration will doubtless seem
utterly paradoxical to the ordinary reader of history. We are very
prone to consider that it is only in our time that anything like
popular education has come into existence. As a matter of fact,
however, the education afforded to the people in the little towns of
the Middle Ages, represents an ideal of educational uplift for the
masses such as has never been even distantly approached in succeeding
centuries. The Thirteenth Century developed the greatest set of
technical schools that the world has ever known. The technical school
is supposed to be a creation of the last half century at the outside.
These medieval towns, however, during the course of the building of
their cathedrals, of their public buildings and various magnificent
edifices of royalty and for the nobility, succeeded in accomplishing
such artistic results that the world has ever since held them in
admiration, and that this admiration has increased rather than
diminished with the development of taste in very recent years.
Nearly every one of the most important towns of England during the
Thirteenth Century was erecting a cathedral. Altogether some twenty
cathedrals remain as the subject of loving veneration and of frequent
visitation for the modern generation. There was intense rivalry
between these various towns. Each tried to surpass the other in the
grandeur of its cathedral and auxiliary buildings. Instead of lending
workmen to one another there was a civic pride in accomplishing for
one's native town whatever was best.
[Illustration]
PULPIT (PISANO, SIENA)
{9}
Each of these towns, then, none of which had more than twenty thousand
inhabitants except London, and even that scarcely more, had to develop
its own artist-artisans for itself. That they succeeded in doing so
demonstrates a great educational influence at work in arts and crafts
in each of these towns. We scarcely succeed in obtaining such trained
workmen in proportionately much fewer numbers even with the aid of our
technical schools, and while these Thirteenth Century people did not
think of such a term, it is evident that they had the reality and that
they were able to develop artistic handicraftsmen--the best the world
has ever known.
With all this of education abroad in the lands, it is not surprising
that great results should have flowed from human efforts and that
these should prove enduring even down to our own time. Accomplishments
of the highest significance were necessarily bound up with
opportunities for self-expression, so tempting and so complete, as
those provided for the generations of the Thirteenth Century. The
books of the Words as well as of the Arts of the Thirteenth Century
will be found eminently interesting, and no period has ever furnished
so many examples of wondrous initiative, followed almost immediately
by just as marvelous progress and eventual approach to as near
perfection as it is perhaps possible to come in things human.
Ordinarily literary origins are not known with sufficient certainty as
to dates for any but the professional scholar to realize the scope of
the century's literature. Only a very little consideration, however,
is needed to demonstrate how thoroughly representative of what is most
enduring in literary expression in modern times, are the works in
every country that had origin in this century.
There was not a single country in civilized Europe which did not
contribute its quota and that of great significance to the literary
movement of the time. In Spain there came the Cid and certain
accompanying products of ballad poetry which form the basis of the
national literature and are still read not only by scholars and
amateurs, but even by the people generally, because of the supreme
human interest in them. In England, the beginning of the Thirteenth
Century saw the putting {10} into shape of the Arthur Legends in the
form in which they were to appeal most nearly to subsequent
generations. Walter Map's work in these was, as we shall see, one of
the great literary accomplishments of all time. Subsequent treatments
of the same subject are only slight modifications of the theme which
he elaborated, and Mallory's and Spenser's and even our own Tennyson's
work derive their interest from the humanly sympathetic story, written
so close to the heart of nature in the Thirteenth Century that it will
always prove attractive.
In Germany, just at the same time, the Nibelungen-Lied was receiving
the form in which it was to live as the great National epic. The
Meistersingers also were accomplishing their supreme work of
Christianizing and modernizing the old German and Christian legends
which were to prove such a precious heritage of interest for
posterity. In the South of Germany the Minnesingers sang their tuneful
strains and showed how possible it was to take the cruder language of
the North, and pour forth as melodious hymns of praise to nature and
to their beloved ones as in the more fluent Southern tongues. Most of
this was done in the old Suabian high German dialect, and the basis of
the modern German language was thus laid. The low German was to prove
the vehicle for the original form of the animal epic or stories with
regard to Reynard, the Fox, which were to prove so popular throughout
all of Europe for all time thereafter.
In North France the Trouvères were accomplishing a similar work to
that of the Minnesingers in South Germany, but doing it with an
original genius, a refinement of style characteristic of their nation,
and a finish of form that was to impress itself upon French literature
for all subsequent time. Here also Jean de Meun and Guillaume de
Lorris wrote the Romance of the Rose, which was to remain the most
popular book in Europe down to the age of printing and for some time
thereafter. At the South of France the work of the Troubadours,
similar to that of the Trouvères and yet with, a spirit and character
all its own, was creating a type of love songs that the world recurs
to with pleasure whenever the lyrical aspect of poetry becomes
fashionable. The influence of the Troubadours was to be felt in Italy,
and before the end of the {11} Thirteenth Century there were many
writers of short poems that deserve a place in what is best in
literature. Men like Sordello, Guido Cavalcanti, Cino da Pistoia, and
Dante da Maiano, deserve mention in any historical review of
literature, quite apart from the influence which they had on their
great successor, the Prince of Italian poets and one of the immortal
trio of the world's supreme creative singers--Dante Alighieri. With
what must have seemed the limit of conceit he placed himself among the
six greatest poets, but posterity breathes his name only with those of
Homer and Shakespeare.
Dante, in spite of his giant personality and sublime poetic genius, is
not an exception nor a solitary phenomenon in the course of the
century, but only a worthy culmination of the literary movement which,
beginning in the distant West in Spain and England, gradually worked
eastward quite contrary to the usual trend of human development and
inspired its greatest work in the musical Tuscan dialect after having
helped in the foundation of all the other modern languages. Dante is
the supreme type of the Thirteenth Century, the child of his age, but
the great master whom medieval influences have made all that he is.
That he belongs to the century there can be no doubt, and of himself
alone he would be quite sufficient to lift any period out of obscurity
and place it among the favorite epochs, in which the human mind found
one of those opportune moments for the expression of what is sublimest
in human thought.
It is, however, the bock of the Arts of the Thirteenth Century that
deserves most to be thumbed by the modern reader intent on learning
something of this marvelous period of human existence. There is not a
single branch of art in which the men of this generation did not
accomplish excelling things that have been favorite subjects for study
and loving imitation ever since. Perhaps the most marvelous quality of
the grand old Gothic cathedrals, erected during the Thirteenth
Century, is not their impressiveness as a whole so much as their
wonderful finish in detail. It matters not what element of
construction or decoration be taken into consideration, always there
is an approach to perfection in accomplishment in some one of the
cathedrals that shows with what thoroughness the men of the {12} time
comprehended what was best in art, and how finally their strivings
after perfection were rewarded as bountifully as perhaps it has ever
been given to men to realize.
Of the major arts--architecture itself, sculpture and painting--only a
word will be said here since they will be treated more fully in
subsequent chapters. No more perfect effort at worthy worship of the
Most High has ever been accomplished than is to be seen in the Gothic
cathedrals in every country in Europe as they exist to the present
day. While the movement began in North France, and gradually spread to
other countries, there was never any question of mere slavish
imitation, but on the contrary in each country Gothic architecture
took on a national character and developed into a charming expression
of the special characteristics of the people for whom and by whom it
was made. English Gothic is, of course, quite different to that of
France; Spanish Gothic has a character all its own; the German Gothic
cathedrals partake of the heavier characteristics of the Northern
people, while Italian Gothic adds certain airy decorative qualities to
the French model that give renewed interest and inevitably indicate
the origin of the structures.
In painting, Cimabue's work, so wonderfully appreciated by the people
of Florence that spontaneously they flocked in procession to do honor
to his great picture, was the beginning of modern art. How much was
accomplished before the end of the century will be best appreciated
when the name of Giotto is mentioned as the culmination of the art
movement of the century. As we shall see, the work done by him,
especially at Assisi, has been a source of inspiration for artists
down even to our own time, and there are certain qualities of his art,
especially his faculty for producing the feeling of solidity in his
paintings, in which very probably he has never been surpassed. Gothic
cathedrals in other countries did not lend themselves so well as
subjects of inspiration for decorative art, but in every country the
sacred books in use in the cathedral were adorned, at the command of
the artistic impulse of the period, in a way that has made the
illuminated missals and office books of the Thirteenth Century perhaps
the most precious that there are in the history of book-making.
{opp13}
[Illustration]
ARCHANGEL MICHAEL (GIOVANNI PISANO, PISA)
[Illustration]
CHRIST (ANDREA PISANO, FLORENCE)
[Illustration]
STA. REPARATA (ANDREA PISANO, FLORENCE)
{13}
It might be thought that in sculpture, at least, these
Thirteenth-Century generations would prove to be below the level of
that perfection and artistic expression which came so assuredly in
other lines. It is true that most of the sculptures of the period have
defects that make them unworthy of imitation, though it is in the
matter of technique that they fail rather than in honest effort to
express feelings appropriately within the domain of chiseled work. On
the other hand there are some supreme examples of what is best in
sculpture to be found among the adornments of the cathedrals of the
period. No more simply dignified rendition of the God Man has ever
been made in stone than the statue of Christ, which with such charming
appropriateness the people of Amiens have called _le Beau Dieu_, their
beautiful God, and that visitors to their great cathedral can never
admire sufficiently, admirably set off, as it is, in its beautiful
situation above the main door of the great cathedral. Other examples
are not lacking, as for instance some of the Thirteenth-Century
effigies of the French kings and queens at St. Denis, and some of the
wonderful sculptures at Rheims. In its place as a subsidiary art to
architecture for decorative purposes, sculpture was even more
eminently successful. The best example of this is the famous Angel
Choir of Lincoln, one of the most beautiful things that ever came from
the hand of man and whose designation indicates the belief of the
centuries that only the angels could have made it.
In the handicrafts most nearly allied to the arts, the Thirteenth
Century reigns supreme with a splendor unapproached by what has been
accomplished in any other century. The iron work of their gates and
railings, even of their hinges and latches and locks, has been admired
and imitated by many generations since. When a piece of it is no
longer of use, or loosens from the crumbling woodwork to which it was
attached, it is straightway transported to some museum, there to be
displayed not alone for its antiquarian interest, but also as a model
and a suggestion to the modern designer. This same thing is true of
the precious metal work of the times also, at least as regards the
utensils and ornaments employed in the sacred services. The chalices
and other sacred {14} vessels were made on severely simple lines and
according to models which have since become the types of such sacred
utensils for all times.
The vestments used in the sacred ceremonials partook of this same
character of eminently appropriate handiwork united to the chastest of
designs, executed with supreme taste. The famous cope of Ascoli which
the recent Pierpont Morgan incident brought into prominence a year or
so ago, is a sample of the needlework of the times that illustrates
its perfection. It is said by those who are authorities in the matter
that Thirteenth-Century needlework represents what is best in this
line. It is not the most elaborate, nor the most showy, but it is in
accordance with the best taste, supremely suitable to the objects of
which it formed a part. It is, after all, only an almost inevitable
appendix to the beautiful work done in the illumination of the sacred
books, that the sacred vestments should have been quite as supremely
artistic and just as much triumphs of art.
As a matter of fact, every minutest detail of cathedral construction
and ornamentation shared in this artistic triumph. Even the
inscriptions, done in brass upon the gravestones that formed part of
the cathedral pavements, are models of their kind, and rubbings from
them are frequently taken because of their marvelous effectiveness as
designs in Gothic tracery.
Their bells were made with such care and such perfection that, down to
the present time, nothing better has been accomplished in this
handicraft, and their marvelous retention of tone shows how thorough
was the work of these early bell-makers.
The triumph of artistic decoration in the cathedrals, however, and the
most marvelous page in the book of the Arts of the century, remains to
be spoken of in their magnificent stained-glass windows. Where they
learned their secret of glass-making we know not. Artists of the
modern time, who have spent years in trying to perfect their own work
in this line, would give anything to have some of the secrets of the
glass-makers of the Thirteenth Century. Such windows as the Five
Sisters at York, or the wonderful Jesse window of Chartres with some
of its companions, are the despair of the modern {15} artists in
stained glass. The fact that their glass-making was not done at one,
or even a few, common centers, but was apparently executed in each of
these small medieval towns that were the site of a cathedral, only
adds to the marvel of how the workmen of the time succeeded so well in
accomplishing their purpose of solving the difficult problems of
stained glasswork.
{opp15}
[Illustration ]
PASCHAL CANDLESTICK (BAPTISTERY, FLORENCE)
[Illustration:]
RELIQUARY (CATHEDRAL ORVIETO, UGOLINO DI VIERI)
If, to crown all that has been said about the Thirteenth Century, we
now add a brief account of what was accomplished for men in the matter
of liberty and the establishment of legal rights, we shall have a
reasonably adequate introduction to this great subject. Liberty is
thought to be a word whose true significance is of much more recent
origin than the end of the Middle Ages. The rights of men are usually
supposed to have received serious acknowledgment only in comparatively
recent centuries. The recalling of a few facts, however, will dispel
this illusion and show how these men of the later middle age laid the
foundation of most of the rights and privileges that we are so proud
to consider our birthright in this modern time. The first great fact
in the history of modern liberty is the signing of Magna Charta which
took place only a little after the middle of the first quarter of the
Thirteenth Century. The movement that led up to it had arisen amongst
the guildsmen as well as the churchmen and the nobles of the preceding
century. When the document was signed, however, these men did not
consider that their work was finished. They kept themselves ready to
take further advantage of the necessities of their rulers and it was
not long before they had secured political as well as legal rights.
Shortly after the middle of the Thirteenth Century the first English
parliament met, and in the latter part of that half century it became
a formal institution with regularly appointed times of meeting and
definite duties and privileges. Then began the era of law in its
modern sense for the English people. The English common law took form
and its great principles were enunciated practically in the terms in
which they are stated down to the present day. Bracton made his famous
digest of the English common law for the use of judges and lawyers and
it became a standard work of reference. Such it {16} has remained down
to our own time. At the end of the century, during the reign of Edward
I, the English Justinian, the laws of the land were formulated,
lacunae in legislation filled up, rights and privileges fully
determined, real-estate laws put on a modern basis, and the most
important portions of English law became realities that were to be
modified but not essentially changed in all the after time.
This history of liberty and of law-making, so familiar with regard to
England, must be repeated almost literally with regard to the
continental nations. In France, the foundation of the laws of the
kingdom were laid during the reign of Louis IX, and French authorities
in the history of law, point with pride, to how deeply and broadly the
foundations of French jurisprudence were laid. Under Louis's cousin,
Ferdinand III of Castile, who, like the French monarch, has received
the title of Saint, because of the uprightness of his character and
all that he did for his people, forgetful of himself, the foundations
of Spanish law were laid, and it is to that time that Spanish jurists
trace the origin of nearly all the rights and privileges of their
people. In Germany there is a corresponding story. In Saxony there was
the issue of a famous book of laws, which represented all the grants
of the sovereigns, and all the claims of subjects that had been
admitted by monarchs up to that time. In a word, everywhere there was
a codification of laws and a laying of foundations in jurisprudence,
upon which the modern superstructure of law was to rise.
This is probably the most surprising part of the Thirteenth Century.
When it began men below the rank of nobles were practically slaves.
Whatever rights they had were uncertain, liable to frequent violation
because of their indefinite character, and any generation might, under
the tyranny of some consciousless monarch, have lost even the few
privileges they had enjoyed before. At the close of the Thirteenth
Century this was no longer possible. The laws had been written down
and monarchs were bound by them as well as their subjects. Individual
caprice might no longer deprive them arbitrarily of their rights and
hard won privileges, though tyranny might still assert itself and a
submissive generation might, for a time, {17} allow themselves to be
governed by measures beyond the domain of legal justification. Any
subsequent generation might, however, begin anew its assertion of its
rights from the old-time laws, rather than from the position to which
their forbears had been reduced by a tyrant's whim.
Is it any wonder, then, that we should call the generations that gave
us the cathedrals, the universities, the great technical schools that
were organized by the trades guilds, the great national literatures
that lie at the basis of all our modern literature, the beginnings of
sculpture and of art carried to such heights that artistic principles
were revealed for all time, and, finally, the great men and women of
this century--for more than any other it glories in names that were
born not to die--is it at all surprising that we should claim for the
period which, in addition to all this, saw the foundation of modern
law and liberty, the right to be hailed--the greatest of human
history?
[Illustration]
THE CHURCH [SYMBOLIZED] (PARIS)
{18}
II
UNIVERSITIES AND PREPARATORY SCHOOLS.
To see, at once, how well the Thirteenth deserves the name of the
greatest of centuries, it is necessary, only, to open the book of her
deeds and read therein what was accomplished during this period for
the education of the men of the time. It is, after all, what a
generation accomplishes for intellectual development and social uplift
that must be counted as its greatest triumph. If life is larger in its
opportunities, if men appreciate its significance better, if the
development of the human mind has been rendered easier, if that
precious thing, whose name, education, has been so much abused, is
made readier of attainment, then the generation stamps itself as
having written down in its book of deeds, things worthy for all
subsequent generations to read. Though anything like proper
appreciation of it has come only in very recent times, there is
absolutely no period of equal length in the history of mankind in
which so much was not only attempted, but successfully accomplished
for education, in every sense of the word, as during the Thirteenth
Century. This included, not only the education of the classes but also
the education of the masses.
For the moment, we shall concern ourselves only with the education
offered to, and taken advantage of by so many, in the universities of
the time. It was just at the beginning of the Thirteenth Century that
the great universities came into being as schools, in which all the
ordinary forms of learning were taught. During the Twelfth Century,
Bologna had had a famous school of law which attracted students from
all over Europe. Under Irnerius, canon and civil law secured a
popularity as subjects of study such as they never had before. The
study of the old Roman Law brought back with it an interest in the
Latin classics, and the beginning of the true new birth--the real
renaissance--of modern education must be traced from here. At Paris
there was a theological school attached to {19} the cathedral which
gradually became noted for its devotion to philosophy as the basis of
theology, and, about the middle of the Twelfth Century, attracted
students from every part of the civilized world. As was the case at
Bologna, interest after a time was not limited to philosophy and
theology; other branches of study were admitted to the curriculum and
a university in the modern sense came into existence.
During the first quarter of the Thirteenth Century both of these
schools developed faculties for the teaching of all the known branches
of knowledge. At Bologna faculties of arts, of philosophy and
theology, and finally of medicine, were gradually added, and students
flocked in ever increasing numbers to take advantage of these
additional opportunities. At Paris, the school of medicine was
established early in the Thirteenth Century, and there were graduates
in medicine before the year 1220. Law came later, but was limited to
Canon law to a great extent, Orleans having a monopoly of civil law
for more than a century. These two universities, Bologna and Paris,
were, in every sense of the word, early in the century, real
universities, differing in no essential from our modern institutions
that bear the same name.
If the Thirteenth Century had done nothing else but put into shape
this great instrument for the training of the human mind, which has
maintained its effectiveness during seven centuries, it must be
accorded a place among the epoch-making periods of history. With all
our advances in modern education we have not found it necessary, or
even advisable, to change, in any essential way, this mold in which
the human intellect has been cast for all these years. If a man wants
knowledge for its own sake, or for some practical purpose in life,
then here are the faculties which will enable him to make a good
beginning on the road he wishes to travel. If he wants knowledge of
the liberal arts, or the consideration of man's duties to himself, to
his fellow-man and to his Creator, he will find in the faculties of
arts and philosophy and theology the great sources of knowledge in
these subjects. If, on the other hand, he wishes to apply his mind
either to the disputes of men about property, or to their injustices
toward one another and the correction of abuses, then the faculty of
law will {20} supply his wants, and finally the medical school enables
him, if he wishes, to learn all that can be known at a given time with
regard to man's ills and their healing. We have admitted the
practical-work subjects into university life, though not without
protest, but architecture, engineering, bridge-building and the like,
in which the men of the Thirteenth Century accomplished such wonders,
were relegated to the guilds whose technical schools, though they did
not call them by that name, were quite as effective practical
educators as even the most vaunted of our modern university mechanical
departments.
It is rather interesting to trace the course of the development of
schools in our modern sense of the term, because their evolution
recapitulates, to some degree at least, the history of the
individual's interest in life. The first school which acquired a
European reputation was that of Salernum, a little town not far from
Naples, which possessed a famous medical school as early as the ninth
century, perhaps earlier. This never became a university, though its
reputation as a great medical school was maintained for several
centuries. This first educational opportunity to attract a large body
of students from all over the world concerned mainly the needs of the
body. The next set of interests which man, in the course of evolution
develops, has to do with the acquisition and retention of property and
the maintenance of his rights as an individual. It is not surprising,
then, to find that the next school of world-wide reputation was that
of law at Bologna which became the nucleus of a great university. It
is only after man has looked out for his bodily needs and his property
rights, that he comes to think of his duties toward himself, his
fellow-men, and his Creator, and so the third of these great medieval
schools, in time, was that of philosophy and theology, at Paris.
It is sometimes thought that the word university applied to these
institutions after the aggregation of other faculties, was due to the
fact that there was a universality of studies, that all branches of
knowledge might be followed in them. The word university, however, was
not originally applied to the school itself, which, if it had all the
faculties of the modern university, was, in the Thirteenth Century,
called a _studium generale_. The Latin word universitas had quite a
different {21} usage at that time. Whenever letters were formally
addressed to the combined faculties of a _studium generale_ by
reigning sovereigns, or by the Pope, or by other high ecclesiastical
authorities, they always began with the designation, Universitas
Vestra, implying that the greeting was to all of the faculty,
universally and without exception. Gradually, because of this word
constantly occurring at the beginning of letters to the faculty, the
term universitas came to be applied to the institution. [Footnote 1]
[Footnote 1: Certain other terms that occur in these letters of
greeting to university officials have a more than passing interest.
The rector of the university, for instance, was always formally
addressed as Amplitudo Vestra, that is, Your Ampleness. Considering
the fact that not a few of the rectors of the old time universities,
all of whom were necessarily ecclesiastics, must have had the
ampleness of girth so characteristic of their order under certain
circumstances, there is an appropriateness about this formal
designation which perhaps appeals more to the risibilities of the
modern mind than to those of medieval time.]
While the universities, as is typically exemplified by the histories
of Bologna and Paris, and even to a noteworthy degree of Oxford, grew
up around the cathedrals, they cannot be considered in any sense the
deliberate creation, much less the formal invention, of any particular
set of men. The idea of a university was not born into the world in
full panoply as Minerva from the brain of Jove. No one set about
consciously organizing for the establishment of complete institutions
of learning. Like everything destined to mean much in the world the
universities were a natural growth from the favoring soil in which
living seeds were planted. They sprang from the wonderful inquiring
spirit of the time and the marvelous desire for knowledge and for the
higher intellectual life that came over the people of Europe during
the Thirteenth Century. The school at Paris became famous, and
attracted pupils during the Twelfth Century, because of the new-born
interest in scholastic philosophy. After the pupils had gathered in
large numbers their enthusiasm led to the establishment of further
courses of study. The same thing was true at Bologna, where the study
of Law first attracted a crowd of earnest students, and then the
demand for broader education led to the establishment of other
faculties.
{22}
Above all, there was no conscious attempt on the part of any supposed
better class to stoop down and uplift those presumably below it. As we
shall see, the students of the university came mainly from the middle
class of the population. They became ardently devoted to their
teachers. As in all really educational work, it was the man and not
the institution that counted for much. In case of disagreement of one
of these with the university authorities, not infrequently there was a
sacrifice of personal advantage for the moment on the part of the
students in order to follow a favorite teacher. Paris had examples of
this several times before the Thirteenth Century, and notably in the
case of Abelard had seen thousands of students follow him into the
distant desert where he had retired. Later on, when abuses on the part
of the authorities of Paris limited the University's privileges, led
to the withdrawal of students and the foundation of Oxford, there was
a community of interest on the part of certain members of the faculty
and thousands of students. This movement was, however, distinctly of a
popular character, in the sense that it was not guided by political or
other leaders. Nearly all of the features of university life during
the Thirteenth Century, emphasize the democracy of feeling of the
students, and make it clear that the blowing of the wind of the spirit
of human liberty and intellectual enthusiasm influencing the minds of
the generation, rather than any formal attempt on the part of any
class of men deliberately to provide educational opportunities, is the
underlying feature of university foundation and development.
While the great universities of Paris, Bologna, and Oxford were, by
far, the most important, they must not be considered as the only
educational institutions deserving the name of universities, even in
our modern sense, that took definite form during the Thirteenth
Century. In Italy, mainly under the fostering care of ecclesiastics,
encouraged by such Popes as Innocent III, Gregory IX, and Honorius IV,
nearly a dozen other towns and cities saw the rise of Studia Generalia
eventually destined, and that within a few decades after their
foundation, to have the complete set of faculties, and such a number
of teachers and of students as merited for them the name of
University.
{opp23}
[Illustration]
ADORATION OF MAGI (PULPIT, SIENA, NIC. PISANO).
{23}
Very early in the century Vicenza, Reggio, and Arezzo became
university towns. Before the first quarter of the century was finished
there were universities at Padua, at Naples, and at Vercelli. In spite
of the troublous times and the great reduction in the population of
Rome there was a university founded in connection with the Roman
Curia, that is the Papal Court, before the middle of the century, and
Siena and Piacenza had founded rival university institutions. Perugia
had a famous school which became a complete university early in the
Fourteenth Century.
Nor were other countries much behind Italy in this enthusiastic
movement. Montpelier had, for over a century before the beginning of
the thirteenth, rejoiced in a medical school which was the most
important rival of that at Salernum. At the beginning this reflected
largely the Moorish element in educational affairs in Europe at this
time. During the course of the Thirteenth Century Montpelier developed
into a full-fledged university though the medical school still
continued to be the most important faculty. Medical students from all
over the world flocked to the salubrious town to which patients from
all over were attracted, and its teachers and writers of medicine have
been famous in medical history ever since. How thorough was the
organization of clinical medical work at Montpelier may perhaps best
be appreciated from the fact, noted in the chapter on City
Hospitals--Organized Charity, that when Pope Innocent III. wished to
establish a model hospital at Rome with the idea that it would form an
exemplar for other European cities, he sent down to Montpelier and
summoned Guy, the head of the Hospital of the Holy Ghost in that city,
to the Papal Capital to establish the Roman Hospital of the Holy Ghost
and, in connection with it, a large number of hospitals all over
Europe.
A corresponding state of affairs to that of Montpelier is to be noted
at Orleans, only here the central school, around which the university
gradually grouped itself, was the Faculty of Civil Law. Canon law was
taught at Paris in connection with the theological course, but there
had always been objection to the admission of civil law as a faculty
on a basis of equality with the other faculties. There was indeed {24}
at this time some rivalry between the civil and the canon law and so
the study of civil law was relegated to other universities. Even early
in the Twelfth Century Orleans was famous for its school of civil law
in which the exposition of the principles of the old Roman law
constituted the basis of the university course. During the Thirteenth
Century the remaining departments of the university gradually
developed, so that by the close of the century, there seem to be
conservative claims for over one thousand students. Besides these
three, French universities were also established at Angers, at
Toulouse, and the beginnings of institutions to become universities
early in the next century are recorded at Avignon and Cahors.
Spain felt the impetus of the university movement early in the
Thirteenth Century and a university was founded at Palencia about the
end of the first decade. This was founded by Alfonso XII. and was
greatly encouraged by him. It is sometimes said that this university
was transferred to Salamanca about 1230, but this is denied by
Denifle, whose authority in matters of university history is
unquestionable. It seems not unlikely that Salamanca drew a number of
students from Palencia but that the latter continued still to attract
many students. About the middle of the Thirteenth Century the
university of Valladolid was founded. Before the end of the century a
fourth university, that of Lerida, had been established in the Spanish
peninsula. Spain was to see the greatest development of universities
during the Fourteenth Century. It was not long after the end of the
Thirteenth Century before Coimbra, in Portugal, began to assume
importance as an educational institution, though it was not to have
sufficient faculty and students to deserve the more ambitious title of
university for half a century.
While most people who know anything about the history of education
realize the important position occupied by the universities during the
Thirteenth Century and appreciate the estimation in which they were
held and the numbers that attended them, very few seem to know
anything of the preparatory schools of the time, and are prone to
think that all the educational effort of these generations was
exhausted in connection {25} with the university. It is often said, as
we shall see, that one reason for the large number of students
reported as in attendance at the universities during the Thirteenth
Century is to be found in the fact that these institutions practically
combined the preparatory school and the academy of our time with the
university. The universities are supposed to have been the only
centers of education worthy of mention. There is no doubt that a
number of quite young students were in attendance at the universities,
that is, boys from 12 to 15 who would in our time be only in the
preparatory school. We shall explain, however, in the chapter on the
Numbers in Attendance at the Universities that students went to
college much younger in the past and graduated much earlier than they
do in our day, yet apparently, without any injury to the efficacy of
their educational training.
In the universities of Southern Europe it is still the custom for boys
to graduate with the degree of A. B. at the age of 15 to 16, which
supposes attendance at the university, or its equivalent in
under-graduate courses, at the age of 12 or even less. There is no
need, however, to appeal to the precociousness of the southern nations
in explanation of this, since there are some good examples of it in
comparatively recent times here in America. Most of the colleges in
this country, in the early part of the nineteenth century and the end
of the eighteenth, graduated young men of 16 and 17 and thought that
they were accomplishing a good purpose, in allowing them to get at
their life work in early manhood. Many of the distinguished divines
who made names in educational work are famous for their early
graduations. Dr. Benjamin Rush, of Philadelphia, whom the medical
profession of this country hails as the Father of American Medicine,
graduated at Princeton at 15. He must have begun his college course,
therefore, about the age of 12. This may be considered inadvisable in
our generation, but, it must be remembered that there are many even in
our day, who think that our college men are allowed to get at their
life-work somewhat too late for their own good.
It must be emphasized, moreover, that in many of the university towns
there were also preparatory schools. Courses {26} were not regularly
organized until well on in the Thirteenth Century, but younger
brothers and friends of students as well as of professors would not
infrequently be placed under their care and thus be enabled to receive
their preparation for university work. At Paris, Robert Sorbonne
founded a preparatory school for that institution under the name of
the College of Calvi. Other colleges of this kind also existed in
Paris. This custom of having a preparatory school in association with
the university has not been abandoned even in our own day, and it has
some decided advantages from an educational standpoint, though perhaps
these are not enough to balance certain ethical disadvantages almost
sure to attach to such a system, disadvantages which ultimately led in
the Middle Ages to the prohibition that young students should be taken
at the universities under any pretext.
The presence of these young students in university towns probably did
add considerably to the numbers reported as in attendance. It must not
be thought, however, that there were no formal preparatory schools
quite apart from university influence. This thought has been the root
of more misunderstanding of the medieval system of education than
almost any other. As a matter of fact there were preliminary and
preparatory schools, what we would now call academies and colleges, in
connection with all of the important monasteries and with every
cathedral. Schools of less importance were required by a decree of a
council held at the beginning of the Thirteenth Century to be
maintained in connection with every bishop's church. During the
Thirteenth Century there were some twenty cathedrals in various parts
of England; each one had its cathedral school. Besides these there
were at least as many important abbeys, nearly a dozen of them immense
institutions, in which there were fine libraries, large writing rooms,
in which copies of books were being constantly made, many of the
members of the communities of which were university men, and around
which, therefore, there clung an atmosphere of bookishness and
educational influence that made them preparatory schools of a high
type. The buildings themselves were of the highest type of
architecture; the community life was well calculated to bring out what
was best in the {27} intellectuality of members of the community, and,
then, there was a rivalry between the various religious orders which
made them prepare their men well in order that they might do honor to
the order when they had the opportunity later, as most of those who
had the ability and the taste actually did have, to go to one or other
of the universities.
This system of preparatory schools need not be accepted on the mere
assumption that the monasteries and churches must surely have set
about such work, because there is abundant evidence of the actual
establishment and maintenance of such schools. With regard to the
monasteries there can be no doubt, because it was the members of the
religious orders who particularly distinguished themselves at the
universities, and the histories of Oxford, Cambridge, and Paris are
full of their accomplishments. They succeeded in obtaining the right
to have their own houses at the universities and to have their own
examinations count in university work, in order that they might
maintain their influence over the members of the orders during the
precious formative period of their intellectual life. With regard to
the church schools there is convincing evidence of another kind.
In the chapter on the foundation of City Hospitals we have detailed on
the authority of Virchow all that Innocent III. accomplished for the
hospital system of Europe. This chapter was published originally in
the form of a lecture from the historical department of the Medical
School of Fordham University and a reprint of it was sent to a
distinguished American educator well known for his condemnation of
supposed church intolerance in the matter of education and scientific
development. He said that he was glad to have it because it confirmed
and even broadened the idea that he had long cherished, that the
Church had done more for Charity during the despised Middle Ages than
national governments had ever been able to accomplish since, though it
was all the more surprising to him that it should not have under the
circumstances, done more for education, since this might have
prevented some of the ills that charity had afterward to relieve. This
expression very probably represents the state of mind of very many
scholars with regard to this period. The Church is supposed to have
interested herself {28} in charity almost to the exclusion of
educational influence. Charity is of course admitted to be her special
work, yet these scholars cannot help but regret that more was not done
in social prophylaxis by the encouragement of education.
In the light of this almost universal expression it is all the more
interesting to find that such opinions are founded entirely on a lack
of knowledge of what was done in education, since the same Pope, in
practically the same way and by the exertion of the same prestige and
ecclesiastical authority, did for education just what he did for
charity in the matter of the hospitals and the ailing poor. Virchow,
as we shall see, declared that to Innocent III. is due the foundation
of practically all the city hospitals in Europe. If the effect of
certain of the decrees issued in his papacy be carefully followed, it
will be found that practically as many schools as hospitals owe their
origin to his beneficent wisdom and his paternal desire to spread the
advantages of Christianity all over the civilized world. This policy
with regard to the hospitals led to the foundation before the end of
the century of at least one hospital in every diocese of all the
countries which were more closely allied with the Holy See. There is
extant a decree issued by the famous council of Lateran, in 1215, a
council in which Innocent's authority was dominant, requiring the
establishment of a Chair of Grammar in connection with every cathedral
in the Christian world. This Chair of Grammar included at least three
of the so-called liberal arts and provided for what would now be
called, the education of a school preparatory to a university.
Before this, Innocent III, [Footnote 2] who had himself received the
benefit of the best education of the time, having spent some years at
Rome and later at Paris and at Bologna, had encouraged the sending of
students to these universities in every way.
[Footnote 2: Most of the details of what was accomplished for
education by Pope Innocent III, and all the references needed to
supply further information, can be found in the _Hestoire
Litteratire de la France_, recent volumes of which were issued by
the French Institute, though the magnificent work itself was begun
by Benedictines of St. Maur, who completed some fifteen volumes. The
sixteenth volume, most of which is written by Dauñou, is especially
valuable for this period. Du Boulay, in his History of the
University of Paris, will furnish additional information with regard
to Pope Innocent's relations to education throughout Europe,
especially, of course, in what regards the University of Paris.]
[Illustration]
CATHEDRAL (YORK)
[Illustration]
CATHEDRAL (LINCOLN)
{29}
Bishops who came to Rome were sure to hear inculcated the advisability
of a taste for letters in clergymen, hear it said often enough that
such a taste would surely increase the usefulness of all churchmen.
Schools had been encouraged before the issuance of the decree. This
only came as a confirmatory document calculated to perpetuate the
policy that had already been so prominently in vogue in the church for
over fifteen years of the Pope's reign. It was meant, too, to make
clear to hesitant and tardy bishops, who might have thought that the
papal interest in education was merely personal, that the policy of
the church was concerned in it and recalled them to a sense of duty in
the matter, since the ordinary enthusiasm for letters, even with the
added encouragement of the Pope, did not suffice to make them realize
the necessity for educational establishments.
The institution of the schools of grammar in connection with
cathedrals was well adapted to bring about a definite increase in the
opportunities for book learning for those who desired it. In
connection with the cathedrals there was always a band of canons whose
duty it was to take part in the singing of the daily office. Their
ceremonial and ritual duties did not, however, occupy them more than a
few hours each day. During the rest of the time they were free to
devote themselves to any subject in which they might be interested and
had ample time for teaching. The requirement that there should be at
least a school of grammar in connection with every cathedral afforded
definite opportunity to such of these ecclesiastics as had
intellectual tastes to devote themselves to the spread of knowledge
and of culture, and this reacted, as can be readily understood, to
make the whole band of canons more interested in the things of the
mind, and to make the cathedral even more the intellectual center of
the district than might otherwise have been the case.
For the metropolitan churches a more far-reaching regulation was made
by this same council of Lateran under the inspiration of the Pope
himself. These important Archiepiscopal cathedrals were required to
maintain professors of three chairs. One of these was to teach
grammar, a second philosophy, and a third canon law. Under these
designations there was practically included much of what is now
studied not only in preparatory {30} schools but also at the beginning
of University courses. The regulation was evidently intended to lead
eventually to the formation of many more universities than were then
in existence, because already it had become clear that the traveling
of students to long distances and their gathering in such large
numbers in towns away from home influences, led to many abuses that
might be obviated if they could stay in their native cities, or at
least did not have to leave their native provinces. This was a
far-seeing regulation that, like so many other decrees of the century,
manifests the very practical policy of the Pope in matters of
education as well as charity. As a matter of fact this decree did lead
to the gradual development of about twenty universities during the
Thirteenth Century, and to the establishment of a number of other
schools so important in scope and attendance that their evolution into
universities during the Fourteenth Century became comparatively easy.
This formal church law, moreover, imposed upon ecclesiastical
authorities the necessity for providing for even higher education in
their dioceses and made them realize that it was entirely in sympathy
with the church's spirit and in accord with the wish of the Father of
Christendom, that they should make as ample provision for education as
they did for charity, though this last was supposed to be their
special task as pastors of the Christian flock.
All this important work for the foundation of preparatory schools in
every diocese and of the preliminary organization of teaching
institutions that might easily develop into universities, as they
actually did in a score of cases in metropolitan cities, was
accomplished under the first Pope of the Thirteenth Century, Innocent
III. His successors kept up this good work. Pope Honorius III., his
immediate successor, went so far in this matter as to depose a bishop
who had not read Donatus, the popular grammarian of the time. The
bishop evidently was considered unfit, as far as his mental training
went, to occupy the important post of head of a diocese. Pope Gregory
IX., the nephew of Innocent III., was one of the most important
patrons of the study of law in this period (see Legal Origins in Other
Countries), and encouraged the collection of the decrees of former
Popes so as to make them available for purposes of study as well as
for court use. He is famous for {31} having protected the University
of Paris during some of the serious trouble with the municipal
authorities, when the large increase of the number of students in
attendance at the University had unfortunately brought about strained
relations between town and gown.
Pope Innocent IV. by several decrees encouraged the development of the
University of Paris, increased its rights and conferred new
privileges. He also did much to develop the University of Toulouse,
and especially to raise its standard and make it equal to that of
Paris as far as possible. The patronage of Toulouse on the part of the
Pope is all the more striking because the study of civil law was here
a special feature and the ecclesiastical authorities were often said
to have looked askance at the rising prominence of civil law, since it
threatened to diminish the importance of canon law; and the
cultivation of it, only too frequently, seemed to give rise to
friction between civil and ecclesiastical authorities. While the
pontifical court of Innocent IV. was maintained at Lyons it seemed,
according to the Literary History of France, [Footnote 3] more like
an academy of theology and of canon law than the court of a great
monarch whose power was acknowledged throughout the world, or a great
ecclesiastic who might be expected to be occupied with details of
Church government.
[Footnote 3: Histoire Litteratire de la France, Vol. XVI,
Introductory Discourse.]
Succeeding Popes of the century were not less prominent in their
patronage of education. Pope Alexander IV. supported the cause of the
Mendicant Friars against the University of Paris, but this was
evidently with the best of intentions. The mendicants came to claim
the privilege of having houses in association with the university in
which they might have lectures for the members of their orders, and
asked for due allowance in the matter of degrees for courses thus
taken. The faculty of the University did not want to grant this
privilege, though it was acknowledged that some of the best professors
in the University were members of the Mendicant orders, and we need
only mention such names as Albertus Magnus and St. Thomas Aquinas from
the Dominicans, and St. Bonaventure, Roger Bacon and Duns Scotus from
the Franciscans, to show the truth of this assertion. To give such a
privilege {32} seemed a derogation of the faculty rights and the
University refused. Then the Holy See interfered to insist that the
University must give degrees for work done, rather than merely for
regulation attendance. The best possible proof that Pope Alexander
cannot be considered as wishing to injure or even diminish the
prestige of the University in any way, is to be found in the fact that
he afterwards sent two of his nephews to Paris to attend at the
University.
All these Popes, so far mentioned, were not Frenchmen and therefore
could have no national feeling in the matter of the University of
Paris or of the French universities in general. It is not surprising
to find that Pope Urban IV., who was a Frenchman and an alumnus of the
University of Paris, elevated many French scholars, and especially his
fellow alumni of Paris, to Church dignitaries of various kinds. After
Urban IV., Nicholas IV. who succeeded him, though once more an
Italian, founded chairs in the University of Montpelier, and also a
professorship in a school that it was hoped would develop into a
university at Gray in Franche Comte. In a word, looked at from every
point of view, it must be admitted that the Church and ecclesiastical
authorities were quite as much interested in education as in charity
during this century, and it is to them that must be traced the
foundation of the preparatory schools, as well as the universities,
and the origin and development of the great educational movement that
stamps this century as the greatest in human history.
[Illustration]
JACQUES COEUR'S HOUSE (BOURGES)
[Illustration]
CLOISTER OF ST. JOHN LATERAN (ROME)
{33}
III
WHAT AND HOW THEY STUDIED AT THE UNIVERSITIES.
It is usually the custom for text books of education to dismiss the
teaching at the universities of the Middle Ages with some such
expression as: "The teachers were mainly engaged in metaphysical
speculations and the students were occupied with exercises in logic
and in dialectics, learning in long drawn out disputations how to use
the intellectual instruments they possessed but never actually
applying them. All knowledge was supposed to be amenable to increase
through dialectical discussion and all truth was supposed, to be
obtainable as the conclusion of a regular syllogism." Great fun
especially is made of the long-winded disputations, the time-taking
public exercises in dialectics, the fine hair-drawn distinctions
presumably with but the scantiest basis of truth behind them and in
general the placing of words for realities in the investigation of
truth and the conveyance of information. The sublime ignorance of
educators who talk thus about the century that saw the rise of the
universities in connection with the erection of the great Cathedrals,
is only equaled by their assumption of knowledge.
It is very easy to make fun of a past generation and often rather
difficult to enter into and appreciate its spirit. Ridicule comes
natural to human nature, alas! but sympathy requires serious mental
application for understanding's sake. Fortunately there has come in
recent years a very different feeling in the minds of many mature and
faithful students of this period, as regards the Middle Ages and its
education. Dialectics may seem to be a waste of time to those who
consider the training of the human mind as of little value in
comparison with the stocking of it with information. Dialectical
training will probably not often enable men to earn more money than
might have otherwise been the case. This will be {34} eminently true
if the dialectician is to devote himself to commercial enterprises in
his future life. If he is to take up one of the professions, however,
there may be some doubt as to whether even his practical effectiveness
will not be increased by a good course of logic. There is, however,
another point of view from which this matter of the study of
dialectics may be viewed, and which has been taken very well by Prof.
Saintsbury of the University of Edinburgh in a recent volume on the
Thirteenth Century.
He insists in a passage which we quote at length in the chapter on the
Prose of the Century, that if this training in logic had not been
obtained at this time in European development, the results might have
been serious for our modern languages and modern education. He says:
"If at the outset of the career of the modern languages, men had
thought with the looseness of modern thought, had indulged in the
haphazard slovenliness of modern logic, had popularized theology and
vulgarized rhetoric, as we have seen both popularized and vulgarized
since, we should indeed have been in evil case." He maintains that
"the far-reaching educative influence in mere language, in mere system
of arrangement and expression, must be considered as one of the great
benefits of Scholasticism." This is, after all, only a similar opinion
to that evidently entertained by Mr. John Stuart Mill, who, as Prof.
Saintsbury says, was not often a scholastically-minded philosopher,
for he quotes in the preface of his logic two very striking opinions
from very different sources, the Scotch philosopher, Hamilton, and the
French philosophical writer, Condorcet. Hamilton said, "It is to the
schoolmen that the vulgar languages are indebted for what precision
and analytical subtlety they possess." Condorcet went even further
than this, and used expressions that doubless will be a great source
of surprise to those who do not realize how much of admiration is
always engendered in those who really study the schoolmen seriously
and do not take opinions of them from the chance reading of a few
scattered passages, or depend for the data of their judgment on some
second-hand authority, who thought it clever to abuse these old-time
thinkers. Condorcet thought them far in advance of the old Greek
philosophers for, he said, "Logic, ethics, and metaphysics {35}
itself, owe to scholasticism a precision unknown to the ancients
themselves."
With regard to the methods and contents of the teaching in the
undergraduate department of the university, that is, in what we would
now call the arts department, there is naturally no little interest at
the present time. Besides the standards set up and the tests required
can scarcely fail to attract attention. Professor Turner, in his
History of Philosophy, has summed up much of what we know in this
matter in a paragraph so full of information that we quote it in order
to give our readers the best possible idea in a compendious form of
these details of the old-time education.
"By statutes issued at various times during the Thirteenth Century
it was provided that the professor should read, that is expound, the
text of certain standard authors in philosophy and theology. In a
document published by Denifle, (the distinguished authority on
medieval universities) and by him referred to the year 1232, we find
the following works among those prescribed for the Faculty of Arts:
Logica Vetus (the old Boethian text of a portion of the Organon,
probably accompanied by Porphyry's Isagoge); Logica Nova (the new
translation of the Organon); Gilbert's Liber Sex Principorium; and
Donatus's Barbarismus. A few years later (1255), the following works
are prescribed: Aristotle's Physics, Metaphysics, De Anima, De
Animalibus, De Caelo et Mundo, Meteorica, the minor psychological
treatises and some Arabian or Jewish works, such as the Liber de
Causis and De Differentia Spirititus et Animae."
"The first degree for which the student of arts presented himself
was that of bachelor. The candidate for this degree, after a
preliminary test called responsiones (this regulation went into
effect not later than 1275), presented himself for the determination
which was a public defense of a certain number of theses against
opponents chosen from the audience. At the end of the disputation,
the defender summed up, or determined, his conclusions. After
determining, the bachelor resumed his studies for the licentiate,
assuming also the task of cursorily explaining to junior students
some portion of the Organon. The test for the degree of licentiate
consisted {36} in a _collatio_, or exposition of several texts,
after the manner of the masters. The student was now a licensed
teacher; he did not, however, become magister, or master of arts,
until he had delivered what was called the _inceptio_, or inaugural
lecture, and was actually installed (_birrettatio_). If he continued
to teach he was called _magisier actu regens_; if he departed from
the university or took up other work, he was called _magister non
regens_. It may be said that, as a general rule, the course of
reading was: (1) for the bachelor's degree, grammar, logic, and
psychology; (2) for the licentiate, natural philosophy; (3) for the
master's degree, ethics, and the completion of the course of natural
philosophy."
Quite apart from the value of its methods, however, scholasticism in
certain of its features had a value in the material which it discussed
and developed that modern generations only too frequently fail to
realize. With regard to this the same distinguished authority whom we
quoted with regard to dialectics, Prof. Saintsbury, does not hesitate
to use expressions which will seem little short of rankly heretical to
those who swear by modern science, and yet may serve to inject some
eminently suggestive ideas into a sadly misunderstood subject.
"Yet there has always in generous souls who have some tincture of
philosophy, subsisted a curious kind of sympathy and yearning over
the work of these generations of mainly disinterested scholars, who,
whatever they were, were thorough, and whatever they could not do,
could think. _And there, have even, in these latter days, been some
graceless ones who have asked whether the Science of the nineteenth
century, after an equal interval, will be of any more positive
value--whether it will not have even less comparative interest than
that which appertains to the Scholasticism of the Thirteenth."_
In the light of this it has seemed well to try to show in terms of
present-day science some of the important reflections with regard to
such problems of natural history, as magnetism, the composition of
matter, and the relation of things physical to one another, which we
now include under the name science, some of the thoughts that these
scholars of the Thirteenth Century were thinking and were developing
for the benefit of the {37} enthusiastic students who flocked to the
universities. We will find in such a review though it must necessarily
be brief many more anticipations of modern science than would be
thought possible.
To take the example for the moment of magnetism which is usually
considered to be a subject entirely of modern attention, a good idea
of the intense interest of this century in things scientific, can be
obtained from the following short paragraph in which Brother Potamian
in his sketch of Petrus Peregrinus, condenses the references to
magnetic phenomena that are found in the literature of the time. Most
of the writers he mentions were not scientists in the ordinary sense
of the word but were literary men, and the fact that these references
occur shows very clearly that there must have been wide-spread
interest in such scientific phenomena, since they had attracted the
attention of literary writers, who would not have spoken of them
doubtless, but that they knew that in this they would be satisfying as
well as exciting public interest.
"Abbot Neckam, the Augustinian (1157-1217), distinguished between
the properties of the two ends of the lodestone, and gives in his De
Utensilibus, what is perhaps the earliest reference to the mariner's
compass that we have. Albertus Magnus, the Dominican (1193-1280), in
his treatise De Mineralibus, enumerates different kinds of natural
magnets and states some of the properties commonly attributed to
them; the minstrel, Guyot de Provins, in a famous satirical poem,
written about 1208, refers to the directive quality of the lodestone
and its use in navigation, as do also Cardinal de Vitry in his
Historia Orientialis (1215-1220), Brunetto Latini, poet, orator and
philosopher (the teacher of Dante), in his Tresor des Sciences, a
veritable library, written in Paris in 1260; Raymond Lully, the
enlightened Doctor, in his treatise, De Contemplatione, begun in
1272, and Guido Guinicelli, the poet-priest of Bologna, who died in
1276." [Footnote 4]
[Footnote 4: The letter of Petrus Peregrinus on the Magnet, A. D.
1269, translated by Bro. Arnold, M. Sc., with an Introductory Note
by Bro. Potamian, N. Y., 1904.]
{38}
The metaphysics of the medieval universities have come in for quite as
much animadversion, not to say ridicule, as the dialectics. None of
its departments is spared in the condemnation, though most fun is made
of the gropings of the medieval mind after truth in the physical
sciences. The cosmology, the science of matter as it appealed to the
medieval mind, is usually considered to have been so entirely
speculative as to deserve no further attention. We have presumably,
learned so much by experimental demonstration and original observation
in the physical sciences, that any thinking of the medieval mind along
these lines may, in the opinion of those who know nothing of what they
speak, be set aside as preposterous, or at best nugatory. It will
surely be a source of surprise, then, to find that in the
consideration of the composition of matter and of the problem of the
forces connected with it, the minds of the medieval schoolmen were
occupied with just the same questions that have been most interesting
to the Nineteenth Century and that curiously enough the conclusions
they reached, though by very different methods of investigation, were
almost exactly the same as those to which modern physical scientists
have attained by their refined methods of investigation.
One or two examples will suffice, I think, to show very clearly that
the students of the Thirteenth Century had presented to them
practically the same problems with regard to matter, its origin and
composition, as occupy the students of the present generation. For
instance Thomas Aquinas usually known as St. Thomas, in a series of
lectures given at the University of Paris toward the end of the third
quarter of the Thirteenth Century, stated as the most important
conclusion with regard to matter, that _"Nihil omnino in nihilum
redigetur_,"' "Nothing at all will ever be reduced to nothingness." By
this it was very evident from the context that he meant that matter
would never be annihilated and could never be destroyed. It might be
changed in various ways but it could never go back into the
nothingness from which it had been taken by the creative act.
Annihilation was pronounced as not being a part of the scheme of
things as far as the human mind could hope to fathom its meaning.
In this sentence, then, Thomas of Aquin was proclaiming the {39}
doctrine of the indestructibility of matter. It was not until well on
in the nineteenth century that the chemists and physicists of modern
times realized the truth of this great principle. The chemists had
seen matter change its form in many ways, had seen it disappear
apparently in the smoke of fire or evaporate under the influence of
heat, but investigation proved that if care were taken in the
collection of the gases that came off under these circumstances, of
the ashes of combustion and of the residue of evaporation, all the
original material that had been contained in the supposedly
disappearing substance could be recovered or at least completely
accounted for. The physicists on their part had realized this same
truth and finally there came the definite enunciation of the absolute
indestructibility of matter. St. Thomas' conclusion "Nothing at all
will ever be reduced to nothingness" had anticipated this doctrine by
nearly seven centuries. What happened in the Nineteenth Century was
that there came an experimental demonstration of the truth of the
principle. The principle itself, however, had been reached long before
by the human mind by speculative processes quite as inerrable in their
way as the more modern method of investigation.
When St. Thomas used the aphorism "Nothing at all will ever be reduced
to nothingness" there was another signification that he attached to
the words quite as clearly as that by which they expressed the
indestructibility of matter. For him _Nihil_ or nothing meant neither
_matter_ nor _form_, that is, neither the material substance nor the
energy which is contained in it. He meant then, that no energy would
ever be destroyed as well as no matter would ever be annihilated. He
was teaching the conservation of energy as well as the
indestructibility of matter. Here once more the experimental
demonstration of the doctrine was delayed for over six centuries and a
half. The truth itself, however, had been reached by this medieval
master-mind and was the subject of his teaching to the university
students in Paris in the Thirteenth Century. These examples should, I
think, serve to illustrate that the minds of medieval students were
occupied with practically the same questions as those which are now
taught to the university students of our day. There are, however, some
even {40} more striking anticipations of modern teaching that will
serve to demonstrate this community of educational interests in spite
of seven centuries of time separation.
In recent years we have come to realize that matter is not the
manifold material we were accustomed to think it when we accepted the
hypothesis that there were some seventy odd different kinds of atoms,
each one absolutely independent of any other and representing an
ultimate term in science. The atomic theory from this standpoint has
proved to be only a working hypothesis that was useful for a time, but
that our physicists are now agreed must not be considered as something
absolute. Radium has been observed changing into helium and the
relations of atoms to one another as they are now known, make it
almost certain that all of them have an underlying sub-stratum the
same in all, but differentiated by the dynamic energies with which
matter in its different forms is gifted. Sir Oliver Lodge has stated
this theory of the constitution of matter very clearly in recent
years, and in doing so has only been voicing the practically universal
sentiment of those who have been following the latest developments in
the physical sciences. Strange as it may appear, this was exactly the
teaching of Aquinas and the schoolmen with regard to the constitution
of matter. They said that the two constituting principles of matter
were prime matter and form. By prime matter they meant the material
sub-stratum the same in all material things. By form they meant the
special dynamic energy which, entering into prime matter, causes it to
act differently from other kinds and gives it all the particular
qualities by which we recognize it. This theory was not original with
them, having been adopted from Aristotle, but it was very clearly set
forth, profoundly discussed, and amply illustrated by the schoolmen.
In its development this theory was made to be of the greatest help in
the explanation of many other difficulties with regard to living as
well as non-living things in their hands. The theory has its
difficulties, but they are less than those of any other theory of the
constitution of matter, and it has been accepted by more philosophic
thinkers since the Thirteenth Century than any other doctrine of
similar nature. It may be said that it was reached only by deduction
and not by experimental observation. Such an expression, {41} however,
instead of being really an objection is rather a demonstration of the
fact that great truths may be reached by deduction yet only
demonstrated by inductive methods many centuries later.
Of course it may well be said even after all these communities of
interest between the medieval and the modern teaching of the general
principles of science has been pointed out, that the universities of
the Middle Ages did not present the subjects under discussion in a
practical way, and their teaching was not likely to lead to directly
beneficial results in applied science. It might well he responded to
this, that it is not the function of a university to teach
applications of science but only the great principles, the broad
generalizations that underlie scientific thinking, leaving details to
be filled in in whatever form of practical work the man may take up.
Very few of those, however, who talk about the purely speculative
character of medieval teaching have manifestly ever made it their
business to know anything about the actual facts of old-time
university teaching by definite knowledge, but have rather allowed
themselves to be guided by speculation and by inadequate second-hand
authorities, whose dicta they have never taken the trouble to
substantiate by a glance at contemporary authorities on medieval
matters.
It will be interesting to quote for the information of such men, the
opinion of the greatest of medieval scientists with regard to the
reason why men do not obtain real knowledge more rapidly than would
seem ought to be the case, from the amount of work which they have
devoted to obtaining it. Roger Bacon, summing up for Pope Clement the
body of doctrine that he was teaching at the University of Oxford in
the Thirteenth Century, starts out with the principle that there are
four grounds of human ignorance. "These are first, trust in inadequate
authority; second, the force of custom which leads men to accept too
unquestioningly what has been accepted before their time; third, the
placing of confidence in the opinion of the inexperienced; and fourth,
the hiding of one's own ignorance with the parade of a superficial
wisdom." Surely no one will ever be able to improve on these four
grounds for human ignorance, and they continue to be as {42} important
in the twentieth century as they were in the Thirteenth. They could
only have emanated from an eminently practical mind, accustomed to
test by observation and by careful searching of authorities, every
proposition that came to him. Professor Henry Morley, Professor of
English Literature at University College, London, says of these
grounds for ignorance of Roger Bacon, in his English Writers, Volume
III, page 321: "No part of that ground has yet been cut away from
beneath the feet of students, although six centuries ago the Oxford
friar clearly pointed out its character. We still make sheep walks of
second, third, and fourth and fiftieth-hand references to authority;
still we are the slaves of habit; still we are found following too
frequently the untaught crowd; still we flinch from the righteous and
wholesome phrase, 'I do not know'; and acquiesce actively in the
opinion of others that we know what we appear to know. Substitute
honest research, original and independent thought, strict truth in the
comparison of only what we really know with what is really known by
others, and the strong redoubt of ignorance has fallen."
The number of things which Roger Bacon succeeded in discovering by the
application of the principle of testing everything by personal
observation, is almost incredible to a modern student of science and
of education who has known nothing before of the progress in science
made by this wonderful man. He has been sometimes declared to be the
discoverer of gunpowder, but this is a mistake since it was known many
years before by the Arabs and by them introduced into Europe. He did
study explosives very deeply, however, and besides learning many
things about them realized how much might be accomplished by their use
in the after-time. He declares in his Opus Magnum: "That one may cause
to burst forth from bronze, thunderbolts more formidable than those
produced by nature. A small quantity of prepared matter occasions a
terrible explosion accompanied by a brilliant light. One may multiply
this phenomenon so far as to destroy a city or an army." Considering
how little was known about gunpowder at this time, this was of itself
a marvelous anticipation of what might be accomplished by it.
[Illustration]
RATHHAUS (TANGERMÜNDE)
Bacon prophesied, however, much more than merely {43} destructive
effects from the use of high explosives, and indeed it is almost
amusing to see how closely he anticipated some of the most modern
usages of high explosives for motor purposes. He seems to have
concluded that some time the apparently uncontrollable forces of
explosion would come under the control of man and be harnessed by him
for his own purposes. He realized that one of the great applications
of such a force would be for transportation. Accordingly he said: "Art
can construct instruments of navigation such that the largest vessels
governed by a single man will traverse rivers and seas more rapidly
than if they were filled with oarsmen. One may also make carriages
which without the aid of any animal will run with remarkable
swiftness." [Footnote 5] When we recall that the very latest thing
in transportation are motor-boats and automobiles driven by gasoline,
a high explosive, Roger Bacon's prophesy becomes one of these weird
anticipations of human progress which seem almost more than human.
[Footnote 5: These quotations are taken from Ozanam's Dante and
Catholic Philosophy, published by the Cathedral Library Association,
New York, 1897. ]
It was not with regard to explosives alone, however, that Roger Bacon
was to make great advances and still more marvelous anticipations in
physical science. He was not, as is sometimes claimed for him, either
the inventor of the telescope or of the theory of lenses. He did more,
however, than perhaps anyone else to make the principles of lenses
clear and to establish them on a mathematical basis. His traditional
connection with the telescope can probably be traced to the fact that
he was very much interested in astronomy and the relations of the
heavens to the earth. He pointed out very clearly the errors which had
crept into the Julian calendar, calculated exactly how much of a
correction was needed in order to restore the year to its proper
place, and suggested the method by which future errors of this kind
could be avoided. His ideas were too far beyond his century to be
applied in a practical way, but they were not to be without their
effect and it is said that they formed the basis of the subsequent
correction of the calendar in the time of Pope Gregory XIII three
centuries later.
{44}
It is rather surprising to find how much besides the theory of lenses
Friar Bacon had succeeded in finding out in the department of optics.
He taught, for instance, the principle of the aberration of light,
and, still more marvelous to consider, taught that light did not
travel instantaneously but had a definite rate of motion, though this
was extremely rapid. It is rather difficult to understand how he
reached this conclusion since light travels so fast that as far as
regards any observation that can be made upon earth, the diffusion is
practically instantaneous. It was not for over three centuries later
that Römer, the German astronomer, demonstrated the motion of light
and its rate, by his observations upon the moons of Jupiter at
different phases of the earth's orbit, which showed that the light of
these moons took a definite and quite appreciable time to reach the
earth after their eclipse by the planet was over.
We are not surprised to find that Bacon should praise those of his
contemporaries who devoted themselves to mathematics and to
experimental observations in science. Of one of his correspondents who
even from distant Italy sent him his observations in order that he
might have the great Franciscan's precious comments on them. Bacon has
given quite a panegyric. The reasons for his praise, however, are so
different from those which are ordinarily proclaimed to have been the
sources of laudation in distant medieval scientific circles, that we
prefer to quote Bacon's own words from the Opus Tertium. Bacon is
talking of Petrus Peregrinus and says: "I know of only one person who
deserves praise for his work in experimental philosophy, for he does
not care for the discourses of men and their wordy warfare, but
quietly and diligently pursues the works of wisdom. Therefore, what
others grope after blindly, as bats in the evening twilight, this man
contemplates in all their brilliancy because he is a master of
experiment. Hence, he knows all natural science whether pertaining to
medicine and alchemy, or to matters celestial and terrestrial.
"He has worked diligently in the smelting of ores as also in the
working of minerals; he is thoroughly acquainted with all sorts of
arms and implements used in military service and in hunting, besides
which he is skilled in agriculture and in the measurement of lands.
{45} It is impossible to write a useful or correct treatise in
experimental philosophy without mentioning this man's name.
Moreover, he pursues knowledge for its own sake; for if he wished to
obtain royal favor, he could easily find sovereigns who would honor
and enrich him."
[Illustration]
CATHEDRAL (YORK)
[Illustration]
CATHEDRAL (HEREFORD)
Lest it should be thought that these expressions of laudatory
appreciation of the great Thirteenth Century scientist are dictated
more by the desire to magnify his work and to bring out the influence
in science of the Churchmen of the period, it seems well to quote an
expression of opinion from the modern historian of the inductive
sciences, whose praise is scarcely if any less outspoken than that of
others whom we have quoted and who might be supposed to be somewhat
partial in their judgment. This opinion will fortify the doubters who
must have authority and at the same time sums up very excellently the
position which Roger Bacon occupies in the History of Science.
Dr. Whewell says that Roger Bacon's Opus Majus is "the encyclopedia
and Novam Organon of the Thirteenth Century, a work equally wonderful
with regard to its general scheme and to the special treatises with
which the outlines of the plans are filled up. The professed object of
the work is to urge the necessity of a reform in the mode of
philosophizing, to set forth the reasons why knowledge had not made a
greater progress, to draw back attention to the sources of knowledge
which had been unwisely neglected, to discover other sources which
were yet almost untouched, and to animate men in the undertaking by a
prospect of the vast advantages which it offered. In the development
of this plan all the leading portions of science are expanded in the
most complete shape which they had at that time assumed; and
improvements of a very wide and striking kind are proposed in some of
the principal branches of study. Even if the work had no leading
purposes it would have been highly valuable as a treasure of the most
solid knowledge and soundest speculations of the time; even if it had
contained no such details it would have been a work most remarkable
for its general views and scope."
It is only what might have been expected, however, from {46} Roger
Bacon's training that he should have made great progress in the
physical sciences. At the University of Paris his favorite teacher was
Albertus Magnus, who was himself deeply interested in all the physical
sciences, though he was more concerned with the study of chemical
problems than of the practical questions which were to occupy his
greatest pupil. There is no doubt at all that Albertus Magnus
accomplished a great amount of experimental work in chemistry and had
made a large series of actual observations. He was a theologian as
well as a philosopher and a scientist. Some idea of the immense
industry of the man can be obtained from the fact that his complete
works as published consist of some twenty large folio volumes, each
one of which contains on the average at least 500,000 words.
Among these works are many treatises relating to chemistry. The titles
of some of them will serve to show how explicit was Albert in his
consideration of various chemical subjects. He has treatises
concerning Metals and Minerals; concerning Alchemy; A Treatise on the
Secret of Chemistry; A Concordance, that is a Collection of
observations from many sources with regard to the Philosopher's Stone;
A Brief Compend on the Origin of the Metals; A Treatise on Compounds;
most of these are to be found in his works under the general heading
"Theatrum Chemicum."
It is not surprising for those who know of Albert's work, to find that
his pupil Roger Bacon defined the limits of chemistry very accurately
and showed that he understood exactly what the subject and methods of
investigation must be, in order that advance should be made in it. Of
chemistry he speaks in his "Opus Tertium" in the following words:
"There is a science which treats of the generation of things from
their elements and of all inanimate things, as of the elements and
liquids, simple and compound, common stones, gems and marble, gold and
other metals, sulphur, salts, pigments, lapis lazuli, minium and other
colors, oils, bitumen, and infinite more of which we find nothing in
the books of Aristotle; nor are the natural philosophers nor any of
the Latins acquainted with these things."
In physics Albertus Magnus was, if possible, more advanced {47} and
progressive even than in chemistry. His knowledge in the physical
sciences was not merely speculative, but partook to a great degree of
the nature of what we now call applied science. Humboldt, the
distinguished German natural philosopher of the beginning of the
Nineteenth Century, who was undoubtedly the most important leader in
scientific thought in his time and whose own work was great enough to
have an enduring influence in spite of the immense progress of the
Nineteenth Century, has summed up Albert's work and given the headings
under which his scientific research must be considered. He says:
"Albertus Magnus was equally active and influential in promoting the
study of natural science and of the Aristotelian philosophy. His
works contain some exceedingly acute remarks on the organic
structure and physiology of plants. One of his works bearing the
title of 'Liber Cosmographicus de Natura Locorum,' is a species of
physical geography. I have found in it considerations on the
dependence of temperature concurrently on latitude and elevation,
and on the effect of different angles of incidence of the sun's rays
in heating the ground, _which have excited my surprise_."
To take up some of Humboldt's headings in their order and illustrate
them by quotations from Albert himself and from condensed accounts as
they appear in his biographer Sighart and in Christian Schools and
Scholars [Footnote 6], will serve to show at once the extent of
Albert's knowledge and the presumptuous ignorance of those who make
little of the science of the medieval period. When we have catalogued,
for instance, the many facts with regard to astronomy and the physics
of light that are supposed to have come to human ken much later, yet
may be seen to have been clearly within the range of Albert's
knowledge, and evidently formed the subject of his teaching at various
times at both Paris and Cologne, for they are found in his authentic
works, we can scarcely help but be amused at the pretentious
misconception that has relegated their author to a place in education
so trivial as is that which is represented in many minds by the term
scholastic.
[Footnote 6: Christian Schools and Scholars. Drane.]
"He decides that the Milky Way is nothing but a vast {48} assemblage
of stars, but supposes naturally enough that they occupy the orbit
which receives the light of the sun. The figures visible on the
moon's disc are not, he says, as hitherto has been supposed,
reflections of the seas and mountains of the earth, but
configurations of her own surface. He notices, in order to correct
it, the assertion of Aristotle that lunar rainbows appear only twice
in fifty years; 'I myself,' he says have observed two in a single
year.' He has something to say on the refraction of a solar ray,
notices certain crystals which have a power of refraction, and
remarks that none of the ancients and few moderns were acquainted
with the properties of mirrors."
Albert's great pupil Roger Bacon is rightly looked upon as the true
father of inductive science, an honor that history has unfortunately
taken from him to confer it undeservedly on his namesake of four
centuries later, but the teaching out of which Roger Bacon was to
develop the principles of experimental science can be found in many
places in his master's writings. In Albert's tenth book, wherein he
catalogues and describes all the trees, plants, and herbs known in his
time, he observes: "All that is here set down is the result of our own
experience, or has been borrowed from authors whom we know to have
written what their personal experience has confirmed: for in these
matters experience alone can give certainty" (_experimentum solum
certificat in talibus_). "Such an expression," says his biographer,
"which might have proceeded from the pen of (Francis) Bacon, argues in
itself a prodigious scientific progress, and shows that the medieval
friar was on the track so successfully pursued by modern natural
philosophy. He had fairly shaken off the shackles which had hitherto
tied up discovery, and was the slave neither of Pliny nor of
Aristotle."
Botany is supposed to be a very modern science and to most people
Humboldt's expression that he found in Albertus Magnus's writings some
"exceedingly acute remarks on the organic structure and physiology of
plants" will come as a supreme surprise. A few details with regard to
Albert's botanical knowledge, however, will serve to heighten that
surprise and to show, that the foolish tirades of modern sciolists,
{49} who have often expressed their wonder that with all the beauties
of nature around them, these scholars of the Middle Ages did not
devote themselves to nature study, are absurd, because if the critics
but knew it there was profound interest in nature and all her
manifestations and a series of discoveries that anticipated not a
little of what we consider most important in our modern science. The
story of Albert's botanical knowledge has been told in a single very
full paragraph by his biographer. Sighart also quotes an appreciative
opinion from a modern German botanist which will serve to dispel any
doubts with regard to Albert's position in botany that modern students
might perhaps continue to harbor, unless they had good authority to
support their opinion, though of course it will be remembered that the
main difference between the medieval and the modern mind is only too
often said to be, that the medieval required an authority while the
modern makes its opinion for itself. Even the most skeptical of modern
minds however, will probably be satisfied by the following paragraph.
"He was acquainted with the sleep of plants, with the periodical
opening and closing of blossoms, with the diminution of sap through
evaporation from the cuticle of the leaves, and with the influence
of the distribution of the bundles of vessels on the folial
indentations. His minute observations on the forms and variety of
plants intimate an exquisite sense of floral beauty. He
distinguished the star from the bell-floral, tells us that a red
rose will turn white when submitted to the vapor of sulphur and
makes some very sagacious observations on the subject of
germination. . . . The extraordinary erudition and originality of this
treatise (his tenth book) has drawn from M. Meyer the following
comment: 'No Botanist who lived before Albert can be compared to
him, unless Theophrastus, with whom he was not acquainted; and after
him none has painted nature in such living colors or studied it so
profoundly until the time of Conrad Gesner and Cesalpino.' All
honor, then, to the man who made such astonishing progress in the
science of nature as to find no one, I will not say to surpass, but
even to equal him for the space of three centuries."
{50}
We point out in the chapter on Geography and Exploration how much this
wonderful Thirteenth Century added to the knowledge of geographical
science. Even before the great explorers of this time, however, had
accomplished their work, this particular branch of science had made
such great progress as would bring it quite within the domain of what
we call the science of geography at the present time. When we remember
how much has been said about the ignorance of the men of the later
Middle Ages as regards the shape of the earth and its inhabitants, and
how many foolish notions they are supposed to have accepted with
regard to the limitation of possible residents of the world and the
queer ideas as to the antipodes, the following passages taken from
Albert's biographer will serve better than anything else to show how
absurdly the traditional notions with regard to this time and its
knowledge, have been permitted by educators to tinge what are supposed
to be serious opinions with regard to the subject matters of education
in that early university period:
"He treats as fabulous the commonly-received idea, in which Bede had
acquiesced, that the region of the earth south of the equator was
uninhabitable, and considers, that from the equator to the South
Pole, the earth was not only habitable, but in all probability
actually inhabited, except directly at the poles, where he imagines
the cold to be excessive. If there be any animals there, he says,
they must have very thick skins to defend them from the rigor of the
climate, and they are probably of a white color. The intensity of
cold, is however, tempered by the action of the sea. He describes
the antipodes and the countries they comprise, and divides the
climate of the earth into seven zones. He smiles with a scholar's
freedom at the simplicity of those who suppose that persons living
at the opposite region of the earth must fall off, an opinion that
can only rise out of the grossest ignorance, 'for when we speak of
the lower hemisphere, this must be understood merely as relatively
to ourselves.' It is as a geographer that Albert's superiority to
the writers of his own time chiefly appears. Bearing in mind the
astonishing ignorance which then prevailed on this subject, it is
truly admirable to find him correctly tracing the chief mountain
chains of Europe, with the rivers which take {51} their source in
each; remarking on portions of coast which have in later times been
submerged by the ocean, and islands which have been raised by
volcanic action above the level of the sea; noticing the
modification of climate caused by mountains, seas and forests, and
the division of the human race whose differences he ascribes to the
effect upon them of the countries they inhabit! In speaking of the
British Isles he alludes to the commonly-received idea that another
distant island called Tile or Thule, existed far in the Western
Ocean, uninhabitable by reason of its frightful climate, but which,
he says, has perhaps not yet been visited by man."
Nothing will so seriously disturb the complacency of modern minds as
to the wonderful advances that have been made in the last century in
all branches of physical science as to read Albertus Magnus' writings.
Nothing can be more wholesomely chastening of present day conceit than
to get a proper appreciation of the extent of the knowledge of the
Schoolmen.
Albertus Magnus' other great pupil besides Roger Bacon was St. Thomas
Aquinas. If any suspicion were still left that Thomas did not
appreciate just what the significance of his teachings in physics was,
when he announced that neither matter nor force could ever be reduced
to nothingness, it would surely be removed by the consideration that
he had been for many years in intimate relations with Albert and that
he had probably also been close to Roger Bacon. After association with
such men as these, any knowledge he displays with regard to physical
science can scarcely be presumed to have been stumbled upon unawares.
St. Thomas himself has left three treatises on chemical subjects and
it is said that the first occurrence of the word amalgam can be traced
to one of these treatises. Everybody was as much interested then, as
we are at the present time, in the transformation of metals and
mercury with its silvery sheen, its facility to enter into metallic
combinations of all kinds, and its elusive ways, naturally made it the
center of scientific interest quite as radium is at the present
moment. Further material with regard to St. Thomas and also to the
subject of education will be found in the chapter, Aquinas the
Scholar.
After this brief review of only a few of the things that they taught
in science at the Thirteenth Century universities, most {52} people
will scarcely fail to wonder how such peculiar erroneous impressions
with regard to the uselessness of university teaching and training
have come to be so generally accepted. The fault lies, of course, with
those who thought they knew something about university teaching, and
who, because they found a few things that now look ridiculous, as
certain supposed facts of one generation always will to succeeding
generations who know more about them, thought they could conclude from
these as to the character of the whole content of medieval education.
It is only another example of what Artemus Ward pointed out so
effectively when he said that "there is nothing that makes men so
ridiculous as the knowing so many things that aint so." We have been
accepting without question ever so many things that simply are not so
with regard to these wonderful generations, who not only organized the
universities but organized the teaching in them on lines not very
different from those which occupy people seven centuries later.
What would be the most amusing feature, if it were not unfortunately
so serious an arraignment of the literature that has grown up around
these peculiar baseless notions with regard to scholastic philosophy,
is the number of men of science who have permitted themselves to make
fun of certain supposed lucubrations of the great medieval
philosophers. It is not so very long ago that, as pointed out by
Harper in the Metaphysics of the School, Professor Tate in a lecture
on Some Recent Advances in Physical Science repeated the old slander
that even Aquinas occupied the attention of his students with such
inane questions as: "How many angels could dance on the point of a
needle?" Modern science very proudly insists that it occupies itself
with observations and concerns itself little with authority. Prof.
Tate in this unhappy quotation, shows not only that he has made no
personal studies in medieval philosophy but that he has accepted a
very inadequate authority for the statements which he makes with as
much confidence as if they had been the result of prolonged research
in this field. Many other modern scientists (?) have fallen into like
blunders. (For Huxley's opinion see Appendix.)
The modern student, as well as the teacher, is prone to wonder what
were the methods of study and the habits of life {53} of the students
of the Thirteenth Century, and fortunately we have a short sketch,
written by Robert of Sorbonne, the famous founder of the Sorbonne, in
which he gives advice to attendants at that institution as to how they
should spend their time, so that at least we are able to get a hint of
the ideals that were set before the student. Robert, whose long
experience of university life made him thoroughly competent to advise,
said:
"The student who wishes to make progress ought to observe six
essential rules.
"First: He ought to consecrate a certain hour every day to the study
of a determined subject, as St. Bernard counselled his monks in his
letter to the Brothers of the Mont Dieu.
"Second: He ought to concentrate his attention upon what he reads
and ought not to let it pass lightly. There is between reading and
study, as St. Bernard says, the same difference as between a host
and a guest, between a passing salutation exchanged in the street
and an embrace prompted by an unalterable affection.
"Third: He ought to extract from the daily study one thought, some
truth or other, and engrave it deeply upon his memory with special
care. Seneca said _'Cum multa percurreris in die, unum tibi elige
quod illa die excoquas'_--When you have run over many things in a
day select one for yourself which you should digest well on that
day.
"Fourth: Write a resume of it, for words which are not confided to
writing fly as does the dust before the wind.
"Fifth: Talk the matter over with your fellow-students, either in
the regular recitation or in your familiar conversation. This
exercise is even more profitable than study for it has as its result
the clarifying of all doubts and the removing of all the obscurity
that study may have left. Nothing is perfectly known unless it has
been tried by the tooth of disputation.
"Sixth: Pray, for this is indeed one of the best ways of learning.
St. Bernard teaches that study ought to touch the heart and that one
should profit by it always by elevating the heart to God, _without,
however, interrupting the study_."
Sorbonne proceeds in a tone that vividly recalls the modern university
professor who has seen generation after generation {54} of students
and has learned to realize how many of them waste their time.
"Certain students act like fools; they display great subtility over
nonsensical subjects and exhibit themselves devoid of intelligence
with regard to their most important studies. So as not to seem to
have lost their time they gather together many sheets of parchment,
make thick volumes of note books out of them, with many a blank
interval, and cover them with elegant binding in red letters. Then
they return to the paternal domicile with their little sack filled
up with knowledge which can be stolen from them by any thief that
comes along, or may be eaten by rats or by worms or destroyed by
fire or water.
"In order to acquire instruction the student must abstain from
pleasure and not allow himself to be hampered by material cares.
There was at Paris not long since two teachers who were great
friends. One of them had seen much, had read much and used to remain
night and day bent over his books. He scarcely took the time to say
an 'Our Father.' Nevertheless he had but four students. His
colleague possessed a much less complete library, was less devoted
to study and heard mass every morning before delivering his lecture.
In spite of this, his classroom was full. 'How do you do it?' asked
his friend. 'It is very simple,' said his friend smiling. 'God
studies for me. I go to mass and when I come back I know by heart
all that I have to teach.'"
"Meditation," so Sorbonne continues, "is suitable not only for the
master, but the good student ought also to go and take his promenade
along the banks of the Seine, not to play there, but in order to
repeat his lesson and meditate upon it."
These instructions for students are not very different from those that
would be issued by an interested head of a university department to
the freshmen of the present day. His insistence, especially on the
difference between reading and study, might very well be taken to
heart at the present time, when there seems to be some idea that
reading of itself is sufficient to enable one to obtain an education.
The lesson of learning one thing a day and learning that well, might
have been selected as a motto for students for all succeeding
generations with manifest advantage to the success of college study.
{55}
In other things Sorbonne departs further from our modern ideas in the
matter of education, but still there are many even at the present time
who will read with profound sympathy his emphatic advice to the
University students that they must educate their hearts as well as
their intellects, and make their education subserve the purpose of
bringing them closer to God.
A word about certain customs that prevailed more or less generally in
the universities at this time, and that after having been much
misunderstood will now be looked at more sympathetically in the light
of recent educational developments will not be out of place here.
One of the advantages of modern German university education has often
been acclaimed to be the fact that students are tempted to make
portions of their studies in various cities, since all the courses are
equalized in certain ways, so that the time spent at any one of them
will be counted properly for their degrees. It has long been
recognized that travel makes the best possible complement to a
university course, and even when the English universities in the
Eighteenth Century sank to be little more than pleasant abiding places
where young men of the upper classes "ate their terms," the fact that
it was the custom "to make the grand tour" of continental travel,
supplied for much that was lacking in the serious side of their
education. Little as this might be anticipated as a feature of the
ruder times of the Thirteenth Century, when travel was so difficult,
it must be counted as one of the great advantages for the inquiring
spirits of the time. Dante, besides attending the universities in
Italy, and he certainly was at several of them, was also at Paris at
one time and probably also at Oxford. Professor Monroe in his text
book in the History of Education has stated this custom very
distinctly.
"With the founding of the universities and the establishment of the
nations in practically every university, it became quite customary
for students to travel from university to university, finding in
each a home in their appropriate nation. Many, however, willing to
accept the privileges of the clergy and the students without
undertaking their obligations, adopted this wandering life as a
permanent one. Being a privileged order, they readily found a
living, or made it by begging. A monk of {56} the early university
period writes: 'The scholars are accustomed to wander throughout the
whole world and visit all the cities, and their many studies bring
them understanding. For in Paris they seek a knowledge of the
liberal arts; of the ancient writers at Orleans; of medicine at
Salernum; of the black art at Toledo; and in no place decent
manners.'"
With regard to the old monk's criticism it must be remembered that old
age is always rather depreciative in criticism of the present and
over-appreciative of what happened in the past _se pueris_. Abuses
always seem to be creeping in that are going to ruin the force of
education, yet somehow the next generation succeeds in obtaining its
intellectual development in rather good shape. Besides as we must
always remember in educational questions, evils are ever exaggerated
and the memory of them is prone to live longer and to loom up larger
than that of the good with which they were associated and to which
indeed, as anyone of reasonable experience in educational circles
knows, they may constitute by comparison only a very small amount.
Undoubtedly the wanderings of students brought with it many abuses,
and if we were to listen to some of the stories of foreign student
life in Paris in our own time, we might think that much of evil and
nothing of good was accomplished by such wandering, but inasmuch as we
do so we invite serious error of judgment.
Another striking feature of university life which constituted a
distinct anticipation of something very modern in our educational
system, was the lending of professors of different nationalities among
the universities. It is only at the beginning of the Twentieth Century
that we have reestablished this custom. In the Thirteenth Century,
however, Albertus Magnus taught for a time at Cologne and then later
at Paris and apparently also at Rome. St. Thomas of Aquin, after
having taught for a time at Paris, lectured in various Italian
universities and then finally at the University of Rome to which he
was tempted by the Popes. Duns Scotus, besides teaching in Oxford,
taught also at Paris. Alexander of Hales before him seems to have done
the same thing. Roger Bacon, after studying at the University of
Paris, seems to have commenced teaching there, though most of his
professional work was {57} accomplished at the University of Oxford.
Raymond Lully probably had professional experiences at several Spanish
Universities besides at Paris. In a word, if a man were a
distinguished genius he was almost sure to be given the opportunity to
influence his generation at a number of centers of educational life,
and not be confined as has been the case in the centuries since to but
one or at most, and that more by accident than intent, to perhaps two.
In a word there is not a distinctive feature of modern university life
that was not anticipated in the Thirteenth Century.
[Illustration]
FLYING BUTTRESS (AMIENS)
{58}
IV
THE NUMBER OF STUDENTS AND DISCIPLINE.
For most people the surprise of finding that the subjects with which
the students were occupied at the universities of the Thirteenth
Century were very much the same as those which claim the attention of
modern students, will probably be somewhat mitigated by the thought
that after all there were only few in attendance at the universities,
and as a consequence only a small proportion of the population shared
in that illumination, which has become so universal in the spread of
opportunities for the higher education in these later times. While
such an impression is cherished by many even of those who think that
they know the history of education, and unfortunately are considered
_by others_ to be authorities on the subject, it is the falsest
possible idea that could be conceived of this medieval time with which
we are concerned. We may say at once that it is a matter of
comparatively easy collation of statistics to show, that in proportion
to the population of the various countries, there were actually more
students taking advantage of the opportunity to acquire university
education in the Thirteenth Century, than there were at any time in
the Nineteenth Century, or even in the midst of this era of widespread
educational opportunities in the Twentieth Century.
Most people know the traditions which declare that there were between
twenty and thirty thousand students at the University of Paris toward
the end of the Thirteenth Century. At the same time there were said to
have been between fifteen and twenty thousand students at the
University of Bologna. Correspondingly large numbers have been
reported for the University of Oxford and many thousands were supposed
to be in attendance at the University of Cambridge. It is usually
considered, however, that these figures are gross exaggerations. It is
easy to assert this but rather difficult to prove. As a matter of fact
the nearer one comes to the actual times in the {59} history of
education, the more definitely do writers speak of these large numbers
of students in attendance. For instance Gascoigne, who says that there
were thirty thousand students at the University of Oxford at the end
of the Thirteenth Century, lived himself within a hundred years of the
events of which he talks, and he even goes so far as to declare that
he saw the rolls of the University containing this many names. There
is no doubt at all about his evidence in the matter and there is no
mistake possible with regard to his figures. They were written out in
Latin, not expressed in Arabic or Roman numerals, the copying of which
might so easily give opportunities for error to creep in.
In spite of such evidence it is generally conceded that to accept
these large numbers would be almost surely a mistake. There were
without any doubt many thousands of students at the Thirteenth Century
universities. There were certainly more students at the University of
Paris in the last quarter of the Thirteenth Century than there were at
any time during the Nineteenth Century. This of itself is enough to
startle modern complacency out of most of its ridiculous
self-sufficiency. There can be scarcely a doubt that the University of
Bologna at the time of its largest attendance had more students than
any university of modern times, proud as we may be (and deservedly) of
our immense institutions of learning. With regard to the English
universities the presence of very large numbers is much more doubtful.
Making every allowance, however, there can be no hesitation in saying
that Oxford had during the last quarter of the Thirteenth Century a
larger number than ever afterwards within her walls and that
Cambridge, though never so numerous as her rival, had a like good
fortune. Professor Laurie of Edinburgh, a very conservative authority
and one not likely to concede too much to the Middle Ages in anything,
would allow, as we shall see, some ten thousand students to Oxford.
Others have claimed more than half that number for Cambridge as the
lowest possible estimate. Even if it be conceded, as has sometimes
been urged, that all those in service in the universities were also
counted as students, these numbers would not be reduced very
materially and it must not be {60} forgotten that, in those days of
enthusiastic striving after education, young men were perfectly
willing to take up even the onerous duties of personal services to
others, in order to have the opportunity to be closely in touch with a
great educational institution and to receive even a moderate amount of
benefit from its educational system. In our own time there are many
students who are working their way through the universities, and in
the Thirteenth Century when the spirit of independence was much less
developed, and when any stigma that attached to personal service was
much less felt than it is at the present time, there were many more
examples of this earnest striving for intellectual development.
If we discuss the situation in English-speaking countries as regards
the comparative attendance at the universities in the Thirteenth
Century and in our own time, we shall be able to get a reasonably good
idea of what must be thought in this matter. The authorities are
neither difficult of consultation nor distant, and comparatively much
more is known about the population of England at this time than about
most of the continental countries. England was under a single ruler,
while the geographical divisions that we now know by the name of
France, Spain, Italy and Germany were the seats of several rulers at
least and sometimes of many, a circumstance which does not favor our
obtaining an adequate idea of the populations.
That but two universities provided all the opportunities for whatever
higher education there was in England at this time, would of itself
seem to stamp the era as backward in educational matters. A little
consideration of the comparative number of students with reference to
the population of the country who were thus given the opportunity for
higher education--and took advantage of it--at that time and the
present, will show the unreasonableness of such an opinion. It is not
so easy as might be imagined to determine just what was the population
even of England in the Thirteenth Century. During Elizabeth's reign
there were, according to the census, an estimate made about the time
of the great Armada, altogether some four millions of people. Froude,
accepts this estimate as representing very well the actual number of
the population. Certainly there were not more {61} than five millions
at the end of the Sixteenth Century. Lingard, who for this purpose
must be considered as a thoroughly conservative authority, estimates
that there were not much more than two millions of people in England
at the end of the Twelfth Century. This is probably not an
underestimate. At the end of the Thirteenth Century there were not
many more than two millions and a half of people in the country. At
the very outside there were, let us say, three millions. Out of this
meagre population, ten thousand students were, on the most
conservative estimate, taking advantage of the opportunities for the
higher education that were provided for them at the universities.
At the present moment, though we pride ourselves on the numbers in
attendance at our universities, and though the world's population is
so much more numerous and the means of transportation so much more
easy, we have very few universities as large as these of the
Thirteenth Century. No American university at the present moment has
as large a number of students as had Oxford at the end of the
Thirteenth Century, and of course none of them compares at all with
Paris or Bologna in this respect. Even the European universities, as
we have suggested, fall behind their former glory from this
standpoint. In the attendance to the number of population the
comparison is even more startling for those who have not thought at
all of the Middle Ages as a time of wonderful educational facilities
and opportunities. In the greater City of New York as we begin the
Twentieth Century there are perhaps fifteen thousand students in
attendance at educational institutions which have university
privileges. I may say that this is a very liberal allowance. At
universities in the ordinary sense of the word there are not more than
ten thousand students and the remainder is added in order surely to
include all those who may be considered as doing undergraduate work in
colleges and schools of various kinds. Of these fifteen thousand at
least one-fourth come from outside of the greater city, and there are
some who think that even one-third would not be too large a number to
calculate as not being drawn directly from our own population.
Connecticut and New Jersey furnish large numbers of students and then,
besides, the post-graduate schools {62} of the universities have very
large numbers in attendance even from distant states and foreign
countries.
It will be within the bounds of truth, then, to say, that there are
between ten and twelve thousand students, out of our population of
more than four millions in Greater New York taking advantage of the
opportunities for the higher education provided by our universities
and colleges. At the end of the Thirteenth Century in England there
were at least ten thousand students out of a population of not more
and very probably less than three millions, who were glad to avail
themselves of similar opportunities. This seems to be perfectly fair
comparison and we have tried to be as conservative as possible in
every way in order to bring out the truth in the matter.
It can scarcely fail to be a matter of supreme surprise to find that a
century so distant as the Thirteenth, should thus equal our own
vaunted Twentieth Century in the matter of opportunities for the
higher education afforded and taken advantage of. It has always been
presumed that the Middle Ages, while a little better than the Dark
Ages, were typical periods in which there was little, if any desire
for higher education and even fewer opportunities. It was thought that
there was constant repression of the desire for knowledge which
springs so eternally in the human heart and that the Church, or at
least the ecclesiastical authorities of the time, set themselves
firmly against widespread education, because it would set people to
thinking for themselves. As a matter of fact, however, every Cathedral
and every monastery became a center of educational influence, and even
the poorest, who showed special signs of talent, obtained the
opportunity to secure knowledge to the degree that they wished. It is
beyond doubt or cavil, that at no time in the world's history have so
many opportunities for the higher education been open to all classes
as during the Thirteenth Century.
In order to show how thoroughly conservative are the numbers in
attendance at the universities that I have taken, I shall quote two
good recent authorities, one of them Professor Laurie, the Professor
of the Institutes and History of Education in the University of
Edinburgh, and the other Thomas Davidson, a well-known American
authority on educational {63} subjects. Each of their works from which
I shall quote has been published or revised within the last few years.
Professor Laurie in "The Rise and Early Constitution of the University
with a Survey of the Medieval Education," which formed one of the
International Educational Series, edited by Commissioner Harris and
published by Appleton, said:
"When one hears of the large number of students who attended the
earliest universities--ten thousand and even twenty thousand at
Bologna, an equal, and at one time a greater, number at Paris, and
thirty thousand at Oxford--one cannot help thinking that the numbers
have been exaggerated. There is certainly evidence that the Oxford
attendance was never so great as has been alleged (see Anstey's 'Mon
Acad.'); but when we consider that attendants, servitors, college
cooks, etc., were regarded as members of the university community,
and that the universities provided for a time the sole recognized
training grounds for those wishing to enter the ecclesiastical or
legal or teaching professions, I see no reason to doubt the
substantial accuracy of the tradition as to attendance--especially
when we remember that at Paris and Oxford a large number were mere
boys of from twelve to fifteen years of age."
As to the inclusion of servitors, we have already said that many,
probably, indeed, most of them, were actual students working their way
through the university in these enthusiastic days. Professor Laurie's
authority for the assertion that a large number of the students at
Paris and Oxford were mere boys, is a regulation known to have existed
at one of these universities requiring that students should not be
less than twelve years of age. Anyone who has studied medieval
university life, however, will have been impressed with the idea, that
the students were on the average older at the medieval universities
rather than younger than they are at the present time. The rough
hazing methods employed, almost equal to those of our own day! would
seem to indicate this. Besides, as Professor Laurie confesses in the
next paragraph, many of the students were actually much older than at
present. Our university courses are arranged for young men between 17
and 22, but that is, to fall back on Herbert Spencer, presumably
because the period of infancy is {64} lengthening with the evolution
of the race. There are many who consider that at the present time
students are too long delayed in the opportunity to get at the
professional studies, and that it is partly the consequence of this
that the practical branches are so much more taken up under the
elective system. As we said in the chapter on Universities and
Preparatory Schools, in Italy and in other southern countries, it is
not a surprising thing to have a young man graduate at the age of 16
or 17 with his degree of A. B., after a thoroughly creditable
scholastic career. This means that he began his university work proper
under 13 years of age; so that we must judge the medieval universities
to some extent at least with this thought in mind.
Mr. Thomas Davidson in his "History of Education," [Footnote 7] in
the chapter on The Medieval University has a paragraph in which he
discusses the attendance, especially during the Thirteenth Century,
and admits that the numbers, while perhaps not so large as have been
reported, were very large in comparison to modern institutions of the
same kind, and frankly concedes that education rose during these
centuries which are often supposed to have been so unfavorable to
educational development, to an amazing height scarcely ever surpassed.
He says:
[Footnote 7: A History of Education, by Thomas Davidson, author of
Aristotle and Ancient Educational Ideas. New York: Scribners, 1900.]
"The number of students reported as having attended some of the
universities in those early days almost passes belief; _e. g._
Oxford is said to have had thirty thousand about the year 1300, and
half that number even as early as 1224. The numbers attending the
University of Paris were still greater. These numbers become less
surprising when we remember with what poor accommodations--a bare
room and an armful of straw--the students of those days were
content, and what numbers of them even a single teacher like Abelard
could, long before draw into lonely retreats. That in the Twelfth
and following centuries there was no lack of enthusiasm for study,
notwithstanding the troubled condition of the times, is very clear.
The instruction given at the universities, moreover, reacted upon
the lower schools, raising their standard and supplying them with
competent teachers. Thus, in the Thirteenth and {65} Fourteenth
centuries, education rose in many European states to a height which
it had not attained since the days of Seneca and Quintilian."
{opp64}
[Illustration]
CHRIST DRIVING OUT MONEY CHANGERS (GIOTTO)
[Illustration]
HEAD FROM ANNUNCIATION (GIOTTO)
[Illustration]
BRIDE MARRIAGE AT CANA (GIOTTO)
[Illustration]
SAINT'S HEAD (MOSAIC, ST. MARK'S VENICE)
A very serious objection that would seem to have so much weight as to
preclude all possibility of accepting as true the large numbers
mentioned, is the fact that it is very hard to understand how such an
immense number of students could have been supported in any town of
the Middle Ages. This objection has carried so much weight to some
minds as to make them give up the thought of large numbers at the
medieval universities. Professor Laurie has answered it very
effectively, however, and in his plausible explanation gives a number
of points which emphasize the intense ardor of these students of the
Middle Ages in their search for knowledge, and shows how ready they
were to bear serious trials and inconveniences, not to say absolute
sufferings and hardships, in order that they might have opportunities
for the higher education. The objection then redounds rather to the
glory of the medieval universities than lessens their prestige, either
as regards numbers or the enthusiasm of their students.
"The chief objection to accepting the tradition (of large numbers at
the universities) lies in the difficulty of seeing how in those
days, so large a number of the young men of Europe could afford the
expense of residence away from their homes. This difficulty,
however, is partly removed when we know that many of the students
were well to do, that a considerable number were matured men,
already monks and canons, and that the endowments of Cathedral
schools also were frequently used to enable promising scholars to
attend foreign universities. Monasteries also regularly sent boys of
thirteen and fourteen to university seats. A papal instruction of
1335 required every Benedictine and Augustinian community to send
boys to the universities in the proportion of one in twenty of their
residents. Then, state authorities ordered free passages for all who
were wending their way through the country to and from the seat of
learning. In the houses of country priests--not to speak of the
monastery hospitals--traveling scholars were always accommodated
gratuitously, and even local subscriptions were frequently made to
help them on their way. {66} Poor traveling scholars were, in fact,
a medieval institution, and it was considered no disgrace for a
student to beg and receive alms for his support."
After reading these authoritative opinions, it would be rather
difficult to understand the false impressions which have obtained so
commonly for the last three centuries with regard to education in the
Middle Ages, if we did not realize that history, especially for
English-speaking people, has for several centuries been written from a
very narrow standpoint and with a very definite purpose. About a
century ago the Comte de Maistre said in his Soirées de St.
Petersburg, that history for the three hundred years before his time
"had been a conspiracy against the truth." Curiously enough the
editors of the Cambridge Modern History in their first volume on the
Renaissance, re-echoed this sentiment of the French historical writer
and philosopher. They even use the very words "history has been a
conspiracy against the truth" and proclaim that if we are to get at
truth in this generation, we must go behind all the classical
historians, and look up contemporary documents and evidence and
authorities once more for ourselves. It is the maintenance of a
tradition that nothing good could possibly have come out of the
Nazareth of the times before the Reformation, that has led to this
serious misapprehension of the true position of those extremely
important centuries in modern education--the Thirteenth and the
Fourteenth.
To those who know even a little of what was accomplished in these
centuries, it is supremely amusing to read the childish treatment
accorded them and the trivial remarks that even accredited historians
of education make with regard to them. Occasionally, however, the
feeling of the reader who knows something of the subject is not one of
amusement, but far from it. There are times when one cannot help but
feel that it is not ignorance, but a deliberate purpose to minimize
the importance of these times in culture and education, that is at the
basis of some of the utterly mistaken remarks that are made. We shall
take occasion only to give one example of this, but that will afford
ample evidence of the intolerant spirit that characterizes the work of
some even of the supposedly most enlightened historians of education.
The quotation will be from Compayré's {67} "History of Pedagogy" which
is, I understand, in use in nearly every Normal School in this country
and is among the books required in many Normal School examinations.
M. Compayré in an infamous paragraph which bears the title "The
Intellectual Feebleness of the Middle Age," furnishes an excellent
example of how utterly misunderstood, if not deliberately
misrepresented, has been the whole spirit and content and the real
progressiveness of education in this wonderful period. After some
belittling expressions as to the influence of Christianity on
education--expressions utterly unjustified by the facts--he has this
to say with regard to the Thirteenth Century, which is all the more
surprising because it is the only place where he calls any attention
to it. He says:
"In 1291, of all the monks in the convent of St. Gall, there was not
one who could read and write. It was so difficult to find notaries
public, that acts had to be passed verbally. The barons took pride
in their ignorance. Even after the efforts of the Twelfth Century,
instruction remained a luxury for the common people; it was the
privilege of the ecclesiastics and even they did not carry it very
far. The Benedictines confess that the mathematics were studied only
for the purpose of calculating the date of Easter."
This whole paragraph of M. Compayré (the rest must be read to be
appreciated), whose history of education was considered to be of such
value that it was deemed worthy of translation by the President of a
State Normal School and that it has been adopted as a work of
reference, in some cases of required study, in many of the Normal
Schools throughout the country, is a most wonderful concoction of
ingredients, all of which are meant to dissolve every possible idea
that people might have of the existence of any tincture of education
during the Middle Ages. There is only one fact which deeply concerns
us because it refers to the Thirteenth Century. M. Compayré says that
in 1291 of all the monks of the Convent of Saint Gall there was not
one who could read and write. This single fact is meant to sum up the
education of the century for the reader. Especially it is meant to
show the student of pedagogy how deeply sunk in ignorance were the
monks and all the ecclesiastics of this period.
{68}
Before attempting to say anything further it may be as well to call
attention to the fact that in the original French edition the writer
did not say that there was not a single monk. He said, "There was but
one monk, who could read and write." Possibly it seemed to the
translator to make the story more complete to leave out this one poor
monk and perhaps one monk more or less, especially a medieval monk,
may not count for very much to modern students of education. There are
those of us, however, who consider it too bad to obliterate even a
single monk in this crude way and we ask that he shall be put back.
There _was one_ who could read and write and carry on the affairs of
the monastery. Let us have him at least, by all means.
In the year 1291 when M. Compayré says that there was but a single
monk at the monastery of St. Gall who could read and write, he, a
professor himself at a French Normal School, must have known very well
that there were over twenty thousand students at the University of
Paris, almost as many at the University of Bologna, and over five
thousand, some authorities say many more than this (Professor Laurie
would admit more than ten thousand), at the University of Oxford,
though all Christian Europe at this time did not have a population of
more than 15,000,000 people. He must have known, too, or be hopelessly
ignorant in educational matters, that many of the students at these
universities belonged to the Franciscans and Dominicans, and that
indeed many of the greatest teachers at the universities were members
of these monastic orders. Of this he says nothing, however. All that
he says is "Education was the privilege of the ecclesiastics and they
did not carry it very far." This is one way of writing a history of
education. It is a very effective way of poisoning the wells of
information and securing the persistence of the tradition that there
was no education until after the beginning of the Sixteenth Century.
Meantime one can scarcely help but admire the ingenuity of deliberate
purpose that uses the condition of the monastery of St. Gall to
confirm his statement. St. Gall had been founded by Irish monks
probably about the beginning of the Eighth Century. It had been for at
least three centuries a center of education, civilization and culture,
as well as of religion, for the {69} barbarians who had settled in the
Swiss country after the trans-migration of nations. The Irish had
originally obtained their culture from Christian Missionaries, and now
as Christian Missionaries they brought it back to Europe and
accomplished their work with wonderful effectiveness. St. Gall was for
centuries a lasting monument to their efforts. After the Tenth
Century, however, the monastery began to degenerate. It was almost
directly in the path of armies which so frequently went down to Italy
because of the German interest in the Italian peninsula and the claims
of the German emperor. After a time according to tradition, the
emperor insisted that certain of the veterans of his army should be
received and cared for in their old age at St. Gall. Gradually this
feature of the institution became more and more prominent until in the
Thirteenth Century it had become little more than a home for old
soldiers. In order to live on the benefices of the monastery these men
had to submit to ecclesiastical regulations and wear the habit. They
were, it is true, a sort of monk, that is, they were willing, for the
sake of the peace and ease which it brought, to accept the living thus
provided for them and obey to some degree at least the rules of the
monastery. It is not surprising that among these there should have
been only one who could read and write. The soldiers of the time
despised the men of letters and prided themselves on not being able to
write. That a historian of pedagogy, however, should take this one
fact in order to give students an idea of the depth of ignorance of
the Middle Ages, is an exhibition of some qualities in our modern
educated men, that one does not like to think of as compatible with
the capacity to read and write. It would indeed be better not to be
able to read and write than thus to read and write one's own
prejudices into history, and above all the history of education.
Compayré's discussion of the "Causes of the Ignorance" of the Middle
Ages in the next paragraph, is one of the most curious bits of special
pleading by a man who holds a brief for one side of the question, that
I think has ever been seen in what was to be considered serious
history. He first makes it clear how much opposed the Christian Church
was to education, then he admits that she did some things which cannot
be denied, but minimizes their significance. Then he concludes that it
was not {70} the fault of the Church, but in this there is a precious
bit of damning by faint praise. It would be impossible for any
ordinary person who had only Compayré for authority to feel anything
after reading the paragraph, but that Christianity was a serious
detriment and surely not a help to the cause of progress in education.
I quote part of the paragraph:
"What were the permanent causes of that situation which lasted for ten
centuries? The Catholic Church has sometimes been held responsible for
this. Doubtless the Christian doctors did not always profess a very
warm sympathy for intellectual culture. Saint Augustine has said: It
is the ignorant who gain possession of heaven (indocti coelum
rapiunt.) Saint Gregory the Great, a Pope of the Sixth Century,
declared that he would blush to have the holy word conform to the
rules of grammar. Too many Christians, in a word, confounded ignorance
with holiness. Doubtless, towards the Seventh Century, the darkness
still hung thick over the Christian Church. Barbarians invaded the
Episcopate, and carried with them their rude manners. Doubtless, also,
during the feudal period the priest often became a soldier, and
remained ignorant. It would, however, be unjust to bring a
constructive charge against the Church of the Middle Age, and to
represent it as systematically hostile to instruction. Directly to the
contrary, it is the clergy who, in the midst of the general barbarism,
preserved some vestiges of the ancient culture. The only schools of
that period are the Episcopal and claustral schools, the first annexed
to the Bishops' palaces, the second to the monasteries. The religious
orders voluntarily associated manual labor with mental labor. As far
back as 530, St. Benedict founded the Convent of Monte Cassino, and
drew up statutes which made reading and intellectual labor a part of
the daily life of the monks." When this damning by faint praise is
taken in connection with the paragraph in which only a single monk at
the Monastery of St. Gall is declared to have been able to read and
write, the utterly false impression that is sure to result, can be
readily understood even by those who are not sympathetic students of
the Middle Ages. This is how our histories of education have been
written as a rule, and as a consequence the most precious period in
modern education, its great origin, has been ignored even by
professional scholars, to the great detriment not only of historical
knowledge but also of any proper appreciation of the evolution of
education.
Portraits
Bennozo Gozzoli
[Illustration]
PETRARCA OMNIUM VIRTUTUM
MONARCA
[Illustration]
GIOTTO, PICTOR EXIMIUS
[Illustration]
DANTE THEOLOGUS NULLIUS
DOGMATIS EXPERS
{71}
It will be said by those who do not appreciate the conditions that
existed in the Middle Ages, that these numbers at the universities
seeking the higher education, mean very little for the culture of the
people, since practically all of those in attendance at the
universities belonged to the clerical order. There is no doubt that
most students were clerics in the Thirteenth Century. This did not
mean, however, that they had taken major orders or had in any way
bound themselves irrevocably to continue in the clerical vocation. The
most surprising thing about the spread of culture and the desire for
the higher education during the Thirteenth Century, is that they
developed in spite of the fact that the rulers of the time were all
during the century, embroiled in war either with their neighbors or
with the nobility. Anyone who wanted to live a quiet, intellectual
life turned naturally to the clerical state, which enabled him to
escape military duties and gave him opportunities for study, as well
as protection from many exactions that might otherwise be levied upon
him. The church not only encouraged education, but supplied the
peaceful asylums in which it might be cultivated to the heart's
content of the student.
While this clerical state was a necessity during the whole time of
residence at the university, it was not necessarily maintained
afterward. Many of the clerics did not even have minor orders--orders
which it is well understood carry with them no absolute obligation of
continuing in the clerical state. Sextons and their assistants were
clerics. When the word canon originally came into use it meant nothing
more than that the man was entered on the rolls of a church and
received some form of wages therefrom. Students at the universities
were by ecclesiastical courtesy then, clerics (from which comes the
word clerk, one who can read and write) though not in orders, and it
was because of this that the university was able to maintain the
rights of students. It was well understood that after graduation men
might take up the secular life and indeed most of them did. In
succeeding chapters we shall see examples of this and discuss the
question further. Professors at the {72} universities had to maintain
their clerical condition so that even professors of law and of
medicine were not allowed to marry. This law continued long beyond the
Thirteenth Century, however. Professors of medicine were the first to
be freed from the obligation of celibacy, but not until the middle of
the Fifteenth Century at Paris, while other professors were bound thus
for a full century later. Certain minor teaching positions at Oxford
are still under this law, which evidently has seemed to have some
advantage or it would not have been maintained.
It might perhaps be thought that only the wealthier class, the sons of
the nobility and of the wealthy merchants of the cities had
opportunities at the universities. As a matter of fact, however, the
vast majority of the students was drawn from the great middle class.
The nobility were nearly always too occupied with their pleasures and
their martial duties to have time for the higher education. The
tradition that a nobleman should be an educated gentleman had not yet
come in. Indeed many of the nobility during the Thirteenth Century
rather prided themselves on the fact that they not only had no higher
education, but that they did not know even how to read and write. When
we reflect, then, on the large numbers who went to the universities,
it adds to our surprise to realize that they were drawn from the
burgher class. It is evident that many of the sons even of the poor
were afforded opportunities in different ways at the universities of
the time.
Tradition shows that from the earliest time there were foundations on
which poor students could live, and various arrangements were made by
which, aside from these, they might make their living while continuing
their studies. Working one's way through the university was more
common in the Thirteenth Century than it is at the present day, though
we are proud of the large numbers who now succeed in the double task
of supporting and educating themselves, with excellent success in both
enterprises. There are many stories of poor students who found
themselves about to be obliged to give up their studies, encountering
patrons of various kinds who enabled them to go on with their
education.
There is a very pretty set of legends with regard to St. Edmund of
Canterbury in this matter. He bears this name {73} because he was
afterward the sainted primate of England. For many years he taught at
the University of Oxford. The story is told of a clerical friend
sending him up a student to Oxford and asking that his bills be sent
to him. St. Edmund's answer was that he would not be robbed of an
opportunity of doing good like this, and he took upon himself the
burden of caring for the student. At the time there were many others
dependent on his bounty and his reputation was such that he was
enabled to help a great many through the benefactions of friends, who
found no higher pleasure in life than being able to come generously to
Edmund's assistance in his charities.
Those who know the difficulty of managing very large bodies of
students will wonder inevitably, how the medieval universities, with
their less formal and less complete organizations, succeeded in
maintaining discipline for all these thousands of students. Most
people will remember at once all the stories of roughness, of horse
play, of drinking and gaming or worse that they have heard of the
medieval students and will be apt to conclude that they are not to be
wondered at after all, since it must have been practically impossible
for the faculties of universities to keep order among such vast
numbers. As a matter of fact, however, the story of the origin and
maintenance of discipline in these universities is one of the most
interesting features of university life. The process of discipline
became in itself a very precious part of education, as it should be of
course in any well regulated institution of learning. The very fact,
moreover, that in spite of these large numbers and other factors that
we shall call attention to in a moment, comparatively so few
disgraceful stories of university life have come down to us, and the
other and still more important fact that the universities could be
kept so constantly at the attainment of their great purpose for such
numbers, is itself a magnificent tribute to those who succeeded in
doing it, and to the system which was gradually evolved, not by the
faculty alone but by teachers and students for university government.
With regard to the discipline of the medieval universities not much is
known and considerable of what has been written on this obscure
subject wears an unfavorable tinge, because it is unfortunately true
that "the good men do is oft interred with {74} their bones" while the
evil has an immortality all its own. The student escapades of the
universities, the quarrels between town and gown, the stories of the
evils apparently inevitable, where many young men are congregated--the
hazing, the rough horse play, the carousing, the immoralities--have
all come down to us, while it is easy to miss the supreme significance
of the enthusiasm for learning that in these difficult times gathered
so many students together from distant parts of the world, when
traveling was so difficult and dangerous, and kept them at the
universities for long years in spite of the hardships and
inconveniences of the life. With regard to our modern universities the
same thing is true, and the outside world knows much more of the
escapades of the few, the little scandals of college life, that
scarcely make a ripple but are so easily exaggerated, and so
frequently repeated and lose nothing by repetition, the waste of time
in athletics, in gambling, in social things, than of the earnest work
and the successful intellectual progress and interests of the many.
This should be quite enough to make the modern university man very
slow to accept the supposed pictures of medieval student life, which
are founded mainly on the worse side of it. Goodness is proverbially
uninteresting, a happy people has no history and the ordinary life of
the university student needs a patient sympathetic chronicler; and
such the medieval universities have not found as yet. But they do not
need many allowances, if it will only be remembered under what
discouragements they labored and how much they accomplished.
The reputation of the medieval universities has suffered from this
very human tendency to be interested in what is evil and to neglect
the good. Even as it is, however, a good deal with regard to the
discipline of the universities in the early times is known and does
not lose in interest from the fact, that the main factor in it was a
committee of the students themselves working in conjunction with the
faculty, and thus anticipating what is most modern in the development
of the disciplinary regime of our up-to-date universities. At first
apparently, in the schools from which the universities originated
there was no thought of the necessity for discipline. The desire for
education was considered to be sufficient to keep men occupied in {75}
such a way that further discipline would not be necessary. It can
readily be understood that the crowds that flocked to hear Abelard in
Paris, and who were sufficiently interested to follow him out to the
Desert of the Paraclete when he was no longer allowed to continue his
lectures in connection with the school at Paris, would have quite
enough of ruling from the internal forum of their supreme interest,
not to need any discipline in the external forum.
In the course of time, however, with the coming of even greater
numbers to the University of Paris, and especially when the attendance
ran up into many thousands, some form of school discipline became an
absolute necessity. This developed of itself and in a very practical
way. The masters seem to have had very little to do with it at the
beginning since they occupied themselves entirely with their teaching
and preparation for lectures. What was to become later one of the
principal instruments of discipline was at first scarcely more than a
social organization among the students. Those who came from different
countries were naturally attracted to one another, and were more ready
to help each other. When students first came they were welcomed by
their compatriots who took care to keep them from being imposed upon,
enabled them to secure suitable quarters and introduced them to
university customs generally, so that they might be able to take
advantage, as soon as possible, of the educational opportunities.
The friendships thus fostered gradually grew into formal
organizations, the so-called "nations." These began to take form just
before the beginning of the Thirteenth Century. They made it their
duty to find lodgings for their student compatriots, and evidently
also to supply food on some cooperative plan for at least the poorer
students. Whenever students of a particular nationality were injured
in any way, their "nation" as a formal organization took up their
cause and maintained their rights, even to the extent of an appeal to
formal process of law before the magistrates, if necessary. The
nations were organized before the faculties in the universities were
formally recognized as independent divisions of the institution, and
they acted as intermediaries between the university head and the
students, making themselves responsible for discipline to no slight
{76} degree. At the beginning of the Thirteenth Century in Paris all
the students belonged to one or other of four nations, the Picard, the
Norman, the French, which embraced Italians, Spaniards, Greeks and
Orientals, and the English which embraced the English, Irish, Germans,
Poles (heterogeneous collection we would consider it in these modern
days) and in addition all other students from the North of Europe.
Professor Laurie, of the University of Edinburgh, in his Rise and
Early Constitution of Universities in the International Educational
Series [Footnote 8] says:
[Footnote 8: The Rise and Early Constitution of Universities, with a
survey of Medieval Education, by S. S. Laurie, LL.D., Professor of
the Institutes and History of Education in the University of
Edinburgh. New York, D. Appleton & Company, 1901.]
"The subdivisions of the nations were determined by the localities
from which the students and masters came. Each subdivision elected its
own dean and kept its own matriculation-book and money-chest. The
whole "nation" was represented, it is true, by the elected
procurators; but the deans of the subdivisions were regarded as
important officials, and were frequently, if not always, assessors of
the procurators. The procurators, four in number, were elected, not by
the students as in Bologna and Padua, but by the students and masters.
Each nation with its procurator and deans was an independent body,
passing its own statutes and rules, and exercising supervision over
the lodging-houses of the students. They had each a seal as
distinguished from the university seal, and each procurator stood to
his "nation" in the same relation as the Rector did to the whole
university. The Rector, again, was elected by the procurators, who sat
as his assessors, and together they constituted the governing body;
but this for purposes of discipline, protection and defense of
privileges chiefly, the _consortium magistrorum_ regulating the
schools. But so independent were the nations that the question whether
each had power to make statutes that overrode those of the
_universitas_, was still a question so late as the beginning of the
Seventeenth Century."
It is typical of the times that the governing system should thus have
grown up of itself and from amongst the students, rather than that it
should have been organized by the teachers {77} and imposed upon the
university. The nations represented the rise of that democratic
spirit, which was to make itself felt in the claims for the
recognition of rights for all the people in most of the countries
during the Thirteenth Century, and undoubtedly the character of the
government of the student body at the universities fostered this
spirit and is therefore to a noteworthy degree, responsible for the
advances in the direction of liberty which are chronicled during this
great century. This was a form of unconscious education but none the
less significant for that, and eminently practical in its results. At
this time in Europe there was no place where the members of the
community who flocked in largest numbers to the universities, the sons
of the middle classes, could have any opportunities to share in
government or learn the precious lessons of such participation, except
at the universities. There gradually came an effort on the part of the
faculties to lessen many of the rights of the nations of the
universities, but the very struggle to maintain these on the part of
the student body, was of itself a precious training against the
usurpation of privileges that was to be of great service later in the
larger arena of national politics, and the effects of which can be
noted in every country in Europe, nowhere more than in England, where
the development of law and liberty was to give rise to a supreme
heritage of democratic jurisprudence for the English speaking peoples
of all succeeding generations.
{78}
V
POST-GRADUATE WORK AT THE UNIVERSITIES.
In modern times it has often been said that no university can be
considered to be doing its proper work unless, besides teaching, it is
also adding to the existing body of knowledge by original research.
Because of unfortunate educational traditions, probably the last thing
in the world that would enter into the minds of most people to
conceive as likely to be found in the history of the universities of
the Thirteenth Century, would be original research in any form. In
spite of this almost universal false impression, original work of the
most valuable kind, for much of which workers would be considered as
amply deserving of their doctorates in the various faculties of the
post-graduate departments of the most up-to-date of modern
universities, was constantly being accomplished during this wonderful
century. It is, as a matter of fact, with this phase of university
activity that the modern educator is sure to have more sympathy than
with any other, once the significant details of the work become clear.
All surprise that surpassing original work was accomplished will cease
when it is recalled that, besides creating the universities
themselves, this century gave us the great Cathedrals--a well-spring
of originality, and a literature in every civilized country of Europe
that has been an inspiration to many subsequent generations. At last
men had the time to devote to the things of the mind. During what are
called the Dark Ages, a term that must ever be used with the
realization that there are many bright points of light in them, men
had been occupied with wars and civic and political dissensions of all
kinds, and had been gradually climbing back to the heights of interest
in intellectual matters which had been theirs before the invasion of
the barbarians and the migration of nations. With the rebirth of
intellectual interests there came an intense curiosity to know
everything and to investigate every manifestation. {79} Everything
that men touched was novel, and the wonderful advances they made can
only be realized from actual consultation of their works, while the
reader puts himself as far as possible at the same mental point of
view from which they surveyed the world and their relations to it.
The modern university prides itself on the number of volumes written
by its professors and makes it a special feature of its announcements
to call attention to its at least supposed additions to knowledge in
this mode. It must have been immensely more difficult to preserve the
writings of the professors of the medieval universities for they had
to be copied out laboriously by hand, yet we have an enormous number
of large volumes of their works, on nearly every intellectual topic,
that have been carefully preserved. There are some twenty closely
printed large folio volumes of the writings of Albertus Magnus that
have come down to us. For two centuries, until the time of printing,
ardent students must have been satisfied to spend much time in
preserving these. While mainly devoted to theology, they treat of
nearly everything else, and at least one of the folio volumes is taken
up almost exclusively with physical science. St. Thomas Aquinas has as
many volumes to his credit and his work is even of more importance.
Duns Scotus died at a very early age, scarcely more than forty, yet
his writings are voluminously extensive and have been carefully
preserved, for few men had as enthusiastic students as he. Alas! that
his name should be preserved for most people only in the familiar
satiric appellation 'dunce.' The modern educator will most rejoice at
the fact that the students of the time must have indeed been devoted
to their masters to set themselves to the task of copying out their
work so faithfully for, as Cardinal Newman has pointed out, it is the
personal influence of the master, rather than the greatness of the
institution, that makes education effective.
First with regard to philosophy, the mistress of all studies, whose
throne has been shaken but not shattered in these ultimate times.
After all it must not be forgotten that this was the great century of
the development of scholastic philosophy. While this scholastic
philosophy is supposed by many students of modern philosophy to be a
thing of the past, it still continues {80} to be the basis of the
philosophical teaching in the Catholic seminaries and universities
throughout the world. Catholic philosophers are well known as
conservative thinkers and writers, and yet are perfectly free to
confess that they consider themselves the nearer to truth the nearer
they are to the great scholastic thinkers of the Thirteenth Century.
Even in the circle of students of philosophy who are outside the
influence of scholasticism, there is no doubt that in recent years an
opinion much more favorable to the Schoolmen has gradually arisen.
This has been due to a study of scholastic sources. Only those despise
and talk slightingly of scholasticism who either do not know it at all
or know it only at second hand. With regard to the system of thought,
as such, ever is it true, that the more close the acquaintanceship the
more respect there is for it.
With regard to theology the case is even stronger than with regard to
philosophy. Practically all of the great authorities in theology
belong to the Thirteenth Century. It is true that men like Saint
Anselm lived before this time and were leaders in the great movement
that culminated in our century. Saint Anselm's book, _Cur Deus Homo_,
is indeed one of the best examples of the combination of scholastic
philosophy and theology that could well be cited. It is a triumph of
logical reasoning, applied to religious belief. Besides, it is a great
classic and any one who can read it unmoved by admiration for the
thinker who, so many centuries ago, could so trenchantly lay down his
thesis and develop it, must be lacking in some of the qualities of
human admiration. The writers of the Thirteenth Century in theology
are beyond even Anselm in their marvelous powers of systematizing
thought. One need only mention such names as Albertus Magnus, Thomas
Aquinas, Bonaventure. Duns Scotus, and Raymond Lully to make those who
are at all acquainted with the history of the time realize, that this
is not an idle expression of the enthusiasm of a special votary of the
Thirteenth Century.
As we shall see in discussing the career of Saint Thomas Aquinas, the
Catholic Church still continues to teach scholastic theology on
exactly the same lines as were laid down by this great doctor of the
church in his teaching at the University of Paris. Amid the crumbling
of many Christian systems of {81} thought, as upheld by the various
protestant sects, there has been a very general realization that the
Catholic Church has built up the only edifice of Christian
apologetics, which will stand the storms of time and the development
of human knowledge. Confessedly this edifice is founded on Thirteenth
Century scholasticism. Pope Leo XIII., than whom, even in the
estimation of those who are least sympathetic toward his high office,
there was no man of more supremely practical intelligence in our
generation, insisted that St. Thomas Aquinas must in general principle
at least, be the groundwork of the teaching of philosophy and theology
as they are to form the minds of future Catholic apologists.
The scholastic theology and philosophy of the Thirteenth Century have
come to us in absolute purity. The huge tomes which represent the
indefatigable labors of these ardent scholars were well preserved by
the subsequent generation which thought so much of them, and in spite
of the absence of printing have come down to us in perfectly clear
texts. It is easy to neglect them and to say that a study of them is
not worth while. They represent, however, the post-graduate work and
the research in the department of philosophy and theology of these
days, and any university of modern time would consider itself honored
by having their authors among its professors and alumni. Any one who
does not think so need only turn to the volumes themselves and read
them with understanding and sympathy, and there will be another
convert to the ranks of that growing multitude of scholars, who have
learned to appreciate the marvelous works of our university colleagues
of the Thirteenth Century.
With regard to law, not much need be said here, since it is well
understood that the foundations of our modern jurisprudence (see
chapters on Legal Origins), as well as the methods of teaching law,
were laid in the Thirteenth Century and the universities were the most
active factors, direct and indirect, in this work. The University of
Bologna developed from a law school. Toward the end of the Twelfth
Century Irnerius revived the study of the old Roman law and put the
curriculum of modern Civil Law on a firm basis. A little later Gratian
made his famous collection of decretals, which are the basis of Canon
{82} Law. Great popes, during the Thirteenth Century, beginning with
Innocent III., and continuing through such worthy emulators as Gregory
IX. and Boniface VIII., made it the special glory of their
pontificates to collect the decrees of their predecessors and arrange
and publish them, so that they might be readily available for
consultation.
French law assumed its modern form, and the basis of French
jurisprudence was laid, under Louis IX., who called to his assistance,
in this matter, the Professors of Law at the University of Paris, with
many of whom he was on the most intimate terms. His cousin, Ferdinand
of Castile, laid the foundation of the Spanish law about the same time
under almost similar circumstances, and with corresponding help. The
study of law in the English universities helped to the formulation of
the principles of the English Common Law in such simple connected form
as made them readily accessible for consultation. Just before the
beginning of the last quarter of the Thirteenth Century, Bracton, of
whose work much more will be said in a subsequent chapter, drew up the
digest of the English Common Law, which has been the basis of English
jurisprudence ever since. It took just about a century for these
countries, previously without proper codification of the principles of
their laws, to complete the fundamental work to such a degree, that it
is still the firm substructure on which rests all our modern laws.
Legal origins, in our modern sense, came not long before the
Thirteenth Century; at its end the work was finished, to all intents
and purposes. Of the influence of the universities and of the
university law departments, in all this there can be no doubt. The
incentive, undoubtedly, came from their teachings. The men who did so
much for legal origins of such far-reaching importance, were mainly
students of the universities of the time, whose enthusiasm for work
had not subsided with the obtaining of their degrees.
It is in medicine, however, much more than in law or theology, that
the eminently practical character of university teaching during the
Thirteenth Century can be seen, at least in the form in which it will
appeal to a scientific generation. We are so accustomed to think that
anything like real progress in medicine, and especially in surgery,
has only come in very {83} recent years, that it is a source of great
surprise to find how much these earnest students of a long distant
century anticipated the answers to problems, the solutions of which
are usually supposed to be among the most modern advances. Professor
Allbutt, the Regius professor of Physic in the University of
Cambridge, a position, the occupant of which is always a leader in
English medical thought, the present professor being one of the
world's best authorities in the history of medicine, recently pointed
out some of these marvels of old-time medicine and surgery. In an
address On the Historical Relations of Medicine and Surgery to the end
of the Sixteenth Century, delivered at the Congress of Arts and
Sciences at the St. Louis Exposition in 1904, he (Prof. Allbutt) spoke
with regard to one of the great university medical teachers of the
Thirteenth Century as follows:
"Both for his own great merits, as an original and independent
observer, and as the master of Lanfranc, William Salicet (Guglielmo
Salicetti of Piacenza, in Latin G. Placentinus de Saliceto--now
Cadeo), was eminent among the great Italian physicians of the latter
half of the Thirteenth Century. Now these great Italians were as
distinguished in surgery as in medicine, and William was one of the
protestants of the period against the division of surgery from inner
medicine; a division which he regarded as a separation of medicine
from intimate touch with nature. Like Lanfranc and the other great
surgeons of the Italian tradition, and unlike Franco and Ambroise
Paré, he had the advantage of the liberal university education of
Italy; but, like Paré and Wurtz, he had large practical experience
in hospital and on the battlefield. He practised first at Bologna,
afterward in Verona. William fully recognised that surgery cannot be
learned from books only. His Surgery contains many case histories,
for he rightly opined that good notes of cases are the soundest
foundation of good practice; and in this opinion and method Lanfranc
followed him. William discovered that dropsy may be due to a
'_durities renum_'; he substituted the knife for the Arabist abuse
of the cautery; he investigated the causes of the failure of healing
by first intention; he described the danger of wounds of the neck;
he sutured divided nerves; he forwarded the diagnosis of {84}
suppurative disease of the hip, and he referred chancre and
phagedaena to their real causes."
This paragraph sets forth some almost incredible anticipations of what
are usually considered among the most modern phases of medicine and
surgery. Perhaps the most surprising thing is the simple statement
that Salicet recognized that surgery cannot be learned from books
alone. His case histories are instructive even to the modern surgeon
who reads them. His insistence on his students making careful notes of
their cases as the soundest foundation of progress in surgery, is a
direct contradiction of nearly everything that has been said in recent
years about medieval medicine and especially the teaching of medicine.
(See Appendix.)
William's great pupil, Lanfranc, followed him in this, and Lanfranc
encouraged the practise at the University of Paris. There is a
note-book of a student at the University of Paris, made toward the end
of the Thirteenth Century, carefully preserved in the Museum of the
University of Berlin. This notebook was kept during Lanfranc's
teaching and contains some sketches of dissections, as well as some
illustrations of operative procedures, as studied with that celebrated
surgeon. The tradition of case histories continued at the University
of Paris down to the beginning of modern surgery.
Some of the doctrines in medicine that William of Salicet stated so
clearly, sound surprisingly modern. The connection, for instance,
between dropsy and _durities renum_ (hardening of the kidneys) shows
how wonderfully observant the old master was. At the present time we
know very little more about the dropsical condition associated with
chronic Bright's disease than the fact that it constantly occurs where
there is a sclerosis or contraction of the kidney. Bright in his study
of albuminuria and contracted kidney practically taught us no more
than this, except that he added the further symptom of the presence of
albumin in the urine. It must have been only as the result of many
carefully studied cases, followed by autopsies, that any such doctrine
could have come into existence. There is a dropsy that occurs with
heart disease; there is also a dropsy in connection with certain
affections of the liver, and yet the most frequent cause is just this
hardening of the kidneys {85} spoken of by this
middle-of-the-Thirteenth Century Italian professor of medicine, who,
if we would believe so many of the historians of medicine, was not
supposed to occupy himself at all with ante and post-mortem studies of
patients, but with the old-time medical authorities.
Almost more surprising than the question of dropsy is the
investigation as to the causes of the failure of healing by first
intention. The modern surgeon is very apt to think that he is the only
one who ever occupied himself with the thought, that wounds might be
made to heal by first intention and without the occurrence of
suppuration or granulation. Certainly no one would suspect any
interest in the matter as far back as the Thirteenth Century. William
of Salicet, however, and Lanfranc, both of them occupied themselves
much with this question and evidently looked at it from a very
practical standpoint. Many careful observations must have been made
and many sources of observational error eliminated to enable these men
to realize the possibilities of primary union, especially, knowing as
they did, nothing at all about the external causes of suppuration and
considering, as did surgeons for nearly seven centuries afterward,
that it was because of something within the patient's tissues that the
cases of suppuration had their rise.
Unfortunately, the pioneer work done by William and his great disciple
did not have that effect upon succeeding generations which it should
have had. There was a question in men's minds as to whether nature
worked better by primary union or by means of the suppurative process.
In the next century surgeons took the wrong horn of the dilemma and
even so distinguished a surgeon as Guy de Chauliac, who has been
called, not without good cause, the father of surgery, came to the
conclusion that suppuration was practically a necessary process in the
healing of large wounds at least, and that it must be encouraged
rather than discouraged. This doctrine did not have its first set-back
until the famous incident in Ambroise Paré's career, when one morning
after a battle, coming to his patients expecting to find many of them
very severely ill, he found them on the contrary in better condition
than the others for whom he had no forebodings. In accord with old
custom {86} he poured boiling oil into the wounds of all patients, but
the great surgeon's supply of oil had failed the day before and he
used plain water to cleanse the wounds of a number, fearing the worst
for them, however, because of the poison that must necessarily stay in
their wounds and then had the agreeable disappointment of finding
these patients in much better condition than those whom he had treated
with all the rules of his art, as they then were. Even this incident,
however, did not serve to correct entirely the old idea as to the
value of suppuration and down to Lister's time, that is almost the
last quarter of the Nineteenth Century, there is still question of the
value of suppuration in expediting the healing of wounds, and we hear
of laudable pus and of the proper inflammatory reaction that is
expected to bring about wound repair.
The danger of wounds of the neck is, of course, not a modern doctrine,
and yet very few people would think for a moment that it could be
traced back to the middle of the Thirteenth Century and to a practical
teacher of surgery in a medieval Italian university. Here once more
there is evidence of the work of a careful observer who has seen
patients expire in a few minutes as the result of some serious
incident during the course of operations upon the neck. He did not
realize that the danger was due, in many cases, to the sucking in of
air into the large veins, but even at the present time this question
is not wholly settled and the problem as to the danger of the presence
of air is still the subject of investigation.
As to the suture of divided nerves, it would ordinarily and as a
matter of course be claimed by most modern historians of surgery and
by practically all surgeons, as an affair entirely of the last half
century. William of Salicet, however, neglected none of the ordinary
surgical procedures that could be undertaken under the discouraging
surgical circumstances in which he lived. The limitations of
anesthesia, though there was much more of this aid than there has
commonly been any idea of, and the frequent occurrence of suppuration
must have been constant sources of disheartenment. His insistence on
the use of the knife rather than on the cautery shows how much he
appreciated the value of proper healing. It is from such a man that we
might expect the advance by careful {87} investigation as to just what
tissues had been injured, with the idea of bringing them together in
such juxtaposition as would prevent loss of function and encourage
rapid and perfect union.
{opp87}
[Illustration]
SCREEN (HEREFORD)
[Illustration]
DOORWAY OF SACRISTY (BOURGES)
Perhaps to the ordinary individual William's reference of certain
known venereal affections to their proper cause, will be the most
astonishing in this marvelous list of anticipations of what is
supposed to be very modern. The whole subject of venereal disease in
anything like a scientific treatment of it is supposed to date from
the early part of the Sixteenth Century. There is even question in
certain minds as to whether the venereal diseases did not come into
existence, or at least were not introduced from America or from some
other distant country that the Europeans had been exploring about this
time. William's studies in this subject, however, serve to show that
nothing escaped his watchful eye and that he was in the best sense of
the word a careful observer and must have been an eminently suggestive
and helpful teacher.
What has thus been learned about him will serve of itself and without
more ado, to stamp all that has been said about the unpractical
character of the medical teaching of the medieval universities as
utterly unfounded. Because men have not taken the trouble to look up
the teaching of these times, and because their works were until recent
years buried in old folios, difficult to obtain and still more
difficult to read when obtained, it has been easy to ignore their
merit and even to impugn the value of their teaching completely.
William of Salicet was destined, moreover, to be surpassed in some
ways by his most distinguished pupil, Lanfranc, who taught at the
University of Paris at the end of the Thirteenth Century. Of Lanfranc,
in the address already quoted from, Professor Allbutt has one very
striking paragraph that shows how progressive was the work of this
great French surgeon, and how fruitful had been the suggestive
teaching of his great master. He says:
"Lanfranc's 'Chirurgia Magna' was a great work, written by a
reverent but independent follower of Salicet. He distinguished
between venous and arterial hemorrhage, and used styptics (rabbit's
fur, aloes, and white of egg was a popular styptic in elder
surgery), digital compression for an hour, or in severe cases
ligature. His chapter on injuries of the head {88} is one of the
classics of medieval surgery. Clerk (cleric) as he was, Lanfranc
nevertheless saw but the more clearly the danger of separating
surgery from medicine."
Certain assertions in this paragraph deserve, as in the case of
Lanfranc's master, to be discussed, because of their anticipations of
what is sometimes thought to be very modern in surgery. The older
surgeons are supposed to have feared hemorrhage very much. It is often
asserted that they knew little or nothing about the ligature and that
their control of hemorrhage was very inadequate. As a matter of fact,
however, it was not primary hemorrhage that the old surgeons feared,
but secondary hemorrhage. Suppuration often led to the opening of an
important artery, and this accident, as can well be understood, was
very much dreaded. Surgeons would lose their patients before they
could come to their relief. How thoroughly Lanfranc knew how to
control primary hemorrhage can be appreciated from the quotation just
made from Dr. Allbutt's address. The ligature is sometimes said to
have been an invention of Ambroise Paré, but, as a matter of fact, it
had been in use for at least three centuries before his time, and
perhaps even longer.
Usually it is considered that the difficult chapter of head injuries,
with all the problems that it involves in diagnosis and treatment, is
a product of the Nineteenth Century. Hence do we read, with all the
more interest, Allbutt's declaration that Lanfranc wrote what is
practically a classical monograph, on the subject. It is not so
surprising, then, to find that the great French surgeon was far ahead
of his generation in other matters, or that he should even have
realized the danger of separating surgery from medicine. Both the
Regius professors of medicine at the two great English universities,
Cambridge and Oxford, have, since the beginning of the Twentieth
Century, made public expression of their opinion that the physician
should see more of the work of the surgeon, and should not depend on
the autopsy room for his knowledge of the results of internal disease.
Professor Osler, particularly, has emphasized his colleague, Professor
Allbutt's opinion in this matter. That a surgical professor at the
University of Paris, in the Thirteenth Century, should have
anticipated these two leaders {89} of medical thought in the Twentieth
Century, would not be so surprising, only that unfortunately the
history of medieval teaching has, because of prejudice and a
lamentable tradition, not been read aright.
Occasionally one finds a startling bit of anticipation of what is most
modern, in medicine as well as in surgery. For instance, toward the
end of the Thirteenth Century, a distinguished English professor of
medicine, known as Gilbert, the Englishman, was teaching at
Montpelier, and among other things, was insisting that the rooms of
patients suffering from smallpox should be hung entirely with red
curtains, and that the doors and the windows should be covered with
heavy red hangings. He claimed that this made the disease run a
lighter course, with lessened mortality, and with very much less
disfigurement. Smallpox was an extremely common disease in the
Thirteenth Century, and he probably had many chances for observation.
It is interesting to realize that one of the most important
observations made at the end of the Nineteenth Century by Dr. Finsen,
the Danish investigator whose studies in light and its employment in
therapeutics, drew to him the attention of the world, and eventually
the Nobel prize of $40,000 for the greatest advance in medicine was,
that the admission of only red light to the room of smallpox patients
modified the disease very materially, shortened its course, often
prevented the secondary fever, and almost did away completely with the
subsequent disfigurement.
It is evident that these men were searching and investigating for
themselves, and not following blindly in the footsteps of any master.
It has often been said that during the Middle Ages it was a heresy to
depart, ever so little, from the teaching of Galen. Usually it is
customary to add that the first writer to break away from Galen,
effectually, was Vesalius, in his De Fabrica Corporis Humani,
published toward the end of the second quarter of the Sixteenth
Century. It may be said, in passing, that, as a matter of fact,
Vesalius, though he accomplished much by original investigation, did
not break so effectually with Galen as would have been for the best in
his own work, and, especially, for its influence on his successors. He
certainly did not set an example of independent research {90} and
personal observation, any more fully, than did the medical teachers of
the Thirteenth Century already mentioned, and some others, like
Mondaville and Arnold of Villanova, whose names well deserve to be
associated with them.
One reason why it is such a surprise to find how thoroughly practical
was the teaching of the Thirteenth Century university medical schools,
is because it has somehow come to be a very general impression that
medicine was taught mainly by disputations, and by the consultation of
authorities, and that it was always more important to have a passage
of Galen to support a medical notion, than, to have an original
observation. This false impression is due to the fact that the writers
of the history of medical education have, until recent years, drawn
largely on their imaginations, and have not consulted the old-time
medical books. In spite of the fact that printing was not discovered
for more than two centuries later, there are many treatises on
medicine that have come down to us from this early time, and the
historians of medicine now have the opportunity, and are taking the
trouble, to read them with a consequent alteration of old-time views,
as to the lack of encouragement for original observation, in the later
Middle Ages. These old tomes are not easy reading, but nothing daunts
a German investigator bound to get to the bottom of his subject, and
such men as Pagel and Puschmann have done much to rediscover for us
medieval medicine. The French medical historians have not been behind
their German colleagues and magnificent work has been accomplished,
especially by the republication of old texts. William of Salicet's
surgery was republished by Pifteau at Toulouse in 1898. Mondaville's
Surgery was republished under the auspices of the Society for the
Publication of old French Texts in 1897 and 1898. These republications
have made the works of the old-time surgeons readily available for
study by all interested in our great predecessors in medicine, all
over the world. Before this, it has always been necessary to get to
some of the libraries in which the old texts were preserved, and this,
of course, made it extremely difficult for the ordinary teacher of the
history of medicine to know anything about them. Besides, old texts
are such difficult reading that few, except the most earnest of
students, {91} have patience for them, and they are so time-taking as
to be practically impossible for modern, hurried students.
Unfortunately, writers of the history of medicine filled up this gap
in their knowledge, only too frequently, either out of their
imaginations, or out of their inadequate authorities, with the
consequence of inveterating the old-time false impression with regard
to the absence of anything of medical or surgical interest, even in
the later Middle Ages.
Another and much more serious reason for the false impression with
regard to the supposed blankness of the middle age in medical
progress, was the notion, quite generally accepted, and even yet not
entirely rejected, by many, that the Church was opposed to scientific
advance in the centuries before the reformation so-called, and that
even the sciences allied to medicine, fell under her ban. For
instance, there is not a history of medicine, so far as I know,
published in the English language, which does not assert that Pope
Boniface VIII., by a Bull promulgated at the end of the Thirteenth
Century, forbade the practise of dissection. To most people, it will,
at once, seem a natural conclusion, that if the feeling against the
study of the human body by dissection had reached such a pass as to
call forth a papal decree in the matter, at the end of the century,
all during the previous hundred years, there must have been enough
ecclesiastical hampering of anatomical work to prevent anything like
true progress, and to preclude the idea of any genuinely progressive
teaching of anatomy.
There is not the slightest basis for this bit of false history except
an unfortunate, it is to be hoped not intentional, misapprehension on
the part of historical writers as to the meaning of a papal decree
issued by Boniface VIII. in the year 1300. He forbade, under pain of
excommunication, the boiling of bodies and their dismemberment in
order that thus piecemeal they might be transported to long distances
for burial purposes. It is now well known that the Bull was aimed at
certain practises which had crept in, especially among the Crusaders
in the East. When a member of the nobility fell a victim to wounds or
to disease, his companions not infrequently dismembered the body,
boiled it so as to prevent putrefaction, or at least delay decay, and
then transported it long distances to his home, in {92} order that he
might have Christian burial in some favorite graveyard, and that his
friends might have the consolation of knowing where his remains
rested. The body of the Emperor Frederick Barbarosa, who died in the
East, is said to have been thus treated. Boniface was one of the most
broadly educated men of his time, who had been a great professor of
canon and civil law at Paris when younger, and realized the dangers
involved in such a proceeding from a sanitary standpoint, and he
forbade it, requiring that the bodies should be buried where the
persons had died. He evidently considered that the ancient custom of
consecrating a portion of earth for the purpose of burial in order
that the full Christian rites might be performed, was quite sufficient
for noble as for common soldier.
For this very commendable sanitary regulation Boniface has been set
down by historians of medicine as striking a death blow at the
development of anatomy for the next two centuries. As a matter of
fact, however, anatomy continued to be studied in the universities
after this Bull as it had been before, and it is evident that never by
any misapprehension as to its meaning was the practise of dissection
lessened. Curiously enough the history of human dissection can only be
traced with absolute certainty from the time immediately after this
Bull. It is during the next twenty-five years at the University of
Bologna, which was always closely in touch with the ecclesiastical
authorities in Italy and especially with the Pope, that the
foundations of dissection, as the most important practical department
of medical teaching, were laid by Mondino, whose book on dissection
continued to be the text book used in most of the medical schools for
the next two centuries. Guy de Chauliac who studied there during the
first half of the Fourteenth Century says he saw many dissections made
there. It was at Montpellier, about the middle of the century, when
the Popes were at Avignon not far away, that Guy de Chauliac himself
made attendance at dissections obligatory for every student, and
obtained permission to use the bodies of criminals for dissection
purposes. At the time Chauliac occupied the post of chamberlain to the
Popes. All during the Fourteenth and Fifteenth centuries constant
progress was making in anatomy, especially in Italy, and some of it
was accomplished at Rome {93} by distinguished teachers of anatomy who
had been summoned by the popes to their capital in order to add
distinction to the teaching staff at the famous Papal School of
Science, the Sapienza, to which were attached during the next two
centuries many of the distinguished scientific professors of the time.
This story with regard to the papal prohibition of dissection has no
foundation in the history of the times. It has had not a little to do,
however, with making these times very much misunderstood and one still
continues to see printed references to the misfortune, which is more
usually called a crime, that prevented the development of a great
humanitarian science because of ecclesiastical prejudice. This story
with regard to anatomy, however, is not a whit worse than that which
is told of chemistry in almost the same terms. At the beginning of the
Fourteenth Century Pope John XXII. is said to have issued a Bull
forbidding chemistry under pain of excommunication, which according to
some writers in the matter is said to have included the death penalty.
It has been felt in the same way as with regard to anatomy, that this
was only the culmination of a feeling in ecclesiastical circles
against chemistry which must have hampered its progress all during the
Thirteenth Century.
An examination of the so-called Bull with regard to chemistry, it is
really only a decree, shows even less reason for the slander of Pope
John XXII. than of Boniface VIII. John had been scarcely a year on the
papal throne when he issued this decree forbidding "alchemies" and
inflicting a punishment upon those who practised them. The first
sentence of the title of the document is: "Alchemies are here
prohibited and those who practise them or procure their being done are
punished." This is evidently all of the decree that those who quoted
it as a prohibition of chemistry seem ever to have read. Under the
name "alchemies," Pope John, as is clear from the rest of the
document, meant a particular kind of much-advertised chemical
manipulations. He forbade the supposed manufacture of gold and silver.
The first sentence of his decree shows how thoroughly he recognized
the falsity of the pretensions of the alchemists in this matter. "Poor
themselves," he says, "the alchemists promise riches which are not
forthcoming." He then forbids them further to impose upon the poor
people {94} whose confidence they abuse and whose good money they take
to return them only base-metal or none at all.
The only punishment inflicted for the doing of these "alchemies" on
those who might transgress the decree was not death or imprisonment,
but that the pretended makers of gold and silver should be required to
turn into the public treasury as much gold and silver as had been paid
them for their alchemies, the money thus paid in to go to the poor. As
in the case of the Bull with regard to anatomy, it is very clear that
by no possible misunderstanding at the time was the development of the
science of chemistry hindered by this papal document. Chemistry had to
a certain extent been cultivated at the University of Paris, mainly by
ecclesiastics. Both Aquinas and his master Albertus wrote treatises on
chemical subjects. Roger Bacon devoted much time to it as is well
known, and for the next three centuries the history of chemistry has a
number of names of men who were not only unhampered by the
ecclesiastical authorities, but who were themselves usually either
ecclesiastics, or high in favor with the churchmen of their time and
place. This is true of Hollandus, of Arnold of Villanova, of Basil
Valentine, and finally of the many abbots and bishops to whom
Paracelsus in his time acknowledged his obligations for aid in his
chemical studies.
Almost needless to say it has been impossible, in a brief sketch of
this kind limited to a single chapter, to give anything like an
adequate idea of what the enthusiastic graduate students and
professors of the Thirteenth Century succeeded in accomplishing. It is
probably this department of University life, however, that has been
least understood, or rather we should say most persistently
misunderstood. The education of the time is usually supposed to be
eminently unpractical, and great advances in the departments of
knowledge that had important bearings on human life and its relations
were not therefore thought possible. It is just here, however, that
sympathetic interpretation and the pointing out of the coordination of
intellectual work often considered to be quite distinct from
university influences were needed. It is hoped then that this short
sketch will prove sufficient to call the attention of modern educators
to a field that has been neglected, or at least has {95} received very
little cultivation compared to its importance, but which must be
sedulously worked, if our generation is to understand with any degree
of thoroughness the spirit manifested and the results attained by the
medieval universities.
[Illustration]
DOUBLE FLYING BUTTRESS (RHEIMS)
{96}
VI
THE BOOK OF THE ARTS AND POPULAR EDUCATION.
The most important portion of the history of the Thirteenth Century
and beyond all doubt the most significant chapter in the book of its
arts, is to be found in the great Gothic Cathedrals, so many of which
were erected at this time and whose greatest perfection of finish in
design and in detail came just at the beginning of this wonderful
period. We are not concerned here with the gradual development of
Gothic out of the older Romanesque architectural forms, nor with the
Oriental elements that may have helped this great evolution. All that
especially concerns us is the fact that the generations of the
Thirteenth Century took the Gothic ideas in architecture and applied
them so marvelously, that thereafter it could be felt that no problem
of structural work had been left unsolved and no feature of ornament
or decoration left untried or at least unsuggested. The great center
of Gothic influence was the North of France, but it spread from here
to every country in Europe, and owing to the intimate relations
existing between England and France because of the presence of the
Normans in both countries, developed almost as rapidly and with as
much beauty, and effectiveness as in the mother country.
It is in fact in England just before the Thirteenth Century, that the
spirit which gave rise to the Cathedrals can be best observed at work
and its purposes most thoroughly appreciated. The great Cathedral at
Lincoln had some of its most important features before the beginning
of the Thirteenth Century and this was doubtless due to the famous St.
Hugh of Lincoln, who was a Frenchman by birth and whose experience in
Normandy in early life enabled him successfully to set about the
creation of a Gothic Cathedral in the country that had become his by
adoption.
{opp96}
[Illustration]
ANGEL CHOIR (LINCOLN)
{97}
Hugh himself was so great of soul, so deeply interested in his people
and their welfare, so ready to make every sacrifice for them even to
the extent of incurring the enmity of his King (even Froude usually so
unsympathetic to medieval men and things has included him among his
Short Studies of Great Subjects), that one cannot help but think that
when he devoted himself to the erection of the magnificent Cathedral,
he realized very well that it would become a center of influence, not
only religious but eminently educational, in its effects upon the
people of his diocese. The work was begun then with a consciousness of
the results to be attained and the influence of the Cathedral must not
be looked upon as accidental. He must have appreciated that the
creating of a work of beauty in which the people themselves shared,
which they looked on as their own property, to which they came nearly
every second day during the year for religious services, would be a
telling book out of which they would receive more education than could
come to them in any other way.
Of course we cannot hope in a short chapter or two to convey any
adequate impression of the work that was done in and for the
Cathedrals, nor the even more important reactionary influence they had
in educating the people. Ferguson says: [Footnote 9 ]
[Footnote 9: Ferguson--History of Architecture. N. Y., Dodd, Mead &
Co.]
"The subject of the cathedrals, their architecture and decoration
is, in fact, practicably inexhaustible. . . . Priests and laymen
worked with masons, painters, and sculptors, and all were bent on
producing the best possible building, and improving every part and
every detail, till the amount of thought and contrivance accumulated
in any single structure is almost incomprehensible. If any one man
were to devote a lifetime to the study of one of our great
cathedrals--assuming it to be complete in all its medieval
arrangements--it is questionable whether he would master all its
details, and fathom all the reasonings and experiments which led to
the glorious result before him. And when we consider that not in the
great cities alone, but in every convent and in every parish,
thoughtful professional men were trying to excel what had been done
and was doing, by their predecessors and their fellows, we shall
{98} understand what an amount of thought is built into the walls of
our churches, castles, colleges, and dwelling houses. If any one
thinks he can master and reproduce all this, he can hardly fail to
be mistaken. My own impression is that not one tenth part of it has
been reproduced in all the works written on the subject up to this
day, and much of it is probably lost and never again to be recovered
for the instruction and delight of future ages."
This profound significance and charming quality of the cathedrals is
usually unrecognized by those who see them only once or twice, and
who, though they are very much interested in them for the moment, have
no idea of the wealth of artistic suggestion and of thoughtful design
so solicitously yet happily put into them by their builders. People
who have seen them many times, however, who have lived in close touch
with them, who have been away from them for a time and have come back
to them, find the wondrous charm that is in these buildings.
Architects and workmen put their very souls into them and they will
always be of interest. It is for this reason, that the casual visitor
at all times and in all moods finds them ever a source of constantly
renewed pleasure, no matter how many times they may be seen.
Elizabeth Robbins Pennell has expressed this power of Cathedrals to
please at all times, even after they have been often seen and are very
well known, in a recent number of the _Century_, in describing the
great Cathedral of Notre Dame, "Often as I have seen Notre Dame," she
says, "the marvel of it never grows less. I go to Paris with no
thought of time for it, busy about many other things and then on my
way over one of the bridges across the river perhaps, I see it again
on its island, the beautiful towers high above the houses and palaces
and the view now so familiar strikes me afresh with all the wonder of
my first impression."
This is we think the experience of everyone who has the opportunity to
see much of Notre Dame. The present writer during the course of his
medical studies spent many months in daily view of the Cathedral and
did a good deal of work at the old Morgue, situated behind the
Cathedral. Even at the end of his stay he was constantly finding new
beauties in {99} the grand old structure and learning to appreciate it
more and more as the changing seasons of a Paris fall and winter and
spring, threw varying lights and shadows over it. It was like a work
of nature, never growing old, but constantly displaying some new phase
of beauty to the passers-by. Mrs. Pennell resents only the
restorations that have been made. Generations down even to our time
have considered that they could rebuild as beautifully as the
Thirteenth Century constructors; some of them even have thought that
they could do better, doubtless, yet their work has in the opinion of
good critics served only to spoil or at least to detract from the
finer beauty of the original plan. No wonder that R. M. Stevenson, who
knew and loved the old Cathedral so well, said: "Notre Dame is the
only un-Greek thing that unites majesty, elegance, and awfulness."
Inasmuch as it does so it is a typical product of this wonderful
Thirteenth Century, the only serious rival the Greeks have ever had.
But of course it does not stand alone. There are other Cathedrals
built at the same time at least as handsome and as full of
suggestions. Indeed in the opinion of many critics it is inferior in
certain respects to some three or four of the greatest Gothic
Cathedrals.
It cannot be possible that these generations builded so much better
than they knew, that it is only by a sort of happy accident that their
edifices still continue to be the subject of such profound admiration,
and such endless sources of pleasure after seven centuries of
experience. If so we would certainly be glad to have some such happy
accident occur in our generation, for we are building nothing at the
present time with regard to which we have any such high hopes. Of
course the generations of Cathedral builders knew and appreciated
their own work. The triumph of the Thirteenth Century is therefore all
the more marked and must be considered as directly due to the
environment and the education of its people. We have then in the study
of their Cathedrals the keynote for the modern appreciation of the
character and the development of their builders.
It will be readily understood, how inevitably fragmentary must be our
consideration of the Cathedrals, yet there is the consolation that
they are the best known feature of Thirteenth {100} Century
achievement and that consequently all that will be necessary will be
to point out the significance of their construction as the basis of
the great movement of education and uplift in the century. Perhaps
first a word is needed with regard to the varieties of Gothic in the
different countries of Europe and what they meant in the period.
Probably, the most interesting feature of the history of Gothic
architecture, at this period, is to be found in the circumstance that,
while all of the countries erected Gothic structures along the general
lines which had been laid down by its great inventors in the North and
Center of France, none of the architects and builders of the century,
in other countries, slavishly followed the French models. English
Gothic is quite distinct from its French ancestor, and while it has
defects it has beauties, that are all its own, and a simplicity and
grandeur, well suited to the more rugged character of the people among
whom it developed. Italian Gothic has less merits, perhaps, than any
of the other forms of the art that developed in the different nations.
In Italy, with its bright sunlight, there was less crying need for the
window space, for the provision of which, in the darker northern
countries, Gothic was invented, but, even here the possibilities of
decorated architecture along certain lines were exhausted more fully
than anywhere else, as might have been expected from the esthetic
spirit of the Italians. German Gothic has less refinement than any of
the other national forms, yet it is not lacking in a certain
straightforward strength and simplicity of appearance, which
recommends it. The Germans often violated the French canons of
architecture, yet did not spoil the ultimate effect. St. Stephen's in
Vienna has many defects, yet as a good architectural authority has
declared it is the work of a poet, and looks it.
A recent paragraph with regard to Spanish Gothic in an article on
Spain, by Havelock Ellis, illustrates the national qualities of this
style very well. As much less is generally known about the special
development of Gothic architecture in the Spanish peninsula, it has
seemed worth while to quote it at some length:
"Moreover, there is no type of architecture which so {101} admirably
embodies the romantic spirit as Spanish Gothic. Such a statement
implies no heresy against the supremacy of French Gothic. But the
very qualities of harmony and balance of finely tempered reason,
which make French Gothic so exquisitely satisfying, softened the
combination of mysteriously grandiose splendor with detailed
realism, in which lies the essence of Gothic as the manifestation of
the romantic spirit. Spanish Gothic at once by its massiveness and
extravagance and by its realistic naturalness, far more potently
embodies the spirit of medieval life. It is less esthetically
beautiful but it is more romantic. In Leon Cathedral, Spain
possesses one of the very noblest and purest examples of French
Gothic--a church which may almost be said to be the supreme type of
the Gothic ideal, of a delicate house of glass finely poised between
buttresses; but there is nothing Spanish about it. For the typical
Gothic of Spain we must go to Toledo and Burgos, to Tarragona and
Barcelona. Here we find the elements of stupendous size, of
mysterious gloom, of grotesque and yet realistic energy, which are
the dominant characters, alike of Spanish architecture and of
medieval romance."
Those who think that the Gothic architecture came to a perfection all
its own by a sort of wonderful manifestation of genius in a single
generation, and then stayed there, are sadly mistaken. There was a
constant development to be noted all during the Thirteenth Century.
This development was always in the line of true improvement, while
just after the century closed degeneration began, decoration became
too important a consideration, parts were over-loaded with ornament,
and the decadence of taste in Gothic architecture cannot escape the
eye even of the most untutored. All during the Thirteenth Century the
tendency was always to greater lightness and elegance. One is apt to
think of these immense structures as manifestations of the power of
man to overcome great engineering difficulties and to solve immense
structural problems, rather than as representing opportunities for the
expression of what was most beautiful and poetic in the intellectual
aspirations of the generations. But this is what they were, and their
architects were poets, for in the best sense of the {102} etymology of
the word they were creators. That their raw material was stone and
mortar rather than words was only an accident of their environment.
Each of the architects succeeded in expressing himself with wonderful
individuality in his own work in each Cathedral.
The improvements introduced by the Thirteenth Century people into the
architecture that came to them, were all of a very practical kind, and
were never suggested for the sake of merely adding to opportunities
for ornamentation. In this matter, skillful combinations of line and
form were thought out and executed with wonderful success. At the
beginning of the century, delicate shafts of marble, highly polished,
were employed rather freely, but as these seldom carried weight, and
were mainly ornamental in character, they were gradually eliminated,
yet, without sacrificing any of the beauty of structure since
combinations of light and shade were secured by the composition of
various forms, and the use of delicately rounded mouldings alternated
with hollows, so as to produce forcible effects in high light and deep
shadow. In a word, these architects and builders, of the Thirteenth
Century, set themselves the problem of building effectively, making
every portion count in the building itself, and yet, securing
ornamental effects out of actual structure such as no other set of
architects have ever been able to surpass, and, probably, only the
Greek architects of the Periclean period ever equaled. Needless to
say, this is the very acme of success in architectural work, and it is
for this reason that the generations of the after time have all gone
back so lovingly to study the work of this period.
It might be thought, that while Gothic architecture was a great
invention in its time and extremely suitable for ecclesiastical or
even educational edifices of various kinds, its time of usefulness has
passed and that men's widening experience in structural work, ever
since, has carried him far away from it. As a matter of fact, most of
our ecclesiastical buildings are still built on purely Gothic lines,
and a definite effort is made, as a rule, to have the completed
religious edifice combine a number of the best features of Thirteenth
Century Gothic. With what {103} success this has been accomplished can
best be appreciated from the fact, that none of the modern structures
attract anything like the attention of the old, and the Cathedrals of
this early time still continue to be the best asset of the towns in
which they are situated, because of the number of visitors they
attract. Far from considering Gothic architecture outlived, architects
still apply themselves to it with devotion because of the practical
suggestions which it contains, and there are those of wide experience,
who still continue to think it the most wonderful example of
architectural development that has ever come, and even do not hesitate
to foretell a great future for it.
Reinach, in his Story of Art Throughout the Ages, [Footnote 10] has
been so enthusiastic in this matter that a paragraph of his opinion
must find a place here. Reinach, it may be said, is an excellent
authority, a member of the Institute of France, who has made special
studies in comparative architecture, and has written works that carry
more weight than almost any others of our generation:
[Footnote 10: Scribners, New York, 1905.]
"If the aim of architecture, considered as an art, should be to free
itself as much as possible from subjection to its materials, it may
be said that no buildings have more successfully realized this ideal
than the Gothic churches. And there is more to be said in this
connection. Its light and airy system of construction, the freedom
and slenderness of its supporting skeleton, afford, as it were, a
presage of an art that began to develop in the Nineteenth Century,
that of metallic architecture. With the help of metal, and of cement
reinforced by metal bars, the moderns might equal the most daring
feats of the Gothic architects. It would even be easy for them to
surpass them, without endangering the solidity of the structure, as
did the audacities of Gothic art. In the conflicts that obtain
between the two elements of construction, solidity and open space,
everything seems to show that the principle of free spaces will
prevail, that the palaces and houses of the future will be flooded
with air and light, that the formula popularized by Gothic
architecture has a great future before it, and that following the
revival of the Graeco-Roman style from {104} the Sixteenth Century,
to our own day, we shall see a yet more enduring renaissance of the
Gothic style applied to novel materials."
It would be a mistake, however, to think that the Gothic Cathedrals
were impressive only because of their grandeur and immense size. It
would be still more a mistake to consider them only as examples of a
great development in architecture. They are much more than this; they
are the compendious expression of the art impulses of a glorious
century. Every single detail of the Gothic Cathedrals is not only
worthy of study but deserving of admiration, if not for itself, then
always for the inadequate means by which it was secured, and most of
these details have been found worthy of imitation by subsequent
generations. It is only by considering the separate details of the art
work of these Cathedrals that the full lesson of what these wonderful
people accomplished can be learned. There have been many centuries
since, in which they would be entirely unappreciated. Fortunately, our
own time has come back to a recognition of the greatness of the art
impulse that was at work, perfecting even what might be considered
trivial portions of the cathedrals, and the brightest hope for the
future of our own accomplishment is founded on this belated
appreciation of old-time work.
It has been said that the medieval workman was a lively symbol of the
Creator Himself, in the way in which he did his work. It mattered not
how obscure the portion of the cathedral at which he was set, he
decorated it as beautifully as he knew how, without a thought that his
work would be appreciated only by the very few that might see it.
Trivial details were finished with the perfection of important parts.
Microscopic studies in recent years have revealed beautiful designs on
pollen grains and diatoms which are far beneath the possibilities of
human vision, and have only been discovered by lens combinations of
very high powers of the compound microscope. Always these beauties
have been there though hidden away from any eye. It was as if the
Creator's hand could not touch anything without leaving it beautiful
as well as useful.
{opp105}
[Illustration]
CATHEDRAL (AMIENS)
{105}
To as great extent as it is possible perhaps for man to secure such a
desideratum, the Thirteenth Century workman succeeded in this same
purpose. It is for this reason more than even for the magnificent
grandeur of the design and the skilful execution with inadequate
means, that makes the Gothic Cathedral such a source of admiration and
wonder.
To take first the example of sculpture. It is usually considered that
the Thirteenth Century represented a time entirely too early in the
history of plastic art for there to have been any fine examples of the
sculptor's chisel left us from it. Any such impression, however, will
soon be corrected if one but examines carefully the specimens of this
form of art in certain Cathedrals. As we have said, probably no more
charmingly dignified presentation of the human form divine in stone
has ever been made than the figure of Christ above the main door of
the cathedral of Amiens, which the Amiennois so lovingly call their
"beautiful God." There are some other examples of statuary in the same
cathedral that are wonderful specimens of the sculptor's art, lending
itself for decorative purposes to architecture. This is true for a
number of the Cathedrals. The statues in themselves are not so
beautiful, but as portions of a definite piece of structural work such
as a doorway or a facade, they are wonderful models of how all the
different arts became subservient to the general effect to be
produced. It was at Rheims, however, that sculpture reached its acme
of accomplishment, and architects have been always unstinted in their
praise of this feature of what may be called the Capitol church of
France.
Those who have any doubts as to the place of Gothic art itself in art
history and who need an authority always to bolster up the opinion
that they may hold, will find ample support in the enthusiastic
opinion of an authority whom we have quoted already. The most
interesting and significant feature of his ardent expression of
enthusiasm is his comparison of Romanesque with Gothic art in this
respect. The amount of ground covered from one artistic mode to the
other is greater than any other advance in art that has ever been
made. After all, the real value of the work of the period must be
judged, rather by the amount of progress that has {106} been made than
by the stage of advance actually reached, since it is development
rather than accomplishment that counts in the evolution of the race.
On the other hand it will be found that Reinach's opinion of the
actual attainments of Gothic art are far beyond anything that used to
be thought on the subject a half century ago, and much higher than any
but a few of the modern art critics hold in the matter. He says:
"In contrast to this Romanesque art, as yet in bondage to
convention, ignorant or disdainful of nature, the mature Gothic art
of the Thirteenth Century appeared as a brilliant revival or
realism. The great sculptors who adorned the Cathedrals of Paris,
Amiens, Rheims, and Chartres with their works, were realists in the
highest sense of the word. They sought in Nature not only their
knowledge of human forms, and of the draperies that cover them, but
also that of the principles of decoration. Save in the gargoyles of
cathedrals and in certain minor sculptures, we no longer find in the
Thirteenth Century those unreal figures of animals, nor those
ornaments, complicated as nightmares, which load the capitals of
Romanesque churches; the flora of the country, studied with loving
attention, is the sole, or almost the sole source from which
decorators take their motives. It is in this charming profusion of
flowers and foliage that the genius of Gothic architecture is most
freely displayed. One of the most admirable of its creations is the
famous Capital of the Vintage in Notre Dame at Rheims, carved about
the year 1250. Since the first century of the Roman Empire art had
never imitated Nature so perfectly, nor has it ever since done so
with a like grace and sentiment."
Reinach defends Gothic Art from another and more serious objection
which is constantly urged against it by those who know only certain
examples of it, but have not had the advantage of the wide study of
the whole field of artistic endeavor in the Thirteenth Century, which
this distinguished member of the Institute of France has succeeded in
obtaining. It is curious what unfounded opinions have come to be
prevalent in art circles because, only too often, writers with regard
to the Cathedrals have spent their time mainly in the large cities, or
along the principal arteries of travel, and have not realized {107}
that some of the smaller towns contained work better fitted to
illustrate Gothic Art principles than those on which they depended for
their information. If only particular phases of the art of any one
time, no matter how important, were to be considered in forming a
judgment of it, that judgment would almost surely be unfavorable in
many ways because of the lack of completeness of view. This is what
has happened unfortunately with regard to Gothic art, but a better
spirit is coming in this matter, with the more careful study of
periods of art and the return of reverence for the grand old Middle
Ages.
{opp107}
[Illustration]
CATHEDRAL (RHEIMS)
Reinach says: "There are certain prejudices against this admirable,
though incomplete, art which it is difficult to combat. It is often
said, for instance, that all Gothic figures are stiff and emaciated.
To convince ourselves of the contrary we need only study the marvelous
sculpture of the meeting between Abraham and Melchisedech, in Rheims
Cathedral; or again in the same Cathedral, the Visitation, the seated
Prophet, and the standing Angel, or the exquisite Magdalen of Bordeaux
Cathedral. What can we see in these that is stiff, sickly, and puny?
The art that has most affinity with perfect Gothic is neither
Romanesque nor Byzantine, but the Greek art of from 500 to 450 B. C.
By a strange coincidence, the Gothic artists even reproduce the
somewhat stereotyped smile of their forerunners." Usually it is said
that the Renaissance brought the supreme qualities of Greek plastic
art back to life, but here is a thoroughly competent critic who finds
them exhibited long before the Fifteenth Century, as a manifestation
of what the self-sufficient generations of the Renaissance would have
called Gothic, meaning thereby, barbarous art.
What has been said of sculpture, however, can be repeated with even
more force perhaps with regard to every detail of construction and
decoration. Builders and architects did make mistakes at times, but,
even their mistakes always reveal an artist's soul struggling for
expression through inadequate media. Many things had to be done
experimentally, most things were being done for the first time.
Everything had an originality of its own that made its execution
something more than merely a secure accomplishment after previous
careful {108} tests. In spite of this state of affairs, which might be
expected sadly to interfere with artistic execution, the Cathedrals,
in the main, are full of admirable details not only worthy of
imitation, but that our designers are actually imitating or at least
finding eminently suggestive at the present time.
To begin with a well known example of decorative effect which is found
in the earliest of the English Cathedrals, that of Lincoln. The nave
and choir of this was finished just at the beginning of the Thirteenth
Century. The choir is so beautiful in its conception, so wonderful in
its construction, so charming in its finish, so satisfactory in all
its detail, though there is very little of what would be called
striving after effect in it, that it is still called the Angel Choir.
The name was originally given it because it was considered to be so
beautiful even during the Thirteenth Century, that visitors could
scarcely believe that it was constructed by human hands and so the
legend became current that it was the work of angels. If the critics
of the Thirteenth Century, who had the opportunity to see work of
nearly the same kind being constructed in many parts of England,
judged thus highly of it, it is not surprising that modern visitors
should be unstinted in their praise. It is interesting to note as
representative of the feeling of a cultured modern scientific mind
that Dr. Osler said not long ago, in one of his medical addresses,
that probably nothing more beautiful had ever come from the hands of
man than this Angel Choir at Lincoln. As to who were the designers,
who conceived it, or the workmen who executed it, we have no records.
It is not unlikely that the famous Hugh of Lincoln, the great Bishop
to whom the Cathedral owes its foundation and much of its splendor,
was responsible to no little extent for this beautiful feature of his
Cathedral church. The workmen who made it were artist-artisans in the
best sense of the word and it is not surprising that other beautiful
architectural features should have flourished in a country where such
workmen could be found.
Almost as impressive as the Angel Choir was the stained glass work at
Lincoln. The rose windows are among the most beautiful ever made and
one of them is indeed considered a gem of its kind. The beautiful
colors and wonderful {109} effectiveness of the stained glass of these
old time Cathedrals cannot be appreciated unless the windows
themselves are actually seen. At Lincoln there is a very impressive
contrast that one can scarcely help calling to attention and that has
been very frequently the subject of comment by visitors. During the
Parliamentary time, unfortunately, the stained glass at Lincoln fell
under the ban of the Puritans. The lower windows were almost
completely destroyed by the soldiers of Cromwell's army. Only the rose
windows owing to their height were preserved from the destroyer. There
was an old sexton at the Cathedral, however, for whom the stained
glass had become as the apple of his eye. As boy and man he had lived
in its beautiful colors as they broke the light of the rising and the
setting sun and they were too precious to be neglected even when lying
upon the pavement of the Cathedral in fragments. He gathered the
shattered pieces into bags and hid them away in a dark corner of the
crypt, saving them at least from the desecration of being trampled to
dust.
Long afterwards, indeed almost in our own time, they were found here
and were seen to be so beautiful that regardless of the fact that they
could not be fitted together in anything like their former places,
they were pieced into windows and made to serve their original purpose
once more. It so happened that new stained glass windows for the
Cathedral of Lincoln were ordered during the Nineteenth Century. These
were made at an unfortunate time in stained glass making and are as
nearly absolutely unattractive, to say nothing worse, as it is
possible to make stained glass. The contrast with the antique windows,
fragmentary as they are, made up of the broken pieces of Thirteenth
Century glass is most striking. The old time colors are so rich that
when the sun shines directly on them they look like jewels. No one
pays the slightest attention, unless perhaps the doubtful compliment
of a smile be given, to the modern windows which were, however, very
costly and the best that could be obtained at that time.
More of the stained glass of the Thirteenth Century is preserved at
York where, because of the friendship of General Ireton, the town and
the Cathedral were spared the worst ravages of the Parliamentarians.
As a consequence York still {110} possesses some of the best of its
old time windows. It is probable that there is nothing more beautiful
or wonderful in its effectiveness than the glass in the Five Sisters
window at York. This is only an ordinary lancet window of five
compartments--hence the name--in the west front of the Cathedral.
There are no figures on the window, it is only a mass of beautiful
greyish green tints which marvelously subdues the western setting sun
at the vesper hour and produces the most beautiful effects in the
interior of the Cathedral. Here if anywhere one can realize the
meaning of the expression dim religious light. In recent years,
however, it has become the custom for so many people to rave over the
Five Sisters that we are spared the necessity of more than mentioning
it. Its tints far from being injured by time have probably been
enriched. There can be no doubt at all, however, of the artistic
tastes and esthetic genius of the man who designed it. The other
windows of the Cathedral were not unworthy of this triumph of art. How
truly the Cathedral was a Technical School can be appreciated from the
fact that it was able to inspire such workmen to produce these
wondrous effects.
Experts in stained glass work have often called attention to the fact
that the windows constructed in the Thirteenth Century were not only
of greater artistic value but were also more solidly put together.
Many of the windows made in the century still maintain their places,
in spite of the passage of time, though later windows are sometimes
dropping to pieces. It might be thought that this was due to the fact
that later stained glass workers were more delicate in the
construction of their windows in order not to injure the effect of the
stained glass. To some extent this is true, but the stained glass
workers of the Thirteenth Century preserve the effectiveness of their
artistic pictures in glass, though making the frame work very
substantial. This is only another example of their ability to combine
the useful with the beautiful so characteristic of the century,
stamping practically every phase of its accomplishment and making
their work more admirable because its usefulness does not suffer on
account of any strained efforts after supposed beauties.
Though it is somewhat out of place here we cannot refrain {111} from
pointing out the educational value of this stained glass work.
Some of the stories on these windows gave details of many passages
from the Bible, that must have impressed them upon the people much
more than any sermon or reading of the text could possibly have
accomplished. They were literally sermons in glass that he who walked
by had to read whether he would or not. When we remember that the
common people in the Middle Ages had no papers to distract them, and
no books to turn to for information, such illustrations as were
provided by the stained glass windows, by the painting and the
statuary decorations of the Cathedrals, must have been studied with
fondest devotion even apart from religious sentiment and out of mere
inquisitiveness. The famous "prodigal" window at Chartres is a good
example of this. Every detail of the story is here pictorially
displayed in colors, from the time when the young man demands his
patrimony through all the various temptations he met with in being
helped to spend it, there being a naive richness of detail in the
matter of the temptations that is quite medieval, from the boon
companions who first led him astray to the depths of degradation which
he finally reached before he returned to his father,--even the picture
of the fatted calf is not lacking.
On others of these windows there are the stories of the Patron Saints
of certain crafts. The life of St. Crispin the shoemaker is given in
rather full detail. The same is true of St. Romain the hunter who was
the patron of the furriers. The most ordinary experiences of life are
pictured and the methods by which these were turned to account in
making the craftsman a saint, must have been in many ways an ideally
uplifting example for fellow craftsmen whenever they viewed the
window. This sort of teaching could not be without its effect upon the
poor. It taught them that there was something else in life besides
money getting and that happiness and contentment might be theirs in a
chosen occupation and the reward of Heaven at the end of it all, for
at the top of these windows the hand of the Almighty is introduced
reaching down from Heaven to reward his faithful servants. It is just
by such presentation of ideals even to the poor, that {112} the
Thirteenth Century differs from the modern time in which even the
teaching in the schools seems only to emphasize the fact that men must
get money, honestly if they can, but must get money, if they would
have what is called success in life.
Another very interesting feature of these windows is the fact that
they were usually the gifts of the various Guilds and so represented
much more of interest, for the members. It is true that in France,
particularly, the monarchs frequently presented stained glass windows
and in St. Louis time this was so common that scarcely a French
Cathedral was without one or more testimonials of this kind to his
generosity; but most of the windows were given by various societies
among the people themselves. How much the construction of such a
window when it was well done, would make for the education in taste of
those who contributed to the expense of its erection, can scarcely be
over-estimated. There was besides a friendly rivalry in this matter in
the Thirteenth Century, which served to bring out the talents of local
artists and by the inevitably suggested comparisons eventually served
to educate the taste of the people.
It must not be thought, however, that it was only in stained glass and
painting and sculpture--the major arts--that these workmen attained
their triumphs. Practically every detail of Cathedral construction is
a monument to the artistic genius of the century, to the wonderful
inspiration afforded the workmen and to the education provided by the
Guilds which really maintained, as we shall see, a kind of Technical
School with the approbation and the fostering care of the
ecclesiastics connected with the Cathedrals. An excellent example of a
very different class of work may be noted in the hinges of the
Cloister door of the Cathedral at York. Personally I have seen three
art designers sketching these at the same time only one of whom was an
Englishman, another coming from the continent and the third from
America. The hinge still swings the heavy oak door of the Thirteenth
Century. The arborization of the metal as it spreads out from the main
shaft of the hinge is beautifully decorative in effect.
{opp112}
[Illustration]
CLOISTER OF ST. PAUL'S (WITHOUT THE WALLS, ROME)
A little study of the hinge seems to show that these branching
portions were so arranged as to make the mechanical {113} moment of
the swinging door less of a dead weight than it would have been if the
hinge were a solid bar of iron. Besides the spreading of the branches
over a wide surface serves to hold the woodwork of the door thoroughly
in place. While the hinge was beautiful, then it was eminently useful
from a good many standpoints, and trivial though it might be
considered to be, it was in reality a type of all the work
accomplished in connection with these Thirteenth Century Cathedrals.
According to the old Latin proverb "_omne tulit punctum qui miscuit
utile dulci_," he scores every point who mingles the useful with the
beautiful, and certainly the Thirteenth Century workman succeeded in
accomplishing the desideratum to an eminent degree. This mingling of
the useful and the beautiful is of itself a supreme difference between
the Thirteenth Century generations and our own. Mr. Yeats, the well
known Irish poet, in bidding farewell to America some years ago said
to a party of friends, that no country could consider itself to be
making real progress in culture until the very utensils in the kitchen
were beautiful as well as useful. Anything that is merely useful is
hideous, and anyone who can handle such things with impunity has not
true culture. In the Thirteenth Century they never by any chance made
anything that was merely useful, especially not if it was to be
associated with their beloved Cathedral.
An excellent example of this can be found in their Chalices and other
ceremonial utensils which were meant for Divine Service. As we have
said elsewhere The Craftsman, the journal of the Arts and Crafts
Movement in this country not long since compared a Chalice of the
Thirteenth Century with the prize cups which are offered for yacht
races and other competitions in this country. We may say at once that
the form which the Chalice received during the Thirteenth Century is
that which constitutes to a great extent the model for this sacred
vessel ever since and the comparison with the modern design is
therefore all the more interesting. In spite of the fact that money is
no object as a rule in the construction of many of the modern prize
cups, they compare unfavorably according to the writer in The
Craftsman with the old time chalices. There is a tendency to over
ornamentation which {114} spoils the effectiveness of the lines of the
metal work in many cases and there is also only too often, an attempt
to introduce forms of plastic art which do not lend themselves well to
this class of work. It is in design particularly that the older
workman excels his modern colleague though usually there are
suggestions from several sources for present day work. In a word the
Thirteenth Century Chalice was much more admirable than the modern
piece of metal work, because the lines were simpler, the combination
of beauty with utility more readily recognizable and the obtrusiveness
of the ornamentation much less marked.
This same thing is true for other even coarser forms of metal work in
connection with the Cathedrals, and anyone who has seen some of the
beautiful iron screens built for Cathedral choirs in the olden times
will realize that even the worker in iron must have been an artist as
well as a blacksmith. The effect produced, especially in the dim light
of the Cathedral, is often that of delicate lace work. To appreciate
the strength of the screen one must actually test it with the hands.
This of itself represents a very charming adaptation of what might be
expected to be rough work meant for protective purposes into a
suitable ornament. Some of the gates of the old churchyards are very
beautiful in their designs and have often been imitated in quite
recent years, for the gates of country places, for our modern
millionaires. The Reverend Augustus Jessopp who has written much with
regard to the times before the Reformation, says that he has found in
his investigations, that not infrequently such gates were made by the
village blacksmiths. Most of the old parish records are lost because
of the suppression of the parishes as well as the monasteries in Henry
the Eighth's time. Some of the original documents are, however,
preserved and among them are receipts from the village blacksmith, for
what we now admire as specimens of artistic ironwork and corresponding
receipts from the village carpenter, for woodwork that we now consider
of equally high order. There were carved bench ends and choir stalls
which seem to have been produced in this way. Just how these
generations of the Thirteenth Century, in little towns of less than
ten thousand inhabitants, {115} succeeded in raising up artisans in
numbers, capable of doing such fine work, and yet content to make
their living at such ordinary occupations, is indeed hard to
understand. It must not be forgotten, moreover, that though there was
not much furniture during the Thirteenth Century what little there
was, was as a rule very carefully and artistically made. Thirteenth
Century benches and tables are famous. Cathedrals and castles worked
together in inspiring and giving occupation to these wonderful
workmen.
It was not only the workmen engaged in the construction of the
edifices proper who made the beautiful things and created marvelously
artistic treasures during this century. All the adornments of the
Cathedrals and especially everything associated in any intimate way
with the religious service was sure to be executed with the most
delicate taste. The vestments of the time are some of the most
beautiful that have ever been made. The historians of needlework tell
us that this period represents the most flourishing era of artistic
accomplishment with the needle of all modern history. One example of
this has secured a large share of notoriety in quite recent years. An
American millionaire bought the famous piece of needlework known as
the Cope of Ascoli. This is an example of the large garment worn over
the shoulders in religious processions and at benediction. The price
paid for the garment is said to have been $60,000. This was not
considered extortionate or enforced, as the Cope was declared by
experts to be one of the finest pieces of needlework in the world. The
jewels which originally adorned it had been removed so that the money
was paid for the needlework itself. After a time it became clear that
the Cope had been stolen before being sold, and accordingly it was
returned to the Italian government who presented the American
millionaire with a medal for his honesty.
We have spoken of the Cathedrals as great stone books, in which he who
ran, might read, even though he were not able to read in the technical
sense of the term. This has been an old-time expression with regard to
the Cathedrals, but not even its inventor perhaps, and certainly not
most of those who have repeated it have realized how literally true
was the saying. I {116} have elsewhere quoted from Reinach's Story of
Art Throughout the Ages as an authority on the subject. His
re-statement of the intellectual significance for the people of the
Cathedrals of their towns, in which it must be remembered that they
had a personal interest because in a sense they were really theirs,
and they felt their ownership quite as much as a modern member of a
parish feels with regard to his church, emphasizes and illuminates
this subject to a wonderful degree. The realization that the
information of the time was deliberately woven into these great stone
structures, mainly of course for decorative purposes, but partly also
with the idea of educating the people, is a startling confirmation of
the idea that education was the most important and significant work of
this great century.
"The Gothic Cathedral is a perfect encyclopedia of human knowledge.
It contains scenes from the Scriptures and the legends of saints;
motives from the animal and vegetable kingdom; representations of
the seasons of agricultural labor, of' the arts and sciences and
crafts, and finally moral allegories, as, for instance, ingenious
personifications of the virtues and the vices. In the Thirteenth
Century a learned Dominican, Vincent of Beauvais, was employed by
St. Louis to write a great work which was to be an epitome of all
the knowledge of his times. This compilation, called The Mirror of
the World, is divided into four parts: The Mirror of Nature, The
Mirror of Science, the Moral Mirror, and the Historical Mirror. A
contemporary archaeologist, M. E. Male, has shown that the works of
art of our great cathedrals are a translation into stone of the
Mirror of Vincent of Beauvais, setting aside the episodes from Greek
and Roman History, which would have been out of place. It was not
that the imagers had read Vincent's work; but that, like him, they
sought to epitomise all the knowledge of their contemporaries. The
first aim of their art is not to please, but to teach; they offer an
encyclopedia for the use of those who cannot read, translated by
sculptor or glass-painter into a clear and precise language, under
the lofty direction of the Church which left nothing to chance. It
was present always and everywhere, advising and superintending the
artist, leaving him to his own devices only when he {117} modelled
the fantastic animals of the gargoyles, or borrowed decorative
motives from the vegetable kingdom." [Footnote 11]
[Footnote 11: Reinach--The Story of Art Throughout the Ages.
Scribner's, 1904.]
[Illustration]
CATHEDRAL (BOURGES)
[Illustration: ]
CATHEDRAL (CHARTRES)
As to how much the cathedrals held of meaning for those who built them
and worshiped in them, only a careful study of the symbolism of the
time will enable the present-day admirer to understand. Modern
generations have lost most of their appreciation of the significance
of symbolism. The occupation of mind with the trivial things that are
usually read in our day, leaves little or no room for the study of the
profounder thought an artist may care to put into his work, and so the
modern artist tells his story as far as possible without any of this
deeper significance, since it would only be lost. In the Thirteenth
Century, however, everything artistic had a secondary meaning.
Literature was full of allegories, even the Arthur Legends were
considered to be the expression of the battle of a soul with worldly
influences as well as a poetic presentation of the story of the old
time British King. The Gothic Cathedrals were a mass of symbolism.
This will perhaps be best understood from the following explanation of
Cathedral symbolism, which we take from the translation of Durandus's
work on the meaning of the Divine Offices, a further account of which
will be found in the chapter on The Prose of the Century.
"Far away and long ere we can catch the first view of the city
itself, the three spires of its Cathedral, rising high above its din
and turmoil, preach to us of the Most High and Undivided Trinity. As
we approach, the Transepts, striking out crosswise, tell of the
Atonement. The Communion of Saints is set forth by the chapels
clustering around Choir and Nave: the mystical weathercock bids us
to watch and pray and endure hardness; the hideous forms that are
seen hurrying from the eaves speak the misery of those who are cast
out of the church; spire, pinnacle, and finial, the upward curl of
the sculptured foliage, the upward spring of the flying buttress,
the sharp rise of the window arch, the high thrown pitch of the
roof, all these, overpowering the horizontal tendency of string
course and parapet, teach us, that vanquishing earthly desires, we
also should ascend in heart and mind. Lessons of holy {118} wisdom
are written in the delicate tracery of the windows; the unity of
many members is shadowed forth by the multiplex arcade; the duty of
letting our light shine before men, by the pierced and flowered
parapet that crowns the whole.
"We enter. The triple breadth of Nave and Aisles, the triple height
of Pier arch, Triforium, and Clerestory, the triple length of Choir,
Transepts, and Nave, again set forth the HOLY TRINITY. And what
besides is there that does not tell of our Blessed SAVIOUR? that
does not point out "HIM First" in the two-fold western door; "HIM
Last" in the distant altar; "HIM Midst," in the great Rood; "HIM
Without End," in the monogram carved on boss and corbel, in the Holy
Lamb, in the Lion of the tribe of Judah, in the Mystic Fish? Close
by us is the font; for by regeneration we enter the Church; it is
deep and capacious; for we are buried in Baptism with CHRIST; it is
of stone, for HE is the Rock; and its spiry cover teaches us, if we
be indeed risen from its waters with HIM, to seek those things which
are above. Before us in long-drawn vista are the massy piers, which
are the Apostles and Prophets--they are each of many members, for
many are the Graces in every Saint, there is beautifully delicate
foliage round the head of all; for all were plentiful in good works.
Beneath our feet are the badges of worldly pomp and glory, the
graves of Kings and Nobles and Knights; all in the Presence of God
as dross and worthlessness. Over us swells the vast valley of the
high pitched roof; from the crossing and interlacing of its curious
rafters hang fadeless flowers and fruits which are not of earth;
from its hammer-beams project wreaths and stars such as adorn
heavenly beings; in its center stands the LAMB as it has been slain;
from around HIM the celestial Host, Cherubim and Seraphim, Thrones,
Principalities, and Powers, look down peacefully on the worshipers
below. Harpers there are among them harping with their harps; for
one is the song of the Church in earth and in Heaven. Through the
walls wind the narrow cloister galleries; emblems of the path by
which holy hermits and anchorets whose conflicts were known only to
their GOD, have reached their Home. And we are compassed about with
a mighty cloud of witnesses; the rich deep glass of the windows
teems {119} with saintly forms, each in its own fair niche, all
invested with the same holy repose; there is the glorious company of
the Apostles; the goodly fellowship of the Prophets; the noble army
of Martyrs; the shining band of Confessors; the jubilant chorus of
the Virgins; there are Kings, who have long since changed an earthly
for an heavenly crown; and Bishops who have given in a glad account
to the Shepherd and Bishop of souls. But on none of these things do
we rest; piers, arch behind arch, windows, light behind light,
arcades, shaft behind shaft, the roof, bay behind bay, the Saints
around us, the Heavenly Hierarchy above with dignity of preeminence
still increasing eastward, each and all, lead on eye and soul and
thought to the Image of the Crucified Saviour as displayed on the
great East window. Gazing steadfastly on that we pass up the Nave,
that is through the Church Militant, till we reach the Rood Screen,
the barrier between it and the Church Triumphant, and therein
shadowing forth the death of the Faithful. High above it hangs on
His Triumphant Cross the image of Him who by His death hath overcome
death; on it are portrayed Saints and Martyrs, His warriors who,
fighting under their LORD have entered into rest and inherit a
tearless eternity. They are to be our examples, and the seven lamps
above them typify those graces of the SPIRIT, by Whom alone we can
tread in their steps. The screen itself glows with gold and crimson;
with gold, for they have on their heads golden crowns; with crimson,
for they passed the Red Sea of Martyrdom, to obtain them. And
through the delicate network, and the unfolding Holy Doors, we catch
faint glimpses of the Chancel beyond. There are the massy stalls;
for in Heaven is everlasting rest; there are the Sedilia, emblems of
the seats of' the Elders round the Throne; there is the Piscina; for
they have washed their robes and made them white; and there heart
and soul and life of all, the Altar with its unquenched lights, and
golden carvings, and mystic steps, and sparkling jewels; even CHRIST
Himself, by Whose only Merits we find admission to our Heavenly
Inheritance. Verily, as we think on the oneness of its design, we
may say: Jerusalem edificatur ut civitas cujus participatio ejus in
idipsum."
{120}
It is because of all this wealth of meaning embodied in them, that the
Cathedrals of this old time continue to be so interesting and so
unfailingly attractive even to our distant and so differently
constituted generation. [Footnote 12]
[Footnote 12: Those who care to realize to some degree all the
Wonderful symbolic meaning of the ornamentation of some of these
cathedrals, should read M. Huysman's book La Cathedrale, which has,
we believe, been translated into English. Needless to say it has
been often in our hands in compiling this chapter, and the death of
its author as this chapter is going through the press poignantly
recalls all the beauty of his work.]
We cannot close this chapter on the Book of the Arts leaving the
impression that only the Church Architecture of the time deserves to
be considered in the category of, great art influences. There were
many municipal buildings, some stately castles, and a large number of
impressively magnificent Abbeys and Monasteries, besides educational
and charitable institutions built at this same time. The town halls of
some of the great Hansa towns, that is, the German free cities that
were members of the Hanseatic League, present some very striking
examples of the civil architecture of the period. It has the same
characteristics that we have discussed in treating of the Cathedrals.
While wonderfully impressive, it was eminently suitable for the
purpose for which it was intended and the decorations always forming
integral parts of the structure, sounded the note of the combination
of beauty with utility which is so characteristic of every phase of
the art accomplishment of the century.
Some of the castles would deserve special description by themselves
but unfortunately space forbids more than a passing mention. Certain
castellated fortresses still standing in England and Ireland come from
the time of King John, and are excellent examples of the stability and
forceful character of this form of architecture in the Thirteenth
Century. It is interesting to find that when we come to build in the
Twentieth Century in America, the armories which are to be used for
the training of our militia and the storage of arms and ammunition,
many of the ideas used in their construction are borrowed from this
olden time.
{opp120}
[Illustration]
DURHAM CASTLE AND CATHEDRAL
[Illustration]
KING JOHN'S CASTLE (LIMERICK)
There is a famous castle in Limerick, Ireland, built in John's time
which constituted an {121} excellent example of this and which has
doubtlessly often been studied and more or less imitated.
One portion of Kenilworth Castle in England dates from the Thirteenth
Century and has been often the subject of careful study by modern
architects. The same thing might be said of many others.
With regard to the English Abbeys too much cannot be said in praise of
their architecture and it has been the model for large educational and
municipal buildings ever since. St. Mary's Abbey at York, though only
a few scattered fragments of its beauties are to be seen and very
little, of its walls still stand, is almost as interesting as
Yorkminster, the great Cathedral itself. There were many such abbeys
as this built in England during the Thirteenth Century--more than a
dozen of them at least and probably a full score. All of them are as
distinguished in the history of architecture as the English
Cathedrals. It will be remembered that what is now called Westminster
Abbey was not a Cathedral church, but only a monastery church attached
to the Abbey of Westminster and this, the only well preserved example
of its class furnishes an excellent idea of what these religious
institutions signify in the Thirteenth Century. They meant as much for
the art impulse as the Cathedrals themselves.
One feature of these monastic establishments deserves special mention.
The cloisters were usually constructed so beautifully as to make them
veritable gems of the art of the period. These cloisters were the
porticos usually surrounding a garden of the monastery within which
the Monks could walk, shaded from the sun, and protected from the rain
and the snow. They might very easily have been hideously useful
porches, especially as they were quite concealed from the outer world
as a rule, and those not belonging to the order were not admitted to
them except on very special occasions. The name cloister signifies an
enclosed place and lay persons were not ordinarily admitted to them.
Those who know anything about them will recall what beautiful
constructive work was put into them. Certain examples as that of St.
John Lateran in Rome and the Cloister of St. Paul's without the walls
some five miles from Rome, constructed during the {122} Thirteenth
Century and under the influence of the same great art movement as gave
the Cathedrals, are the most beautiful specimens that now remain. The
only thing that they can be compared with is the famous Angel Choir at
Lincoln which indeed they recall in many ways.
The pictures of these two Cloisters which we present will give some
idea of their beauty. To be thoroughly appreciated, however, they must
be seen, for there is a delicacy of finish about every detail that
makes them an unending source of admiration and brings people back
again and again to see them, yet always to find something new and
apparently unnoticed before. It might be thought that the studied
variety in the columns so that no two are of exactly the same form,
would produce a bizarre effect. The lack of symmetry that might
result, from this same feature could be expected to spoil their
essential beauty. Neither of these effects has been produced, however.
The Cloisters were, moreover, not purple patches on monasteries, but
ever worthy portions of very beautiful buildings.
All of these buildings were furnished as regards their metal work,
their wood work, and the portions that lent themselves to decoration,
in the same spirit as the Cathedrals themselves. The magnificent
tables and benches of the Thirteenth Century are still considered to
be the best models of simplicity of line with beauty of form and
eminent durability in the history of furniture making. The fashion for
Colonial furniture in our own time has brought us nearer to such
Thirteenth Century furniture making than has been true at any other
time in history. Here once more there was one of these delightful
combinations of beauty and utility which is so characteristic of the
century. Even the kitchen utensils were beautiful as well as useful
and the Irish poet might have been satisfied to his heart's content.
{opp122}
[Illustration]
PALAZZO VECCHIO (ARNULFO, FLORENCE)
CAMPANILE (GIOTTO)
[Illustration]
GIOTTO'S TOWER (FLORENCE)
Certain other architectural forms were wonderfully developed during
the Thirteenth Century and the opening years of the Fourteenth Century
while men trained during the former period were still at work.
Giotto's tower, for instance, must be considered a Thirteenth Century
product since its architect was well past thirty-five years of age
before the Thirteenth {123} Century closed and all his artistic
character had been formed under its precious inspiration. It is a
curious reflection on modern architecture, that some of the modern
high business buildings are saved from being hideous just in as much
as they approach the character of some of these tower-like structures
of the Thirteenth Century. The first of New York's skyscrapers which
is said to have escaped the stigma of being utterly ugly, as most of
them are, because of their appeal to mere utility, was the New York
Times Building which is just Giotto's tower on a large scale set down
on Broadway at the beginning of the Twentieth Century. Seen from a
mile away the effect is exactly that of the great Florentine
architect's beautiful structure and this was of course the deliberate
intention of the modern architect. Anyone who would think, however,
that our modern business building with its plain walls recalls in any
adequate sense its great pattern, should read what Mr. Ruskin has said
with regard to the wealth of meaning that is to be found in Giotto's
tower. Into such structures just as into the Cathedrals, the
architects and builders of the time succeeded in putting a whole
burden of suggestion, which to the generations of the time in which
they were built, accustomed to the symbolism of every art feature in
life around them, had a precious wealth of significance that we can
only appreciate after deep study and long contemplation. We have felt
that only the quotation from Mr. Ruskin himself can fully illustrate
what we wish to convey in this matter.
"Of these representations of human art under heavenly guidance, the
series of basreliefs which stud the base of this tower of Giotto's
must be held certainly the chief in Europe. At first you may be
surprised at the smallness of their scale in proportion to their
masonry; but this smallness of scale enabled the master workmen of
the tower to execute them with their own hands; and for the rest, in
the very finest architecture, the decoration of most precious kind
is usually thought of as a jewel, and set with space round it--as
the jewels of a crown, or the clasp of a girdle."
{124}
VII
ARTS AND CRAFTS--GREAT TECHNICAL SCHOOLS
The most interesting social movement in our time is undoubtedly that
of the arts and crafts. Its central idea is to lift the workmen up
above the mere machine that he is likely to become, as the result of
the monotonous occupation at some trade, that requires him only to do
a constantly repeated series of acts, or direct, one little portion of
machinery and so kills the soul in him. Of course, the other idea that
a generation of workmen shall be created, who will be able to make
beautiful things, for the use of the household as well as the
adornment of the house is another principal purpose. Too many people
have mistaken this entirely secondary aim of the movement for its
primary end. It is because of the effect upon the workman himself of
the effort to use his intellect in the designing, his taste in the
arrangement, and his artisan skill for the execution of beautiful
things, that the arts and crafts movement has its appeal to the
generality of mankind.
The success of the movement promises, to do more, to solve social
problems than all the socialistic agitation that is at present causing
so much dismay in some quarters and raising so many hopes that are
destined to be disappointed in the hearts of the laboring classes. The
solution of the problem of social unrest is to be found, not in
creating new wants for people and giving them additional wages that
will still further stimulate their desire to have many things that
will continue to be in spite of increased wages beyond their means,
but rather to give them such an interest in their life work that their
principal source of pleasure is to be found in their occupation.
Unfortunately work has come to be looked upon as a drudgery and as men
must spend the greater portion of their lives, at least the vast
majority of them must, in doing something that will enable them to
make a living, it is clear that unhappiness {125} and discontent will
still continue. Blessed is the man who has found his work, blessed is
the man to whom his work appeals with so much interest that he goes
from it with a longing to be able to finish what he has been at, and
comes back to it with a prospect that now he shall be able to
accomplish what time and perhaps fatigue would not allow him to
proceed with the day before.
This is the best feature of the promises held out by the arts and
crafts movement, that men shall be interested in the work they do.
This may seem to some people an unrealizable idea and a poetic
aspiration rather than a possible actuality. A little study of what
was accomplished in this line during the Thirteenth Century, will
surely prove even to the most skeptical how much of success is capable
of being realized in this matter. The men who worked around the
Cathedrals were given opportunities to express themselves and the best
that was in them as no class of workmen before or since have ever had
the opportunity. Every single portion of the Cathedral was to be made
as beautiful as the mind of man could conceive, his taste could plan
and his hands could achieve. As a consequence the carpenter had the
chance to express himself in the woodwork, the village blacksmith the
opportunity to display his skill in such small ironwork as the hinges
or the latch for the door and every workman felt called upon to do the
best that was in him.
It is easy to understand under these circumstances with what interest
the men must have applied themselves to their tasks. They were, as a
rule, the designers as well as the executors of the work assigned
them. They planned and executed in the rough and tried, then modified
and adapted, until finally as we know of most of the Cathedrals, their
finished product was as nearly perfect in most particulars as it is
ordinarily given to man to achieve. Their aim above all was to make
such a combination of utility with beauty of line yet simplicity of
finish, as would make their work worthy counterparts of all the other
portions of the Cathedral. The sense of competition must have stirred
men to the very depths of their souls and yet it was not the heartless
rivalry that crushes when it succeeds, but the inspiring emulation
that makes one do as well as or better than others, though not
necessarily in such a way as to {126} belittle others' efforts by
contrast or humble them by triumph.
{opp126}
[Illustration]
FOUNTAIN (PERUGIA) [TOWN PUMP]
[Illustration]
LAVATOIO (TODI) [PUBLIC WASH-HOUSE]
In these old medieval days England used to be called Merrie England
and it is easy to understand that workmen would be profoundly merry at
heart, when they had the consciousness of accomplishing such good
work. Men must have almost tardily quitted their labor in the evening
while they hoped and strove to accomplish something that would be
worthy of the magnificent building in which so many of their fellow
workmen were achieving triumphs of handicraftsmanship. Each went home
to rest for the night, but also to dream over what he might be able to
do and awoke in the morning with the thought that possibly to-day
would see some noteworthy result. This represents the ideal of the
workman's life. He has an interest quite apart from the mere making of
money. The picture of the modern workman by contrast looks vain and
sordid. The vast majority of our workmen labor merely because they
must make enough money to-day, in order that they may be able to buy
food enough so as to get strength to work to-morrow. Of interest there
is very little. Day after day there is the task of providing for self
and others. Only this and nothing more. Is it any wonder that there
should be social unrest and discontentment? How can workmen be merry
unless with the artificial stimulus of strong drink, when there is
nothing for them to look forward to except days and weeks and years of
labor succeeding one another remorselessly, and with no surcease until
Nature puts in her effective demand for rest, or the inevitable end
comes.
It would be idle to say that these men who knew how to make the
beautiful things for these cathedrals were not conscious of the
perfection of the work that they were accomplishing. The very fact
that each in his own line was achieving such beautiful results must
have stamped him as thoroughly capable of appreciating the work of
others. The source of pleasure that there must have been therefore, in
some twenty towns in England alone, to see their Cathedral approaching
completion, must have been of itself a joy far beyond anything we can
imagine as possible for the workmen of the present day. The interest
in it was supreme and was only heightened by the fact that it was
being done by relatives and friends and brother workmen, even {127}
though they might be rivals, and that whatever was done was redounding
first to the glory of the Lord to whom they turned with so much
confidence in these ages of faith, and secondly, and there was
scarcely less satisfaction in the thought, to the reputation of their
native town and their fellow-townsmen.
This is the feature of the life of the lower classes in the Thirteenth
Century which most deserves to be studied in our time. We hear much of
people being kept in ignorance and in servitude. Men who talk this way
know nothing at all of the lives of the towns of the Middle Ages and
are able to appreciate not even in the slightest degree the wonderful
system of education, that made life so much fuller of possibilities
for intellectual development for all classes and for happiness in
life, than any other period of which we know. This phase of the
Thirteenth Century is at once the most interesting, the most
significant for future generations, and the most important in its
lessons for all time.
We have been following up thus far the exemplification in the
Thirteenth Century of John Ruskin's saying, that if you wish to get at
the real significance of the achievements of a period in history, you
must read the book of its deeds, the book of its arts and the book of
its words. We have been turning over a few of the pages of the book of
the deeds of the Thirteenth Century in studying the history of the
establishment of the universities and of the method and content of
university teaching. After all the only deeds that ought to count in
the history of mankind are those that are done for men--that have
accomplished something for the uplift of mankind. History is
unfortunately occupied with deeds of many other kinds, and it is
perhaps the saddest blot on our modern education, that it is mainly
the history of deeds that have been destructive of man, of human
happiness and in only too many cases of human rights and human
liberties, that are supposed to be most worthy of the study of the
rising generation. History as written for schools is to a great extent
a satire on efforts for social progress.
We shall continue the study of the book of the deeds of the Thirteenth
Century and its most interesting and important chapter, that of the
education of the masses. We shall find in what was accomplished in
educating the people of the {128} Thirteenth Century, the model of the
form of education which in spite of our self-complacency does not
exist, but must come in our time, if our education is to fulfill its
real purpose. Perhaps the most interesting phase of this question of
the education of the masses will be the fact that in studying this
book of the deeds, we shall have also to study once more the book of
the arts of the Thirteenth Century. All their best accomplishment was
linked with achievement and progress in art. Yet it was from the
masses that the large number of artist-artisans of workmen with the
true artistic spirit came, who in this time in nearly every part of
Europe, created masterpieces of art in every department which have
since been the admiration of the world.
We may say at once that the opportunity for the education of the
masses was furnished in connection with the Cathedrals. In the light
of what we read in these great stone books, it is a constant source of
surprise that the Church should be said to have been opposed to
education. Reinach in his Story of Art throughout the Ages says:
"The Church was not only rich and powerful in the Middle Ages; it
dominated and directed all the manifestations of human activity.
There was practically no art but the art it encouraged, the art it
needed to construct and adorn its buildings, carve its ivories and
its reliquaries, and paint its glass and its missals. Foremost among
the arts it fostered was architecture, which never played so
important a part in any other society. Even now, when we enter a
Romanesque or Gothic church, we are impressed by the might of that
vast force of which it is the manifestation, a force which shaped
the destinies of Europe for a thousand years."
It was as the result of this demand for art that the technical schools
naturally developed around the Cathedrals. To take the example of
England alone, during the Thirteenth Century some twenty cathedrals
were erected in various parts of the country. Most of these were built
in what we would now call small towns, indeed some of them would be
considered scarcely more than villages. There were no large cities, in
praise be it spoken, during the Thirteenth Century, and it must not be
forgotten that the whole population of England at the beginning {129}
of the century was scarcely more than two millions of people and did
not reach three millions even at the end of it. Every rood of ground
did not perhaps maintain its man, but every part of England had its
quota of population so that there could not be many crowded centers.
Even London probably at no time during the century had more than
twenty-five thousand inhabitants and Oxford during the palmiest days
of the University was perhaps the most populous place in the land.
There was a rivalry in the building of Cathedrals, and as the main
portion of the buildings were erected in the short space of a single
century, a feeling of intense competition was rife so that there was
very little possibility of procuring workmen from other towns. Each
town had to create not only its cathedral but the workmen who would
finish it in all its details. When we consider that a Cathedral like
Salisbury was practically completed in the short space of about
twenty-five years, it becomes extremely difficult to understand just
how this little town succeeded in apparently accomplishing the
impossible. It has often been said that artists cannot be obtained
merely because of a demand for them and that they are the slow
creation of rather capricious nature. It is only another way of saying
that the artist is born, not made. Nature then must have been in a
particularly fruitful mood and tense during the Thirteenth Century,
for there is no doubt at all of the wonderful artistic beauty of the
details of these Gothic cathedrals. While nature's beneficence meant
much, however, the training of the century probably meant even more
and the special form of popular education which developed well
deserves the attention of all other generations.
It may be said at once that education in our sense of teaching
everybody to read and write there was none. There were more students
at the universities to the number of the population than in the
Twentieth Century as we have seen, but people who were not to devote
themselves in after life to book learning, were not burdened with
acquisitions of doubtful benefit, which might provide stores of
useless information for them, or enable them to while away hours of
precious time reading trash, or make them conceited with the thought
that because they had absorbed some of the opinions of others on
things in general, {130} they had a right to judge of most things
under the sun and a few other things besides. The circulation of our
newspapers and the records of the books in demand at our libraries,
show how much a knowledge of reading means for most of our population.
Popular education of this kind may, and does benefit a few, but it
works harm to a great many.
Of education in the sense of training the faculties so that the
individual might express whatever was in him and especially that he
might bring out what was best in him, there was much. Take again the
example of England. There was considerably less in population than
there is in Greater New York at the present time, yet there was some
twenty places altogether in which they were building Cathedrals during
this century, that would be monuments of artistic impulse and
accomplishment for all future time. Any city in this country would be
proud to have any one of these English cathedrals of the Thirteenth
Century as the expression of its taste and power to execute. We have
tried to imitate them more or less in many places. In order to
accomplish our purpose in this matter, though, we deliberately did
everything on a much smaller and less ambitious scale than the people
of the small English towns of seven centuries ago, and our results do
not bear comparison for a moment with theirs, we had to appeal to
other parts of the country and even to Europe for architects and
designers, and even had to secure the finished products of art from
distant places. This too, in spite of the fact that we are seven
centuries later and that our education is supposed to be developed to
a high extent. If there were twenty places of instruction in Greater
New York where architects and artist workers in iron and glass, and
metal of all kinds, and wood and stone, were being trained to become
such finished artisans as were to be found in twenty different little
towns of England in the Thirteenth Century, we should be sure that our
manual training schools and our architectural departments of
universities and schools of design were wonderfully successful.
When we find this to be true of the England of the Thirteenth Century
we can conclude that somehow better opportunities for art education
must have been supplied in those times than in our own, and though we
do not find the mention or {131} records of formal schools, we must
look patiently for the methods of instruction that enabled these
generations to accomplish so much. Needless to say such attainments do
not come spontaneously in a large number of people, but must be
carefully fostered and are the result of that greatest factor in
education, environment. It will not be hard to find where the
ambitious youth of England even of the workman class found
opportunities for technical education of the highest character in
these little towns. This was never merely theoretic, though, it was
sufficiently grounded in principle to enable men to solve problems in
architecture and engineering, in decoration and artistic arrangement,
such as are still sources of anxiety for modern students of these
questions.
To take but a single example, it will be readily appreciated that the
consideration of the guilds of builders of the Cathedrals as
constituting a great technical school, is marvelously emphasized by
certain recent observations with regard to architects' and builders'
methods in the Cathedrals. There is a passage in Evelyn's Diary in
which he describes certain corrections that were introduced into Old
St. Paul's Cathedral, London (the Gothic edifice predecessor of the
present classical structure), in order to remove appearances of
dissymmetry and certain seeming mistakes of construction. This passage
was always so misunderstood that editors usually considered it to be
defective in some way and as the classical critics always fall back on
an imperfect text for insoluble difficulties, so somehow Evelyn was
considered as either not having understood what he intended to say, or
else the printer failed to put in all the words that he wrote. It was
the modern readers, however, not Evelyn nor his printer who were
mistaken. Mr. Goodyear of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences
has proved by a series of photographs and carefully made observations,
that many of the old Gothic Cathedrals have incorporated into them by
their builders, optical corrections which correspond to those made by
the Greeks in their building in the classical period, which have been
the subject of so much admiration to the moderns.
The medieval architects and builders knew nothing of these classical
architectural refinements. They learned for themselves by actual
experience the necessity for making such optical {132} corrections and
then introduced them so carefully, that it is not until the last
decade or so that their presence has been realized. It is only by an
educational tradition of the greatest value that the use of such a
refinement could become as general as Professor Goodyear has found it
to be. Besides the practical work then, and the actual exercise of
craftsmanship and of design which the apprentices obtained from the
guild, there was evidently a body of very definite technical
information conveyed to them, or at least to certain chosen spirits
among them, which carried on precious traditions from place to place.
This same state of affairs must of course have existed with regard to
stained glass work, the making of bells and especially the finer work
in the precious metals. Practical metallurgy must have been studied
quite as faithfully as in any modern technical school, at least so far
as its practical purposes and application were concerned. Here we have
the secret of the technical schools revealed.
It is extremely interesting to study the details of the very practical
organization by which this great educational movement in the arts and
crafts was brought about. It was due entirely to the trades' and
merchants' guilds of the time. In the cathedral towns the trades'
guilds preponderated in influence. There gathered around each of these
cathedrals during the years when work was most active, numbers of
workmen engaged at various occupations requiring mechanical skill and
long practice at their trade. These workmen were all affiliated with
one another and they were gradually organized into trades' unions that
had a certain independent existence. There was the guild of the stone
workers; the guild of the metal workers--in some places divided into a
guild of iron workers and a guild of gold workers, or workers in
precious metals; there was the guild of the wood workers and then of
the various other forms of occupation connected with the supplying of
finished or unfinished materials for the cathedral. In association
with these were established guilds of tailors, bakers, butchers, all
affiliated in a merchants' guild which maintained the rights of its
members as well as the artisans' guilds. Some idea of the number and
variety of these can be obtained from the list given in the chapter on
the Origin of the Drama.
{opp133}
[Illustration]
RELIQUARY (LIMOGES MUSEO, FLORENCE)
[Illustration]
CRUCIFIX (DUOMO, SIENA)
{133}
These were the workmen who not only accomplished such brilliant
results in art work, but also succeeded in training other workmen so
admirably for every line of artistic endeavor.
It is somewhat difficult to understand just how a village carpenter
did wood-carving of so exquisite a design and such artistic finish of
detail that it has remained a subject of admiration for centuries. It
is quite as difficult to understand how one of the village blacksmiths
of the time made a handsome gate, that has been the constant
admiration of posterity ever since, or designed huge hinges for doors
that artists delight to copy, or locks and latches and bolts that are
transported to our museums to be looked at with interest, not only
because they are antiques, but for the wonderful combination of the
beautiful and the useful which they illustrate. We are assured,
however, by the Rev. Augustus Jessopp, that he has seen in the
archives of the old English parishes, some of the receipts for the
bills of these village workmen as we would term them, for the making
of these beautiful specimens of arts and crafts.
The surprise grows greater when we realize that these beautiful
objects were made not alone in one place or even in a few places, but
in nearly every town of any size in England and France and Italy and
Germany and Spain at various times during the Thirteenth Century, and
that at any time a town of considerably less than ten thousand
inhabitants seemed to be able to obtain among its own inhabitants, men
who could make such works of art not as copies nor in servile
imitation of others, but with original ideas of their own, and make
them in such perfection that in many cases they have remained the
models for future workmen for many centuries. Even the bells for the
cathedrals seem to have been cast in practically all cases in the
little town in which they were to be used. It may be added that these
bells of the Thirteenth Century represent the highest advances in bell
making that have ever been attained and that their form and
composition have simply been imitated over and over again since that
time. Even the finer precious metal work such as chalices and the
various sacred vessels and objects used in the church services, were
not obtained from a distance but were made at home.
An article that appeared a few years ago in The Craftsman {134}
(Syracuse, N. Y.), a magazine published in the interests of the Arts
and Crafts movement, called attention to how much more beautifully the
Thirteenth Century workman in the precious metals accomplished his
artistic purpose than does the corresponding workman of the present
day. A definite comparison, was made between some typical chalices of
the Thirteenth Century and some prize cups which were made without
regard to cost, as rewards for yachting and other competitions in the
Twentieth Century. The artist workman of the olden time knew how to
combine the beautiful with the useful, to use decoration just enough
not to offend good taste, to make the lines of his work eminently
artistic and in general to turn out a fine work of art. The modern
prize cup is usually made by one of the large firms engaged in such
work who employ special designers for the purpose, such designs
ordinarily passing through the trained hands of a series of critics
before being accepted, and only after this are turned over to the
modern skilled workmen to be executed in metal. All this ought to
assure the more artistic results; that they do not according to the
writer in The Craftsman, demonstrates how much such success is a
matter of men and of individual taste rather than of method. We have
already called attention to the fact that in needlework and in other
arts connected with the provision of church ornaments and garments,
the success of the Thirteenth Century workers was quite as great. The
Cope of Ascoli considered by experts to be one of the most beautiful
bits of needlework ever made is an example of this. Many other
examples are to be found in the treasuries of churches and
monasteries, in spite of the ravages of time and only too often of
intolerant and unfortunate destruction by so-called reformers, who
could see no beauty in even the most beautiful things if they ran
counter to certain of their religious prejudices.
The training necessary for the production of such beautiful objects of
handicraftsmanship was obtained through the guilds themselves. The boy
in the small town who thought that he had a liking for a certain trade
or craft was received as an apprentice in it. If during the course of
a year or more he demonstrated his aptness for his chosen craft, he
was allowed to {135} continue his labor of assisting the workmen in
various ways, and indeed very early in the history of the guilds was
bound over to some particular workman, who usually supplied him with
board and clothing, though with no other remuneration during his years
of apprenticeship. After four or five years, always, however, with the
understanding that he had shown a definite talent for his chosen
trade, he was accepted among the workmen of the lowest grade, the
journeymen, who usually went traveling in order to perfect their
knowledge of the various methods by which their craft maintained
itself and the standard of its workmanship in the different parts of
the country.
During these three years of "journeying" a striking development was
likely to take place in the mind of the ambitious young workman. His
_wanderjahre_ came just at the most susceptible period, sometime
between 17 and 25, they continued for three years or more, and the
young workman if at all ambitious was likely to see many men and
methods and know much of the cities and towns of his country before he
returned to his native place. Sometimes these craft-wanderings took
him even into France, where he learned methods and secrets so
different to those at home.
After these years if he wished to settle down in his native town or in
some other, having brought evidence of the accomplishment of his
apprenticeship and then of his years as a journeyman, he became an
applicant for full membership in the guild to which his years of
training had been devoted. He was not admitted, however, until he had
presented to the officials of the organization a piece of work showing
his skill. This might be only a hinge, or a lock for a door, but on
the other hand it might be a design for an important window or a
delicate piece of wood or stone-carving. If it was considered worthy
of the standard of workmanship of the guild it was declared to be a
masterpiece. This is where the fine old English word masterpiece comes
from. The workman was then admitted as a master workman and became a
full member of the guild.
This membership carried with it a number of other rights besides that
of permission to work as a master-workman at full wages whenever the
guild was employed. Guilds had certain privileges conferred on them by
the towns in which they lived, {136} by the nobles for whom they
worked and the ecclesiastical authorities on whose various church
structures they were employed. At the beginning of the Thirteenth
Century at least, feudal ideas prevailed to such an extent that no one
was supposed to enjoy any rights or privileges except those which had
been conferred on him by some authority. Besides the workmen of the
same guild were bound together by ties, so that any injury inflicted
on one of them was considered to be done to the whole body. When human
rights were much less recognized than has come to be the case since,
this constituted an important source of protection against many forms
of injury and infringement of rights.
Besides the privileges, however, the guild possessed certain other
decided advantages which made membership desirable, even though it
involved the fulfilment of certain duties. In the various towns in
England, after the introduction during the Thirteenth Century of the
practice of having mystery plays in the various towns, the guild
claimed and obtained the privilege of giving these at various times
during the year. The guild of the goldsmiths would give the
performance of one portion of the Old Testament; the guild of the
tailors another; the guild of the butchers and so on for each of the
trades and crafts still another, so that during the year a whole cycle
of the mysteries of the Christian religion in type and in reality were
exhibited to the people of each region. Almost needless to say, on
such festive occasions, for the plays were given on important feast
days, the people from the countryside flocked in to see them and the
influence was widespread. What was most important, however, was the
influence on those who took part in the plays, of such intimate
contact for a prolonged period with the simplicity of style, the
sublimity of thought, the concentration of purpose and the
effectiveness of expression of the Scriptures and the Scripture
narratives even in their dramatized form.
The fact of actually taking part in these performances meant ever so
much more than merely viewing them as an outsider. It is doubtless to
this intimate relationship with the great truths of Christianity that
the profound devotion so characteristic of the accomplishments of the
arts and crafts, during the Thirteenth Century, must be to no little
extent attributed.
{opp136}
[Illustration ]
MADONNA, CIMABUE
(RUCELLAI CHAPEL, SANTA MARIA NOVELLA, FLORENCE)
{137}
Their beautiful work could only have come from men of profoundest
faith, but also it could not have come from those who were ignorant of
the basis of what they accepted on faith. In other words, there was a
mental training with regard to some of the sublimest truths of life
and its significance, the creation of a Christian philosophy of life,
that made the workman see clearly the great truths of religion and so
be able to illustrate them by his handiwork. Education of a higher
order than this has never been conceived of, and the very lack of
tedious formality in it only made it all the more effectual in action.
Other duties were involved in membership in the guild. All the members
were bound to attend church services regularly and to perform what is
known as their religious duties at periodic intervals, that is, the
rule of the guild required them to go to mass on Sundays and holy
days, to abstain from manual labor on such days unless there was
absolute necessity for it, and to go to confession and communion
several times a year. Besides they were bound to contribute to the
support of such of their fellow-members as were sick and unable to
work or as had been injured. A very interesting phase of this duty
toward sick members existed at least in some parts of the country. A
workman was supposed to pass one night at certain intervals on his
turn, in helping to nurse a fellow-workman who was seriously hurt or
who was very ill. It was considered that the family were quite worn
out enough with the care of the sick man during the day, and so one of
his brother guildsmen came to relieve them of this duty at night. It
is a custom that is still maintained in certain country places but
which of course has passed out of use entirely in our unsympathetic
city life. In a word, there was a thorough education not only in the
life work that made for wages and family support, but also in those
precious social duties that make for happiness and contentment in
life.
{138}
VIII
GREAT ORIGINS IN PAINTING. [Footnote 13]
[Footnote 13: Most of this chapter is taken from the work on Italian
painting (La Peinture Italienne depuis les origines jusqu'a la fin
du xv Siecle, par Georges Lafenestre, Paris Ancienne Maison Quantin
Libraries-Imprimeries Reunies, May & Motteroz, Directeurs, rue
Saint-Benoit. Nouvelle Edition), which forms one of the series of
text books for instruction in art at L'Ecole Des Beaux-Arts--the
famous French Government Art School in Paris. It may be said that
this collection of art manuals is recognized as an authority on all
matters treated of, having been crowned by the Academie Des
Beaux-Arts with the prize Bordin. There is no better source of
information with regard to the development of the arts and none
which can be more readily consulted nor with more assurance as to
the facts and opinions exposed.]
At the commencement of the Thirteenth Century the movement of
emancipation in every phase of thought and life in Italy went on apace
with an extraordinary ardor. After a very serious struggle the Italian
republics were on the point of forcing the German Empire to recognize
them. Everywhere in the first enthusiasm of their independence which
had been achieved by valiant deeds and aspirations after liberty as
lofty as any in modern times, the cities, though united in
confederations they were acting as independent rivals, brought to all
enterprises, lay or religious foundations, commercial or educational
institutions, a wonderful youthful activity and enterprise. The papacy
allied with them favored this movement in its political as well as its
educational aspects and strengthened the art movement of the time.
Christianity under their guidance, by the powerful religious
exaltation which it inspired in the hearts of all men, became a potent
factor in all forms of art. From Pope Innocent III to Boniface VIII
probably no other series of Popes have been so misunderstood and so
misrepresented by subsequent generations, as certainly the Popes of no
other century did so much to awaken the enthusiasm of Christians for
all modes of religious development, and be it said though credit for
this is {139} only too often refused them, also for educational,
charitable and social betterment.
The two great church institutions of the time that were destined to
act upon the people more than any others were the Franciscan and
Dominican orders--the preachers and the friars minor, who were within
a short time after their formation to have such deep and widespread
influence on all strata of society. Both of these orders from their
very birth showed themselves not only ready but anxious to employ the
arts as a means of religious education and for the encouragement of
piety. Their position in this matter had an enormous influence on art
and on the painters of the time. The Dominicans, as became their more
ambitious intellectual training and their purpose as preachers of the
word, demanded encyclopedic and learned compositions; the Franciscans
asked for loving familiar scenes such as would touch the hearts of the
common people. Both aided greatly in helping the artist to break away
from the old fashioned formalism which was no longer sufficient to
satisfy the new ardors of men's souls. In this way they prepared the
Italian imagination for the double revolution which was to come.
It was the great body of legends which grew up about St. Francis
particularly, all of them bound up with supreme charity for one's
neighbor, with love for all living creatures even the lowliest, with
the tenderest feelings for every aspect of external nature, which
appealed to the painters as a veritable light in the darkness of the
times. It was especially in the churches founded by the disciples of
"the poor little man of Assisi," that the world saw burst forth before
the end of the century, the first grand flowers of that renewal of art
which was to prove the beginning of modern art history. It is hard to
understand what would have happened to the painters of the time
without the spirit that was brought into the world by St. Francis'
beautifully simple love for all and every phase of nature around him.
This it was above all that encouraged the return to nature that soon
supplanted Oriental formalism. It was but due compensation that the
greatest works of the early modern painters should have been done in
St. Francis' honor. Besides this the most important factor in art was
the revival of the thirst for knowledge, which arose among the more
intellectual portions of the {140} communities and developed an
enthusiasm for antiquity which was only a little later to become a
veritable passion.
The most important phase of Italian art during the Thirteenth Century
is that which developed at Florence. It is with this that the world is
most familiar. It began with Cimabue, who commenced painter, in the
quaint old English phrase, not long before the middle of the century
and whose great work occupies the second half of it. There are not
wanting some interesting traditions of certain other Florentine
painters before his time as Marchisello, of the early part of the
century, Lapo who painted, in 1261, the facade of the Cathedral at
Pistoia, and Fino di Tibaldi who painted a vast picture on the walls
of the Municipal Palace about the middle of the century, but they are
so much in the shadow of the later masters' work as to be scarcely
known. Everywhere Nature began to reassert herself. The workers in
Mosaic even, who were occupied in the famous baptistry at Florence
about the middle of the century, though they followed the Byzantine
rules of their art, introduced certain innovations which brought the
composition and the subjects closer to nature. These are enough to
show that there was a school of painting and decoration at Florence
quite sufficient to account for Cimabue's development, without the
necessity of appealing to the influence over him of wandering Greek
artists as has sometimes been done.
Though he was not the absolute inventor of all the new art modes as he
is sometimes supposed to be, Cimabue was undoubtedly a great original
genius. Like so many others who have been acclaimed as the very first
in a particular line of thought or effort, his was only the
culminating intelligence which grasped all that had been done before,
assimilated it and made it his own. As a distinct exception to the
usual history of such great initiators, this father of Italian
painting was rich, born of a noble family, but of a character that was
eager for work and with ambition to succeed in his chosen art as the
mainspring of life. At his death, as the result of his influence,
artists had acquired a much better social position than had been
theirs before, and one that it was comparatively easy for his
successors to maintain. His famous Madonna which was subsequently
borne in triumph from his studio to the Church of {141} Santa Maria
Novella, placed the seal of popular approval on the new art, and the
enthusiasm it evoked raised the artist for all time from the plane of
a mere worker in colors to that of a member of a liberal profession.
Even before this triumph his great picture had been deemed worthy of a
visit by Charles of Anjou, the French King, who was on a visit to
Florence and according to tradition ever afterwards the portion of the
city in which it had been painted and through which it was carried in
procession, bore by reason of these happy events the name Borgo
Allegri--Ward of Joy.
This picture is still in its place in the Rucellai chapel and is of
course the subject of devoted attention on the part of visitors.
Lafenestre says of it, that this monument of Florentine art quite
justifies the enthusiasm of contemporaries if we compare it with the
expressionless Madonnas that preceded it. There is an air of
beneficent dignity on the features quite unlike the rigidity of
preceding art, and there is besides an attractive suppleness about the
attitude of the body which is far better proportioned than those of
its predecessors. Above all there is a certain roseate freshness about
the colors of the flesh which are pleasant substitutes for the pale
and greenish tints of the Byzantines. It did not require more than
this to exalt the imaginations of the people delivered from their
old-time conventional painting. It was only a ray of the dawn after a
dark night, but it announced a glorious sunrise of art and the
confident anticipations of the wondrous day to come, aroused the
depths of feeling in the peoples' hearts. Life and nature went back
into art once more; no wonder their re-apparition was saluted with so
much delight.
Two other Madonnas painted by him, one at Florence in the Academy, the
other in Paris in the Louvre, besides his great Mosaic in the apse of
the Cathedral at Pisa, serve to show with what prudence Cimabue
introduced naturalistic qualities into art, while always respecting
the tradition of the older art and preserving the solemn graces and
the majestic style of monumental painting. The old frescoes of the
upper church at Assisi which represent episodes in the life of St.
Francis have also been attributed to Cimabue, but evidently were done
by a number of artists probably under his direction. It is easy to
{142} see from them what an important role the Florentine artist
played in directing the gropings of his assistant artists.
After Cimabue the most important name at Florentine in the Thirteenth
Century is that of his friend, Gaddo Gaddi, whose years of life
correspond almost exactly with those of his great contemporary. His
famous Coronation of the Virgin at Santa Maria de Fiore in Florence
shows that he was greatly influenced by the new ideas that had come
into art. Greater than either of these well-known predecessors
however, was Giotto the friend of Dante, whose work is still
considered worthy of study by artists because of certain qualities in
which it never has been surpassed nor quite outgrown. From Giotto,
however, we shall turn aside for a moment to say something of the
development of art in other cities of Italy, for it must not be
thought that Florence was the only one to take up the new art methods
which developed so marvelously during the Thirteenth Century.
Even before the phenomenal rise of modern art in Florence, at Pisa, at
Lucca and especially at Siena, the new wind of the spirit was felt
blowing and some fine inspirations were realized in spite of hampering
difficulties of all kinds. The Madonna of Guido in the Church of St.
Dominic at Siena is the proof of his emancipation. Besides him
Ugolino, Segna and Duccio make up the Siena school and enable this
other Tuscan city to dispute even with Florence the priority of the
new influence in art. At Lucca Bonaventure Berlinghieri flourished and
there is a famous St. Francis by him only recently found, which proves
his right to a place among the great founders of modern art. Giunta of
Pisa was one of those called to Assisi to paint some of the frescoes
in the upper church. He is noted as having striven to make his figures
more exact and his colors more natural. He did much to help his
generation away from the conventional expressions of the preceding
time and he must for this reason be counted among the great original
geniuses in the history of art.
The greatest name in the art of the Thirteenth Century is of course
that of Giotto. What Dante did for poetry and Villani for history,
their compatriot and friend did for painting. Ambrogio de Bondone
familiarly called Ambrogiotto (and with the abbreviating habit that
the Italians have always had for the names of all those of whom they
thought much shortened to {143} Giotto, as indeed Dante's name had
been shortened from Durante) was born just at the beginning of the
last quarter of the Thirteenth Century. According to a well-known
legend he was guarding the sheep of his father one day and passing his
time sketching a lamb upon a smooth stone with a soft pebble when
Cimabue happened to be passing. The painter struck by the signs of
genius in the work took the boy with him to Florence, where he made
rapid progress in art and soon surpassed even his master. The
wonderful precocity of his genius may be best realized from the fact
that at the age of twenty he was given the commission of finishing the
decorations of the upper Church at Assisi, and in fulfilling it broke
so completely with the Byzantine formalism of the preceding
millennium, that he must be considered the liberator of art and its
deliverer from the chains of conventionalism into the freedom of
nature.
It is no wonder that critics and literary men have been so unstinted
in his praise. Here is an example:
"In the Decamerone it is said of him 'that he was so great a genius
that there was nothing in nature he had not so reproduced that it
was not only like the thing, but seemed to be the thing itself.'
Eulogies of this tenor on works of art are, it is quite true, common
to all periods alike, to the most accomplished of classical
antiquity as well as to the most primitive of the Middle Age; and
they must only be accepted relatively, according to the notion
entertained by each period of what constitutes truth and
naturalness. And from the point of view of his age, Giotto's advance
towards nature, considered relatively to his predecessors, was in
truth enormous. What he sought was not merely the external truth of
sense, but also the inward truth of the spirit. Instead of solemn
images of devotion, he painted pictures in which the spectator
beheld the likeness of human beings in the exercise of activity and
intelligence. His merit lies, as has been well said, in 'an entirely
new conception of character and facts.'" [Footnote 14]
[Footnote 14: History of Ancient, Early Christian and Medieval
Painting from the German of the late Dr. Alfred Woltmann,
Professor at the Imperial University of Strasburg, and Karl
Woertmann, Professor at the Royal Academy of Arts, Dusselford.
Edited by Sidney Colvin, M. A., Dodd, Mead & Co., N. Y., 1894.]
{144}
Lafenestre, in his history of Italian painting for the Beaux-Arts of
Paris already referred to, says that what has survived of Giotto's
work justifies the enthusiasm of his contemporaries. None of his
predecessors accomplished anything like the revolution that he worked.
He fixed the destinies of art in Italy at the moment when Dante fixed
those of literature. The stiff, confused figures of the mosaics and
manuscripts grew supple under his fingers and the confusion
disappeared. He simplified the gestures, varied the expression,
rectified the proportions. Perhaps the best example of his work is
that of the upper Church of Assisi, all accomplished before he was
thirty. What he had to represent were scenes of life almost
contemporary yet already raised to the realm of poetry by popular
admiration. He interpreted the beautiful legend of the life of the
Saint preserved by St. Bonaventure, and like the subject of his
sketches turned to nature at every step of his work. If his figures
are compared with those of the artists of the preceding generations,
their truth to life and natural expressions easily explain the
surprise and the rapture of his contemporaries.
Beautiful as are the pictures of the Upper Church, however, ten years
after their completion Giotto's genius can be seen to have taken a
still higher flight by the study of the pictures on the vast ceilings
of the Lower Church. The four compartments contain the Triumph of
Chastity, the Triumph of Poverty, the Triumph of Obedience, and the
Glorification of St. Francis. The ideal and the real figures in these
compositions are mingled and grouped with admirable clearness and
inventive force. To be appreciated properly they must be seen and
studied _in situ_. Many an artist has made the pilgrimage to Assisi
and none has come away disappointed. Never before had an artist dared
to introduce so many and such numerous figures, yet all were done with
a variety and an ease of movement that is eminently pleasing and even
now are thoroughly satisfying to the artistic mind. After his work at
Assisi some of the best of Giotto's pictures are to be found in the
Chapel of the Arena at Padua. Here there was a magnificent opportunity
and Giotto took full advantage of it. The whole story of Christ's life
is told in the fourteen episodes of the life of his Mother which were
painted here by Giotto. For their sake Padua as well as {145} Assisi
has been a favorite place of pilgrimage for artists ever since and
never more so than in our own time.
{opp144}
[Illustration]
ST. FRANCIS' MARRIAGE WITH POVERTY (GIOTTO, ASSISI)
No greater tribute to the century in which he lived could possibly be
given than to say that his genius was recognized at once, and he was
sought from one end of Italy to another by Popes and Kings, Republics
and Princes, Convents and Municipalities, all of which competed for
the privilege of having this genius work for them with ever increasing
enthusiasm. It is easy to think and to say that it is no wonder that
such a transcendent genius was recognized and appreciated and received
his due reward. Such has not usually been the case in history,
however. On the contrary, the more imposing the genius of an artist,
or a scientist, or any other great innovator in things human, the more
surely has he been the subject of neglect and even of misunderstanding
and persecution. The very fact that Giotto lifted art out of the
routine of formalism in which it was sunk might seem to be enough to
assure failure of appreciation. Men do not suddenly turn round to like
even great innovations, when they have long been satisfied with
something less and when their principles of criticism have been formed
by their experience with the old.
We need not go farther back than our own supposedly illuminated
Nineteenth Century to find some striking examples of this. Turner, the
great English landscapist, failed of appreciation for long years and
had to wait till the end of his life to obtain even a small meed of
reward. The famous Barbizon School of French Painters is a still more
striking example. They went back to nature from the classic formalism
of the early Nineteenth Century painters just as Giotto went back to
nature from Byzantine conventionalism. The immediate rewards in the
two cases were very different and the attitude of contemporaries
strikingly contrasted. Poor Millet did his magnificent work in spite
of the fact that his family nearly starved. Only that Madame Millet
was satisfied to take more than a fair share of hardships for herself
and the family in order that her husband might have the opportunity to
develop his genius after his own way, we might not have had the
magnificent pictures which Millet sold for a few paltry francs that
barely kept {146} the wolf from the door, and for which the next
generation has been paying almost fabulous sums.
All through the Thirteenth Century this characteristic will be found
that genius did not as a rule lack appreciation. The greater the
revolution a genuinely progressive thinker and worker tried to
accomplish in human progress, the more sure was he to obtain not only
a ready audience, but an enthusiastic and encouraging following. This
is the greatest compliment that could be paid to the enlightenment of
the age. Men's minds were open and they were ready and willing to see
things differently from what they had been accustomed to before. This
constitutes after all the best possible guarantee of progress. It is,
however, very probably the last thing that we would think of
attributing to these generations of the Thirteenth Century, who are
usually said very frankly to have been wrapped up in their own
notions, to have been only too ready to accept things on authority
rather than by their own powers of observation and judgment, and to
have been clingers to the past rather than lookers to the present and
the future. Giotto's life shows better than any other how much this
prejudiced view of the Thirteenth Century and perforce of the Middle
Age needs to be corrected.
During forty years Giotto responded to every demand, and made himself
suffice for every call, worked in nearly every important city of
Italy, enkindling everywhere he went the new light of art. Before the
end of the century he completed a cartoon for the famous picture of
the Boat of Peter which was to adorn the Facade of St. Peter's. He was
in Rome in 1300, the first jubilee year, arranging the decorations at
St. John Lateran. The next year he was at Florence, working in the
Palace of the Podesta. And so it went for full two score years. He was
at Pisa, at Lucca, at Arezzo, at Padua, at Milan, then he went South
to Urbino, to Rome and then even to Naples. Unfortunately the strain
of all this work proved too much for him and he was carried away at
the comparatively early age of sixty in the midst of his artistic
vigor and glory.
{opp147}
[Illustration]
ESPOUSAL OF ST. CATHERINE
(GADDI, XIII. CENTURY PUPIL, PERUGIA)
The art of the Middle Ages and especially at the time of the
beginnings of modern art in the Thirteenth Century, is commonly
supposed to be inextricably bound up with certain {147} influences
which place it beyond the pale of imitation for modern life. It has
frequently been said, that this art besides being too deeply mystical
and pietistic, is so remote from ordinary human feelings as to
preclude a proper understanding of it by the men of our time and
certainly prevent any deep sympathy. The pagan element in art which
entered at the time of the Renaissance and which emphasized the joy of
life itself and the pleasure of mere living for its own sake, is
supposed to have modified this sadder aspect of things in the earlier
art, so that now no one would care to go back to the pre-Renaissance
day. There has been so much writing of this kind that has carried
weight, that it is no wonder that the impression has been deeply made.
It is founded almost entirely on a misunderstanding, however. Reinach
whom we have quoted before completely overturns this false notion in
some paragraphs which bring out better than any others that we know
something of the true significance of the Thirteenth Century art in
this particular.
Those who think that Gothic art was mainly gloomy in character, or if
not absolutely sad at heart that it always expressed the sadder
portion of religious feelings, who consider that the ascetic side of
life was always in the ascendant and the brighter side of things
seldom chosen, for pictorial purposes, should recall that the Gothic
Cathedrals themselves are the most cheery and lightsome buildings,
that indeed they owe their character as creations of a new idea in
architecture to the determined purpose of their builders to get
admission for all possible light in the dreary Northern climates. The
contradiction of the idea that Gothic art in its essence was gloomy
will at once be manifest from this. Quite apart from this, however, if
Gothic art be studied for itself and in its subjects, that of the
Thirteenth Century particularly will be found far distant from,
anything that would justify the criticism of over sadness. Reinach (in
his Story of Art Throughout the Middle Ages) has stated this so
clearly that we prefer simply to quote the passage which is at once
authoritative and informing:
"It has also been said that Gothic art bears the impress of ardent
piety and emotional mysticism, that it dwells on the suffering of
Jesus, of the Virgin, and of the martyrs with harrowing persistency.
Those who believe this have never studied {148} Gothic art. It is so
far from the truth that, as a fact, the Gothic art of the best
period, the Thirteenth Century, never represented any sufferings
save those of the damned. The Virgins are smiling and gracious,
never grief stricken. There is not a single Gothic rendering of the
Virgin weeping at the foot of the cross. The words and music of the
Stabat Mater, which are sometimes instanced as the highest
expression of the religion of the Middle Ages, date from the end of
the Thirteenth Century at the very earliest, and did not become
popular till the Fifteenth Century. Jesus himself is not represented
as suffering, but with a serene and majestic expression. The famous
statue known as the Beau Dieu d'Amiens may be instanced as typical."
[Illustration]
GROUP FROM VISITATION (RHEIMS)
{149}
IX
LIBRARIES AND BOOKMEN.
As the Thirteenth Century begins some 250 years before the art of
printing was introduced, it would seem idle to talk of libraries and
especially of circulating libraries during this period and quite as
futile to talk of bookmen and book collectors. Any such false
impression, however, is founded entirely upon a lack of knowledge of
the true state of affairs during this wonderful period. A diocesan
council held in Paris in the year 1212, with other words of advice to
religious, recalled to them the duty that they had to lend such books
as they might possess, with proper guarantee for their return, of
course, to those who might make good use of them. The council, indeed,
formally declared that the lending of books was one of the works of
mercy. The Cathedral chapter of Notre Dame at Paris was one of the
leaders in this matter and there are records of their having lent many
books during the Thirteenth Century. At most of the abbeys around
Paris there were considerable libraries and in them also the lending
custom obtained. This is especially true of the Abbey of St. Victor of
which the rule and records are extant.
Of course it will be realized that the number of books was not large,
but on the other hand it must not be forgotten that many of them were
works of art in every particular, and some of them that have come down
to us continue to be even to the present day among the most precious
bibliophilic treasures of great state and city libraries. Their value
depends not alone on their antiquity but on their perfection as works
of art. In general it may be said that the missals and office books,
and the prayer books made for royal personages and the nobility at
this time, are yet counted among the best examples of bookmaking the
world has ever seen. It is not surprising that such should be the case
since these books were mainly meant for use in the Cathedrals and the
chapels, and these edifices were so beautiful in every detail that the
generations that erected them {150} could not think of making books
for use in them, that would be unworthy of the artistic environment
for which they were intended. With the candlesticks, the vessels, and
implements used in the ceremonial surpassing works of art, with every
form of decoration so nearly perfect as to be a source of unending
admiration, with the vestments and altar linens specimens of the most
exquisite handiwork of their kind that had ever been made, the books
associated with them had to be excellent in execution, expressive of
the most refined taste and finished with an attention utterly careless
of the time and labor that might be required, since the sole object
was to make everything as absolutely beautiful as possible. Hence
there is no dearth of wonderful examples of the beautiful bookmaking
of this century in all the great libraries of the world.
The libraries themselves, moreover, are of surpassing interest because
of their rules and management, for little as it might be expected this
wonderful century anticipated in these matters most of our very modern
library regulations. The bookmen of the time not only made beautiful
books, but they made every provision to secure their free circulation
and to make them available to as many people as was consonant with
proper care of the books and the true purposes of libraries. This is a
chapter of Thirteenth Century history more ignored perhaps than any
other, but which deserves to be known and will appeal to our century
more perhaps than to any intervening period.
The constitutions of the Abbey St. Victor of Paris give us an
excellent idea at once of the solicitude with which the books were
guarded, yet also of the careful effort that was made to render them
useful to as many persons as possible. One of the most important rules
at St. Victor was that the librarian should know the contents of every
volume in the library, in order to be able to direct those who might
wish to consult the books in their selection, and while thus sparing
the books unnecessary handling also save the readers precious time. We
are apt to think that it is only in very modern times that this
training of librarians to know their books so as to be of help to the
readers was insisted on. Here, however, we find it in full force seven
centuries ago. It would be much more difficult in the present day to
know all the books confided to his care, but some of the {151}
librarians at St. Victor were noted for the perfection of their
knowledge in this regard and were often consulted by those who were
interested in various subjects.
In his book on the Thirteenth Century [Footnote 15 ] M. A. Lecoy de
la Marche says that in France, at least, circulating libraries were
quite common. As might be expected of the people of so practical a
century, it was they who first established the rule that a book might
be taken out provided its value were deposited by the borrower. Such
lending libraries were to be found at the Sorbonne, at St. Germain des
Prés, as well as at Notre Dame. There was also a famous library at
this time at Corbie but practically every one of the large abbeys had
a library from which books could be obtained. Certain of the castles
of the nobility, as for instance that of La Ferte en Ponthieu, had
libraries, with regard to which there is a record, that the librarian
had the custom of lending certain volumes, provided the person was
known to him and assumed responsibility for the book.
[Footnote 15: Le Treizieme Siecle Litteraire et Scientifique, Lille,
1857.]
Some of the regulations of the libraries of the century have an
interest all their own from the exact care that was required with
regard to the books. The Sorbonne for instance by rule inflicted a
fine upon anyone who neglected to close large volumes after he had
been making use of them. Many a librarian of the modern times would be
glad to put into effect such a regulation as this. A severe fine was
inflicted upon any library assistant who allowed a stranger to go into
the library alone, and another for anyone who did not take care to
close the doors. It seems not unlikely that these regulations, as M.
Lecoy de la Marche says, were in vigor in many of the ecclesiastical
and secular libraries of the time.
Some of the regulations of St. Victor are quite as interesting and
show the liberal spirit of the time as well as indicate how completely
what is most modern in library management was anticipated. The
librarian had the charge of all the books of the community, was
required to have a detailed list of them and each year to have them in
his possession at least three times. On him was placed the obligation
to see that the books were not destroyed in any way, either by
parasites of any kind or by {152} dampness. The librarian was required
to arrange the books in such a manner as to make the finding of them
prompt and easy. No book was allowed to be borrowed unless some pledge
for its safe return were left with the librarian. This was emphasized
particularly for strangers who must give a pledge equal to the value
of the book. In all cases, however, the name of the borrower had to be
taken, also the title of the book borrowed, and the kind of pledge
left. The larger and more precious books could not be borrowed without
the special permission of the superior.
The origin of the various libraries in Paris is very interesting as
proof that the mode of accumulating books was nearly the same as that
which enriches university and other such libraries at the present
time. The library of La St. Chapelle was founded by Louis IX, and
being continuously enriched by the deposit therein of the archives of
the kingdom soon became of first importance. Many precious volumes
that were given as presents to St. Louis found their way into this
library and made it during his lifetime the most valuable collection
of books in Paris. Louis, moreover, devoted much time and money to
adding to the library. He made it a point whenever on his journeys he
stopped, at abbeys or other ecclesiastical institutions, to find out
what books were in their library that were not at La Saint Chapelle
and had copies of these made. His intimate friendship with Robert of
Sorbonne, with St. Thomas of Aquin, with Saint Bonaventure, and above
all with Vincent of Beauvais, the famous encyclopedist of the century,
widened his interest in books and must have made him an excellent
judge of what he ought to procure to complete the library. It was, as
we shall see, Louis' munificent patronage that enabled Vincent to
accumulate that precious store of medieval knowledge, which was to
prove a mine of information for so many subsequent generations.
From the earliest times certain books, mainly on medicine, were
collected at the Hotel Dieu, the great hospital of Paris, and this
collection was added to from time to time by the bequests of
physicians in attendance there. This was doubtless the first regular
hospital library, though probably medical books had also been
collected at Salernum. The principal colleges of the universities also
made collections of books, some of them {153} very valuable, though as
a rule, it would seem as if no attempt was made to procure any other
books than those which were absolutely needed for consultation by the
students. The best working library at Paris was undoubtedly that of
the Sorbonne, of which indeed its books were for a long time its only
treasures. For at first the Sorbonne was nothing but a teaching
institution which only required rooms for its lectures, and usually
obtained these either from the university authorities or from the
Canons of the Cathedral and possessed no property except its library.
From the very beginning the professors bequeathed whatever books they
had collected to its library and this became a custom. It is easy to
understand that within a very short time the library became one of the
very best in Europe. While most of the other libraries were devoted
mainly to sacred literature, the Sorbonne came to possess a large
number of works of profane literature. Interesting details with regard
to this library of the Sorbonne and its precious treasures have been
given by M. Leopold Delisle, in the second volume of Le Cabinet des
Manuserits, describing the MSS. of the Bibliothèque Nationale at
Paris. According to M. Lecoy de la Marche, this gives an excellent
idea of the persevering efforts which must have been required, to
bring together so many bibliographic treasures at a time when books
were such a rarity, and consequently enables us better almost than
anything else, to appreciate the enthusiasm of the scholars of these
early times and their wonderful efforts to make the acquisition of
knowledge easier, not only for their own but for succeeding
generations. When we recall that the library of the Sorbonne was,
during the Thirteenth Century, open not only to the professors and
students of the Sorbonne itself, but also to those interested in books
and in literature who might come from elsewhere, provided they were
properly accredited, we can realize to the full the thorough
liberality of spirit of these early scholars. Usually we are prone to
consider that this liberality of spirit, even in educational matters,
came much later into the world.
In spite of the regulations demanding the greatest care, it is easy to
understand that after a time even books written on vellum or parchment
would become disfigured and worn under the ardent fingers of
enthusiastic students, when comparatively so {154} few copies were
available for general use. In order to replace these worn-out copies
every abbey had its own scriptorium or writing room, where especially
the younger monks who were gifted with plain handwriting were required
to devote certain hours every day to the copying of manuscripts.
Manuscripts were borrowed from neighboring libraries and copied, or as
in our modern day exchanges of duplicate copies were made, so as to
avoid the risk that precious manuscripts might be subject to on the
journeys from one abbey to another. How much the duty of transcription
was valued may be appreciated from the fact, that in some abbeys every
novice was expected to bring on the day of his profession as a
religious, a volume of considerable size which had been carefully
copied by his own hands.
Besides these methods of increasing the number of books in the
library, a special sum of money was set aside in most of the abbeys
for the procuring of additional volumes for the library by purchase.
Usually this took the form of an ecclesiastical regulation requiring
that a certain percentage of the revenues should be spent on the
libraries. Scholars closely associated with monasteries frequently
bequeathed their books and besides left money or incomes to be
especially devoted to the improvement of the library. It is easy to
understand that with all these sources of enrichment many abbeys
possessed noteworthy libraries. To quote only those of France,
important collections of books were to be found at Cluny, Luxeuil,
Fleury, Saint-Martial, Moissac, Mortemer, Savigny, Fourcarmont, Saint
Père de Chartres, Saint Denis, Saint-Maur-des-Fossés, Saint Corneille
de Compiègne, Corbie, Saint-Amand, Saint-Martin de Tournai, where
Vincent de Beauvais said that he found the greatest collections of
manuscripts that existed in his time, and then especially the great
Parisian abbeys already referred to, Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Saint
Victor, Saint-Martin-des-Champs, the precious treasures of which are
well known to all those who are familiar with the Bibliothèque
Nationale of Paris, of whose manuscript department their relics
constitute the most valuable nucleus.
Some of the bequests of books that were made to libraries at this time
are interesting, because they show the spirit of the {155} testators
and at the same time furnish valuable hints as to the consideration in
which books were held and the reverent care of their possessors for
them. Peter of Nemours, the Bishop of Paris, when setting out on the
crusades with Louis IX. bequeathed to the famous Abbey of St. Victor,
his Bible in 22 volumes, which was considered one of the finest copies
of the scriptures at that time in existence. To the Abbey of Olivet he
gave his Psalter with Glosses, besides the Epistles of St. Paul and
his Book of Sentences, by which is evidently intended the well-known
work with that title by the famous Peter Lombard. Finally he gave to
the Cathedral of Paris all the rest of his books. Besides these he had
very little to leave. It is typical of the reputation of Paris in that
century and the devotion of her churchmen to learning and culture,
that practically all of the revenues that he considered due him for
his personal services had been invested in books, which he then
disposed of in such a way as would secure their doing the greatest
possible good to the largest number of people. His Bible was evidently
given to the abbey of St. Victor because it was the sort of work that
should be kept for the occasional reference of the learned rather than
the frequent consultation of students, who might very well find all
that they desired in other and less valuable copies. His practical
intention with regard to his books can be best judged from his gift to
Notre Dame, which, as we have noted already possessed a very valuable
library that was allowed to circulate among properly accredited
scholars in Paris.
According to the will of Peter Ameil, Archbishop of Narbonne, which is
dated 1238, he gave his books for the use of the scholars whom he had
supported at the University of Paris and they were to be deposited in
the Library at Notre Dame, but on condition that they were not to be
scattered for any reason nor any of them sold or abused. The effort of
the booklover to keep his books together is characteristic of all the
centuries since, only most people will be surprised to find it
manifesting itself so early in bibliophilic history. The Archbishop
reserved from his books, however, his Bible for his own church. Before
his death he had given the Dominicans in his diocese many books from
his library. This churchman of the first half of the {156} Thirteenth
Century seems evidently to deserve a prominent place among the bookmen
of all times.
There are records of many others who bequeathed libraries and gave
books during their lifetime to various institutions, as may be found
in the Literary History of France, [Footnote 16] already mentioned,
as well as in the various histories of the University of Paris. Many
of these gifts were made on condition that they should not be sold and
the constantly recurring condition made by these booklovers is that
their collections should be kept together. The libraries of Paris were
also in the market for books, however, and there is proof that the
Sorbonne purchased a number of volumes because the cost price of them
was noted inside the cover quite as libraries do in our own days. When
we realize the forbidding cost of them, it is surprising that there
should be so much to say about them and so many of them constantly
changing hands. An ordinary folio volume probably cost from 400 to 500
francs in our values, that is between $80 and $100.
[Footnote 16: Histoire Litteraire de la France, by the Benedictines
of St. Maur.]
While the older abbeys of the Benedictines and other earlier religious
orders possessed magnificent collections of books, the newer orders of
the Thirteenth Century, the Mendicants, though as their name indicates
they were bound to live by alms given them by the faithful, within a
short time after their foundation began to take a prominent part in
the library movement. It was in the southern part of France that the
Dominicans were strongest and so there is record of regulations for
libraries made at Toulouse in the early part of the Thirteenth
Century. In Paris, in 1239, considerable time and discussion was
devoted in one of the chapters of the order to the question of how
books should be kept, and how the library should be increased. With
regard to the Franciscans, though their poverty was, if possible,
stricter, the same thing is known before the end of the century. In
both orders arrangements were made for the copying of important works
and it is, of course, to the zeal and enthusiasm of the younger
members of these orders for this copying work, that we owe the
preservation by means of a large number of manuscript copies, of the
{157} voluminous writings of such men as Albertus Magnus, St. Thomas,
Duns Scotus and others.
{opp156}
[Illustration]
MONUMENT OF CARDINAL DE BRAY (ARNOLFO)
While the existence of libraries of various kinds, and even
circulating libraries, in the Thirteenth Century may seem definitely
settled, it will appear to most people that to speak of book
collecting at this time must be out of place. That fad is usually
presumed to be of much later origin and indeed to be comparatively
recent in its manifestations. We have said enough already, however, of
the various collections of books in libraries especially in France to
show that the book collector was abroad, but there is much more direct
evidence of this available from an English writer. Richard de Bury's
Philobiblon is very well known to all who are interested in books for
their own sake, but few people realize that this book practically had
its origin in the Thirteenth Century. The writer was born about the
beginning of the last quarter of that century, had completed his
education before its close, and it is only reasonable to attribute to
the formative influences at work in his intellectual development as a
young man, the germs of thought from which were to come in later life
the interesting book on bibliophily, the first of its kind, which was
to be a treasure for book-lovers ever afterwards.
Philobiblon tells us, among other things, of Richard's visits to the
continent on an Embassy to the Holy See and on subsequent occasions to
the Court of France, and the delight which he experienced in handling
many books which he had never seen before, in buying such of them as
his purse would allow, or his enthusiasm could tempt from their owners
and in conversing with those who could tell him about books and their
contents. Such men were the chosen comrades of his journeys, sat with
him at table, as Mr. Henry Morley tells us in his English Writers
(volume IV, page 51), and were in almost constant fellowship with him.
It was at Paris particularly that Richard's heart was satisfied for a
time because of the great treasures he found in the magnificent
libraries of that city. He was interested, of course, in the
University and the opportunity for intellectual employment afforded by
Academic proceedings, but above all he found delight in books, which
monks and monarchs and professors and churchmen of all kinds and
scholars {158} and students had gathered into this great intellectual
capital of Europe at that time. Anyone who thinks the books were not
valued quite as highly in the Thirteenth Century as at the present
time should read the Philobiblon. He is apt to rise from the reading
of it with the thought that it is the modern generations who do not
properly appreciate books.
One of the early chapters of Philobiblon argues that books ought
always to be bought whatever they cost, provided there are means to
pay for them, except in two cases, "when they are knavishly
overcharged, or when a better time for buying is expected." "That sun
of men, Solomon," Richard says, "bids us buy books readily and sell
them unwillingly, for one of his proverbs runs, 'Buy the truth and
sell it not, also wisdom and instruction and understanding.'" Richard
in his own quaint way thought that most other interests in life were
only temptations to-draw men away from books. In one famous paragraph
he has naively personified books as complaining with regard to the
lack of attention men now display for them and the unworthy objects,
in Richard's eyes at least, upon which they fasten their affections
instead, and which take them away from the only great life interest
that is really worth while--books.
"Yet," complain books, "in these evil times we are cast out of our
place in the inner chamber, turned out of doors, and our place taken
by dogs, birds, and the two-legged beast called woman. But that beast
has always been our rival, and when she spies us in a corner, with no
better protection than the web of a dead spider, she drags us out with
a frown and violent speech, laughing us to scorn as useless, and soon
counsels us to be changed into costly head-gear, fine linen, silk and
scarlet double dyed, dresses and divers trimmings, linens and woolens.
And so," complain the books still, "we are turned out of our homes,
our coats are torn from our backs, our backs and sides ache, we lie
about disabled, our natural whiteness turns to yellow--without doubt
we have the jaundice. Some of us are gouty, witness our twisted
extremities. Our bellies are griped and wrenched and are consumed by
worms; on each side the dirt cleaves to us, nobody binds up our
wounds, we lie ragged and weep in dark corners, or meet with Job upon
a dunghill, or, as seems hardly fit to be said, we are hidden in
abysses of the {159} sewers. We are sold also like slaves, and lie as
unredeemed pledges in taverns. We are thrust into cruel butteries, to
be cut up like sheep and cattle; committed to Jews, Saracens, heretics
and Pagans, whom we always dread as the plague, and by whom some of
our forefathers are known to have been poisoned."
Richard De Bury must not be thought to have been some mere wandering
scholar of the beginning of the Fourteenth Century, however, for he
was, perhaps, the most important historical personage, not even
excepting royalty or nobility, of this era and one of the striking
examples of how high a mere scholar might rise in this period quite
apart from any achievement in arms, though this is usually supposed to
be almost the only basis of distinguished reputation and the reason
for advancement at this time. While he was only the son of a Norman
knight, Aungervyle by name, born at Bury St. Edmund's, he became the
steward of the palace and treasurer of the royal wardrobe, then Lord
Treasurer of England and finally Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal. While
on a mission to the Pope he so commended himself to the Holy See that
it was resolved to make him the next English bishop. Accordingly he
was made Bishop of Durham shortly after and on the occasion of his
installation there was a great banquet at which the young King and
Queen, the Queen Mother Isabelle, the King of Scotland, two
Archbishops, five bishops, and most of the great English lords were
present. At this time the Scots and the English were actually engaged
in war with one another and a special truce was declared, in order to
allow them to join in the celebration of the consecration of so
distinguished an individual to the See of Durham near the frontier.
Before he was consecrated Bishop, Richard De Bury had been for some
time the treasurer of the kingdom. Before the end of the year in which
he was consecrated he became Lord Chancellor, at a time when the
affairs of the kingdom needed a master hand and when the French and
the Scots were seriously disturbing English peace and prosperity. He
resigned his office of Chancellor, as Henry Morley states, only to go
abroad in the royal service as ambassador that he might exercise his
own trusted sagacity in carrying out the peaceful policy he had {160}
advised. During this diplomatic mission to the continent he visited
the courts of Paris, of Flanders, of Hainault and of Germany. He
succeeded in making terms of peace between the English king and the
Counts of Hainault and Namur, the Marquis of Juliers and the Dukes of
Brabant and Guelders. This would seem to indicate that he must be
considered as one of the most prominent men of Europe at this time.
His attitude toward books is then all the more noteworthy. Many people
were surprised that a great statesman like Gladstone in the Nineteenth
Century, should have been interested in so many phases of thought and
of literature and should himself have been able to find the time to
contribute important works to English letters. Richard De Bury was at
least as important a man in his time as Gladstone in ours, and
occupied himself as much with books as the great English commoner.
This is what will be the greatest source of surprise to those who in
our time have been accustomed to think, that the great scholars deeply
interested in books who were yet men of practical worth in helping
their generation in its great problems, are limited to modern times
and are least of all likely to be found in the heart of the Middle
Ages. In spite of his occupations as a politician and a bookman,
Richard De Bury was noted for his faithfulness in the fulfilment of
his duties as a churchman and a bishop. It is worthy of note that many
of the important clergymen of England, who were to find the highest
church preferment afterwards, were among the members of his household
at various times and that the post of secretary to the bishop,
particularly, was filled at various times by some of the best scholars
of the period, men who were devoted friends to the bishop, who
dedicated their works to him and generally added to the reputation
that stamped him as the greatest scholar of England and one of the
leading lights of European culture of his time.
This is not so surprising when we realize that to be a member of
Richard's household was to have access to the best library in England,
and that many scholars were naturally ambitious to have such an
opportunity, and as the results showed many took advantage of it.
Among Richard of Durham's chaplains were Thomas Bradwardine who
afterwards became Archbishop of Canterbury, Richard Fitzraufe,
subsequently Archbishop of {161} Armagh, Walter Seagrave, afterwards
Bishop of Chichester, and Richard Bentworth, who afterwards became
Bishop of London Among the distinguished scholars who occupied the
post were Robert Holcot, John Manduit, the astronomer of the
Fourteenth Century, Richard Kilmington, a distinguished English
theologian, and Walter Burley, a great commentator on Aristotle, who
dedicated to the bishop, who had provided him with so many
opportunities for study, his Commentaries upon the Politics and Ethics
of the ancient Greek philosopher.
That Richard's love for books and the time he had necessarily devoted
to politics did not dry up the fountains of charity in his heart, nor
cause him to neglect his important duties as the pastor of the people
and especially of the poor, we know very well from certain traditions
with regard to his charitable donations. According to a standing rule
in his household eight quarters of wheat were regularly every week
made into bread and given to the poor. In his alms giving Richard was
as careful and as discriminating as in his collection of books, and he
used a number of the regularly organized channels in his diocese to
make sure that his bounty should be really helpful and should not
encourage lack of thrift. This is a feature of charitable work that is
supposed to be modern, but the personal service of the charitably
inclined in the Thirteenth Century, far surpassed in securing this
even the elaborate organization of charity in modern times. Whenever
the bishop traveled generous alms were distributed to the poor people
along the way. Whenever he made the journey between Durham and New
Castle eight pounds sterling were set aside for this purpose; five
pounds for each journey between Durham and Stockton or Middleham, and
five marks between Durham and Auckland. Money had at that time at
least ten times the purchasing power which it has at present, so that
it will be easy to appreciate the good bishop's eminent liberality.
That Richard was justified in his admiration of the books of the time
we know from those that remain, for it must not be thought for a
moment that because the making of books was such a time-taking task in
the Thirteenth Century, they were not therefore made beautiful. On the
contrary, as we shall see {162} shortly, no more beautiful books have
ever been made than at this time. This of itself would show how
precious in the eyes of the collectors of the time their books were,
since they wanted to have them so beautifully made and were satisfied
to pay the high prices that had to be demanded for such works of art.
Very few books of any size cost less than the equivalent of $100 in
our time and illuminated books cost much higher than this, yet seem
never to have been a drug on the market. Indeed, considering the
number of them that are still in existence to this day, in spite of
the accidents of fire, and water, and war, and neglect, and
carelessness, and ignorance, there must have been an immense number of
very handsome books made by the generations of the Thirteenth Century.
While illumination was not an invention of the Thirteenth Century, as
indeed were very few of the great art features of the century, during
this time book decoration was carried to great perfection and reached
that development which artists of the next century were to improve on
in certain extrinsic features, though the intrinsic qualities were to
remain those which had been determined as the essential
characteristics of this branch of art in the earlier time. The
Thirteenth Century, for instance, saw the introduction of the
miniature as a principal feature and also the drawing out of initials
in such a way as to make an illuminated border for the whole side of
the page. After the development thus given to the art in the
Thirteenth Century further evolution could only come in certain less
important details. In this the Thirteenth Century generations were
accomplishing what they had done in practically everything else that
they touched, laying foundations broad and deep and giving the
superstructure the commanding form which future generations were only
able to modify to slight degree and not always with absolute good
grace.
Humphreys in his magnificent volume on The Illuminated Books of the
Middle Ages, which according to its title contains an account of the
development and progress of the art of illumination as a distinct
branch of pictorial ornamentation from the Fourth to the Seventeenth
centuries, [Footnote 17] has some very striking words of praise for
Thirteenth Century illuminations and the artists who made them. He
says:
[Footnote 17: The Illuminated Books of the Middle Ages, by Henry
Noel Humphreys Longman. Green, Brown and Longmans, London, 1848.]
{163}
"Different epochs of the art of illumination present widely
different and distinct styles; the most showy and the best known,
though the least pure and inventive in design, being that of the
middle and end of the Fifteenth Century; whilst the period perhaps
the least generally known, that of the Thirteenth Century, may be
considered as the most interesting and original, many of the best
works of that period displaying an astonishing variety and profusion
of invention. The manuscript, of which two pages form the opposite
plate, may be ranked among the most elaborate and profusely
ornamented of the fine books of that era; every page being
sufficient to make the fortune of the modern decorator by the quaint
and unexpected novelties of inventions which it displays at every
turn of its intricate design."
The illuminations of the century then are worthy of the time and also
typical of the general work of the century. It is known by experts for
its originality and for the wealth of invention displayed in the
designs. Men did not fear that they might exhaust their inventive
faculty, nor display their originality sparingly, in order that they
might have enough to complete other work. As the workmen of the
Cathedrals, the artist illuminators devoted their very best efforts to
each piece of work that came to their hands, and the results are
masterpieces of art in this as in every other department of the
period. The details are beautifully wrought, showing the power of the
artist to accomplish such a work and yet his designs are never
overloaded, at least in the best examples of the century, with details
of ornamentation that obscure and minimize the effect of the original
design. This fault was to be the error of his most sophisticated
successors two centuries later.
Nor must it be thought the high opinion of the century is derived from
the fact that only a very few examples of its illumination and
bookmaking are now extant, and that these being the chosen specimens
give the illumination of the century a higher place than it might
otherwise have. Many examples {164} have been preserved and some of
them are the most beautiful books that were made. Paris was
particularly the home of this form of art in the Thirteenth Century,
and indeed the school established there influenced all the modes of
illumination everywhere, so much so that Dante speaks of the art with
the epithet "Parisian," as if it were exclusively done there. The
incentive to the development of this form of art came from St. Louis
who, as we have said, was very much interested in books. His taste as
exhibited in La Sainte Chapelle was such as to demand artistic
excellence of high grade in this department of art, which has many
more relations with the architecture of the period, and especially
with the stained glass, than might possibly be thought at the present
time, for most of the decoration of books partook of the character of
the architectural types of the moment.
Among the most precious treasures from the century are three books
which belonged to St. Louis himself. One of these is the Hours or
Office Book; a second, is his Psalter, which contains some extremely
beautiful initials; a third, which is in the Library of the Arsenal at
Paris, is sometimes known as the Prayer Book of St. Louis himself,
though a better name for it would be the Prayer Book of Queen Blanche,
for it was made at Louis' orders for his mother, the famous Blanche of
Castile, and is a worthy testimonial of the affectionate relations
which existed between mother and son.
Outside of Paris there are preserved many books of great value that
come from this century. One of them, a Bestiarum or Book of Beasts, is
in the Ashmoleam Museum at Oxford. This is said to be a very beautiful
example of the illumination of the Thirteenth Century, but it is even
more interesting because it shows the efforts of the artists of the
time to copy nature in the pictures of animals as they are presented.
There is said to be an acuity of observation and a vigor of
representation displayed in the book which is highly complimentary to
the powers of the Thirteenth Century artists.
Even these brief notes of the books and libraries of the Thirteenth
Century, will serve to make clear how enthusiastic was the interest of
the generations of this time in beautiful books and in collections of
them that were meant for show as {165} well as for practical
usefulness. There is perhaps nothing more amusing in the attitude of
modern generations with regard to the Middle Ages, than the assumption
that all the methods of education and of the distribution of knowledge
worth while talking about, are the inventions of comparatively modern
times. The fact that libraries were also a creation of that time and
that most of the regulations which are supposed to be the first fruit
of quite recent science in the circulation of books had been adopted
by these earlier generations, is commonly ignored utterly, though it
is a precious bit of knowledge that cannot help but increase our
sympathy with those bookmen of the olden times, who thought so much of
their books, yet wished to share the privilege of their use with all
those who would employ them properly, and who, in their great
practical way succeeded in working out the scheme by which many people
could have the opportunity of consulting the treasures they thought so
much of, without risk of their loss or destruction, even though use
might bring some deterioration of their value.
[Illustration]
DECORATION (XIII. CENT. PSALTER MSS.)
{166}
X
THE CID, THE HOLY GRAIL, THE NIBELUNGEN.
Anyone who has studied even perfunctorily the Books of the Arts and of
the Deeds of the Thirteenth Century, who has realized its
accomplishments in enduring artistic creations, sublime and exemplary
models and inspirations for all after time, who has appreciated what
it succeeded in doing for the education of the classes and of the
masses, the higher education being provided for at least as large a
proportion of the people as in our present century, while the creation
of what were practically great technical schools that culled out of
the masses the latent geniuses who could accomplish supreme artistic
results in the arts and crafts and did more and better for the masses
than any subsequent generation, can scarcely help but turn with
interest to read the Book of the Words of the period and to find out
what forms of literature interested this surprising people. One is
almost sure to think at the first moment of consideration that the
literature will not be found worthy of the other achievements of the
times. In most men's minds the Thirteenth Century does not readily
call up the idea of a series of great works in literature, whose
influence has been at all as profound and enduring as that of the
universities in the educational order, or of the Cathedrals in the
artistic order.
This false impression, however, is due only to the fact that the
literary creations of the Thirteenth Century are so diverse in subject
and in origin, that they are very seldom associated with each other,
unless there has been actual recognition of their contemporaneousness
from deliberate calling to mind of the dates at which certain basic
works in our modern literatures were composed. It is not the least
surprise that comes to the student of the Thirteenth Century, to find
that the great origins of what well deserves the name of classic
modern literature, comprising a series of immortal works in prose and
poetry, were initiated by the contemporaries of the makers of the
{167} universities and the builders of the Cathedrals. If we stop to
think for a moment it must be realized, that generations who succeeded
in expressing themselves so effectively in other departments of
esthetics could scarcely be expected to fail in literature alone, and
they did not. From the Cid in Spain, through the Arthur Legends in
England, the Nibelungen in Germany, the Minnesingers and the
Meistersingers in the southern part of what is now the German Empire,
the Trouvères in North France, the Troubadours in South France and in
Italy, down to Dante, who was 35 before the century closed, there has
never been such a mass of undying literature written within a little
more than a single hundred years, as came during the period from
shortly before 1200 down to 1300. Great as was the Fifth Century
before Christ in this matter it did not surpass the Thirteenth Century
after Christ in its influence on subsequent generations.
We have already pointed out in discussing the Cathedrals that one of
the most characteristic features of the Gothic architecture was the
marvelous ease with which it lent itself to the expression of national
peculiarities. Norman Gothic is something quite distinct from German
Gothic which arose in almost contiguous provinces, but so it is also
from English Gothic; these two were very closely related in origin and
undoubtedly the English Cathedrals owe much to the Norman influence so
prevalent in England at the end of the Twelfth Century, and the
beginning of the Thirteenth Century. Italian Gothic has the principal
characteristic peculiarities of the architectural style which passes
under the name developed to a remarkable degree, and yet its finished
product is far distant from any of the three other national forms that
have been mentioned, yet is not lacking in a similar interest. Spanish
Gothic has an identity of its own that has always had a special appeal
for the traveler. Any one who has ever visited the shores of the
Baltic sea and has seen what was accomplished in such places as
Stralsund, Greifswald, Lübeck, and others of the old Hansa towns, will
appreciate still more the power of Gothic to lend itself to the
feelings of the people and to the materials that they had at hand.
Here in the distant North they were far away from any sources of the
stone that would ordinarily be deemed absolutely {168} necessary for
Gothic construction. How effectively they used brick for
ecclesiastical edifices can only be realized by those who have seen
the remains of the Gothic monuments of this portion of Europe.
The distinguishing mark of all these different styles is the eminent
opportunity for the expression of nationality which, they afford. It
might be expected that since they were all Gothic, most of them would
be little better than servile copies, or at best scarce more than good
imitations of the great originals of the North of France. As a matter
of fact, the assertion of national characteristics, far from
destroying the effectiveness of Gothic, rather added new beauties to
this style of architecture. This was true even occasionally when
mistakes were made by architects and designers. As Ferguson has said
in his History of Architecture, St. Stephen's at Vienna is full of
architectural errors and yet the attractiveness of the Cathedral
remains. It was a poet who designed it and something of his poetic
soul gleams out of the material structure after the lapse of
centuries.
In nearly this same way the literatures of the different countries
during the Thirteenth Century are eminently national and mirror with
quite wonderful appropriateness the characteristics of the various
people. This is true even when similar subjects, as for instance the
Graal stories, are treated from nearly the same standpoint by the two
Teutonic nations, the Germans and the English. Parsifal and Galahad
are national as well as poetic heroes with a distinction of character
all their own. As we shall see, practically every nation finds in this
century some fundamental expression of its national feeling that has
been among its most cherished classics ever since.
{opp168}
[Illustration]
SANTA MARIA SOPRA MINERVA (ROME'S GOTHIC CATHEDRAL)
The first of these in time is the Cid, which was written in Spain
during the latter half of the Twelfth Century, but probably took its
definite form just about the beginning of the Thirteenth. It might
well be considered that this old-fashioned Spanish ballad would have
very little of interest for modern readers, and yet there are very few
scholars of the past century who have not been interested in this
literary treasure. Critics of all nations have been unstinted in their
praise of it. Since the Schlegels recalled world attention to Spanish
{169} literature, it has been considered almost as unpardonable for
anyone who pretended to literary culture not to have read the Cid, as
it would be not to have read Don Quixote.
As is true of all the national epics founded upon a series of ballads
which had been collecting in the mouth of the people for several
centuries before a great poetic genius came to give them their supreme
expression, there has been some doubt expressed as to the single
authorship of Cid. We shall find the same problem to be considered
when we come to discuss the Nibelungen Lied. A half a century ago or
more the fashion of the critics for insisting on the divided
authorship of such poems was much more prevalent than it is at
present. At that time a great many scholars, following the initiative
of Wolf and the German separatist critics, declared even that the
Homeric poems were due to more than one mind. There are still some who
cling to this idea with regard to many of these primal national epics,
but at the present time most literary men are quite content to accept
the idea of a single authorship. With regard to the Cid in this matter
Mr. Fitzmaurice Kelly, in his Short History of Spanish Literature in
the Literatures of the World Series, says very simply:
"There is a unity of conception and of language which forbids our
accepting the Poema (del Cid) as the work of several hands; and the
division of the poem into several cantares is managed with a
discretion which argues a single artistic intelligence. The first
part closes with the marriage of the hero's daughters; the second
with the shame of the Infantes de Carrion, and the proud
announcement that the Kings of Spain are sprung from the Cid's
loins. In both the singer rises to the level of his subject, but his
chiefest gust is in the recital of some brilliant deed of arms."
The Spanish ballad epic is a characteristic example of the epics
formed by the earliest poetic genius of a country, on the basis of the
patriotic stories of national origin that had been accumulating for
centuries. Of course the Cid had to be the Christian hero who did most
in his time against the Moslem in Spain. So interesting has his story
been made, and so glorious have been his deeds as recorded by the
poets, that there has been even some doubt of his existence expressed,
but that he {170} was a genuine historical character seems to be
clear. Many people will recall the Canons' argument in the forty-ninth
chapter of Don Quixote in which Cervantes, evidently speaking for
himself, says: "That there was a Cid no one will deny and likewise a
Bernardo Del Carpio, but that they performed all the exploits ascribed
to them, I believe there is good reason to doubt." The Cid derives his
name from the Arabic Seid which means Lord and owes his usual epithet.
El Campeador (champion), to the fact that he was the actual champion
of the Christians against the Moors at the end of the Eleventh
Century. How gloriously his warlike exploits have been described may
be best appreciated from the following description of his charge at
Alcocer:
"With bucklers braced before their breasts, with lances pointing low.
With stooping crests and heads bent down above the saddle-bow.
All firm of hand and high of heart they roll upon the foe.
And he that in good hour was born, his clarion voice rings out,
And clear above the clang of arms is heard his battle-shout,
'Among them, gentlemen! Strike home for the love of charity!
The Champion of Bivar is here--Ruy Diaz--I am he!'
Then bearing where Bermuez still maintains unequal fight.
Three hundred lances down they come, their pennons flickering white;
Down go three hundred Moors to earth, a man to every blow;
And, when they wheel, three hundred more, as charging back they go.
It was a sight to see the lances rise and fall that day;
The shivered shields and riven mail, to see how thick they lay;
The pennons that went in snow-white come out a gory red;
The horses running riderless, the riders lying dead;
While Moors call on Muhamed, and 'St. James!' the Christians cry."
While the martial interest of such early poems would be generally
conceded, it would usually be considered that they would be little
likely to have significant domestic, and even {171} what might be
called romantic, interests. The Cid's marriage is the result of not
what would exactly be called a romance nowadays, though in ruder times
there may have been a certain sense of sentimental reparation in it at
least. He had killed in fair fight the father of a young woman, who
being thus left without a protector appealed to the king to appoint
one for her. In the troublous Middle Ages an heiress was as likely to
be snapped up by some unsuitable suitor, more literally but with quite
as much haste, as in a more cultured epoch. The king knew no one whom
he could trust so well with the guardianship of the rich and fair
young orphan than the Cid, of whose bravery and honor he had had many
proofs. Accordingly he suggested him as a protector and the Cid
himself generously realizing how much the fair Jimena had lost by the
death of her father consented, and in a famous passage of the poem, a
little shocking to modern ideas, it must be confessed, frankly states
his feelings in the matter:
"And now before the altar the bride and bridegroom stand,
And when to fair Jimena the Cid stretched forth his hand,
He spake in great confusion: 'Thy father have I slain
Not treacherously, but face to face, my just revenge to gain
For cruel wrong; a man I slew, a man I give to thee;
In place of thy dead father, a husband find in me.'
And all who heard well liked the man, approving what he said;
Thus Rodrigo the Castilian his stately bride did wed."
There are tender domestic scenes between the Cid and his wife and his
daughters, which serve to show how sincere was his affection and with
what sympathetic humanity a great poet knew how to depict the tender
natural relations which have an interest for all times. Some of these
domestic scenes are not unworthy to be placed beside Homer's picture
of the parting of Hector and Andromache, though there is more naive
self-consciousness in the work of the Spanish bard, than in that of
his more artistic colleague of the Grecian olden times. There is
particularly a famous picture of the duties of noble ladies in Spain
of this time and of the tender solicitude of a father for his
daughters' innocence, that is quite beyond expectation at {172} the
hands of a poet whose forte was evidently war and its alarms, rather
than the expression of the ethical qualities of home life. The
following passage, descriptive of the Cid's parting from his wife,
will give some idea of these qualities better than could be conveyed
in any other way:
"Thou knowest well, señora, he said before he went,
To parting from each other our love doth not consent;
But love and joyance never may stand in duty's way,
And when the king commandeth the noble must obey.
Now let discretion guide thee, thou art of worthy name;
While I am parted from thee, let none in thee find blame.
Employ thy hours full wisely, and tend thy household well,
Be never slothful, woe and death with idleness do dwell.
Lay by thy costly dresses until I come again.
For in the husband's absence let wives in dress be plain;
And look well to thy daughters, nor let them be aware.
_Lest they comprehend the danger because they see thy care,
And lose unconscious innocence. At home they must abide,
For the safety of the daughter is at the mother's side_.
Be serious with thy servants, with strangers on thy guard,
With friends be kind and friendly, and well thy household ward,
To no one show my letters, thy best friends may not see.
Lest reading them they also may guess of thine to me.
And if good news they bring thee, and woman-like dost seek
The sympathy of others, with thy daughters only speak.
* * *
Farewell, farewell, Jimena, the trumpet's call I hear!
One last embrace, and then he mounts the steed without a peer."
The touch of paternal solicitude and prudence in the passage we have
put in italics is so apparently modern, that it can scarcely fail to
be a source of surprise, coming as it does from that crude period at
the end of the Twelfth Century when such minute psychological
observation as to young folks' ways would be little expected, and
least of all in the rough warrior {173} hero or his poet creator,
whose notions of right and wrong are, to judge from many passages of
the poem, so much coarser than those of our time.
After the Cid in point of time, the next enduring poetic work that was
destined to have an influence on all succeeding generations, was the
series of the Arthur Legends as completed in England. As in the case
of the Cid these stories of King Arthur's Court, his Knights and his
Round Table, had been for a long time the favorite subject of ballad
poets among the English people. Just where they originated is not very
clear, though it seems most likely that the original inspiration came
from Celtic sources. These old ballads, however, had very little of
literary form and it was not until the end of the Twelfth and the
beginning of the Thirteenth Century that they were cast in their
present mold, after having passed through the alembic of the mind of a
great poetic and literary genius, which refined away the dross and
left only the pure gold of supremely sympathetic human stories. To
whom we owe this transformation is not known with absolute certainty,
though the literary and historical criticism of the last quarter of a
century seems to have made it clear that the work must be attributed
to Walter Map or Mapes, an English clergyman who died during the first
decade of the Thirteenth Century.
His claims to the authorship of the Graal legend in its artistic
completeness and to the invention of the character of Lancelot, which
is one of the great triumphs of the Arthur legends as they were told
at this time, have been much discussed by French and English critics.
This discussion has perhaps been best summarized by Mr. Henry Morley,
the late Professor of Literature at the University of London, whose
third volume of English writers contains an immense amount of valuable
information with regard to the literary history, not alone of England
at this time but practically of all the countries of Europe. Mr.
Morley's plan was conceived with a breath of view that makes his work
a very interesting and authoritative guide in the literary matters of
the time. His summation of the position of critical opinion with
regard to the authorship of the Arthur Legends deserves to be quoted
in its entirety:
"The Arthurian Romances were, according to this opinion. {174} all
perfectly detached tales, till in the Twelfth Century Robert de
Borron (let us add, at Map's suggestion) translated the first
Romance of the St. Graal as an introduction to the series, and
shortly afterwards Walter Map added his Quest of the Graal,
Lancelot, and Mort Artus. The way for such work had been prepared by
Geoffrey of Monmouth's bold setting forward of King Arthur as a
personage of history, in a book that was much sought and discussed,
and that made the Arthurian Romances a fresh subject of interest to
educated men.
"But M. Paulin Paris, whose opinions, founded upon a wide
acquaintance with the contents of old MSS. I am now sketching, and
in part adopting, looked upon Walter Map as the soul of this work of
Christian spiritualisation. Was the romance of the St. Graal Latin,
before it was French? He does not doubt that it was. He sees in it
the mysticism of the subtlest theologian. It was not a knight or a
jongleur who was so well read in the apocryphal gospels, the legends
of the first Christian centuries, rabbinical fancies, and old Greek
mythology; and there is all this in the St. Graal. There is a
theory, too, of the sacrifice of the mass, an explanation of the
Saviour's presence in the Eucharist, that is the work, he says, of
the loftiest and the most brilliant imagination. These were not
matters that a knight of the Twelfth Century would dare to touch.
They came from an ecclesiastic and a man of genius. But if so, why
should we refuse credit to the assertion, repeated in every MS. that
they were first written in Latin? The earliest MSS. are of a date
not long subsequent to the death of Walter Map, Latinist,
theologian, wit, and Chaplain to King Henry II., who himself took
the liveliest interest in Breton legends. King Henry, M. Paris
supposes, wished them to be collected, but how? Some would prefer
one method, some another; Map reconciled all. He satisfied the
clergy, pleased the scholar, filled the chasms in the popular tales,
reconciled contradictions, or rejected inconsistencies, and by him
also the introductory tale of the Graal was first written in Latin
for Robert de Borron to translate into French."
The best literary appreciation of Map's genius, apart, of course, from
the fact that all generations ever since have acknowledged the supreme
human interest and eminently {175} sympathetic quality of his work, is
perhaps to be found in certain remarks of the modern critics who have
made special studies in these earlier literary periods. Prof. George
Saintsbury, of the University of Edinburgh, for instance, in the
second volume of Periods of English Literature, [Footnote 18] has
been quite unstinted in his praise of this early English writer. He
has not hesitated even to say in a striking passage that Map, or at
least the original author of the Launcelot story, was one of the
greatest of literary men and deserves a place only next to Dante in
this century so preciously full of artistic initiative.
[Footnote 18: The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory, by
George Saintsbury, Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature in
the University of Edinburgh (New York, Charles Scribner & Sons,
1897).]
"Whether it was Walter Map, or Chrestien de Troyes, or both, or
neither to whom the glory of at once completing and exalting the
story is due, I at least have no pretension to decide. Whoever did
it, if he did it by himself, was a great man indeed--a man second to
Dante among the men of the Middle Age. Even if it was done by an
irregular company of men, each patching and piecing the other's
efforts, the result shows a marvelous 'wind of the spirit' abroad
and blowing on that company."
Prof. Saintsbury then proceeds to show how much even readers of
Mallory miss of the greatness and especially of the sympathetic
humanity of the original poem, and in a further passage states his
firm conviction that the man who created Lancelot was one of the
greatest literary inventors and sympathetic geniuses of all times, and
that his work is destined, because the wellsprings of its action are
so deep down in the human heart, to be of interest to generations of
men for as long as our present form of civilization lasts.
"Perhaps the great artistic stroke in the whole legend, and one of
the greatest in all literature, is the concoction of a hero who
should be not only
'Like Paris handsome, and like Hector brave,'
but more heroic than Paris and more interesting than Hector--not
only a 'greatest knight,' but at once the sinful lover of his queen
and the champion who should himself all but achieve and in the
person of his son actually achieve, the sacred {176} adventure of
the Holy Graal. If, as there seems no valid reason to disbelieve,
the hitting upon this idea, and the invention or adoption of
Lancelot to carry it out, be the work of Walter Mapes (or Map), then
Walter Mapes is one of the great novelists of the world, and one of
the greatest of them. If it was some unknown person (it could hardly
be Chrestien, for in Chrestien's form the Graal interest belongs to
Percevale, not to Lancelot or Galahad), then the same compliment
must be paid to that person unknown. Meanwhile the conception and
execution of Lancelot, to whomsoever they may be due, are things
most happy. Entirely free from the faultlessness which is the curse
of the classical hero; his unequaled valor not seldom rewarded only
by reverses; his merits redeemed from mawkishness by his one great
fault, yet including all virtues that are themselves most amiable,
and deformed by no vice that is actually loathsome; the soul of
goodness in him always warring with his human frailty--Sir Lancelot
fully deserves the noble funeral eulogy pronounced over his grave,
felt by all the elect to be, in both senses, one of the first of all
extant pieces of perfect English prose."
To appreciate fully how much Walter Map accomplished by his series of
stories with regard to King Arthur's Court, it should be remembered
that poets and painters have in many generations ever since found
subjects for their inspiration within the bounds of the work which he
created. After all, the main interest of succeeding poets who have put
the legends into later forms, has centered more in the depth of
humanity that there is in the stories, than in the poetic details for
which they themselves have been responsible. In succeeding generations
poets have often felt that these stories were so beautiful that they
deserved to be retold in terms readily comprehensible to their own
generation. Hence Malory wrote his Morte D'Arthur for the Fifteenth
Century, Spenser used certain portions of the old myths for the
Sixteenth, and the late Poet-laureate set himself once more to retell
the Idyls of the King for the Nineteenth Century. Each of these was
adding little but new literary form, to a work that genius had drawn
from sources so close to the heart of human nature, that the stories
were always to remain of enduring interest.
{177}
For the treasure of poesy with which humanity was enriched when he
conceived the idea of setting the old ballads of King Arthur into
literary form, more must be considered as due to the literary original
writer than to any of his great successors. This is precisely the
merit of Walter Map. Of some of his less ambitious literary work we
have many examples that show us how thoroughly interested he was in
all the details of human existence, even the most trivial. He had his
likes and dislikes, he seems to have had some disappointed ambition
that made him rather bitter towards ecclesiastics, he seems to have
had some unfortunate experiences, especially with the Cistercians,
though how much of this is assumed rather than genuine, is hard to
determine at this modern day. Many of the extremely bitter things he
says with regard to the Cistercians might well be considered as
examples of that exaggeration, which in certain minds constitutes one
modality of humor, rather than as serious expressions of actual
thought. It is hard, for instance, to take such an expression as the
following as more than an example of this form of jesting by
exaggeration. Map heard that a Cistercian had become a Jew. His
comment was: "If he wanted to get far from the Cistercians why didn't
he become a Christian."
From England the transition to Germany is easy. Exactly contemporary
with the rise of the Arthur Legends in England to that standard of
literary excellence that was to give them their enduring poetic value,
there came also the definite arrangement and literary transformation
of the old ballads of the German people, into that form in which they
were to exert a lasting influence upon the German language and
national feeling. The date of the Nibelungen Lied has been set down
somewhat indefinitely as between 1190 and 1220. Most of the work was
undoubtedly accomplished after the beginning of the Thirteenth Century
and in the form in which we have it at present, there seems to be no
doubt that much was done after the famous meeting of the
Meistersingers on the Wartburg--the subject of song and story and
music drama ever since, which took place very probably in the year
1207. With regard to the Nibelungen Lied, as in the case of the other
great literary arrangements of folk-ballads, there has been question
as to the {178} singleness of authorship. Here, however, as with
regard to Homer and the Cid, the trend of modern criticism has all
been towards the attribution of the poem to one writer, and the
internal evidence of similarity of expression constantly maintained, a
certain simplicity of feeling and naïveté of repetition seems to leave
no doubt in the matter.
As regards the merits of the Nibelungen Lied as a great work of
literature, there has been very little doubt in the English-speaking
world at least, because of the enthusiastic recognition accorded it by
German critics and the influence of German criticism in all branches
of literature over the whole Teutonic race during the Nineteenth
Century. English admiration for the poem began after Carlyle's
introduction of it to the English reading public in his essays. Since
this time it has come to be very well known and yet, notwithstanding
all that has been said about it no English critic has expressed more
fully the place of the great German poem in world literature, than did
this enthusiastic pro-German of the first half of the Nineteenth
Century.
For those for whom Carlyle's Essays are a sealed book because of loss
of interest in him with the passage of time, the citation of some of
his appreciative critical expressions may be necessary.
"Here in the old Frankish (Oberdeutsch) dialect of the Nibelungen,
we have a clear decisive utterance, and in a real system of verse,
not without essential regularity, great liveliness and now and then
even harmony of rhythm. Doubtless we must often call it a diffuse
diluted utterance; at the same time it is genuine, with a certain
antique garrulous heartiness, and has a rhythm in the thoughts as
well as the words. The simplicity is never silly; even in that
perpetual recurrence of epithets, sometimes of rhymes, as where two
words, for instance lip (body), lif (leib) and wip (woman), weib
(wife) are indissolubly wedded together, and the one never shows
itself without the other following--there is something which reminds
us not so much of poverty, as of trustfulness and childlike
innocence. Indeed a strange charm lies in those old tones, where, in
gay dancing melodies, the sternest tidings are sung to us; and deep
floods of sadness and strife play lightly in little {179} purling
billows, like seas in summer. It is as a meek smile, in whose still,
thoughtful depths a whole infinitude of patience, and love, and
heroic strength lie revealed. But in other cases too, we have seen
this outward sport and inward earnestness offer grateful contrasts,
and cunning excitement; for example, in Tasso; of whom, though
otherwise different enough, this old Northern Singer has more than
once reminded us. There too, as here, we have a dark solemn meaning
in light guise; deeds of high temper, harsh self-denial, daring and
death, stand embodied in that soft, quick-flowing joyfully-modulated
verse. Nay farther, as if the implement, much more than we might
fancy, had influenced the work done, these two poems, could we trust
our individual feeling, have in one respect the same poetical result
for us; in the Nibelungen as in the Gerusalemme, the persons and
their story are indeed brought vividly before us, yet not near and
palpably present; it is rather as if we looked on that scene through
an inverted telescope, whereby the whole was carried far away into
the distance, the life-large figures compressed into brilliant
miniatures, so clear, so real, yet tiny, elf-like and beautiful as
well as lessened, their colors being now closer and brighter, the
shadows and trivial features no longer visible. This, as we partly
apprehend, comes of singing epic poems; most part of which only
pretend to be sung. Tasso's rich melody still lives among the
Italian people; the Nibelungen also is what it professes to be, a
song."
The story of the Nibelungen would ordinarily be supposed to be so
distant from the interests of modern life, as scarcely to hold the
attention of a reader unless he were interested in it from a scholarly
or more or less antiquarian standpoint. For those who think thus,
however, there is only one thing that will correct such a false
impression and that is to read the Nibelungen itself. It has a depth
of simplicity and a sympathetic human interest all its own but that
reminds one more of Homer than of anything else in literature, and
Homer has faults but lack of interest is not one of them. From the
very beginning the story of the young man who does not think he will
marry, and whose mother does not think that any one is good enough for
him, and of the young woman who is sure that no one will come that
will attract enough of her attention so as to compel {180} her to
subject herself to the yoke of marriage, are types of what is so
permanent in humanity, that the readers' attention is at once caught.
After this the fighting parts of the story become the center of
interest and hold the attention in spite of the refining influences
that later centuries are supposed to have brought to humanity.
Hence it is that Prof. Saintsbury in the second volume of his Periods
of European Literature, already quoted from, is able to say much of
the modern interest in the story. "There may be," as he says, "too
many episodic personages--Deitrich of Bern, for instance, has
extremely little to do in this galley. But the strength, thoroughness,
and in its own savage way, charm of Kriemhild's character, and the
incomparable series of battles between the Burgundian princes and
Etzel's men in the later cantos--cantos which contain the very best
poetical fighting in the history of the world--far more than redeem
this. The Nibelungen Lied is a very great poem; and with Beowulf (the
oldest but the least interesting on the whole), Roland (the most
artistically finished in form), and the poem of the Cid (the
cheerfullest and perhaps the fullest of character), composes a
quartette of epics with which the literary story of the great European
literary nations most appropriately begins. In bulk, dramatic
completeness, and a certain furia, the Nibelungen Lied, though the
youngest and probably the least original is the greatest of the four."
Less need be said of the Nibelungen than of the Cid or Walter Map's
work because it is much more familiar, and even ordinary readers of
literature have been brought more closely in touch with it because of
its relation to the Wagnerian operas. Even those who know the fine old
German poems only passingly, will yet realize the supreme genius of
their author, and those who need to have the opinions of distinguished
critics to back them before they form an estimate for themselves, will
not need to seek far in our modern literature to find lofty praises of
the old German epic.
With even this brief treatment no reader will doubt that there is in
these three epics, typical products of the literary spirit of three
great European nations whose literatures rising high above these deep
firm substructures, were to be of the greatest {181} influence in the
development of the human mind, and yet were to remain practically
always within the limits of thought and feeling that had been traced
by these old founders of literature of the early Thirteenth Century,
whose work, like that of their contemporaries in every other form of
artistic expression, was to be the model and the source of inspiration
for future generations.
[Illustration]
CROZIER (OBVERSE AND REVERSE)
{182}
XI
MEISTERSINGERS, MINNESINGERS, TROUVÈRES, TROUBADOURS.
It would be a supreme mistake to think because the idea of literature
in the Thirteenth Century is usually associated with the Arthur
Legends, the Nibelungen and Dante, that all of the literary content of
the century was inevitably serious in character or always epical in
form. As a matter of fact the soul of wit and humor had entered into
the body social, as we shall see in subsequent chapters, and the
spirit of gaiety and the light-hearted admiration for nature found as
frequent expression as at any time in history. With these as always in
literary history there came outbursts of love in lyric strains that
were not destined to die. While the poets of South Germany and of
Italy sang of love that was of the loftiest description, never mingled
with anything of the merely sensual, their tuneful trifles are quite
as satisfying to the modern ear in both sense and sound as any of the
more elaborate _vers de societé_ of the modern times. The German poets
particularly did not hesitate to emphasize the fact that sensuality
had no part in Minne--their pretty term for love--and yet they sang
with all the natural grace and fervid rapture of the Grecian poets of
the old pagan times, worshiping at the shrines of fleshly goddesses,
or singing to the frail beauties of an unmoral period. Nothing in the
history of literature is better proof that ideal love can, unmixed
with anything sensual, inspire lyric outbursts of supreme and enduring
beauty, than the poems of the Minnesingers and of some of the French
and Italian Troubadours of this period. It is easier to understand
Dante's position in this matter after reading the poems of his
predecessors in the Thirteenth Century.
For this feeling of the lofty character of the love they sang was not,
in spite of what is sometimes said, confined only to the Germans,
though as is well known from time immemorial the {183} Teutonic
feeling towards woman was by racial influence of higher character than
that of the southern Nations. As Mr. H. J. Chaytor says in the
introduction to his Troubadours of Dante, there came a gradual change
over the mind of the Troubadour about the beginning of the Thirteenth
Century and "seeing that love was the inspiring force to good deeds,"
the later Troubadours gradually dissociated their love from the object
which had aroused it. Among them, "as among the Minnesingers, love is
no longer sexual passion, it is rather the motive to great works, to
self-surrender, to the winning an honorable name as Courtier and
Poet." Mr. Chaytor then quotes the well known lines from Bernart de
Ventadorn, one of the Troubadours to whom Dante refers, and whose
works Dante seems to have read with special attention since their
poems contain similar errors of mythology.
"for indeed I know
Of no more subtle passion under heaven
Than is the maiden passion for a maid.
Not only to keep down the base in man.
But teach high thought and amiable words.
And courtliness and the desire of fame.
And love of truth and all that makes a man."
A sentiment surely that will be considered as true now as it ever was,
be the time the Thirteenth Century or earlier or later, and that
represents the best solution of social problems that has ever been put
forward--nature's own panacea for ills that other remedies at best
only palliate.
In the early Nineteenth Century Carlyle said of this period what we
may well repeat here:
"We shall suppose that this Literary Period is partially known to
all readers. Let each recall whatever he has learned or figures
regarding it; represent to himself that brave young heyday of
Chivalry and Minstrelsy when a stern Barbarossa, a stern Lion-heart,
sang sirventes, and with the hand that could wield the sword and
sceptre twanged the melodious strings, when knights-errant tilted,
and ladies' eyes rained bright influences; and suddenly, as at
sunrise, the whole earth had grown {184} vocal and musical. Then
truly was the time of singing come; for princes and prelates,
emperors and squires, the wise and the simple, men, women and
children, all sang and rhymed, or delighted in hearing it done. It
was a universal noise of Song; as if the Spring of Manhood had
arrived, and warblings from every spray, not, indeed, without
infinite twitterings also, which, except their gladness, had no
music, were bidding it welcome."
This is the keynote of the Century--song, blithesome and gay as the
birds, solemn and harmonious as the organ tones that accord so well
with the great Latin hymns--everywhere song.
"Believers," says Tieck, the great collector of Thirteenth Century
poetry, "sang of Faith; Lovers of Love; Knights described knightly
actions and battles; and loving, believing knights were their chief
audience. The Spring, Beauty, Gaiety, were objects that could never
tire; great duels and deeds of arms carried away every hearer, the
more surely the stronger they were painted; and as the pillars and
dome of the Church encircled the flock, so did Religion, as the
Highest, encircle Poetry and Reality; and every heart, in equal love,
humbled itself before her."
The names of the Meistersingers are well-known to musical lovers at
least, because of the music drama of that name and the famous war of
the Wartburg. The most familiar of all of them is doubtless Walter von
der Vogelweide who, when he was asked where he found the tuneful
melodies for his songs, said that he learned them from the birds.
Those who recall Longfellow's pretty ballad with regard to Walter and
his leaving all his substance to feed the birds over his grave near
Nuremberg's minster towers, will not find it surprising that this
Meistersinger's poetry breathes the deepest love of Nature, and that
there is in it a lyric quality of joy in the things of Nature that we
are apt to think of as modern, until we find over and over again in
these bards, that the spirit of the woods and of the fields and of the
spring time, meant as much for them as for any follower of the
Wordsworth school of poetry in the more conscious after-time. This
from Walter with regard to the May will serve to illustrate very well
this phase of his work.
{185}
Gentle May, thou showerest fairly
Gifts afar and near;
Clothest all the woods so rarely,
And the meadows here;
O'er the heath new colors glow;
Flowers and clover on the plain.
Merry rivals, strive amain
Which can fastest grow.
Lady! part me from my sadness.
Love me while 'tis May;
Mine is but a borrowed gladness
If thou frown alway;
Look around and smile anew!
All the world is glad and free;
Let a little joy from thee
Fall to my lot too!
Walter could be on occasion, however, as serious as any of the
Meistersingers and is especially known for his religious poems. It is
not surprising that any one who set woman on so high a pedestal as did
Walter, should have written beautiful poems to the Blessed Virgin. He
was the first, so it is said, to express the sentiment: "Woman, God
bless her, by that name, for it is a far nobler name than lady."
Occasionally he can be seriously didactic and he has not hesitated
even to express some sentiments with regard to methods of education.
Among other things he discusses the question as to whether children
should be whipped or not in the process of education and curiously
enough takes the very modern view that whipping is always a mistake.
In this, of course, he disagrees with all the practical educators of
his time, who considered the rod the most effective instrument for the
education of children and strictly followed the scriptural injunction
about sparing the rod and spoiling the child. Walter's opinion is for
that reason all the more interesting:
"Children with rod ruling--
'Tis the worst of schooling.
Who is honor made to know.
Him a word seems as a blow."
{186}
The birds were always a favorite subject for poetic inspiration on the
part of the Minnesingers. Bird music rapt poetic souls into ecstasies
in which the passage of time was utterly unnoticed. It is from the
Thirteenth Century that comes the beautiful legend with regard to the
monk who, having wondered how time could be kept from dragging in
Heaven, was permitted to listen to the song of a bird one day in the
forest and when he awoke from his rapture and went back to his convent
found that a hundred years had passed, that all of the monks of his
acquaintance were dead, and while his name was found on the rolls of
the monastery, after it there was a note that he had disappeared one
day and had never been heard of afterwards. Almost in the same tenor
as this is a pretty song from Dietmar von Eist, written at the
beginning of the Thirteenth Century, and which was a type of the
charming songs that were to be so characteristic of the times:
There sat upon the linden-tree
A bird, and sung its strain;
So sweet it sung that as I heard
My heart went back again.
It went to one remember'd spot,
It saw the rose-tree grow.
And thought again the thoughts of love,
There cherished long ago.
A thousand years to me it seems
Since by my fair I sate;
Yet thus to be a stranger long
Is not my choice, but fate;
Since then I have not seen the flowers,
Nor heard the birds' sweet song;
My joys have all too briefly past.
My griefs been all too long.
Hartman von Aue was a contemporary of Walter's and is best known for
his romantic stories. It is rather curiously interesting to find that
one of the old chroniclers considers it a great mark of distinction
that, though Hartman was a knight, he was able to read and write
whatever he found written in {187} books. It must not be forgotten,
however, that not all of these poets could read and write, and that
indeed so distinguished a literary man as Wolfram von Eschenbach, the
author of Percival, the story on which Wagner founded his opera of
Parsifal, could neither read nor write. He had developed a very
wonderful memory and was able to store faithfully his poems in the
course of their composition so that he was above the need of pen and
paper. Hartman is most famous for having written the story of Poor
Henry, which Longfellow has chosen so effectively for his Golden
Legend. Hartman's appreciation of women can be judged from the
following lines, which accord her an equal share in her lord's glory
because of her sufferings in prayer at home.
Glory be unto her whose word
Sends her dear lord to bitter fight;
Although he conquer by his sword.
She to the praise has equal right;
He with the sword in battle, she at home with prayer.
Both win the victory, and both the glory share.
Occasionally one finds, as we have said, among the little songs of the
Minnesingers of the time such tuneful trifles as could be included
very appropriately in a modern collection of _vers de société_, or as
might even serve as a love message on a modern valentine or a
Christmas card. The surprise of finding such things at such a time
will justify the quotation of one of them from Brother Wernher, who
owes his title of brother not to his membership in any religious
order, very probably, but to the fact that he belonged to the
brotherhood of the poets of the time.
Since creation I was thine;
Now forever thou art mine.
I have shut thee fast
In my heart at last.
I have dropped the key
In an unknown sea.
Forever must thou my prisoner be!
{188}
Wolfram von Eschenbach was the chief of a group of poets who at the
close of the Twelfth and beginning of the Thirteenth centuries
gathered about the Landgraf Hermann of Thuringen in his court on the
Wartburg, at the foot of which lies Eisenach, in the present Grand
Duchy of Saxe-Weimar. They shaped tales of knightly adventure, blended
with reflection, spiritual suggestion, and a grace of verse that
represented the best culture of the court, and did not address itself
immediately to the people. Wolfram was a younger son of one of the
lower noble Bavarian families settled at Eschenbach, nine miles from
Ausbach, in Middle Franconia. He had a poor little home of his own,
Wildenberg, but went abroad to seek adventures as a knight, and tell
adventures as a poet welcome to great lords, and most welcome to the
lavish friend of poets, Hermann of Thuringen, at whose court on the
Wartburg he remained twenty years, from 1195 to 1215, in which latter
year his "Parzival" was finished. From some passages in his poem it
may safely be inferred that he was happily married, and had children.
The Landgraf Hermann died in 1216, and, was succeeded by Ludwig,
husband of St. Elizabeth.
We cannot ascribe to English writers alone the spiritualizing of the
Grail Legends, when there is Wolfram's "Parzival" drawing from the
same cycle of myths a noble poem of the striving to bind earthly
knighthood to the ever-living God. While Gawain, type of the earthly
knight wins great praise in love and chivalry,
Parzival--Percival--finds his way on from childhood up, through humble
searchings of the spirit, till he is ruler in the kingdom of the soul,
where he designs that Lohengrin, his eldest son, shall be his
successor, while Kardeiss, his younger son, has rule over his earthly
possessions.
How beautifully the Minnesingers could enter into the spirit of nature
and at the same time how much the spirit of Spring has always been
prone to appeal to poetic sensibilities may be judged from the
following song of Conrad of Kirchberg, which is translated very
closely and in the same meter as the original old high German poem. It
is very evident that none of the spirit of Spring was lost on this
poet of the olden time, nor on the other hand that any possibility of
poetic expression was missed by him. There is a music in the lilt of
the verselets, {189} eminently suggestive of the lyric effect that the
new birth of things had on the poet himself and that he wished to
convey to his readers. Of this, however, every one must judge for
himself and so we give the poem as it may be found in Roscoe's edition
of Sismondi's Literature of the South of Europe.
May, sweet May, again is come;
May, that frees the land from gloom.
Up, then, children, we will go
Where the blooming roses grow.
In a joyful company
We the bursting flowers will see;
Up! your festal dress prepare!
Where gay hearts are meeting, there
May hath pleasures most inviting
Heart, and sight, and ear delighting:
Listen to the bird's sweet song.
Hark! how soft it floats along!
Courtly dames our pleasures share.
Never saw I May so fair;
Therefore, dancing will we go:
Youths rejoice, the flowrets blow;
Sing ye! join the chorus gay!
Hail this merry, merry May!
At least as beautiful in their tributes to their lady loves and their
lyric descriptions of the beauties of Spring, were the Troubadours
whose tuneful trifles, sometimes deserving of much more serious
consideration than the application of such a term to them would seem
to demand, have come down to us though the centuries. One of the best
known of these is Arnaud de Marveil, who was born in very humble
circumstances but who succeeded in raising himself by his poetic
genius to be the companion of ruling princes and the friend of the
high nobility. Among the provencals he has been called the great
Master of Love, though this is a name which Petrarch reserves
especially for Arnaud Daniel, while he calls Marveil the less famous
of the Arnauds. An example of his work as the Poet of Love, that is
typical of what is usually considered to have {190} been the favorite
mode of the Troubadour poets runs as follows:
All I behold recalls the memory
Of her I love. The freshness of the hour
Th' enamell'd fields, the many coloured flower,
Speaking of her, move me to melody.
Had not the poets, with their courtly phrase,
Saluted many a fair of meaner worth,
I could not now have render'd thee the praise
So justly due, of "Fairest of the Earth."
To name thee thus had been to speak thy name,
And waken, o'er thy cheek, the blush of modest shame.
An example of the love of nature which characterizes some of Arnaud de
Marveil's work will serve to show how thoroughly he entered into the
spirit of the spring-time and how much all the sights and sounds of
nature found an echo in his poetic spirit. The translation of this as
of the preceding specimen from Arnaud is taken from the English
edition of the Historical View of the Literature of the South of
Europe by Sismondi, and this translation we owe to Thomas Roscoe, the
well known author of the life of Lorenzo the Magnificent, who
considering that Sismondi does not furnish enough of specimens of this
Troubadour poet, inserts the following verses, for the translation of
which he acknowledges himself indebted to the kindness of friends, a
modest concealment doubtless of his own work:
Oh! how sweet the breeze of April,
Breathing soft as May draws near!
While, through nights of tranquil beauty,
Songs of gladness meet the ear:
Every bird his well-known language
Uttering in the morning's pride,
Revelling in joy and gladness
By his happy partner's side.
When, around me, all is smiling,
When to life the young birds spring,
Thoughts of love, I cannot hinder,
Come, my heart inspiriting--
Nature, habit, both incline me
In such joy to bear my part:
With such sounds of bliss around me
Could I wear a sadden'd heart?
{191}
His description of his lady love is another example of his worship of
nature in a different strain, which serves to show that a lover's
exaggeration of the qualities of his lady is not a modern development
of _la belle passion_.
Fairer than the far-famed Helen,
Lovelier than the flow'rets gay.
Snow-white teeth, and lips truth-telling,
Heart as open as the day;
Golden hair, and fresh bright roses--
Heaven, who formed a thing so fair.
Knows that never yet another
Lived, who can with thee compare.
A single stanza from a love-song by Bertrand De Born will show better
than any amount of critical appreciation how beautifully he can treat
the more serious side of love. While the Troubadours are usually said
to have sung their love strains in less serious vein than their German
brother poets of the North, this has the ring of tenderness and truth
about it and yet is not in these qualities very different from others
of his songs that are well known. The translation we have chosen is
that made by Roscoe who has rendered a number of the songs of the
Troubadours into English verse that presents an excellent equivalent
of the original. Bertrand is insisting with his lady-love that she
must not listen to the rumors she may hear from others with regard to
his faithfulness.
I cannot hide from thee how much I fear
The whispers breathed by flatterers in thine ear
Against my faith. But turn not, oh, I pray!
That heart so true, so faithful, so sincere.
So humble and so frank, to me so dear.
Oh, lady! turn it not from me away.
{192}
At times one is surprised to find pretty tributes to nature even in
the midst of songs that are devoted to war. The two things that were
nearest the hearts of these Troubadour poets were war and their
lady-loves, but the beauties of nature became mixed up not only with
their love songs but also with their battle hymns, or at least with
their ardent descriptions of military preparations and the glories of
war. An excellent example of this is to be found in the following
stanza written by William of Saint Gregory, a Troubadour who is best
known for his songs of war rather than of tenderness.
The beautiful spring delights me well.
When flowers and leaves are growing;
And it pleases my heart to hear the swell
Of the birds' sweet chorus flowing
In the echoing wood;
And I love to see all scattered around
Pavilions and tents on martial ground;
And my spirit finds it good
To see on the level plains beyond
Gay knights and steeds caparison'd.
Occasionally the Troubadours indulge in religious poetry though
usually not of a mystical or profoundly devotional character. Even the
famous Peyrols, who is so well known for his love songs, sometimes
wandered into religious poetry that was not unworthy to be placed
beside his lyric effusions on other topics. Peyrols is best known
perhaps for his lamentations over King Richard the Lion Heart's fate,
for he had been with that monarch on the crusade, and like most of the
Troubadours who went with the army, drank in deep admiration for the
poetic king. After his visit to the Holy Land on this occasion one
stanza of his song in memory of that visit runs as follows: [Footnote
19: Translated by Roscoe.]
{193}
I have seen the Jordan river,
I have seen the holy grave.
Lord! to thee my thanks I render
For the joys thy goodness gave,
Showing to my raptured sight
The spot whereon thou saw'st the light.
Vessel good and favoring breezes,
Pilot, trusty, soon shall we
Once more see the towers of Marseilles
Rising o'er the briny sea.
Farewell, Acre, farewell, all.
Of Temple or of Hospital:
Now, alas! the world's decaying.
When shall we once more behold
Kings like lion-hearted Richard,
France's monarch, stout and bold?
[Illustration]
TOWER OF SCALIGERS (VERONA)
{194}
XII
GREAT LATIN HYMNS AND CHURCH MUSIC.
One of the most precious bequests of the Thirteenth Century to all the
succeeding centuries is undoubtedly the great Latin hymns. These
sublime religious poems, comparable only to the Hebrew psalms for
their wondrous expression of the awe and devotion of religious
feeling, present the beginnings of rhymed poetry, yet they have been
acclaimed by competent modern critics as among the greatest poems that
ever came from the mind of man. They come to us from this period and
were composed, most of them at least, during the Thirteenth Century
itself, a few, shortly before it, though all of them received during
this century the stamp of ecclesiastical and popular approval, which
made them for many centuries afterward the principal medium of the
expression of congregational devotion and the exemplar and incentive
for vernacular poetry. It is from these latter standpoints that they
deserve the attention of all students of literature quite apart from
their significance as great expressions of the mind of these wondrous
generations.
These Latin hymns have sometimes been spoken of with perhaps a certain
degree of contempt as "rhymed Latin poetry," as if the use of rhyme in
conjunction with Latin somehow lowered the dignity of the grand old
tongue in which Cicero wrote his graceful periods and Horace sang his
tuneful odes. As a matter of fact, far from detracting from the
beauties of Latin expression, these hymns have added new laurels to
the glory of the language and have shown the wonderful possibilities
of the Roman speech in the hands of generations long after the
classical period. If they served no other purpose than to demonstrate
beyond cavil how profoundly the scholars of this generation succeeded
in possessing themselves of the genius of the Latin language, they
would serve to contradict the foolish critics who talk of the
education of the period as superficial, or as negligent of everything
but scholastic philosophy and theology.
{195}
At least one distinguished philologist, Professor F. A. March, who has
now for the better part of half a century occupied the chair of
comparative philology at Lafayette College, does not hesitate to say
that the Latin hymns represent an expression of the genius of the
Latin people and language, more characteristic than the classical
poetry even of the golden or silver ages. "These hymns," he says,
"were the first original poetry of the people in the Latin language,
unless perhaps those Latin critics may be right who think they find in
Livy a prose rendering of earlier ballads. The so-called classic
poetry was an echo of Greece, both in substance and in form. The
matter and meters were both imitated and the poems were composed for
the lovers of Grecian art in the Roman Court. It did not spring from
the people, but the Christian hymns were proper folk poetry, the Bible
of the people--their Homeric poems. Their making was not so much
speech as action. They were in substance festive prayers, the simplest
rhythmic offering of thanks and praise to the Giver of Light and of
rest both natural and spiritual, at morning and evening and at other
seasons, suited to the remembrance and rhythmical rehearsal of the
truths of the Bible." Prof. March's opinion has been echoed by many
another enthusiastic student of these wonderful hymns. It is only
those who do not know them who fail to grow enthusiastic about them.
This of itself would stamp these great poems as worthy of careful
study. There is, however, an additional reason for modern interest in
them. These hymns were sung by the whole congregation at the many
services that they attended in the medieval period. In this regard it
seems well to recall, that it was the custom to go to church much
oftener then than at present. Besides the Sundays there were many holy
days of obligation, that is, religious festivals on which attendance
at Church was obligatory, and in addition a certain number of days of
devotion on which, because of special reverence for some particular
saint, or in celebration of some event in the life of the Lord or his
saints, the people of special parts of the country found themselves
drawn to attendance on church services. It seems probable that instead
of the sixty or so times a year that is now obligatory, people went to
Church during the Thirteenth {196} Century more than a hundred times
in the year. Twice a week then, at least, there was the uplifting
cultural influence of this congregational singing of wonderful hymns
that are among the greatest poems ever written and that belong to
literature of the very highest order. The educational value of such
intimate contact with what is best in literary expression could
scarcely fail to have a distinct effect upon the people. It is idle to
say that the hymns being in Latin they were not understood, since the
language of them was close akin to the spoken tongues, the subjects
were eminently familiar mysteries of religion and constant repetition
and frequent explanation must have led to a very general comprehension
even by the least educated classes. For anyone with any pretension to
education they must have been easy to understand, since Latin was
practically a universal language.
It is not always realized by the students whose interests have been
mainly confined to modern literature, in what estimation these Latin
hymns have been held by those who are in the best position to be able
to judge critically of their value as poetry. Take for example the
Dies Irae, confessedly the greatest of them, and it will be found that
many of the great poets and literary men of the Nineteenth Century
have counted it among their favorite poems. Such men as Goethe,
Friedrich and August Schlegel, Scott, Milman and Archbishop Trench
were enthusiastic in its praise. While such geniuses as Dryden,
Johnson and Jeremy Taylor, and the musicians Mozart and Hayden, avowed
supreme admiration for it. Herder, Fichte and August Schlegel besides
Crashaw, Drummond, Roscommon, Trench and Macaulay gave the proof of
their appreciation of the great Thirteenth Century hymn by devoting
themselves to making translations of it, and Goethe's use of it in
Faust and Scott's in the Lay of the Last Minstrel, show how much
poets, whose sympathies were not involved in its religious aspects,
were caught by its literary and esthetic merit.
In very recent times the Latin hymns have been coming more to their
own again and such distinguished critics as Prof. Henry Morley, and
Prof. George Saintsbury, have not hesitated to express their critical
appreciation of these hymns as great {197} literature. Prof.
Saintsbury says in his volume of the Thirteenth Century literature:
[Footnote 20]
[Footnote 20: The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory,
Volume II. of Periods of European Literature, Edited by George
Saintsbury, New York, Scribners, 1899.]
{opp197}
[Illustration]
ST. FRANCIS PROPHESIES THE DEATH OF CELANO (GIOTTO, UPPER CH., ASSISI)
"It will be more convenient to postpone to a later chapter of this
volume a consideration of the exact way in which Latin sacred poetry
affected the prosody of the vernacular; but it is well here to point
out that almost all the finest and most famous examples of the
medieval hymns, with perhaps the sole exception of the Veni Sancte
Spiritus, date from the Twelfth and Thirteenth centuries. Ours (that
is, from this period) are the stately rhythms of Adam of St. Victor,
and the softer ones of St. Bernard the Greater. It was at this time
that Jacopone da Todi, in the intervals of his eccentric vernacular
exercises, was inspired to write the Stabat Mater. From this time
comes that glorious descant of Bernard of Morlaix, in which, the
more its famous and very elegant English paraphrase is read beside
it (Jerusalem the Golden), the more does the greatness and the
beauty of the original appear.
"And from this time comes the greatest of all hymns, and one of the
greatest of all poems, the Dies Irae. There have been attempts--more
than one of them--to make out that the Dies Irae is no such
wonderful thing after all; attempts which are, perhaps, the extreme
examples of that cheap and despicable paradox which thinks to escape
the charge of blind docility by the affectation of heterodox
independence. The judgment of the greatest (and not always of the
most pious) men of letters of modern times may confirm those who are
uncomfortable without authority in a different opinion. Fortunately
there is not likely ever to be lack of those who, authority or no
authority, in youth and in age, after much reading or without much,
in all time of their tribulation and in all time of their wealth,
will hold these wonderful triplets, be they Thomas of Celano's or
another's, as nearly or quite the most perfect wedding of sound to
sense that they know."
This seems almost the limit of praise but Prof. Saintsbury can say
even more than this: "It would be possible, indeed, to {198}
illustrate a complete dissertation on the methods of expression in
serious poetry from the fifty-one lines of the Dies Irae. Rhyme,
alliteration, cadence, and adjustment of vowel and consonant
values--all these things receive perfect expression in it, or, at
least, in the first thirteen stanzas, for the last four are a little
inferior. It is quite astonishing to reflect upon the careful art or
the felicitous accident of such a line as:
Tuba mirum spargens sonum,
with the thud of the trochee falling in each instance in a different
vowel; and still more on the continuous sequence of five stanzas, from
_Judex ergo_ to _non sit cassus_, in which not a word could be
displaced or replaced by another without loss. The climax of verbal
harmony, corresponding to and expressing religious passion and
religious awe, is reached in the last--
Quaerens me sedisti lassus,
Redemisti crucem passus:
Tantus labor non sit cassus!
where the sudden change from the dominant _e_ sounds (except
in the rhyme foot) of the first two lines to the _a's_ of the last
is simply miraculous and miraculously assisted by what may
be called the internal sub-rhyme of _sedisti_ and _redemisti_. This
latter effect can rarely be attempted without a jingle: there is
no jingle here, only an ineffable melody. After the Dies Irae,
no poet could say that any effect of poetry was, as far as sound
goes, unattainable, though few could have hoped to equal it,
and perhaps no one except Dante and Shakespeare has fully
done so."
Higher praise than this could scarcely be given and it comes from an
acknowledged authority, whose interests are moreover in secular rather
than religious literature, and whose enthusiastic praise is therefore
all the more striking. Here in America, Schaff, whose critical
judgment in religious literature is unquestionable and whose
sympathies with the old church and her hymns were not as deep as if he
had been a Roman Catholic, has been quite as unstinted in laudation.
"This marvelous hymn is the acknowledged masterpiece of Latin
poetry, and the most sublime of all uninspired hymns. {199} ... The
secret of its irresistible power lies in the awful grandeur of the
theme, the intense earnestness and pathos of the poet, the simple
majesty and solemn music of its language, the stately meter, the
triple rhyme, and the vowel assonances, chosen in striking
adaptation to the sense--all combining to produce an overwhelming
effect, as if we heard the final crash of the universe, the
commotion of the opening graves, the trumpet of the archangel
summoning the quick and the dead, and saw the 'king of tremendous
majesty' seated on the throne of justice and of mercy, and ready to
dispense everlasting life and everlasting woe."
Neale says of Thomas Aquinas' great hymn the Pange Lingua: "This hymn
contests the second place among those of the Western Church, with the
'Vexilla Regis,' the 'Stabat Mater,' the 'Jesu Dulcis Memoria,' the
'Ad Regias Agni Dapes,' the 'Ad Supernam,' and one or two others,
leaving the 'Dies Irae' in its unapproachable glory," thus furnishing
another supreme testimony to the hymn we have been discussing, which
indeed only needs to be read to be appreciated, since it will
inevitably tempt to successive readings and these bring with them ever
and ever increasing admiration, showing in this more than in any other
way that it is a work of sublime genius.
With regard to rhyme particularly the triumph of art and the influence
of the Latin hymns is undoubted. This latest beauty of poetry reached
its perfection of expression in the Latin hymns. It is rather curious
to trace its gradual development. It constitutes the only feature of
literature which apparently did not come to us from the East. The
earlier specimens of poetry of which we know anything among the
Oriental nations other than the Hebrews, are beautiful examples of the
possibilities of rhythm and the beginnings of meter. As poetry goes
westward meter becomes as important as rhythm in poetry and these two
qualities differentiated it from prose. Both of these literary modes,
however, are eastern in origin. Rhyme comes from the distant West and
seems to have originated in the alliteration invented by the Celtic
bards. The vowel assonance was after a time completed by the addition
of consonantal assonance and then the invention of rhyme was
completed. The first fully rhymed hymns seem to have been written by
the {200} Irish monks and carried over to the Continent by them on
their Christianizing expeditions, after the irruption of the
barbarians had obliterated the civilization of Europe. During the
Tenth and Eleventh centuries rhyme developed mainly in connection with
ecclesiastical poetry. During the Twelfth and Thirteenth centuries it
reached an acme of evolution which has never been surpassed during all
the succeeding generations.
It must not be thought that, because so much attention is given to the
Dies Irae, this constitutes the only supremely great hymn of the
Thirteenth Century. There are at least five or six others that well
deserve to be mentioned in the same breath. One of them, the famous
Stabat Mater of Jacopone da Todi, has been considered by some critics
as quite as beautiful as the Dies Irae in poetic expression, though
below it as poetry because of the lesser sublimity of its subject.
Certainly no more marvelously poetic expression of all that is saddest
in human sorrow has ever been put into words, than that which is to be
found in these stanzas of the Franciscan Monk who had himself known
all the depths of human sorrow and trial. Most people know the opening
stanzas of it well enough to scarce need their presentation and yet it
is from the poem itself, and not from any critical appreciation of it,
that its greatness must be judged.
{opp200}
[Illustration]
VIRGIN AND CHILD (PISA, CAMPO SANTO, GIOV. PISANO)
Stabat mater dolorosa
Juxta crucem lacrymosa,
Dum pendebat filius,
Cuius animan gementem,
Contristantem at dolentem
Pertransivit gladius.
O quam tristis et afflicta
Fuit illa benedicta
Mater unigeniti.
Quae moerebat et dolebat
Et tremebat, dum videbat
Nati poenas inclyti.
Quis est homo, qui non fleret,
Matrem Christi si videret,
In tanto supplicio?
Quis non posset contristari,
Piam matrem contemplari
Dolentem cum filio!
{201}
As in the case of the Dies Irae there have been many translations of
the Stabat Mater, most of them done by poets whose hearts were in
their work and who were accomplishing their purpose as labors of love.
While we realize how many beautiful translations there are, it is
almost pitiful to think what poor English versions are sometimes used
in the devotional exercises of the present day. One of the most
beautiful translations is undoubtedly that by Denis Florence
MacCarthy, who has been hailed as probably the best translator into
English of foreign poetry that our generation has known, and whose
translations of Calderon present the greatest of Spanish poets, in a
dress as worthy of the original as it is possible for a poet to have
in a foreign tongue. MacCarthy has succeeded in following the
intricate rhyme plan of the Stabat with a perfection that would be
deemed almost impossible in our harsher English, which does not
readily yield itself to double rhymes and which permits frequency of
rhyme as a rule only at the sacrifice of vigor of expression. The
first three stanzas, however, of the Stabat Mater will serve to show
how well MacCarthy accomplished his difficult task:
By the cross, on which suspended.
With his bleeding hands extended,
Hung that Son she so adored,
Stood the mournful Mother weeping.
She whose heart, its silence keeping.
Grief had cleft as with a sword.
O, that Mother's sad affliction--
Mother of all benediction--
Of the sole-begotten One;
Oh, the grieving, sense-bereaving,
Of her heaving breast, perceiving
The dread sufferings of her Son.
What man is there so unfeeling.
Who, his heart to pity steeling.
Could behold that sight unmoved?
Could Christ's Mother see there weeping,
See the pious Mother keeping
Vigil by the Son she loved?
{202}
A very beautiful translation in the meter of the original was also
made by the distinguished Irish poet, Aubrey de Vere. The last two
stanzas of this translation have been considered as perhaps the most
charmingly effective equivalent in English for Jacopone's wonderfully
devotional termination that has ever been written.
May his wounds both wound and heal me;
His blood enkindle, cleanse, anneal me;
Be his cross my hope and stay:
Virgin, when the mountains quiver,
From that flame which burns for ever,
Shield me on the judgment-day.
Christ, when he that shaped me calls me,
When advancing death appalls me.
Through her prayer the storm make calm:
When to dust my dust returneth
Save a soul to thee that yearneth;
Grant it thou the crown and palm.
Even distinguished professors of philosophy and theology occasionally
indulged themselves in the privilege of writing these Latin hymns and,
what is more surprising, succeeded in making poetry of a very high
order. At least two of the most distinguished professors in these
branches at the University of Paris in the latter half of the
Thirteenth Century, must be acknowledged as having written hymns that
are confessedly immortal, not because of any canonical usage that
keeps them alive, but because they express in very different ways, in
wondrously beautiful language some of the sublimest religious thoughts
of their time. These two are St. Bonaventure, the Franciscan, and St.
Thomas of Aquin, the Dominican. St. Bonaventure's hymns on the Passion
and Cross of Christ represent what has been most beautifully sung on
these subjects in all the ages. St. Thomas' poetic work centers around
the Blessed Sacrament in whose honor he was so ardent and so devoted
{203} that the composition of the office for its feast was confided to
him by the Pope. The hymns he wrote, far from being the series of
prosy theological formulas that might have been expected perhaps under
such circumstances, are great contributions to a form of literature
which contains more gems of purest ray in its collection than almost
any other. St. Thomas' poetic jewels shine with no borrowed radiance,
and their effulgence is not cast into shadow even by the greatest of
their companion pieces among the Latin hymns of a wonderfully
productive century. Neale's tribute to one of them has already been
quoted in an earlier part of this chapter.
It has indeed been considered almost miraculous, that this profoundest
of thinkers should have been able to attain within the bounds of rhyme
and rhythm, the accurate expression of some of the most intricate
theological thoughts that have ever been expressed, and yet should
have accomplished his purpose with a clarity of language, a simplicity
and directness of words, a poetic sympathy of feeling, and an utter
devotion, that make his hymns great literature in the best sense of
the word. One of them at least, the Pange Lingua Gloriosi, has been in
constant use in the church ever since his time, and its two last
stanzas beginning with Tantum Ergo Sacramentum, are perhaps the most
familiar of all the Latin hymns. Few of those most familiar with it
realize its place in literature, the greatness of its author, or its
own marvelous poetic merits.
It must not be forgotten that at the very time when these hymns were
most popular the modern languages were just assuming shape. Even at
the end of the Thirteenth Century none of them had reached anything
like the form that it was to continue to hold, except perhaps the
Italian and to some extent the Spanish. When Dante wrote his Divine
Comedy at the beginning of the Fourteenth Century, he was tempted to
use the Latin language, the common language of all the scholars of his
day, and the language ordinarily used for any ambitious literary
project for nearly a century later. It will not be forgotten that when
Petrarch in the Fourteenth Century wrote his epic, Africa, on which he
expected his fame as a poet to rest, he preferred to use the Latin
language. Fortunately Dante was large enough of mind to realize, that
the vulgar {204} tongue of the Italians would prove the best
instrument for the expression of the thoughts he wished to
communicate, and so he cast the Italian language into the mold in
which it has practically ever since remained.
His very hesitation, however, shows how incomplete as yet were these
modern languages considered by the scholars who used them. It was at
this very formative period, however, that the people on whose use of
the nascent modern languages their future character depended, were
having dinned into their ears in the numerous church services, the
great Latin hymns with their wonderful finish of expression.
Undoubtedly one of the most effective factors of whatever of sweetness
there is in the modern tongues, must be attributed to this influence
exerted all unconsciously upon the minds of the people. The rhythm and
the expressiveness of these magnificent poems could scarcely fail to
stamp itself to some degree upon the language, crude though it might
be, of the people who had become so familiar with them. It is, then,
to no small extent because of the influence of these Latin hymns that
our modern languages possess a rhythmic melodiousness that in time
enabled them to become the instruments for poetic diction in such a
way as to satisfy all the requirements of the modern ear in rhyme, and
rhythm, and meter. A striking corresponding effect upon the exactness
of expression in the modern languages, it will be noticed, is pointed
out in the chapter on the Prose of the Century as representing,
according to Professor Saintsbury, the greatest benefit that was
derived from the exaggerated practise of dialectic disputation in the
curriculum of the medieval Universities.
Those who would think that the Thirteenth Century was happy in
creative genius but lacking in the critical faculty that would enable
it to select the best, not only of the hymns presented by its own
generations but also of those which came from the preceding centuries,
should make themselves acquainted with the history of these Latin
hymns. Just before the Thirteenth Century the monks of the famous
Abbey of St. Victor took up the writing of hymns with wonderful
success and two of them, Adam and Hugh, became not only the favorites
of their own but of succeeding generations. The Thirteenth {205}
Century received the work of these men and gave them a vogue which has
continued down to our own time. Some of the hymns that were thus
acclaimed and made popular are among the greatest contributions to
this form of literature, and while they have had periods of eclipse
owing to bad taste in the times that followed, the reputation secured
during the Thirteenth Century has always been sufficient to recall
them to memory and bring men again to a realization of their beauty
when a more esthetic generation came into existence.
One of the hymns of the immediately preceding time, which attained
great popularity during the Thirteenth Century--a popularity that
reflects credit on those among whom it is noted as well as upon the
great hymn itself--was Bernard of Cluny's or Bernard of Morlaix's
hymn, concerning the contempt of the world, many of the ideas of which
were to be used freely in the book bearing this title written by the
first Pope of the century, Innocent III, whose name is usually, though
gratuitously associated with quite other ideas than those of contempt
for worldly grandeur. The description of the New Jerusalem to come,
which is found at the beginning of this great poem, is the basis of
all the modern religious poems on this subject. Few hymns have been
more praised. Schaff, in his Christ in Song says: "This glowing
description is the sweetest of all the new Jerusalem Hymns of Heavenly
Homesickness which have taken their inspiration from the last two
chapters of Revelation." The extreme difficulty of the meter which its
author selected and which would seem almost to preclude the
possibility of expressing great connected thought, especially in so
long a poem, became under the master hand of this poetic genius, whose
command of the Latin language is unrivaled, the source of new beauties
for his poem. Besides maintaining the meter of the old Latin
hexameters he added double rhymes in each line and yet had every
alternate line also end in a rhyme. To appreciate the difficulty this
must be read.
{206}
Hora novissima, tempora pessima sunt, vigilemus,
Ecce minaciter imminet arbiter ille supremus
Imminet, imminet ut mala terminet, aequa coronet.
Recta remuneret, anxia liberet, aethera donet,
Auferat aspera duraque pondera mentis onustae,
Sobria muniat, improba puniat, utraque juste.
Hic breve vivitur, hic breve plangitur, hic breve fletur;
Non breve vivere, non breve plangere retribuetur;
O retributio! stat brevis actio, vita perennis;
O retributio! coelica mansio stat lue plenis;
Quid datur et quibus? aether egentibus et cruce dignis,
Sidera vermibus, optima sontibus, astra malignis.
There are many versions, but few translators have dared to attempt a
close imitation of the original meter. Its beauty is so great,
however, that even the labor required for this has not deterred some
enthusiastic admirers. Our English tongue, however, does not lend
itself readily to the production of hexameters, though in these lines
the rhyme and rhythm has been caught to some extent:
"These are the latter times, these are not better times;
Let us stand waiting;
Lo! how with, awfulness, He, first in lawfulness,
Comes arbitrating."
Even from this it may be realized that Doctor Neale is justified in
his enthusiastic opinion that "it is the most lovely, in the same way
that the Dies Irae is the most sublime, and the Stabat Mater the most
pathetic, of medieval poems."
While it scarcely has a place here properly, a word must be said with
regard to the music of the Thirteenth Century. It might possibly be
thought that these wondrous rhymes had been spoiled in their
effectiveness by the crude music to which they were set. To harbor any
such notion, however, would only be another exhibition of that
intellectual snobbery which concludes that generations so distant
could not have anything worth the consideration of our more developed
time. The music of the Thirteenth Century is as great a triumph as any
other feature of its accomplishment. It would be clearly absurd to
suppose, that the people who created the Cathedrals and made every
element associated with the church ceremonial so beautiful as to
attract the attention of all generations since, could have failed to
develop a music suitable to these {207} magnificent fanes. As a matter
of fact no more suitable music for congregational singing than the
Gregorian Chant, which reached the acme of its development in the
Thirteenth Century, has been invented, and the fact that the Catholic
Church, after having tried modern music, is now going back to this
medieval musical mode for devotional expression, is only a further
noteworthy tribute to the enduring character of another phase of
Thirteenth Century accomplishment.
Rockstro, who wrote the article on Plain Chant for Grove's Dictionary
of Music and for the Encyclopedia Britannica, declared that no more
wonderful succession of single notes, had even been strung into
melodies so harmoniously adapted to the expression of the words with
which they were to be sung, than some of these Plain Chants of the
Middle Ages and especially of the Thirteenth Century. No more
sublimely beautiful musical expression of all the depths there are in
sadness has ever found its way into music, than what is so simply
expressed in the Lamentations as they are sung in the office called
Tenebrae during Holy Week. Even more beautiful in its joyousness is
the marvelous melody of the Exultet which is sung in the Office of
Holy Saturday. This latter is said to be the sublimest expression of
joyful sound that has ever come from the human heart and mind. In a
word, in music as in every other artistic department, the men of the
Thirteenth Century reached a standard that has never been excelled and
that remains to the present day as a source of pleasure and admiration
for intellectual men, and will continue to be so for numberless
generations yet unborn.
Nor must it be thought that the Thirteenth Century men and women were
satisfied with Church music alone. About the middle of the century
part singing came into use in the churches at the less formal
ceremonials, and soon spread to secular uses. As the Mystery Plays
gave rise to the modern drama, so church music gave birth to the
popular music of the time. In England, particularly, about the middle
of the century, various glee songs were sung, portions of which have
come down to us, and a great movement of folk music was begun. Before
the end of the century the interaction of church and secular music had
given rise to many of the modes of modern musical {208} development,
and the musical movement was as substantially begun as were any of the
other great artistic and intellectual movements which this century so
marvelously initiated. This subject, of course, is of the kind that
needs to be studied in special works if any satisfactory amount of
information is to be obtained, but even the passing hint of it which
we have been able to give will enable the reader to realize the
important place of the Thirteenth Century in the development of modern
music.
[Illustration]
ENTOMBMENT OF BLESSED VIRGIN (NOTRE DAME, PARIS)
{209}
XIII
THREE MOST READ BOOKS OF THE CENTURY.
Three books were more read than any others during the Thirteenth
Century, that is, of course, apart from Holy Scriptures, which
contrary to the usually accepted notion in this matter, were
frequently the subject of study and of almost daily contact in one way
or another by all classes of people. These three books were, Reynard
the Fox, that is the series of stories of the animals in which they
are used as a cloak for a satire upon man and his ways, called often
the Animal Epic; the Golden Legend, which impressed Longfellow so much
that he spent many years making what he hoped might prove for the
modern world a bit of the self-revelation that this wonderful old
medieval book has been for its own and subsequent generations; and,
finally, the Romance of the Rose, probably the most read book during
the Thirteenth and Fourteenth and most of the Fifteenth centuries in
all the countries of Europe. Its popularity can be well appreciated
from the fact that, though Chaucer was much read, there are more than
three times as many manuscript copies of The Romance of the Rose in
existence as of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and it was one of the
earliest books to see the light in print. [Footnote 21]
[Footnote 21: It was a favorite occupation some few years ago to pick
out what were considered the ten best books. Sir John Lubbock first
suggested, that it would be an interesting thing to pick out the ten
books which, if one were to be confined for life, should be thought
the most likely to be of enduring interest. If this favorite game
were to be played with the selection limited to the authors of a
single century, it is reasonably sure that most educated people
would pick out the thirteenth century group of ten for their
exclusive reading for the rest of life, rather than any other. An
experimental list of ten books selected from the thirteenth century
writers would include the Cid, the Legends of King Arthur, the
Nibelungen Lied, the Romance of the Rose, Reynard the Fox, the
Golden Legend, the Summa of St. Thomas Aquinas, Parsifal or Perceval
by Wolfram von Eschenbach, Durandus's Symbolism and Dante. As will
readily be appreciated by anyone who knows literature well, these
are eminently books of enduring interest. When it is considered that
in making this list no call is made upon Icelandic Literature nor
Provençal Literature, both of which are of supreme interest, and
both reached their maturity at this time, the abounding literary
wealth of the century will be understood.]
{210}
It has become the fashion in recent years, to take the pains from time
to time to find out which are the most read books. The criterion of
worth thus set up is not very valuable, for unfortunately for the
increase in readers, there has not come a corresponding demand for the
best books nor for solid literature. The fact that a book has been the
best seller, or the most read for a time, usually stamps it at once as
trivial or at most as being of quite momentary interest and not at all
likely to endure. It is all the more interesting to find then, that
these three most read books of the Thirteenth Century, have not only
more than merely academic interest at the present time, but that they
are literature in the best sense of the word. They have always been
not only a means of helping people to pass the time, the sad office to
which the generality of books has been reduced in our time, but a
source of inspiration for literary men in many generations since they
first became popular. The story of Reynard the Fox is one of the most
profoundly humorous books that was ever written. Its satire was aimed
at its own time yet it is never for a moment antiquated for the modern
reader. At a time when, owing to the imperfect development of personal
rights, it would have been extremely dangerous to satirize as the
author does very freely, the rulers, the judges, the nobility, the
ecclesiastical authorities and churchmen, and practically all classes
of society, the writer, whose name has, unfortunately for the
completeness of literary history, not come down to us, succeeded in
painting all the foibles of men and pointing out all the differences
there are between men's pretensions and their actual accomplishments.
All the methods by which the cunning scoundrel could escape justice
are exploited. The various modes of escaping punishment by direct and
indirect bribery, by pretended repentance and reformation, by cunning
appeal to the selfishness of judges, are revealed with the fidelity to
detail of a modern muckraker; yet, all of it with a humanly humorous
quality which, while it takes away nothing from the completeness of
the exposure, removes most of the bitterness that probably would have
made the satire fail of its purpose. While every class in the
community of the time comes in for satirical allusions, that give us a
better idea of how closely the men and the women {211} of the time
resembled those of our own, than is to be found in any other single
literary work that has been preserved for us from this century, or,
indeed, any other, the series of stories seemed to be scarcely more
than a collection of fables for children, and probably was read quite
unsuspectingly by those who are so unmercifully satirized in it,
though doubtless, as is usually noted in such cases, each one may have
applied the satire of the story as he saw it to his neighbor and not
to himself.
A recent editor has said very well of Reynard the Fox that it is one
of the most universal of books in its interest for all classes.
Critics have at all times been ready to praise and few if any have
found fault. It is one of the books that answers well to what Cardinal
Newman declared to be at least the accidental definition of a classic;
it pleases in childhood, in youth, in middle age and even in declining
years. It is because of the eternal verity of the humanity in the
book, that with so much truth Froude writing of Reynard can say: "It
is not addressed to a passing mode of folly or of profligacy, but it
touches the perennial nature of mankind, laying bare our own
sympathies, and tastes, and weaknesses, with as keen and true an edge
as when the living world of the old Suabian poet winced under its
earliest utterance."
The writer who traced the portraits must be counted one of the great
observers of all time. As is the case with so many creative artists of
the Thirteenth Century, though this is truer elsewhere than in
literature, the author is not known. Perhaps he thought it safer to
shroud his identity in friendly obscurity, rather than expose himself
to the risks the finding of supposed keys to his satire might
occasion. Too much credit must not be given to this explanation,
however, though some writers have made material out of it to exploit
Church intolerance, which the conditions do not justify. We are not
sure who wrote the Arthur Legends, we do not know the author of the
Cid, even all-pervasive German scholarship has not settled the problem
of the writer of the Nibelungen, and the authorship of the Dies Irae
is in doubt, though all of these would be sources of honor and praise
rather than danger. Authors had evidently not as yet become
sophisticated to the extent of {212} seeking immortality for their
works. They even seem to have been indifferent as to whether their
names were associated with them or not. Enough for them apparently to
have had the satisfaction of doing, all else seemed futile.
The original of Reynard the Fox was probably written in the
Netherlands, though it may be somewhat difficult for the modern mind
to associate so much of wit and humor with the Dutchmen of the Middle
Ages. It arose there about the time that the Cid came into vogue in
Spain, the Arthur Legends were being put into shape in England, and
the Nibelungen reaching its ultimate form in Germany. Reynard thus
fills up the geographical chart of contemporary literary effort for
the Thirteenth Century, since France and Italy come in for their share
in other forms of literature, and no country is missing from the story
of successful, enduring accomplishment in letters. It was written from
so close to the heart of Nature, that it makes a most interesting gift
book even for the Twentieth Century child, and yet will be read with
probably even more pleasure by the parents. With good reason another
recent editor has thus summed up the catholicity of its appeal to all
generations:
"This book belongs to the rare class which is equally delightful to
children and to their elders. In this regard it may be compared to
'Gulliver's Travels,' 'Don Quixote' and 'Pilgrim's Progress.' For wit
and shrewd satire and for pure drollery both in situations and
descriptions, it is unsurpassed. The animals are not men dressed up in
the skin of beasts, but are throughout true to their characters, and
are not only strongly realized but consistently drawn, albeit in so
simple and captivating a way that the subtle art of the narrator is
quite hidden, and one is aware only of reading an absorbingly
interesting and witty tale." To have a place beside Gulliver, the old
Spanish Knight and Christian, shows the estimation in which the book
is held by those who are best acquainted with it.
The work is probably best known through the version of it which has
come to us from the greatest of German poets, Goethe, whose Reineke
Fuchs has perhaps had more sympathetic readers and a wider audience
than any other of Goethe's {213} works. The very fact that so deeply
intellectual a literary man should have considered it worth his while
to devote his time to making a modern version of it, shows not only
the estimation in which he held it, but also affords excellent
testimony to its worth as literature, for Goethe, unlike most poets,
was a fine literary critic, and one who above all knew the reasons for
the esthetic faith that was in him. Animal stories in every age,
however, have been imitations of it much more than is usually
imagined. While the author probably obtained the hint for his work
from some of the old-time fables as they came to him by tradition,
though we have no reason to think that AEsop was familiar to him and
many for thinking the Greek fabulist was not, he added so much to this
simple literary mode, transformed it so thoroughly from child's
literature to world literature, that the main merit of modern animal
stories must be attributed to him. Uncle Remus and the many
compilations of this kind that have been popular in our own
generation, owe much more to the animal Epic than might be thought
possible by one not familiar with the original Thirteenth Century
work.
Every language has a translation of the Animal Epic and most of the
generations since have been interested and amused by the quaint
conceits, which enable the author to picture so undisguisedly, men and
women under animal garb. It discloses better than any other specimen
of the literature of the time that men and women do not change even in
the course of centuries, and that in the heart of the Middle Ages a
wise observer could see the foibles of humanity just as they exist at
the present time. Any one who thinks that evolution after seven
centuries should have changed men somewhat in their ethical aspects,
at least, made their aspirations higher and their tendencies less
commonplace, not to say less degenerative, should read one of the old
versions of Reynard the Fox and be convinced that men and women in the
Thirteenth Century were quite the same as we are familiar with them at
the present moment.
The second of the most read books of the century is the famous Legenda
Aurea or, as it has been called in English, the Golden Legend, written
by Jacobus de Voragine, the distinguished Dominican preacher and
writer (born during the first half of the Thirteenth Century, died
just at its close), who, {214} after rising to the higher grades in
his own order, became the Archbishop of Genoa. His work at once sprang
into popular favor and continued to be perhaps the most widely read
book, with the exception of the Holy Scriptures, during the Fourteenth
and Fifteenth centuries. It was one of the earliest books printed in
Italy, the first edition appearing about 1570, and it is evident that
it was considered that its widespread popularity would not only
reimburse the publisher, but would help the nascent art of printing by
bringing it to the attention of a great many people. Its subject is
very different from that of the modern most read books; librarians do
not often have to supply lives of Saints nowadays, though some
similarities of material with that of books now much in demand help to
account for its vogue.
Jacobus de Voragine's work consisted of the lives of the greater
Saints of the Church since the time of Christ, and detailed especially
the wonderful things that happened in their lives, some of which of
course were mythical and all of them containing marvelous stories.
This gave prominence to many legends that have continued to maintain
their hold upon the popular imagination ever since. With all this
adventitious interest, however, the book contained a solid fund of
information with regard to the lives of the Saints, and besides it
taught the precious lessons of unselfishness and the care for others
of the men who had come to be greeted by the title of Saint. The work
must have done not a little to stir up the faith, enliven the charity,
and build up the characters of the people of the time, and certainly
has fewer objections than most popular reading at any period of the
world's history. For young folks the wonderful legends afforded
excellent and absolutely innocuous exercise of the functions of the
imagination quite as well as our own modern wonder books or fairy
tales, while the stories themselves presented many descriptive
portions out of which subjects for decorative purposes could readily
be obtained. It must be set down as another typical distinction of the
Thirteenth Century and an addition to its greatness, that it should
have made the Golden Legend popular and thus preserved it for future
generations, who became {215} deeply interested in it, as in most of
the other precious heritages they received from this great original
century.
{opp214}
[Illustration]
MADONNA AND CHILD (GIOV. PISANO, PADUA)
[Illustration]
ST. CHRISTOPHER (ALTO RELIEVO, VENICE)
The third of the most read books of the century, The Romance of the
Rose, is not so well known except by scholars as is the Animal Epic or
perhaps even the Golden Legend. Anyone who wants to understand the
burden of the time, however, and who wishes to put himself in the mood
and the tense to comprehend not only the other literature of the era,
and in this must be included even Dante, but also the social,
educational, and even scientific movements of the period, must become
familiar with it. It has been well said that a knowledge and study of
the three most read books of the century, those which we have named,
will afford a far clearer insight into the daily life and the spirit
working within the people for whom they were written, than the annals
of the wars or political struggles that were waged during the same
period between kings and nobles. For this clearer insight a knowledge
of the Romance of the Rose is more important than of the others. It
provides a better introduction to the customs and habits, the manners
of thought and of action, the literary and educational interests of
the people of the Thirteenth Century, than any mere history, however
detailed, could. In this respect it resembles Homer who, as Froude
declares, has given us a better idea of Greek life than a whole
encyclopedia of classified information would have done. The intimate
life stories of no other periods in history are so well illustrated,
nor so readily to be comprehended, as those of Homer and the authors
of the medieval Romaunt.
The Romance of the Rose continued to be for more than two centuries
the most read book in Europe. Every one with any pretense to
scholarship or to literary taste in any European country considered it
necessary to be familiar with it, and without exaggeration what Lowell
once declared with regard to Don Quixote, that it would be considered
a mark of lack of culture to miss a reference to it in any country in
Europe, might well have been repeated during the Fourteenth and
Fifteenth centuries of the Romance of the Rose. It has in recent years
been put into very suitable English dress by Mr. F. S. Ellis and
published among the Temple Classics, thus placing it {216} within easy
reach of English readers. Mr. Ellis must certainly be considered a
suitable judge of the interest there is in the work. He spent several
years in translating its two and twenty thousand six hundred and eight
lines and yet considers that few books deserve as much attention as
this typical Thirteenth Century allegory. He says:
"The charge of dulness once made against this highly imaginative and
brilliant book, successive English writers, until quite recent times
have been content to accept the verdict, though Professor Morley and
others have of late ably repelled the charge. If further testimony
were necessary as to the falsity of the accusation, and the opinion
of one who has found a grateful pastime in translating it might be
considered of any weight, he would not hesitate to traverse the
attribution of dulness, and to assert that it is a poem of extreme
interest, written as to the first part with delicate fancy, sweet
appreciation of natural beauty, clear insight, and skilful
invention, while J. de Meun's continuation is distinguished by
vigor, brilliant invention, and close observation of human nature.
The Thirteenth Century lives before us."
The Rose is written on a lofty plane of literary value, and the fact
that it was so popular, speaks well for the taste of the times and for
the enthusiasm of the people for the more serious forms of literature.
Not that the Romance of the Rose is a very serious book itself, but if
we compare it with the popular publications which barely touch the
realities of life in the modern time, it will seem eminently serious.
In spite of the years that have elapsed since its original publication
it has not lost all its interest, even for a casual reader, and
especially for one whose principal study is mankind in its varying
environment down the ages, for it presents a very interesting picture
of men and their ways in this wonderful century. Here, as in the
stories of Reynard the Fox, one is brought face to face with the fact
that men and women have not changed and that the peccadillos of our
own generation have their history in the Middle Ages also. Take, for
instance, the question of the too great love of money which is now the
subject of so much writing and sermonizing. One might think that at
least this was {217} modern. Here, however, is what the author of the
Romance of the Rose has to say about it:
Three cruel vengeances pursue
These miserable wretches who
Hoard up their worthless wealth: great toil
Is theirs to win it; then their spoil
They fear to lose; and lastly, grieve
Most bitterly that they must leave
Their hoards behind them. Cursed they die
Who living, lived but wretchedly;
For no man, if he lack of love.
Hath peace below or joy above.
If those who heap up wealth would show
Fair love to others, they would go
Through life beloved, and thus would reign
Sweet happy days. If they were fain,
Who hold so much of good to shower around
Their bounty unto those they found
In need thereof, and nobly lent
Their money, free from measurement
Of usury (yet gave it not
To idle gangrel men), I wot
That then throughout the land were seen
No pauper carl or starveling quean.
But lust of wealth doth so abase
Man's heart, that even love's sweet grace
Bows down before it; men but love
Their neighbors that their love may prove
A profit, and both bought and sold
Are friendships at the price of gold.
Nay, shameless women set to hire
Their bodies, heedless of hell-fire;
It is after reading a passage like this in a book written in the
Thirteenth Century that one feels the full truth of that expression of
the greatest of American critics, James Russell Lowell, which so often
comes back to mind with regard to the works of this century, that to
read a classic is like reading a commentary on the morning paper. When
this principle is {218} applied the other way, I suppose it may be
said, that when a book written in the long ago sounds as if it were
the utterance of some one aroused by the evils round him in our modern
life, then it springs from so close to the heart of nature that it is
destined to live and have an influence far beyond its own time. The
Romance of the Rose, written seven centuries ago, now promises to have
renewed youth in the awakening of interest in our Gothic ancestors and
their accomplishments, before the over-praised renaissance came to
trouble the stream of thought and writing.
Other passages serve to show how completely the old-time poet realized
all the abuses of the desire for wealth, and how much it makes men
waste their lives over unessentials, instead of trying to make
existence worth while for themselves and others. Here is an
arraignment of the strenuous life of business every line of which is
as true for us as it was for the poet's generation:
'Tis truth (though some 'twill little please)
To hear the trader knows no ease;
For ever in his soul a prey
To anxious care of how he may
Amass more wealth: this mad desire
Doth all his thought and actions fire.
Devising means whereby to stuff
His barns and coffers, for 'enough'
He ne'er can have, but hungreth yet
His neighbors' goods and gold to get.
It is as though for thirst he fain
Would quaff the volume of the Seine
At one full draught, and yet should fail
To find its waters of avail
To quench his longing. What distress,
What anguish, wrath, and bitterness
Devour the wretch! fell rage and spite
Possess his spirit day and night.
And tear his heart; the fear of want
Pursues him like a spectre gaunt.
The more he hath, a wider mouth
He opes, no draught can quench his drouth.
{219}
The old poet pictures the happiness of the poor man by contrast, and
can in conclusion depict even more pitilessly the real poverty of
spirit of the man who "having, struggleth still to get" and never
stops to enjoy life itself by helping his fellows:
Light-heart and gay
Goes many a beggar by the way,
But little heeding though his back
Be bent beneath a charcoal sack.
They labor patiently and sing.
And dance, and laugh at whatso thing
Befalls, for havings care they nought.
But feed on scraps and chitlings bought
Beside St. Marcel's, and dispend
Their gains for wassail, then, straight wend
Once more to work, not grumblingly.
But light of heart as bird on tree
Winning their bread without desire
To fleece their neighbors. Nought they tire
Of this their round, but week by week
In mirth and work contentment seek;
Returning when their work is done
Once more to swill the jovial tun.
And he who what he holds esteems
Enough, is rich beyond the dreams
Of many a dreary usurer,
And lives his life-days happier far;
For nought it signifies what gains
The wretched usurer makes, the pains
Of poverty afflict him yet
Who having, struggleth still to get.
The pictures are as true to life at the beginning of the Twentieth
Century as they were in the latter half of the Thirteenth. There are
little touches of realism in both the pictures, which show at once how
acute an observer, how full of humor his appreciation, and yet how
sympathetic a writer the author of the Romance was, and at the same
time reveal something of the sociological value of his work. It
discloses what is so easily concealed under the mask of formal
historical writing and {220} tells us of the people rather than of the
few great ones among them, or those whom time and chance had made
leaders of men. It seems long to read but as a recent translator has
said, it represents only the file of a newspaper for eighteen months,
and while it talks of quite as trivial things as the modern newspaper,
the information is of a kind that is likely to do more good, and prove
of more satisfaction, than the passing crimes and scandals that now
occupy over-anxious readers.
[Illustration]
CENTRAL TOWER (LINCOLN)
{221}
XIV
SOME THIRTEENTH CENTURY PROSE.
It would be unpardonable to allow the notion to be entertained that it
was only in poetry that the writers of the Thirteenth Century
succeeded in creating works of enduring influence. Some of the prose
writings of the time are deeply interesting for many reasons. Modern
prose was in its formative period, and the evolution of style, as of
other things in the making, is proverbially worthy of more serious
study than even the developed result. The prose writings of the
Thirteenth Century were mainly done in Latin, but that was not for
lack of command over the vernacular tongues, as we shall see, but
because this was practically a universal language. This century had
among other advantages that subsequent ages have striven for
unsuccessfully, our own most of all, a common medium of expression for
all scholars at least. There are, however, the beginnings of Prose in
all the modern languages and it is easy to understand that the Latin
of the time had a great influence on the vernacular and that the modes
of expression which had become familiar in the learned tongue, were
naturally transferred to the vulgar speech, as it was called, whenever
accuracy of thought and nicety of expression invited such
transmutation.
With regard to the Latin of the period it is the custom of many
presumably well-educated men to sniff a little and say deprecatingly,
that after all much cannot be expected from the writers of the time,
since they were dependent on medieval or scholastic Latin for the
expression of their ideas. This criticism is supposed to do away with
any idea of the possibility of there having been a praiseworthy prose
style, at this time in the Middle Ages. In the chapter on the Latin
Hymns, we call attention to the fact that this same mode of criticism
was supposed to preclude all possibility of rhymed Latin, as worthy to
occupy a prominent place in literature. The widespread {222}
encouragement of this false impression has, as a matter of fact, led
to a neglect of these wonderful poems, though they may in the opinion
of competent critics, even be considered as representing the true
genius of the Latin language and its powers of poetic expression
better than the Greek poetic modes, which were adopted by the Romans,
but which, with the possible exception of their two greatest poets,
never seem to have acquired that spontaneity that would characterize a
native outburst of lingual vitality.
As for the philosophic writers of the century that great period holds
in this, as in other departments, the position of the palmiest time of
the Middle Ages. To it belongs Alexander Hales, the Doctor
Irrefragabilis who disputes with Aquinas the prize for the best
example of the Summa Theologiae; Bonaventure the Mystic, and writer of
beautiful hymns; Roger Bacon, the natural philosopher; Vincent of
Beauvais, the encyclopedist. While of the four, greatest of all,
Albertus Magnus, the "Dumb Ox of Cologne," was born seven years before
its opening, his life lasted over four-fifths of it; that of Aquinas
covered its second and third quarters; Occam himself, though his main
exertions lie beyond this century, was probably born before Aquinas
died; while John Duns Scotus hardly outlived the century's close by a
decade. Raymond Lully, one of the most characteristic figures of
Scholasticism and of the medieval period (with his "great art" of
automatic philosophy), who died in 1315, was born as early as 1235.
Peter the Spaniard, Pope and author of the Summulae Logicales, the
grammar of formal logic for ages as well of several medieval treatises
that have attracted renewed attention in our day, died in 1277.
With regard to what was accomplished in philosophic and theologic
prose, examples will be found in the chapter on St. Thomas Aquinas,
which prove beyond all doubt the utter simplicity, the directness, and
the power of the prose of the Thirteenth Century. In the medical works
of the time there was less directness, but always a simplicity that
made them commendable. In general, university writers were influenced
by the scholastic methods and we find it reflected constantly in their
works. In the minds of many people this would be {223} enough at once
to condemn it. It will usually be found, however, as we have noted
before, that those who are readiest to condemn scholastic writing know
nothing about it, or so little that their opinion is not worth
considering. Usually they have whatever knowledge they think they
possess, at second hand. Sometimes all that they have read of
scholastic philosophy are some particularly obscure passages on
abstruse subjects, selected by some prejudiced historian, in order to
show how impossible was the philosophic writing of these centuries of
the later Middle Ages.
There are other opinions, however, that are of quite different
significance and value. We shall quote but one of them, written by
Professor Saintsbury of the University of Edinburgh, who in his volume
on the Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory (the Twelfth
and Thirteenth centuries) of his Periods of European Literature, has
shown how sympathetically the prose writing of the Thirteenth Century
may appeal even to a scholarly modern, whose main interests have been
all his life in literature. Far from thinking that prose was spoiled
by scholasticism. Prof. Saintsbury considers that scholasticism was
the fortunate training school in which all the possibilities of modern
prose were brought out and naturally introduced into the budding
languages of the time. He says:
"However this may be" (whether the science of the Nineteenth Century
after an equal interval will be of any more positive value, whether
it will not have even less comparative interest than that which
appertains to the scholasticism of the Thirteenth Century) "the
claim modest, and even meager as it may seem to some, which has been
here once more put forward for this scholasticism--the claim of a
far-reaching educative influence in mere language, in mere system of
arrangement and expression, will remain valid. If at the outset of
the career of modern languages, men had thought with the looseness
of modern thought, had indulged in the haphazard slovenliness of
modern logic, had popularized theology and vulgarized rhetoric, as
we have seen both popularized and vulgarized since, we should indeed
have been in evil case. It used to be thought clever to moralize and
to felicitate mankind over the rejection of the stays, the fetters,
the prison in which its {224} thought was medievally kept. The
justice or the injustice, the taste or the vulgarity of these
moralizings, of these felicitations, may not concern us here. But in
expression, as distinguished from thought, the value of the
discipline to which these youthful languages was subjected is not
likely now to be denied by any scholar who has paid attention to the
subject. It would have been perhaps a pity if thought had not gone
through other phases; it would certainly have been a pity if the
tongues had been subjected to the fullest influence of Latin
constraint. But that the more lawless of them benefited by that
constraint there can be no doubt whatever. The influence of form
which the best Latin hymns of the Middle Ages exercised in poetry,
the influence in vocabulary and in logical arrangement which
scholasticism exercised in prose are beyond dispute: and even those
who will not pardon literature, whatever its historic and educative
importance be, for being something less than masterly in itself,
will find it difficult to maintain the exclusion of the Cur Deus
Homo, and impossible to refuse admission to the Dies Irae."
Besides this philosophic and scientific prose, there were two forms of
writing of which this century presents a copious number of examples.
These are the chronicles and biographies of the time and the stories
of travelers and explorers. These latter we have treated in a separate
chapter. The chronicles of the time deserve to be studied with patient
attention by anyone who wishes to know the prose writers of the
century and the character of the men of that time and their outlook on
life. It is usually considered that chroniclers are rather tiresome
old fogies who talk much and say very little, who accept all sorts of
legends on insufficient authority and who like to fill up their pages
with wonderful things regardless of their truth. In this regard it
must not be forgotten that in times almost within the memory of men
still alive, Herodotus now looked upon deservedly as the Father of
History and one of the great historical writers of all time, was
considered to have a place among these chroniclers, and his works were
ranked scarcely higher, except for the purity of their Greek style.
The first of the great chroniclers in a modern tongue was the famous
Geoffrey de Villehardouin, who was not only a writer {225} of, but an
actor in the scenes which he describes. He was enrolled among the
elite of French Chivalry, in that Crusade at the beginning of the
Thirteenth Century, which resulted in the foundation of the
Greco-Latin Empire. His book entitled "The Conquest of
Constantinople," includes the story of the expedition during the years
from 1198 to 1207. Modern war correspondents have seldom succeeded in
giving a more vivid picture of the events of which they were witnesses
than this first French chronicler of the Thirteenth Century. It is
evident that the work was composed with the idea that it should be
recited, as had been the old poetic Chansons de Geste, in the castles
of the nobles and before assemblages of the people, perhaps on fair
days and other times when they were gathered together. The consequence
is that it is written in a lively straightforward style with direct
appeals to its auditors.
It contains not a few passages of highly poetic description which show
that the chronicler was himself a literary man of no mean order and
probably well versed in the effusions of the old poets of this
country. His description of the fleet of the Crusaders as it was about
to set sail for the East and then his description of its arrival
before the imposing walls of the Imperial City, are the best examples
of this, and have not been surpassed even by modern writers on similar
topics.
Though the French writer was beyond all doubt not familiar with the
Grecian writers and knew nothing of Xenophon, there is a constant
reminder of the Greek historian in his work. Xenophon's simple
directness, his thorough-going sincerity, the impression he produces
of absolute good faith and confidence in the completeness of the
picture, so that one feels that one has been present almost at many of
the scenes described, are all to be encountered in his medieval
successor. Villehardouin went far ahead of his predecessors, the
chroniclers of foregoing centuries, in his careful devotion to truth.
A French writer has declared that to Villehardouin must be ascribed
the foundation of historical probity. None of his facts, stated as
such, has ever been impugned, and though his long speeches must
necessarily have been his own composition, there seems no doubt that
they contain the ideas which had been expressed on various occasions,
and besides were composed with due reference to {226} the character of
the speaker and convey something of his special style of expression.
Prof. Saintsbury in his article in the Encyclopedia Britannica on
Villehardouin, sums up very strikingly the place that this first great
vernacular historian's book must occupy.
He says: "It is not impertinent, and at the same time an excuse for
what has been already said, to repeat that Villehardouin's book, brief
as it is, is in reality one of the capital books of literature, not
merely for its merit, but because it is the most authentic and the
most striking embodiment in the contemporary literature of the
sentiments which determined the action of a great and important period
of history. There are but very few books which hold this position, and
Villehardouin's is one of them. If every other contemporary record of
the crusades perished, we should still be able by aid of this to
understand and realize what the mental attitude of crusaders, of
Teutonic Knights, and the rest was, and without this we should lack
the earliest, the most undoubtedly genuine, and the most
characteristic of all such records. The very inconsistency with which
Villehardouin is chargeable, the absence of compunction with which he
relates the changing of a sacred religious pilgrimage into something
by no means unlike a mere filibustering raid on a great scale, add a
charm to the book. For, religious as it is, it is entirely free from
the very slightest touch of hypocrisy or, indeed, of
self-consciousness of any kind. The famous description of the
Crusades, _gesta Dei per Francos_, was evidently to Villehardouin a
plain matter-of-fact description and it no more occurred to him to
doubt the divine favor being extended to the expeditions against
Alexius or Theodore than to doubt that it was shown to expeditions
against Saracens and Turks."
{opp226}
[Illustration]
PONTE ALLE GRAZIE (FLORENCE, LAPO)
[Illustration]
PORTA ROMANA GATE, (FLORENCE, N. PISANO)
It was especially in the exploitation of biographical material that
the Thirteenth Century chroniclers were at their best. Any one who
recalls Carlyle's unstinted admiration of Jocelyn of Brakelonds' life
of Abbot Sampson in his essays Past and Present, will be sure that at
least one writer in England had succeeded in pleasing so difficult a
critic in this rather thorny mode of literary expression. It is easy
to say too much or too little about the virtues and the vices of a man
whose biography one has chosen to write. Jocelyn's simple,
straightforward story {227} would seem to fulfill the best canons of
modern criticism in this respect. Probably no more vivid picture of a
man and his ways was ever given until Boswell's Johnson. Nor was the
English chronicler alone in this respect. The Sieur de Joinville's
biographical studies of the life of Louis IX. furnish another example
of this literary mode at its best, and modern writers of biography
could not do better than go back to read these intimate pictures of
the life of a great king, which are not flattered nor overdrawn but
give us the man as he actually was.
The English biographic chronicler of the olden time could picture
exciting scenes without any waste of words. A specimen of his work
will serve to show the merit of his style. After reading it one is not
likely to be surprised that Carlyle should have so taken the
Chronicler to heart nor been so enthusiastic in his praise. It is the
very type of that impressionism in style that has once more in the
course of time become the fad of our own day.
"The abbot was informed that the church of Woolpit was vacant,
Walter of Coutances being chosen to the bishopric of Lincoln. He
presently convened the prior and great part of the convent, and
taking up his story thus began: 'You well know what trouble I had in
respect of the church of Woolpit; and in order that it should be
obtained for your exclusive use I journeyed to Rome at your
instance, in the time of the schism between Pope Alexander and
Octavian. I passed through Italy at that time when all clerks
bearing letters of our lord the Pope Alexander were taken. Some were
imprisoned, some hanged, and some, with nose and lips cut off, sent
forward to the pope, to his shame and confusion. I, however,
pretended to be Scotch; and putting on the garb of a Scotchman, and
the gesture of one, I often brandished my staff, in the way they use
that weapon called, a gaveloc, at those who mocked me, using
threatening language, after the manner of the Scotch. To those that
met and questioned me as to who I was, I answered nothing, but,
"Ride ride Rome, turne Cantwereberei." This did I to conceal myself
and my errand, and that I should get to Rome safer in the guise of a
Scotchman.
"'Having obtained letters from the pope, even as I wished, on my
return I passed by a certain castle, as my way led me {228} from the
city; and behold the officers thereof came about me, laying hold
upon me, and saying, "This vagabond who makes himself out to be a
Scotchman is either a spy or bears letters from the false pope
Alexander." And while they examined my ragged clothes, and my boots,
and my breeches, and even the old shoes which I carried over my
shoulders, after the fashion of the Scotch, I thrust my hand into
the little wallet which I carried, wherein was contained the letter
of our lord the pope, placed under a little cup I had for drinking.
The Lord God and St. Edmund so permitting, I drew out both the
letter and the cup together, so that, extending my arm aloft, I held
the letter underneath the cup. They could see the cup plain enough,
but they did not see the letter; and so I got clear out of their
hands, in the name of the Lord. Whatever money I had about me they
took away; therefore I had to beg from door to door, without any
payment, until I arrived in England.'"
Another excellent example of the biographic prose of the century,
though this is the vernacular, is Joinville's life of St. Louis,
without doubt one of the precious biographical treasures of all times.
It contains a vivid portrait of Louis IX., made by a man who knew him
well personally, took part with him in some of the important actions
of the book, and in general was an active personage in the affairs of
the time. Those who think that rapid picturesque description such as
vividly recalls deeds of battle was reserved for the modern war
correspondent, should read certain portions of Joinville's book. As an
example we have ventured to quote the page on which the seneschal
historian himself recounts the role which he played in the famous
battle of Mansourah, at which, with the Count de Soissons and Pierre
de Neuville, he defended a small bridge against the enemy under a hail
of arrows.
He says: "Before us there were two sergeants of the king, one of whom
was named William de Boon and the other John of Gamaches. Against
these the Turks who had placed themselves between the river and the
little tributary, led a whole mob of villains on foot, who hurled at
them clods of turf or whatever came to hand. Never could they make
them recoil upon us, however. As a last resort the Turks sent forward
a foot soldier {229} who three times launched Greek fire at them. Once
William de Boon received the pot of green fire upon his buckler. If
the fire had touched anything on him he would have been entirely
burned up. We at the rear were all covered by arrows which had missed
the Sergeants. It happened that I found a waistcoat which had been
stuffed by one of the Saracens. I turned the open side of it towards
me and made a shield out of the vest which rendered me great service,
for I was wounded by their arrows in only five places though my horse
was wounded in fifteen. One of my own men brought me a banner with my
arms and a lance. Every time then that we saw that they were pressing
the Royal Sergeants we charged upon them and they fled. The good Count
Soissons, from the point at which we were, joked with me and said
'Senechal, let us hoot out this rabble, for by the headdress of God
(this was his favorite oath) we shall talk over this day you and I
many a time in our ladies' halls.'"
We have said that the writing of the Thirteenth Century must have been
done to a great extent for the sake of the women of the time, and that
its very existence was a proof that the women possessed a degree of
culture, that might not be realized from the few details that have
been preserved to us of their education and habits of life. In this
last passage of Joinville we have the proof of this, since evidently
the telling of the stories of these days of battle was done mainly in
order that the women folks might have their share in the excitement of
the campaign, and might be enabled vividly to appreciate what the
dangers had been and how gloriously their lords had triumphed. At
every period of the world's history it was true that literature was
mainly made for women and that some of the best portions of it always
concerned them very closely.
We have purposely left till last, the greatest of the chroniclers of
the Thirteenth Century, Matthew Paris, the Author of the Historia
Major, who owes his surname doubtless to the fact that he was educated
at the University of Paris. Instead of trying to tell anything about
him from our own slight personal knowledge, we prefer to quote the
passage from Green's History of the English People, in which one of
the greatest of our modern English historians pays such a magnificent
tribute to his colleague of the earlier times:
{230}
"The story of this period of misrule has been preserved for us by an
annalist whose pages glow with the new outburst of patriotic feeling
which this common expression of the people and the clergy had
produced. Matthew Paris is the greatest, as he is in reality the
last of our monastic historians. The school of St. Albans survived
indeed till a far later time, but the writers dwindle into mere
annalists whose view is bounded by the Abbey precincts, and whose
work is as colorless as it is jejune. In Matthew the breadth and
precision of the narrative, the copiousness of his information on
topics whether national or European, the general fairness and
justice of his comments, are only surpassed by the patriotic fire
and enthusiasm of the whole. He had succeeded Roger of Wendover as
Chronicler of St. Albans; and the Greater Chronicle, with the
abridgement of it which has long passed under the name of Matthew of
Westminster, a "History of the English," and the "Lives of the
Earlier Abbots," were only a few among the voluminous works which
attest his prodigious industry. He was an eminent artist as well as
a historian, and many of the manuscripts which are preserved are
illustrated by his own hand. A large circle of
correspondents--bishops like Grosseteste, ministers like Hubert de
Burgh, officials like Alexander de Swinford--furnished him with
minute accounts of political and ecclesiastical proceedings.
Pilgrims from the East and Papal agents brought news of foreign
events to his scriptorium at St. Albans. He had access to and quotes
largely from state documents, charters, and exchequer rolls. The
frequency of the royal visits to the abbey brought him a store of
political intelligence and Henry himself contributed to the great
chronicle which has preserved with so terrible a faithfulness the
memory of his weakness and misgovernment. On one solemn feast-day
the King recognized Matthew, and bidding him sit on the middle step
between the floor and the throne, begged him to write the story of
the day's proceedings. While on a visit to St. Albans he invited him
to his table and chamber, and enumerated by name two hundred and
fifty of the English barons for his information. But all this royal
patronage has left little mark on his work. "_The case,_" as he
says, "_of historical writers is hard, for if they tell the truth
they provoke men, and if they write what is false they offend God._"
{231} With all the fullness of the school of court historians, such
as Benedict or Hoveden, Matthew Paris combines an independence and
patriotism which is strange to their pages. He denounces with the
same unsparing energy the oppression of the Papacy and the King. His
point of view is neither that of a courtier nor of a Churchman, but
of an Englishman, and the new national tone of his chronicle is but
an echo of the national sentiment which at last bound nobles and
yeomen and Churchmen together into an English people."
We of the Twentieth Century are a people of information and
encyclopedias rather than of literature, so that we shall surely
appreciate one important specimen of the prose writing of the
Thirteenth Century since it comprises the first modern encyclopedia.
Its author was the famous Vincent of Beauvais. Vincent consulted all
the authors, sacred and profane, that he could possibly lay hands on,
and the number of them was indeed prodigious. It has often been said
by men supposed to be authorities in history, that the historians of
the Middle Ages had at their disposition only a small number of books,
and that above all they were not familiar with the older historians.
While this was true as regards the Greek, it was not for the Latin
historical writers. Vincent of Beauvais has quotations from Caesar's
De Bello Gallico, from Sallust's Catiline and Jugurtha, from Quintus
Curtius, from Suetonius and from Valerius Maximus and finally from
Justin's Abridgement of Trogus Pompeius.
Vincent had the advantage of having at his disposition the numerous
libraries of the monasteries throughout France, the extent of which,
usually unrealized in modern times, will be appreciated from our
special chapter on the subject. Besides he consulted the documents in
the chapter houses of the Cathedrals especially those of Paris, of
Rouen, of Laon, of Beauvais and of Bayeux, which were particularly
rich in collections of documents. It might be thought that these
libraries and archives would be closely guarded. Far from being closed
to writers from the outer world they were accessible to all to such an
extent, indeed, that a number of them are mentioned by Vincent as
public institutions.
{232}
His method of collecting his information is interesting, because it
shows the system employed by him is practically that which has
obtained down to our own day. He made use for his immense
investigation of a whole army of young assistants, most of whom were
furnished him by his own order, the Dominicans. He makes special
mention in a number of places of quotations due to their
collaboration. The costliness of maintaining such a system would have
made the completion of the work absolutely impossible were it not for
the liberality of King Louis IX., who generously offered to defray the
expenses of the composition. Vincent has acknowledged this by
declaring in his prefatorial letter to the King that, "you have always
liberally given assistance even to the work of gathering the
materials."
{opp232}
[Illustration]
ST. CATHERINE'S (LÜBECK)
[Illustration]
CHURCH AND CLOISTERS, SAN ANTONIO (PADUA)
Vincent's method of writing is quite as interesting as his method of
compilation of facts. The great Dominican was not satisfied with being
merely a source of information. The philosophy of history has received
its greatest Christian contribution from St. Augustine's City of God.
In this an attempt was made to trace the meaning and causal sequence
of events as well as their mere external connection and place in time.
In a lesser medieval way Vincent tried deliberately to imitate this
and besides writing history attempted to trace the philosophy of it.
For him, as for the great French philosophic historian Bossuet in his
Universal History five centuries later, everything runs its provided
race from the creation to the redemption and then on toward the
consummation of the world. He describes at first the commencements of
the Church from the time of Abel, through its progress under the
Patriarchs, the Prophets, Judges, Kings, and leaders of the people,
down to the Birth of Christ. He traces the history of the Apostles and
of the first Disciples, though he makes it a point to find place for
the famous deeds of the great men of Pagan antiquity. He notes the
commencement of Empires and Kingdoms, their glory, their decadence,
their ruin, and the Sovereigns who made them illustrious in peace and
war. There was much that was defective in the details of history as
they were traced by Vincent, much that was lacking in completeness,
but the intention was evidently the best, and patience and labor were
devoted to the {233} sources of history at his command. Perhaps never
more than at the present moment have we been in a position to realize
that history at its best can be so full of defects even after further
centuries of consultation of documents and printed materials, that we
are not likely to be in the mood to blame this first modern historian
very much. As for the other portions of his encyclopedia, biographic,
literary and scientific, they were not only freely consulted by his
contemporaries and successors, but we find traces of their influence
in the writings and also in the decorative work of the next two
centuries. We have already spoken of the use of his book in the
provision of subjects for the ornamentation of Cathedrals and the same
thing might be said of edifices of other kinds.
Nor must it be thought that Vincent has only a historic or
ecclesiastical interest. Dr. Julius Pagel, in his Chapter on Medicine
in the Middle Ages in Puschmann's Hand-Book of the History of
Medicine, [Footnote 22] says, "that there were three writers whose
works were even more popular than those of Albertus Magnus. These
three were Bartholomew, the Englishman; Thomas, of Cantimprato, and
Vincent, of Beauvais, the last of whom must be considered as one of
the most important contributors to the generalization of scientific
knowledge, not alone in the Thirteenth but in the immediately
succeeding centuries. His most important work was really an
encyclopedia of the knowledge of his time. It was called the Greater
Triple Mirror and there is no doubt that it reflected the knowledge of
his period. He had the true scientific spirit and constantly cites the
authorities from whom his information was derived. He cites hundreds
of authors and there is scarcely a subject that he does not touch on.
One book of his work is concerned with human anatomy, and the
concluding portion of it is an abbreviation of history carried down to
the year 1250."
[Footnote 22: Puschmann. Hand-Buch der Geschichte der Medizin, Jena,
Fischer, 1902.]
It might be considered that such a compend of information would be
very dry-as-dust reading and that it would be fragmentary in character
and little likely to be attractive except to a serious student. Dr.
Pagel's opinion does not agree with this _a priori_ impression. He
says with regard to it: {234} "The language is clear, readily
intelligible, and the information is conveyed usually in an excellent,
simple style. Through the introduction of interesting similes the
contents do not lack a certain taking quality, so that the reading of
the work easily becomes absorbing." This is, I suppose, almost the
last thing that might be expected of a scientific teacher in the
Thirteenth Century, because, after all, Vincent of Beauvais must be
considered as one of the schoolmen, and they are supposed to be
eminently arid, but evidently, if we are to trust this testimony of a
modern German physician, only by those who have not taken the trouble
to read them.
One of the most important works of Thirteenth Century prose is the
well-known Rationale Divinorum Officiorum (Significance of the Divine
Offices) written by William Durandus, the Bishop of Mende, in France,
whose tomb and its inscription in the handsome old Gothic Cathedral of
Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, in Rome, shares with the body of St.
Catherine of Sienna the honor of attracting so many visitors. The book
has been translated into English under the title. The Symbolism of
Churches and Church Ornaments, and has been very widely read. It was
very popular in the Thirteenth Century, and the best possible idea of
its subsequent reputation can be gathered from the fact, that the
Rationale was the first work from the pen of an uninspired writer to
be accorded the privilege of being printed. The Editio Princeps, a
real first edition of supreme value, appeared from the press of John
Fust in 1459. The only other books that had been printed at that time
were the Psalters of 1457 and 1459. This edition is, of course, of the
most extreme rarity. According to the English translators of Durandus
the beauty of the typography has seldom been exceeded.
The style of Durandus has been praised very much by the critics of
succeeding centuries for its straightforwardness, simplicity and
brevity. Most of these qualities it evidently owes to the hours spent
by its author in the reading of Holy Scriptures. Durandus fashioned
his style so much on the sacred writings that most of his book
possesses something of the impressive character of the Bible itself.
The impression derived from it is that of reading a book on a
religious subject written {235} in an eminently suitable tone and
spirit. Most of this impression must be attributed without doubt to
the fact, that Durandus has not only formed his style on the
Scriptures, but has actually incorporated Scriptural expressions in
his writings to such an extent as to make them mostly a scriptural
composition. This, far from being a fault, appears quite appropriate
in his book because of its subject and the method of treatment. A
quotation from the proeme (as it is in the quaint spelling of the
English translation) will give the best idea of this.
"All things, as pertain to offices and matters ecclesiastical, be
full of divine significations and mysterious, and overflow with
celestial sweetness; if so be that a man be diligent in his study of
them, and know how to draw HONEY FROM THE ROCK, AND OIL FROM THE
HARDEST STONE. But who KNOWETH THE ORDINANCES OF HEAVEN, OR CAN FIX
THE REASONS THEREOF UPON THE EARTH? for he that prieth into their
majesty, is overwhelmed by the glory of them. Of a truth THE WELL IS
DEEP, AND I HAVE NOTHING TO DRAW WITH: unless he giveth it unto me
WHO GIVETH TO ALL MEN LIBERALLY, AND UPBRAIDETH NOT: so that WHILE I
JOURNEY THROUGH THE MOUNTAINS I may DRAW WATER WITH JOY OUT OF THE
WELLS OF SALVATION. Wherefore albeit of the things handed down from
our forefathers, capable we are not to explain all, yet if among
them there be any thing which is done without reason it should be
forthwith put away. Wherefore, I, WILLIAM, by the alone tender mercy
of God, Bishop of the Holy Church which is in Mende, will knock
diligently at the door, if so be that THE KEY OF DAVID will open
unto me: that the King may BRING ME INTO HIS TREASURE? and shew unto
me the heavenly pattern which was shewed unto Moses in the mount: so
that I may learn those things which pertain to Rites Ecclesiastical
whereof they teach and what they signify: and that I may be able
plainly to reveal and make manifest the reasons of them, by HIS
help, WHO HATH ORDAINED STRENGTH OUT OF THE MOUTH OF BABES AND
SUCKLINGS: WHOSE SPIRITS BLOWETH WHERE IT {236} LISTETH: DIVIDING TO
EACH SEVERALLY AS IT WILL to the praise and glory of the Trinity."
This passage alone of Durandus would serve as an excellent refutation
of the old-time Protestant tradition, fortunately now dying out though
not as yet entirely eradicated, which stated so emphatically that the
Bible was not allowed to be read before Luther's time.
Those who wish to obtain a good idea of Durandus' style and the way he
presents his material, can obtain it very well from his chapter on
Bells, the first two paragraphs of which we venture to quote. They
will be found quite as full of interesting information in their way as
any modern writer might have brought together, and have the dignity
and simplicity of the best modern prose.
"Bells are brazen vessels, and were first invented in Nola, a city
of Campania. Wherefore the larger bells are called Campanae, from
Campania the district, and the smaller Nolae, from Nola the town.
"You must know that bells, by the sound of which the people
assembleth together to the church to hear, and the Clergy to preach,
IN THE MORNING THE MERCY OF GOD AND HIS POWER BY NIGHT do signify
the silver trumpets, by which under the Old Law the people was
called together unto sacrifice. (Of these trumpets we shall speak in
our Sixth Book.) For just as the watchmen in a camp rouse one
another by trumpets, so do the Ministers of the Church excite each
other by the sound of bells to watch the livelong night against the
plots of the Devil. Wherefore our brazen bells are more sonorous
than the trumpets of the Old Law, because then GOD was known in
Judea only, but now in the whole earth. They be also more durable:
For they signify that the teaching of the New Testament will be more
lasting than the trumpets and sacrifices of the Old Law, namely,
even unto the end of the world.
"Again bells do signify preachers, who ought after the likeness of a
bell to exhort the faithful unto faith: the which was typified in
that the LORD commanded Moses to make a vestment for the High Priest
who entered into the Holy of Holies. Also the cavity of the bell
denoteth the mouth of the preacher, {237} according to the saying of
the Apostle, I AM BECOME AS SOUNDING BRASS ON A TINKLING CYMBAL."
Of course there are what we would be apt to consider exaggerations of
symbolic meanings and far-fetched explanations and references, but
this was of the taste of the time and has not in subsequent centuries
been so beyond the canons of good taste as at present. Durandus goes
on to tell that the hardness of the metal of the bell signifies
fortitude in the mind of the preacher, that the wood of the frame on
which the bell hangeth doth signify the wood of our Lord's Cross, that
the rope by which the bell is strung is humility and also showeth the
measure of life, that the ring in the length of the rope is the crown
of reward for perseverance unto the end, and then proceeds to show why
and how often the bells are rung and what the significance of each
ringing is. He explains why the bells are silent for three days before
Easter and also during times of interdict, and gives as the
justification for this last the quotation from the Prophet "I WILL
MAKE THY TONGUE CLEAVE TO THE ROOF OF THY MOUTH FOR THEY ARE A
REBELLIOUS HOUSE."
Even these few specimens of the prose of the Thirteenth Century, will
serve to show that the writers of the period could express themselves
with a vigor and directness which have made their books interesting
reading for generations long after their time, and which stamp their
authors as worthy of a period that found enduring and adequate modes
of expression for every form of thought and feeling.
[Illustration]
STONE CARVING (PARIS)
{238}
XV
ORIGIN OF THE DRAMA.
The last place in the world, perhaps, that one would look for a great
impulse to the development of the modern drama, which is entirely a
new invention, an outgrowth of Christian culture and has practically
no connection with the classic drama, would be in the life of St.
Francis of Assisi. His utter simplicity, his thorough-going and
cordial poverty, his sincere endeavor all during his life to make
little of himself, might seem quite enough to forbid any thought of
him as the father of a literary movement of this kind. "The poor
little man of God," however, as he liked to call himself, in his
supreme effort to get back to nature and out of the ways of the
conventional world, succeeded in accomplishing a number of utterly
unexpected results. His love for nature led to his wonderful
expression of his feelings in his favorite hymn, one of the first
great lyrical outbursts in modern poetry, a religious poem which as we
shall see in the chapter on the Father of the Renaissance, Renan
declares can only be appreciated properly by comparing it with the old
Hebrew psalms, beside which it is worthy to be placed.
Those who know the life of St. Francis best will easily appreciate how
dramatic, though unconsciously so, were all the actions of his life.
After all, his utter renunciation of all things, his taking of holy
poverty to be his bride, his address to the birds, his sisters, his
famous question of the butcher as to why he killed his brothers, the
sheep, his personification of the sun and the moon and even of the
death of the body as his brothers and sisters, are all eminently
dramatic moments. His life is full of incidents that lent themselves,
because of their dramatic quality, to the painters of succeeding
centuries as the subjects of their striking pictures. Before the end
of the century Giotto had picked out some of the most interesting of
these for the decorative illustration of the upper church at {239}
Assisi. During the succeeding century, the author of the Little
Flowers of St. Francis, embodied many of these beautiful scenes in his
little work, where they have been the favorite reading of poets for
many centuries since.
It should not be such a surprise as it might otherwise be, then, to
find that St. Francis may be considered in one sense as the father of
the modern drama. The story is a very pretty one and has an additional
value because it has been illustrated by no less a brush than that of
Giotto. One Christmas Eve just at the beginning of the Thirteenth
Century, St. Francis gathered round him some of the poor people living
outside of the town of Assisi, in order to recall vividly to them the
great event which had taken place on that night so many centuries
before. A little figure of a child, dressed in swaddling clothes, was
laid on some straw in a manger with the breath of the nearby animals
to warm it. To this manger throne of the Child King of Bethlehem,
there came in adoration, after the hymns that recalled the angels'
visit, first some of the shepherds from the surrounding country and
then some of the country people who represented the kings from the
East with their retinues, bringing with them their royal gifts. After
this little scene, probably one of the first Nativity plays that had
ever been given, St. Francis, according to the old legend, took the
little image in his arms and in an excess of devotion pressed it to
his heart. According to the old-time story, the infant came to life in
his embrace and putting its little arms around his neck embraced him
in return. Of course our modern generation is entirely too devoted to
"common sense" to accept any such pretty, pious story as this as more
than a beautiful poetic legend. The legend has provided a subject for
poet and painter many a time in subsequent centuries. Perhaps never
has it been used with better effect than by Giotto, whose
representation is one of the favorite pictures on the wall of the
upper church of Assisi. Whether the little baby figure of the play
actually came to life in his arms or not we do not know, but one thing
is certain, that infant modern dramatic literature did come to life at
the moment and that before the end of the Thirteenth Century it was to
have a vigor and an influence that made it {240} one of the great
factors in the social life of the period. The Franciscans were soon
spread over the world. With filial reverence they took with them all
the customs of their loved Father of Assisi, and especially such as
appealed to the masses and brought home to them in a vivid way the
great truths of religion. By the middle of the century many of the
towns had cycles of mystery plays given at various times during the
year, associated with the different feasts and illustrating and
enforcing the lessons of the liturgy for the people in a manner so
effective that it has probably never been equaled before or since.
While the most potent factor in the dissemination of the early
religious drama can be traced to Francis and the Franciscans, they
were but promoters of a movement already well begun. Mystery plays
were attempted before the Thirteenth Century in England and in North
France. There is a well-known story from Matthew Paris, who wrote
about the middle of the Thirteenth Century, of one Geoffrey who
afterwards became Abbot of St. Albans. While yet a secular he borrowed
certain precious religious vestments to be used in some sort of a
miracle play in honor of St. Catherine. During the performance of the
play, these vestments were destroyed by fire and Geogory was so much
afflicted by the misfortune that in a spirit of reparation he became a
religious in the Abbey of St. Albans. This must have been about the
beginning of the Twelfth Century. Towards the end of this century
mystery plays were not infrequent, though not in anything like the
developed form nor popular character which they acquired during the
Thirteenth Century. Fitz Stephen, writing the life of St. Thomas a
Becket, towards the end of the Twelfth Century, contrasts the holier
plays of London in his days with the theatrical spectacles of ancient
Rome. The plays he mentioned were, however, scarcely more than slight
developments of Church ceremonial with almost literal employment of
scripture and liturgical language.
{opp240}
[Illustration]
ST. FRANCIS' NATIVITY PLAY (GIOTTO)
The first cycle of mystery plays of which there is definite mention is
that of Chester. According to the proclamation of the Chester plays,
the representation of this cycle dates in some form from the mayoralty
of John Arneway, who was the {241} Mayor of Chester, between 1268 and
1276. Of the series of plays as given in the Thirteenth Century there
are few remains. It is probable, even, that at this early date they
were not acted in English but in French. English plays were probably
first given in some of the Cathedral towns along the east coast of
England, and perhaps York should have the credit of this innovation.
It is easy to understand how the simpler dramatic additions to the
ritual of the Church would inevitably develop in the earnest and very
full religious life of the people which came with the building of the
cathedrals, the evolution of Church ceremonial and the social life
fostered by the trade-guilds of the time. While we have none of the
remains of the actual plays of the Thirteenth Century, there is no
doubt that an excellent idea of their form and content can be gathered
from the English mystery plays, that have recently been edited in
modern form and which serve to show the characteristics of the various
cycles.
It might perhaps be thought that these mystery plays would not furnish
any great amount of entertainment for the populace, especially after
they had seen them a certain number of times. The yearly repetition
might naturally be expected to bring with it before long a satiety
that would lead to inattention. As is well known, however, there is an
enduring interest about these old religious stories that makes them of
much greater attractiveness than most ordinary historical traditions.
Many a faithful reader of the Bible finds constantly renewed interest
in the old Biblical stories in spite of frequent repetition. Their
significance to the eye of faith in the Middle Ages gave them, beyond
any doubt, that quality which in any literary work will exemplify and
fulfill Horace's dictum, _decies repetita placebit_. Besides, it must
not be forgotten that the men and women of the Thirteenth Century had
not the superficial facilities of the printing press to cloy their
intellectual curiosity, and by trivial titillation make them
constantly crave novelty.
It must not be thought, in spite of the fact that these were religious
plays, that they were always so serious as to be merely instructive
without being amusing. A large fund of amusement was injected into the
old biblical stories by the {242} writers of the different cycles and
undoubtedly the actors themselves added certain personal elements in
this matter, which still further enhanced some of the comical aspects
of the solemn stories. Nearly always the incidents of the Scriptural
narrative though followed more or less literally, were treated with a
large humanity that could scarcely fail to introduce elements of humor
into the dramatic performances. Such liberties, however, were taken
only with characters not mentioned by the Bible--the inventions of the
writers. A series of quotations from the Chester Cycle of Plays will
best illustrate this. We give them in the quaint spelling of the
oldest version extant. The scene we quote is from the play dealing
with Noah's flood and pictures Noah's wife as a veritable shrew.
NOYE--
Wyffe, in this vessel we shall be kepte:
My children and thou, I woulde in ye lepte.
Noye's Wiffe--
In fayth, Noye, I hade as leffe thou slepte!
For all thy frynishe fare,
I will not doe after thy reade.
Noye--
Good wyffe, doe nowe as I thee bydde.
Noye's Wiffe--
Be Christe! not or I see more neede,
Though thou stande all the daye and stare.
Noye--
Lorde, that wemen be crabbed aye,
And non are meke, I dare well saye.
This is well seene by me to daye,
In witnesse of you ichone (each one).
Goodwiffe, lett be all this beare,
That thou maiste in this place heare;
For all the wene that thou arte maister,
And so thou arte, by Sante John!
All Noah's artful concession of his wife's mastery in the household
does not avail to move her and so he tries objurgation.
Noye--
Wiffe, come in: why standes thou their?
Thou arte ever frowarde, I dare well sweare;
Come in, one Godes halfe! tyme yt were,
For feare leste that we drowne.
{243}
Noye's Wiffe--
Yes, sir, sette up youer saile,
And rowe fourth with evill haile,
For withouten (anye) fayle
I will not oute of this towne;
But I have my gossippes everyechone,
One foote further I will not gone:
The shall not drowne, by Sainte John!
And I may save ther life.
The loven me full well, by Christe!
But thou lett them into thy cheiste, (ark)
Elles rowe nowe wher thee leiste,
And gette thee a newe wiffe.
It is evident that he will not succeed so Noah, wise doubtless with
the wisdom of experience, forbears to urge but appeals to her sons to
bring her.
NOYE--
Seme, sonne, loe! thy mother is wrawe:
Forsooth, such another I doe not knowe.
Sem--
Father, I shall fetch her in, I trowe,
Withoutten anye fayle.--
Mother, my father after thee sends.
And byddes thee into yeinder shippe wende.
Loke up and see the wynde.
For we bene readye to sayle.
Noye's Wiffe--
Seme, goe againe to hym, I saie;
I will not come theirin to daye.
Noye--
Come in, wiffe, in twentye devilles waye!
Or elles stand there without.
Ham--
Shall we all feche her in?
Noye--
Yea, sonnes, in Christe blessinge and myne!
I woulde you hied you be-tyme.
For of this flude I am in doubte.
Jeffatte--
Mother, we praye you all together.
For we are heare, youer owne childer.
Come into the shippe for feare of the weither,
For his love that you boughte!
{244}
Noye's Wiffe--
That will not I, for all youer call,
But I have my gossippes all.
Sem--
In faith, mother, yett you shalle,
Wheither thou wylte or (nought).
_(Her sons bring her in; as she steps aboard she is greeted by Noah.)_
Noye--
Welckome, wiffe, into this botte.
Noye's Wiffe--
Have thou that for thy note!
(_Giving her husband a cuff on the head_).
Noye--
Ha, ha! Marye, this is hotte!
It is good for to be still.
Ha! children, me thinkes my botte remeves,
Our tarryinge heare highlye me greves,
Over the lande the watter spreades;
God doe as he will.
This quotation will give a good idea of the human interest of these
Mystery Plays and serve to show that they did not fail in dramatic
power for any lack of humor or acute observation. It would be easy to
illustrate this much more amply. The opportunities to enjoy these
plays were abundant. We have said that the Chester Cycle is the one of
which there is earliest mention. The method of its presentation has
been described by Mr. Henry Morley in the fourth volume of his English
Writers. He says:
"There were scaffolds erected for spectators in those places to
which the successive pageants would be drawn; and a citizen who on
the first day saw in any place the first pageant (that of the Fall
of Lucifer), if he kept his place and returned to it in good time on
each successive morning, would see the Scripture story, as thus
told, pass in its right order before him. Each pageant was drawn on
four or six wheels, and had a room in which the actors and
properties were concealed, under the upper room or stage on which
they played."
Mr. Morley then describes the action of the various parts of the
cycle, showing how clearly the lessons of the Old Testament history
and its symbolic and typical meaning were pointed out so that the
spectators could not miss them.
{245}
How completely the story of the Bible was told may be judged from the
order of the Pageants of the Play of Corpus Christi, in the time of
the mayoralty of William Alne, in the third year of the reign of King
Henry V., compiled by Roger Burton, town clerk.
1. Tanners.
God the Father Almighty creating and forming the heavens, angels and
archangels, Lucifer and the angels that fell with him to hell.
2. Plasterers.
God the Father, in his own substance, creating the earth and all
which is therein, in the space of five days.
3. Cardmakers.
God the Father creating Adam of the clay of the earth and making Eve
of Adam's rib, and inspiring them with the breath of life.
4. Fullers.
God forbidding Adam and Eve to eat of the tree of life.
5. Coopers.
Adam and Eve and a tree betwixt them; the serpent deceiving them
with apples; God speaking to them and cursing the serpent, and with
a sword driving them out of paradise.
6. Armourers.
Adam and Eve, an angel with a spade and distaff assigning them work.
7. Gaunters (Glovers).
Abel and Cain offering victims in sacrifice.
8. Shipwrights.
God warning Noah to make an Ark of floatable wood,
9. Pessoners (Fishmongers) and Mariners.
Noah in the Ark, with his wife; the three sons of Noah with their
wives; with divers animals.
10. Parchment-makers, Bookbinders.
Abraham sacrificing his son, Isaac, on an altar, a boy with wood and
an angel.
11. Hosiers.
Moses lifting up the serpent in the wilderness; King Pharaoh; eight
Jews wondering and expecting.
12. Spicers.
A Doctor declaring the sayings of the prophets of the future birth
of Christ. Mary; an angel saluting her; Mary saluting Elizabeth.
13. Pewterers, Founders.
Mary, Joseph wishing to put her away; an angel speaking to them that
they go to Bethlehem.
{246}
14. Tylers.
Mary, Joseph, a midwife; the Child born, lying in a manger betwixt
an ox and an ass, and an angel speaking to the shepherds, and to the
players in the next pageant.
15. Chandlers.
The shepherds talking together, the star in the East; an angel
giving the shepherds the good tidings of the Child's birth.
16, 17. Orfevers (Goldsmiths), Goldbeaters, Moneymakers.
The three kings coming from the East, Herod asking them about the
child Jesus; the son of Herod, two counsellors, and a messenger.
Mary with the Child, a star above, and the three kings offering
gifts.
How completely the people of each town were engaged in the
presentation of the plays, can be judged from the following
supplementary list of the other trade guilds that took parts. Many of
them bear quaint names, which are now obsolete. They included the
girdellers, makers of girdles; nailers, sawyers, lorymers (bridle
makers), the spurriers (makers of spurs), the fevers or smiths, the
curriers, the plumbers, the pattern-makers, the bottlers, the
cap-makers, the skinners, the bladesmiths, the scalers, the
buckle-makers, the cordwainers, the bowyers (makers of bows), the
fletchers (arrow-featherers), the tilemakers, the hayresters (workers
in horse hair), the boilers (bowl-makers), the tunners, the sellers or
saddlers; the fuystours (makers of saddle tree), the verrours
(glaziers), the broggours (brokers), the dubbers (refurbishers of
clothes), the luminers or illuminators, the scriveners, the drapers,
the potters, the weavers, the hostlers and mercers. The men of no
occupation, however menial it may seem to us, were barred. Each of
these companies had a special pageant with a portion of the Old or New
Testament to represent and in each succeeding year spent much of their
spare time in preparing for their dramatic performance, studying and
practising their parts and making everything ready for competition
with their brother craftsmen in the other pageants. Only those who
know the supreme educative value of dramatic representations for those
actively interested in them, will appreciate all that these plays
meant for popular education in the best sense of the word, but all can
readily understand how much they stood for in popular occupation of
mind with high thoughts and how {247} much they must have acted as a
preventive of debasing dissipations.
It is extremely interesting to follow out some of the details of the
management of these Mystery Plays. We shall find in even the meagre
accounts that we have of them, sufficient to show us that men were not
expected to work for nothing, nor even to be satisfied with what
compensation there might be in the honor of being chosen for certain
parts, nor in the special banquets that were provided for the actors
after the performances. A definite salary was paid to each of the
actors according to the importance of the part he took. Not only this,
but the loans of garments for costume purposes, or of furniture or
other material for stage properties, was repaid by definite sums of
money. These are not large, but, considering the buying power of money
at that time and the wages paid workmen, which enabled them to live at
least as well, comparatively, as modern workmen, the compensation is
ample. Mr. Morley, in the fourth volume of his "English Writers," has
given us some of these details and as they have a special social
interest and the old documents rejoice in a comic literalness of
statement, they deserve citation.
When about to set up a play, each guild chose for itself a competent
manager, to whom it gave the rule of the pageant, and voted a fixed
sum for its expenses. The play-book and the standing wardrobe and
other properties were handed over to him, and he was accountable, of
course, for their return after the close of the performances. The
manager had to appoint his actors, to give them their several parts
written out for them (perhaps by the prompter, who was a regular
official), and to see to the rehearsals, of which there would be two
for an old play and at least five for a new one.
At rehearsal time, as well as during the great performance the actors
ate and drank at the cost of the guild, ending all with a supper, at
which they had roast beef and roast goose, with wine for the chiefs,
and beer for the rest. The actors were paid, of course, according to
the length of their parts and quantity of business in them, not their
dignity. Thus in a play setting forth the Trial and Crucifixion of our
Lord, the actors of Herod and Caiaphas received each 3s. 4d.; {248}
the representative of Annas, 2s. 2d.; and of Christ 2s.; which was
also the sum paid to each actor in the parts of His executioners, and
6d. more than was paid for acting the Devil or Judas. In the united
plays of the "Descent into Hell" and the "Ascension," the payment was
to the actor who represented Christ, 1s. 6d.; and 1s. 4d. to him who
played the Devil. In one play we find this gradation of the scale of
payment to performers:--"Paid, for playing of Peter, xvid.; to two
damsels, xiid.; to the demon, vid.; to Fawston for hanging Judas,
ivd.; paid to Fawston for cock-crowing, ivd."
{opp248}
[Illustration]
PALAZZO BUONDELMONTE (FLORENCE)
[Illustration]
PALAZZO TOLOMEI (SIENA)
Of the costume of the actors, and of the stage furniture a tolerably
clear notion is also to be drawn from the Coventry account-books, of
which Mr. Sharp printed all that bears upon such questions. They
record, of course, chiefly repairs and renewals of stage properties
and wardrobe. "In one year Pilate has a new green cloak, in another a
new hat. Pilate's wife was Dame Procula, and we have such entries as,
'For mending of Dame Procula's garments, viid.' 'To reward to Mrs.
Grimsby for lending of her gear for Pilate's wife, xiid.' 'For a quart
of wine for hiring Porcula's gown, iid.' No actor had naked hands.
Those not in masks had their faces prepared by a painter. The costume
of each part was traditional, varied little in the course of years,
and much of it was originally designed after the pictures and painted
sculpture in the churches. As in those medieval decorations, gilding
was used freely; the performer of Christ wore a gilt peruke and beard,
so did Peter, and probably all the Apostles or saints who would be
represented on church walls with a gilt nimbus." Christ's coat was of
white sheep-skin, painted and gilded, with a girdle and red sandals.
The part of the High Priests Caiaphas and Annas were often played in
ecclesiastical robes hired from a church, a practice (one sad result
of which because of fire has already been noted) that was eventually
condemned as likely to lead to disrespect for sacred objects. Herod,
who wore a mask, was set up as a sceptred royal warrior in a gilt and
silvered helmet, in armour and gown of blue satin, with such Saracen
details of dress as the Crusaders connected with the worship of
Mahomet, including the crooked faulchion, which was gilt. The
tormentors of Christ wore jackets of black {249} buckram with nails
and dice upon them. The Virgin Mary was crowned, as in her images. The
angels wore white surplices and wings. The devil also had wings, and
was played in an appropriate mask and leather dress trimmed with
feathers and hair. He was, as the Prologue to the Chester Plays
describes him, "the devil in his feathers all ragged and rent," or, as
the Coventry account-books show, carried three pounds of hair upon his
hose.
There was probably no greater impulse for social uplift and for real
education of the masses than these mystery and morality plays, in
which the people took part themselves and in which, as a consequence
of the presence of friends in the various roles, the spectators had a
livelier interest than would have been otherwise the case under even
the most favorable circumstances, or with elaborate presentation. In
recent years there has come the realization that the drama may thus be
made a real educational influence. Unfortunately at the present time,
whatever of influence it has is exerted almost exclusively upon the
better-to-do classes, who have so many other opportunities for
educational uplift. These plays during the Thirteenth Century brought
the people intimately into contact with the great characters of Old
Testament and New Testament history, and besides giving them precious
religious information, which of itself, however, might mean very
little for true education, helped them to an insight into character
and to a right appreciation of human actions and a sympathy with what
was right even though it entailed suffering, such as could not have
otherwise been obtained.
Of course it is easy to say that such dramas constantly repeated, the
subjects always the same and only the cast varying from year to year,
would become intolerably familiar and might after a time degenerate
into the merely contemptible. As a matter of fact, however, they did
not. These old stories of religious heroes were written so close to
the heart of nature, involved so intimately all the problems of life
that they are of undying interest. Their repetition was only from year
to year and this did not give the opportunity for the familiarity
which breeds contempt. Besides, though the plays in the various cycles
existed in definite forms there seems no doubt that {250} certain
changes were made by the players themselves and by the managers of the
plays from time to time, and indeed such changes of the text of a play
as we know from present-day experience, are almost inevitable.
It might be urged, too, that the people themselves would scarcely be
possessed of the histrionic talent necessary to make the plays
effective. Ordinarily, however, as we know from our modern city life,
much less of the actor's art is needed than of interest in the action,
to secure the attention of the gallery. It must not be assumed too
readily, however, that the guilds which were able to supply men for
the great artistic decoration of the cathedrals of the Thirteenth
Century, could not supply actors who would so enter into the artistic
expression of a part as to represent it to the life. The actor is more
born than made, in spite of the number of schools of acting that are
supposed to be turning out successful rivals of Roscius, on recurring
graduation days. It must not be forgotten that the only example of
these mystery plays which is still left to us is the Passion Play at
Oberammergau, and that is one of the world's greatest spectacles. On
the last occasion when it was given about half a million of people
from all over the world, many of them even from distant America and
Australia, found their way into the Tyrolese Mountains in order to be
present at it. It is only the old, old, old story of the Passion and
death of the Lord. It is represented by villagers chosen from among
the inhabitants of a little village of fourteen hundred inhabitants,
who while they have a distinct taste for the artistic and produce some
of the best wood-carving done anywhere in Europe, thus approximating
very interestingly the Thirteenth Century peoples, are not
particularly noted for their education, nor for their dramatic
ability. No one who went up to see the Passion Play came away
dissatisfied either with the interest of the play or with its manner
of representation. It is distinctly an example of how well men and
women do things when they are thoroughly interested in them, and when
they are under the influence of an old-time tradition according to
which they must have the ability to accomplish what is expected of
them. Such a tradition actually existed during the Thirteenth and
Fourteenth centuries, leading to a gradual development of {251}
dramatic power both in writers and actors, that eventually was to
result in the magnificent outburst of dramatic genius during the
Elizabethan period. For it must not be forgotten, that mystery and
morality plays continued to hold the stage down almost, if not quite,
to the time of Shakespeare's early manhood, and he probably saw the
Coventry Cycle of plays acted.
While we have a certain number of these old-time plays, most of them,
of course, have disappeared by time's attrition during the centuries
before the invention of printing, when they were handed round only in
manuscript form. Of some of these plays we shall have something to say
after a moment, stopping only to call attention to the fact that in
this literary mode of the mystery and morality plays, dramatic
literature in English reached a height of development which has been
equaled only by our greatest dramatic geniuses.
Within the last few years most of the large cities of the
English-speaking world, besides the more important universities, have
been given the opportunity to hear one of the great products of this
form of literary activity. "Everyman" is probably as great a play as
there is in English and comparable with the best work of Shakespeare,
Marlowe and Jonson. Its author only took the four last things to be
remembered--Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell--the things which must
come to every man, and wrote his story around them, yet he did it with
such artistic effectiveness as to make his drama a triumph of literary
execution.
The Mystery Plays were as interesting in their way to the medieval
generations as "Everyman" to us. As may be seen from the list quoted
from Mr. Morley, practically all the significant parts of the Bible
story were acted by these craftsmen. Too much can scarcely be said of
the educational value of such dramatic exercises; the Bible itself
with its deep religious teachings, with its simple but sublime style,
with its beautiful poetry, entered for a time into the very lives of
these people. No wonder that our English speech during these centuries
became saturated with biblical thoughts and words. Anyone who has ever
had any experience with amateur theatricals when a really great play
was given, will be able to realize how much more thoroughly every
quality, dramatic, literary, poetic, even lyric {252} and historical,
that there might be in the drama, entered into the hearts and minds of
those who took part. It is this feature that is especially deserving
of attention with regard to these mystery plays which began in the
Thirteenth Century. The people's interest in them, lifted them out of
themselves and their trivial round of life into the higher life of
this great religious poetry. On the other hand the teachings of the
Bible came down from the distant plane on which they might otherwise
have been set and entered into the very life of the people. Their
familiarity with scripture made it a something not to be discussed
merely, but to be applied in their everyday affairs.
Besides this, the organization of the company to give the play and the
necessity for the display and exercise of taste in the costumes and of
ingenuity in the stage settings, were of themselves of great educative
value. The rivalry that naturally existed between the various
companies chosen from the different guilds only added to the zest with
which rehearsals were taken up, and made the play more fully occupy
the minds of those actively engaged in its preparation. For several
dull winter months before Easter time there was an intense
preoccupation of mind with great thoughts and beautiful words, instead
of with the paltry round of daily duties, which would otherwise form
the burden of conversation. Gossip and scandal mongering had fewer
opportunities since people's minds were taken up by so much worthier
affairs. The towns in which the plays were given never had more than a
few thousand inhabitants and most of them must have been personally
interested in some way in the play. The Jesuits, whose acumen for
managing students is proverbial, have always considered it of great
importance to have their students prepare plays several times a year.
Their reason is the occupation of mind which it affords as well as the
intellectual and elocutionary training that comes with the work. What
they do with premeditation, the old guilds did unconsciously but even
more effectively, and their success must be considered as one of the
social triumphs of this wonderful Thirteenth Century.
Only in recent years has the idea succeeded in making way in
government circles on the continent, that the giving of free dramatic
entertainments for the poor would form an excellent {253} addition to
other educational procedures. Such performances have new been given
for nearly a score of years in Berlin. After all, the subvention
allowed by government to the great theaters and opera houses in Europe
is part of this same policy, though unfortunately they are calculated
to affect only the upper classes, who need the help and the stimulus
of great dramatic art and great music less than the lower classes, who
have so little of variety or of anything that makes for uplift in
their lives. In the Thirteenth Century this very modern notion was
anticipated in such a way as to benefit the very poorest of the
population, and that not only passively, that is by the hearing of
dramatic performances, but also actively, by taking parts in them and
so having all the details of the action and the words impressed upon
them.
[Illustration]
CAPITAL (LINCOLN)
{254}
XVI
FRANCIS THE SAINT--THE FATHER OF THE RENAISSANCE.
The Renaissance is often thought of as a movement which originated
about the middle of the Fifteenth Century. Careful students sometimes
trace its origin back somewhat further. In recent years it has come to
be realized, however, that the great intellectual development which
came during the century after the fall of Constantinople in Italy, and
gradually spread to all the civilized countries of Europe, had been
preparing for at least two centuries and a half. While the period from
the middle of the Fifteenth to the end of the Sixteenth Centuries well
deserves the name of Renaissance, because one of the most important
fructifying principles of the movement was the rebirth of Greek ideas
into the modern world after the dispersion of Greek scholars by the
Turkish advance into the Byzantine Empire, the term must not be
allowed to carry with it the mistaken notion which only too often has
been plausibly accepted, that there was a new birth of poetic,
literary and esthetic ideas at this time, just as if there had been
nothing worth considering in these lines before. Any such notion as
this would be the height of absurdity in the light of the history of
the previous centuries in Italy. It was a cherished notion of the
people of the Renaissance themselves that they were the first to do
artistic and literary work, hence they invented the term Gothic,
meaning thereby barbarous, for the art of the preceding time, but in
this they were only exercising that amusing, self-complacency which
each generation deems its right. Succeeding generations adopting their
depreciative term have turned it into one of glory so that Gothic art
is now in highest honor.
Fortunately in recent years there has come, as we have said, a growing
recognition of the fact that the real beginning of modern art lies
much farther back in history, and that the real {255} father of the
Italian Renaissance is a man whom very few people in the last three
centuries have appreciated at his true worth. Undoubtedly the leader
in that great return to nature, which constitutes the true basis of
modern poetic and artistic ideas of all kinds, was St. Francis of
Assisi. "The poor little man of God," as in his humility he loved to
call himself, would surely be the last one to suspect that he should
ever come to be thought of as the initiator of a great movement in
literature and art. Such he was, however, in the highest sense of the
term and because of the modern appreciation of him in this regard,
publications concerning him have been more frequent during the last
ten years than with regard to almost any other single individual. We
have under our hand at the present moment what by no means claims to
be a complete bibliography of St. Francis' life and work, yet we can
count no less than thirty different works in various languages (not
reckoning translations separate from the originals) which have issued
from the press during the last ten years alone. This gives some idea
of present day interest in St. Francis.
It must not be thought, however, that it is only in our time that
these significant tributes have been paid him. Much of his influence
in literature and art, as well as in life, was recognized by the
southern nations all during the centuries since his death. That it is
only during the last century that other nations have come to
appreciate him better, and especially have realized his literary
significance, has been their loss and that of their literatures. At
the beginning of the Nineteenth Century Görres, the German historian
who was so sympathetic towards the Middle Ages, wrote of St. Francis
as one of the Troubadours, and even did not hesitate to add that
without St. Francis at the beginning of the Thirteenth Century there
would have been no Dante at the end. Renan, the well-known French
rationalist historian and literateur, did not hesitate to proclaim St.
Francis one of the great religious poets of all time and his famous
Canticle of the Sun as the greatest religious poem since the Hebrew
Psalms were written. It was from Renan that Matthew Arnold received
his introduction to St. Francis as a literary man, and his own studies
led him to write the famous passages in the Essays in Criticism, which
are usually so much a source of {256} surprise to those who think of
Mr. Arnold as the rationalizing critic, rather than the sympathetic
admirer of a medieval saint.
"In the beginning of the Thirteenth Century, when the clouds and
storms had come, when the gay sensuous pagan life was gone, when men
were not living by the senses and understanding, when they were
looking for the speedy coming of Antichrist, there appeared in
Italy, to the north of Rome, in the beautiful Umbrian country at the
foot of the Appennines, a figure of the most magical power and
charm, St. Francis. His century is, I think, the most interesting in
the history of Christianity after its primitive age; more
interesting than even the century of the Reformation; and one of the
chief figures, perhaps the very chief, to which this interest
attaches itself, is St. Francis. And why? Because of the profound
popular instinct which enabled him, more than any man since the
primitive age, to fit religion for popular use. He brought religion
to the people. He founded the most popular body of ministers of
religion that has ever existed in the Church. He transformed
monachism by uprooting the stationary monk, delivering him from the
bondage of property, and sending him, as a mendicant friar, to be a
stranger and sojourner, not in the wilderness, but in the most
crowded haunts of men, to console them and to do them good. This
popular instinct of his is at the bottom of his famous marriage with
poverty. Poverty and suffering are the condition of the people, the
multitude, the immense majority of mankind; and it was towards this
people that his soul yearned. "He listens," it was said of him, "to
those to whom God himself will not listen."
Matthew Arnold has thus surprisingly summed up Francis' age and his
work. With a sympathy that could scarcely be expected from the man for
whom the Deity had become merely "a stream of tendency that makes for
righteousness," he realized the influence that this supreme lover of a
personal God had over his generation, and his brother poet soul flew
to its affinity in spite of the apparently insurmountable obstacle of'
extreme aloofness of spiritual temperament.
{opp256}
[Illustration: ]
THE GLORIFICATION OF ST. FRANCIS (GIOTTO, LOWER CHURCH OF ASSISI)
Matthew Arnold proceeds:
"So in return, as no other man, St. Francis was listened to. When an
Umbrian town or village heard of his approach, the {257} whole
population went out in joyful procession to meet him, with green
boughs, flags, music, and songs of gladness. The master, who began
with two disciples, could in his own lifetime (and he died at
forty-five) collect to keep Whitsuntide with him, in presence of an
immense multitude, five thousand of his Minorites. He found
fulfilment to his prophetic cry: "I hear in my ears the sound of the
tongues of all the nations who shall come unto us; Frenchmen,
Spaniards, Germans, Englishmen. The Lord will make of us a great
people, even unto the ends of the earth."
When we reach the next paragraph the secret of this surprising
paradoxical sympathy is out. It is the literary and esthetic side of
St. Francis that has appealed to him, and like Renan he does not
hesitate to give "the poor little man of God" a place among the great
original geniuses of all time, associating his name with that of
Dante.
"Prose could not satisfy this ardent soul, and he made poetry. Latin
was too learned for this simple, popular nature, and he composed in
his mother tongue, in Italian. The beginnings of the mundane poetry
of the Italians are in Sicily, at the court of kings; the beginnings
of their religious poetry are in Umbria, with St. Francis. His are
the humble upper waters of a mighty stream: at the beginning of the
Thirteenth Century, it is St. Francis, at the end, Dante. Now it
happens that St. Francis, too, like the Alexandrian songstress, has
his hymn for the sun, for Adonis; Canticle of the Sun, Canticle of
the Creatures, the poem goes by both names. Like the Alexandrian
hymn, it is designed for popular use, but not for use by King
Ptolemy's people; artless in language, irregular in rhythm, it
matches with the childlike genius that produced it, and the simple
natures that loved and repeated it."
Probably the most satisfactory translation for those who may not be
able to appreciate the original of this sublime hymn that has evoked
so many tributes, is the following literal rendering into English in
which a quite successful attempt to give the naif rhythm of the
original Italian, which necessarily disappears in any formal rhymed
translation, has been made by Father Paschal Robinson of the Order of
St. Francis for his recent edition of the writings of St. Francis.
[Footnote 23]
[Footnote 23: Philadelphia, The Dolphin Press, 1906.]
{258}
"Here begin the praises of the Creatures which the Blessed Francis
made to the praise and honor of God while he was ill at St. Damian's:
Most high, omnipotent, good Lord,
Praise, glory and honor and benediction all, are Thine.
To Thee alone do they belong, most High,
And there is no man fit to mention Thee.
Praise be to Thee, my Lord, with all Thy creatures.
Especially to my worshipful brother sun,
The which lights up the day, and through him dost Thou brightness give;
And beautiful is he and radiant with splendor great;
Of Thee, Most High, signification gives.
Praised be my Lord, for sister moon and for the stars,
In heaven Thou hast formed them clear and precious and fair.
Praised be my Lord for brother wind
And for the air and clouds and fair and every kind of weather.
By the which Thou givest to Thy creatures nourishment.
Praised be my Lord for sister water,
The which is greatly helpful and humble and precious and pure.
Praised be my Lord for brother fire,
By the which Thou lightest up the dark.
And fair is he and gay and mighty and strong.
Praised be my Lord for our sister, mother earth.
The which sustains and keeps us
And brings forth diverse fruits with grass and flowers bright.
Praised be my Lord for those who for Thy love forgive
And weakness bear and tribulation.
Blessed those who shall in peace endure,
For by Thee, Most High, shall they be crowned.
Praised be my Lord for our sister, the bodily death.
From the which no living man can flee.
{259}
Woe to them who die in mortal sin;
Blessed those who shall find themselves in Thy most holy will,
For the second death shall do them no ill.
Praise ye and bless ye my Lord, and give Him thanks,
And be subject unto Him with great humility."
Except for his place in literature and art, the lives of few men would
seem to be of so little interest to the modern time as that of St.
Francis of Assisi, yet it is for the man himself that so many now turn
to him. His spirit is entirely opposed to the sordid principles that
have been accepted as the basis of success in modern life. His idea
was that happiness consisted in being free from unsatisfied desires
rather than seeking to secure the satisfaction of his wishes. Duty was
self-denial, not self-seeking under any pretext. He stripped himself
literally of everything and his mystic marriage to the Lady Poverty
was, so far as he was concerned, as absolute a reality, as if the
union had been actual instead of imaginary. The commonplace details of
his early years seem all the more interesting from these later
developments, and have been the subject of much sympathetic study in
recent years.
St. Francis' father was a cloth merchant and St. Francis had been
brought up and educated as became the son of a man whose commercial
journeys often took him to France. It was indeed while his father was
absent on one of these business expeditions that Francis was born and
on his father's return received from him the name of Francisco--the
Frenchman--in joyful commemoration of his birth.
As he grew up he did not differ from the ordinary young man of his
time, but seems to have taken the world and its pleasures quite as he
found them and after the fashion of those around him. At the age of
twenty-five he fell seriously ill and then, for the first time, there
came to him the realization of the true significance of life. As Dean
Stanley said shortly before his death, "life seemed different when
viewed from the horizontal position." Life lived for its own sake was
not worth while. To Francis there came the realization that when God
Himself became man he lived his life for others. Francis {260} set
about literally imitating him. Enthusiastic students of his life
consider him the great type of genuine Christian, the most real
disciple of Christ who ever lived. Some money and goods that came into
his hands having been disposed of for the poor, Francis' father made
serious objection and Francis was brought before the ecclesiastical
authorities. It was at this moment that he stripped himself of
everything that he had, the Bishop even having to provide a cloak to
cover his nakedness, and became the wonderful apostle to the poor that
he remained during all the rest of his life. Curious as it must ever
seem, it was not long before he had many who wished to imitate him and
who insisted on becoming his disciples and followers. St. Francis had
had no idea how infectious his example was to prove. Before his death
his disciples could be numbered by the thousands and the great order
of the Franciscans, that for centuries was to do so much work, had
come into existence not by any conscious planning, but by the mere
force of the great Christian principles that were the guiding factors
in St. Francis' own life.
Ruskin in his Mornings in Florence in discussing Giotto's famous
picture of St. Francis' renunciation of his inheritance, and his
incurrence thereby of his father's anger, has a characteristic passage
that sounds the very keynote of the Saint's life and goes to the heart
of things. In it he explains the meaning of this apparently
contradictory incident in St. Francis' life, since Francis' great
virtue was obedience, yet here, apparently as a beginning of his more
perfect Christian life, is an act of disobedience. After Ruskin's
explanation, however, it is all the more difficult to understand the
present generation's revival of interest in Francis unless it be
attributed to a liking for contrast.
"That is the meaning of St. Francis' renouncing his inheritance; and
it is the beginning of Giotto's gospel of Works. Unless this hardest
of deeds be done first--this inheritance of mammon and the world
cast away,--all other deeds are useless. You cannot serve, cannot
obey, God and mammon. No charities, no obedience, no self-denials,
are of any use while you are still at heart in conformity with the
world. You go to church, because the world goes. You keep Sunday,
because your {261} neighbor keeps it. But you dress ridiculously
because your neighbors ask it; and you dare not do a rough piece of
work, because your neighbors despise it. You must renounce your
neighbor, in his riches and pride, and remember him in his distress.
That is St. Francis' 'disobedience.'"
{opp261}
[Illustration]
ST. FRANCIS (CHURCH OF THE FRARI, VENICE, NIC. PISANO)
In spite of Ruskin's charming explanation of St. Francis' place in
history, and his elucidation of the hard passages in his life, most
people will only find it more difficult, after these explanations, to
understand the modern acute reawakening of interest in St. Francis.
Our generation in its ardent devotion to the things of this world does
not seem a promising field for the evangel, "Give up all thou hast and
follow me." The mystery of St. Francis' attraction only deepens the
more we know of him. An American Franciscan has tried to solve the
problem and his words are worth quoting. Father Paschal Robinson, O.
S. M., in his "The True St. Francis" says:--
"What is the cause of the present widespread homage to St. Francis?
It is, of course, far too wide a question to allow the present
writer to do more than make a few suggestions. First and foremost,
we must ever reckon with the perennial charm of the Saint's
personality, which seems to wield an ineffable influence over the
hearts of men--drawing and holding those of the most different
habits of mind, with a sense of personal sympathy. Perhaps no other
man, unless it be St. Paul, ever had such wide reaching,
all-embracing sympathy: and it may have been wider than St. Paul's,
for we find no evidence in the great apostle of a love for nature
and of animals. This exquisite Franciscan spirit, as it is called,
which is the very perfume of religion--this spirit at once so
humble, so tender, so devout, so akin to 'the good odor of
Christ'--passed out into the whole world and has become a permanent
source of inspiration. A character at once so exhalted and so
purified as St. Francis was sure to keep alive an ideal; and so he
does. From this one can easily understand St. Francis' dominance
among a small but earnest band of enthusiasts now pointing the world
back to the reign of the spirit. It was this same gentle idealism of
St. Francis which inspired the art of the Umbrian people; it was
this which was translated into the paintings of the greatest
artists. No school of painting has ever been penetrated with {262}
such pure idealism as the Umbrian; and this inspiration, at once
religious and artistic, came from the tomb of the _poverello_ above
which Giotto had painted his mystical frescoes. The earnest
quasi-religious study of the medieval beginnings of western art has
therefore rightly been set down as another cause for some of the
latter-day pilgrimages to Assisi. In like manner, the scientific
treatment of the Romance literature leads naturally to St. Francis
as to the humble upper waters of a mighty stream; at the beginning
of the Thirteenth Century is St. Francis, at the end is Dante. It
was Matthew Arnold, we believe, who first held up the poor man of
Assisi as a literary type--a type as distinct and formal as the
author of the _Divine Comedy_. 'Prose,' he says, 'could not easily
satisfy the saint's ardent soul, and so he made poetry.' 'It was,'
writes Ozanam, 'the first cry of a nascent poetry which has grown
and made itself heard through the world.'"
Considering how thoroughly impractical Francis seemed to be in his
life, it can scarcely help but be a source of ever increasing wonder
that he succeeded in influencing, his generation so widely and so
thoroughly. It is evident that there were many men of the time tired
of the more or less strenuous life, which chained them either to the
cares of business or tempted them for the sake of the bubble
reputation into a military career. To these St. Francis' method of
life came with an especially strong appeal. The example of his neglect
of worldly things and of his so thoroughly maintained resolve not to
be harassed by the ordinary cares of life, and especially not to take
too much thought of the future, penetrated into all classes. While it
made the rich realize how much of their lives they were living merely
for the sake of others, it helped the poor to be satisfied, since here
was a sublime and complete recognition of the fact that an existence
without cares was better than one with many cares, such as were sure
to come to those who wrought ever and anon increase of the goods of
this world. Such ideas may seen to be essentially modern, but anyone
who will turn to the chapter on The Three Most Read Books of the
Century and read the passages from the "Romance of the Rose" on wealth
and poverty, will know better than to think them anything but
perennial.
{263}
Men gathered around St. Francis then and pleaded to be allowed to
follow his mode of life. Some of the men who thus came to him were the
choice spirits of the times. Thomas of Celano, who was to be one of
the Master's favorite disciples and subsequently to be his most
authoritative biographer, was one of the great literary geniuses of
all times, the author of the sublime Dies Irae. While most of his
first companions were men of such extreme simplicity of mind that the
world has been rather in an amused than admiring attitude with regard
to them, there can be no doubt that this simplicity was of itself an
index not only of their genuine sincerity of heart, but of a greatness
of mind that set them above the ordinary run of mankind and made them
live poetry when they did not write it. The institute established by
St. Francis was destined, in the course of the century, to attract to
it some of the great men of every country. Besides Thomas of Celano
there was, in Italy, Anthony of Padua, almost as famous as his master
for the beauty of his saintly life; Jacopone Da Todi, the well-known
author of the Stabat Mater, a hymn that rivals in poetic genius, the
Dies Irae; Bonaventure, the great teacher of philosophy and theology
at the University of Paris, and the writer of some of the sublimest
treatises of mystical theology that were to be text books for the
members of the Franciscan order, and of many other religious bodies
for centuries after his death, indeed down to even our own times.
There was Roger Bacon, in England, the famous teacher of science at
Paris and at Oxford; and that Subtle Doctor, Duns Scotus, whose
influence in philosophical speculation was destined never quite to
disappear, and many others, the pick of the generations in which they
lived, all proud to look up to Francis of Assisi as their father; all
glad of the opportunity that the order gave them, to pass their lives
in peace, far from the madding crowd with its strifes and competition,
providing them constantly with opportunities to live their own lives,
to find their own souls, to cultivate their own individualities
untrammelled by worldly cares.
Francis' success in this matter and the propaganda of his influence
will not be so surprising to Americans of this generation, if they
will only recall what is still a precious memory in {264} the minds of
men who are yet alive, that efforts to found a community not unlike
that of the Franciscans in certain ways, attracted widespread
attention even in our own country half a century ago. After all, the
men who gathered at Brook Farm had ideas and ideals not so distant
from those cherished by St. Francis and the early members of the
Franciscan Order. Their main effort was also to get away from worldly
cares and have the opportunity to work out their philosophy of life
far from the disturbing influence of city life, in the peaceful
pursuit of only such agricultural efforts as might be necessary to
ensure them simple sustenance, yet at the same time enforce from them
such exercise in the open air as would guarantee the preservation of
health. The men of Brook Farm were, in the eyes of their generation,
quite as far from practical ideas as were the early Franciscans. It
must not be forgotten, however, that these men who thus attempted in
the Nineteenth Century what St. Francis succeeded in accomplishing in
the Thirteenth, in their subsequent careers succeeded in impressing
themselves very strongly upon the life of the American people. Much of
what is best in our Nineteenth Century life would be lost if the Brook
farmers and what they accomplished were to be removed from it. Men of
ideals are usually also men of working ideas, as these two experiences
in history would seem to show.
{opp264}
[Illustration]
ST. ELIZABETH--THREE FRANCISCANS (GIOTTO)
[Illustration]
ST. LOUIS--THREE FRANCISCANS (GIOTTO)
[Illustration]
ST. CLARE--THREE FRANCISCANS (GIOTTO)
It was not alone for the men of his generation, however, that Francis
was destined to furnish a refuge from worldly care and a place of
peace and thoughtful life. We have already said that it was by chance,
certainly without any conscious intention on Francis' part that the
Franciscan order for men which is usually spoken of as the First Order
came into existence. The last thing in the world very probably that
would ever have entered into the mind of Francis when he began to lead
the simple life of a poor little man of God, was the founding of a
religious order for women. We tell elsewhere the story, of St. Clare's
interest in St. Francis' mode of life and of the trials that she
underwent in order to obtain permission and opportunity to fashion her
own life in the same way. The problem was even more serious for women
than for men. St. Francis considered that they should not be {265}
allowed to follow the Franciscan custom of going out to seek alms and
yet required that they should live in absolute poverty, possessing
nothing and supporting themselves only by the contributions of the
faithful and the work of their hands. St. Clare attempted the
apparently impossible and solved the problem of a new career for the
women of her time.
It was not very long before St. Clare's example proved as infective as
that of St. Francis himself. While in the beginning the members of her
family had been the most strenuous objectors against her taking up
such an unwonted mode of existence it was not long before she was
joined in the monastery of St. Damian where her little community was
living, by her sister who was to become almost as famous as herself
under the name of St. Agnes, and by her mother and other near
relatives, from Assisi and the neighborhood. This Second Order of St.
Francis to which only women were admitted proved to have in it the
germ of as active life as that of the first order. Before the end of
the Thirteenth Century there were women Franciscans in every country
in Europe. These convents furnished for women a refuge from the
worried, hurried, over-busy life around them that proved quite as
attractive as the similar opportunity for the men. For many hundreds
of years down even to our own time, women were to find in the quiet
obscurity of such Franciscan convents a peaceful, happy life in which
they occupied themselves with simple conventual duties, with manual
labor in their monastery gardens, with the making of needle work in
which they became the most expert in the world, with the illuminating
of missals and office books of such artistic beauty that they have
become the most precious treasures of our great libraries, and with
the long hours of prayer by which they hoped to accomplish as much in
making the world better as if they devoted themselves to ardent
efforts of reform which, of course, the circumstances of the time
would not have permitted.
Finally there was the Third Order of St. Francis, which was to gather
to itself so many of the distinguished people of the century whose
occupations and obligations would not permit them to live the
conventual life, but who yet felt that they must be attached by some
bond to this beautiful sanctity that was {266} entering into all the
better life of the century. The Third Order was established so as to
permit all the world to become Franciscans to whatever degree it
considered possible, and to share in the sublime Christianity of the
founder whom they all admired so much, even if they were not able to
imitate his sublimer virtues. Into this Third Order of St. Francis
most of the finer spirits of the time entered with enthusiasm. We need
only recall that Louis IX. of France, the greatest Monarch of the
century, considered it a special privilege to be a follower of the
humble Francis, and that St. Elizabeth of Hungary, the daughter of a
king, the wife and mother of a ruling prince, gave another example of
the far-reachingness of Francis' work. Dante was another of the great
members of the Third Order and was buried in the habit of St. Francis,
glorying in the thought of the brotherhood this gave him with the
saint he loved so much.
All down the centuries since, other distinguished men in many
countries of Europe were proud to claim the same distinction. Modern
science is supposed to be unorthodox in its tendencies and electricity
is the most recent of the sciences in development. Three of the great
founders in electricity, Volta, Galvani and Ampere, were members of
the Third Order of St. Francis and at least one of them, Galvani,
insisted on being buried in the habit of the order six centuries after
the death of his father Francis in order to show how much he
appreciated the privilege. There is no man who lived in the Thirteenth
Century who influenced the better side of men more in all the
succeeding ages down to and including our own time, than the poor
little man of God of Assisi. He is just coming into a further precious
heritage of uplift for the men of our time, that is surprising for
those who are so buried in the merely material that they fail to
realize how much the ideal still rules the minds of thinking men, but
that seems only natural and inevitable to those who appreciate all the
attractiveness there is in a simple life lived without the bootless
hurry, the unattaining bustle and the over-strained excitement of the
strenuous existence.
What St. Francis and his order accomplished in Italy another great
Saint, Dominic, was achieving in the West. The {267} fact that another
order similar to that of St. Francis in many respects, yet differing
from it in a number of essential particulars, should have arisen
almost at the same time shows how profoundly the spirit of
organization of effort had penetrated into the minds of these
generations of the Thirteenth Century. While poverty was to be the
badge of St. Dominic's followers as well as those of St. Francis,
learning was to replace the simplicity which St. Francis desired for
his sons. The order of preachers began at once to give many eminent
scholars to the Church, and for three centuries there was not a single
generation that did not see as Dominicans some of the most
intellectual men of Europe. Leaders they were in philosophy, in the
development of thought, in education, and in every phase of
ecclesiastical life. The watch dogs of the Lord, (Domini Canes) they
were called, punning on their name because everwhere, they were in the
van of defense against the enemies of Christianity. That the
Thirteenth Century should have given rise to two such great religious
orders stamps it as a wonderfully fruitful period for religion as well
as for every other phrase of human development.
In order to understand what these great founders tried to do, the work
of these two orders must be considered together. They have never
ceased, during all the intervening seven centuries, to be the source
of great influence in the religious world. They have proven refuges
for many gentle spirits at all times and have been the homes of
learning, as well as of piety. While occasionally their privileges
have been abused, and men have taken advantage of the opportunities to
be idle and luxurious, this has happened much seldomer than the world
imagines. Not a single century has failed to show men among them whom
the world honors as Saints, and whose lives have been examples of what
can be accomplished by human nature at its best. They have been
literally schools of unselfishness, and men have learned to think less
of themselves and more of their labor by the contemplation of the
lives of these begging friars. What they did for England, the Rev.
Augustus Jessopp, a non-conformist clergyman in England, has recently
told very well, and the more one studies their history, the higher the
estimation of them; and the more one knows of {268} them, the less
does one talk of their vices. Green in his "History of the English
People" has paid them a tribute that it is well to remember:--
"To bring the world back again within the pale of the Church was the
aim of two religious orders which sprang suddenly to life at the
opening of the Thirteenth Century. The zeal of the Spaniard Dominic
was aroused at the sight of the lordly prelates who sought by fire
and sword to win the Albigensian heretics to the faith. 'Zeal,' he
cried, 'must be met by zeal, lowliness by lowliness, false sanctity
by real sanctity, preaching lies by preaching truth.' His fiery
ardor and rigid orthodoxy were seconded by the mystical piety, the
imaginative enthusiasm of Francis of Assisi. The life of Francis
falls like a stream of tender light across the darkness of the time.
In the frescoes of Giotto or the verse of Dante we see him take
Poverty for his bride. He strips himself of all: he flings his very
clothes at his father's feet, that he may be one with Nature and
God. His passionate verse claims the moon for his sister and the sun
for his brother; he calls on his brother the Wind, and his sister
the Water. His last faint cry was a 'Welcome, Sister Death.'
Strangely as the two men differed from each other, their aim was the
same, to convert the heathen, to extirpate heresy, to reconcile
knowledge with orthodoxy, to carry the Gospel to the poor. The work
was to be done by the entire reversal of the older monasticism, by
seeking personal salvation in effort for the salvation of their
fellow-men, by exchanging the solitary of the cloister for the
preacher, the monk for a friar. To force the new 'brethren' into
entire dependence on those among whom they labored the vow of
Poverty was turned into a stern reality; the 'Begging Friars' were
to subsist on the alms of the poor, they might possess neither money
nor lands, the very houses in which they lived were to be held in
trust for them by others. The tide of popular enthusiasm which
welcomed their appearance swept before it the reluctance of Rome,
the jealousy of the older orders, the opposition of the parochial
priesthood. Thousands of brethren gathered in a few years around
Francis and Dominic, and the begging preachers, clad in their coarse
frock of serge, with the girdle of rope around their waist, wandered
barefooted as {269} missionaries over Asia, battled with heresy in
Italy and Gaul, lectured in the Universities, and preached and
toiled among the poor."
[Illustration]
SIDE CAPITAL (LINCOLN)
{270}
XVII
AQUINAS THE SCHOLAR.
No one of all the sons of the Thirteenth Century, not even Dante
himself, so typifies the greatness of the mentality of the period as
does Thomas, called from his birthplace Aquinas, or of Aquin, on whom
his own and immediately succeeding generations because of what they
considered his almost more than human intellectual acumen, bestowed
the title of Angelical Doctor, while the Church for the supremely
unselfish character of his life, formally conferred the title of
Saint. The life of Aquinas is of special interest, because it serves
to clarify many questions as to the education of the Thirteenth
Century and to correct many false impressions that are only too
prevalent with regard to the intellectual life of the period. Though
Aquinas came of a noble family which was related to many of the Royal
houses of Europe and was the son of the Count of Aquino, then one of
the most important of the non-reigning noble houses of Italy, his
education was begun in his early years and was continued in the midst
of such opportunities as even the modern student might well envy.
It is often said that the nobility at this time, paid very little
attention to the things of the intellect and indeed rather prided
themselves on their ignorance of even such ordinary attainments as
reading and writing. While this was doubtless true for not a few of
them, Aquinas's life stands in open contradiction with the impression
that any such state of mind was at all general, or that there were not
so many exceptions as to nullify any such supposed rule. Evidently
those who wished could and did take advantage of educational
opportunities quite as in our day. Aquinas's early education was
received at the famous monastery of Monte Cassino in Southern Italy,
where the Benedictines for more than six centuries had been providing
magnificent opportunities for the studious youth of Italy and for
serious-minded students from all over Europe. {271} When he was
scarcely more than a boy he proceeded to the University of Naples,
which at that time, under the patronage of the Emperor Frederick II.,
was being encouraged not only to take the place so long held by
Salernum in the educational world of Europe, but also to rival the
renowned Universities of Paris and Bologna. Here he remained until he
was seventeen years of age when he resolved to enter the Dominican
Order, which had been founded only a short time before by St. Dominic,
yet had already begun to make itself felt throughout the religious and
educational world of the time.
Just as it is the custom to declare that as a rule, the nobility cared
little for education, so it is more or less usual to proclaim that
practically only the clergy had any opportunities for the higher
education during the Thirteenth Century. Thomas had evidently been
given his early educational opportunities, however, without any
thought of the possibility of his becoming a clergyman. His mother was
very much opposed to his entrance among the Dominicans, and every
effort was made to picture to him the pleasures and advantages that
would accrue to him because of his noble connections, in a life in the
world. Thomas insisted, however, and his firm purpose in the matter
finally conquered even the serious obstacles that a noble family can
place in the way of a boy of seventeen, as regards the disposition of
his life in a way opposed to their wishes.
The Dominicans realized the surpassing intelligence of the youth whom
they had received and accordingly he was sent to be trained under the
greatest teacher of their order, the famous Albert the Great, who was
then lecturing at Cologne. Thomas was not the most brilliant of
scholars as a young man and seems even to have been the butt of his
more successful fellow-students. They are said to have called him the
dumb one, or sometimes because of his bulkiness even as a youth, the
dumb ox. Albert himself, however, was not deceived in his estimation
of the intellectual capacity of his young student, and according to
tradition declared, that the bellowings of this ox would yet be heard
throughout all Christendom. After a few years spent at Cologne, Thomas
when he was in his early twenties, accompanied Albert who had been
called to {272} Paris. It was at Paris that Thomas received his
bachelor's degree and also took out his license to teach--the doctor's
degree of our time. After this some years further were spent at
Cologne and then the greatness of the man began to dawn on his
generation. He was called back to Paris and became one of the most
popular of the Professors at that great University in the height of
her fame, at a time when no greater group of men has perhaps ever been
gathered together, than shared with him the honors of the professors'
chairs at that institution.
"Albert the Great, Roger Bacon, St. Bonaventure, and St. Thomas
Aquinas, form among themselves, so to speak, a complete
representation of all the intellectual powers: they are the four
doctors who uphold the chair of philosophy in the temple of the
Middle Ages. Their mission was truly the reestablishment of the
sciences, but not their final consummation. They were not exempt
from the ignorances and erroneous opinions of their day, yet they
did much to overcome them and succeeded better than is usually
acknowledged in introducing the era of modern thought. Often, the
majesty, I may even say the grace of their conceptions, disappears
under the veil of the expressions in which they are clothed; but
these imperfections are amply atoned for by superabundant merits.
Those Christian philosophers did not admit within themselves the
divorce, since their day become so frequent, between the intellect
and the will; their lives were uniformly a laborious application of
their doctrines. They realized in its plenitude the practical wisdom
so often dreamed of by the ancients--the abstinence of the disciples
of Pythagoras, the constancy of the stoics, together with humility
and charity, virtues unknown to the antique world. Albert the Great
and St. Thomas left the castles of their noble ancestors to seek
obscurity in the cloisters of St. Dominic: the former abdicated, and
the latter declined, the honors of the Church. It was with the cord
of St. Francis that Roger Bacon and St. Bonaventure girded their
loins; when the last named was sought that the Roman purple might be
placed upon his shoulders, he begged the envoys to wait until he
finished washing the dishes of the convent. Thus they did not
withdraw themselves {273} within the exclusive mysteries of an
esoteric teaching; they opened the doors of their schools to the
sons of shepherds and artisans, and, like their Master, Christ, they
said: "Come all!" After having broken the bread of the word, they
were seen distributing the bread of alms. The poor knew them and
blessed their names. Even yet, after the lapse of six hundred years,
the dwellers in Paris kneel round the altar of the Angel of the
School, and the workmen of Lyons deem it an honor once a year to
bear upon their brawny shoulders the triumphant remains of the
'Seraphic Doctor.'"
For most modern students and even scholars educated in secular
universities the name of Aquinas is scarcely more than a type, the
greatest of them, it is true, of the schoolmen who were so much
occupied with distant, impractical and, to say the least, merely
theoretic metaphysical problems, in the later Middle Ages. It is true
that the renewed interest in Dante in recent years in English speaking
countries, has brought about a revival of attention in Aquinas's work
because to Dante, the Angelical Doctor, as he was already called,
meant so much, and because the Divine Comedy has been declared often
and often, by competent critics, to be the Summa Theologiae of St.
Thomas of Aquin in verse. Even this adventitious literary interest,
however, has not served to lift the obscurity in which Aquinas is
veiled for the great majority of scholarly people, whose education has
been conducted according to modern methods and present-day ideas.
As showing a hopeful tendency to recognize the greatness of these
thinkers of the Middle Ages it is interesting to note that about five
years ago one of St. Thomas's great works--the Summa Contra
Gentiles--was placed on the list of subjects which a candidate may at
his option offer in the final honor school of the _litterae
humaniores_ at Oxford. There has come a definite appreciation of the
fact that this old time philosopher represents a phase of intellectual
development that must not be neglected, and that stands for such
educational influence as may well be taken advantage of even in our
day of information rather than mental discipline. For the purposes of
this course Father Rickaby, S. J., has prepared an annotated
translation of the great philosophic work under the title, {274} "Of
God and His Creatures," which was published by Burns and Oates of
London, 1905. This will enable those for whom the Latin of St. Thomas
was a stumbling block, to read the thoughts of the great scholastic,
in translation at least, and it is to be hoped that we shall hear no
more of the trifling judgments which have so disgraced our English
philosophical literature.
The fact that Pope Leo XIII., by a famous papal bull, insisted that
St. Thomas should be the standard of teaching in philosophy and
theology in all the Catholic institutions of learning throughout the
world, aroused many thinkers to a realization of the fact that far
from being a thing of the dead and distant past, Thomas's voice was
still a great living force in the world of thought. To most people Leo
XIII. appealed as an intensely practical and thoroughly modern ruler,
whose judgment could be depended on even with regard to teaching
problems in philosophy and theology. There was about him none of the
qualities that would stamp him as a far-away mystic whose thoughts
were still limited by medieval barriers. The fact that in making his
declaration the Pope was only formulating as a rule, what had
spontaneously become the almost constant practice and tradition of
Catholic schools and universities, of itself served to show how great
and how enduring was St. Thomas's influence.
In the drawing together of Christian sects that has inevitably come as
a result of the attacks made upon Christianity by modern materialists,
and then later by those who would in their ardor for the higher
criticism do away with practically all that is divine in Christianity,
there has come a very general realization even on the part of those
outside of her fold, that the Roman Catholic Church occupies a
position more solidly founded on consistent logical premises and
conclusions than any of the denominations. Without her aid Christian
apologetics would indeed be in sad case. Pope Leo's declaration only
emphasizes the fact, then, that the foundation stone of Christian
apologetics was laid by the great work of St. Thomas, and that to him
more than any other is due that wonderful coordination of secular and
religious knowledge, which appoints for each of these branches of
knowledge its {275} proper place, and satisfies the human mind better
than any other system of philosophic thought. This is the real
panegyric of St. Thomas, and it only adds to the sublimity of it that
it should come nearly six centuries and a half after his death. To
only a bare handful of men in the history of the human race, is it
given thus to influence the minds of subsequent generations for so
long and to have laid down the principles of thought that are to
satisfy men for so many generations. This is why, in any attempt at
even inadequate treatment of the greatness of the Thirteenth Century,
Thomas Aquinas, who was its greatest scholar, must have a prominent
place. The present generation has had sufficient interest in him
aroused, however, amply to justify such a giving of space.
When Leo XIII. made his recommendation of St. Thomas it was not as one
who had merely heard of the works of the great medieval thinker, or
knew them only by tradition, or had slightly dipped into them as a
dilettante, but as one who had been long familiar with them, who had
studied the Angelical Doctor in youth, who had pondered his wisdom in
middle age, and resorted again and again to him for guidance in the
difficulties of doctrine in maturer years, and the difficulties of
morals such as presented themselves in his practical life as a
churchman. It was out of the depths of his knowledge of him, that the
great Pope, whom all the modern world came to honor so reverently
before his death, drew his supreme admiration for St. Thomas and his
recognition of the fact that no safer guide in the thorny path of
modern Christian apologetics could be followed, than this wonderful
genius who first systematized human thought as far as the relations of
Creator to creature are considered, in the heyday of medieval
scholarship and university teaching.
Those who have their knowledge of scholastic philosophy at second
hand, from men who proclaim this period of human development as
occupied entirely with fruitless discussion of metaphysical theories,
will surely think that they could find nothing of interest for them in
St. Thomas's writings. It is true the casual reader may not penetrate
far enough into his writing to realize its significance and to
appreciate its depth of knowledge, but the serious student finds
constant {276} details of supreme interest because of their
applications to the most up-to-date problems. We venture to quote an
example that will show this more or less perfectly according to the
special philosophic interest of readers. It is St. Thomas's discussion
of the necessity there was for the revelation of the truth of the
existence of God. His statement of the reasons why men, occupied with
the ordinary affairs of life, would not ordinarily come to this truth
unless it were revealed to them, though they actually have the mental
capacity to reach it by reason alone, will show how sympathetically
the Saint appreciated human conditions as they are.
"If a truth of this nature were left to the sole inquiry of reason,
three disadvantages would follow. One is that the knowledge of God
would be confined to few. The discovery of truth is the fruit of
studious inquiry. From this very many are hindered. Some are
hindered by a constitutional unfitness, their natures being
ill-disposed to the acquisition of knowledge. They could never
arrive by study at the highest grade of human knowledge, which
consists in the knowledge of God. Others are hindered by the claims
of business and the ties of the management of property. There must
be in human society some men devoted to temporal affairs. These
could not possibly spend time enough in the learned lessons of
speculative inquiry to arrive at the highest point of human inquiry,
the knowledge of God. Some again are hindered by sloth. The
knowledge of the truths that reason can investigate concerning God
presupposes much previous knowledge; indeed almost the entire study
of philosophy is directed to the knowledge of God. Hence, of all
parts of philosophy that part stands over to be learned last, which
consists of metaphysics dealing with (divine things). Thus only with
great labour of study is it possible to arrive at the searching out
of the aforesaid truth; and this labour few are willing to undergo
for sheer love of knowledge.
"Another disadvantage is that such as did arrive at the knowledge or
discovery of the aforesaid truth would take a long time over it on
account of the profundity of such truth, and the many prerequisites
to the study, and also because in youth and early manhood the soul,
tossed to and fro on the {277} waves of passion, is not fit for the
study of such high truth; only in settled age does the soul become
prudent and scientific, as the philosopher says. Thus if the only
way open to the knowledge of God were the way of reason, the human
race would (remain) in thick darkness of ignorance: as the knowledge
of God, the best instrument for making men perfect and good, would
accrue only to a few after a considerable lapse of time.
"A third disadvantage is that, owing to the infirmity of our
judgment and the perturbing force of imagination, there is some
admixture of error in most of the investigations of human reason.
This would be a reason to many for continuing to doubt even of the
most accurate demonstrations, not perceiving the force of the
demonstration, and seeing the divers judgments, of divers persons
who have the name of being wise men. Besides, in the midst of much
demonstrated truth there is sometimes an element of error, not
demonstrated but asserted on the strength of some plausible and
sophistic reasoning that is taken for a demonstration. And therefore
it was necessary for the real truth concerning divine things to be
presented to men with fixed certainty by way of faith. Wholesome,
therefore, is the arrangement of divine clemency, whereby things
even that reason can investigate are commanded to be held on faith,
so that all might be easily partakers of the knowledge of God, and
that without doubt and error (Book I. cix)."
A still more striking example of Thomas's eminently sympathetic
discussion of a most difficult problem, is to be found in his
treatment of the question of the Resurrection of the Body. The
doctrine that men will rise again on the last day with the same bodies
that they had while here on earth, has been a stumbling block for the
faith of a great many persons from the beginning of Christianity. In
recent times the discovery of the indestructibility of matter, far
from lessening the skeptical elements in this problem as might have
been anticipated, has rather emphasized them. While the material of
which man's body was composed is never destroyed, it is broken up
largely into its original elements and is used over and over again in
many natural processes, and even enters into the composition of other
men's bodies during the long succeeding generations. Here is a problem
upon which it would {278} ordinarily be presumed at once, that a
philosophic writer of the Thirteenth Century could throw no possible
light. We venture to say, however, that the following passage which we
quote from an article on St. Thomas in a recent copy of the Dublin
_Review_, represents the best possible solution of the problem, even
in the face of all our modern advance in science.
"What does not bar numerical unity in a man while he lives on
uninterruptedly (writes St. Thomas), clearly can be no bar to the
identity of the arisen man with the man that was. In a man's body,
while he lives, there are not always the same parts in respect of
matter but only in respect of species. In respect of matter there is
a flux and reflux of parts. Still that fact does not bar the man's
numerical unity from the beginning to the end of his life. The form
and species of the several parts continue throughout life, but the
matter of the parts is dissolved by the natural heat, and new matter
accrues through nourishment. Yet the man is not numerically
different by the difference of his component parts at different
ages, although it is true that the material composition of the man
at one stage of his life is not his material composition at another.
Addition is made from without to the stature of a boy without
prejudice to his identity, for the boy and the adult are numerically
the same man."
In a word, Aquinas says that we recognize that the body of the boy and
of the man are the same though they are composed of quite different
material. With this in mind the problem of the Resurrection takes on
quite a new aspect from what it held before. What we would call
attention to, however, is not so much the matter of the argument as
the mode of it. It is essentially modern in every respect. Not only
does Thomas know that the body changes completely during the course of
years, but he knows that the agent by which the matter of the parts is
dissolved is "the natural heat," while "new matter accrues through
nourishment." The passage contains a marvelous anticipation of
present-day physiology as well as a distinct contribution to Christian
apologetics. This coordination of science and theology, though usually
thought to be lacking among scholastic philosophers, is constantly
typical of their mode of thought and discussion, and this example, far
from {279} being exceptional, is genuinely representative of them, as
all serious students of scholasticism know.
Perhaps the last thing for which the ordinary person would expect to
find a great modern teacher recommending the reading of St. Thomas
would be to find therein the proper doctrine with regard to liberty
and the remedies for our modern social evils. Those who will recall,
however, how well the generations of the Thirteenth Century faced
social problems even more serious than ours--for the common people had
no rights at all [at] the beginning of the century, yet secured them with
such satisfaction as to lay the foundation of the modern history of
liberty--will realize that the intellectual men of the time must have
had a much better grasp of the principles underlying such problems,
than would otherwise be imagined. As a matter of fact, St. Thomas's
treatment of Society, its rights and duties, and the mutual
relationship between it and the individual, is one of the triumphs of
his wonderful work in ethics. It is no wonder, then, that the great
Pope of the end of the Nineteenth Century, whose encyclicals showed
that he understood very thoroughly these social evils of our time,
recognized their tendencies and appreciated their danger, recommended
as a remedy for them the reading of St. Thomas. Pope Leo said:
"Domestic and civil society, even, which, as all see, is exposed to
great danger from the plague of perverse opinions, would certainly
enjoy a far more peaceful and a securer existence if more wholesome
doctrine were taught in the academies and schools--one more in
conformity with the teaching of the Church, such as is contained in
the works of Thomas Aquinas.
"For the teachings of Thomas on the true meaning of liberty--which
at this time is running into license--on the divine origin of all
authority, on laws and their force, on the paternal and just rule of
princes, on obedience to the higher powers, on mutual charity one
towards another--on all of these and kindred subjects, have very
great and invincible force to overturn those principles of the new
order which are well known to be dangerous to the peaceful order of
things and to public safety."
{280}
For this great Pope, however, there was no greater teacher of any of
the serious philosophical, ethical and theological problems than this
Saint of the Thirteenth Century. His position in the matter would only
seem exaggerated to those who do not appreciate Pope Leo's marvelous
practical intelligence, and Saint Thomas's exhaustive treatment of
most of the questions that have always been uppermost in the minds of
men. While, with characteristic humility, he considered himself
scarcely more than a commentator on Aristotle, his natural genius was
eminently original and he added much more of his own than what he took
from his master. There can be no doubt that his was one of the most
gifted minds in all humanity's history and that for profundity of
intelligence he deserves to be classed with Plato and Aristotle, as
his great disciple Dante is placed between Homer and Shakespeare.
Those who know St. Thomas the best, and have spent their lives in the
study of him, not only cordially welcomed but ardently applauded Pope
Leo's commendation of him, and considered that lofty as was his praise
there was not a word they would have changed even in such a laudatory
passage as the following:
"While, therefore, we hold that every word of wisdom, every useful
thing by whomsoever discovered or planned, ought to be received with
a willing and grateful mind. We exhort you, Venerable Brethren, in
all earnestness to restore the golden wisdom of St. Thomas, and to
spread it far and wide for the defense and beauty of the Catholic
faith, for the good of society, and for the advantage of all the
sciences. The wisdom of St. Thomas, We say--for if anything is taken
up with too great subtlety by the scholastic doctors, or too
carelessly stated--if there is anything that ill agrees with the
discoveries of a later age, or, in a word, improbable in whatever
way, it does not enter Our mind, to propose that for imitation to
Our age. Let carefully selected teachers endeavor to implant the
doctrines of Thomas Aquinas in the minds of students, and set forth
clearly his solidity and excellence over others. Let the academies
already founded or to be founded by you illustrate and defend this
doctrine, and use it for refutation of prevailing errors. But, lest
the false for the true or the corrupt for the pure be drunk in, be
watchful that the doctrine of Thomas {281} be drawn from his own
fountains, or at least from those rivulets which derived from the
very fount, have thus far flowed, according to the established
agreement of learned men, pure and clear; be careful to guard the
minds of youth from those which are said to flow thence, but in
reality are gathered from strange and unwholesome streams."
Tributes quite as laudatory are not lacking from modern secular
writers and while there have been many derogatory remarks, these have
always come from men who either knew Aquinas only at second hand, or
who confess that they had been unable to read him understandingly. The
praise all comes from men who have spent years in the study of his
writings.
A recent writer in the Dublin _Review_ (January, 1906) sums up his
appreciation of one of St. Thomas's works, his masterly book in
philosophy, as follows:
"The _Summa contra Gentiles_ is an historical monument of the first
importance for the history of philosophy. In the variety of its
contents, it is a perfect encyclopedia of the learning of the day.
By it we can fix the high-water mark of Thirteenth Century thought,
for it contains the lectures of a doctor second to none in the great
school of thought then flourishing--the University of Paris. It is
by the study of such books that one enters into the mental life of
the period at which they were written; not by the hasty perusal of
histories of philosophy. No student of the Contra Gentiles is likely
to acquiesce in the statement that the Middle Ages were a time when
mankind seemed to have lost the power of thinking for themselves.
Medieval people thought for themselves, thoughts curiously different
from ours and profitable to study."
Here is a similar high tribute for Aquinas's great work on Theology
from his modern biographer, Father Vaughan:
"The 'Summa Theologica' is a mighty synthesis, thrown into technical
and scientific form, of the Catholic traditions of East and West, of
the infallible dicta of the Sacred Page, and of the most enlightened
conclusions of human reason, gathered from the soaring intuitions of
the Academy, and the rigid severity of the Lyceum.
"Its author was a man endowed with the characteristic notes of the
three great Fathers of Greek Philosophy: he possessed {282} the
intellectual honesty and precision of Socrates, the analytical
keenness of Aristotle, and that yearning after wisdom and light
which was the distinguishing mark of 'Plato the divine,' and which
has ever been one of the essential conditions of the highest
intuitions of religion."
As a matter of fact it was the very greatness of Thomas Aquinas, and
the great group of contemporaries who were so close to him, that
produced an unfortunate effect on subsequent thinking and teaching in
Europe. These men were so surpassing in their grasp of the whole round
of human thought, that their works came to be worshiped more or less
as fetishes, and men did not think for themselves but appealed to them
as authorities. It is a great but an unfortunate tribute to the
scholastics of the Thirteenth Century that subsequent generations for
many hundred years not only did not think that they could improve on
them, but even hesitated to entertain the notion that they could equal
them. Turner in his History of Philosophy has pointed out this fact
clearly and has attributed to it, to a great extent, the decadence of
scholastic philosophy.
"The causes of the decay of scholastic philosophy were both internal
and external. The internal causes are to be found in the condition
of Scholastic philosophy at the beginning of the Fourteenth Century.
The great work of Christian syncretism had been completed by the
masters of the preceding period; revelation and science had been
harmonized; contribution had been levied on the pagan philosophies
of Greece and Arabia, and whatever truth these philosophies had
possessed had been utilized to form the basis of a rational
exposition of Christian revelation. The efforts of Roger Bacon and
of Alfred the Great to reform scientific method had failed; the
sciences were not cultivated. There was, therefore, no source of
development, and nothing was left for the later Scholastics except
to dispute as to the meaning of principles, to comment on the text
of this master or of that, and to subtilize to such an extent that
Scholasticism soon became a synonym for captious quibbling. The
great Thomistic principle that in philosophy the argument from
authority is the weakest of all arguments was forgotten; Aristotle,
St. Thomas, or Scotus became the criterion of truth, and as Solomon,
whose youthful wisdom had {283} astonished the world, profaned his
old age by the worship of idols, the philosophy of the schools, in
the days of its decadence, turned from the service of truth to
prostrate itself before the shrine of a master. Dialectic, which in
the Thirteenth Century had been regarded as the instrument of
knowledge, now became an object of study for the sake of display;
and to this fault of method was added a fault of style--an
uncouthness and barbarity of terminology which bewilder the modern
reader."
The appreciation of St. Thomas in his own time is the greatest tribute
to the critical faculty of the century that could be made. "Genius is
praised but starves," in the words of the old Roman poet. Certainly
most of the geniuses of the world have met with anything but their
proper meed of appreciation in their own time. This is not true,
however, during our Thirteenth Century. We have already shown how the
artists, and especially Giotto, (at the end of the Thirteenth Century
Giotto was only twenty-four years old) were appreciated, and how much
attention Dante began to attract from his contemporaries, and we may
add that all the great scholars of the period had a following that
insured the wide publication of their works, at a time when this had
to be accomplished by slow and patient hand-labor. The appreciation
for Thomas, indeed, came near proving inimical to his completion of
his important works in philosophy and theology. Many places in Europe
wanted to have the opportunity to hear him. We have only reintroduced
the practise of exchanging university professors in very recent years.
This was quite a common practise in the Thirteenth Century, however,
and so St. Thomas, after having been professor at Paris and later at
Rome, taught for a while at Naples and then at a number of the Italian
universities.
Everywhere he went he was noted for the kindliness of his disposition
and for his power to make friends. Looked upon as the greatest thinker
of his time it would be easy to expect that there should be some signs
of consciousness of this, and as a consequence some of that unpleasant
self-assertion which so often makes great intellectual geniuses
unpopular. Thomas, however, never seems to have had any
over-appreciation of his own talents, but, realizing how little he
knew compared to {284} the whole round of knowledge, and how
superficial his thinking was compared to the depth of the mysteries he
was trying, not to solve but to treat satisfactorily, it must be
admitted that there was no question of conceit having a place in his
life. This must account for the universal friendship of all who came
in contact with him. The popes insisted on having him as a professor
at the Roman university in which they were so much interested, and
which they wished to make one of the greatest universities of the
time. Here Thomas was brought in contact with ecclesiastics from all
over the world and helped to form the mind of the time. Those who
think the popes of the Middle Ages opposed to education should study
the records of this Roman university.
Thomas became the great friend of successive popes, some of whom had
been brought in contact with him during his years of studying and
teaching at Rome and Paris. This gave him many privileges and abundant
encouragement, but finally came near ruining his career as a
philosophic writer and teacher, since his papal friends wished to
raise him to high ecclesiastical dignities. Urban IV. seems first to
have thought of this but his successor Clement IV., one of the noblest
churchmen of the period, who had himself wished to decline the papacy,
actually made out the Bull, creating Thomas Archbishop of Naples. When
this document was in due course presented to Aquinas, far from giving
him any pleasure it proved a source of grief and pain. He saw the
chance to do his life-work slipping from him. This was so evident to
his friend the Pope that he withdrew the Bull and St. Thomas was left
in peace during the rest of his career, and allowed to prosecute that
one great object to which he had dedicated his mighty intellect. This
was the summing up of all human knowledge in a work that would show
the relation of the Creator to the creature, and apply the great
principles of Greek philosophy to the sublime truths of Christianity.
Had Thomas consented to accept the Archbishopric of Naples in all
human probability, as Thomas's great English biographer remarks, the
Summa Theologica would never have been written. It seems not unlikely
that the dignity was pressed upon him by the Pope partly at the
solicitation of powerful members of {285} his family, who hoped in
this to have some compensation for their relative's having abandoned
his opportunities for military and worldly glory. It is fortunate that
their efforts failed, and it is only one of the many examples in
history of the short-sightedness there may be in considerations that
seem founded on the highest human prudence.
Thomas was left free then to go on with his great work, and during the
next five years he applied every spare moment to the completion of his
Summa. More students have pronounced this the greatest work ever
written than is true for any other text-book that has ever been used
in schools. That it should be the basis of modern theological teaching
after seven centuries is of itself quite sufficient to proclaim its
merit. The men who are most enthusiastic about it are those who have
used it the longest and who know it the best.
St. Thomas's English biographer, the Very Rev. Roger Bede Vaughan, who
is a worthy member of that distinguished Vaughan family who have given
so many zealous ecclesiastics to the English Church and so many
scholars to support the cause of Christianity, can scarcely say enough
of this great work, nor of its place in the realm of theology. When it
is recalled that Father Vaughan was not a member of St. Thomas's own
order, the Dominicans, but of the Benedictines, it will be seen that
it was not because of any _esprit de corps_, but out of the depths of
his great admiration for the saint, that his words of praise were
written:
"It has been shown abundantly that no writer before the Angelical's
day could have created a synthesis of all knowledge. The greatest of
the classic Fathers have been treated of, and the reasons of their
inability are evident. As for the scholastics who more immediately
preceded the Angelical, their minds were not ripe for so great and
complete a work: the fullness of time had not yet come. Very
possibly had not Albert the Great and Alexander (of Hales) preceded
him, St. Thomas would not have been prepared to write his
master-work; just as, most probably, Newton would never have
discovered the law of gravitation had it not been for the previous
labors of Galileo and of Kepler. But just as the English astronomer
stands solitary in his greatness, though surrounded and {286}
succeeded by men of extraordinary eminence, so also the Angelical
stands by himself alone, although Albertus Magnus was a genius,
Alexander was a theological king, and Bonaventure a seraphic doctor.
Just as the Principia is a work unique, unreachable, so, too, is the
'Summa Theologica' of the great Angelical. Just as Dante stands
alone among the poets, so stands St. Thomas in the schools."
Probably the most marvelous thing about the life of St. Thomas is his
capacity for work. His written books fill up some twenty folios in
their most complete edition. This of itself would seem to be enough to
occupy a lifetime without anything more. His written works, however,
represent apparently only the products of his hours at leisure. He was
only a little more than fifty when he died and he had been a
university professor at Cologne, at Bologna, at Paris, at Rome, and at
Naples. In spite of the amount of work that he was thus asked to do,
his order, the Dominican, constantly called on him to busy himself
with certain of its internal affairs. On one occasion at least he
visited England in order to attend a Dominican Chapter at Oxford, and
the better part of several years at Paris was occupied with his labors
to secure for his brethren a proper place in the university, so that
they might act as teachers and yet have suitable opportunities for the
education and the discipline of the members of the Order.
Verily it would seem as though his days must have been at least twice
as long as those of the ordinary scholar and student to accomplish so
much; yet he is only a type of the monks of the Middle Ages, of whom
so many people seem to think that their principal traits were to be
fat and lazy. Thomas was fat, as we know from the picture of him which
shows him before a desk from which a special segment has been removed
to accommodate more conveniently a rather abnormal abdominal
development, but as to laziness, surely the last thing that would
occur to anyone who knows anything about him, would be to accuse him
of it. Clearly those who accept the ancient notion of monkish laziness
will never understand the Middle Ages. The great educational progress
of the Thirteenth Century was due almost entirely to monks.
{287}
There is another extremely interesting side to the intellectual
character of Thomas Aquinas which is usually not realized by the
ordinary student of philosophy and theology, and still less perhaps by
those who are interested in him from an educational standpoint. This
is his poetical faculty. For Thomas as for many of the great
intellectual geniuses of the modern time, the sacrament of the Holy
Eucharist was one of the most wondrously satisfying devotional
mysteries of Christianity and the subject of special devotion. In our
own time the great Cardinal Newman manifested this same attitude of
mind. Thomas because of his well-known devotion to the Blessed
Sacrament, was asked by the Pope to write the office for the then
recently established feast of Corpus Christi. There are always certain
hymns incorporated in the offices of the different Feast days. It
might ordinarily have been expected that a scholar like Aquinas would
write the prose portions of the office, leaving the hymns for some
other hand, or selecting hymns from some older sacred poetry. Thomas,
however, wrote both hymns and prose, and, surprising as it may be, his
hymns are some of the most beautiful that have ever been composed and
remain the admiration of posterity.
It must not be forgotten in this regard that Thomas's career occurred
during the period when Latin hymn writing was at its apogee. The Dies
Irae and the Stabat Mater were both written during the Thirteenth
Century, and the most precious Latin hymns of all times were composed
during the century and a half from 1150 to 1300. Aquinas's hymns do
not fail to challenge comparison even with the greatest of these.
While he had an eminently devotional subject, it must not be forgotten
that certain supremely difficult theological problems were involved in
the expression of devotion to the Blessed Sacrament. In spite of the
difficulties, Thomas succeeded in making not only good theology but
great poetry. A portion of one of his hymns, the Tantum Ergo, has been
perhaps more used in church services than any other, with the possible
exception of the Dies Irae. Another one of his beautiful hymns that
especially deserves to be admired, is less well known and so I have
ventured to quote three selected stanzas of it, as an illustration
{288} of Thomas's command over rhyme and rhythm in the Latin tongue.
[Footnote 24]
Adoro te devote, latens Deitas,
Quae sub his figuris vere latitas.
Tibi se cor meum totum subjicit,
Quia te contemplans totum deficit.
Visus, tactus, gustus, in te fallitur,
Sed auditu solo tute creditur:
Credo quidquid dixit Dei filius
Nihil veritatis verbo verius.
And the less musical but wonderfully significative fourth, stanza--
Plagas sicut Thomas non intueor,
Deum tamen meum te confiteor,
Fac me tibi semper magis credere,
In te spem habere, te diligere.
Only the ardent study of many years will give anything like an
adequate idea of the great schoolman's universal genius. I am content
if I have conveyed a few hints that will help to a beginning of an
acquaintance with one of the half dozen supreme minds of our race.
[Footnote 24: The following translation made by Justice O'Hagan
renders sense and sound into English as adequately perhaps as is
possible:
Hidden God, devoutly I adore thee,
Truly present underneath these veils:
All my heart subdues itself before thee.
Since it all before thee faints and fails.
Not to sight, or taste, or touch be credit.
Hearing only do we trust secure;
I believe, for God the Son hath said it--
Word of truth that ever shall endure.
...
Though I look not on thy wounds with Thomas,
Thee, my Lord, and thee, my God, I call:
Make me more and more believe thy promise,
Hope in thee, and love thee over all.
]
{289}
XVIII
ST. LOUIS THE MONARCH.
If large numbers of men are to be ruled by one of their number, as
seems more or less inevitable in the ordinary course of things, then,
without doubt, the best model of what such a monarch's life should be,
is to be found in that of Louis IX., who for nearly half a century was
the ruler of France during our period. Of all the rulers of men of
whom we have record in history he probably took his duties most
seriously, with most regard for others, and least for himself and for
his family. There is not a single relation of life in which he is not
distinguished and in which his career is not worth studying, as an
example of what can be done by a simple, earnest, self-forgetful man,
to make life better and happier for all those who come in contact with
him.
His relations with his mother are those of an affectionate son in whom
indeed, from his easy compliance with her wishes in his younger years
one might suspect some weakness, but whose strength of character is
displayed at every turn once he himself assumed the reins of
government. After many years of ruling however, when his departure on
the Crusade compelled him to be absent from the kingdom it was to her
he turned again to act as his representative and the wisdom of the
choice no one can question. As a husband Louis' life was a model, and
though he could not accomplish the impossible, and was not able to
keep the relations of his mother and his wife as cordial as he would
have liked them to be, judging from human experience generally it is
hard to think this constitutes any serious blot on his fair name. As a
father, few men have ever thought less of material advantages for
their children, or more of the necessity for having them realize that
happiness in life does not consist in the possession of many things,
but rather in the accomplishment of duty and in the recognition of the
fact that the giving of happiness to others {290} constitutes the best
source of felicity for one's self. His letters and instructions to his
children, as preserved for us by Joinville and other contemporaries,
give us perhaps the most taking picture of the man that we have, and
round out a personality, which, while it has in the telling French
phrase "the defects of its virtues," is surely one of the most
beautiful characters that has ever been seen upon earth, in a man who
took an active and extremely important part in the great events of the
world of his time.
The salient points of his character are his devotion to the three
great needs of humanity as they present themselves in his time. He
made it the aim of his life that men should have justice, and
education, and when for any misfortune they needed it,--charity; and
every portion of his career is taken up with successful achievement in
these great departments of social action. It is well known that when
he became conscious that the judges sometimes abused their power and
gave sentences for partial reasons, the monarch himself took up the
onerous duty of hearing appeals and succeeded in making the judges of
his kingdom realize, that only the strictest justice would save them
from the king's displeasure, and condign punishment. For an unjust
judge there was short shrift. The old tree at Versailles, under which
he used to hear the causes of the poor who appealed to him, stood for
many centuries as a reminder of Louis' precious effort to make the
dispensing of justice equal to all men. When the duty of hearing
appeals took up too much of his time it was transferred to worthy
shoulders, and so the important phase of jurisprudence in France
relating to appeals, came to be thoroughly established as a part of
the organic law of the kingdom.
{opp290}
[Illustration]
NOTRE DAME (PARIS)
As regards education, too much can not be said of Louis' influence. It
is to him more than to anybody else that the University of Paris owes
the success it achieved as a great institution of learning at the end
of the Thirteenth Century. Had the monarch been opposed to the spread
of education with any idea that it might possibly undermine his
authority, had he even been indifferent to it, Paris would not have
come to be the educational center of the world. As it was, Louis not
only encouraged it in every way, but also acted as the patron of great
{291} subsidiary institutions which were to add to its prestige and
enhance its facilities. Among the most noteworthy is the Sorbonne. La
Sainte Chapelle deserves to be mentioned, however, and the library
attached to it, which owed its foundation and development to Louis,
were important factors in attracting students to Paris and in
furnishing them interestingly suggestive material for thought and the
development of taste during their residence there. His patronage of
Vincent of Beauvais, the encyclopedist, was but a further
manifestation of his interest in everything educational. His
benefactions to the Hotel Dieu must be considered rather under the
head of charity, and yet they also serve to represent his
encouragement of medical education and of the proper care for the poor
in educated hands.
Voltaire, to whom Louis' character as a supreme believer in revealed
religion must have been so utterly unsympathetic, and whose position
as the historical symbol of all that Voltaire most held in antipathy
in medievalism, might have been expected to make the French
philosopher avoid mention of him since he could not condemn, has been
forced into some striking utterances in praise of Louis, one of which
we quote:
"Louis IX appeared to be a prince destined to reform Europe, if she
could have been reformed, to render France triumphant and civilized,
and to be in all things a pattern for men. His piety which was that
of an anchorite, did not deprive him of any kingly virtue. A wise
economy took nothing from his liberality. A profound policy was
combined with strict justice and he is perhaps the only sovereign
who is entitled to this praise; prudent and firm in counsel,
intrepid without rashness in his wars, he was as compassionate as if
he had always been unhappy. No man could have carried virtue
further."
Guizot, the French statesman and historian, whose unbending Calvinism
made the men and institutions of the Middle Ages almost
incomprehensible to him from their Catholic aspects, has much of good
to say of Louis, though there is not wanting rather definite evidence
of the reluctance of his admiration:
"The world has seen more profound politicians on the throne, greater
generals, men of more mighty and brilliant intellect, princes who
have exercised a more powerful influence {292} over later
generations and events subsequent to their own times; but it has
never seen such a king as this St. Louis, never seen a man
possessing sovereign power and yet not contracting the vices and
passions which attend it, displaying upon the throne in such a high
degree every human virtue purified and ennobled by Christian faith.
St. Louis did not give any new or personal impulse to his age; he
did not strongly influence the nature or the development of
civilization in France; whilst he endeavored to reform the gravest
abuses of the feudal system by the introduction of justice and
public order, he did not endeavor to abolish it either by the
substitution of a pure monarchy, or by setting class against class
in order to raise the royal authority high above all. He was neither
an egotist nor a scheming diplomatist; he was, in all sincerity, in
harmony with his age and sympathetic alike with the faith, the
institutions, the customs, and the tastes of France in the
Thirteenth Century. And yet, both in the Thirteenth Century and in
later times St. Louis stands apart as a man of profoundly original
character, an isolated figure without any peer among his
contemporaries or his successors. As far as it was possible in the
Middle Ages, he was an ideal man, king, and Christian."
Guizot goes even further than this when he says, "It is reported that
in the Seventeenth Century, during the brilliant reign of Louis XIV.,
Montecuculli, on learning of the death of his illustrious rival,
Turenne, said to his officers, 'A man has died to-day who did honor to
mankind.' St. Louis did honor to France, to royalty, to humanity, and
to Christianity. This was the feeling of his contemporaries, and after
six centuries it is still confirmed by the judgment of the historian."
Of Louis' wonderful influence for good as a ruler all historians are
agreed in talking in the highest terms. His private life however, is
even more admirable for our purpose of bringing out the greatness of
the Thirteenth Century. Of course many legends and myths have gathered
around his name, but still enough remains of absolutely trustworthy
tradition and even documentary evidence, to make it very clear that he
was a man among men, a nobleman of nature's making, who in any
position of life would have acquitted himself with a perfection sure
to make his life worthy of admiration. One of the most {293} striking
traits of his character is his love of justice, his insatiable desire
to render to all men what was rightly theirs. A biographer has told
the story that gives the most telling proof of this in relating the
solicitude with which he tried to right all the wrongs not only of his
own reign, but of those of his predecessors, before he set out on the
Crusade. He wished to have the absolute satisfaction that he, nor his,
owed any man any reparation, as the most precious treasure he could
take with him on his perilous expedition. He wished even to undo any
wrongs that might have been done in his name though he was entirely
unconscious of them.
"As he wished to be in a state of grace at the moment of departure,
and to take with him to the Holy Land a quiet conscience by leaving
the kingdom in as happy a condition as possible, he resolved to
carry out one of the noblest measures ever undertaken by a king. By
his order, inquisitors were sent into all the provinces annexed to
the royal dominion since the accession of Philip Augustus. All those
who had been maltreated or despoiled by the bailiffs, seneschals,
provosts, sergeants, and other representatives of the royal
authority, came to declare their wrongs to these newly appointed
judges, and to demand the reparation which was due to them; the
number was great, since for forty years there had been much
suffering in the country districts and even in the towns .... The
royal officers had too often acted as if they were in a conquered
country; they believed themselves to be safe from observation, so
that they might do as they pleased. The people had much to endure
during these forty years, and it was a noble idea to make reparation
freely and with elaborate care. No prince had been known, of his own
accord and at his own cost, to redress the wrongs inflicted on the
people during the reigns of his father and grandfather. This made an
immense impression, which lasted for centuries. Blanche's son was
not merely a good king, he became the unrivalled sovereign, the
impeccable judge, the friend and consoler of his subjects."
It is no wonder that so inappeasable a lover of justice should commend
that virtue above all others to his son. When we read his letters to
that son who was to be his successor, in the light of Louis' own
career, we appreciate with what utter {294} sincerity they were
written. Louis realized that simple justice between men would undo
more of the world's wrongs than most of the vaunted cures for social
ills, which are only too often the result of injustice.
"Dear son," he writes in his Instruction, "if you come to reign, do
that which befits a king, that is, be so just as to deviate in
nothing from justice, whatever may befall you. If a poor man goes to
law with one who is rich, support the poor rather than the rich man
until you know the truth, and when the truth is known, do that which
is just. And if it happen that any man has a dispute with yourself,
maintain the cause of your adversary before the council so as not to
appear partial to your own cause, until the truth is known. Unless
you do this, those who are of the council may fear to speak against
you, and this ought not to be. . . . And if you find that you
possess anything unjustly acquired, either in your time or in that
of your predecessors, make restitution at once, however great its
value, either in land, money, or any other thing. . . . If the
matter is doubtful and you cannot find out the truth, follow the
advice of trusty men, and make such an agreement as may fully
deliver your soul and that of your predecessors. If you hear that
your predecessors have made restitution of anything, take great
trouble to discover if anything more should be restored, and if you
find that this is the case, restore it at once so as to deliver your
own soul and that of your predecessors."
"The education of his children, their future position and
well-being, engrossed the attention of the King as entirely, and
were subjects of as keen an interest, as if he had been a father
with no other task than the care of his children. After supper they
followed him to his apartment, where he made them sit around him for
a time whilst he instructed them in their duty; he then sent them to
bed. He would direct their attention particularly to the good and
bad actions of Princes. He used to visit them in their own apartment
when he had any leisure, inquire as to their progress, and like a
second Tobias, give them excellent instruction .... On Maundy
Thursday, he and his children used to wash the feet of a dozen poor
persons, give them large alms, and afterward wait upon them whilst
they dined. The King together with his son-in-law {295} King
Thibault, whom he loved and looked upon as his own son, carried the
first poor man to the hospital of Compiègne, and his two oldest
sons, Louis and Philippe, carried the second. They were accustomed
to act with him in all things, showing him great reverence, and he
desired that they and Thibault should also obey him implicitly in
everything that he commanded."
Anyone who still retains any trace of the old-fashioned notion, which
used to be unfortunately a commonplace among English speaking people,
that the medieval Monks were unworthy of their great calling, and that
the monasteries were the homes of lazy, fat-witted men whose only
object in taking up the life was to secure an easy means of
livelihood, will be thoroughly undeceived, if he but read with some
attention the stories of Louis' relations to the monasteries. In all
his journeys he stopped in them, he always asked to see their
libraries, he insisted on not being treated better than the community
and in every way he tried to show his esteem for them. There is a
story which may or may not be true in the "Little Flowers of St.
Francis," which comes from almost a contemporary source, however, that
once on his travels he called on Brother Giles, the famous
simple-minded companion of St. Francis, of whom so many delightfully
humorous stories are told. Brother Giles received his affectionate
greeting but said never a word in return. After the first words the
King himself said nothing, but both sat and communed in silence for
some time, and then the King departed apparently well-pleased with his
visit. Needless to say when Brother Giles told the story of the King
of France having called on him there was a commotion in the community.
But by this time the King was far distant on his way.
Indeed Louis took so many opportunities to stop in monasteries and
follow monastic regulations as to prayer and the taking of meals while
there, that he quite disgusted some of the members of his retinue who
were most with him. One of the ladies of the court in her impatience
at him for this, is once said to have remarked under such indiscreet
circumstances that it was reported to Louis, that she wished they had
a man and not a monk for King. Louis is said to have asked her very
{296} gently if she would prefer that he spend most of his time in
sport and in excesses of various kinds. Even such remarks, however,
had no effect in turning him from his purpose to live as simply and as
beneficently for others as possible. His genuine appreciation of the
monks must be recognized from his wishes with regard to his children.
On the other hand his readiness to secure their happiness as far as
possible in the way they wished for themselves shows the tenderness of
his fatherly heart. A modern biographer has said of him:--
"He was very anxious that his three children born in the East during
the Crusade--Jean Tristan, Pierre, and Blanche--and even his eldest
daughter Isabella, should enter the monastic life, which he looked
upon as the most likely to insure their salvation; he frequently
exhorted them to take this step, writing letters of the greatest
tenderness and piety, especially to his daughter Isabella; but, as
they did not show any taste for it, he did not attempt to force
their inclinations. Thenceforth, he busied himself in making
suitable marriages for them, and establishing them according to
their rank; at the same time he gave them the most judicious advice
as to their conduct and actions in the world upon which they were
entering. When he was before Tunis and found that he was sick unto
death, he gave the instructions which he had written out in French
with his own hand to his eldest son, Philip. They are models of
virtue, wisdom and paternal tenderness, worthy of a King and a
Christian."
Perhaps the most interesting feature of St. Louis' life was his
treatment of the poor. He used literally to recall the fact that they
must stand to him in the place of God. "Whatever you do to the least
of these you do even unto me" was a favorite expression frequently in
his mouth. He waited on them personally and no matter how revolting
their appearance would not be deterred from this personal service. It
is easy to understand that his courtiers did not sympathize with this
state of mind, though Louis used to encourage them not only by his
example but by personal persuasion. Every Holy Thursday he used to
wash the feet of twelve poor people at a public ceremonial, in honor
of the washing of the feet of the Apostles by Christ.
{opp296}
[Illustration]
APOSTLE (LA SAINTE CHAPELLE, PARIS)
It must not be thought moreover, that such a {297} proceeding was
perhaps less repugnant to the feelings of the men of that time than
they are to the present generation. It might be considered that the
general paucity of means for maintaining personal cleanliness in
medieval times would make the procedure less disgusting. As a proof of
the contrary of this we have the words of Joinville who tells of the
following conversation:--
"Many a time," says Joinville, "I have seen him cut their bread for
them, and pour out their drink. One day he asked me if I washed the
feet of the poor on Maundy Thursday. "Sire," I answered, "What, the
feet of those dirty wretches! No indeed, I shall never wash them."
"Truly," replied the King, "you have spoken ill, for you ought not
to despise that which God intended for your instruction. I pray you,
therefore, first of all for the love of God, and then by your love
towards me, that you make a habit of washing their feet."
Even more striking than this however, was his attitude toward the
lepers of the time. These poor creatures were compelled to live apart
from the population and were not allowed to approach healthy
individuals. They were of exceeding interest to Louis however, who
took every opportunity to mitigate the trials and hardships of their
existence. Whenever he met them on his journeys he insisted on
abundant alms being given them, and gave orders that every possible
provision for their welfare, consonant with the care that their
affection should not be permitted to spread, be made for them. Over
and over again he greeted them as his brothers and when his retinue
feared to approach them, would himself go to them, in order to console
them by his words and his exhibition of personal interest. There is an
incident told of his having on one occasion, when a muddy stream
intervened between him and some lepers, forded the stream alone in
order to get to them, and neither any personal fear of contagion nor
any natural repugnance was permitted to deter him from this sublime
work of charity. It is no wonder that his people proclaimed him a
saint, that is "one who thinks first of others and only second of
himself," even during his lifetime.
The only supposed blot upon Louis' character is the denunciation by
certain modern writers of what they call the fanaticism, {298} which
prompted him to go on the Crusades instead of remaining at home
properly to care for his people. The opinion with regard to the place
that must be assigned to the Crusades as a factor in history and
national as well as European development, has changed very much in
recent years. Formerly it was the custom almost entirely to condemn
them and to look upon them as a serious mistake. Such ideas however,
are only entertained by those who do not realize the conditions under
which they were undertaken or the important results which flowed from
them. Bishop Stubbs in his lectures on Medieval and Modern History,
delivered while he was professor of History at Oxford, has been at
some pains to correct this false notion, and his passage constitutes
one of the best apologies for Louis' interest in the Crusades which
could be written. He said:--
"The Crusades are not, in my mind, either the popular delusions that
our cheap literature has determined them to be, nor papal
conspiracies against kings and peoples, as they appear to Protestant
controversialists; nor the savage outbreak of expiring barbarism,
thirsting for blood and plunder, nor volcanic explosions of
religious intolerance. I believe them to have been in their deep
sources, and in the minds of their best champions, and in the main
tendency of their results, capable of ample justification. They were
the first great effort of medieval life to go beyond the pursuit of
selfish and isolated ambitions; they were the trial-feat of the
young world, essaying to use, to the glory of God and the benefit of
man, the arms of its new knighthood. That they failed in their
direct object is only what may be alleged against almost every great
design which the great disposer of events has moulded to help the
world's progress; for the world has grown wise from the experience
of failure, rather than by the winning of high aims. That the good
they did was largely leavened with evil may be said of every war
that has ever been waged; that bad men rose by them while good men
fell, is and must be true, wherever and whenever the race is to the
swift and the battle to the strong. But that in the end they were a
benefit to the world no one who reads can doubt; and that in their
course they brought out a love for all that is heroic in human
nature, the love of freedom, the honor of prowess, sympathy with
sorrow, {299} perseverance to the last, the chronicles of the age
abundantly prove; proving, moreover, that it was by the experience
of these times that the forms of those virtues were realized and
presented to posterity." [Footnote 25]
[Footnote 25: Stubbs, "Seventeen Lectures on Medieval and Modern
History," p. 180.]
With the stigma of supposed imprudence or foolhardiness for having
gone on the Crusade turned into a new cause for honor, Louis must be
considered as probably the greatest monarch who ever occupied an
important throne. Instead of being surprised that such a monarch
should have come in the heart of the Middle Ages and during a century
so distant as the Thirteenth, readers must now be ready to appreciate
to some degree at least the fact, that his environment instead of
being a hindrance in any sense of the word to the development of
Louis' greatness, should rather be considered as one of the principal
sources of it. Louis' character was representative of the men of that
time and exhibits in their most striking form the qualities that were
set up as ideals in that period. If the century had produced nothing
else but Louis, it would have to be considered as a great epoch in
history, for he was no mere accident but typically a son of his age.
If this is but properly appreciated the true significance not only of
Louis' life but the period in which he lived will be better understood
than would be possible by any other means. Those who want to know the
men of this wonderful century as they actually were should study
Louis' life in detail, for we have been only able to hint at its most
striking characteristics.
{opp300}
[Illustration]
DECORATION (QUEEN MARY'S PSALTER, XIII. CENTURY MS.)
{300}
XIX
DANTE THE POET.
It is only too often the custom to talk of Dante as a solitary
phenomenon in his time. Even Carlyle who knew well and properly
appreciated many things in medieval life and letters and especially in
the literary productions of the Thirteenth Century said, that in Dante
"ten silent centuries found a voice." Anyone who has followed what we
have had to say with regard to the Thirteenth Century will no longer
think of Dante as standing alone, but will readily appreciate that he
is only the fitting culmination of a great literary era. After having
gone over even as hurriedly as has been necessary in our brief space,
what was accomplished in every country of Europe in literature that
was destined to live not only because of the greatness of the
thoughts, but also for the ultimateness of its expression, we should
expect some surpassing literary genius at the end of the period. It
seems almost inevitable indeed that a supreme poet, whose name stands
above all others but one or two at the most in the whole history of
the race, should have lived in the Thirteenth Century, and should have
summed up effectually in himself all the greatness of the century and
enshrined its thoughts in undying verse for all future generations.
{opp300}
[Illustration]
PORTRAIT OF DANTE (GIOTTO, IN THE BARGELLO, FLORENCE)
When Dante himself dares to place his name with those of the men whom
he considered the five greatest poets of all time, it seems sublimest
egotism. At first thought many will at once conclude that his reason
for so doing was, that in the unlettered times his critical faculty
was not well developed and as he knew that his work far surpassed that
of his contemporaries, he could scarcely help but conclude that his
place must be among the great poets. Any such thought however, is
entirely due to lack of knowledge of the conditions of Dante's life
and education. He had been in the universities of Italy, and in his
exile had visited Paris and probably also Oxford. He knew the poets of
his country well. He appreciated them {301} highly. It was the
consciousness of genius that made him place himself so high and not
any faulty comparison with others. Succeeding generations have set him
even higher than the place chosen by himself and now we breathe his
name only with those of Homer and Shakespeare, considering that these
three sublime immortals are so far above all other poets that there is
scarcely a second to them.
Dante is the most universal of poets. He has won recognition from all
nations, and he has been the favorite reading of the most diverse
times and conditions of men. From the very beginning he has been
appreciated, and even before his death men had begun to realize
something of the supremacy of his greatness. Commentaries on his works
that have been preserved down to our own day were written almost
during his lifetime. Only supreme interest could have tempted men to
multiply these by the hard labor of patient handwriting. Petrarch who
as a young man, was his contemporary, recognized him as the Prince of
Italian poets who had composed in their common tongue, and even was
tempted to say that the subtle and profound conceptions of the
Commedia could not have been written without the special gift of the
Holy Ghost. Boccaccio was wont to speak of him as the Divine Poet, and
tells us that he had learned that Petrarch deliberately held aloof
from the Commedia, through fear of losing his originality if he came
under the spell of so great a master.
Very few realize how great a poet Dante must be considered even if
only the effusions of his younger years were to be taken as the
standard of his poetical ability. Some of his sonnets are as beautiful
of their kind as are to be found in this form of poetry. His
description of his lady-love is famous among sonnets of lovers and may
only be compared with some of the Sonnets from the Portuguese in our
own day, or with one or two of Camoens' original sonnets in the
Portuguese, for lofty praise of the beloved in worthy numbers. After
reading Dante's sonnets it is easy to understand how a half century
later Petrarch was able to raise the sonnet form to an excellence that
was never to be surpassed. With a beginning like this it is no wonder
that the sonnet became so popular in Europe during the next three
centuries, and that every young poet, {302} down to Shakespeare's
time, had an attack of sonneteering just as he might have had an
attack of the measles. The first one of a pair of sonnets that are
considered supreme in their class deserves a place here as an example
of Dante's poetic faculty in this form, for which he is so much less
known than he ought to be.
He sees completely fullest bliss abound
Who among ladies sees my Lady's face;
Those that with her do go are surely bound
To give God thanks for such exceeding grace.
And in her beauty such strange might is found.
That envy finds in other hearts no place;
So she makes them walk with her, clothed all round
With love and faith and courteous gentleness.
The sight of her makes all things lowly be;
Nor of herself alone she gives delight.
But each through her receiveth honor due.
And in her acts is such great courtesy,
That none can recollect that wondrous sight.
Who sighs not for it in Love's sweetness true.
It will be noted that Dante has nothing to say of the personal
appearance of his beloved. This is true, however, of the whole series
of poems to and about her. He never seems to have thought for a moment
of her physical qualities. What he finds worthy to praise is her
goodness which shines out from her features so that everyone rejoices
in it, while a sweetness fills the heart as if a heavenly visitor had
come. For him her supreme quality is that, with all her beauty, envy
finds no place in others' hearts because she is so clothed around with
love and faith and courteous gentleness. It has often been said that
Shakespeare did not describe the physical appearances of his heroines
because he realized that this meant very little, but then Shakespeare
had to write for the stage and realized that blondes and brunettes,
especially in the olden time, could not be made to order and that it
was better to leave the heroine's physical appearance rather vague. It
would be expected, however, that Dante, with his Southern temperament,
would have dwelt on the physical perfections of his fair. The next
{303} sonnet, however, of the best known group emphasizes his
abstraction of all physical influence in the matter and insists on her
goodness and the womanly beauty of her character. It will be found in
our chapter on Women of the Century.
In his earlier years Dante considered himself one of the Troubadours,
and there can be no doubt that if he had never written the Divine
Comedy, he still would have been remembered as one of the great poets
who wrote of love in this Thirteenth Century. Not only does he deserve
a place among the greatest of the Minnesingers, the Trouvères, and the
Troubadours, but he is perhaps the greatest of them. That he should
have sung as he did at the end of the century only shows that he was
in the stream of literary evolution and not being merely carried idly
along, but helping to guide it into ever fairer channels. Dante's
minor poems would have made enduring fame for any poet of less genius
than himself. His prose works deserve to be read by anyone who wishes
to know the character of this greatest of poets, and also to
appreciate what the educational environment of the Thirteenth Century
succeeded in making out of good intellectual material when presented
to it. Dante's works are the real treasury of information of the most
precious kind with regard to the century, since they provide the
proper standpoint from which to view all that it accomplished.
While Dante was a supreme singer among the poets of a great song time,
it was only natural, in the light of what we know about the literary
product of the rest of this century, that he should have put into epic
form the supreme product of his genius. With the great national epics
in every country of Europe--the Cid, the Arthur Legends, and the
Nibelungen, at the beginning of this century, and the epical poems of
the Meistersingers during its first half, it is not surprising, but on
the contrary rather what might have been confidently looked for, that
there should have arisen a great national epic in Italy before the end
of the century. The Gothic art movement spread through all these
countries, and so did the wind of the spirit of esthetic
accomplishment which blew the flame of national literature in each
country into a mighty blaze, that not only was {304} never to be
extinguished, but was to be a beacon light in the realm of national
literatures forever after.
We have already said a word of the well-known contemporary admiration
for the poet but it should be realized that due appreciation of Dante
continued in Italy during all the time when Italian art and literature
was at its highest. It dwindled only at periods of decadence and lack
of taste. Cornelius' law with regard to Dante's influence on art is
very well known, Italian art according to him, has been strong and
vigorous just in proportion as it has worked under Dante's influence,
while it became weak and sensuous as that influence declined. This has
held true from the very beginning and has been as true for literature
as for art. When the Italians became interested in trivialities and
gave themselves up to weak imitations of the classics, or to pastoral
poetry that was not a real expression of feeling but a passing fancy
of literary folk, then Dante was for a time in obscurity. Even at the
height of the Renaissance, however, when Greek was at the acme of its
interest and the classics occupied so much attention that Dante might
be expected to be eclipsed, the great thinkers and critics of the time
still worshipped at the shrine of their great master of Italian verse.
The best proof of this is to be found in Michael Angelo's famous
sonnets in praise of Dante, the second of which would seem to exhaust
all that can be said in praise of a brother poet.
Into the dark abyss he made his way;
Both nether worlds he saw, and in the might
Of his great soul beheld God's splendour bright.
And gave to us on earth true light of day:
Star of supremest worth with its clear ray.
Heaven's secrets he revealed to us through our dim sight.
And had for guerdon what the base world's spite
Oft gives to souls that noblest grace display,
Full ill was Dante's life-work understood,
His purpose high, by that ungrateful state.
That welcomed all with kindness but the good.
Would I were such, to bear like evil fate,
To taste his exile, share his lofty mood.
For this I'd gladly give all earth calls great.
{305}
In the first of this pair of sonnets, however, Michael Angelo gave if
possible even higher praise than this. It will be recalled that he
himself, besides being the greatest of sculptors and one of the
greatest of painters and architects in a wonderfully productive
period, was also a very great poet. These sonnets to Dante, the one to
his crucifix, and one to Vittoria Colonna, are the best proof of this.
He knew how to chisel thoughts into wonderfully suitable words quite
as well as marble into the beautiful forms that grew under his hands.
With all his greatness, and he must have been conscious of it, he
thinks that he would be perfectly willing to give up all that earth
calls great, simply to share Dante's lofty mood even in his exile. No
greater tribute has ever been paid by one poet to another than this,
and Michael Angelo's genius was above all critical, never
thoughtlessly laudatory. As emphasizing the highest enlightened taste
of a great epoch this has seemed to deserve a place here also.
What should be said of him speech may not tell;
His splendor is too great for men's dim sight;
And easier 'twere to blame his foes aright
Than for his poorest gifts to praise him well.
He tracked the path that leads to depths of Hell
To teach us wisdom, scaled the eternal height.
And heaven with open gates did him invite.
Who in his own loved city might not dwell.
Ungrateful country step-dame of his fate.
To her own loss: full proof we have in this
That souls most perfect bear the greatest woe.
Of thousand things suffice in this to state:
No exile ever was unjust as his,
Nor did the world his equal ever know.
In England, in spite of distance of country, race and language, the
appreciation of Dante began very early. Readers of Chaucer know the
great Italian as the favorite poet of the Father of English poetry,
and over and over again he has expressed the feeling of how much
greater than anything he could hope to do was Dante's accomplishment.
Readers will remember how Chaucer feels unable to tell the story of
{306} Ugolino and his starving sons in the Hunger Tower, and refers
those interested in the conclusion of the tale to Dante. After the
religious revolt of the early Sixteenth Century Dante was lost sight
of to a great extent. His temper was too Catholic to be appreciated by
Puritan England, and the Elizabethans were too much occupied with
their own creation of a great national literature, to have any time
for appreciation of a foreigner so different in spirit from their
times. With the coming of the Oxford Movement, however, Dante at once
sprang into favor, and a number of important critical appreciations of
him reintroduced him to a wide reading public in England, most of whom
were among the most cultured of the island. This renewed interest in
Dante gave rise to some of the best critical appreciations in any
language. Dean Church's famous essay is the classic English monograph
on Dante, and its opening paragraph sounds the keynote of critical
opinion among English speaking people.
"The Divina Commedia is one of the landmarks of history. More than a
magnificent poem, more than the beginning of a language and the
opening of a national literature, more than the inspirer of art and
the glory of a great people, it is one of those rare and solemn
monuments of the mind's power which measure and test what it can
reach to, which rise up ineffaceably and forever as time goes on,
marking out its advance by grander divisions than its centuries, and
adopted as epochs by the consent of all who come after. It stands
with the Iliad and Shakespeare's Plays, with the writings of
Aristotle and Plato, with the Novum Organon and the Principia, with
Justinian's Code, with the Parthenon and St. Peter's. It is the
first Christian Poem, and it opens European literature as the Iliad
did that of Greece and Rome. And, like the Iliad, it has never
become out of date; it accompanies in undiminished freshness the
literature which it began."
{opp306}
[Illustration]
TORRE DEL FAME (DANTE, PISA)
[Illustration]
PALAZZO PRETORIO (TODI)
No better introduction to Dante could be obtained than this from Dean
Church. Those who have found it difficult to get interested in the
great Florentine poet, and who have been prone to think that perhaps
the pretended liking for him on the part of many people was an
affectation rather than a sincere expression of opinion, should read
this essay and learn {307} something of the wealth of sympathy there
is in Dante for even the man of these modern times. Our Thirteenth
Century poet is not easy to read but there is probably no reading in
all the world that brings with it so much of intellectual
satisfaction, so much of awakening of the best feelings in man, so
many glimpses into the depths of his being, as some lines from Dante
pondered under favorable circumstances. Like one of these Gothic
cathedrals of the olden times he never grows old, but, on the
contrary, every favorite passage seems to have a new message for each
mood of the reader. This is particularly true for the spiritual side
of man's being as has been pointed out by Dean Church in a well-known
passage toward the end of his essay.
"Those who know the Divina Commedia best will best know how hard it
is to be the interpreter of such a mind; but they will sympathize
with the wish to call attention to it. They know, and would wish
others also to know, not by hearsay, but by experience, the power of
that wonderful poem. They know its austere yet submitting beauty;
they know what force there is in its free and earnest and solemn
verse to strengthen, to tranquillize, to console. It is a small
thing that it has the secret of Nature and Man; that a few keen
words have opened their eyes to new sights in earth, and sea, and
sky; have taught them new mysteries of sound; have made them
recognize, in distinct image of thought, fugitive feelings, or their
unheeded expression, by look, or gesture, or motion; that it has
enriched the public and collective memory of society with new
instances, never to be lost, of human feeling and fortune; has
charmed mind and ear by the music of its stately march, and the
variety and completeness of its plan. But besides this, they know
how often its seriousness has put to shame their trifling, its
magnanimity their faint-heartedness, its living energy their
indolence, its stern and sad grandeur rebuked low thoughts, its
thrilling tenderness overcome sullenness and assuaged distress, its
strong faith quelled despair, and soothed perplexity, its vast grasp
imparted the sense of harmony to the view of clashing truth. They
know how often they have found in times of trouble, if not light, at
least that deep sense of reality, permanent though unseen, which is
more than light can {308} always give--in the view which it has
suggested to them of the judgments and love of God."
As might have been expected from the fact of Dante's English
popularity paralleling the Oxford Movement, both the great English
Cardinals who were such prominent agents in that movement, looked upon
him as a favorite author. Both of them have given him precious
tributes. Newman's lofty compliment was the flattery of imitation when
he wrote the Dream of Gerontius, that poem for poets which has told
the men of our generation more about the immediate hereafter than
anything written in these latter centuries. No poet of the intervening
period, or of any other time, has so satisfactorily presented the
after world as these writers so distant in time, so different in
environment,--the one an Italian of the Thirteenth, the other an
Englishman of the Nineteenth Century.
Cardinal Manning's tribute was much more formal though not less
glorious. It occurs in the introduction to Father Bowden's English
edition of the German critic Hettinger's appreciation of Dante, and
deserves a place here because it shows how much a representative
modern churchman thinks of the great Florentine poet.
"There are three works which always seem to me to form a triad of
Dogma, of Poetry, and of Devotion,--The Summa of St. Thomas, The
Divina Commedia, and the Paradisus Animae (a manual of devotional
exercises by Horstius). All three contain the same outline of Faith.
St. Thomas traces it on the intellect, Dante upon the imagination,
and the Paradisus Animae upon the heart. The poem unites the book of
Dogma and the book of Devotion, clothed in conceptions of intensity
and of beauty which have never been surpassed nor equalled. No
uninspired hand has ever written thoughts so high in words, so
resplendent as the last stanza of the Divina Commedia. It was said
of St. Thomas, _'Post Summan Thomae nihil restat nisi lumen
gloriae_'--After the Summa of Thomas nothing is left except the
light of glory. It may be said of Dante, _'Post Dantis Paradisum
nihil restat nisi visio Dei_,'--After Dante's Paradise nothing is
left except the vision of God."
Of course John Ruskin had a thorough-going admiration for so great a
spiritual thinker as Dante and expressed it in no {309} uncertain
terms. With his wonderful power to point out the significance of
unexpected manifestations of human genius, Ruskin has even succeeded
in minimizing one of the great objections urged against Dante, better
perhaps than could be done by anyone else, for English speaking people
at least. For many readers Dante is almost unbearable, because of
certain grotesque elements they find in him. This has been the source
and cause of more unfavorable criticism than anything else in the
great Florentine's writings. Ruskin of course saw it but appreciated
it at its proper significance, and has made clear in a passage that
every Dante reader needs to go over occasionally, in order to assure
himself that certain unusual things in Dante's attitude towards life
are an expression rather of the highest human genius and its outlook
on life, than some narrow limitation of medievalism. Ruskin said:--
"I believe that there is no test of greatness in nations, periods,
nor men more sure than the development, among them or in them, of a
noble grotesque, and no test of comparative smallness or limitation,
of one kind or another, more sure than the absence of grotesque
invention or incapability of understanding it. I think that the
central man of all the world, as representing in perfect balance the
imaginative, moral and intellectual faculties, all at their highest
is Dante; and in him the grotesque reaches at once the most distinct
and the most noble development to which it was ever brought in the
human mind. Of the grotesqueness in our own Shakespeare I need
hardly speak, nor of its intolerableness to his French critics; nor
of that of AEschylus and Homer, as opposed to the lower Greek
writers; and so I believe it will be found, at all periods, in all
minds of the first order."
Great reverence for Dante might have been expected in Italy but the
colder Northern nations shared it.
In Germany modern admiration for Dante began with that great wave of
critical appreciation which entered into German literature with the
end of the Eighteenth and the beginning of the Nineteenth Century. As
might almost have been expected, Frederick Schlegel was one of the
first modern German admirers of Dante, though his brother August,
whose translations of Shakespeare began that series of German studies
of {310} Shakespeare which has been so fruitful during the past
century, was also an open admirer of the medieval poet. Since then
there has practically been no time when Germany has not had some
distinguished Dante scholar, and when it has not been supplying the
world with the products of profound study and deep scholarship with
regard to him. The modern educational world has come to look so
confidently toward Germany for the note of its critical appreciation,
that the Dante devotion of the Germans will be the best possible
encouragement for those who need to have the feeling, that their own
liking is shared by good authorities, before they are quite satisfied
with their appreciation. Dean Plumptre has summed up the Dante
movement in Germany in a compendious paragraph that must find a place
here.
"In the year 1824, Scartazzini, the great Dante scholar of the
Nineteenth Century, recognizes a new starting point. The period of
neglect of supercilious criticism comes to an end, and one of
reverence, admiration and exhaustive study begins. His account of
the labors of German scholars during the sixty years that have
followed fills a large part of his volume. Translations of the
Commedia by Kopisch, Kannegiesser, Witte, Philalethes (the nom de
plume of John, King of Saxony), Josefa Von Hoffinger, of the Minor
Poems by Witte and Krafft, endless volumes and articles on all
points connected with Dante's life and character, the publications
of the Deutsche Dante-Gesellschaft from 1867 to 1877, present a body
of literature which has scarcely a parallel in history. It is no
exaggeration to say that the Germans have taught Italians to
understand and appreciate their own poet, just as they have at least
helped to teach Englishmen to understand Shakespeare."
Nor must it be thought that only the literary lights of Germany
thoroughly appreciated the great Florentine. The greater the genius of
the man the more his admiration for Dante if he but once becomes
interested in him. A noteworthy example of this is Alexander Von
Humboldt the distinguished German scientist, who was generally looked
upon as perhaps the greatest thinker in European science during the
first quarter of the Nineteenth Century. He is said to have been very
faithful in his study of Dante and has expressed his admiration in no
{311} uncertain terms. Curiously enough he found much to admire him
for in matters scientific, for while it is not generally realized,
Dante was an acute observer of Nature and has given expression in his
works to many observations with regard to subjects that would now be
considered within the scope of natural science, in a way to anticipate
many supposedly modern bits of information. With regard to this
Humboldt said in his Cosmos:--
"When the glory of the Aramaic Greek and Roman dominion--or I might
almost say, when the ancient world had passed away,--we find in the
great and inspired founder of a new era, Dante Alighieri, occasional
manifestations of the deepest sensibility to the charms of the
terrestrial life of Nature, whenever he abstracts himself from the
passionate and subjective control of that despondent mysticism which
constituted the general circle of his ideas." How little Humboldt
seems to have realized in his own absorption in external nature, that
the qualities he blames in Dante are of the very essence of his
genius, rounding out his humanity to an interest in all man's
relations, supernatural as well as natural, and that without them he
would not be the world poet for all time that he is.
In America Dante came to his own almost as soon as literature obtained
her proper place in our new country. The first generation of
distinctly literary men comprise the group at Cambridge including
Longfellow, Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Charles Eliot Norton,
James Russell Lowell, and others of minor importance. It soon became a
favorite occupation among these men to give certain leisure hours to
Dante. The Cambridge Dante society added not a little to the world's
knowledge of the poet. Longfellow's translation and edition of Dante's
works was a monumental achievement, for which its author is likely to
be remembered better by future generations than perhaps for any of his
original work. Future generations are likely to remember James Russell
Lowell for his essays on Dante and Shakespeare better than for
anything else. His Dante monograph is as magnificently illuminating as
that of Dean Church's and perhaps even more satisfying to critical
readers. That these men should have been content to give so much of
their time to the study of the Thirteenth {312} Century poet shows in
what appreciation he must be held by the rest of us if we would give
him his due place in literature.
There are many misunderstandings with regard to Dante which apparently
only some serious study of the poet serves to remove satisfactorily.
Most people consider that he was a distant, prophetic, religious
genius, and that his poetry has in it very little of sympathy for
humanity. While it is generally conceded that he saw man projected on
the curtain of eternity, and realized all his relationships to the
universe and to his Creator better than perhaps any other poet of all
time, it is usually thought that one must have something of the
medieval frame of mind in order to read him with interest and
admiration. Such impressions are largely the result of reading only a
few lines of Dante, and, finding them difficult of thorough
comprehension, allowing one's self to be forced to the conclusion that
he is not of interest to the modern reader. The Inferno being the
first part of Dante's great poem is the one oftenest read in this
passing fashion and so many ideas with regard to Dante are derived
from this portion, which is not only not the masterpiece of the work
but, if taken alone, sadly misrepresents the genius of the poet. His
is no morbid sentimentality and does not need the adventitious
interest of supreme suffering.
As a matter of fact the Purgatorio is a much better introduction to
Dante's real greatness, and is considered by the generality of Dante
scholars as the more humanly sympathetic if not really the supreme
expression of his creative faculty. The ascent of the Mount of
Expiation with its constant note of hope and the gradually increasing
facility of the ascent as the summit is approached, touches condolent
cords in the human heart and arouses feelings that are close to what
is best in human aspiration in spite of its consciousness of defect.
Over and over again in the Purgatorio one finds evidence of Dante's
wonderful powers of observation. The poet is first of all according to
the etymology of the word a creator, one who gives life to the
figments of his imagination so that we recognize them as vital
manifestations of human genius, but is also the seer, the man who sees
deeper into things and sees more of them than anyone else. Ordinarily
Dante is considered by those who do not know him as not having been an
observer of things human and around him in life. There are passages in
his works, however, that entirely refute this.
[Illustration]
ANGEL (RHEIMS)
{313}
The story that he went about the cities of North Italy during his
exile, with countenance so gloomy and stare so fixed that men pointed
to him and spoke of him as one who had visited Hell, and the other
tradition, however well it may be founded, that the women sometimes
pointed him out to their children and then used the memory of him as a
bogy man to scare them into doing unpleasant things afterwards, would
seem to indicate that he had occupied himself very little with the
things around him, and that above all he had paid very little
attention to the ways of childhood. He has shown over and over again,
especially in the Purgatorio, that the simplest and most natural
actions of child-life had been engraved upon his heart for he uses
them with supreme truth in his figures. He knows how
"An infant seeks his mother's breast
When fear or anguish vex his troubled heart,"--
but he knows too, how the child who has done wrong, confesses its
faults.
"As little children, dumb with shame's keen smart.
Will listening stand with eyes upon the ground.
Owning their faults with penitential heart,
So then stood I."
There is a passage in the Inferno in which he describes so vividly the
rescue of a child from the flames by its mother that Plumptre has even
ventured to suggest that Dante himself may have been the actual
subject of the rescue. Because it helps to an appreciation of Dante's
intensity of expression and poignancy of vision the passage itself,
with Plumptre's comment, seems deserving of quotation:
"Then suddenly my Guide his arms did fling
Around me, as a mother, roused by cries,
Sees the fierce flames around her gathering
And takes her boy, nor ever halts but flies.
Caring for him than for herself far more,
Though one scant shift her only robe supplies."
{314}
It must not be thought, however, that Dante's quality as an observer
was limited to the actions of human beings. His capacity to see many
other things is amply manifested in his great poem. Even the smallest
of living things, that would surely be thought beneath his notice,
became the subject of similies that show how much everything in nature
interested the spirit of genius. The passage with regard to the ants
has often been quoted, and is indeed a surprising manifestation of
nature study at an unexpected time and from an entirely unanticipated
quarter. Dante saw the souls of those who were so soon to enter into
the realm of blessedness, and who were already in the last circle of
purgatory, greeting each other with the kiss of peace and his
picturesque simile for it is:--
"So oft, within their dusk brown host, proceed
This ant and that, till muzzle muzzle meet;
Spying their way, or how affairs succeed."
As for the birds his pages are full of references to them and all of
his bird similies are couched in terms that show how sympathetically
observant he was of their habits and ways. He knows their different
methods of flying in groups and singly, he has observed them on their
nests and knows their wonderful maternal anxiety for their young, and
describes it with a vividness that would do credit to a naturalist of
the modern time who had made his home in the woods. Indeed some of his
figures taken from birds constitute examples of the finest passages of
poetic description of living nature that have ever been written. The
domestic animals, moreover, especially the cat and the dog, come in
for their share of this sympathetic observance, and he is able to add
greatly to the vividness of the pictures he paints by his references
to the well-known habits of these animals. It is no wonder that the
tradition has grown up that he was fond of such pets and possessed
several of them that were well-known to the early commentators on his
poems, and the subject of no little erudition.
Nothing escaped the attention of this acute observer in the world
around him, and over and over again one finds surprising bits of
observation with regard to natural phenomena usually supposed to be
quite out of the range of the interest of {315} medieval students
generally, and above all of literary men of this Middle Age. Alexander
Von Humboldt calls attention in a well-known passage in his Cosmos to
the wonderful description of the River of Light in the Thirtieth Canto
of the Paradiso.
"I saw a glory like a stream flow by.
In brightness rushing and on either shore
Were banks that with spring's wondrous hues might vie.
And from that river living sparks did soar,
And sank on all sides in the flow'rets' bloom,
Like precious rubies set in golden ore.
Then, as if drunk with all the rich perfume,
Back to the wondrous torrent did they roll,
And as one sank another filled its room."
Humboldt explains this as follows, with a suggestion that deserves to
be remembered.
"It would almost seem as if this picture had its origin in the
poet's recollection of that peculiar and rare phosphorescent
condition of the ocean in which luminous points appear to rise from
the breaking waves, and, spreading themselves over the surface of
the waters, convert the liquid plain into a moving sea of sparkling
stars."
Probably the best way for a modern to realize how much of interest
there may be for him in Dante is to consider the great Italian epic
poet in comparison with our greatest of English epic poets, Milton.
While any such comparison in the expressive Latin phrase is sure to
walk lame, it serves to give an excellent idea of the methods of the
two men in the illustration of their ideas. We venture therefore to
quote a comparison between these two poets from a distinguished critic
who knows both of them well, and whose modern training in English
methods of thought, would seem to make him likely to be partial to the
more modern poet though as a matter of fact he constantly leans toward
the great medieval bard.
"The poetry of Milton differs from that of Dante as the
hieroglyphics of Egypt differ from the picture-writing of Mexico.
The images which Dante employs speak for themselves; they stand
simply for what they are. Those of Milton have a {316} signification
which is often discernible only to the initiated. . . . However
strange, however grotesque, he never shrinks from describing it. He
gives us the shape, the color, the sound, the smell, the taste; he
counts the numbers; he measures the size. His similies are the
illustrations of a traveler. Unlike those of other poets, and
especially of Milton, they are introduced in a plain business-like
manner, not for the sake of any of the beauty in the objects from
which they are drawn; not for the sake of any ornament they may
impart to the poem; but simply in order to make the meaning of the
writer as clear to the reader as it is to himself."
"Still more striking is the similarity between Dante and Milton.
This may be said to lie rather in the kindred nature of their
subjects, and in the parallel development of their minds, than in
any mere external resemblance. In both the man was greater than the
poet, the souls of both were 'like a star and dwelt apart.' Both
were academically trained in the deepest studies of their age; the
labour which made Dante lean made Milton blind. The 'Doricke
sweetnesse' of the English poet is not absent from the tender pages
of the Vita Nuova. The middle life of each was spent in active
controversy; each lent his services to the state; each felt the
quarrels of his age to be the 'business of posterity,' and left his
warnings to ring in the ears of a later time. The lives of both were
failures. 'On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues,' they
gathered the concentrated experience of their lives into one
immortal work, the quintessence of their hopes, their knowledge, and
their sufferings. But Dante is something more than this. Milton's
voice is grown faint to us--we have passed into other modes of
expression and of thought."
The comparison with Vergil is still more striking and more favorable
to the Italian poet. "Dante's reputation has passed through many
vicissitudes, and much trouble has been spent by critics in comparing
him with other poets of established fame. Read and commented upon in
the Italian universities in the generation immediately succeeding his
death, his name bcame obscured as the sun of the Renaissance rose
higher towards its meridian. In the Seventeenth Century he was less
read than Petrarch, Tasso, or Ariosto; in the Eighteenth he was {317}
almost universally neglected. His fame is now fully vindicated.
Translations and commentaries issue from every press in Europe and
America. Dante Societies are formed to investigate the difficulties of
his works. He occupies in the lecture-rooms of regenerated Italy a
place by the side of those great masters whose humble disciple he
avowed himself to be. The Divine Comedy is indeed as true an epic as
the AEneid, and Dante is as real a classic as Vergil. His metre is as
pliable and flexible to every mood of emotion, his diction as
plaintive and as sonorous. Like him he can immortalize by a simple
expression, a person, a place, or a phase of nature. Dante is even
truer in description than Vergil, whether he paints the snow falling
in the Alps, or the homeward flight of birds, or the swelling of an
angry torrent. But under this gorgeous pageantry of poetry there lies
a unity of conception, a power of philosophic grasp, an earnestness of
religion, which to the Roman poet were entirely unknown."
If we would have a very recent opinion as to the position of Dante as
a literary man and as a great intellectual force, perhaps no better
can be obtained than from some recent expressions of Mr. Michael
Rossetti, whose Italian descent, English training, and literary and
artistic heredity, seem to place him in an ideal position for writing
this generation's ultimate judgment with regard to the great poet of
the Thirteenth Century. In his Literature of Italy he said:--
"One has to recur time after time, to that astounding protagonist,
phenomenon and hero, Dante Alighieri. If one were to say that
Italian literature consists of Dante, it would, no doubt, be an
exaggeration, and a gross one, and yet it would contain a certain
ultimate nucleus of truth."
"Dante fixed the Italian language, and everyone had to tread in his
vestiges. He embodied all the learning and thought of his age and
transcended them. He went far ahead of all his predecessors,
contemporaries, and successors; he wrote the first remarkable book
in Italian prose, La Vita Nuova; and a critical exposition of it in
the Convito; in Latin, a linguistic treatise, the De Vulgari
Eloquio, which upholds the Vulgare Illustre, or speech of the best
cultivated classes, markedly in Tuscany and Bologna, against the
common dialects; and a {318} political study, De Monarchia, of the
most fundamental quality, which even to us moderns continues to be
sane and convincing in its essence, though its direct line of
argument has collapsed; and finally, and most important by far, he
produced in La Commedia Divina the one poem of modern Europe that
counter-balances Shakespeare and challenges antiquity. This is the
sole book which makes it a real pity for anyone to be ignorant of
Italian. Regarded singly, it is much the most astonishing poem in
the world, dwarfing all others by its theme, pulverizing most of
them by its majesty and sustainment, unique in the force of its
paraded personality and the thunderous reverberation of its
judgments on the living and the dead."
{319}
XX
THE WOMEN OF THE CENTURY.
In generations whose men proved so unending in initiative and so
forceful in accomplishment, so commanding in intelligence, so
persistent in their purposes, so acute in their searching, so
successful in their endeavors, the women of the time could not have
been unworthy of them. Some hints of this have been already given, in
what has been said about the making of furnishings for the church,
especially in the matter of needlework and the handpainting of various
forms of ornaments. There are further intimations in the histories of
the time, though unfortunately not very definite information, with
regard to even more ambitious accomplishments by the women of the
period. There are, for instance, traditions that the designs for some
of the Cathedrals and certainly for portions of many of them came from
women's hands. It is in the ethical sphere, however, that women
accomplished great things during the Thirteenth Century. Their
influence stood for what was best and highest in the life of the time
and their example encouraged not only their own generation, but many
people in many subsequent generations "to look up, not down, to look
within, not without" for happiness, and to trust that "God's in his
heaven and all's well with the world."
There are a number of women of the time whose names the race will not
let die. While if the ordinary person were asked to enumerate the
great women of the Thirteenth Century it would be rare to find one
able properly to place them, as soon as their names are mentioned, it
will be recognized that they succeeded in accomplishing work of such
significance that the world is not likely to let the reputation of it
perish. Some of these names are household words. The bearers of them
have been written of at length in quite recent years in English as
well as in other languages. Their work was of the kind that ordinarily
stands quite apart from the course of history and {320} so dates are
usually not attached to it. It is thought of as a portion of the
precious heritage of mankind rather than as belonging to any
particular period. Three names occur at once. They are St. Clare of
Assisi, St. Elizabeth of Hungary, and Queen Blanche of Castile, the
mother of St. Louis. To these should be added Queen Berengaria, the
sister of Blanche, and the mother of Ferdinand of Castile; Mabel Rich,
the London tradesman's wife, the mother of St. Edmund of Canterbury;
and Isabella, the famous Countess of Arundel.
The present day interest in St. Francis of Assisi, has brought St.
Clare under the lime-light of publicity. There is no doubt at all that
her name is well worthy to be mentioned along with his and that she,
like him, must be considered one of the strongest and most beautiful
characters of all time. She was the daughter of a noble family at
Assisi, who, having heard St. Francis preach, became impressed with
the idea that she too should have the opportunity to live the simple
life that St. Francis pictured. Of course her family opposed her in
any such notion. That a daughter of theirs should take up with a
wandering preacher, who at that time was looked on not a little
askance by the regular religious authorities, and whose rags, and
poverty made him anything but a proper associate for a young lady of
noble birth, could not but seem an impossible idea. Accordingly Clare
ran away from home and told Francis that she would never go back and
that he must help her to live her life in poverty just as he was doing
himself. He sent her to a neighboring convent to be cared for, and
also very probably so as to be assured of her vocation.
After a time a special convent home for Clare and some other young
women, who had become enamored with the life of poverty and simplicity
was established, and to this Clare's sister Agnes came as a postulant.
By this time apparently the family had become reconciled to Clare's
absence from home, but they would not stand another daughter following
such a foolish example. Accordingly Agnes was removed from the convent
by force after a scene which caused the greatest excitement in the
little town. It was not long, however, before Agnes returned to the
convent and within a few years their mother followed them, and became
one of the most fervent members of the little community.
{opp320}
[Illustration]
ST. CLARE'S FAREWELL TO THE DEAD ST. FRANCIS (GIOTTO)
{321}
The peace and happiness that came with this life of absolute poverty
soon attracted many other women and Clare was asked to establish
houses at a distance. Gradually the order of Poor Clares, the second
order of St. Francis, thus came into existence. When it was necessary
to draw up constitutions for the order, Clare showed not only the
breadth of her intelligence, but the depth of her knowledge of human
nature, and her appreciation of what was absolutely necessary in order
to keep her order from degeneration. Against the counsels of all the
ecclesiastics of her time, including many cardinals and even a Pope,
she insisted on the most absolute poverty as the only basis for the
preservation of the spirit of her second order of St. Francis. Her
character was well manifested in this contest from which she came out
victorious.
Her body has been miraculously preserved and may still be seen at
Assisi. Anyone who has seen the strongly set lips and full firm chin
of the body in the crypt of San Damiano, can easily understand the
strength of purpose and of character of this young woman who moulded a
generation to her will. The story is told of her, that once when the
Saracens invaded Italy and attacked the convent, she mounted the walls
with a monstrance containing the Blessed Sacrament in her hands, and
the marauders turned away in consternation from the stern brave figure
that confronted them, and bothered the nuns no more. After St.
Francis' death she, more than anyone else, succeeded in maintaining
the spirit of the Franciscan order in the way in which St. Francis
would have it go. Long after her death a copy of the original rules
was found in the fold of her garments and did much to restore the
Franciscan life to its primitive simplicity and purpose, so that even
after she was no more on earth, she was still the guardian and
promoter of St. Francis' work.
If one wants to know how much of happiness there came to her in life
one should read the famous passage which describes her visit to St.
Francis, and how she and he with sisters and brothers around them
broke bread together, with a sweetness that was beyond human. The
passage is to be found in the "Little Flowers of St. Francis of
Assisi" which was written {322} within a century after the occurrences
described. It recalls nothing so much as the story of the disciples at
Emaus and is worthy to be thought of beside the Scripture story.
[Footnote 26]
[Footnote 26: When came the day ordained by Francis, Saint Clare
with one companion passed forth from out the convent and with the
companions of Saint Francis to bear her company came unto Saint Mary
of the Angels, and devoutly saluted the Virgin Mary before her
altar, where she had been shorn and veiled; so they conducted her to
see the house, until such time as the hour for breaking bread was
come. And in the meantime Saint Francis let make ready the table on
the bare ground, as he was wont to do. And the hour of breaking
bread being come, they set themselves down together. Saint Francis
and Saint Clare, and one of the companions of Saint Francis with the
companion of Saint Clare, and all the other companions took each his
place at the table with all humility. And at the first dish, Saint
Francis began to speak of God so sweetly, so sublimely and so
wondrously, that the fulness of Divine grace came down on them, and
they all were wrapt in God. And as they were thus wrapt, with eyes
and hands uplift to heaven, the folk of Assisi and Bettona and the
country round about, saw that Saint Mary of the Angels, and all the
House, and the wood that was just hard by the house, were burning
brightly, and it seemed as it were a great fire that filled the
church and the House and the whole wood together: for the which
cause the folk of Assisi ran thither in great haste to quench the
flames, believing of a truth that the whole place was all on fire.
But coming closer up to the House and finding no fire at all, they
entered within and found Saint Francis and Saint Clare and all their
company in contemplation rapt in God and sitting around that humble
board. Whereby of a truth they understood that this had been a
heavenly flame and no earthly one at all, which God had let appear
miraculously, for to show and signify the fire of love divine
wherewith the souls of those holy brothers and holy nuns were all
aflame; wherefor they got them gone with great consolation in their
hearts and with holy edifying. Then after some long space. Saint
Francis and Saint Clare, together with all the others, returning to
themselves again and feeling of good comfort from the spiritual food
took little heed of the food of the body.]
{opp322}
[Illustration]
CHURCH (DOBERAN, GERMANY)
[Illustration]
SAN DAMIANO (ASSISI)
What Saint Clare accomplished as her life work was the making of a new
vocation for women. There are always a certain number of women who
look for peace and quiet rather than the struggle for existence. For
these the older monasteries did not supply a place unless they were of
the wealthier class as a rule. Among the Poor Clares women of all
classes were received. In this way a great practical lesson in
equality was {323} taught. Women did not have to marry, perhaps
unsuitable, often even objectionable men, simply in order to have a
mode of life. They could join one of these communities and though in
absolute poverty, with many hours each day devoted to meditation and
prayer, had time to give to beautiful needlework, to painting and book
illumination, and to other feminine occupations; and might thus pass
long, happy lives, apart from the bustle of the strenuous time.
Italy at this time, it must be recalled, was a seething cauldron of
political and military strife. Wars were waged, and struggles of all
kinds engaged in for precedence and power. These women got away from
this unfortunate state of affairs. Occasionally in times of
pestilence, when they were specially needed, as happened at least once
in Saint Clare's life, they took care of the ailing and lent their
convent as a hospital. Above all they stood in the eyes of their
generation for chosen people who saw things differently from others.
They taught the great lesson of not caring too much for the things of
this world and of not living one's life in order to get admiration
though usually envy comes, nor idle praise for qualities they either
do not possess or that are not worthy of notice. They showed people
the real value of this life by its reflection upon the other. Many a
man turned aside from ambitious schemes that would have injured
others, because of the kindly influence of these unselfish women and
because of the memory of a sister, or an aunt whose sacrificing life
was thus a rebuke to his foolish selfishness. Other women learned
something of the vanity of human things by learning to value the
character of these Poor Clares and realizing how much of happiness
came to them from the accomplishment of their simple duties. Professor
Osler said, in his lecture on Science and Immortality, of these
self-forgetting ones:--"The serene faith of Socrates with the cup of
Hemlock at his lips, the heroic devotion of a St. Francis or a St.
Teresa, but more often for each one of us the beautiful life of some
good woman whose--
Eyes are homes of silent prayer,
. . .
Whose loves in higher love endure.
{324}
do more to keep alive among the Laodiceans a belief in immortality
than all the preaching in the land." This is what St. Clare
accomplished for her own generation and her influence is still a great
living force in the world.
What especially should attract the attention of the modern time is the
perfect basis of equality on which the Franciscan and Dominican orders
of men and of women were organized. Each community had the opportunity
to elect its own superiors. The rules were practically the same for
the first (for men) and the second (for women) order of St. Francis,
except that while the first order were supposed to live on alms
collected by begging from door to door, this menial obligation was not
imposed upon the women, who were expected to be supported by alms
brought to their convents by the faithful, and by the labor of their
own hands. This equality of men and women in the monastic
establishments became widespread after the Thirteenth Century and made
itself felt in the social order of the time as a factor for feminine
uplift. Undoubtedly Saint Clare's work in the foundation of the second
order of St. Francis must be held responsible to no small degree for
this. Before her death, there were half a dozen scions of royal
families in various parts of Europe who had become members of her
order, and literally hundreds of the daughters of the nobility, many
of them of high rank, had put off their dignity and position in the
world, to become poor daughters of Saint Clare. They did so for the
peace and the happiness of the vocation, and the opportunity to seek
their souls and live their lives in their own quiet way, which her
convents afforded them.
{opp325}
[Illustration]
ST. ELIZABETH'S CATHEDRAL (MARBURG)
After Saint Clare, the best known woman of the Thirteenth Century is
undoubtedly Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, of whom the world knows some
pretty legends, while the serious historian recognizes that she was
the first settlement worker of history. As a child she wandered down
from the castle walls in which she lived and saw the poor in their
suffering. She felt so much for them that she stripped herself of most
of her garments and finally even of her shoes in order to clothe them.
When she was taken to task for this, she said that she had suffered
whatever inconvenience there was in it only for a few minutes while
the poor had suffered all their lives. She became {325} the wife of
the Duke of Thuringia, and there were three years of ideal happiness
with her husband and her children. When he went away on the Crusade
she gave herself up to the care of the poor. When he died, though she
was only twenty, and according to tradition one of the handsomest
women of her time, she devoted herself still more to her poor and even
went to live among them. She tried to teach them, as do the settlement
workers of the modern time, something of the true significance of
life, to bring them to realize to some degree at least, that so many
of the things they so vainly desire are not worth thinking about, but
that happiness consists in lopping off one's desires rather than
trying vainly, as it must ever be, to satisfy them. It is no wonder
that throughout all Germany she came to be called "the dear St.
Elizabeth." Literally thousands of women since her time have turned to
read the story of her beautiful devotion to charity, and have been
incited by her example to do more and more for the poor around them.
Those who know it only through Kingsley's, "The Saint's Tragedy,"
though this is disfigured by many failures to understand parts of her
career and her environment, can scarcely fail to realize that hers was
one of the world's sublimely beautiful characters. All she attempted
in the thorny paths of charity was accomplished in such a practical
way that the amount of good done was almost incalculable. The simple
recital of what she did as it has often been told, is the story of a
great individuality that impressed itself deeply upon its generation
and left the example of a precious life to act as a leaven for good in
the midst of the social fermentations of succeeding generations.
Yet Elizabeth succeeded in accomplishing all this in spite of the fact
that she was born the daughter of a king and married the reigning
prince of one of the most important ducal houses in Germany. One would
expect to find that her life had been long, so many traditions have
gathered around her name. She was twenty when her husband died, and
she survived him only four years. Literally she had accomplished a
long space in a short time and her generation in raising in her honor
the charming Gothic Cathedral at Marburg, one of the most {326}
beautiful in Germany, was honoring itself nobly as well as her. It is
the greatest monument to a woman in all the world.
The next great woman of the century also belonged to a reigning family
and is for obvious historical reasons better known, perhaps, than her
Saint contemporaries. This was Blanche, daughter of the King of
Castile, but intimately related to the English royal family. Married
to Louis VIII of France she is known principally as the mother of
Louis IX. She ruled France for many years while her boy was a minor
and when he came to the age, when he might ordinarily assume the reins
of government, he voluntarily permitted his mother to continue her
regency for some time longer. France was probably happier under her
than under any ruler that the country has ever had with the possible
exception of her son Louis. She succeeded in suppressing to a great
extent the quarrels so common among the nobility, she strengthened and
centralized the power of the crown, she began the correction of abuses
in the administration of justice which her son was to complete so
well, she organized charity in various ways, and the court was an
example to the kingdom of simple dignified life, without any abuse of
power, or wealth, or passion. No wonder that when Louis went on the
Crusade, he left his mother to reign in his stead confident that all
would go well. If one needed a demonstration that women can rule well
there is an excellent example in the life of Blanche.
Personally she seems to have had not only an amiable but a deeply
intellectual character. She encouraged education and beautiful
book-making and the Gothic architecture which was developing in France
so wonderfully during her period. Of course she also worshipped her
boy Louis, but how much her motherly tenderness was tempered with the
most beautiful Christian feeling can be understood from the famous
expression attributed to her on good authority, that she "would rather
see her boy dead at her feet, than have him commit a mortal offense
against his God or his neighbor." One might almost say that it is no
wonder that Louis became a saint. As a matter of fact he attributed to
his mother whatever of goodness there was in himself. There is a touch
of humanity in the picture, however, a trait that shows, that Blanche
was a woman, {327} though it is a fault which draws our sympathy to
her even more surely than if she were the type of perfection she might
have been without it. She did not get on well with her daughter-in-law
and one of the trials of Louis' life, as we have said, was to keep the
scales evenly balanced between his mother and his wife, both of whom
he loved very dearly. After Blanche's life there could be no doubt
that a woman, when given the opportunity, can manage men and
administer government quite as well as any masculine member of the
race, and the Thirteenth Century had given another example of its
power to bring out what was best in its fortunate children.
One of the most interesting women of the Thirteenth Century was
neither a Saint nor a member of the nobility, but only the wife of a
simple London merchant. This was Mabel Rich, the mother of Saint
Edmund of Canterbury. Edmund is one of the striking men of a supreme
century. He had been a student at Paris, and later a professor at
Oxford. Then, he became the treasurer of the Cathedral at Salisbury
about the time when, not a little through his influence, that
magnificent edifice was receiving the form which was to make it one of
the world's great churches for all time. Later he was the Archbishop
of Canterbury and while defending the rights of his church and his
people, came under the ban of Henry III, and spent most of the latter
years of his life in exile on the continent. Edmund insisted that he
owed more to his mother than to any other single factor in life. With
her two boys, aged ten and fourteen, Mabel Rich was left to care for
the worldly concerns of the household as well as for their education.
When they were twelve and sixteen, with many misgivings she sent them
off to the University of Paris to get their education. Edmund tells
how besides packing their linen very carefully she also packed a
hairshirt for each of them, which they were to wear occasionally
according to their promise to her, to remind them that they must not
look for ease and comfort in life, above all must not yield to sensual
pleasures, but must be ready to suffer many little troubles
voluntarily, in order that they might be able to resist temptation
when severer trials came. Mabel Rich believed in discipline, as a
factor in education, and thought that character was formed by habits
of fortitude in resisting {328} petty annoyances until, finally, even
serious troubles were easy to bear.
Both of her sons proved worthy of her maternal solicitude. Edmund
tells how the poor around her home in London blessed her for her
charity. All during his life the thought of his mother was uppermost
in his mind, and in the immortality that has been given his name,
because of the utter forgetfulness of self which characterized his
life, his mother has been associated. Unfortunately details are
lacking that would show us something of the manner of living of this
strong woman of the people, but we know enough to make us realize that
she was a fine type of the Christian mother, memory of whose goodness
means more not only for her children but for all those who come in
contact with her, than all the sermons and pious exhortations that
they hear, and often, such is the way of human nature, even than the
divine commandments or the personal conscience of those whom she
loves.
There were noble women among the gentlewomen of England at this time
too, and though space will not let us dwell on them, at least one must
be mentioned. This is the famous Isabella, Countess of Arundel, who
with a dignity which, Matthew Paris says, was more than that of woman,
reproached Henry III (1252), when he sought to browbeat her. She made
bold to tell the king, "You govern neither us nor yourself well." On
this the king, with a sneer and a grin, said with a loud voice, "Ho,
ho, my lady countess, have the noblemen of England granted you a
charter and struck a bargain with you to become their spokeswoman
because of your eloquence?" She answered, "My liege, the nobles have
made no charter, but you and your father have made a charter, and you
have sworn to observe it inviolably, and yet many times have you
extorted money from your subjects and have not kept your word. Where
are the liberties of England, often reduced to writing, so often
granted, so often again denied?" [Footnote 27]
[Footnote 27: Medieval England, English Feudal Society, from the
Norman Conquest to the Middle of the Fourteenth Century, by Mary
Bateson.]
The question of womanly occupations apart from their household duties
will be of great interest to our generation.
{opp328}
[Illustration]
MARRIAGE OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN (GIOTTO, PADUA)
A hint of one form of woman's occupation has already been {329} given
in discussing the needlework done for the Cathedrals and especially
the Cope of Ascoli. It must not be forgotten that this was the age not
alone of Cathedrals but also of monasteries and of convents. In all of
these convents every effort was made to have whatever was associated
with the religious ceremonial as beautiful as possible. Hence it was
that needlework rose to a height of accomplishment such as has never
been reached since according to the best authorities, and many
examples of it have come down to us to confirm such an opinion. This
needlework was done not only for religious purposes, however, but also
as presents for Kings and Queens and the nobility, and such presents
proved to be exemplars of artistic beauty that must have helped to
raise the taste of the time. This was essentially woman's work, and in
their distant castles the women of the households of the nobility
occupied themselves with it to much better effect than their sisters
of the modern time with the grievous burden of their so-called social
duties.
Miss Bateson [Footnote 28: Ibidem.] has given a pretty, yet piquant
picture of woman at these occupations. She says:--"There are not
wanting Thirteenth Century satires to tell the usual story of female
levities, and of female devotion to the needle, to German work and
pierced work, Saracen work and combed work, cutout work and wool-work,
and a multitude of other "works" to which the clue seems to be now
wholly lost. Whilst the women are thus engaged, the one who knows most
reads to them, the others listen attentively, and do not sleep as they
do at mass, 'pur la prise de vanite dont ont grant leesce (joy).' The
'opus anglicum' consisted of chain-stitch in circles, with hollows,
made by a heated iron rod, to represent shadows. A cope of this work
was made by Rose de Burford at Edward II's order, and sent to Rome.
One, known as the Syon cope, passed into the possession of the nuns of
Syon, Isleworth, and can be seen at the Victoria and Albert Museum."
Another form of woman's work that came to prominence during the
century was the service in hospitals. While the records of the
hospitals of the Holy Ghost, which under Innocent Third's fostering
care spread so widely throughout Europe in this century, are mainly
occupied with the institutions of {330} the Brothers of the Holy
Ghost, there were many hospitals under the care of women, and indeed
there was an almost universally accepted idea, that women patients and
obstetrical cases should be cared for by women rather than men. It is
easy to make little of the hospitals of this time but any such thought
will be the result of ignorance rather than of any serious attempt to
know what was actually accomplished. The sisters' hospitals soon
usurped the most prominent place in the life of the time and during
succeeding centuries gradually replaced those which had been
originally under the control of men. It was recognized that nursing
was a much more suitable occupation for the gentler sex and that there
were many less abuses than when men were employed. The success of
these hospitals in gradually eradicating leprosy and in keeping down
the death-rate from St. Anthony's fire, or erysipelas, shows how
capable they were of accomplishing great humanitarian work.
Perhaps the most interesting feature of the story of woman's position
during the Thirteenth Century is that at the Italian universities at
least, co-education was not only admitted in principle but also in
practice, and many women were in attendance at the universities. In
the West of Europe this feature did not exist. It is a startling
comment on how comparatively trivial a thing may change the course of
history, that the lamentable Heloise and Abelard incident at the
University of Paris during the Twelfth Century, precluded all
subsequent possibility of the admission of women students to the
University of Paris. Oxford, it will be remembered, was formed by the
withdrawal of students from the University of Paris, and the same
tradition was maintained. Cambridge was a grand-daughter of the
University of Paris and the French and Spanish universities must all
be considered as standing in the relation of its direct descendants.
The unfortunate experience at Paris shaped the policy as to the
co-education of the sexes for all these. It would have been too much
to expect that university authorities would take the risks which had
been so clearly demonstrated even with regard to a distinguished
professor, and so co-education was excluded.
It is not easy to say what proportion of women there were {331} in
attendance at the university of Bologna during the Thirteenth Century.
Apparently it should not be difficult to take the lists of the
matriculates as far as they have been preserved and by a little
calculation obtain rather exact figures. Italy, like most of the Latin
countries, differs from the Teutonic regions in not being quite so
exact in the distribution of names to the different sexes, that the
first name inevitably determines whether the individual is male or
female. It is not an unusual thing even at the present day for a man
to have as a first name in Italy, or France, or Spain, the equivalent
of our name Mary. On the other hand, not a few girls are called by
men's names and without the feminine termination which is so
distinctive among the English speaking peoples. In the olden times
this was still more the case. Until very recently at least, if not
now, every child born in Venice was given two names at its
baptism--Maria and Giovanni--in honor of the two great patron saints
of the city and then the parents might add further names if they so
desired. A matriculation list of the University of Bologna then, tells
very little that is absolute with regard to the sex of the
matriculates.
All that we know for sure is that there were women students at the
University of Bologna apparently from the beginning of the Thirteenth
Century, and that some of them secured the distinction of being made
Professors. Of one of these there is a pretty legend told, which seems
to illustrate the fact that charming young women of profound
intellectual qualities did not lose the characteristic modesty and
thoughtfulness for others of their sex, because of their elevation to
university professorship. This young woman, Maria di Novella, when
only twenty-five became the Professor of mathematics at the University
of Bologna. According to tradition she was very pretty and as is usual
in life was not unaware of that happy accident. She feared that her
good looks might disturb the thoughts of her students during her
lessons and accordingly she delivered her lectures from behind a
curtain. The story may, of course, be only a myth. One of the best
woman educators that I know once said to me, that if the tradition
with regard to her beauty were true, then she doubted the rest of the
story, but then women are not always the best judges of the {332}
actions of other women and especially is this true when there is
question of a grave and learned elderly woman passing judgment on a
young and handsome professor of mathematics.
The Italians became so much impressed with the advisability of
permitting women to study at the universities, that a certain amount
of co-education has existed all down the centuries in Italy and not a
century has passed since the Thirteenth, which has not chronicled the
presence of at least one distinguished woman professor at some Italian
university. Indeed it was doubtless the traditional position of
tolerance in this matter that made it seem quite natural for women,
when the Renaissance period came around, to take their places beside
their brothers and their cousins in the schools where the new learning
was being taught.
It may be rather difficult for some to understand how with this
opening wedge for the higher education of women well placed, the real
opportunity for widespread feminine education should only have come in
our own time. This last idea, however, which would represent ours as
the only generation which has given women adequate opportunities for
intellectual development, is one of those self-complacent bits of
flattery of ourselves and our own period that is so irritatingly
characteristic of recent times. There have been at least three times
in the world's history before our own when as many women as wanted
them, in the class most interested in educational matters, were given
the opportunities for the higher education. As a matter of fact
whenever there have been novelties introduced into educational
systems, women have demanded and quite naturally--since, "What a good
woman wants," said a modern saint, "is the will of God"--have obtained
the privilege of sharing the educational opportunities of the time.
This was true in Charlemagne's time when the women of the court
attended the lectures in the traveling palace school the great Charles
founded and fostered. It was true four centuries later, as we have
seen, when a great change in educational methods was introduced with
the foundation of the universities. It was exemplified again when the
"New Learning" came in and the study of the classics took the place of
the long hours spent in scholastic disputation, that had previously
occupied {333} so much university attention. In our own time it was
the introduction of the study of the social sciences particularly,
with the consequent appearance of many novelties in the educational
curriculum, that once more was the signal for women asking and quite
naturally obtaining educational privileges.
{opp333}
[Illustration]
MOSAIC (ST. MARK'S, VENICE, 1220)
Each of the previous experiences in the matter of feminine education
has been followed by a considerable period during which there was a
distinct incuriousness on the part of women in educational matters. Of
course that is only an analogy and though history is worth studying,
only because the lessons of the past are the warnings of the future,
yet this does not foretell a lessening of feminine interest in
educational matters, after a few generations of experience of its
vanity to make up to them for the precious special privileges of their
nature, the proper enjoyment and exercise of which it is so likely to
hamper. It would be interesting to know just why feminine education,
after a period of efflorescence during the Thirteenth Century,
retrograded during the next century. There have been some ungallant
explanations offered, which we mention merely because of their
historical interest but without any hint of their having any real
significance in the matter.
A distinguished German educational authority has called attention to
the fact that a well-known prepared food, for which Bologna is famous,
is first heard of about the time that the higher education for women
came into vogue at the Italian universities. Towards the end of the
same century a special kind of pudding, since bearing the name of its
native city, Bologna, which might very well have taken the place of an
ordinary dessert, also began to come into prominence. This German
writer suggests then, that possibly the serving of meals consisting of
these forms of prepared food, which did not require much household
drudgery and did not necessitate the bending over the kitchen range or
whatever took its place in those days, may have led the men to grumble
about the effects of the higher education. After all, he adds, though
the women get whatever they want, when they ask for it seriously, if
it proves after a time that the men do not want them to have it, then
women lose interest and care for it no longer. This, of course, must
be taken with the proverbial grain of salt, though it {334}
illustrates certain phases of the domestic life of the time as well as
affording a possible glimpse into the inner circle of the family life.
The real story of woman's intellectual position in the century is to
be found in its literature. How deep was the general culture of the
women of the Thirteenth Century, in Italy at least, can be judged from
the Sonnets of Dante and his friends to their loved ones at the end of
this century. Some of the most beautiful poetry that was ever written
was inspired by these women and like the law of hydrostatics, it is
one of the rules of the history of poetry, that inspiration never
rises higher than its source and that poetry addressed to women is
always the best index of the estimation in which they are held, the
reflection of the highest qualities of the objects to which it is
addressed. Anyone who reads certain of the sonnets of Dante, or of his
friends Guido Cavalcanti or Gino da Pistoia or Dante da Maiano, will
find ready assurance of the high state of culture and of intellectual
refinement that must have existed among the women to whom they were
dedicated. This same form of reasoning will apply also with regard to
the women of the South of France to whom the Troubadours addressed
their poetry; to those of the north of France who were greeted by the
Trouvères; and those of the south of Germany for whom the Minnesingers
tuned their lyres and invoked the Muses to enable them to sing their
praises properly. It would seem sometimes to be forgotten that poetry
generally is written much more for women than for men. Everyone
realizes that for one man who has read Tennyson's "Idyls of the King"
there are probably five women to whom they have been a source of
delight. When we think of the Thirteenth Century as not affording
opportunities of intellectual culture for its women, we should ask
ourselves where then did the Meistersingers and the poets of England,
Germany and France who told their romantic tales in verse find an
audience, if it was not among the women. The stories selected by the
Meistersingers are just those which proved so popular to feminine
readers of Tennyson in the Nineteenth Century, and the chosen subjects
of interest in the stories show that men and women have not changed
much during the intervening centuries. The literature of any {335}
period reflects the interest of the women in it and, as interest is
itself an index of intellectual development, Thirteenth Century
literature must be taken as the vivid reflection of the cultural
character of the women of the time, and this is of itself the highest
possible tribute to their intelligence and education.
On the other hand the best possible testimony to the estimation of
women during the Thirteenth Century, is to be found in the attitude of
the men of the generations towards them, as it is clearly to be seen
in the literature of the time. In the Holy Graal, the Cid, the
Minnesingers and the Meistersingers, woman occupies the higher place
in life and it is recognized that she is the highest incentive to
good, unfortunately also sometimes to evil, but always the best reward
that men can have for their exertions in a great cause. The supreme
tribute to woman comes at the end of the century in Dante's apotheosis
of her in the Divine Comedy. In this it is a woman who inspires, a
woman who leads, a woman who is the reward of man's aspirations, and
though the symbolism may be traced to philosophy, the influence of an
actual woman in it all is sure beyond all doubt. Nor must it be
thought that it was merely in this highest flight of his imagination
that this greatest of poets expressed such lofty sentiments with
regard to women. Anyone who thinks this does not know Dante's minor
poems, which contain to women in the flesh and above all to one of
them, the most wonderful tributes that have ever been paid to woman.
Take this one of his sonnets for instance.
So gentle and so fair she seems to be.
My Lady, when she others doth salute,
That every tongue becomes, all trembling, mute,
And every eye is half afraid to see;
She goes her way and hears men's praises free.
Clothed in a garb of kindness, meek and low.
And seems as if from heaven she came, to show
Upon the earth a wondrous mystery:
To one who looks on her she seems so kind,
That through the eye a sweetness fills the heart,
Which only he can know who doth it try.
{336}
And through her face there breatheth from her mind
A spirit sweet and full of Love's true art,
Which to the soul saith, as it cometh, "Sigh."
It will be noted that though this contains the highest possible praise
of the woman whom he loved, it has not a single reference to any of
her physical perfections, or indeed to any of those charms that poets
usually sing. We have already called attention to this, that it is not
the beauty of her face or her figure that has attracted him, but the
charm of her character, which all others must admire--which even women
do not envy, it is so beautiful--that constitutes the supreme reason
for Dante's admiration. Nor must it be thought that this is a unique
example of Dante's attitude in this matter; on the contrary, it is the
constant type of his expression of feeling. The succeeding sonnet in
his collection is probably quite as beautiful as the first quoted, and
yet is couched in similar terms. It will be found in the chapter on
Dante the Poet. Need we say more to prove that the women of the
century were worthy of the men and of the supreme time in which they
lived; that they were the fit intellectual companions of perhaps the
greatest generation of men that ever lived?
[Illustration]
STONE CARVING (AMIENS)
{337}
XXI
CITY HOSPITALS--ORGANIZED CHARITY.
While the Thirteenth Century was engaged in solving the problems of
the higher education and of technical education for the masses, and
was occupied so successfully, as we have seen, with the questions of
the rights of man and the development of law and of liberty, other and
more directly social and humanitarian works were not neglected. There
had been hospitals in existence from even before the Christian era,
but they had been intended rather for the chronic ailments and as the
name implies, for the furnishing of hospitality to strangers and
others who had for the time no habitation, than for the care of the
acutely ill. In the country places there was a larger Christian
charity which led people to care even for the stranger, and there was
a sense of human duty that was much more binding than in the modern
world. The acutely ill were not infrequently taken into the houses of
even those who did not know them, and cared for with a solicitude
difficult to understand in this, colder time. This was not so much
typical of the times, however, as of the social conditions, since we
have many stories of such events in our colonial days.
In the cities, however, which began more and more to be a feature of
life in the Thirteenth Century, though they counted their inhabitants
only by a few thousands where ours count them by hundreds of
thousands, the need of some other method of caring for such cases made
itself distinctly felt. At the end of the Twelfth and the beginning of
the Thirteenth centuries this need became demandingly manifest, and
the consequence was a movement that proved to be of great and
far-reaching practical benevolence. It is to the first Pope of the
Thirteenth Century, Innocent III., that we owe the modern city
hospital as we have it at the present time, with its main purpose to
care for the acutely ill who may have no one to take care of them
properly, as well as for those who have been injured or {338} who have
been picked up on the street and whose friends are not in a position
to care for them.
The deliberateness with which Innocent III. set about the
establishment of the mother city hospital of the world, is a striking
characteristic of the genius of the man and an excellent illustration
of the practical character of the century of which he is so thoroughly
representative.
Pope Innocent recognized the necessity for the existence of a city
hospital in Rome and by inquiry determined that the model hospital for
this purpose existed down at Montpelier in connection with the famous
medical school of the university there. Montpelier had succeeded to
the heritage of the distinguished reputation in medical matters which
had been enjoyed by Salernum, not far from Naples, during the Ninth,
Tenth, and Eleventh centuries. The shores of the Mediterranean have
always been recognized as possessing a climate especially suitable for
invalids and with the diminution of the influence of the Salernitan
school, a transfer of its prestige to Montpelier, where the close
relationship with Spain had given the medical schools the advantage of
intimate contact with the medicine of the Arabs, is not a matter of
surprise. At Montpelier the hospital arrangements made by Guy de
Montpelier were especially efficient. The hospital of which he had
charge was under the care of the members of the order of the Holy
Spirit.
Pope Innocent summoned Guy, or Guido as he was known after this, to
Rome and founded for him the hospital of the Holy Spirit in the Borgo,
not far from St. Peter's, where it still exists. This was the mother
and model hospital for the world. Visitors to Rome saw it, and could
not fail to admire its great humanitarian work. Bishops from all over
the world on their official visits to the head of the Church, admired
the policy under which the hospital was conducted, recognized the
interest of the Pope in it, and went back to their homes to organize
institutions of the same kind. How many of these were established in
various parts of Europe is hard to determine. Virchow in his History
of the Foundations of the German Hospitals, has a list of over one
hundred towns in Germany in which hospitals of the Holy Spirit, or
medical institutions modeled on this hospital at Rome were founded.
{339} Many of these towns were comparatively small. Most of them
contained at the time less than five thousand inhabitants, so that it
can be said without hesitation, that practically every town of any
importance, at least in Germany, came under the influence of this
great philanthropic hospital movement.
With regard to other countries, it is more difficult to determine the
number of places in which such institutions were established. As both
France and Italy were, however, much more closely in touch with the
Holy See at this time, it would be surprising if they had not been
affected as much as Germany by the Pope's enthusiasm in the matter. We
do know that in various large cities, as in Florence, Siena, Paris and
London, there was a development of existing hospitals and the
establishment of new ones, that points to a distinct community of
interest in the hospital movement. At Paris, the Hotel Dieu was moved
from the Petit Pont, where it had been, to its present situation and
received large extensions in size and in usefulness. It was at this
time, particularly, that it received donations for endowment purposes
that would enable it to be self-supporting. A number of bequests of
property, the rent of which was to be paid to the hospital, were made,
and the details of some of these bequests have an interest of their
own. Houses were not numbered at this time but were distinguished by
various signs, usually figures of different kinds that formed part of
their facade. The Hotel Dieu acquired the houses with the image of St.
Louis, with the sign of the golden lion of Flanders, with the image of
the butterfly, with the group of the three monkeys, with the image of
the wolf, with the image of the iron lion, with the cross of gold,
with the chimneys, etc. The Hotel Dieu, indeed, seems to have become
practically a fully endowed institution during the course of the
Thirteenth Century, for there are apparently no records of special
revenues voted by the city or the king, though there are such records
with regard to other places. For instance the Hospital of St. Louis
received the right to collect a special tax on all the salt that came
into the city.
In England the hospital movement during the Thirteenth Century is
evidently quite as active as in Germany, at least as far as the
records go. These refer mainly to London and show {340} that the
influence of the work of Innocent III. and his enthusiasm was felt in
the English capital. The famous St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London
had been a Priory founded at the beginning of the Twelfth Century,
which took care of the poor and the ailing, but at the beginning of
the Thirteenth Century it became more frankly a hospital in the modern
sense of the word. St. Thomas' Hospital, which remains to the present
day one of the great medical institutions of London, was founded by
Richard, Prior of Bermondsey, in 1213. Bethlehem or Bedlam, which
afterwards became a hospital for the insane, was founded about the
middle of the Thirteenth Century. The name Bedlam is a corruption of
Bethlehem, since adopted into the English language to express a place
where fools do congregate. Bridewell and Christ's Hospital, which were
the other two of the institutions long known as the five Royal
Hospitals of London, also seem either to have been founded, or to have
received a great stimulus and reorganization in the Thirteenth
Century, but both ceased after some time to be places for the
reception, of the ailing and became, one of them a prison and the
other a school.
The names of some of these institutions became associated with that of
Edward VI. about the middle of the Sixteenth Century. For this,
however, there was no proper justification, since, at most, all that
was accomplished within the reign of the boy king, was the
reestablishment of institutions formerly in existence which had been
confiscated under the laws of Henry VIII., but the necessity for whose
existence had been made very clear, because of the suffering entailed
upon the many ailing poor by the fact, that in their absence there was
nowhere for them to go to be cared for. As Gairdner points out in his
History of the English Church in the Sixteenth Century, "Edward has
left a name in connection with charities and education which critical
scholars find to be little justified by fact." The supposed foundation
of St. Thomas' Hospital was only the reestablishment of this
institution, and even when it was granted by him to the citizens of
London, this was not, as Gairdner says, "without their paying for it."
How much all this hospital movement owes to Innocent III. will be best
appreciated from Virchow's account of the German {341} hospitals, the
great German Scientist not being one of those at all likely to
exaggerate, the beneficent influence of the Popes, he says:
"The main cause decisive in influencing and arousing interest of the
people of the time in the hospitals of the Holy Ghost was the Papal
enthusiasm in the matter. The beginning of their history is
connected with the name of that Pope, who made the boldest and
farthest-reaching attempt to gather the sum of human interest into
the organization of the Catholic Church. The hospitals of the Holy
Ghost were one of the many means by which Innocent III. thought to
bind humanity to the Holy See. And surely it was one of the most
effective. Was it not calculated to create the most profound
impression, to see how the mighty Pope who humbled emperors and
deposed kings, who was the unrelenting adversary of the Albigenses,
turned his eyes sympathetically upon the poor and sick, sought the
helpless and the neglected on the streets, and saved the
illegitimate children from death in the waters. There is something
conciliating and fascinating in the fact that at the very same time
at which the Fourth Crusade was inaugurated through his influence,
the thought of founding a great organization of an essentially
humane character to extend throughout all Christendom, was also
taking form in his soul; and that in the same year (1204) in which
the new Latin Empire was founded in Constantinople, the newly
erected hospital of the Santo Spirito, by the Old Bridge across the
Tiber, was blessed and dedicated as the future center of this
universal humanitarian organization."
{opp341}
[Illustration]
HOSPITAL OF THE HOLY GHOST (LÜBECK)
Virchow, of course, considers Innocent's action as due to the entirely
interested motive of binding the Catholic world to the Holy See.
Others, however, who have studied Innocent's life even more
profoundly, have not considered his purpose as due to any such mean
motive. Hurter who wrote a history of Pope Innocent III., the
researches for which he began as a Protestant with the idea that in
the life of this Pope better than anywhere else the pretensions of the
papacy could be most effectively exposed, but who was so taken by the
character of the man that before he completed his history he had
become a Catholic, looks at it in a very different way. Even Virchow
himself quotes {342} Hurter's opinion, though not without taking some
exceptions to it. Hurter said with regard to charitable foundations in
his history of Pope Innocent III.: "All benevolent institutions which
the human race still enjoys, all care for the deserted and needy
through every stage of suffering from the first moment of birth to the
return of the material part to earth, have had their origin in the
church. Some of them directly, some of them indirectly through the
sentiments and feelings which she aroused, strengthened and vivified
into action. The church supplied for them the model and sometimes even
the resources; that these great humanitarian needs were not neglected
and their remedies not lacking in any respect is essentially due to
her influence upon human character."
With regard to this Virchow says that hospitals had existed among the
Arabs and among the Buddhists in the distant East, "nevertheless," he
adds, "it may be recognized and admitted, that it was reserved for the
Roman Catholic Church and above all for Innocent III., to establish
institutions for the care of those suffering from diseases."
A corresponding hospital movement that received considerable attention
within the Thirteenth Century was the erection of Leproseries or
hospitals for the care of lepers. Leprosy had become quite common in
Europe during the Middle Ages, and the contact of the West with the
East during the Crusades had brought about a notable increase of the
disease. It is not definitely known how much of what was called
leprosy at that time really belonged to the specific disease now known
as lepra. There is no doubt that many affections which have since come
to be considered as quite harmless and non-contagious, were included
under the designation leprosy by the populace and even by physicians
incapable as yet of making a proper differential diagnosis. Probably
severe cases of eczema and other chronic skin diseases, especially
when complicated by the results of wrongly directed treatment or of
lack of cleansing, were sometimes pronounced to be leprosy. Certain of
the severer forms of what is now known as psoriasis--a non-contagious
skin disease--running a very slow course and sometimes extremely
obstinate to treatment, were almost surely included under the
diagnosis of leprosy. Personally I have seen {343} in the General
Hospital in Vienna, a patient who had for many months been compelled
by the villagers among whom he lived to confine himself to his
dwelling, sustained by food that was thrown into him at the window by
the neighbors who were fearful of the contagiousness of his skin
disease, yet he was suffering from only a very neglected case of
psoriasis.
There is no doubt, however, of the existence of actual leprosy in many
of the towns of the West from the Twelfth to the Fifteenth centuries,
and the erection of these special hospitals proved the best possible
prophylactic against the further spread of the disease. Leprosy is
contagious, but only mildly so. Years of association with lepers may
and usually does bring about the communication of the disease to those
around them, especially if they do not exercise rather carefully
certain precise precautions as to cleanliness, after personal contact
or after the handling of things which have previously been in the
leper's possession. As the result of the existence of these houses of
segregation, leprosy disappeared during the course of the next three
centuries and thus a great hygienic triumph was obtained by sanitary
regulation.
This successful hygienic and sanitary work, which brought about
practically the complete obliteration of leprosy in the Middle Ages,
furnished the first example of the possibility of eradicating a
disease that had become a scourge to mankind. That this should have
been accomplished by a movement that had its greatest source in the
Thirteenth Century, is all the more surprising, since we are usually
accustomed to think of the people of those times, as sadly lacking in
any interest in sanitary matters. The significance of the success of
the segregation movement was lost upon men down almost to our own
time. This was, however, because it was considered that most of the
epidemic diseases were conveyed by the air. They were thought
infectious and due to a climatic condition rather than to contagion,
that is conveyed by actual contact with the person having the disease
or something that had touched him, which is the view now held. With
the beginning of the crusade against tuberculosis in the latter part
of the Nineteenth Century, however, the most encouraging factor for
those engaged in it, was the history of the success of segregation
methods and careful {344} prevention of the spread of the disease
which had been pursued against leprosy. In a word the lessons in
sanitation and prophylaxis of the Thirteenth Century are only now
bearing fruit, because the intervening centuries did not have
sufficient knowledge to realize their import and take advantage of
them.
Pope Innocent III. was not the only occupant of the papal throne whose
name deserves to be remembered with benedictions in connection with
the hospital movement of the Thirteenth Century. His successors took
up the work of encouragement where he had left it at his death and did
much to bring about the successful accomplishment of his intentions in
even wider spheres. Honorius III. is distinguished by having made into
an order the Antonine Congregation of Vienna, which was especially
devoted to the care of patients suffering from the holy fire and from
various mutilations. The disease known as the holy fire seems to have
been what is called in modern times erysipelas. During the Middle Ages
it received various titles such as St. Anthony's fire, St. Francis'
fire, and the like, the latter part of the designation evidently being
due to the intense redness which characterizes the disease, and which
can be compared to nothing better than the erythema consequent upon a
rather severe burn. This affection was a great deal commoner in the
Middle Ages than in later times, though it must not be forgotten that
its disappearance has come mainly in the last twenty-five years.
It is now known to be a contagious disease and indeed, as Oliver
Wendell Holmes pointed out over half a century ago, may readily be
carried from place to place by the physician in attendance. It does
not always manifest itself as erysipelas when thus carried, however,
and the merit of Dr. Holmes' work was in pointing out the fact that
physicians who attended patients suffering from erysipelas and then
waited on obstetrical cases, were especially likely to carry the
infection which manifested itself as puerperal fever. A number of
cases of this kind were reported and discussed by him, and there is no
doubt that his warning served to save many precious lives.
Of course nothing was known of this in the Thirteenth Century, yet the
encouragement given to this religious order, which devoted itself
practically exclusively to the care in special {345} hospitals of
erysipelas, must have had not a little effect in bringing about a
limitation of the spread of the disease. In such hospitals patients
were not likely to come in contact with many persons and consequently
the contagion-radius of the disease was limited. In our own time
immediate segregation of cases when discovered has practically
eradicated it, so that many a young physician, even though ten years
in practise, has never seen a case of it. It was so common in America
during the Civil War and for half a century prior thereto, that there
were frequent epidemics of it in hospitals and it was generally
recognized that the disease was so contagious that when it once gained
a foothold in a hospital, nearly every patient suffering from an open
wound was likely to be affected by it.
It is interesting then to learn that these people of the Middle Ages
attempted to control the disease by erecting special hospitals for it,
though unfortunately we are not in a position to know just how much
was accomplished by these means. A congregation devoted to the special
care of the disease had been organized, as we have said, early in the
Thirteenth Century. At the end of this century this was given the full
weight of his amplest approval by Pope Boniface VIII., who conferred
on it the privilege of having priests among its members. It will be
remembered that Pope Boniface VIII. is said to have issued the Bull
which forbade the practise of dissection. The decretal in question,
however, which was not a Bull, only regulated, as I have shown, the
abuse which had sprung up of dismembering bodies and boiling them in
order to be able to carry them to a distance for burial, and was in
itself an excellent hygienic measure.
Many orders for the care of special needs of humanity were established
during the Thirteenth Century. It is from this period that most of the
religious habits worn by women originate. These used to be considered
rather cumbersome for such a serious work as the nursing and care of
the sick, but in recent years quite a different view has been taken.
The covering of the head, for instance, and the shearing of the hair
must have been of distinct value in preventing communication of
certain diseases. There has been a curious assimilation in the last
few years, of the dress required to be worn by nurses in operating
{346} rooms to that worn by most of the religious communities. The
head must be completely covered, and the garments worn are of material
that can be washed. It will be recalled that the headdresses of
religious, being as a rule of spotless white, must be renewed
frequently and therefore must be kept in a condition of what is
practically surgical cleanliness. While this was not at all the
intention of those who adopted the particular style of headdress worn
by religious, yet their choice has proved, in what may well be
considered a Providential way, to be an excellent protective for the
patients against certain dangers that would inevitably have been
present, if their dress had been the ordinary one of the women of
their class during these many centuries of hospital nursing by
religious women.
The organization of charity is supposed to be a feature of social life
that was reserved for these modern times. A subsequent chapter on
Democracy, Christian Socialism and National Patriotism, shows how
false this notion is from one standpoint; a little additional
interpretation will show that the generations which organized the
hospitals, took care of the lepers in such a way as to prevent their
becoming sources of infection for others, and segregated such severe
contagious diseases as erysipelas, not only knew how to organize
charitable efforts, but were able to accomplish their purposes in this
matter in such a way, that the friction of the charity organization
itself absorbed as little as possible of the beneficent energy put
into it, and much less than is the case in our own time. Besides the
monasteries were really active centers of charity organization of the
most practical character. They not only gave to the people when their
necessities required it, but they were active employers of labor and
in times of scarcity constantly made large sacrifices in order to keep
their people employed, and even the community itself went on short
rations in order that the suffering in the neighborhood might not be
extreme. In times of prosperity there were, no doubt, abuses in
monasteries, but no one ever accused them of neglecting the poor
during times of famine.
While the Thirteenth Century was so intent upon the relief of the
social needs consequent upon illness and injury, it did not neglect
other forms of social endeavor. One of the crying {347} evils of the
Thirteenth Century was the fact that mariners and merchants, as well
as pilgrims to the Holy Land, were not infrequently captured by
corsairs from the northern coast of Africa, and sold into slavery. At
times, if there was hope of a very large ransom, news of the condition
of these poor victims might find its way to their homes. As a rule,
however, they were as much lost to family and friends as if they had
actually been swallowed up by the sea, which was usually concluded to
have been their fate. The hardships thus endured and the utter
helplessness of their conditions made them fitting subjects for
special social effort. The institution which was to provide relief for
this sad state of affairs had its rise in a typically Thirteenth
Century way--what, doubtless, the modern world would be apt to think
of as characteristically medieval--but the result achieved was as
good an example of practical benevolence as has ever been effected in
the most matter-of-fact of centuries.
{opp347}
[Illustration]
CHARITY (GIOTTO)
[Illustration]
FORTITUDE (GIOTTO)
[Illustration]
HOPE (GIOTTO)
Shortly after the beginning of the Thirteenth Century two very
intelligent men, whose friends honored them very much for the
saintliness of their lives--meaning by saintliness not only their
piety but their thoughtfulness for others before themselves--had a
dream in which they saw poor captives held in slavery and asking for
some one out of Christian charity to come and ransom them. One of
these men was John of Matha, a distinguished teacher of Theology at
the University of Paris. The other was Felix of Valois, more
distinguished for his piety than his learning, but by no means an
ignorant man. On the same night, though living at a distance from one
another, they had this identical dream. Having told it next day to
some friends, it happened that after a time it came to their mutual
knowledge that the other had had a similar vision. The circumstance
seemed so striking to them that they applied to the Pope for an
interpretation of it. The Pope, who was Innocent III., the founder of
city hospitals, saw in it a magnificent opportunity for the foundation
of another great Christian charity.
Accordingly in interpreting it, he directed their thoughts toward the
redemption of Christian captives taken by the Saracens. He has as a
consequence been regarded as the founder of the order of Trinitarians
(A. D. 1198), and did, in {348} fact, draft its Rule. It was called,
from its object, Ordo de Redemptione Captivorum, (Order for the
Redemption of Captives), but its members were more generally known as
Trinitarians. They wore a white habit, having a red and blue cross on
the breast. They were well received in France, where they had
originated, were the recipients of large sums of money to be devoted
to the objects of the order, and had large accessions to their number,
among whom were many distinguished by ability and profound learning.
In the year 1200 the first company of ransomed captives arrived from
Morocco, and one may easily imagine their joy on again regaining their
freedom and beholding once more their friends and native land.
The members of this order were sometimes called Mathurins, from the
title of the first church occupied by them in Paris. They spread
rapidly in Southern France, through Spain, Italy, England, Saxony, and
Hungary, and foundations of a similar kind were also opened for women.
Cerfroid, in the diocese of Meaux, where the first house of the order
was opened, became the residence of the General (minister generalis).
There was a fine field for their labors in Spain, where the Moors were
constantly at war with the Christians. The self-sacrificing spirit of
these religious, which led them to incur almost any dangers in the
accomplishment of their purpose, was only equaled by their zeal in
arousing interest for the poor captives. They became the accredited
agents for the ransoming of prisoners, and also for their exchange and
even the Mahometans learned to trust and eventually to reverence them.
When they could not ransom at once they thus succeeded in ameliorating
the conditions in which slave prisoners were kept, and proved a great
source of consolation to them.
Another order, having the same object in view but differing somewhat
in its constitution, was founded in 1218, by Peter of Nolasco, a
distinguished Frenchman, and Raymond of Pennafort the famous authority
on canon law. In this, too, medieval supernaturalism evolved the usual
practical results. In consequence of a vision, the order was placed
under the special protection of the Blessed Virgin, and called the
Order of the Blessed Virgin of Mercy (Ordo. B. Mariae de Mercede). Its
{349} members bound themselves by vow to give their fortunes and to
serve as soldiers in the cause. Their devotion was so ardent that for
the accomplishment of their purpose they vowed if necessary to make a
sacrifice of their very persons, as Peter actually did in Africa, for
the redemption of Christian captives. Hence their members were divided
into Knights who wore a white uniform, and Brothers, who took orders
and provided for the spiritual wants of the community. Gregory IX.,
admiring the heroic devotion of these intrepid men, approved the
order. Many thousands of captive Christians who would otherwise have
dragged out a miserable existence as slaves among the Mahometans of
North Africa, were thus rescued and restored to their families and a
life of freedom and happiness in Europe. This was a fine practical
example of Abolitionism worthy of study and admiration.
[Illustration]
HOSPITAL INTERIOR
{350}
XXII
GREAT ORIGINS IN LAW.
Perhaps the most surprising phase of Thirteenth Century history is
that much of what is most valued and most valuable in our modern laws,
especially as they concern the fundamental rights of man, is to be
found clearly expressed in the great lawmaking of the Thirteenth
Century. It can scarcely fail to astonish those who look upon the
Middle Ages as hopelessly barren in progress, to find that human
liberty in its development reached such a pass before the end of the
Middle Ages, or that any period so long before the Renaissance and the
reformation so-called, could be picked out as representing a
distinctive epoch in supremely liberal legislation. After careful
study, the surprise is apt to be rather that there should have been
comparatively so little advance since that time, seeing how much the
generations of this marvelous century were able to accomplish in
definitely formulating principles of human rights.
The first great document in the laws of the Thirteenth Century is, of
course, Magna Charta, signed in 1215, the foundation of all the
liberties of English speaking people ever since. Perhaps the highest
possible tribute to the Great Charter is the fact that it has grown in
the estimation of intelligent men, rather than lost significance. In
quite recent years it has become somewhat the custom to belittle its
import and its influence. But it must not be forgotten that over and
over again in times of national crises in England, Magna Charta has
been confidently appealed to as a fundamental law too sacred to be
altered, as a talisman containing some magic spell capable of averting
national calamity. Bishop Stubbs said of it, that "the Great Charter
was the first supreme act of the nation after it had realized its own
identity."
Perhaps in nothing does its supremacy as basic legislation for
national purposes so shine forth, as from the fact that it is {351}
not a vague statement of great principles, not a mere declaration of
human rights, not a documentary rehearsal of fundamental legalities,
but a carefully collected series of practical declarations for the
solution of the problems that were then disturbing the peace of the
kingdom, and leading to charge and countercharge of infringement of
right on the part of the king and his subjects. As might have been
expected from the men of the Thirteenth Century--from the generations
who more than any other in all human history succeeded in uniting the
useful with the beautiful in everything from the decoration of their
churches and other great architectural structures to the ordinary
objects of everyday life--it was of eminently practical character.
While it is the custom to talk much of Magna Charta and to praise its
wonderful influence there are very few people who have ever actually
read its provisions. The classics are said to be books that everyone
praises but no one reads, and Magna Charta and the Constitution of the
United States are documents that are joined in the same fate. A little
consideration of some of the chapters of the Charter will give an
excellent idea of its thoroughly straightforward practicalness, though
it may serve also to undeceive those who would expect to find in this
primal document a lofty statement of abstract human rights, such as
the men of the Thirteenth Century were never conscious of, since their
thoughts were always in the concrete and their efforts were bent to
the solution of the problems lying just before them, and not to the
lifting of all the burdens that human nature has to bear.
Before this, of course, there had been some development of legislation
to furnish the basis for what was to come in the Thirteenth Century.
The famous Constitutions of Clarendon under Henry II. and the Assizes
of Clarendon (quite a different matter) and of North Hampton and the
Forest under Henry II., gave assurances of rights that had only
existed somewhat shadily before. According to the Constitutions of
Clarendon sworn men gave their verdict in cases from their own
knowledge. This was, of course, quite a different matter from the
giving of a verdict from knowledge obtained through witnesses at a
trial, but the germ of the jury trial can be seen. It was not,
however, until the next reign that the men of England {352} did not
merely wait for the free gifts of legal rights but demanded and
obtained them. There was a new hitherto undreamt-of spirit abroad in
the Thirteenth Century, by which men dared to ask for the rights they
considered should be theirs.
The opening chapter of Magna Charta states especially the subjects of
the rights that are guaranteed by the document. It is not surprising
then, to find that the first subject is the Church and that the most
extensive guarantees are made that the English Church liberties shall
be inviolate. Churchmen had been largely concerned in the movement
which secured the signing of Magna Charta, and then after all, as must
never be forgotten, the Church at this time was distinctly felt by all
to be the spiritual expression of the religious aspirations of the
people. Over the concluding sentence of this chapter, "the grant of
the unwritten liberties to all freemen of our kingdom," there has been
no little discussion. There are some who would consider that it
applied to all Englishmen above the condition of villeins or serfs,
while there are others who would limit its application practically to
those nobly born in the kingdom. Posterity undoubtedly came to
translate it in the broader sense, so that, whatever the original
intention, the phrase became as a grant eventually to all free
Englishmen.
Chapter I.: "In the first place we have granted to God, and by this
our present charter confirmed for us and our heirs for ever, that the
English Church shall be free, and shall have her rights entire, and
her liberties inviolate; and we will that it be thus observed; which
is apparent from this that the freedom of elections, which is reckoned
most important and very essential to the English Church, we of our
pure and unconstrained will, did grant, and by our charter confirm and
did obtain the ratification of the same from our lord, Pope Innocent
III. before the quarrel arose between us and our barons, and this we
will observe, and our will is that it be observed in good faith by
our heirs for ever. We have also granted to all freemen of our
kingdom, for us and for our heirs for ever, all the underwritten
liberties, to be had and held by them and their heirs, of us and our
heirs for ever."
Perhaps the most interesting feature of Magna Charta is to {353} be
found in the fact, that it did actually in most cases come to be
applied ever so much wider than had apparently been the original
intention. It was in this sense a vital document as it were, since it
had within itself the power of developing so as to suit the varying
circumstances for which recourse was had to it. There is no doubt at
all of the good faith of the men who appealed to it, nor of their firm
persuasion that the document actually intended what they claimed to
find in it. Modern criticism has succeeded in stripping from the
original expressions many of the added meanings that posterity
attached to them, but in so doing has really not lessened the
estimation in which Magna Charta must be held.
The position is indeed noteworthily analagous to that of the original
deposit of faith and the development of doctrine which has taken
place. Higher criticism has done much to show how little of certain
modern ideas was apparently contained explicitly in the original
formulas of Christian faith, and yet by so doing has not lessened our
beliefs, but has rather tended to make us realize the vitality of the
original Christian tenets. As everything living in God's creation,
they have developed by a principle implanted within them to suit the
evolutionary conditions of man's intelligence and the developing
problems that they were supposed to offer solutions for. The
comparison, of course, like all comparisons, must walk a little lame,
since after all Magna Charta is a human document, and yet the very
fact that it should have presented itself under so many varying
conditions, ever with new significance to succeeding generations of
thinking men, is the best evidence of how nearly man's work at its
best may approach that of the Creator. It is an exemplification, in a
word, of the creative genius of the century, a worthy compeer of the
other accomplishments which have proved so enduring and so capable of
making their influence felt even upon distant generations.
It is of the very essence of the practicality of Magna Charta that
among the early chapters of the important document--Chapter VII.--is
one that concerns widows and their property rights immediately after
the death of their husbands. Previous chapters had discussed questions
of guardianship and inheritance, since it was especially minors who in
this rude period {354} were likely to suffer from the injustice of the
crown, of their over-lords in the nobility, and even from their
guardians. While Magna Charta, then, begins with the principles for
the regulation of matters of property as regards children, it proceeds
at once to the next class most liable to injustice because of their
inability to properly defend themselves by force of arms--the widows.
Chapter VII.: "A widow, after the death of her husband, shall
forthwith and without difficulty have her marriage portion and
inheritance; nor shall she give anything for her dower or for her
marriage portion, or for the inheritance which she and her husband
held on the day of the death of that husband; and she may remain in
the house of her husband for forty days after his death, within which
time her dower shall be assigned to her."
Chapter VIII.: "Let no widow be compelled to marry, so long as she
prefers to live without a husband; provided always that she gives
security not to marry without our consent, if she holds of us, or
without the consent of the lord of whom she holds, if she holds of
another."
The first of these provisions serves to show very well how early in
the history of English jurisprudence a thoroughgoing respect for
woman's legal rights began to have a place. The beginning Thirteenth
Century made an excellent start in their favor. For some reason the
movement for justice thus initiated did not continue, but suffered a
sad interruption down almost to our own times.
The second of these provisions for widows, embodied in Chapter VIII.,
sounds a little queer to the modern ear. This protection of widows
from compulsion to marry is apt to seem absolutely unnecessary in
these modern days. Some of the unmarried are indeed prone to think,
perhaps, that widows have more than their due opportunity in this
matter without any necessity for protecting them from compulsion. Of
course it is to be understood that it was not always so much the
charms of the lady herself that must be protected from compulsion, as
those of the property which she inherited and the political and
martial influence that she might be expected to bring her husband. In
these troublous times when disputes with {355} appeals to arms were
extremely frequent, it was important to have the regulation, that
after the death of a husband there should be no sudden unbalancing of
political power because of the compelled marriage of the widow of some
powerful noble.
In certain subsequent chapters up to the twelfth there is question
mainly of the rights of the Jews, as money-lenders, to collect their
debts with interest after the death of the principal to whom it was
loaned. For instance, according to Chapter X., the debt shall not bear
interest while the heir is under age and if the debt fell to the hands
of the crown, nothing but the principal was to be taken. In Chapter
XI. if any one died indebted to the Jews his wife should have her
dower and pay nothing of that debt. For children under age the same
principle held and they had a right to the provision of necessaries in
keeping with the condition of their father. This last clause has been
perpetuated in the practice of our courts, as some consider even to
the extent of an abuse, so that debtors cannot collect from the income
of a young man to whom money has been left, if by so doing the income
should be impaired to such an extent as to make his method of living
unsuitable to the condition in life to which he was born and brought
up.
Chapter XII. has been the subject of more discussion perhaps than any
other. McKechnie, the most recent commentator on Magna Charta, says of
it: [Footnote 29]
[Footnote 29: Magna Carta, a Commentary on the Great Charter of King
John, with an Historical Introduction by William Sharp McKechnie,
M.D., LL.B., D. Phil. Glasgow, James Maclehose and Sons, Publishers
to the University, 1905.]
"This is a famous clause, greatly valued at the time it was framed
because of its precise terms and narrow scope (which made evasion
difficult), and even more highly valued in after days for exactly
opposite reasons. It came indeed to be interpreted in a broad
general sense by enthusiasts who, with the fully-developed British
constitution before them, read the clause as enunciating the modern
doctrine that the Crown can impose no financial burden whatsoever on
the people without consent of Parliament."
Readers may judge for themselves from the tenor of the {356} chapter,
how wide a latitude in interpretation it not only permits, but
invites.
Chapter XII.: "No scutage nor aid shall be imposed in our kingdom,
unless by common counsel of our kingdom, except for ransoming our
person, for making our eldest son a knight, and for once marrying our
eldest daughter; and for these there shall not be levied more than a
reasonable aid. In like manner it shall be done concerning aids from
the citizens of London."
There is no doubt that it is hard to read in this chapter all that has
been found in it by enthusiastic appellants to Magna Charta at many
times during the succeeding centuries. As a matter of fact, however,
within half a century after it had been promulgated, it was appealed
to confidently as one of the reasons why an English Parliament should
meet if the King required special levies of money for the purpose of
carrying on war. It was during the sixth and seventh decades of the
Thirteenth Century that the great principle of English Legislation:
"There shall be no taxation without representation"--which six
centuries later was to be appealed to by the American Colonies as the
justification for their war for independence, gradually came to be
considered as a fundamental principle of the relationship between the
government and the people. That it had its origin in Magna Charta
there seems no doubt, and it is only another example of that
unconscious development of a vital principle which, as we know from
History, took place so often with regard to chapters of the Great
Charter.
Undoubtedly one of the most important chapters of Magna Charta is the
very brief one, No. 17, which concerns itself with the holding of a
Court of Common Pleas. The whole of the chapter is, "Common Pleas
shall not follow our Court but shall be held in some fixed place."
This represented a distinct step in advance in the dispensing of
justice. It is a little bit hard for us to understand, but all
departments of government were originally centered in the king and his
household--the court--which attended to royal and national business of
every kind. As pointed out by Mr. McKechnie in his Magna Charta, the
court united in itself the functions of the modern cabinet of the
administrative department--the home office, the foreign office and the
admiralty, and of the various legal tribunals. It {357} was the parent
of the Court at St. James and the courts at Westminster. Almost
needless to say, it is from the fact that the dispensing of justice
was a function of royalty, that the places of holding trials are still
called courts.
According to this chapter of Magna Charta, thereafter ordinary trials,
Common Pleas, did not have to follow the Court, that is the royal
household, in its wanderings through various parts of the kingdom, but
they were held at an appointed place. In the days of Henry II. the
entire machinery of royal justice had to follow the monarch as he
passed, sometimes on the mere impulse of the moment, from one of his
favorite hunting-seats to another. Crowds thronged after him in hot
pursuit, since it was difficult to transact business of moment before
the court without being actually present. This entailed almost
intolerable delay, extreme annoyance and great expense upon litigants,
who brought their pleas for the king's decision. There is an account
of the hardships which this system inflicted upon suitors told of one
celebrated case. Richard D'Anesty gives a graphic record of his
journeyings in search of justice throughout a period of five years,
during which he visited in the king's wake most parts of England,
Normandy, Aquitaine, and Anjou. Ultimately successful he paid dearly
for his legal triumph. He had to borrow at a ruinous rate of interest
in order to meet his enormous expenses, mostly for traveling, and was
scarcely able to discharge his debts.
All litigation then, that did not directly involve the crown or
criminal procedures, could be tried thereafter by a set of judges who
sat permanently in some fixed spot, which though not named was
probably intended from the beginning to be Westminster. Hence it has
been said by distinguished English jurists that Magna Charta gave
England a Capital. On the other hand Chapter XXIV. insured justice in
criminal cases by reserving these pleas to judges appointed by the
crown. This short chapter reads: "No sheriff, constable, coroner, or
others of our bailiffs shall hold pleas of our Crown." This last
expression did not necessarily mean matters concerned with royal
business as might be thought, but had in King John's time come to
signify criminal trials of all kinds. It is easy to understand that
those accused of crime would look confidently for {358} justice to the
representative of the central government, while they dreaded the
jurisdiction of the less responsible officials resident in the
counties, who had a wide-spread reputation for cruelty and oppression,
and for a venality that it was hard to suppress.
It would seem as though these quotations would serve to make even the
casual reader appreciate how thoroughly Magna Charta deserves the
reputation which it has borne now for nearly seven centuries, of an
extremely valuable fundamental document in the history of the
liberties of the English speaking people. Some of the subsequent
chapters may be quoted without comment because they show with what
careful attention to detail the rights of the people were guaranteed
by the Charter, and how many apparently trivial things were considered
worthy of mention. We may call attention to the fact that in Chapters
forty-one and forty-two there are definite expressions of guarantee
for the rights even of aliens, which represent a great advance over
the feelings in this respect that had animated the people of a century
or so before, and foreshadow the development of that international
comity which is only now coming to be the distinguishing mark of our
modern civilization.
"A freeman shall not be amerced for a small offence, except in
accordance with the degree of the offence; and for a grave offence
he shall be amerced in accordance with the gravity of his offence,
yet saving always his 'contentment'; and a merchant in the same way,
saving his wares; and a villein shall be amerced in the same way,
saving his wainage--if they have fallen into our mercy; and none of
the aforesaid amercements shall be imposed except by the oath of
honest men of the neighborhood.
"If any freeman shall die intestate, his chattels shall be
distributed by the hands of the nearest kinsfolk and friends, under
the supervision of the church, saving to everyone the debts which
the deceased owed to him.
"No constable or other bailiff of ours shall take corn or other
provisions from anyone without immediately tendering money therefor,
unless he can have postponement thereof by permission of the seller.
"No sheriff or bailiff of ours, or any other person shall take {359}
the horses or carts of any freeman for transport duty, against the
will of the said freeman.
"All kydells for the future shall be removed altogether from the
Thames and Medway, and throughout all England, except upon the sea
coast.
"Nothing in the future shall be taken or given for a writ of
inquisition of life or limbs, but freely it shall be granted, and
never denied.
"No bailiff for the future shall put any man to his 'law' upon his
own mere word of mouth, without credible witnesses brought for this
purpose.
"No freeman shall be arrested or detained in prison, or deprived of
his freehold, or outlawed, or banished, or in any way molested, and
we will not set forth against him, nor send against him, unless by
the lawful judgment of his peers and by the law of the land.
"To no one will we sell, to no one will we refuse or delay, right or
justice.
"All merchants shall have safe and secure exit from England, and
entry to England, with the right to tarry there and to move about as
well by land as by water, for buying and selling by the ancient and
right customs, quit from all evil tolls, except (in time of war)
such merchants as are of the land at war with us. And if such are
found in our land at the beginning of the war, they shall be
detained without injury to their bodies or goods, until information
be received by us, or by our chief justiciar, how the merchants of
our land found in the land at war with us are treated and if our men
are safe there, the others shall be safe in our land.
"It shall be lawful in future for any one (excepting always those
imprisoned or outlawed in accordance with the law of the kingdom,
and natives of any country at war with us, and merchants, who shall
be treated as is above provided) to leave our kingdom, and to
return, safe and secure by land and water, except for a short period
in time of war, on grounds of public policy--reserving always the
allegiance due to us.
"We will appoint as justices, constables, sheriffs or bailiffs only
such as know the law of the realm and mean to observe it well.
{360}
"We shall have, moreover, the same respite and the same manner in
rendering justice concerning the disafforestation or retention of
those forests which Henry our father and Richard our brother
afforested and concerning the wardship of lands which are of the
fief of another (namely, such wardships as we have hitherto had by
reason of a fief, which any one held of us by knight's service) and
concerning abbeys founded on other fiefs than our own, in which the
lord of the fee claims to have right; and when we have returned, or
if we desist from our expedition, we will immediately grant full
justice to all who complain of such things.
"All fines made with us unjustly and against the law of this land,
and all amercements imposed unjustly and against the law of this
land, shall be entirely remitted, or else it shall be done
concerning them according to the decision of the five and twenty
barons of whom mention is made below, in the clause for securing the
peace, or according to the judgment of the majority of the same,
along with the aforesaid Stephen Archbishop of Canterbury, if he can
be present, and such others as he may wish to bring with him for
this purpose, and if he cannot be present the business shall
nevertheless proceed without him, provided always that if any one or
more of the aforesaid five and twenty barons are in a similar suit,
they shall be removed as far as concerns this particular judgment,
others being substituted in their places after having been selected
by the rest of the same five and twenty for this purpose only, and
after having been sworn.
"Moreover, all the aforesaid customs and liberties, the observance
of which we have granted in our kingdom as far as pertains to us
towards our men, shall be observed by all of our kingdom, as well by
clergy as by laymen, as far as pertains to them towards their men.
"And, on this head, we have caused to be made out letters patent of
Stephen, Archbishop of Canterbury, Henry, Archbishop of Dublin, the
bishops aforesaid, and Master Pandulf, as evidence of this clause of
security and of the aforesaid concessions."
These last provisions show how closely the Church was bound up with
the securing and maintenance of the rights of {361} the English
people. The clauses we have quoted just before, need no comment to
show how sturdily the spirit of liberty strode abroad even at the
beginning of the Thirteenth Century, for Magna Charta was signed in
1215. The rest of the century was to see great advances in liberty and
human rights, even beyond the guarantees of the Great Charter.
Magna Charta, glorious as it was, was only the beginning of that basic
legislation which was to distinguish the Thirteenth Century in
England. About the middle of the century Bracton began his collection
of the laws of the land which has since been the great English classic
of the Common Law. His work was accomplished while he was the Chief
Justiciary during the reign of Henry III. For many years before he had
occupied various judicial positions, as Justice Itinerant of the
counties of Nottingham and Derby and for seventeen years his name
appears as one of the justices of the Aula Regis. This experience put
him in an eminently fitting position to be the mouthpiece of English
practice and law applications, and his book was at once accepted as an
authority. It is a most comprehensive and systematic work in five
volumes, bearing the title De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae, and
was modeled after the Institutes of Justinian.
It was during the reign of Edward I., the English Justinian as he has
been called, that the English Common Law came to its supreme
expression, and this monarch has rightly been placed among the great
benefactors of mankind for his magnanimous generosity in securing the
legal rights of his subjects and framing English liberties for all
time. Not a little of Edward's greatness as a law-maker and his
readiness to recognize the rights of his subjects, with his consequent
willingness to have English law arranged and published, must be
attributed to his connection during his earlier years as Prince of
Wales with the famous Simon De Montfort. To this man more than to any
other the English speaking people owe the development of those
constitutional rights, which gradually came to be considered
inalienably theirs during the Thirteenth Century. He is undoubtedly
one of the very great characters of history and the Thirteenth Century
is by so much greater for having been the scene of his labors, during
so many years, for the {362} establishment of constitutional
limitations to the power of the monarch, and the uplifting of the
rights of subjects not only among the nobility, but also among the
lower classes.
It was in Edward's time that the English Common Law was fashioned into
the shape in which it was to exist for many centuries afterwards. How
true this is may perhaps best be judged by the fact that even the laws
with regard to real estate have not been changed in essence since that
time, though medieval titles to land would seem to be so different to
those of the present day. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica the
changes which have been made since that time have been mainly due to
the action of equity and legislation, the latter sometimes interpreted
by the courts in a manner very different from the intention of
Parliament. The same authority is responsible for the statement that
the reign of Edward I., is notable for three leading real estate
statutes which are still law. One of these was with regard to
Mortmain, while the important statute known as _Quia Emptores_ (the
eighteenth of Chapter I. of the Laws of Edward I.) had the practical
effect of making the transfer of land thenceforward, more of a
commercial and less of a legal transaction. It is to this same period
that is owed the writ _Elegit_ which introduced the law practice of a
creditor's remedy over real estate. How little was accomplished in the
matter of law-making in subsequent centuries, may be gathered from the
fact that Mr. James Williams who writes the article on real estate in
the Encyclopedia Britannica ninth edition, says that from 1290 to the
reign of Henry VIII., that is down to the Sixteenth Century, there is
no statute of the first importance dealing with real estate.
In a word, then, it may be said that these law-makers of the
Thirteenth Century anticipated most of the legal difficulties of the
after-time. Their statutory provisions, as in the case of the chapters
of Magna Charta, seemed originally only to have a narrow application
to certain urgent legal questions of the time, but proved eventually
to contain in themselves the essence of legal principles that could be
applied in circumstances such as the original law-maker had not even
imagined. This is indeed the typical triumph of the century in every
line of endeavor, that while apparently it devoted itself only to the
{363} narrow problems of its own time, its solutions of them whether
in art and architecture or decoration, in literary expression or
poetic effectiveness, in educational methods or social uplift, always
proved so complete, so thoroughly human in the broadest sense of that
word and so consonant with development, that their work did not have
to be done over again. No greater praise than this could be bestowed.
[Illustration]
SPIRE OF ST. ELIZABETH'S (MARBURG)
{364}
XXIII
JUSTICE AND LEGAL DEVELOPMENT.
It must not be thought because we have devoted so much time to the
triumphs of English law-making in the Thirteenth Century that,
therefore, there is little or nothing to be said about this same
admirable feature of the time in other countries. As a matter of fact
every nation in Europe saw the foundation of its modern legal system
laid, and was responsive witness to the expression of the first
principles of popular rights and popular liberties. Montalembert in
his Life of St. Elizabeth of Hungary [Footnote 30] makes no mention
in the Introduction which is really a panegyric of the Thirteenth
Century, of the progress of English law-making, and yet considers that
he is able to bring together enough evidence to show that legislation
had its acme of development just at this time. His paragraph on the
subject will serve as the best possible preface to the scant treatment
of continental law-making and enforcement of justice in this period,
that our limited space will allow. He says:
[Footnote 30: Life of St. Elizabeth of Hungary by the Count De
Montalembert, translated by Francis Deming Hoyt, New York,
Longman's, Green and Company, 1904.]
"Legislation never, perhaps, had a more illustrious period. On the
one hand, the Popes, supreme authorities in matters of law as well
as of faith, gave to canon law the fullest development possible to
this magnificent security of Christian civilization; sat themselves
as judges with exemplary assiduity, published immense collections,
and founded numerous schools. On the other hand, that period gave
birth to most of the national legislation of the various states of
Europe; the great _Mirrors_ of Swabia and Saxony, the first laws
published in the German language by Frederick II. at the diet of
Mentz, and the code given by him to Sicily; in France, the
Institutes of St. Louis, together with the _Common Law_ of Pierre
des Fontaines, {365} and the _Statutes of Beauvoisis_ of Philip of
Beaumanoir; and lastly the French version of the _Assizes of
Jerusalem_, in which is to be found the most complete résumé now
extant of Christian and chivalric law. All these precious monuments
of the old Christian organization of the world are preserved in the
native languages of the various people, and are distinguished, less
even by this fact than by their generous and pious spirit, from that
pernicious Roman law, the progress of which was destined soon to
change all the principles of the former."
Most of Montalembert's paragraph refers to the law-making in France
with which he is naturally more familiar. He has supplied ample
material for consultation for those who wish to follow out this
interesting theme further. Even more significant, however, than the
law-making in France, were the new ideas with regard to the
enforcement in law that came in during the reign of Louis IX. We have
not had to wait until this generation to realize, that as a rule it is
not the absence of law so much as the lack of enforcement of such laws
as exist, that gives rise to many of the injustices between men. St.
Louis made it his business to bring about the enforcement of the laws
with proper construction of their terms in such a way as to secure the
rights of all. He himself sat under the famous old oak of Versailles
as a Court of Appeals, reviewing especially the cases of the poor. It
soon came to be known, that it would be a sad occasion for any and
every court official who was found to have given judgment against the
poor because of partiality or the yielding to unlawful influence. On
the other hand, in order to keep the right of appeal from being
abused, punishments were meted out to those who made appeals without
good reason.
Finding that he was unable to hear so many causes as were appealed to
him, Louis chose Stephen Boileau to act as Chief Justice and committed
the care of proper legal enforcement with confidence into his hands.
Boileau had become famous by having condemned some very near
relatives, under circumstances such that relationship might have been
expected to weigh down the wrong side of the scales of justice, and in
a few years he enhanced his reputation by the utter disregard of all
motives in the settlement of suits at law, except those of {366} the
strictest justice. How much Louis himself did in order to safeguard
the rights of the poor can be judged from the famous incident told by
all his biographers, in which he risked the enmity of the most
powerful among his barons, in order to secure the punishment of one of
them who had put two students to death. This was the first time that
the rights of men, as men, were asserted and it constitutes the best
possible testimony to the development of law and true liberty in
France.
"Three young nobles of the county of Flanders were surprised,
together with the abbot of St. Nicholas, in a wood pertaining to
Coucy, with bows and arrows. Although they had neither dogs nor
hunting implements, they were found guilty of having gone out to
hunt and were hanged. The abbot and several women of their families
made complaint to the king, and Enguerrard was arrested and taken to
the Louvre. The king summoned him before him; he appeared, having
with him the King of Navarre, the King of Burgundy, the counts of
Bar, Soissons, Brittany, and Blois, the Archbishop of Rheims, Sire
John of Thorote, and nearly all the great men in the kingdom. The
accused said that he wished to take counsel, and he retired with
most of the seigneurs who had accompanied him, leaving the king
alone with his household. When he returned, John of Thorote, in his
name, said that he would not submit to this inquiry, since his
person, his honour, and his heritage were at stake, but that he was
ready to do battle, denying that he had hanged the three young men,
or ordered them to be hanged. His only opponents were the abbot and
the women, who were there to ask for justice. The king answered that
in causes in which the poor, the churches, and persons worthy of
pity, took part, it was not fitting to decide them in battle; for it
was not easy to find anyone to fight for such sorts of people
against the barons of the kingdom. He said that his action against
the accused was no new thing, and he alleged the example of his
predecessor Philip Augustus. He therefore agreed to the request of
the complainants, and caused Enguerrard to be arrested by the
sergeants and taken to the Louvre. All prayers were useless; St.
Louis refused to hear them, rose from his seat, and the barons went
away astonished and confused.
{367}
"They did not, however, consider that they were beaten. They again
came together; the King of Navarre, the Count of Brittany, and with
them the Countess of Flanders, who ought rather to have intervened
for the victims. It was as if they had conspired against the king's
power and honour; for they were not content to implore Coucy's
release, but asserted that he could not be kept in prison. The Count
of Brittany maintained that the king had no right to institute
inquiries against the barons of his kingdom in matters which
concerned their persons, their heritage or their honour. The king
replied, 'You did not speak thus in former times when the barons in
direct dependence upon you came before me with complaints against
yourself, and offered to sustain them in battle. You then said that
to do battle was not in the way of justice.' The barons put forward
a final argument, namely, that according to the customs of the
kingdom, the king could only judge the accused and punish him in
person after an inquiry to which he had refused to submit. The king
was resolute, and declared that neither the rank of the guilty man
nor the power of his friends should prevent him from doing full
justice. Coucy's life was, however, spared. The fact that he had not
been present at the judgment, nor at the execution, prevailed in his
favour. By the advice of his counsellors, the king condemned him to
pay 1200 livres parisis, which, considering the difference in the
purchasing power of money, may be estimated at considerably more
than 400,000 pounds, and he sent this sum to St. John of Acre for
the defense of Palestine. The wood in which the young men were
hanged was confiscated to the abbey of St. Nicholas. The condemned
man was also constrained to found three perpetual chapelries for the
souls of his victims, and he forfeited jurisdiction over his woods
and fish ponds, so that he was forbidden to imprison or execute for
any offense which had to do with them. Since Enguerrard's defender,
John of Thorote, had in his anger told the barons that the king
would do well to hang them all, the king, who had been told of this,
sent for him and said, 'How comes it, John, that you have said I
should hang my barons? I certainly will not have them hanged, but I
will punish them when they do amiss.' John of Thorote denied that he
had said this, and offered to {368} justify himself on the oath of
twenty or thirty knights. The king would not carry the matter
further, and let him go."
One of the best evidences of the development of the spirit of law in
Germany during this time is the establishment of the famous Fehmic
Courts, or Vehmgerichte, which achieved their highest importance
during the Thirteenth Century. As with regard to the universities,
there is a tradition that carries the origin of these courts back to
the time of Charlemagne. They are much more likely to have been
developments out of the relics of the ancient free courts of the old
Teutonic Tribe. The first definite knowledge of their existence cannot
be traced much earlier than a decade or two before the Thirteenth
Century. They had their principal existence in Westphalia. Practically
the whole country between the Rhine and the Weser was ruled to a
subordinate degree by these Fehmic courts. During the Thirteenth
Century they were used only in the most beneficial and liberal spirit,
supplying a means of redress at a time when the public administration
of justice was almost completely in abeyance. As a matter of fact,
before their establishment disregard for authority to the extent of
utter lawlessness prevailed in this part of Germany.
{opp368}
[Illustration]
CITY GATE (NEUBRANDENBURG)
[Illustration]
RATHHAUS (STRALSUND)
The significance of these courts has sometimes been missed. They
arose, however, out of the justice loving spirit of the people
themselves and were meant to supply legal enforcements when the
regularly constituted authorities were unable to secure them. They
remind one very much of the vigilance committees, which in our own
country, in the cities of the distant West, bravely and with the
admirable prudence of the race, have so often supplied the place of
regular courts and have brought justice and order out of the chaos of
lawlessness. The last place most people would expect their prototypes,
however, would be here in the Germany of the Thirteenth Century. How
much these Vehmgerichte accomplished during the Thirteenth and
Fourteenth centuries it would be difficult to say. They represent an
outgrowth of the spirit of the people themselves, that constitutes
another striking feature of the practical side of the generations of
the Thirteenth Century. They had much more to do with bringing about
the development of the modern acute sense of justice among the
Teutonic peoples {369} than is usually thought. They are the German
expression of the same feelings that in England dictated trial by
jury, and secured for the English speaking people of all time the
precious privileges of even-handed justice and the right to be judged
by one's peers.
It was not alone in the western countries of Europe that great
advances were made in liberty. The democratic spirit that was abroad
made itself felt everywhere and the foundations of rights for the
people were laid even in central Europe, in countries which ordinarily
are thought of at this time as scarcely more than emerging from
barbarism. Hungary may be cited as an example. Andrew II. is usually
set down by narrow-minded historians as having been entirely too
visionary in his character, and the fact that he led the fifth
Crusade, apparently even more fruitless than were most of the others,
is supposed to be an additional proof of this. Even Duruy in his
History of the Middle Ages says of him, "he organized a state of
anarchy by decreeing his Golden Bull, that if the King should violate
the privileges of the nobility, they should be permitted to resist him
by force and such resistance should not be treated as rebellion." As a
matter of fact, his people were thus granted a constitution more
liberal even than that of Magna Charta, but containing quite similar
provisions in many respects, and the curious historical analogy is
heightened when we recall that at the two ends of civilized Europe
these constitutions were given in the same decade. One cannot help but
wonder whether the Saxon elements which were in both peoples, for many
Saxon and Frisian colonists had been induced to settle in certain
parts of Transylvania just half a century before, did not have much to
do with this extremely interesting development in Hungary, so like the
corresponding evolution of the democratic spirit among their western
kinsfolk.
In Poland the development in law came a little later but evidently as
the result of the same factors that were at work during the Thirteenth
Century. Casimir the Great, who was born shortly after the close of
the Thirteenth Century, gave wise laws to Poland which have
constituted the basis of Polish law ever since. At this time Poland
was one of the most important countries in Europe. Casimir, besides
giving laws to {370} his people, also founded a university for them
and in every way encouraged the development of such progress as would
make his subjects intelligently realize their own rights and maintain
them, apparently foreseeing that thus the King would be better able to
strengthen himself against the many enemies that surrounded him in
central Europe.
How much the great Popes of the century accomplished for the
foundation and development of law, can only be appreciated by those
who realize the extent of their contributions to the codification of
canon law. It was the arrangement of this in definite shape that put
the civil jurists of the time at work setting their house in order.
Innocent III., who is deservedly called _Pater Juris_, devoted a great
deal of his wonderful energy and genius to the arrangement of canon
law. This placed for the first time the canon law on an absolutely
sure footing and filled up many gaps that formerly existed. Gregory
IX. commissioned his chaplain, the famous Raymond of Pennafort, who
had been a professor of canon law in the University of Bologna, to
codify all the decretals since the time of Gratian. This work was
officially promulgated in 1234, four years of labor having been
devoted to it. The laws are in the form of decisions pronounced in
cases submitted to the Pope from all parts of Christendom, including
many from the distant East and not a few from England and Scotland.
Gregory's decretals were published in five books; a supplement under
the name of the sixth book was published under Pope Boniface VIII. in
1298. In this for the first time abstract rules of law are laid down
extracted from actual judgments. A compendium of Roman Law was added
so as to approximate canon and civil procedure.
This gives the best possible idea of how deeply the popes and the
authorities in canon law of the century were laying the foundations of
canonical practise and procedure for all times. The origins of modern
law are to be found here, and yet not, as might be anticipated because
of the distance in time, in such a confused or unmanageable fashion
that they are not worth while consulting, but on the contrary with
such clarity and distinctness and with such orderly arrangement, that
they have been the subjects of study on the part of distinguished
{371} jurists for most of the centuries ever since, and have never
lost their interest for the great lawyers and canonists, who prefer to
know things from the foundation rather than accept them at second
hand.
Some of the commentaries, or glosses as they were called, on canon law
serve to give an excellent idea of the legal ability as well as the
intellectual acumen of the canon lawyers of the century. The system of
teaching was oral, and careful study was devoted to original
authorities in law. Explanatory notes were added by the professors to
their copies of the text. When later these texts were given out or
lent for transcription, the notes were also copied, usually being
written in the margin. After a time the commentary, however, proved to
be, for students at least, as important as the text and so was
transcribed by itself and was called an apparatus, that is a series of
mechanical helps, as it were, to the understanding of the text.
Of the names of some of the most distinguished glossatores the memory
has been carefully preserved because they produced so much effect on
legal teaching. The gloss written on Gratian by Joannes Teutonicus
(John the German), probably during the first decade of the Thirteenth
Century, was revised and supplemented by Bartholomew of Brescia about
the middle of the Thirteenth Century. Some ten years later Bernard of
Parma wrote a commentary on the decretals of Gregory. All of these are
important fundamental works in canon law, and they were of very great
influence in bringing out the principles of law and showing the basis
on which they were founded. It is almost needless to say that they
aroused additional interest and made the subject much more easy of
approach than it had been. The fact that all of these magnificent
contributions to the science and literatures of law should have been
made during our Thirteenth Century, serves only to emphasize the fact
that everything that men touched during this period was sure to be
illuminated by the practical genius of the time, and put into a form
in which for many centuries it was to be appealed to as a model and an
authority in its own line. How much of legal commentary writing there
was besides these, can be readily understood from the fact that these
represent the activity only of the University of Bologna {372} which
was, it is true, the greatest of universities in its law department,
but it must not be forgotten that many other universities throughout
Europe also had distinguished professors of law at this time.
All this would seem to be of little interest for the secular
law-making of the period, but it must not be forgotten that civil law
was closely related to canon law at all times and that the development
of canon law always meant a renewed evolution of the principles, and
practise, and procedure of the civil law. In such countries as
Scotland, indeed, the canon law formed the basis of the civil
jurisprudence and its influence was felt even for centuries after the
so-called reformation. On the other hand it must not be forgotten that
the popes and the ecclesiastics helped to fight the battles of the
middle and lower classes against the king and the nobility in
practically every country in Europe. A very striking example of this
is to be found in the life of that much misunderstood Pope Boniface
VIII., the last pope of the century, who had received his legal
training at Bologna, and who was one of the great jurists of his time.
Circumstances differ so much, however, and obscure realities to such a
degree, that at the present time we need the light of sympathetic
interpretation to enable us to realize what Boniface accomplished.
{opp372}
[Illustration]
PORTRAIT OF POPE BONIFACE VIII. (GIOTTO, ROME)
He did much to complete in his time that arrangement and codification
of canon law which his predecessors during the Thirteenth Century had
so efficiently commenced. Like Innocent III. he has been much maligned
because of his supposed attempt to make the governments of the time
subservient to the Pope and to make the Church in each nation
independent of the political government. With regard to the famous
Bull Clericis Laicos, "thrice unhappy in name and fortune" as it has
been designated, much more can be said in justification than is
usually considered to be the case. Indeed the Rev. Dr. Barry, whose
"Story of the Papal Monarchy" in the Stories of the Nations series has
furnished the latest discussion of this subject, does not hesitate to
declare that the Bull far from being subversive of political liberties
or expressive of too arrogant a spirit on the part of the Church, was
really an expression of a great principle that was to become very
prominent in {373} modern history, and the basis of many of the modern
declarations of rights against the claims of tyranny.
He says in part:
"Imprudent, headlong, but in its main contention founded on history,
this extraordinary state-paper declared that the laity had always
been hostile to the clergy, and were so now as much as ever. But
they possessed no jurisdiction over the persons, no claims on the
property of the church, though they had dared to exact a tenth, nay,
even a half, of its income for secular objects, and time-serving
prelates had not resisted. Now, on no title whatsoever from
henceforth should such taxes be levied without permission of the
Holy See. Every layman, though king or emperor, receiving these
moneys fell by that very act under anathema; every churchman paying
them was deposed from his office; universities guilty of the like
offense were struck with interdict.
"Robert of Winchelsea, Langton's successor as primate, shared
Langton's views. He was at this moment in Rome, and had doubtless
urged Boniface to come to the rescue of a frightened, down-trodden
clergy, whom Edward I. would not otherwise regard. In the Parliament
at Bury, this very year, the clerics refused to make a grant. Edward
sealed up their barns. The archbishop ordered that in every
cathedral the pope's interdiction should be read. Hereupon the
chief-justice declared the whole clergy outlawed; they might be
robbed or murdered without redress. Naturally, not a few gave way; a
fifth, and then a fourth, of their revenue was yielded up. But
Archbishop Robert alone, with all the prelates except Lincoln
against him, and the Dominicans preaching at Paul's cross on behalf
of the king, stood out, lost his lands, and was banished to a
country parsonage. War broke out in Flanders. It was the saving of
the archbishop. At Westminster Edward relented and apologized. He
confirmed the two great charters; he did away with illegal judgments
that infringed them. Next year the primate excommunicated those
royal officers who had seized goods or persons belonging to the
clergy, and all who had violated Magna Charta. The Church came out
of this conflict exempt, or, more truly a self-governing estate of
the realm. It must be considered as {374} having greatly concurred
towards the establishment of that fundamental law invoked long after
by the thirteen American Colonies, 'No taxation without
representation,' which is the corner stone of British freedom."
We have so often heard it said that there is nothing new under the
sun, that finally the expression has come to mean very little, though
its startling truth sometimes throws vivid light on historical events.
Certainly the last place in the world that one would expect to find if
not the origin, for all during the Thirteenth Century this great
principle had been gradually asserting itself, at least, a wondrous
confirmation of the principle on which our American revolution
justified itself, would be in a papal document of the end of the
Thirteenth Century. Here, however, is a distinguished scholar, who
insists that the Colonists' contention that there must be no taxes
levied unless they were allowed representation in some way in the body
which determined the mode and the amount of taxation, received its
first formal justification in history at the hands of a Roman Pontiff,
nearly five centuries before the beginning of the quarrel between the
Colonies and the Mother Country. The passage serves to suggest how
much of what is modern had its definite though unsuspected origin, in
this earlier time.
[Illustration]
DECORATION THIRTEENTH CENTURY PSALTER MS.
{375}
XXIV
DEMOCRACY, CHRISTIAN SOCIALISM AND NATIONALITY.
Democracy is a word to conjure with but it is usually considered that
the thing it represents had its origin in the modern world much later
than the period with which we are occupied. The idea that the people
should be ready to realize their own rights, to claim their privileges
and to ask that they should be allowed to rule themselves, is supposed
ordinarily to be a product of the last century or two. Perhaps in this
matter more than any other does the Thirteenth Century need
interpretation to the modern mind, yet we think that after certain
democratic factors and developments in the life of this period are
pointed out and their significance made clear, it will become evident
that the foundations of our modern democracy were deeply laid in the
Thirteenth Century, and that the spirit of what was best in the
aspiration of people to be ruled by themselves, for themselves, and of
themselves had its birth in this precious seed time of so much that is
important for our modern life.
Lest it should be thought that this idea of the development of
democracy has been engendered merely in the enthusiastic ardor of
special admiration for the author's favorite century, it seems well to
call attention to the fact that historians in recent years have very
generally emphasized the role that the Thirteenth Century played in
the development of freedom. A typical example may be quoted from the
History of Anglo-Saxon Freedom by Professor James K. Hosmer,
[Footnote 31] who does not hesitate to say that "while in England
representative government was gradually developing during this
century, in Germany the cities were beginning to send deputies to the
Imperial Parliament and the Emperor, Frederick II., was allowing a
certain amount of representation in the {376} Government of Sicily. In
Spain, Alfonso the Wise, of Castile, permitted the cities to send
representatives to the Cortez, and in France this same spirit
developed to such a degree that a representative parliament met at the
beginning of the Fourteenth Century." In none of these countries,
however, unfortunately did the spirit of representative government
continue to develop as in England and in many of them the privileges
obtained in the Thirteenth Century were subsequently lost.
[Footnote 31: Scribners, New York, 1890.]
Certain phases of the rise of the democratic spirit have already been
discussed, and the reader can only be referred to them now with the
definite idea of recognizing in them the democratic tendencies of the
time. What we have said about the trade guilds constitutes one
extremely important element of the movement which will be further
discussed in this chapter. After this comes the guild merchant in its
various forms. After all the Hanseatic League was only one
manifestation of these guilds. Its widespread influence in awakening
in people's minds the realization that they could do for themselves
much more, and secure success in their endeavors much better by their
own united efforts, than by anything that their accepted political
rulers could do or at least would do for them, will be readily
appreciated by all who read that chapter.
Hansa must have been a great enlightener for the Teutonic peoples. The
History of the league shows over and over again their political rulers
rather interfering with than fostering their commercial prosperity.
These rulers were always more than a little jealous of the wealth
which the citizens of these growing towns in their realm were able to
accumulate, and they showed it on more than one occasion. The history
of the Hansa towns exhibits the citizens doing everything to dissemble
the feelings of disaffection that inevitably came to them as the
result of their appreciation of the fact, that they could rule
themselves so much better than they were being ruled, and that they
could accomplish so much more for themselves by their commercial
combination with other cities than had ever been done for them by
these hereditary princes, who claimed so much yet gave so little in
their turn.
The training in self-government that came with the {377} necessities
for defense as well as for the protection of commercial visitors from
other cities in the league, who trustfully came to deal with their
people, was an education in democracy such as could not fail to bring
results. The rise of the free cities in Germany represents the growth
of the democratic spirit down to our own time, better than any other
single set of manifestations that we have. The international relations
of these cities did more, as we have said, to broaden men's minds and
make them realize the brotherhood of man in spite of national
boundaries than any other factor in human history. Commerce has always
been a great leveler and such it proved to be in these early days in
Germany, only it must not be thought that these German cities had but
faint glimmerings of the great purpose they were engaged in, for
seldom has the spirit of popular government risen higher than with
them.
How clearly the Teutonic mind had grasped the idea of democracy can be
best appreciated perhaps from the attitude of the Swiss in this
matter. These hardy mountaineers whose difficult country and rather
severe climate separate them effectually from the other nations, soon
learned the advisability of ruling themselves for their own benefit.
Before the end of the Thirteenth Century they had formed a defensive
and offensive union among themselves against the Hapsburgs, and though
for a time overborne by the influence of this house after its head
ascended the Imperial throne, immediately on Rudolph's death they
proceeded to unite themselves still more firmly together. They then
formed the famous league of 1291 which represents so important a step
in the democracy of modern times. The formal document which
constituted this league a federal government deserves to be quoted. It
is the first great declaration of independence, and its ideas were to
crop out in many another declaration in the after times. It is an
original document in the strictest sense of the word. It runs as
follows:
"Know all men that we, the people of the valley of Uri, the
community of the valley of Schwiz, and the mountaineers of the lower
valley, seeing the malice of the times, have solemnly agreed and
bound ourselves by oath to aid and defend each other with all our
might and main, with our lives and property, {378} both within and
without our boundaries each at his own expense, against every enemy
whatever who shall attempt to molest us, either singly or
collectively. This is our ancient covenant. Whoever hath a lord let
him obey him according to his bounden duty. We have decreed that we
shall accept no magistrate in our valleys who shall have obtained
his office for a price, or who is not a native or resident among us.
Every difference among us shall be decided by our wisest men; and
whoever shall reject their award shall be compelled by the other
confederates. Whoever shall wilfully commit a murder shall suffer
death, and he who shall attempt to screen the murderer from justice
shall be banished from our valleys. An incendiary shall lose his
privileges as a free member of the community, and whoever harbors
him shall make good the damage. Whoever robs or molests another
shall make full restitution out of the property he possesses among
us. Everyone shall acknowledge the authority of a chief magistrate
in either of the valleys. If internal quarrels arise, and one of the
parties shall refuse fair satisfaction, the confederates shall
support the other party. This covenant for our common weal, shall,
God willing, endure forever."
In England democracy was fostered in the guilds, which, as we have
already seen in connection with the cathedrals, proved the sources of
education and intellectual development in nearly every mode of thought
and art. The most interesting feature of these guilds was the fact
that they were not institutions suggested to the workmen and tradesmen
by those above them, but were the outgrowth of the spirit of self help
and organization which, came over mankind during this century. At the
beginning they were scarcely more than simple beneficial associations
meant to be aids in times of sickness and trial, and to make the
parting of families and especially the death of the head of the family
not quite so difficult for the survivors, since affiliated brother
workmen remained behind who would care for them. During this century,
however, the spirit of democracy, that is the organized effort of the
people to take care of themselves, better their conditions, and add to
their own happiness, led to the development of the guilds in a fashion
that it is rather difficult for generations of the modern time to
{379} understand, for our trades' unions do not, as yet at least,
present anything that quite resembles their work in our times.
It was because of the effective social work of these guilds that
Urbain Gohier, the well-known French socialist and writer on
sociological subjects, was able to say not long ago in the North
American Review:
"When the workmen of the European Continent demand 'the three
eights'--eight hours of work, eight hours of rest and refreshment,
physical and mental, and eight hours of sleep--some of them are aware
of the fact that this reform already exists in the Anglo-Saxon
countries; but all are ignorant of this other fact that, during the
Middle Ages, in an immense number of labor corporations and cities, a
work-day was often only nine, eight and even seven hours long. Nor
have they ever been told that every Saturday, and on the eve of over
two dozen holidays, work was stopped everywhere at four o'clock." The
Saturday half holiday began it may be said even earlier, namely at the
Vesper Hour which according to medieval church customs was some time
between two and three p. m. and the same was true on the vigils, as
the eves of the important church festivals were called.
The only possible way to give a reasonably good idea of the spirit of
the old-time guilds which succeeded in accomplishing such a wonderful
social revolution, is to quote some of their rules, which serve to
show their intents and purposes at least, even though they may not
always have fulfilled their aims. Their rules regard two things
particularly--the religious and the social functions of the guild.
There was a fine for absence from the special religious services held
for the members but also a fine of equal amount for absence from the
annual banquet. In this they resemble the rules of the religious
orders which were coming to be widely known at the end of the Twelfth
and the beginning of the Thirteenth Century, and according to which
the members of the religious community were required quite as strictly
to be present at daily recreation, that is, at the hour of
conversation after meals, as at daily prayer. An interesting phase of
the social rules of the guild is that a member was expected to bring
his wife with him, or if not his wife then his sweetheart. They were
franker in these matters {380} in this simpler age and doubtless the
custom encouraged matrimony a little bit more than our modern colder
customs.
As giving a fair idea of the ordinances of the pre-Reformation guilds
in their original shape the rules of the Guild of St. Luke at Lincoln,
may be cited. St. Luke had been chosen as patron because according to
tradition he was an artist as well as an evangelist. The patron saint
was chosen always so that he might be a model of life as well as a
protector in Heaven. Its members were the painters, guilders,
stainers, and alabaster men of the city. The first rule provides that
on the Sunday next after the feast of St. Luke all the brothers and
sisters of the Guild shall, with their officers, go in procession from
an appointed place, carrying a great candle, to the Cathedral Church
of Lincoln, and there every two of the brethren and sisters shall
offer one half-penny or more after their devotion, and then shall
offer the great candle before an image of St. Luke within the church.
And any who were absent without lawful cause shall forfeit one pound
of wax to the sustentation of the said great candle.
On the same Sunday, "for love and amity and good communication to be
had for the several weal of the fraternity," the guildmen dined
together, every brother paying for himself and his wife, or
sweetheart, the sum of four pence. Absentees were fined one pound of
wax towards the aforesaid, candle.
The third rule provided that four "mornspeeches"--that its business
meetings--should be held each year, "for ordering and good rule to be
had and made amongst them." Absentees from a mornspeech forfeited one
pound of wax to St. Luke's candle. Another rule provided that the
decision of ambiguities or doubts about the forfeitures prescribed
should be referred to the mayor and four aldermen of the city. Rules 4
to 11, and also 13, regulate the taking of apprentices and the setting
up in trade; forbid the employing of strangers; provide for the
settlement of disputes and the examination of work not sufficiently
done after the sample. Already the tendency to limit the number of
workmen that might be employed which was later to prove a stumbling
block to artistic progress is to be noted. On the other hand the
effort to keep work up to a certain standard, which was to mean so
much for artistic {381} accomplishment in the next few generations
must be noted as a compensatory feature of the Guild regulations.
{opp381}
[Illustration]
DOORWAY (LINCOLN)
[Illustration]
NAVE (DURHAM CATHEDRAL)
[Illustration]
BROKEN ARCH (ST. MARY'S, YORK, CLIMAX OF GOTHIC)
Rule 12 directs that "when it shall happen any brother or sister of
the said fraternity to depart and decease from the world, at his first
Mass the gracemen and wardens (skyvens) for the time being shall offer
of the goods and chattels of the said fraternity, two pence; and at
his eighth day, or thirtieth day, every brother and sister shall give
to a poor creature a token made by the dean, for which tokens every
brother and sister shall pay the dean a fixed sum of money, and with
the money thus raised he shall buy white bread to give to the poor
creatures" holding the tokens, the bread to be distributed at the
church of the parish in which the deceased lived.
This twelfth rule with regard to the manner of giving charity is
particularly striking, because it shows a deliberate effort to avoid
certain dangers, the evil possibilities of which our modern organized
charity has emphasized. According to this rule of the Guild of St.
Luke's at Lincoln, all the members were bound to give a certain amount
in charity, for the benefit of a deceased member. This was not,
however, by direct alms, but by means of tokens for which they paid a
fixed price to the Dean, who redeemed the tokens when they were
presented by the deserving poor. This guaranteed that each member
would give the fixed sum in charity and at the same time safeguarded
the almsgiving from any abuses, since the member of the guild himself
would be likely to know something of the poor person and his
deservingness, and if not there was always the question of the Dean
being informed with regard to the needs of the case. All of this was
accomplished, however, without hurting the feelings of the recipients
of the charity, since they felt that it was done not for them but for
the benefit of a deceased member.
How much the guilds came to influence the life of the people during
the next two centuries may be best appreciated from their great
increase in number and wealth.
In England, it is computed that at the beginning of the Sixteenth
Century there were thirty thousand of these institutions spread over
the country. The county of Norfolk alone had nine hundred, of which
number the small town of {382} Wymondham had at least eleven still
known by names, one--the Guild of Holy Trinity, Wymondham--being
possessed of a guild-hall of its own, whilst it and the other guilds
of the town are said to have been "well endowed with lands and
tenements." In Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk, there were twenty-three
guilds; Boston, Lincolnshire, had fourteen, of which the titles and
other particulars are known, whilst in London their number must have
been very great. Of the London trade guilds, Stow, the Elizabethan
antiquary, records the names of sixty of sufficient importance to
entitle their representatives to places at the civic banquets in the
reign of Henry VIII. Many of them are still in existence, having been
spared at the time of the Reformation on the plea that they were
trading or secular associations. Fifteen of the largest of
them--including the merchant tailors, the goldsmiths and the
stationers--have at the present time an annual income of over $50,000
each.
The reasons for their popularity can be readily found in the many
social needs which they cared for. Socialistic cooperation has,
perhaps, never been carried so far as in these medieval institutions
which were literally "of the people, by the people, and for the
people." Often their regulation made provisions for insurance against
poverty, fire, and sometimes against burglary. Frequently they
provided schoolmasters for the schools. Their funds they loaned out to
needy brethren in small sums on easy terms, whilst trade and other
disputes likely to give rise to ill-feeling and contention were
constantly referred to the guilds for arbitration. One of the rules of
the Guild of our Lady at Wymondham thus ordains, that for no manner of
cause should any of the brothers or sisters of the fraternity go to
law till the officers of the guild had been informed of the
circumstances and had done their best to settle the dispute and
restore "unity and love betwixt the parties." To assist at the burial
of deceased brethren, and to aid in providing for the celebration of
obits for the repose of their souls, were duties incumbent on all,
defaulters without good excuse being subject to fines and censure.
It must not be thought that these tendencies to true democracy were
confined to the trades guilds, however. The historian of the merchant
guilds has demonstrated that they had the {383} same spirit and this
was especially true for the great guild merchant. He says:
"To this category of powerful affinities must be added the Gild
Merchant. The latter was from the outset a compact body emphatically
characterized by fraternal solidarity of interests, a protective
union that naturally engendered a consciousness of strength and a
spirit of independence. As the same men generally directed the
counsels of both the town and the Gild, there would be a gradual,
unconscious extension of the unity of the one to the other, the
cohesive force of the Gild making itself felt throughout the whole
municipal organism. But the influence of the fraternity was material
as well as moral. It constituted a bond of union between the
heterogeneous sokes (classes of tenants) of a borough; the townsmen
might be exclusively amenable to the courts of different lords, but,
if engaged in trade within the town, they were all members of one
and the same Gild Merchant. The independent regulation of trade also
accustomed the burgesses to self-government, and constituted an
important step toward autonomy; the town judiciary was always more
dependent upon the crown or mesne lord than was the Gild Merchant."
Because of the supreme interest in everything connected with
Shakespeare, the existence of one of the most important guilds in
Stratford, has led to the illustration of guilds' works there better
than for any English town during this period. The Guild of the Holy
Cross was the most important institution of Stratford and enthusiastic
Shakespeare scholars have applied themselves to find out every detail
of its history as far as it is now available, in order to make clear
the conditions--social and religious--that existed in the great
dramatist's birthplace. Halliwell, in his Descriptive Calendar of the
Records of Stratford on Avon, and Sidney Lee, in his Stratford on Avon
in the Time of the Shakespeares, have gathered together much of this
information:--"The Guild has lasted, wrote its chief officer in 1309,
for many, many years and its beginning was from time whereunto the
memory of man reaches not." Bowden, in his volume on the Religion of
Shakespeare, has a number of the most important details with regard to
Stratford's Guild. The earliest extant documents with regard to it are
from the {384} Reign of Henry III., 1216-1272, and include a deed of
gift by one William Sede, of a tenement to the Guild, and an
indulgence granted October 7th, 1270, by Giffard, Bishop of Wooster,
of forty days to all sincere penitents who after having duly confessed
had conferred benefits on the Guild.
By the close of the reign of Edward I., at the beginning of the
Fourteenth Century, the Guild was wealthy in houses and lands, and the
foundation was laid of its chapel and almshouses which, with the hall
of meeting--the "Rode or Reed Hall"--stood where the Guild Hall is at
the present day. Edward III. and Richard II., during the Fourteenth
Century, confirmed the rights of the Guild and even added to its
privileges. Though it was a purely local institution, the fame of its
good works had spread so wide during these next centuries that
affiliation with it became a distinction, and the nobility were
attracted to its ranks. George, Duke of Clarence, brother of Edward,
with his wife and children, and the Earl of Warwick, and the Lady
Margaret were counted among its members, and merchants of distant
towns counted it an honor to belong to it. Later, also, Judge
Littleton, one of the famous founders of English law, was on its roll
of membership.
The objects of the Guild were many and varied and touched the social
life of Stratford at every point. The first object was mutual prayer.
The Guild maintained five priests or chaplains who were to say masses
daily, hour by hour, from six to ten o'clock for its members, it being
expected that some of them would be present at each of the masses. Out
of the fees of the Guild one wax candle was to be kept alight every
day throughout the year at every mass in the church before the rood,
or cross, "so that God and our Blessed Virgin and the Venerated Cross
may keep and guard all the brethren and sisters of the Guilds from
every ill." The second object was charity, under which was included
all the various Works of Mercy. The needs of any brother or sister who
had fallen into poverty or been robbed were to be provided for "as
long as he bears himself rightly towards the brethren." When a brother
died all the brethren were bound to follow the body to the church and
to pray for his soul at its burial. The Guild candle and eight smaller
ones were to be kept burning by the body from the {385} time of death
till the funeral. When a poor man died in the town the brethren and
sisters were, for their soul's health, to find four wax candles, a
sheet, and a hearse cloth for the corpse. This rule also applied in
the event of a stranger's death, if the stranger had not the necessary
means for burial. Nor were the efforts of the Guild at Stratford
devoted solely to the alleviation of the ills of mankind and the more
serious purposes of life. Once a year, in Easter Week, a feast of the
members was held in order to foster peace and true brotherly love
among them. At this time offerings were made for the poor in order
that they too might share in the happiness of the festival time. There
was attendance at church before the feasting and a prayer was offered
by all the "brethren and sisters that God and our Blessed Virgin and
the Venerated Cross in whose honor we have come together will keep us
from all ills and sins." This frequent reference to the Cross will be
better understood if it is recalled that the Guild at Stratford bore
the name of the Guild of the Holy Cross, and the figure of the
crucified One was one of its most respected symbols and was always
looked upon as a special object of veneration on the part of the
members.
The thoroughly progressive spirit of the Guild at Stratford will
perhaps be best appreciated by the modern mind from the fact, that to
it the town owed the foundation of its famous free school. During the
Thirteenth and Fourteenth centuries the study of grammar, and of the
various theoretical branches, was not considered the essential part of
an education. Gradually, however, there had arisen the feeling that
all the children should be taught the ground-work of the vulgar
tongue, and that those whose parents wished it should receive
education in Latin also; hence the establishment of grammar schools,
that at Stratford being founded for the children of the members of the
Guild about the middle of the Fifteenth Century. This was only the
normal development of the earlier spirit of the Guild which enabled it
to meet the growing social needs of the time. It was at this school,
as reconstituted under Edward VI., that Shakespeare was educated, and
the reestablishment by Edward was only in response to the many
complaints which arose because of the absence of the school after its
suppression by {386} Henry VIII. The fact that Shakespeare was
educated at an Edward VI. grammar school, has often given occasion for
commentators to point out that it was practically the Reformation in
England which led to the establishment of free schools. Any such
suggestion, however, can be made only in complete ignorance of the
preexisting state of affairs in which the people, by organization,
succeeded in accomplishing so much for themselves.
As a matter of fact the Guild at Stratford, as in most of the towns in
England--for we have taken this as an example only because it is
easier to get at the details of its history--was the most important
factor in the preservation of social order, in the distribution of
charity, in the providing of education, and even the maintenance of
the security of the life and property of its inhabitants. When it was
dissolved, in 1547, Stratford found itself in a chaotic state and had
to petition Edward VI. to reconstitute the Guild as a civil
corporation, which he did by charter in 1553.
After this consideration of the guilds and their purpose and success,
it is no wonder that we should declare that the wind of the spirit of
democracy was blowing in England and carrying away the old landmarks
of absolute government. It is to the spirit thus fostered that must be
attributed the marvelous progress in representative government, the
steps of which we recall.
In 1215, all England united against the odious John Lackland and
obliged him to grant the Magna Charta--a declaration of national
liberty.
In 1257, the Provisions of Oxford, under Henry III., established, for
the moment, the stated recurrence of the great national council of
Parliament.
In 1265, under the same Prince, the earl of Leicester admitted to
Parliament the knights of the shire and the representatives of the
townspeople, who formed later the lower house, or House of Commons,
while those personally summoned to attend by the king from the great
nobles formed the upper house, or House of Lords.
Beginning with the year 1295, in the reign of Edward I., the
attendance of the county and town members became {387} regular, making
Parliament really representative of the country.
In 1309, in the reign of Edward II., Parliament revealed its possible
strength by putting conditions on its vote for taxes.
There were other factors at work, however, and one of them at least,
because of its importance, deserves to be recalled here. In the
chapter on Great Beginnings of Modern Commerce we call attention to
the fact, that the Crusades were responsible to a great degree for the
spirit of enterprise which led to the formation of the Lombard league
of cities, and later to the great Hanseatic League, which seems to
have taken at least its incentive from the Southern Confederation. In
the chapter on Louis IX. we point out that the Crusades, and his
connection with them, far from being blots on Louis's career must
rather be considered as manifestations of the great heart of the time
which was awakening to all needs, and had its religious aspirations
stirred so deeply that men were ready to give up everything in order
to follow an idea. One thing is certain, the Crusades did more to set
ferments at work in the social organization of Europe than would have
been possible by any other movement. These ferments brought about two
results, one the uplift of the common people, the other the
centralization of power in the hands of the kings with the gradual
diminution of the influence of the nobility. While fostering the
spirit of democracy on the one hand, they gave birth to the spirit of
nationality and to all that this has accomplished in modern history.
Storrs, in his life of St. Bernard, recently issued, has given
expression to this thought in a very striking fashion. He says:
"It used to be the fashion to regard the Crusades as mere fantastic
exhibitions of a temporary turbulent religious fanaticism, aiming at
ends wholly visionary, and missing them, wasting the best life of
Europe in colossal and bloody undertakings, and leaving effects only
of evil for the time which came after. More reasonable views now
prevail; and while the impulse in which the vast movement took its
rise is recognized as passionate and semi-barbaric, it is seen that
many effects followed which were beneficial rather than harmful,
which could not perhaps have been at the time in other ways
realized. As I have already suggested, properties were to an
important {388} extent redistributed in Europe, and the
constitutions of states were favorably affected. Lands were sold at
low prices by those who were going on the distant expeditions, very
probably, as they knew, never to return; and horses and armor, with
all martial equipments, were bought at high prices by the Jews, who
could not hold land, and the history of whom throughout the Middle
Ages is commonly traced in fearful lines of blood and fire, but who
increased immeasurably their movable wealth through these transfers
of property. Communes bought liberties by large contributions to the
needs of their lord; and their liberties, once secured, were
naturally confirmed and augmented, as the years went on. The smaller
tended to be absorbed in the larger; the larger often to come more
strictly under royal control, thus increasing the power of the
sovereign--which meant at the time, general laws, instead of local,
a less minutely oppressive administration, the furtherance of the
movement toward national unity. It is a noticeable fact that Italy
took but a comparatively small part in the Crusades; and the long
postponement of organic union between different parts of the
magnificent peninsula is not without relation to this. The influence
which operated elsewhere in Europe to efface distinction of custom
and language in separate communities, to override and extinguish
local animosities, to make scattered peoples conscious of kinship,
did not operate there; and the persistent severance of sections from
each other, favored, of course, by the run of the rivers and the
vast separating walls of the Apenines, was the natural consequence
of the want of this powerful unifying force." [Footnote 32]
[Footnote 32: Storrs, "Bernard of Chairvaux," New York
(Scribners), 1897, pp. 544-45. ]
As a matter of fact very few people realize how much was accomplished
for the spirit of democracy, for liberty, for true progress, as
regards the rights of men of all classes, and for the feeling of the
brotherhood of man itself, by the Crusades. A practical money-making
age may consider them examples of foolish religious fanaticism, but
those who have studied them most profoundly and with most sympathy,
who are deeply interested in the social amelioration which they
brought about, and, above all, those who look at them in the higher
poetic {389} spirit of what they did to lift man above the sordid
cares of everyday life, see them in a far different way. Charles
Kingsley sang in the poem of The Saints Tragedy:
"Tell us how our stout crusading fathers
Fought and bled for God and not for gold."
But quite apart from the poetry of them, from the practical side much
can be said which even the most matter of fact of men will appreciate.
Here, for instance, are a series of paragraphs from the history of the
Middle Ages by George Washington Greene, which he confesses to have
taken chiefly from the French, [Footnote 33] which will make clear
something of the place these great expeditions should be considered as
holding in the history of democracy and of liberty:
[Footnote 33: New York, Appleton, 1867.]
"Christendom had not spent in vain its treasures and its blood in
the holy wars. Its immense sacrifices were repaid by immense
results, and the evils which these great expeditions necessarily
brought with them were more than compensated for by the advantages
which they procured for the whole of Europe.
"The Crusades saved Europe from the Mussulman invasion and this was
their immediate good. Their influence was felt, too, in a manner
less direct, but not less useful. The Crusades had been preached by
a religion of equality in a society divided by odious distinctions.
All had taken part in them, the weak as well as the strong, the serf
and the baron, man and woman, and it was by them that the equality
of man and woman, which Christianity taught, was made a social fact.
St. Louis declared that he could do nothing without the consent of
his queen, his wife. It was from this period that we must date that
influence of woman which gave rise to chivalric courtesy, the first
step towards refinement of manners and civilization. The poor, too,
were the adopted children of the Christian chivalry of the Crusades.
The celebrated orders of Palestine were instituted for the
protection of poor pilgrims. The Knights of the hospitals called the
poor their masters. Surely no lesson was more needed by these proud
barons of the Middle Ages than that of charity and humility.
{390}
"These ideas were the first to shake the stern despotism of
feudality, by opposing to it the generous principles of chivalry
which sprang all armed from the Crusades. Bound to the military
orders by a solemn vow--and in the interests of all Christendom--the
knight felt himself free from feudal dependence, and raised above
national limits, as the immediate warrior and servant of the united
Christendom and of God. Chivalry founded not upon territorial
influence, but upon personal distinction, necessarily weakened
nobility by rendering it accessible to all, and diminishing the
interval which separated the different classes of society. Every
warrior who had distinguished himself by his valor could kneel
before the king to be dubbed a knight, and rise up the equal, the
superior even, of powerful vassals. The poorest knight could sit at
the king's table while the noble son of a duke or prince was
excluded, unless he had won the golden spurs of knighthood. Another
way by which the Crusades contributed to the decay of feudalism was
by favoring the enfranchisement of serfs, even without the consent
of their masters. Whoever took the cross became free, just as every
slave becomes free on touching the soil of England or France.
"The communities whose development is to be referred to the period
of the Crusades, multiplied rapidly; the nobility gladly granting
charters and privileges in exchange for men and money. With the
communities the royal power grew, and that of the aristocracy
decreased. The royal domain was enlarged, by the escheating of a
great number of fiefs which had been left vacant by the death of
their lords. The kings protected the communities, favored their
enfranchisement, and employed them usefully against insubordinate
vassals. The extension of the royal power favored the organization
of the nation, by establishing a principle of unity, for till then,
and with that multitude of masters, the nation had been little else
than an agglomeration of provinces, strangers to one another, and
destitute of any common bond or common interest. The great vassals,
themselves, often united under the royal banner, became accustomed
during these distant expeditions to submission and discipline, and
learned to recognize a legitimate authority; and if they lost by
this submission a part of their {391} personal power, they gained in
compensation the honorable distinctions of chivalry.
"But it was not the national feeling alone which was fostered by the
Crusades. Relations of fraternity, till then wholly unknown, grew up
between different nations, and softened the deep-rooted antipathy of
races. The knights, whom a common object united in common dangers,
became brothers in arms and formally formed permanent ties of
friendship. That barbarous law which gave the feudal lord a right to
call every man his serf who settled in his domains was softened.
Stranger and enemy seemed to be synonymous, and 'the Crusaders,' say
the chroniclers of the times, 'although divided by language, seemed
to form only one people, by their love for God and their neighbor.'
And without coloring the picture too warmly, and making all due
allowance for the exaggerations which were so natural to the first
recorders of such a movement, we may say that human society was
founded and united and Europe began to pass from the painful period
of organization, to one of fuller and more rapid development."
Here in reality modern democracy had its rise, striking its roots deep
into the disintegrating soil of the old feudalism whence it was never
to be plucked, and though at times it languished it was to remain ever
alive until its luxuriant growth in recent times.
[Illustration]
ANIMALS FROM BESTIARIUM, THIRTEENTH CENTURY MS.
{392}
XXV
GREAT EXPLORERS AND THE FOUNDATION OF GEOGRAPHY.
Geography is usually considered to be quite a modern subject. The idea
that great contributions were made to it in the Thirteenth Century
would ordinarily not be entertained. America was discovered at the end
of the Fifteenth Century. Knowledge of the East was obtained during
the Sixteenth Century. Africa was explored in the Nineteenth and a
detailed knowledge of Asia came to us in such recent years that the
books are still among the novelties of publication. Our knowledge of
Persia, of Northern India, of Thibet, and of the interior of China are
all triumphs of Nineteenth Century enterprise and exploration. As a
matter of fact, however, all portions of the East were explored, the
Capital and the dominions of Jenghis Khan described, Lhasa was entered
and the greater part of China thoroughly explored by travelers of the
Thirteenth Century, whose books still remain as convincing evidence of
the great work that they accomplished. This chapter of Thirteenth
Century accomplishment is, indeed, one of the most interesting and
surprising in the whole story of the time.
It is usually considered that the teaching, supposed to have been more
or less generally accepted, that the Antipodes did not exist,
prevented any significant development of geography until comparatively
modern times. While the question of the existence of antipodes was
discussed in the schools of the Middle Ages, and especially of the
Thirteenth Century when men's minds were occupied with practically all
of the important problems even of physical science, and while many
intelligent men accepted the idea that there could not be inhabitants
on the other side of the world because of physical difficulties which
supposedly made it impossible, it would be a mistake to think that
this idea was universally accepted. We have already called attention
to the fact in the chapter on "What was Taught at the {393}
Universities," that Albertus Magnus, for instance, ridiculed the
notion that men could not live with their heads down, as was urged
against the doctrine of the existence of antipodes, by suggesting very
simply that for those on the other side of the earth what we call down
was really not down but up. This expresses, of course, the very heart
of the solution of the supposed difficulty.
As a matter of fact it seems clear that many of the great travelers
and explorers of the later Middle Ages harbored the notion that the
earth was round. As we shall note a little later in mentioning Sir
John Mandeville's work, the writer, whomever he was who took that
pseudonym, believed thoroughly in the rotundity of the earth and did
not hesitate to use some striking expressions--which have been often
quoted--that he had heard of travelers who by traveling continually to
the eastward had come back eventually to the point from which they
started. While in the schools, then, the existence of antipodes may
have been under discussion, there was a practical acceptance of their
existence among those who were better informed with regard to
countries and peoples and all the other topics which form the proper
subject matter of geography.
It must be realized, moreover, that though the existence of the
Antipodes is an important matter in geography, at this early period it
was a mere theory, not a condition antecedent to progress. It was
really a side issue as compared with many other questions relating to
the earth's surface and its inhabitants with which the medieval mind
was occupied. To consider that no knowledge of geography could be
obtained until there was a definite acceptance of the right view of
the earth's surface, would be to obliterate much precious knowledge.
The argument as to the existence of antipodes, as it was carried on,
was entirely outside of geography properly so-called. It never
influenced in the slightest degree the men who were consciously and
unconsciously laying deep and broad the foundations of modern
geography. To consider such a matter as vital to the development of as
many sided a subject as geography, illustrates very typically the
narrowness of view of so many modern scholars, who apparently can see
the value of nothing which does not entirely accord with modern
knowledge. The really {394} interesting historian of knowledge,
however, is he who can point out the beginnings of what we now know,
in unexpected quarters in the medieval mind.
As the story of these travels and explorations is really a glorious
chapter in the history of the encouragement of things intellectual, as
well as an interesting phase of an important origin whose foundations
were laid broad and deep in the Thirteenth Century, it must be told
here in some detail. Our century was the great leader in exploration
and geography as in so many other matters in which its true place is
often unrecognized.
The people of the time are usually considered to have had such few
facilities for travel that they did not often go far from home, and
that what was known about distant countries, therefore, was very
little and mainly legendary. Nothing could be more false than any such
impression as this. The Crusades during the previous century had given
the people not only a deep interest in distant lands, but the
curiosity to go and see for themselves. Pilgrimages to the Holy Land
were frequent, ecclesiastics often traveled at least as far as Italy,
and in general the tide of travel in proportion to the number of
population must have been not very much less in amount than in our own
day. After the establishment of the religious orders, missionary
expeditions to the East became very common and during the Thirteenth
Century, as we shall see, the Franciscans particularly, established
themselves in many parts of the Near East, but also of the Far East,
especially in China. Many of those wrote accounts of their travels,
and so the literature of travel and exploration during the Thirteenth
Century is one of the most interesting chapters of the literature of
these times, while the wonderfully deep foundations that were laid for
the science of geography, are worthy to be set beside the great
origins in other sciences and in the arts, for which the century is so
noteworthy.
To most people it will come as a distinct surprise to learn that the
travelers and explorers of the Thirteenth Century--merchants,
ambassadors, and missionaries--succeeded in solving many of the
geographical problems that have been of deepest interest to the
generations of the last half of last century. {395} The eastern part
of Asia particularly was traveled over and very thoroughly described
by them. Even the northern part of India, however, was not neglected
in spite of the difficulties that were encountered, and Thibet was
explored and Lhasa entered by travelers of the Thirteenth Century. Of
China as much was written as had been learned by succeeding
generations down practically to our own time. This may sound like a
series of fairy-tales instead of serious science, but it is the
travelers and explorers of the modern time who have thought it worth
while to comment on the writings of these old-time wanderers of the
Thirteenth Century, and who have pointed out the significance of their
work. These men described not only the countries through which they
passed, but also the characters of the people, their habits and
customs, their forms of speech, with many marvelous hints as regards
the relationship of the different languages, and even something about
the religious practises of these countries and their attitude toward
the great truths of Christianity when they were presented to them.
Undoubtedly one of the greatest travelers and explorers of all times
was Marco Polo, whose book was for so long considered to be mainly
made up of imaginary descriptions of things and places never seen, but
which the development of modern geographical science by travels and
expeditions has proved to be one of the most valuable contributions to
this department of knowledge that has ever been made. It took many
centuries for Marco Polo to come to his own in this respect but the
Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries have almost more than made up for
the neglect of their predecessors. Marco Polo suffered the same fate
as did Herodotus of whom Voltaire sneered "father of history, say,
rather, father of lies." So long as succeeding generations had no
knowledge themselves of the things of which both these great writers
had written, they were distrusted and even treated contemptuously.
Just as soon, however, as definite knowledge began to come it was seen
how wonderfully accurate both of them were in their descriptions of
things they had actually seen, though they admitted certain
over-wonderful stories on the authority of others. Herodotus has now
come to be acknowledged as {396} one of the greatest of historians. In
his lives of celebrated travelers, James Augustus St. John states the
change of mind with regard to Marco Polo rather forcibly:
"When the travels of Marco Polo first appeared, they were generally
regarded as fiction; and as this absurd belief had so far gained
ground, that when he lay upon his death bed, his friends and nearest
relatives, coming to take their eternal adieu, conjured him as he
valued the salvation of his soul, to retract whatever he had
advanced in his book, or at least many such passages as every person
looked upon as untrue; but the traveler whose conscience was
untouched upon that score, declared solemnly, in that awful moment,
that far from being guilty of exaggeration, he had not described
one-half of the wonderful things which he had beheld. Such was the
reception which the discoveries of this extraordinary man
experienced when first promulgated. By degrees, however, as
enterprise lifted more and more the veil from Central and Eastern
Asia the relations of our traveler rose in the estimation of
geographers; and now that the world--though containing many unknown
tracts--has been more successfully explored, we begin to perceive
that Marco Polo, like Herodotus, was a man of the most rigid
veracity, whose testimony presumptuous ignorance alone can call in
question."
There is many a fable that clings around the name of Marco Polo, but
this distinguished traveler needs no fictitious adornments of his tale
to make him one of the greatest explorers of all time. It is sometimes
said that he helped to introduce many important inventions into Europe
and one even finds his name connected with the mariner's compass and
with gunpowder. There are probably no good grounds for thinking that
Europe owes any knowledge of either of these great inventions to the
Venetian traveler. With regard to printing there is more doubt and
Polo's passage with regard to movable blocks for printing paper money
as used in China may have proved suggestive.
There is no need, however, of surmises in order to increase his fame
for the simple story of his travels is quite sufficient for his
reputation for all time. As has been well said most of the modern
travelers and explorers have only been developing what Polo indicated
at least in outline, and they have been {397} scarcely more than
describing with more precision of detail what he first touched upon
and brought to general notice. When it is remembered that he visited
such cities in Eastern Turkestan as Kashgar, Yarkand, and Khotan,
which have been the subject of much curiosity only satisfied in quite
recent years, that he had visited Thibet, or at least had traveled
along its frontier, that to him the medieval world owed some definite
knowledge of the Christian kingdom of Abyssinia and all that it was to
know of China for centuries almost, his merits will be readily
appreciated. As a matter of fact there was scarcely an interesting
country of the East of which Marco Polo did not have something to
relate from his personal experiences. He told of Burmah, of Siam, of
Cochin China, of Japan, of Java, of Sumatra, and of other islands of
the great Archipelago, of Ceylon, and of India, and all of these not
in the fabulous dreamland spirit of one who has not been in contact
with the East but in very definite and precise fashion. Nor was this
all. He had heard and could tell much, though his geographical lore
was legendary and rather dim, of the Coast of Zanzibar, of the vast
and distant Madagascar, and in the remotely opposite direction of
Siberia, of the shores of the Arctic Ocean, and of the curious customs
of the inhabitants of these distant countries.
How wonderfully acute and yet how thoroughly practical some of Polo's
observations were can be best appreciated by some quotations from his
description of products and industries as he saw them on his travels.
We are apt to think of the use of petroleum as dating from much later
than the Thirteenth Century, but Marco Polo had not only seen it in
the Near East on his travels, but evidently had learned much of the
great rock-oil deposits at Baku which constitute the basis for the
important Russian petroleum industry in modern times. He says:
"On the north (of Armenia) is found a fountain from which a liquor
like oil flows, which, though unprofitable for the seasoning of
meat, is good for burning and for anointing camels afflicted with
the mange. This oil flows constantly and copiously, so that camels
are laden with it."
He is quite as definite in the information acquired with regard, to
the use of coal. He knew and states very confidently that {398} there
were immense deposits of coal in China, deposits which are so
extensive that distinguished geologists and mineralogists who have
learned of them in modern times have predicted that eventually the
world's great manufacturing industries would be transferred to China.
We are apt to think that this mineral wealth is not exploited by the
Chinese, yet even in Marco Polo's time, as one commentator has
remarked, the rich and poor of that land had learned the value of the
black stone.
"Through the whole Province of Cathay," says Polo, "certain black
stones are dug from the mountains, which, put into the fire, burn
like wood, and being kindled, preserve fire a long time, and if they
be kindled in the evening they keep fire all the night."
Another important mineral product which even more than petroleum or
coal is supposed to be essentially modern in its employment is
asbestos. Polo had not only seen this but had realized exactly what it
was, had found out its origin and had recognized its value. Curiously
enough he attempts to explain the origin of a peculiar usage of the
word salamander (the salamander having been supposed to be an animal
which was not injured by fire) by reference to the incombustibility of
asbestos. The whole passage as it appears in The Romance of Travel and
Exploration deserves to be quoted. While discoursing about Dsungaria,
Polo says:
"And you must know that in the mountain there is a substance from
which Salamander is made. The real truth is that the Salamander is
no beast as they allege in our part of the world, but is a substance
found in the earth. Everybody can be aware that it can be no
animal's nature to live in fire seeing that every animal is composed
of all the four elements. Now I, Marco Polo, had a Turkish
acquaintance who related that he had lived three years in that
region on behalf of the Great Khan, in order to procure these
salamanders for him. He said that the way they got them was by
digging in that mountain till they found a certain vein. The
substance of this vein was taken and crushed, and when so treated it
divides, as it were, into fibres of wool, which they set forth to
dry. When dry these fibres were pounded in a copper mortar and then
washed so as to remove all the earth and to leave only the fibres,
like {399} fibres of wool. These were then spun and made into
napkins." Needless to say this is an excellent description of
asbestos.
It is not surprising, then, that the Twentieth Century so interested
in travel and exploration should be ready to lay its tributes at the
feet of Marco Polo, and that one of the important book announcements
of recent years should be that of the publication of an annotated
edition of Marco Polo from the hands of a modern explorer, who
considered that there was no better way of putting definitely before
the public in its true historical aspect the evolution of modern
geographical knowledge with regard to Eastern countries.
It can scarcely fail to be surprising to the modern mind that Polo
should practically have been forced into print. He had none of the
itch of the modern traveler for publicity. The story of his travels he
had often told and because of the wondrous tales he could unfold and
the large numbers he found it frequently so necessary to use in order
to give proper ideas of some of his wanderings, had acquired the
nickname of Marco Millioni. He had never thought, however, of
committing his story to writing or perhaps he feared the drudgery of
such literary labor. After his return from his travels, however, he
bravely accepted a patriot's duty of fighting for his native country
on board one of her galleys and was captured by the Genoese in a
famous sea-fight in the Adriatic in 1298. He was taken prisoner and
remained in captivity in Genoa for nearly a year.
It was during this time that one Rusticiano, a writer by profession,
was attracted to him and tempted him to tell him the complete story of
his travels in order that they might be put into connected form.
Rusticiano was a Pisan who had been a compiler of French romances and
accordingly Polo's story was first told in French prose. It is not
surprising that Rusticiano should have chosen French since he
naturally wished his story of Polo's travels to be read by as many
people as possible and realized that it would be of quite as much
interest to ordinary folk as to the literary circles of Europe. How
interesting the story is only those who have read it even with the
knowledge acquired by all the other explorers since his time, can
properly appreciate. It lacks entirely the egotistic quality that
usually characterizes an explorer's account of his travels, and,
indeed, {400} there can scarcely fail to be something of
disappointment because of this fact. No doubt a touch more of personal
adventure would have added to the interest of the book. It was not a
characteristic of the Thirteenth Century, however, to insist on the
merely personal and consequently the world has lost a treat it might
otherwise have had. There is no question, however, or the greatness of
Polo's work as a traveler, nor of the glory that was shed by it on the
Thirteenth Century. Like nearly everything else that was done in this
marvelous century he represents the acme of successful endeavor in his
special line down even to our own time.
It has sometimes been said that Marco Polo's work greatly influenced
Columbus and encouraged him in his attempt to seek India by sailing
around the globe. Of this, however, there is considerable doubt. We
have learned in recent times, that a very definite tradition with
regard to the possibility of finding land by sailing straight westward
over the Atlantic existed long before Columbus' time. [Footnote 34]
Polo's indirect influence on Columbus by his creation of an interest
in geographical matters generally is much clearer. There can be no
doubt of how much his work succeeded in drawing men's minds to
geographical questions during the Fourteenth and Fifteenth centuries.
[Footnote 34: My learned friend, Father DeRoo, of Portland, Ore.,
who has written two very interesting volumes on the History of
America before Columbus, does not hesitate to say that Columbus may
even have met in his travels and spoken with sailors who had touched
on some portions of the American Continent, and that, of course, the
traditions with regard to Greenland were very clear.]
After Marco Polo, undoubtedly, the most enterprising explorer and
interesting writer on Travel in the Thirteenth Century was John of
Carpini, the author of a wonderful series of descriptions of things
seen in Northern Asia. Like so many other travelers and explorers at
this time John was a Franciscan Friar, and seems to have been one of
the early companions and disciples of St. Francis of Assisi, whom he
joined when he was only a young man himself. Before going on his
missionary and ambassadorial expedition he had been one of the most
prominent men in the order. He had much to do with its {401}
propagation among the Northern nations of Europe, and occupied
successively the offices of custos or prior in Saxony and of
Provincial in Germany. He seems afterwards to have been sent as an
organizer into Spain and to have gone even as far as the Barbary
coast.
It is not surprising, then, that when, in 1245, Pope Innocent IV.
(sometime after the Mongol invasion of Eastern Europe and the
disastrous battle of Legamites which threatened to place European
civilization and Christianity in the power of the Tartars) resolved to
send a mission to the Tartar monarch, John of Carpini was selected for
the dangerous and important mission.
At this time Friar John was more than sixty years of age, but such was
the confidence in his ability and in his executive power that
everything on the embassy was committed to his discretion. He started
from Lyons on Easter Day, 1245. He sought the counsel first of his old
friend Wenceslaus, King of Bohemia, and from that country took with
him another friar, a Pole, to act as his interpreter. The first stage
in his journey was to Kiev, and from here, having crossed the Dnieper
and the Don to the Volga, he traveled to the camp of Batu, at this
time the senior living member of Jenghis Khan's family. Batu after
exchanging presents allowed them to proceed to the court of the
supreme Khan in Mongolia. As Col. Yule says, the stout-hearted old man
rode on horseback something like three thousand miles in the next
hundred days. The bodies of himself and companion had to be tightly
bandaged to enable them to stand the excessive fatigue of this
enormous ride, which led them across the Ural Mountains and River past
the northern part of the Caspian, across the Jaxartes, whose name they
could not find out, along the Dzungarian Lakes till they reached the
Imperial Camp, called the Yellow Pavilion, near the Orkhon River.
There had been an interregnum in the empire which was terminated by a
formal election while the Friars were at the Yellow Pavilion, where
they had the opportunity to see between three and four thousand envoys
and deputies from all parts of Asia and Eastern Europe, who brought
with them tributes and presents for the ruler to be elected.
{402}
It was not for three months after this, in November, that the Emperor
dismissed them with a letter to the Pope written in Latin, Arabic, and
Mongolian, but containing only a brief imperious assertion that the
Khan of the Tartars was the scourge of God for Christianity, and that
he must fulfill his mission. Then sad at heart, the ambassadors began
their homeward journey in the midst of the winter. Their sufferings
can be better imagined than described, but Friar John who does not
dwell on them much tells enough of them to make their realization
comparatively easy. They reached Kiev seven months later, in June, and
were welcomed there by the Slavonic Christians as though arisen from
the dead. From thence they continued their journey to Lyons where they
delivered the Khan's letter to the Pope.
Friar John embodied the information that he had obtained in this
journey in a book that has been called Liber Tartarorum (the Book of
the Tartars or according to another manuscript, History of the Mongols
whom we call Tartars). Col. Yule notes that like most of the other
medieval monks' itineraries, it shows an entire absence of that
characteristic traveler's egotism with which we have become abundantly
familiar in more recent years, and contains very little personal
narrative. We know that John was a stout man and this in addition to
his age when he went on the mission, cannot but make us realize the
thoroughly unselfish spirit with which he followed the call of Holy
Obedience, to undertake a work that seemed sure to prove fatal and
that would inevitably bring in its train suffering of the severest
kind. Of the critical historical value of his work a good idea can be
obtained from the fact, that half a century ago an educated Mongol,
Galsang Gombeyev, in the Historical and Philological Bulletin of the
Imperial Academy of St. Petersburg, reviewed the book and bore
testimony to the great accuracy of its statements, to the care with
which its details had been verified, and the evident personal
character of all its observations.
Friar John's book attracted the attention of compilers of information
with regard to distant countries very soon after it was issued, and an
abridgment of it is to be found in the Encyclopedia of Vincent of
Beauvais, which was written shortly {403} after the middle of the
Thirteenth Century. At the end of the Sixteenth Century Hakluyt
published portions of the original work, as did Borgeron at the
beginning of the Seventeenth Century. The Geographical Society of
Paris published a fine edition of the work about the middle of the
Nineteenth Century, and at the same time a brief narrative taken down
from the lips of John's companion. Friar Benedict the Pole, which is
somewhat more personal in its character and fully substantiates all
that Friar John had written.
As can readily be understood the curiosity of his contemporaries was
deeply aroused and Friar John had to tell his story many times after
his return. Hence the necessity he found himself under of committing
it to paper, so as to save himself from the bother of telling it all
over again, and in order that his brother Franciscans throughout the
world might have the opportunity to read it.
Col. Yule says "The book must have been prepared immediately after the
return of the traveler, for the Friar Salimbene, who met him in France
in the very year of his return (1247) gives us these interesting
particulars: 'He was a clever and conversable man, well lettered, a
great discourser, and full of diversity of experience. He wrote a big
book about the Tartars (sic), and about other marvels that he had seen
and whenever he felt weary of telling about the Tartars, he would
cause this book of his to be read, as I have often heard and seen.
(Chron. Fr. Salembene Parmensis in Monum. Histor. ad Provinceam
Placent: Pertinentia, Parma 1857).'"
Another important traveler of the Thirteenth Century whose work has
been the theme of praise and extensive annotation in modern times was
William of Rubruk, usually known under the name of Rubruquis, a
Franciscan friar, thought, as the result of recent investigations,
probably to owe his cognomen to his birth in the little town of Rubruk
in Brabant, who was the author of a remarkable narrative of Asiatic
travel during the Thirteenth Century, and whose death seems to have
taken place about 1298. The name Rubruquis has been commonly used to
designate him because it is found in the Latin original of his work,
which was printed by Hayluyt in his collection of Voyages at the end
of the {404} Sixteenth Century. Friar William was sent partly as an
ambassador and partly as an explorer by Louis IX. of France into
Tartary. At that time the descendants of Jenghis Khan ruled over an
immense Empire in the Orient and King Louis was deeply interested in
introducing Christianity into the East and if possible making their
rulers Christians. About the middle of the Thirteenth Century a rumor
spread throughout Europe that one of the nephews of the great Khan had
embraced Christianity. St. Louis thought this a favorable opportunity
for getting in touch with the Eastern Potentate and so he dispatched
at least two missions into Tartary at the head of the second of which
was William of Rubruk.
His accounts of his travels proved most interesting reading to his own
and to many subsequent generations, perhaps to none more than our own.
The Encyclopedia Britannica (ninth edition) says that the narrative of
his journey is everywhere full of life and interest, and some details
of his travels will show the reasons for this. Rubruk and his party
landed on the Crimean Coast at Sudak or Soldaia, a port which formed
the chief seat of communication between the Mediterranean countries
and what is now Southern Russia. The Friar succeeded in making his way
from here to the Great Khan's Court which was then held not far from
Karakorum. This journey was one of several thousand miles. The route
taken has been worked out by laborious study and the key to it is the
description given of the country intervening between the basin of the
Talas and Lake Ala-Kul. This enables the whole geography of the
region, including the passage of the River Ili, the plain south of the
Bal Cash, and the Ala-Kul itself, to be identified beyond all
reasonable doubt.
The return journey was made during the summertime, and the route lay
much farther to the north. The travelers traversed the Jabkan Valley
and passed north of the River Bal Cash, following a rather direct
course which led them to the mouth of the Volga. From here they
traveled south past Derbend and Shamakii to the Uraxes, and on through
Iconium to the coast of Cilicia, and finally to the port of Ayas,
where they embarked for Cyprus. All during his travels Friar William
made observations on men and cities, and rivers and mountains, and
{405} languages and customs, implements and utensils, and most of
these modern criticism has accepted as representing the actual state
of things as they would appear to a medieval sightseer. Occasionally
during the period intervening between his time and our own, scholars
who thought that they knew better, have been conceited enough to
believe themselves in a position to point out glaring errors in
Rubruquis' accounts of what he saw. Subsequent investigation and
discovery have, as a rule, proved the accuracy of the earlier
observations rather than the modern scholar's corrections. An
excellent example of this is quoted in the Encyclopedia Britannica
article on Rubruquis already referred to.
{opp405}
[Illustration]
DOORWAY OF GIOTTO'S TOWER (FLORENCE)
[Illustration]
PRINCIPAL DOOR OF BAPTISTERY (PISA, DIOTISALVI)
The writer says: "This sagacious and honest observer is denounced as
an ignorant and untruthful blunderer by Isaac Jacob Schmidt (a man no
doubt of useful learning, of a kind rare in his day but narrow and
long-headed and in natural acumen and candour far inferior to the
Thirteenth Century friar whom he maligns), simply because the evidence
of the latter as to the Turkish dialect of the Uigurs traversed a pet
heresy long since exploded which Schmidt entertained, namely, that the
Uigurs were by race and language Tibetan."
Some of the descriptions of the towns through which the travelers
passed are interesting because of comparisons with towns of
corresponding size in Europe. Karakorum, for instance, was described
as a small city about the same size as the town of St. Denis near
Paris. In Karakorum the ambassador missionary maintained a public
disputation with certain pagan priests in the presence of three of the
secretaries of the Khan. The religion of these umpires is rather
interesting from its diversity: the first was a Christian, the second
a Mohammedan, and the third a Buddhist. A very interesting feature of
the disputation was the fact that the Khan ordered under pain of death
that none of the disputants should slander, traduce, or abuse his
adversaries, or endeavor by rumor or insinuations to excite popular
indignation against them. This would seem to indicate that the great
Tartar Khan who is usually considered to have been a cruel, ignorant
despot, whose one quality that gave him supremacy was military valor,
was really a large, liberal-minded man. His idea seems to have been to
discover {406} the truth of these different religions and adopt that
one which was adjudged to have the best groundwork of reason for it.
It is easy to understand, however, that such a disputation argued
through interpreters wholly ignorant of the subject and without any
proper understanding of the nice distinctions of words or any practise
in conveying their proper significance, could come to no serious
conclusion. The arguments, therefore, fell flat and a decision was not
rendered.
Friar William's work was not unappreciated by his contemporaries and
even its scientific value was thoroughly realized. It is not
surprising, of course, that his great contemporary in the Franciscan
order, Roger Bacon, should have come to the knowledge of his Brother
Minorite's book and should have made frequent and copious quotations
from it in the geographical section of his Opus Majus, which was
written some time during the seventh decade of the Thirteenth Century.
Bacon says that Brother William traversed the Oriental and Northern
regions and the places adjacent to them, and wrote accounts of them
for the illustrious King of France who sent him on the expedition to
Tartary. He adds: "I have read his book diligently and have compared
it with similar accounts." Roger Bacon recognized by a sort of
scientific intuition of his own, certain passages which have proved to
be the best in recent times. The description, for instance, of the
Caspian was the best down to this time, and Friar William corrects the
error made by Isidore, and which had generally been accepted before
this, that the Caspian Sea was a gulf. Rubruk, as quoted by Roger
Bacon, states very explicitly that it nowhere touches the ocean but is
surrounded on all sides by land. For those who do not think that the
foundations of scientific geography were laid until recent times, a
little consultation of Roger Bacon's Opus Majus would undoubtedly be a
revelation.
It is probably with regard to language that one might reasonably
expect to find least that would be of interest to modern scholars in
Friar William's book. As might easily have been gathered from previous
references, however, it is here that the most frequent surprises as to
the acuity of this medieval traveler await the modern reader.
Scientific philology is so much a product of the last century, that it
is difficult to {407} understand how this old-time missionary was able
to reach so many almost intuitive recognitions of the origin and
relationships of the languages of the people among whom he traveled.
He came in contact with the group of nations occupying what is now
known as the Near East, whose languages, as is well known, have
constituted a series of the most difficult problems with which
philology had to deal until its thorough establishment on scientific
lines enabled it to separate them properly. It is all the more
surprising then, to find that Friar William should have so much in his
book that even the modern philologist will read with attention and
unstinted admiration.
With regard to this Colonel Yule, whose personal experience makes him
a valuable guide in such matters, has written a paragraph which
contains so much compressed information that we venture to quote it
entire. It furnishes the grounds for the claim (which might seem
overstrained if it were not that its author was himself one of the
greatest of modern explorers) that William was an acute and most
intelligent observer, keen in the acquisition of knowledge; and the
author in fact of one of the best narratives of travel in existence.
Col. Yule says:
"Of his interest and acumen in matters of language we may cite
examples. The language of the Pascatir (or Bashkirds) and of the
Hungarians is the same, as, he had learned from Dominicans who had
been among them. The language of the Ruthenians, Poles, Bohemians,
and Slavonians is one, and is the same with that of the Wandals or
Wends. In the town of Equinus (immediately beyond the Ili, perhaps
Aspara) the people were Mohammedans speaking Persian, though so far
remote from Persia. The Yugurs (or Uigurs) of the country about the
Cailac had formed a language and character of their own, and in that
language and character the Nestorians of that tract used to perform
their office and write their books. The Yugurs are those among whom
are found the fountain and root of the Turkish and Comanian tongue.
Their character has been adopted by the Moghals. In using it they
begin writing from the top and write downwards, whilst line follows
line from left to right. The Nestorians say their service, and have
their holy book in Syriac, but know nothing of the {408} language,
just as some of our Monks sing the mass without knowing Latin. The
Tibet people write as we do, and their letters have a strong
resemblance to ours. The Tangut people write from right to left like
the Arabs, and their lines advance upwards."
There were other matters besides language and religion on which Friar
William made observations, and though his book is eminently human
giving us a very interesting view of his own personality and of his
difficulties with his dragoman, which many a modern Eastern traveler
will sympathize with, and a picture that includes the detail that he
was a very heavy man, _valde ponderosus_, which makes his travel on
horseback for some 10,000 miles all the more wonderful; it also
contains a mass of particulars, marvelously true--or so near the truth
as to be almost more interesting--as to Asiatic nature, ethnography,
manners, morals, commercial customs, and nearly everything else
relating to the life of the peoples among whom he traveled. A typical
example of this is to be found in the following suggestive paragraph:
"The current money of Cathay is of cotton paper, a palm in length and
breath, and on this they print lines like those of Mangu Khan's seal:
'imprimunt lineas sicut est sigillum Mangu'"--a remarkable expression.
"They write with a painter's pencil and combine in one character
several letters, forming one expression: 'faciunt in una figura plures
literas comprehendentes unam dictionem'"--a still more remarkable
utterance, showing an approximate apprehension of the nature of
Chinese writing.
There are other distinguished travelers whose inspiration came to them
during the Thirteenth Century though their works were published in the
early part of the next century. Some of these we know mainly through
their adaptation and incorporation into his work without due
recognition, by that first great writer of spurious travels Sir John
Mandeville. Mandeville's work was probably written some time during
the early part of the second half of the Fourteenth Century, but he
used materials gathered from travelers of the end of the Thirteenth
and the beginning of the next (his own) century. Sir Henry Yule has
pointed out, that by far the greater part of the supposed {409} more
distant travels of Sir John Mandeville were appropriated from the
narrative of Friar Odoric, a monk, who became a member of the
Franciscan order about the end of the Thirteenth Century, and whose
travels as a missionary in the East gave him the opportunities to
collect a precious fund of information which is contained in Odoric's
famous story of his voyages. Of Odoric himself we shall have something
to say presently.
In the meantime it seems well worth while calling to attention, that
the accepted narrative of Sir John Mandeville as it is called, and
which may have been written by a physician of the name of John of
Burgoigne under an assumed name, contains a number of interesting
anticipations of facts that were supposed to enter into the domain of
human knowledge much later in the intellectual development of the
race. In certain passages, and especially in one which is familiar
from its being cited by Dr. Johnson in the preface to his dictionary,
Mandeville, to use the name under which the story is best known, shows
that he had a correct idea of the form of the earth and of position in
latitude as it could be ascertained by observation of the Pole Star.
He knew also, as we noted at the beginning of this article, that there
are antipodes, and if ships were sent on voyages of discovery they
might sail around the world. As Col. Yule has pointed out, Mandeville
tells a curious story which he had heard in his youth of how "a worthy
man did travel ever eastward until he came to his own country again."
Odoric of whom we have already spoken must be considered as the next
great missionary traveler of this age. He took Franciscan vows when
scarcely a boy and was encouraged to travel in the East by the example
of his Holy Father St. Francis, and also by the interest and
missionary zeal to convert the East which had been aroused by Marco
Polo's travels. His long journeys will be more readily understood,
however, if we realize, as is stated in the article on him in the
Encyclopedia Britannica, an authority that will surely be unsuspected
of too great partiality for the work of Catholic missionaries, that
"There had risen also during the latter half of the Thirteenth Century
an energetic missionary action, extending all over the East on the
part of both the new orders of Preaching and Minorite (or Dominican
and Franciscan) Friars which had caused {410} members of these orders,
of the last especially, to become established in Persia and what is
now Southern Russia, in Tartary and in China."
In the course of his travels in the East Odoric visited Malabar
touching at Pandarini (twenty miles north of Calicut), at Craganore
and at Quilon, preceding thence, apparently, to Ceylon and to the
Shrine of St. Thomas at Mailapur near Madras.
Even more interesting than his travels in India, however, are those in
China. He sailed from the Hindustan Peninsula in a Chinese junk to
Sumatra, visiting various ports on the northern coast of that island
and telling something about the inhabitants and the customs of the
country. According to Sir Henry Yule he then visited Java and it would
seem also the coast of Borneo, finally reaching Kanton, at that time
known to Western Asiatics as Chin Kalan or Great China. From there he
went to the great ports of Fuhkeen and Schwan Chow, where he found two
houses of his order, thence he proceeded to Fuchau from which place he
struck across the mountains into Chekaeng and then visited Hang Chow
at that time renowned under the name of Cansay. Modern authorities in
exploration have suggested that this might be King Sae, the Chinese
name for Royal Residence, which was then one of the greatest cities of
the world. Thence Odoric passed northward by Nanking, and, crossing
the great Kiang, embarked on the Grand Canal and traveled to Cambaluc
or Pekin, where he remained for three years and where it is thought
that he was attached to one of the churches founded by Archbishop John
of Monte Corvino, who was at this time in extreme old age.
The most surprising part of Odoric's travels were still to come. When
the fever for traveling came upon him again he turned almost directly
westward to the Great Wall and through Shenshua. From here the
adventurous traveler (we are still practically quoting Sir Henry Yule)
entered Thibet and appears to have visited Lhasa. Considering how much
of interest has been aroused by recent attempts to enter Lhasa and the
surprising adventures that men have gone through in the effort, the
success of this medieval monk in such an expedition would seem
incredible, if it were not substantiated by documents that {411} place
the matter beyond all doubt even in the minds of the most
distinguished modern authorities in geography and exploration. How
Odoric returned home is not definitely known, though certain
fragmentary notices seem to indicate that he passed through Khorasan
and probably Tabriz to Europe.
It only remains to complete the interest of Odoric's wondrous tale to
add that during a large portion of these years' long journeys his
companion was Friar James, an Irishman who had been attracted to Italy
in order to become a Franciscan. As appears from a record in the
public books of the town of Udine in Italy, where the monastery of
which both he and Odoric were members was situated, a present of two
marks was made by the municipal authorities to the Irish friar shortly
after Odoric's death. The reason for the gift was stated to be, that
Friar James had been for the love of God and of Odoric (a typical
Celtic expression and characteristic) a companion of the blessed
Odoric in his wanderings. Unfortunately Odoric died within two years
after his return though not until the story of his travels had been
taken down in homely Latin by Friar William of Bologna. Shortly after
his death Odoric became an object of reverence on the part of his
brother friars and of devotion on the part of the people, who
recognized the wonderful apostolic spirit that he had displayed in his
long wanderings, and the patience and good-will with which he had
borne sufferings and hardships for the sake of winning the souls of
those outside the Church.
Sir Henry Yule summed up his opinion of Odoric in the following
striking passage which bears forcible testimony also to the healthy
curiosity of the times with regard to all these original sources of
information which were recognized as valuable because first hand:
"The numerous MSS. of Odoric's narrative that have come down to our
time (upwards of forty are known), and chiefly from the Fourteenth
Century, show how speedily and widely it acquired popularity. It
does not deserve the charge of general mendacity brought up against
it by some, though the language of other writers who have spoken of
the traveler as a man of learning is still more injudicious. Like
most of the medieval travelers, he is indiscriminating in accepting
strange tales; but while some of these are the habitual stories of
the {412} age, many particulars which he recited attest the genuine
character of the narrative, and some of those which Tiraboschi and
others have condemned as mendacious interpolations are the very
seals of truth."
Besides Odoric there is another monkish traveler from whom Mandeville
has borrowed much, though without giving him any credit. This is the
well-known Praemonstratensian Monk Hayton, who is said to have been a
member of a princely Armenian family and who just at the beginning of
the Fourteenth Century dictated a work on the affairs of the Orient
and especially the history of the nearer East in his own time, of
which, from the place of his nativity and bringing up, he had abundant
information, while he found all round him in France, where he was
living at the time, the greatest thirst for knowledge with regard to
this part of the world. His book seems to have been dictated
originally in French at Poictiers, and to have attracted great
attention because of its subject, many copies of it being made as well
as translations into other languages within a few years after its
original appearance.
The story of Odoric is a forcible reminder of how much the
missionaries accomplished for geography, ethnology, and ethnography in
the Thirteenth Century, as they did in succeeding centuries. If what
the missionaries have added to these sciences were to have been lost,
there would have been enormous gaps in the knowledge with which modern
scholars began their scientific labors in philology. It may be a
surprise to most people, moreover, to be thus forcibly reminded of the
wonderful evangelizing spirit which characterized the later middle
age. Needless to say these graduates of the Thirteenth Century
universities who wandered in distant eastern lands, brought with them
their European culture for the uplifting of the Orientals, and brought
back to Europe many ideas that were to be fruitful sources of
suggestions not only for geographical, ethnological, philological, and
other departments of learning, but also in manufactures and in arts.
We mentioned the fact that Odoric in his travels eventually reached
Cambaluc, or Pekin, where he found Archbishop John of Monte Corvino
still alive though at an advanced age, and was probably attached for
the three years of his stay to one of {413} the churches that had been
founded by this marvelous old Friar, who had been made Archbishop
because of the wonderful power of organization and administration
displayed during his earlier career as a missionary. The story of this
grand old man of the early Franciscan missions is another one of the
romances of Thirteenth Century travels and exploration which well
deserves to be studied in detail. Unfortunately the old Archbishop was
too much occupied with his work as a missionary and an ecclesiastic to
return to Europe in order to tell of it, or to write any lengthy
account of his experiences. Like many another great man of the
Thirteenth Century he was a doer and not a writer, and, but for the
casual mention of him by others, the records of his deeds would only
be found in certain ecclesiastical records, and his work would now be
known to the Master alone, for whom it was so unselfishly done.
It will be noted that most of these traveling missionaries were
Franciscans but it must not be thought that it was only the
Franciscans who sent out such missionaries. The Dominicans
(established at the beginning of the Thirteenth Century) also did
wonderful missionary work and quite as faithfully as even their
Franciscan brothers. Undoubtedly the Franciscans surpassed them in the
extent of their labors, but then the Dominicans were founded with the
idea of preaching and uplifting the people of Europe rather than of
spreading the good news of the Gospel outside the bounds of
Christianity as it then existed. From the very earliest traditions of
their order the Franciscans had their eyes attracted towards the East.
The story that St. Francis himself went to the Holy Land at the
beginning of the Thirteenth Century in order to convert Saladin, the
Eastern monarch whose name has been made famous by the stories of the
Crusade in which Richard Coeur de Lion took part, has been doubted,
but it seems to be founded on too good contemporary authority to be
considered as entirely apocryphal. St. Francis' heart went out to
those in darkness who knew nothing of the Christ whom he had learned
to love so ardently, and it was a supreme desire of his life that the
good tidings of Christianity should be spread by his followers all
over the world. While they did this great work they accomplished
unwittingly great things in all the series of sciences {414} now
included under the term geography, and gathered precious information
as to the races of men, their relations to one another and to the part
of the earth in which they live. The scientific progress thus made
will always redound largely to their credit in the story of the
intellectual development of modern Europe. Most of their work was far
ahead of the times and was not to be properly appreciated until quite
recent generations, but this must only emphasize our sympathy for
those obscure, patient but fruitful workers in a great field of human
knowledge. As to what should be thought of those who ignorant of their
work proclaim that the Church did not tolerate geography it is hard to
say. Our geographical knowledge comes mainly from travelers whose wish
it is to gain commercial opportunities for themselves or their
compatriots; that of the Middle Ages was gained by men who wished
anxiously to spread the light of Christianity throughout the world.
The geographical societies of these earlier days were the religious
orders who sent but the explorers and travelers, furnished them on
their return with an enthusiastic audience to hear their stories, and
then helped to disseminate their books all over the then civilized
world.
There is probably no better refutation of the expression so often
heard from those who know nothing about it, with regard to the
supposed laziness of the Monks of the Middle Ages, than this chapter
of the story of their exploration and missionary labors during the
Thirteenth Century. It is usually supposed that if a Monk was fat he
could not possibly have accomplished any serious work in life. Some of
these men were _valde ponderosi_, very weighty, yet they did not
hesitate to take on themselves these long journeys to the East. Their
lives are the best illustration of the expression of Montalembert:
"Let us then banish into the world of fiction that affirmation so
long repeated by foolish credulity which made monasteries an asylum
for indolence and incapacity, for misanthropy and pusillanimity, for
feeble and melancholic temperaments, and for men who were no longer
fit to serve society in the world. It was not the sick souls, but on
the contrary the most vigorous and healthful the human race has ever
produced who presented themselves in crowds to fill them."
{415}
XXVI
GREAT BEGINNINGS OF MODERN COMMERCE.
For our present eminently commercial age nothing of all the
accomplishment of the Thirteenth Century will probably possess
livelier interest than the fact that, in spite of what must have
seemed insuperable difficulties to a less enterprising generation, the
men of that time succeeded in making such business combinations and
municipal affiliations, besides arranging various trade facilities
among distant, different peoples, that not only was commerce rendered
possible and even easy, but some of the most modern developments of
the facilitation of international intercourse were anticipated. The
story of the rise of this combination of many men of different
nations, of many cities whose inhabitants were of different races and
of different languages, of commercial enterprise that carried men
comparatively much farther than they now go on trade expeditions,
though we have thought that our age had exhausted the possibilities of
progress in this matter, cannot fail to have an interest for everyone
whose attention has been attracted to the people of this time and must
be taken as a symbol of the all-pervading initiative of the
generations, which allowed no obstacle to hinder their progress and
thought no difficulty too great to be surmounted.
In beginning the history of the great commercial league which in the
Thirteenth Century first opened men's minds to the possibilities of
peace and commerce among the nations and alas! that it should be said,
did more perhaps than any other agent except Christianity to awaken in
different races the sense of the brotherhood of man, the English
historian of the Hanseatic League, Miss Zimmern in the Stories of the
Nations, said:
"There is scarcely a more remarkable chapter in history than that
which deals with the trading alliance or association known as the
Hanseatic League. The league has long since {416} passed away having
served its time and fulfilled its purpose. The needs and circumstances
of mankind have changed, and new methods and new instruments have been
devised for carrying on the commerce of the world. Yet, if the league
has disappeared, the beneficial results of its action survive to
Europe though they have become so completely a part of our daily life
that we accept them as matters of course, and do not stop to inquire
into their origin." This last declaration may seem surprising for
comparatively few know anything about this medieval commercial league,
yet the effects claimed for it are only what we have seen to be true
with regard to most of the important institutions of the period--they
were the origins of what is best in our modern life.
Like many of the great movements of the Thirteenth Century the origin
of the Hanseatic League is clouded somewhat by the obscurity of the
times and the lack of definite historical documents. [Footnote 35]
There is no doubt, however, that just before the middle of the century
it was in flourishing existence, and that by the end of the century it
had reached that acme of its power and influence which it was to
maintain for several centuries in spite of the jealousy of the
nobility, of certain towns that did not have the same privileges, and
even of the authorities of the various countries who resented more and
more as time went on the growing freedom and independence of these
wealthy cities. The impetus for the formation of the League seems to
have been given during the Crusades. Like so many other of the
important movements of the time commerce was greatly influenced by
these expeditions, and the commercial spirit not only aroused but
shown the possibility of {417} accomplishing hitherto impossible
results in the matter of transportation and exchange. The returning
crusaders brought back with them many precious Eastern objects whose
possession was a source of envy to others and whose value was rated so
high as to make even distant travel for them well worth while. The
returning crusaders also knew how cheaply objects considered very
precious in the West might be purchased in the East, and they told the
stories of their own acquisition of them to willing listeners, who
were stimulated to try their fortunes in expeditions that promised
such rich rewards.
[Footnote 35: Perhaps no better idea of the obscurity of the origin of
the Hansa confederation can be given, than is to be derived from the
fact that even the derivation of the word Hansa is not very clear.
Bishop Ulfilas in his old Gothic translation of the Scriptures used
the word "hansa" to designate the mob of soldiers and servants of
the High Priest who came to take Christ prisoner in the Garden.
Later on the word Hansa was used to mean a tax or a contribution.
This term was originally employed to designate the sum of money
which each of the cities was compelled to pay on becoming a member
of the league, and it is thought to be from this that the terms
Hansa and Hanseatic League were eventually derived.]
{opp417}
[Illustration]
PALAZZO DEI CONSOLI (GUBBIO)
[Illustration]
PALAZZO ZABARELLA (PADUA)
Besides the crusaders on their return through Italy had observed what
was accomplished by the League of the Lombard cities which had been in
existence in a more or less imperfect way for more than a century, and
at the end of the Twelfth and the beginning of the Thirteenth Century
had begun to provide an example of the strength there is in union, and
of the power for good there is in properly regulated combinations of
commercial interests with due regard for civic rights and privileges.
This League of the Lombard cities was encouraged by the popes
especially by Innocent III. and his successors who are usually said to
have given it their approbation for their own purposes, though this is
to look at but one side of the case. The German Emperors endeavored to
assert their rights over Italian territory and in so doing came into
collision with the popes not only in temporal matters but also in
spiritual things. As we have noted in the short sketch of the popes of
the century, Innocent III. was the first great Italian patriot and
original advocate of Italy for the Italians. He constantly opposed the
influence of the German Emperor in Italian politics, mainly, of
course, because this interfered with the power of the Church, but to a
very great degree also because it proved a source of manifold
political evil for the Italian cities.
The Germans then, who in the train of the Emperor went down into Italy
saw the working of this League of Lombard cities, talked about it on
their return, and were naturally tempted to essay what might be
accomplished by the same means on German territory. These two
elements, the incentive of the crusades and the stimulus of the
example of the {418} Italians, must be considered as at the basis of
Hansa, though these were only seeds, and it was the nurture and
fostering care of the German mind which ever since the days of Tacitus
had been noted as the freest in Europe, that gave the League its
wonderful development.
It is difficult to tell how many towns belonged to the Hanseatic
League during the Thirteenth Century but at the end of this period,
Hansa, as it came to be called, was, as we have said, in its most
flourishing condition and we know something definite of its numbers a
little more than half a century later. In 1367 deputies from all the
towns met in the large council chamber of the famous town hall at
Cologne to discuss certain injustices that had been committed against
the members of the League, or as the document set forth "against the
free German merchants," in order to determine some way of preventing
further injuries and inflict due punishment. Altogether the deputies
of 77 towns were present and declared most solemnly "that because of
the wrongs and the injuries done by the King of Denmark to the common
German merchant the cities would be his enemies and help one another
faithfully." The distant and smaller cities were not expected to send
troops or even naval forces but promised to give contributions in
money. Such cities as did not take part in this movement were to be
considered as having forfeited their membership and would no longer be
permitted to trade with the members of Hansa.
Lest it should be thought that the cities were incapable of enforcing
any such boycott with effect, the story of the town of Lübeck must be
recalled. Lübeck on one occasion refused to join with the other Hansa
towns in a boycott of certain places in Flanders which had refused to
observe the regulations as to trading. One of these was to the effect
that such vessels as were lost on a coast did not become the property
of the people of the neighborhood, though they had a right to a due
share for salvage, but a fair proportion must be returned to the
citizens of the town that suffered the loss. Lübeck was at the moment
one of the most powerful commercial cities in Germany, and her
citizens seemed to think that they could violate the Hansa regulation
with impunity. For 30 years. {419} however, the Hansa boycott was
maintained and so little trading was done in the city that according
to one old writer "the people starved, the markets were deserted,
grass grew in the street and the inhabitants left in large numbers."
Such a lesson as this was enough to make the Hanseatic decrees be
observed with scrupulous care and shows the perfection of the
organization.
The outcome of the war with Denmark demonstrates the power of the
league. The King of Denmark is said to have scorned their declaration
of war, and making an untranslatable pun on the word "Hansa" called
the members of the League "geese who cackled much but need not be
feared." The fleet of the League, however, succeeded in shutting off
all the commerce of the coast of Denmark and though there was a truce
each winter the war was renewed vigorously, and with summer many of
the Danish cities were ransacked and plundered. At the end of the
second year Denmark was exhausted and the people so weary of war that
they pleaded for peace, and Valdemar had to accept the terms which the
"geese" were willing to offer him. This triumph of the common people
over a reigning monarch is one of the most striking passages in
medieval history. It comes about a half century after the close of the
Thirteenth, and is evidently the direct result of the great practical
forces that were set in movement during that wonderful period, when
the mighty heart of humanity was everywhere bestirring men to deeds of
high purpose and far-reaching significance.
As a matter of fact, Hansa became, very early in its career, one of
the firmest authorities in the midst of these troubled times and meted
out unfailingly the sternest justice against those who infringed its
rights if they were outsiders, or broke the rules of the League if
they were its members. It was ever ready to send its ships against
offenders and while it soon came to be feared, this fear was mingled
with respect, and its regulations were seldom infringed. It is a most
interesting reflection, that as its English Historian says, "never
once in the whole course of its history did it draw the sword
aggressively or against its own members." While it was ever on the
look-out to increase its power by adding new cities to the League,
cities were not forced to join and when it meted {420} out punishments
to its members this was not by the levying of war but by fines, the
refusal to pay these being followed by the "declaration of boycott,"
which soon brought the offender to terms. War was only declared in all
cases as a last resort, and the ships of the League were constantly
spoken of and designated in all documents as "peace ships," and even
the forts which the League built for the protection of its towns, or
as places where its members might be sure of protection, were
described as "Peace Burgs."
Unfortunately, the lessons of peace that were thus taught by commerce
were not to bear fruit abundantly for many centuries after the
Thirteenth. It is practically only in our own time that they have been
renewed, and the last generation or two, has rather plumed itself over
the fact that trade was doing so much to prevent war. Evidently this
is no guarantee of the perpetuation of such an improvement in national
or international morals, for the influence of Hansa for peace came to
be lost entirely, after a few centuries. The cities themselves,
however, that belonged to the League gradually became more and more
free, and more independent of their rulers. It was thus, in fact, that
the free cities of Germany had their origin, and in them much more of
modern liberty was born than has ever been appreciated, except by
those whose studies have brought them close to these marvelous
medieval manifestations of the old spirit of Teutonic freedom.
The names of most of the cities that were members of the Hansa League
are well known, though it is not easy to understand in the decrepitude
that has come over many of them, how they could have been of so much
importance as has been claimed for them in the Middle Ages. All the
cities of the North Sea and the Baltic Sea were united together, and
while we think of these as German, many of them really belonged to
Slav people at this time, so that the membership of a number of
Russian cities is not surprising. While the Rhenish cities were
important factors in the League, Cologne indeed being one of the most
important, Bremen and Hamburg and both the Frankforts, and Rostock,
and Lübeck and Stralsund, and Tangermünde and Warnemunde, were
important members. Novgorod was founded by Hansa for the purpose of
trading {421} with the Orientals, and the Volga, the Dnieper, the
Dwina, and the Oder were extensively used for the purpose of
transporting goods here and there in central Europe. One of their most
famous towns, Winetha in German, Julin in Danish, disappeared beneath
the waters of the Baltic Sea and gave rise to many legends of its
reappearance. It is hard to realize that it was so important that it
was called the Venice of the North, and was seriously compared with
its great southern rival.
A good idea of the intimate relations of the Hansa towns to England
and the English people can be obtained from the article on the subject
written by Richard Lodge for the Ninth Edition of the Encyclopedia
Britannica. A single paragraph of this compresses much of the external
and internal history of the "Rise and Development of Hansa." It was
rather to be expected that the commercial relations between England
and the various cities situated along the North Sea, as well as the
Baltic and up the Rhine, would be active and would have to be
submitted to careful regulation. Unless the modern mind is actually
brought directly in touch, however, with the complex yet very
practical state of affairs, which actually existed, it will utterly
fail to appreciate how thoroughly progressive and enterprising were
these medieval peoples. Enterprise and practicalness we are apt to
think of as the exclusive possession of much more modern generations.
Least of all would we be apt to consider them as likely to be found in
the Thirteenth Century, yet here they are, and the commercial
arrangements which were made are as absolute premonitions of our
modern thought as were the literature and architecture, the painting,
even the teachings of science at the same period.
"The members of this League (Hanseatic) came to England mostly from
Cologne, the first German town which obtained great importance both at
home and abroad. Its citizens possessed at an early date a guild-hall
of their own (in London), and all Germans who wished to trade with
England had to join their guild. This soon included merchants from
Dortmund, Soest and Munster, in Westphalia; from Utrecht, Stavern and
Groningen, in the Netherlands, and from Bremen and Hamburg on the
North Sea. But, when at the beginning of the Thirteenth Century, the
rapidly rising town of Lübeck {422} wished to be admitted into the
guild, every effort was made to keep her out. The intervention of
Frederick II. was powerless to overcome the dread felt by Cologne
towards a possible rival to its supremacy. But this obstacle to the
extension of the League was soon overcome. In 1260 a charter of Henry
III. assured protection to all German merchants. A few years later
Hamburg and Lübeck also were allowed to form their own guilds. The
Hansa of Cologne, which had long been the only guild, now sinks to the
position of a branch Hansa, and has to endure others with equal
privileges. Over all the branch Hansas rises the "Hansa Alamanniae,"
first mentioned in 1282.
This article gives additional information with regard to the many and
varied influences at work at the end of the Thirteenth Century. It
furnishes in brief, moreover, an excellent picture of the activity of
mind and power of organization so frequently displayed during this
period in every branch of life. This is after all the highest quality
of man. The development of associations of various kinds, especially
such as are helpfully purposive, are the outcome of that social
quality in man's mind which is the surest index of his rational
quality. Succeeding centuries lost for some almost unaccountable
reason much of this faculty of organization and the result was a
lamentable retrogression from the advances made by older generations,
so that it was only in quite recent years that anything like this old
international comity was reestablished.
{opp422}
[Illustration]
RATHHAUS (LÜBECK)
The extent and very natural development of this community of interests
must ever attract attention. It is the first time in our modern
history that it occurs and men of some seven different races and
tongues were at last drawn into it. In this it represents the greatest
advance of history, for it led to assimilation of laws and of
liberties, with some of the best features of each nation's old-time
customs preserved in the new codes. Its extension even to Novgorod, in
what is now the heart of Russia is a surprising demonstration of
successful enterprise and spread of influence almost incredible. The
settling of the trade disputes of this distant Russian City in the
courts of a North Sea town, is an evidence of advance in commercial
relations emphasized by the writer in the Britannica, that deserves to
be well weighed as a manifestation of what is often thought {423} to
be the exclusively modern recognition of the rights of commerce and
the claims of justice over even national feelings.
"The league between Lübeck and Hamburg was not the only, and possibly
not the first, league among the German towns. But it gradually
absorbed all others. Besides the influence of foreign commercial
interests there were other motives which compelled the towns to union.
The chief of these were the protection of commercial routes both by
sea and land, and the vindication of town independence as opposed to
claims of the landed aristocracy. The first to join the League were
the Wendish towns to the East, Wismar, Rostock, Stralsund, etc., which
had always been intimately connected with Lübeck, and were united by a
common system of laws known as the 'Lübisches Recht' (Lübeck Laws).
The Saxon and Westphalian towns had long possessed a league among
themselves; they also joined themselves to Lübeck. Lübeck now became
the most important town in Germany. It had already surpassed Cologne
both in London and Bruges. It soon gained a similar victory over
Wisby. At a great convention in which twenty-four towns from Cologne
to Revel took part, it was decided that appeals from Novgorod which
had hitherto been decided at Wisby should henceforth be brought to
Lübeck."
After much travail and vexation of spirit, after much diplomacy and
political and parliamentary discussion, after much striving on the
part of the men in all nations, who have the great cause of universal
peace for mankind at heart, we have reached a position where at least
commercial difficulties can be referred to a sort of international
court for adjudication. The standing of this court is not very clear
as yet. Special arrangements at least are required, if not special
treaties in many cases, even for the reference of such merely
commercial difficulties as debt-collecting to it. In the last quarter
of the Nineteenth Century special tribunals had to be erected for the
settlement of such difficulties between nations. In the Twentieth
Century the outlook is more hopeful and the actual accomplishment is
indeed encouraging. In the Thirteenth Century with the absence of the
telegraph and the cable, with the slowness of sailing vessels and the
distance of towns {424} emphasizing all the difficulties of the
situation, the Hanseatic League succeeded in obtaining an
international tribunal, whose judgments with regard to commercial
difficulties were final and were accepted by men of many different
races and habits and customs, and to which causes were referred
without any of the immense machinery apparently required at the
present time.
This is the real triumph of the commercial development of the
Thirteenth Century. While it may be astonishing to many modern people
to learn how much was accomplished in this utterly unexpected quarter,
it will not be a surprise to those who realize the thoroughly
practical character of the century and the perfectly matter of fact
way in which it went about settling all the difficulties that
presented themselves; and how often they succeeded in reaching a very
practical if not always ideal solution. The sad feature of the case is
to think that most of this coming together of nations was lost by the
gradual development of national feeling, much of benefit as there may
have been in that for the human race, and by the drawing of the
language lines between nations more closely than they had been before,
for the next three centuries saw the development of modern tongues
into the form which they have held ever since.
Hansa did more than almost any other institution in northern Europe to
establish the reign of Law. If it had accomplished no other purpose,
this would make it eminently worthy of the study of those who are
interested in sociology and social evolution. Before the time of Hansa
the merchant by sea or land was liable to all sorts of impositions,
arbitrary taxes, injustices, and even the loss of life as well of his
goods. As Hansa gained in power however, these abuses disappeared.
Perhaps the most noteworthy improvement came with regard to
navigation. There is a story told of a famous rock in Brittany on
which many ships were wrecked during the Middle Ages. Even as late as
the Thirteenth Century sometimes false lights were displayed on this
rock with the idea of tempting vessels to their destruction on it.
Everything that was thrown ashore in the neighborhood was considered
to be the property of the people who gathered it, except that a
certain portion of its value had to be paid to the Lord of the Manor.
{425} This worthy representative of the upper classes is said to have
pointed out the rock to some visiting nobleman friends one day, and
declared that it was more precious to him than the most precious stone
in the diadem of any ruling monarch in Europe. This represents the
state of feeling with regard to such subjects when Hansa started in to
correct the abuses.
It may be looked upon as a serious disgrace to the Thirteenth Century
that such a low state of ethical feeling should have existed, but it
is the amelioration of conditions which obliterated such false
sentiments that constitutes the triumph of the period. On the other
hand we must not with smug self-complacency think that our generation
is so much better than those of the past. It is easy to be pharisaical
while we forget that many a fortune in modern times suffers shipwreck
on the coasts of business and investment, because the false lights of
advertising intended to deceive, are displayed very prominently, for
those who are only anxious as were the mariners of the olden times to
make their fortunes. Doubtless too the proprietors of many of the
papers which display such advertisements, and it is nonsense to say
that they are unconscious of the harm they do, are quite as proud of
the magnificent revenue that their advertising columns bring to them
as was the Breton noble of the Thirteenth Century. Man has not changed
much in the interval.
Lest it should be thought that even the present-day initiation into
secret societies of various kinds is the invention of modern times, it
seems well to give some of the details of the tests through which
those seeking to be members of the Hanseatic League were subjected, by
those who were already initiated. It may possibly seem that some of
these customs were too barbarous to mention in the same breath with
the present-day initiations, but if it is recalled that at least once
a year some serious accident is reported as the result of the
thoughtless fooling of "frat" students at our universities, this
opinion may be withdrawn. Miss Helen Zimmern in her story of the Hansa
Towns already quoted several times, has a paragraph or two of
descriptions of these that we shall quote. It may be well to remember
that these tests were not entirely without a serious significance for
the members of the Hansa. Much {426} was expected of those who
belonged to the Hansa Guild. A number of precious trade secrets were
entrusted them, and they alone knew the methods and mysteries of
Hansa. In order that these might not by any possibility be betrayed,
the members of Hansa who lived in foreign countries were forbidden to
marry while abroad and were bound under the severest penalties to live
a life of celibacy. They were not supposed to be absent from the
houses assigned to them during the night, and their factories so
called, or common-places of residence, were guarded by night watchman
and fierce dogs in order to secure the keeping of these rules.
Besides torture was a very common thing in those times and a man who
belonged to a country that happened to be at war for the moment, might
very easily be subjected to torture for some reason or another with
the idea of securing important information from him. If the members of
Hansa wanted to be reasonably assured that new members would not give
up their secrets without a brave struggle, they had no better way than
by these tests, for which there was therefore some excuse. As to the
brutality of the tests perhaps Miss Zimmern in maidenly way has said
too much. We commend her paragraphs to the modern committees of
reception of college secret societies, because here as elsewhere this
generation may get points from the Thirteenth Century.
{opp426}
[Illustration]
MINSTER (CHORIN, GERMANY)
[Illustration]
CITY GATE (NEUBRANDENBURG)
"We cannot sully our pages by detailing the thirteen different games
or modes of martyrdom that were in use at Bergen. Our more civilized
age could not tolerate the recital. In those days they attracted a
crowd of eager spectators who applauded the more vociferously the more
cruel and barbarous the tortures. The most popular were those
practices known as the smoke, water and flogging games; mad, cruel
pranks calculated to cause a freshman to lose health and reason. Truly
Dantesque hell tortures were these initiations into Hansa mysteries.
Merely to indicate their nature we will mention that for the smoke
game the victim was pulled up the big chimney of the Schutting while
there burned beneath him the most filthy materials, sending up a most
nauseous stench and choking wreaths of smoke. While in this position
he was asked a number of questions, to which he was forced, under yet
more terrible penalties, to reply. If {427} he survived his torture he
was taken out into the yard and plied under the pump with six tons of
water." (Even the "Water Cure" is not new).
There was a variety about the tests at different times and places that
show no lack of invention on the part of the members of Hansa. With
regard to other water tests Miss Zimmern has furnished some
interesting details:
"The 'water' game that took place at Whitsuntide consisted in first
treating the probationer to food, and then taking him out to sea in a
boat. Here he was stripped thrown into the ocean, ducked three times,
made to swallow much sea-water, and thereafter mercilessly flogged by
all the inmates of the boats. The third chief game was no less
dangerous to life and limb. It took place a few days after, and was a
rude perversion of the May games. The victims had first to go out into
the woods to gather the branches with which later they were to be
birched. Returned to the factory, rough horse play pranks were
practised upon them. Then followed an ample dinner, which was
succeeded by mock combats, and ended in the victims being led into the
so-called Paradise, where twenty-four disguised men whipped them till
they drew blood, while outside this black hole another party made
hellish music with pipes, drums and triangles to deafen the screams of
the tortured. The 'game' as considered ended when the shrieks of the
victims were sufficiently loud to overcome the pandemonic music." Some
of the extreme physical cruelties of the initiations our modern
fraternities have eliminated, but the whole story has a much more
familiar air than we might have expected.
Probably the most interesting feature of the history of the Hanseatic
League is the fact that this great combination for purposes of trade
and commerce proved a source of liberty for the citizens of the
various towns, and enabled them to improve their political status
better than any other single means at this precious time of
development of legal and social rights. This is all the more
interesting because great commercial combinations with similar
purposes in modern times have usually proved fruitful rather of
opposite results. A few persons have been very much benefited by them,
or at least have made much money by them, which is quite another
thing, though money is {428} supposed to represent power and
influence, but the great mass of the people have been deprived of
opportunities to rise and have had taken from them many chances for
the exercise of initiative that existed before.
There is a curious effect of Hansa upon the political fortunes of the
people of the cities that were members of the League which deserves to
be carefully studied. As with regard to so many other improvements
that have come in the history of the race, it was not a question so
much of the recognition of great principles as of money and revenues
that proved the origin of amelioration of civic conditions. These
commercial cities accumulated wealth. Money was necessary for their
rulers for the maintenance of their power and above all for the waging
of war. In return for moneys given for such purposes the cities
claimed for the inhabitants and were granted many privileges. These
became perpetuated and as time went on were added to as new
opportunities for the collection of additional revenues occurred,
until finally an important set of fundamental rights with documentary
confirmation were in the hands of the city authorities. One would like
to think that this state of affairs developed as the result of the
recognition on the part of the ruling sovereign, of the benefits that
were conferred on his realm by having in it, or associated with it, an
important trading city whose enterprising citizens gave occupation to
many hands. This was very rarely the case, however, but as was true of
the legal rights obtained by England's citizens during the Thirteenth
Century, it was largely a question of the coordination of taxation and
legislative representation and the consequent attainment of
privileges.
The most important effect on the life of Europe and the growth of
civilization that the Hanseatic League exerted, was its success in
showing that people of many different nations and races, living under
very different circumstances, might still be united under similar laws
that would enable them to accomplish certain objects which they had in
view. Germans, Slavs and English learned to live in one another's
towns and while observing the customs of these various places
maintained the privileges of their homes. The mutual influence of
these people on one another, many of them being the most practical and
{429} enterprising individuals of the time, could scarcely fail to
produce noteworthy effects in broadening the minds of those with whom
they came in contact. It is to this period that we must trace the
beginnings of international law. Hansa showed the world how much
commercial relations were facilitated by uniform laws and by just
treatment of even the citizens of foreign countries. It is to commerce
that we owe the first recognition of the rights of the people of other
countries even in time of war. If the Hanseatic League had done
nothing else but this, it must be considered as an important factor in
the development of our modern civilization and an element of influence
great as any other in this wonderful century.
[Illustration]
HINGE FROM CATHEDRAL, SCHLESTADT
{430}
APPENDIX I
SO-CALLED HISTORY.
RULERS.
EMPERORS OF GERMANY.
Otho IV 1198-1218
Frederick II 1212-1250
Conrad IV 1250-1254
William of Holland 1254-1256
Richard Earl of Cornwall 1257-1273
Rudolph of Hapsburg 1273-1291
Adolph of Nassau 1292-1298
Albert of Austria 1298-1308
KINGS OF SCOTLAND..
William 1175-1214
Alexander II 1214-1249
Alexander III 1249-1286
Margaret 1286-1292
John Balliol 1292-1296
Interregnum 1296-1306
KINGS OF CASTILE AND LEON.
Alfonso IX 1188-1214
Henry I 1214-1217
St. Ferdinand III 1217-1252
Alfonso X 1252-1284
Sancho IV 1284-1295
Ferdinand IV 1295-1312
KINGS OF ENGLAND.
John Lackland 1199-1216
Henry III 1216-1272
Edward I 1272-1307
KINGS OF FRANCE.
Philip II 1180-1223
Louis VIII 1223-1226
Louis IX 1226-1270
Philip III 1270-1285
Louis [Philip] IV 1314-1316
KINGS OF ARAGON.
Pedro II 1196-1213
James I., the Conqueror 1215-1276
Pedro III 1276-1285
Alfonso III 1285-1291
James II 1291-1327
KINGS OF NAPLES.
Conrad 1250-1254
Conradin 1254-1258
Manfred 1258-1266
Charles of Anjou 1266-1285
Charles 1285-1309
EVENTS.
1202.--Fourth great crusade under Boniface, marquis of Montferrat.
1204.--The English stripped of Normandy, etc.,
by Philip Augustus of France.
1206.--Jenghis-Khan: foundation of the great empire of the Moguls.
1212.--Battle of Ubeda: defeat and fall of Almohads of Africa.
1213.--John Lackland acknowledges himself vassal of the pope.
1213.--Battle of Bouvines won by Philip Augustus.
1215.--Magna Charta.
The palatinate of the Rhine goes to the house of Wittelsbach.
1217.--Crusade of Andrew II., King of Hungary.
1218.--Extinction of the dukes of Zarringuia:
Switzerland becomes an immediate province of the empire.
{431}
1222.--Charter or decree of Andrew II.,
basis of the Hungarian constitution.
1226.--Renewal of the League of Lombardy
to oppose the Emperor Frederick II.
1227.--Battle of Bornhoeved in Holstein: Waldemar II., King of
Denmark, loses his conquests on the southern coast of the Baltic.
1228.--Crusade of the Emperor Frederick II.
1230.--The Teutonic order establishes itself in Prussia.
Conquest of the Balearic islands by the King of Aragon.
1235.--Formation of the Duchy of Brunswick in favor
of the house of the Guelphs.
1236.--Conquest of the Kingdoms of Cordova, Murcia and
Seville by the Castilians.
1237.--Conquest of Russia by Baton-Khan: origin of the
Mogul or Tartar horde of Kaptschak.
1241.--Invasion of Poland, Silesia, and Hungary by the Moguls.
1248.--Crusade of St. Louis, King of France.
1250.--Beginning of the great interregnum in Germany.
1254.--Accessions of the emperors of different houses in
Germany. End of the dominion of the Agubites in Egypt and
Syria; beginning of the empire of the Mamelukes.
1256.--Enfranchisement of the serfs at Bologna in Italy.
1261.--Michel Paleologus, emperor of Nice,
takes Constantinople; end of the empire of the Latins.
1265.--Accession of the house of Anjou to the throne of the
Two Sicilies.
1266.--Admission of the Commons to the Parliament of England.
1268.--Corradino decapitated at Naples; extinction of the house of
Hohenstaufen. Suabia and Franconia become immediate
provinces of the empire.
1271.--The county of Toulouse passes to the King of
France, and the Venaissin to the Pope.
1273.--Accession of the Emperor Rudolph of Hapsburg to
the throne of the empire: first election by the seven electors.
1282.--Conquest of Wales by the King of England.
1282.--The Sicilian Vespers, the kingdom of Sicily passes to
the King of Aragon. The Emperor Rudolph gives to his sons the
duchies of Austria; foundation of the house of Hapsburg.
1283.--The Teutonic order completes the conquest of Prussia.
1289.--Extinction of the male line of the old race of Scotch
kings. Contest of Baliol and Bruce.
1290.--Decline of the republic of Piza. Aggrandizement of that of Genoa.
1291.--Taking of Ptolemais and Tyre by the Mamelukes.
End of the crusades.
1294.--Decline of the Mogul empire at the death of Kublai-Khan.
1298.--Introduction of an hereditary aristocracy at Venice.
1300.--Foundation of the modern Turkish empire by
Ottoman I. First Jubilee proclaimed by Pope Boniface VIII.
{432}
APPENDIX II.
TWENTY-SIX CHAPTERS THAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN.
I. AMERICA IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY.
To most people it would seem quite out of the question that a chapter
on America in the Thirteenth Century might have been written. One of
the most surprising chapters for most readers in the previous edition
was that on Great Explorers and the Foundation of Geography, for it
was a revelation to learn that Thirteenth Century travelers had
anticipated all of our discoveries in the Far and in the Near East
seven centuries ago. Certain documents have turned up, however, which
make it very clear that with the same motives as those which urged
Eastern travelers, Europeans went just as far towards the West at this
time. Documents found in the Vatican Archives in 1903 and exhibited at
St. Louis in 1904, have set at rest finally and absolutely the long
disputed question of the discovery of America by the Norsemen, and in
connection with these the story of America in the Thirteenth Century
might well have been told. There is a letter from Pope Innocent III.,
dated February 13, 1206, addressed to the Archbishop of Norway, who
held jurisdiction over Greenland, which shows not only the presence of
the Norsemen on the American Continent at this time, but also that
they had been here for a considerable period, and that there were a
number of churches and pastors and large flocks in whom the Roman See
had a lively interest. There are Americana from three other Popes of
the Thirteenth Century. John XXI. wrote, in 1276, Nicholas III. two
letters, one dated January 31, 1279, and another June 9, 1279, and
Martin III. wrote 1282. We have inserted on the opposite page a
reproduction of a portion of the first Papal document extant relating
to America, the letter of Pope Innocent III., taken from "The Norse
Discovery of America" (The Norraena Society, N. Y., 1908). The word
_Grenelandie_, underscored, indicates the subject. The writing as an
example of the chirography of the century is of interest.
II. A REPRESENTATIVE UPPER HOUSE.
In most historical attempts at government by the people it has been
recognized that legislation is better balanced if there are two
chambers in the law-making body, one directly elected by the people,
the other indirectly chosen and representing important vested
interests that are likely to make its members conservative. The
initiative for legislation comes, as a rule, from the direct
representatives of the people, while the upper chamber represses
radical law-making or sudden changes in legislative policy, yet does
not hamper too much the progress of democracy.
{433}
[Illustration]
PART OF LETTER OF POPE INNOCENT III. MENTIONING GREENLAND.
{434}
During the last few years a crisis in English politics has led to a
very general demand for a modification of the status of the House of
Lords, while almost similar conditions have led to the beginning at
least of a similar demand for the modification of our Senate in this
country. Both these upper chambers have come to represent vested
interests to too great a degree. The House of Lords has been the
subject of special deprecation. The remark is sometimes made that it
is unfortunate that England is weighted down by this political
incubus, the House of Lords, which is spoken of as a heritage from the
Middle Ages. The general impression, of course, is that the English
House of Lords, as at present constituted, comes down from the oldest
times of constitutional government in England. Nothing could well be
more untrue than any such idea.
The old upper chamber of England, the medieval House of Lords, was an
eminently representative body. Out of the 625 or more of members of
the English House of Lords at the present time about five hundred and
fifty hold their seats by heredity. Only about seventy-five are in
some sense elective. At least one-half of these elected peers,
however, must be chosen from the hereditary nobility of Ireland and
Scotland. Nearly nineteen-twentieths of the membership of the House of
Lords, as at present constituted, owe their place in national
legislation entirely to heredity. Until the reformation so-called this
was not so. More than one-half of the English House of Lords, a good
working majority, consisted of the Lords spiritual. Besides the
Bishops and Archbishops there were the Abbots and Priors of
monasteries, and the masters of religious orders. These men as a rule
had come up from the people. They had risen to their positions by
intellectual abilities and by administrative capacity. The abbots and
other superiors of religious orders had been chosen by their monks as
a rule because, having shown that they knew how to rule themselves,
they were deemed most fitting to rule over others.
Even in our day, when the Church occupies nothing like the position in
the hearts of the masses that she held in the ages of faith, our
Catholic Cardinals, Archbishops and Bishops, both here and in England,
are chosen as members of arbitration boards to settle strikes and
other social difficulties, because it is felt that the working class
has full confidence in them, and that they are thoroughly
representative of the spirit of democracy. In England Cardinal Manning
served more than once in critical social conditions. In this country
we have had a series of such examples. From these we can better
understand what the Lords spiritual represented in the English House
of Lords. There were abuses, though they were not nearly so frequent
as were thought, by which unworthy men sometimes reached such
positions, for men abuse even the best things, but in general these
clerical members of the House of Lords were the chosen intellectual
and moral products of the kingdom. Since they were without families
they had {435} less temptation to serve personal interests and,
besides, they had received a life-long training in unselfishness, and
the best might be expected of them. For an ideal second chamber I know
none that can compare with this old English House of Lords of the
Middle Ages. How much it was responsible for the foundation of the
liberties of which the English-speaking people are deservedly so
proud, and which have been treated in some detail in the chapter on
Origins in Law, would be interesting to trace.
III. THE PARISH, AND TRAINING IN CITIZENSHIP.
Mr. Toulmin Smith, in his book on "The Parish," and Dom Gasquet, in
his volume on "The Parish Before the Reformation," have shown what a
magnificent institution for popular self-government was the English
medieval parish, and how much this contributed to the solution of
important social problems and to the creation of a true democratic
spirit. Mr. Toulmin Smith calls particular attention to the fact that
when local self-government gets out of the hands of the people of a
neighborhood personal civic energy goes to sleep. The feeling of
mutual responsibility of the men of the place is lost, to the great
detriment of their larger citizenship in municipality and nation. In
the parish, however, forming a separate community, of which the
members had rights and duties, the primal solid basis for government,
the parish authorities took charge of the highways, the roads, the
paths, the health, the police, the constabulary, and the fires of
their neighborhood. They kept, besides, a registry of births and
deaths and marriages. When these essentially local concerns are
controlled in large bodies the liability to abuse at once becomes easy
and political corruption sets in. He mentions, besides many parochial
institutions, a parochial friendly society for loans on security,
parish gilds for insurance, and many other phases of that thoroughly
organized mutual aid so characteristic of the Middle Ages.
These parishes became completely organized, so as to be thoroughly
democratic and representative of all the possibilities of local
self-government under King Edward at the end of the Thirteenth and the
beginning of the Fourteenth Century. Rev. Augustus Jessopp, in "After
the Great Pillage," tells the story of how the parishes were broken up
as a consequence of the confiscation of their endowment during the
so-called reformation. The quotation from him may be found in Appendix
III. in the section on "How it all stopped."
Toulmin Smith is not so emphatic, but he is scarcely less explicit
than Jessopp. "The attempts of ecclesiastical authority to encroach on
the civil authorities of the parish have been more successful since
the reformation." As a matter of fact, at that time all government
became centralized, and complete contradiction though it may seem to
be of what is sometimes declared the place of the reformation in the
history {436} of human liberty, the genuine democratic institutions of
England were to a great extent impaired by the reform, and an
autocracy, which later developed into an autocratic aristocracy,
largely took its place. Out of that England has gradually lifted
itself during the Nineteenth Century. Even now, however, as pointed
out in the preceding chapter that might have been, the House of Lords
is not at all what it was in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries
when the majority of its members were Lords spiritual, men who had
come up from the masses as a rule.
IV. THE CHANCE TO RISE.
We are very prone to think that even though there may have been
excellent opportunities for the higher education in the Thirteenth
Century and, in many ways, an ideal education of the masses, still
there was one great social drawback in those times, the lack of
opportunity for men of humble birth to rise to higher stations.
Nothing, however, is less true. There probably never was a time when
even members of the poorest families might rise more readily or
rapidly to the highest positions in the land. The sons of village
merchants and village artisans, nay, the sons and grandsons of farmers
bound to the soil, could by educational success become clergymen in
various ranks, and by attaining a bishopric or the position of abbot
or prior of a monastery, reach a seat in the House of Lords. Most of
the Lord High Chancellors of England during the Middle Ages--and some
of them are famous for their genius as canon and civil lawyers, for
their diplomatic abilities and their breadth of view and capacity as
administrators--were the sons of humble parents.
Take the single example of Stratford, the details of whose
inhabitants' lives, because of the greatness of one of them, have
attracted more attention than those of any other town of corresponding
size in England. At the beginning of the Fourteenth Century it is only
what we would call a village, and it probably did not have 3,000
inhabitants, if, indeed, the number was not less than 2,000. In his
book, "Shakespeare the Boy," Mr. Rolfe calls attention to certain
conditions that interest us in the old village. He tells us of what
happened as a result of the development of liberty in the Thirteenth
Century:
"Villeinage gradually disappeared in the reign of Edward VII.
(1327-1337), and those who had been subject to it became free
tenants, paying definite rents for house and land. Three natives of
the town, who, after the fashion of the time, took their surnames
from the place of their birth, rose to high positions in the Church,
one becoming Archbishop of Canterbury, and the others respectively
Bishops of London and Chichester. John of Stratford and Robert of
Stratford were brothers, and Ralph of Stratford was their nephew.
John and Robert were both for a time Chancellors of England, and
there is no other instance of two brothers attaining that high
office in succession."
{437}
To many people the fact that the avenue to rise was through the Clergy
more than in any other way will be disappointing. One advantage,
however, that the old people would insist that they had from their
system was that these men, having no direct descendants, were less
likely to pursue selfish aims and more likely to try to secure the
benefit of the Community than are those who, in our time, rise through
the legal profession. The Lord High Chancellors of recent time have
all been lawyers. Would not most of the world confess that the
advantage was with the medieval peoples?
President Woodrow Wilson of Princeton realized sympathetically this
great element of saving democracy in the Middle Ages, and has paid
worthy tribute to it. He said: "The only reason why government did not
suffer dry rot in the Middle Ages under the aristocratic systems which
then prevailed was that the men who were efficient instruments of
government were drawn from the church--from that great church, that
body which we now distinguish from other church bodies as the Roman
Catholic Church. The Roman Catholic Church then, as now, was a great
democracy. There was no peasant so humble that he might not become a
priest, and no priest so obscure that he might not become Pope of
Christendom, and every chancellery in Europe was ruled by those
learned, trained and accomplished men--the priesthood of that great
and then dominant church; and so, what kept government alive in the
Middle Ages was this constant rise of the sap from the bottom, from
the rank and file of the great body of the people through the open
channels of the Roman Catholic priesthood."
V. INSURANCE.
Insurance is usually supposed to be a modern idea representing one of
those developments of the capitalization of mutual risks of life,
property, and the like that have come as a consequence of modern
progress. The insurance system of the Middle Ages, the organization of
which came in the Thirteenth Century, is therefore extremely
interesting. It was accomplished, as was every form of co-operation
and co-ordination of effort, through special gilds or through the
trade or merchant gilds. Among the objects of the gilds enumerated by
Toulmin Smith is insurance against loss by fire. This was paid through
the particular gild to which the merchant belonged, or in the case of
the artisan through a special gild which he joined for the purpose.
Provision was made, however, for much more than insurance by fire. Our
fire insurance companies are probably several centuries old, so also
are our insurance arrangements against shipwreck. Other features of
insurance, however, are much more recent. Practically all of these
were in active existence during the Middle Ages, though they
disappeared with the so-called reformation, and then {438} did not
come into existence again for several centuries and, indeed, not until
our own time.
The old gilds, for instance, provided insurance against loss from
flood, a feature of insurance that has not, so far as I know,
developed in our time, against loss by robbery (our burglary insurance
is quite recent), against loss by the fall of a house, by
imprisonment, and then also insurance against the loss of cattle and
farm products. All the features of life insurance also were in
existence. The partial disability clauses of life or accident
insurance policies are recent developments. In the old days there is
insurance against the loss of sight, against the loss of a limb, or
any other form of crippling. The deaf and dumb might be insured so as
to secure an income for them, and corresponding relief for leprosy
might be obtained; so that, if one were set apart from the community
by the law requiring segregation of lepers, there might be provision
for food and lodging, even though productive work had become
impossible. In a word, the insurance system of the Middle Ages was
thoroughly developed. It was not capitalistic. The charges were only
enough to maintain the system, and not such as to provide large
percentage returns on invested stock and on bonds, and the
accumulation of huge surpluses that almost inevitably lead to gross
abuses. What is best in our modern system of insurance is an imitation
of the older methods. Certain of the trade insurance companies which
assume a portion of the risk on mills, factories and the like, are
typical examples. They know the conditions, enforce proper
precautions, keep an absolute check on suspicious losses, accumulate
only a moderate surplus and present very few opportunities for
insurance abuses. The same thing is true for the fraternal societies
that conduct life insurance. When properly managed they represent the
lowest possible cost and the best efficiency with least opportunities
for fraud and without any temptations to interfere with legislation
and any allurements for legislators to spend their time making strike
and graft bills instead of doing legislative work.
VI. OLD AGE PENSIONS.
This generation has occupied itself much with the question of old age
pensions. Probably most people feel that this is the first time in the
world's history that such arrangements have been made. The movement is
supposed to represent a recent development of humanitarian purpose,
and to be a feature of recent philanthropic evolution. It is rather
interesting, in the light of that idea, to see how well they
accomplish this same purpose in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth
Centuries. In our time it has been a government affair, with all the
possibilities of abuse that there are in a huge pension system, and
surely no country knows it better than we do here in America. The old
countries, Germany and France, have established a contributing {439}
system of pension. This was the model of their system of caring for
the old and the disabled in the Middle Ages. Toulmin Smith cites a
rule of one of the gilds which gives us exactly the status of the old
age disability pension question. After a workman had been seven years
a member, the gild assured him a livelihood in case of disability from
any cause.
When we recall that employer as well as employee as a rule belonged to
the gild and this was a real mutual organization in which there was a
sharing of the various risks of life, we see how eminently well
adapted to avoid abuses this old system was. Where the pensioners
appeal to a government pension system, abuses are almost inevitable.
There is the constant temptation to exploit the system on the part of
the pensioners, because they have the feeling that if they do not,
others will. Then the investigation of each particular case is
difficult, and favoritism and graft of various kinds inevitably finds
its way in. Where the pension is paid by a small body of fellow
workmen, the investigation is easy, the temptation to exploit does not
readily find place, and while abuses are to some extent inevitable,
these are small in amount, and not likely to be frequent. Friends and
neighbors know conditions, and men are not pauperized by the system,
and if, after an injury that seemed at first so disabling as to be
permanent, the pensioner should improve enough to be able to get back
to work, or, at least, to do something to support himself, the system
is elastic enough so that he is not likely to be tempted to continue
to live on others rather than on his own efforts.
VII. THE WAYS AND MEANS OF CHARITY--ORGANIZED CHARITY.
Most of us would be apt to think that our modern methods of obtaining
funds for charitable purposes represented definite developments, and
that at least special features of our collections for charity were our
own invention. In recent years the value of being able to reach a
great many people even for small amounts has been particularly
recognized. "Tag day" is one manifestation of that. Everyone in a
neighborhood is asked to contribute a small amount for a particular
charitable purpose, and the whole collection usually runs up to a snug
sum. Practices very similar to this were quite common in the
Thirteenth Century. As in our time, it was the women who collected the
money. A rope, for instance, was stretched across a marketplace, where
traffic was busy, and everyone who passed was required to pay a toll
for charity. Occasionally the rope was stretched across a bridge and
the tolls were collected on a particular day each year. Other forms of
charitable accumulation resembled ours in many respects.
Entertainments of various kinds were given for charity, and special
collections were made during the exhibition of mystery plays {440}
partly to pay the expenses of the representation, and the surplus to
go to the charities of the particular gild.
Most of the charity, however, was organized. Indeed it is the
organization of charity during the Thirteenth Century that represents
the best feature of its fraternalism. The needy were cared for by the
gilds themselves. There were practically no poorhouses, and if a man
was willing to work and had already shown this willingness, there were
definite bureaus that would help him at least to feed his family while
he was out of work. This system, however, was flexible enough to
provide also for the ne'er-do-wells, the tramps, the beggars, but they
were given not money, but tokens which enabled them to obtain the
necessaries of life without being able to abuse charity. The
committees of the gilds consulted in various ways among themselves and
with the church wardens so as to be sure that, while all the needy
were receiving help, no one was abusing charity by drawing help from a
number of different quarters. Of course, they did not have the problem
of large city life that we have, and so their comparatively simple
organization of charity sufficed for all the needs of the time, and at
the same time anticipated our methods.
VIII. SCIENTIFIC UNIVERSITIES.
In the first edition of this book I called attention to the fact, that
science, even in our sense of physical science, was, in spite of
impressions to the contrary, a favorite subject for students and
teachers in the early universities. What might have been insisted on,
however, is that these old universities were scientific universities
resembling our own so closely in their devotion to science as to
differ from them only in certain unimportant aspects. Because the
universities for three centuries before the Nineteenth had been
occupied mainly with classical studies, we are prone to think that
these were the main subjects of university teaching for all the
centuries before. Nothing could well be less true. The undergraduate
studies consisted of the seven liberal arts so-called, though these
were largely studied from the scientific standpoint. The quotation
from Prof. Huxley (Appendix III., Education) makes this very clear.
What we would now call the graduate studies consisted of metaphysics,
in which considerable physics were studied, astronomy, medicine, above
all, mathematics, and then the ethical sciences, under which were
studied what we now call ethics, politics and economics. The picture
of these medieval universities as I have given them in my lecture on
Medieval Scientific Universities, in "Education, How Old the New,"
makes this very clear. The interests and studies were very like those
of our own time, only the names for them being different. Nature-study
was a favorite subject, and, as I have pointed out in "The Popes and
Science," Dante must be considered as a great nature student, for he
was able to draw the most exquisite figures from details of knowledge
of living things with which few {441} poets are familiar. The books of
the professors of the Thirteenth Century which have been preserved,
those of Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, Aquinas, Duns Scotus and
others, make it very clear that scientific teaching was the main
occupation of the university faculties, while the preservation of
these huge tomes by the diligent copying of disciples shows how deeply
interested were their pupils in the science of the time.
IX. MEDICAL TEACHING AND PROFESSIONAL STANDARDS.
At all times in the history of education, the standards of scientific
education, and the institutions of learning, can be best judged from
the condition of the medical schools. When the medical sciences are
taken seriously, when thorough preparation is demanded before their
study may be taken up, when four or five years of attention to
theoretic and practical medicine are required for graduation, and when
the professors are writing textbooks that are to attract attention for
generations afterwards, then, there is always a thoroughly scientific
temper m the university itself. Medicine is likely to suffer, first,
whenever there is neglect of science. The studies of the German
historians, Puschmann, Pagel, Neuberger, and Sudhoff in recent years,
have made it very clear that the medical schools of the universities
of the Thirteenth Century were maintaining high standards. The
republication of old texts, especially in France, has called attention
to the magnificent publications of their professors, while a review of
their laws and regulations confirms the idea of the good work that was
being done. Gurlt, in his history of surgery, "Geschichte der
Chirurgie" (Berlin, 1898), has reviewed the textbooks of Roger and
Roland and the Four Masters, of William of Salicet and Lanfranc and of
many others, in a way to make it very clear that these men were
excellent teachers.
When we discover that three years of preparatory university work was
required before the study of medicine could be begun, and four years
of medical studies were required, with a subsequent year of practice
under a physician's direction, before a license for independent
practice could be issued, then the scientific character of the medical
schools and therefore of the universities to which they were attached
is placed beyond all doubt. These are the terms of the law issued by
the Emperor Frederick II. for the Two Sicilies. That, in substance, it
applied to other countries we learn from the fact that the charters of
medical schools granted by the Popes at this time require proper
university preliminary studies, and four or five years at medicine
before the degree of Doctor could be given. We know besides that in
the cities only those who were graduates of properly recognized
medical schools were allowed to practice medicine, so that there was
every encouragement for the maintenance of professional standards.
Indeed, {442} strange as it may seem to our generation, the standards
of the Thirteenth Century in medical education were much higher than
our own, and their medical schools were doing fine work.
X. MAGNETISM.
For proper understanding of the Thirteenth Century scholars, it is
especially important to appreciate their thoroughly scientific temper
of mind, their powers of observation, and their successful attainments
in science. I know no more compendious way of reaching the knowledge
of these qualities in the medieval mind, than a study of the letter of
Peregrinus, which we would in our time call a monograph on magnetism.
Brother Potamian, in his chapter in "Makers of Electricity" (Fordham
University Press, N. Y., 1909) on Peregrinus and Columbus, sums up the
very interesting contributions of this medieval student of magnetism
to the subject. The list of chapters alone in Peregrinus' monograph
(Epistola) makes it very clear how deep were his interests and how
thoroughly practical his investigations.
[Illustration]
THE DOUBLE PIVOTED NEEDLE OF PEREGRINUS.
They are:--"Part I., Chapter i, purpose of this work; 2,
qualifications of the experimenter; 3, characteristics of a good
lodestone; 4, how to distinguish the poles of a lodestone; 5, how to
tell which pole is north and which is south; 6, how one lodestone
attracts another; 7, how iron touched by a lodestone turns toward the
poles of the world; 8, how a lodestone attracts iron; 9, why the north
pole of one lodestone attracts the south pole of another, and vice
versa; 10, an inquiry into the natural virtue of the lodestone.
"Part II., Chapter 1, construction of an instrument for measuring the
azimuth of the sun, the moon or any star then in the horizon; 2,
construction of a better instrument for the same purpose; 3, the art
of making a wheel of perpetual motion."
In order to illustrate what Peregrinus accomplished it has seemed
worth while to reproduce here the sketches which illustrate his
epistle. We have the double pivoted needle and the first pivoted
compass.
In the light of certain recent events a passage from the "New Naval
History or Complete Review of the British Marine" (London, 1757) is of
special interest. It illustrates perhaps the new confidence that came
to men in sailing to long distances as the result of the {443}
realization of the practical value of the magnetic needle during the
Thirteenth Century.
[Illustration]
FIRST PIVOTED COMPASS (PEREGRINUS, 1269).
"In the year 1360 it is recorded that a friar of Oxford called
Nicholas de Linna (of Lynn), being a good astronomer, went in company
with others to the most northern island, and thence traveled alone,
and that he went to the North Pole, by means of his skill in magic, or
the black art; but this magic or black art may probably have been
nothing more than a knowledge of the magnetic needle or compass, found
out about sixty years before, though not in common use until many
years after."
XI. BIOLOGICAL THEORIES, EVOLUTION, RECAPITULATION.
Of course only those who are quite unfamiliar with the history of
philosophic thought are apt to think that the theory of evolution is
modern. Serious students of biology are familiar with the long history
of the theory, and especially its anticipations by the Greeks. Very
few know, however, that certain phases of evolutionary theory
attracted not a little attention from the scholastic philosophers. It
would not be difficult to find expressions in Roger Bacon and Albertus
Magnus, that would serve to show that they thought not only of the
possibility of some very intimate relation of species but of
developmental connections. The great teacher of the time, St. Thomas
Aquinas, has some striking expressions in the matter, which deserve to
be quoted, because he is the most important representative of the
philosophy and science of the century and the one whose works most
influenced succeeding generations. In the lecture on Medieval
Scientific Universities, published in "Education, How Old the New"
(Fordham University Press, N. Y., 1910), I called particular attention
to this phase of St. Thomas' teaching. Two quotations will serve to
make it clear here.
Prof. Osborne, in "From the Greeks to Darwin," quotes Aquinas'
commentary on St. Augustine's opinion with regard to the origin of
things as they are. Augustine declared that the Creator had simply
{444} brought into life the seeds of things, and given these the power
to develop. Aquinas, expounding Augustine, says:
"As to production of plants, Augustine holds a different view, . . .
for some say that on the third day plants were actually produced,
each in his kind--a view favored by the superficial reading of
Scripture. But Augustine says that the earth is then said to have
brought forth grass and trees _causaliter_; that is, it then
received power to produce them." (Quoting Genesis ii:4): "For in
those first days, . . . God made creation primarily or _causaliter_,
and then rested from His work."
Like expressions might be quoted from him, and other writers of the
Thirteenth Century might well be cited in confirmation of the fact
that while these great teachers of the Middle Ages thoroughly
recognize the necessity for creation to begin with and the placing by
the Creator of some power in living things that enables them to
develop, they were by no means bound to the thought that all living
species were due to special creations. They even did not hesitate to
teach the possibility of the lower order of living beings at least
coming into existence by spontaneous generation, and would probably
have found no difficulty in accepting a theory of descent with the
limitations that most scientific men of our generation are prone to
demand for it.
Lest it should be thought that this is a mere accidental agreement
with modern thought, due much more to a certain looseness of terms
than to actual similarity of view, it seems well to point out how
close St. Thomas came to that thought in modern biology, which is
probably considered to be one of our distinct modern contributions to
the theory of evolution, though, in recent years, serious doubts have
been thrown on it. It is expressed by the formula of Herbert Spencer,
"Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny." According to this, the completed
being repeats in the course of its development the history of the
race, that is to say, the varying phases of foetal development from
the single cell in which it originates up to the perfect being of the
special type as it is born into the world, retrace the history by
which from the single cell being the creature in question has
gradually developed.
It is very curious to find that St. Thomas Aquinas, in his teaching
with regard to the origin and development of the human being, says,
almost exactly, what the most ardent supporters of this so-called
fundamental biogenetic law proclaimed during the latter half of the
Nineteenth Century, thinking they were expressing an absolutely new
thought. He says that "the higher a form is in the scale of being and
the farther it is removed from mere material form, the more
intermediate forms must be passed through before the finally perfect
form is reached. Therefore, in the generation of animal and man--
these having the most perfect forms--there occur many intermediate
forms in generations, and consequently destruction, because the {445}
generation of one being is the destruction of another." St. Thomas
draws the ultimate conclusions from this doctrine without hesitation.
He proclaims that the human material is first animated by a vegetative
soul or principle of life, and then by an animal soul, and only
ultimately when the matter has been properly prepared for it by a
rational soul. He said: "The vegetative soul, therefore, which is
first in embryo, while it lives the life of a plant, is destroyed, and
there succeeds a more perfect soul, which is at once nutrient and
sentient, and for that time the embryo lives the life of an animal:
upon the destruction of this there succeeds the rational soul, infused
from without."
XII. THE POPE OF THE CENTURY.
The absence of a chapter on the Pope of the Century has always seemed
a lacuna in the previous editions of this book. Pope Innocent III.,
whose pontificate began just before the century opened, and occupied
the first fifteen years of it, well deserves a place beside Francis
the Saint, Thomas the Scholar, Dante the Poet, and Louis the Monarch
of this great century. More than any other single individual he was
responsible for the great development of the intellectual life that
took place, but at the same time his wonderfully broad influence
enabled him to initiate many of the movements that meant most for
human uplift and for the alleviation of suffering in this period. It
was in Councils of the Church summoned by him that the important
legislation was passed requiring the development of schools, the
foundation of colleges in every diocese and of universities in
important metropolitan sees. What he accomplished for hospitals has
been well told by Virchow, from whom I quote a magnanimous tribute in
the chapter on the Foundation of City Hospitals. The legislation of
Innocent III. did much to encourage, and yet to regulate properly the
religious orders of this time engaged in charitable work. Besides
doing so much for charity, he was a stern upholder of morals. As more
than one king of the time realized while Innocent was Pope, there
could be no trifling with marriage vows.
On the other hand, while Innocent was so stern as to the enforcement
of marriage laws, his wonderfully judicious character and his care for
the weak and the innocent can be particularly noted in his treatment
of the children in these cases. While he compelled recalcitrant kings
to take back the wives they would repudiate, and put away other women
who had won their affections, he did not hesitate to make due
provision as far as possible for the illegitimate children. Pirie
Gordon, in his recent life of Pope Innocent III., notes that he
invariably legitimated the offspring of these illegal unions of kings,
and even declared them capable of succession. He would not visit the
guilt of the parent on the innocent offspring.
{446}
Innocent did more to encourage the idea of international arbitration
than anyone up to his time. During his period more than once he was
the arbitrator to whom rival national claims that might have led to
war were referred. Probably his greatest claim on our admiration in
the modern time is his attitude toward the Jews. In this he is
centuries ahead of his time and, indeed, the policy that he laid down
is far ahead of what is accorded to them by many of the nations even
at the present time, and it must not be forgotten that it is only
during the past hundred years that the Jew has come to have any real
privileges comparable to those accorded to other men. At a time when
the Jew had no real rights in law, Innocent insisted on according them
all the rights of men. His famous edict in this regard is well known.
"Let no Christian by violence compel them to come dissenting or
unwilling to Baptism. Further let no Christian venture maliciously to
harm their persons without a judgment of the civil power, to carry off
their property or change their good customs which they have had
hitherto in that district which they inhabit." When, in addition to
all this, it is recalled that he was a distinguished scholar and
graduate of the University of Paris, looked up to as one of the
intellectual geniuses of the time, the author of a treatise "On the
Contempt of the World" at a time when the kings of the earth were
obeying him, known for his personal piety and for his thorough
regulation of his own household, something of the greatness of the man
will be appreciated. No wonder that historians who have taken up the
special study of his career have always been won over to deep personal
admiration of him, and though many of them began prejudiced in his
regard, practically all of them were converted to be his sincere
admirers.
XIII. INTERNATIONAL ARBITRATION.
During the Peace Conference in New York in 1908 I was on the programme
with Mr. William T. Stead of London, the editor of the English _Review
of Reviews_, who was very much interested in the volume on the
Thirteenth Century, and who suggested that one chapter in the book
should have been devoted to the consideration of what was accomplished
for peace and for International Arbitration during this century. There
is no doubt that there developed, as the result of many Papal decrees,
a greater tendency than has existed ever before or since, to refer
quarrels between nations that would ordinarily end in war to decision
by some selected umpire. Usually the Pope, as the head of the
Christian Church, to which all the nations of the civilized world
belonged, was selected as the arbitrator. This international
arbitration, strengthened by the decrees of Pope Innocent III., Pope
Honorius III. and Pope Alexander III., developed in a way that is well
worth while studying, and that has deservedly been the subject of
careful investigation since the present {447} peace movement began.
Certainly the outlook for the securing of peace by international
arbitration was better at this time than it has been at any time
since. What a striking example, for instance, is the choice of King
Louis of France as the umpire in the dispute between the Barons and
the King of England, which might have led to war. Louis' position with
regard to the Empire and the Papacy was to a great extent that of a
pacificator, and his influence for peace was felt everywhere
throughout Europe. The spirit of the century was all for arbitration
and the adjudication of intranational as well as international
difficulties by peaceful means.
XIV. BIBLE REVISION.
Most people will be quite sure that at least the question of Bible
revision with critical study of text and comparative investigation of
sources was reserved for our time. The two orders of friars founded in
the early part of the Thirteenth Century, however, devoted themselves
to the task of supplying to the people a thoroughly reliable edition
of the Scriptures. The first systematic revision was made by the
Dominicans about 1236. After twenty years this revision was set aside
as containing too many errors, and another Dominican correction
replaced it. Then came that great scholar, Hugh of St. Cher, known
later as the Cardinal of Santa Sabina, the author of the first great
Biblical Concordance. His Bible studies did much to clarify
obscurities in the text. Sometime about 1240 he organized a commission
of friars for the revision of what was known as the Paris Exemplar,
the Bible text that was most in favor at that time. The aim of Hugh of
St. Cher was to establish the old Vulgate of St. Jerome, the text
which received this name during this century, but with such revision
as would make this version correspond as nearly as possible to the
Hebrew and the Greek.
This activity on the part of the Dominicans was rivaled by the
Franciscans. We might not expect to find the great scientist, Roger
Bacon, as a Biblical scholar and reviser, but such he was, working
with Willermus de Mara, to whom, according to Father Denifle, late the
Librarian of the Vatican Library, must be attributed the title given
him by Roger Bacon of Sapientissimus Vir. The Dominicans under the
leadership of Hugh of St. Cher with high ideals had hoped to achieve a
perfect primitive text. The version made by de Mara, however, with the
approval and advice of Bacon, was only meant to bring out St. Jerome's
text as perfectly as possible. These two revisions made in the
Thirteenth Century are typical of all the efforts that men have made
since in that same direction. Contrary to usual present day
impressions, they are characterized by critical scholarship, and
probably represent as great a contribution to Biblical lore as was
made by any other century.
{448}
XV. FICTION OF THE CENTURY.
Ordinarily it would be presumed that life was taken entirely too
seriously during the Thirteenth Century for the generation to pay much
attention to fiction. In a certain sense this is true. In the sense,
however, that they had no stories worthy of the great literature in
other departments it would be quite untrue. There is a naiveté about
their story telling that rather amuses our sophisticated age, yet all
the elements of our modern fiction are to be found in the stories that
were popular during the century, and arranged with a dramatic effect
that must have given them a wide appeal.
The most important contribution to the fiction of the century is to be
found in the collection known as the _Cento Novelle Antiche_ or
"Hundred Ancient Tales," which contains the earliest prose fiction
extant in Italian. Many of these come from a period anterior to Dante,
and it is probable from what Manni, the learned editor of the
_Novelliero_, says, that they were written out in the Thirteenth
Century and collected in the early part of the Fourteenth Century.
They did not all originate in Italy, and, indeed, Manni considers that
most of them derived their origin from Provence. They represent the
interest of the century in fiction and in anecdotal literature.
As for the longer fiction, the pure love story of the modern time, we
have one typical example of it in that curious relic of the Middle
Ages, "Aucassin and Nicolette." The manuscript which preserved this
for us comes from the Thirteenth Century. Perhaps, as M. Paris
suggests, the tale itself is from the preceding century. At least it
was the interest of the Thirteenth Century in it that saved it for us.
For those who think that the love romance in any of its features is
novel, though we call it by that name, or that there has been any
development of human nature which enables the writer of love stories
to appeal to other and deeper, or purer and loftier feelings in his
loved ones now than in the past, all that is needed, as it seems to
me, is a casual reading of this pretty old song-story.
Perhaps the most interesting feature of this oldest specimen of modern
fiction is the number of precious bits of psychologic analysis or, at
least, what is called that in the recent time, which occur in the
course of it. For instance, when Aucassin is grieving because he
cannot find Nicolette he wanders through the forest on horseback, and
is torn by trees and brambles, but "he feels it not at all." On the
other hand, when he finds Nicolette, though he is suffering from a
dislocated shoulder, he no longer feels any pain in it, because of his
joy at the meeting, and Nicolette (first aid to the injured) is able
to replace the dislocated part without difficulty (the trained nurse
in fiction) because he is so happy as not to notice the pain
(psychotherapy). The herdsman whom he meets wonders that Aucassin,
with plenty of money and victuals, should grieve so much over the loss
of Nicolette, {449} while he has so much more cause to grieve over the
loss of an ox, which means starvation to him. Toward the end of the
story we have the scene in which Nicolette, stolen from home when very
young, and utterly unable to remember anything about her childhood,
has brought back to her memory by the view of the city of Carthage
forgotten events of her childhood (subconscious memory). These
represent naively enough, it is true, the study of the mind under
varying conditions that has in recent years been given the rather
ambitious name of psychology in fiction.
XVI. GREAT ORATORS.
Without a chapter on the great orators of the period an account of the
Thirteenth Century is quite incomplete. Great as were the other forms
of literature, epic, lyric and religious poetry and the prose writing,
it is probable that the oratory of the time surpassed them all. When
we recall that the Cid, the Arthur Legends, the Nibelungen, the
Meistersingers, and the Minnesingers, Reynard the Fox, the Romance of
the Rose, the Troubadours, and even Dante are included in the other
term of the comparison thus made, it may seem extravagant, but what we
know of the effect of the orators of the time fully justifies it. Just
before the Thirteenth Century, great religious orators swayed the
hearts and minds of people, to the organization of the Crusades. At
the beginning of the Thirteenth Century the mendicant orders were
organized, and their important duties were preaching and teaching. The
Dominicans were of course the Order of Preachers, and we have
traditions of their sway over the minds of the people of the time
which make it very clear that their power was equal to that exerted in
any other department of human expression. There are traditions
particularly of the oratory of the Dominicans among the German races,
which serve to show how even a phlegmatic people can be stirred to the
very depths of their being by the eloquent spoken word. In France the
traditions are almost as explicit in this matter, and there are
remains of religious orations that fully confirm the reputation of the
orators of the time.
Rhetoric and oratory was studied very assiduously. Cicero was the
favorite reading of the great preachers of the time, and we find the
court preachers of St. Louis, Étienne de Bourbon, Elinand, Guillaume
de Perrault and others appealing to his precepts as the infallible
guide to oratory. Quintilian was not neglected, however, and Symmachus
and Sidonius Apollinaris were also faithfully studied. If we turn to
the speeches that are incorporated in the epics, as, for instance, the
Cid, or in some of the historians, as Villehardouin, we have definite
evidence of the thorough command of the writers of the time over the
forms of oratory. M. Paullin Paris, the authority in our time on the
literature of the Thirteenth Century, quotes a passage from
Villehardouin in which Canon de Bethune speaks in the {450} name of
the French chiefs of the Fourth Crusade to the Emperors Isaac and
Alexis Comnenus. M. Paris does not hesitate to declare that the
passage is equal to many of the same kind that have been much admired
in the classic authors. It has the force, the finish and the
compression of Thucydides.
XVII. GREAT BEGINNINGS IN ENGLISH LITERATURE.
Only the fact that this work was getting beyond the number of printed
pages determined for it in the first edition prevented the insertion
of a chapter especially devoted to the great beginnings of English
literature in the Thirteenth Century. The most important contributions
to Early English were made at this period. The Ormulum and Layamon's
Brut, both written probably during the first decade of the Thirteenth
Century, have become familiar to all students of Old English. Mr.
Gollancz goes so far as to say that "The Ormulum is perhaps the most
valuable document we possess for the history of English sound. Orm was
a purist in orthography as well as in vocabulary, and may fittingly be
described as the first of English phoneticians."
[Illustration]
MANUSCRIPT OF ORMULUM (THIRTEENTH CENTURY)
Of Layamon, Garnett said in his "English Literature" (Garnett and
Gosse): "It would have sufficed for the fame of Layamon had he been no
more than the first minstrel to celebrate Arthur in English song, but
his own pretensions as a poet are by no means inconsiderate. He is
everywhere vigorous and graphic, and improved upon his predecessor,
Wace, alike by his additions and expansions, and by his more spiritual
handling of the subjects common to both." Even more important in the
history of language than these is _The Ancren Riwle_ (The Anchorites'
Rule). This was probably written by Richard Poore, Bishop of
Salisbury, for three Cistercian nuns. Its place in English literature
may be judged from a quotation or two with regard to it. Mr.
Kington-Oliphant says: "_The Ancren Riwle_ is the forerunner of a
wondrous change in our speech. More than anything else written outside
the Danelagh, that piece has influenced our standard {451} English."
Garnett says: "_The Ancren Riwle_ is a work of great literary merit
and, in spite of its linguistic innovations, most of which have
established themselves, well deserves to be described as 'one of the
most perfect models of simple eloquent prose in our language.'"
The religious poetry of the time is not behind the great prose of _The
Ancren Riwle_, and one of them, the _Luve Ron_ (Love Song) of Thomas
de Hales, is very akin to the spirit of that work, and has been well
described as "a contemplative lyric of the simplest, noblest mold."
Garnett says: "The reflections are such as are common to all who have
in all ages pleaded for the higher life under whatsoever form, and
deplored the frailty and transitoriness of man's earthly estate. Two
stanzas on the latter theme as expressed in a modernized version might
almost pass for Villon's:--
"Paris and Helen, where are they,
Fairest in beauty, bright to view?
Amadas, Tristrem, Ideine, yea
Isold, that lived with love so true?
And Caesar, rich in power and sway,
Hector the strong, with might to do?
All glided from earth's realm away,
Like shaft that from the bow-string flew.
"It is as if they ne'er were here.
Their wondrous woes have been a' told,
That it is sorrow but to hear;
How anguish killed them sevenfold,
And how with dole their lives were drear;
Now is their heat all turned to cold.
Thus this world gives false hope, false fear;
A fool, who in her strength is bold."
XVIII. GREAT ORIGINS IN MUSIC.
In the chapter on the Great Latin Hymns a few words were said about
one phase of the important musical development in the Thirteenth
Century, that of plain chant. In that simple mode the musicians of the
Thirteenth Century succeeded in reaching a climax of expression of
human feeling in such chants as the _Exultet_ and the _Lamentation_
that has never been surpassed. Something was also said about the
origin of part music, but so little that it might easily be thought
that in this the century lagged far behind its achievements in other
departments. M, Pierre Aubry has recently published (1909) _Cent
Motets du XIIIe Siècle_ in three volumes. His first volume contains a
photographic reproduction of the manuscript of Bamberg from which the
hundred musical modes are secured, the second a transcription in
modern musical notation of the old music, and the third volume studies
and commentaries on the music and the times. If anything were needed
to show how utterly ignorant we have been of the interests and
artistic achievements of the Middle Ages, it is this book of M. Aubry.
Victor Hugo said that music dates from the Sixteenth Century, and it
has been quite the custom, even for people who thought they {452} knew
something about music, to declare that we had no remains of any music
before the Sixteenth Century worth while talking about. Ancient music
is probably lost to us forever, but M. Aubry has shown conclusively
that we have abundant remains to show us that the musicians of the
Thirteenth Century devoted themselves to their art with as great
success as their rivals in the other Gothic arts and, indeed, they
thought that they had nearly exhausted its possibilities and tried to
make a science of it. By their supposedly scientific rules they
succeeded in binding music so firmly as to bring about its obscuration
in succeeding centuries. This is, however, the old story of what has
happened in every art whenever genius succeeds in finding a great mode
of expression. A formula is evolved which often binds expression so
rigorously as to prevent natural development.
XIX. A CHAPTER ON MANNERS.
Whatever the people of the Middle Ages may have been in morals, their
manners are supposed to have been about as lacking in refinement as
possible. As for nearly everything else, however, this impression is
utterly false, and is due to the assumption that because we are
better-mannered than the generations of a century or two ago,
therefore we must be almost infinitely in advance, in the same
respect, of the people of seven centuries ago. There are ups and downs
in manners, however, as there are in education, and the beginnings of
the formal setting forth of modern manners are, like everything else
modern, to be found in the Thirteenth Century. About the year 1215
Thomasin Zerklaere wrote in German a rather lengthy treatise, _Der
Wälsche Gast_, on manners. It contains most of the details of polite
conduct that have been accepted in later times. Not long afterwards,
John Garland, an Oxford man who had lived in France for many years,
wrote a book on manners for English young men. He meant this to be a
supplement to Dionysius Cato's treatise, written probably in the
Fourth Century in Latin, which was concerned more with morals than
manners and had been very popular during the Middle Ages. Garland's
book was the first of a series of such treatises on manners which
appeared in England at the close of the Middle Ages. Many of them have
been recently republished, and are a revelation of the development of
manners among our English forefathers. The book is usually alluded to
in literature as Liber Faceti, or as Facet; the full title was, "The
Book of the Polite Man, Teaching Manners for Men, Especially for Boys,
as a Supplement to those which were Omitted by the Most Moral Cato."
The "Romance of the Rose" has, of course, many references to manners
which show us how courtesy was cultivated in France. In Italy, Dante's
teacher, Bruneto Latini, published his "Tesoretto," which treats of
manners, and which was soon followed by a number of similar treatises
in {453} Italian. In a word, we must look to the Thirteenth Century
for the origin, or at least the definite acceptance, of most of those
conventions which make for kindly courtesy among men, and have made
possible human society and friendly intercourse in our modern sense of
those words.
We are prone to think that refinement in table manners is a matter of
distinctly modern times. In "The Babees' Book," which is one of the
oldest books of English manners, the date of which in its present form
is about the middle of the Fourteenth Century, many of our rules of
politeness at table are anticipated. This book is usually looked upon
as a compilation from preceding times, and the original of it is
supposed to be from the preceding century. A few quotations from it
will show how closely it resembles our own instructions to children:
"Thou shalt not laugh nor speak nothing
While thy mouth be full of meat or drink;
Nor sup thou not with great sounding
Neither pottage nor other thing.
At meat cleanse not thy teeth, nor pick
With knife or straw or wand or stick.
While thou holdest meat in mouth, beware
To drink; that is an unhonest chare;
And also physic forbids it quite.
Also eschew, without strife.
To foul the board cloth with thy knife.
Nor blow not on thy drink or meat,
Neither for cold, neither for heat.
Nor bear with meat thy knife to mouth.
Whether thou be set by strong or couth.
Lean not on elbow at thy meat,
Neither for cold nor for heat.
Dip not thy thumb thy drink into;
Thou art uncourteous if thou it do.
In salt-cellar if thou put
Or fish or flesh that men see it,
That is a vice, as men me tells;
And great wonder it would be else."
The directions, "how to behave thyself in talking with any man," in
one of these old books, are very minute and specific:--
"If a man demand a question of thee.
In thine answer making be not too hasty;
Weigh well his words, the case understand
Ere an answer to make thou take in hand;
Else may he judge in thee little wit,
To answer to a thing and not hear it.
Suffer his tale whole out to be told.
Then speak thou mayst, and not be controlled;
In audible voice thy words do thou utter,
Not high nor low, but using a measure.
Thy words see that thou pronounce plaine.
And that they spoken be not in vain;
In uttering whereon keep thou an order,
Thy matter thereby thou shalt much forder
Which order if thou do not observe.
From the purpose needs must thou swerve."
{454}
XX. TEXTILE WORK OF THE CENTURY.
A special chapter might easily have been written on the making of fine
cloths of various kinds, most of which reached their highest
perfection in the Thirteenth Century. Velvet, for instance, is
mentioned for the first time in England in 1295, but existed earlier
on the continent, and cut velvets with elaborate patterns were made in
Genoa exactly as we know finished velvet now. Baudekin or Baldichin, a
very costly textile of gold and silk largely used in altar coverings
and hangings, came to very high perfection in this century also. The
canopy for the Blessed Sacrament is, because of its manufacture from
this cloth, still called in Italy a _baldichino_. Chaucer in the next
century tells how the streets in royal processions were "hanged with
cloth of gold and not with serge." Satin also was first manufactured
very probably in the Thirteenth Century. It is first mentioned in
England about the middle of the Fourteenth Century, when Bishop
Grandison made a gift of choice satins to Exeter Cathedral. The word
satin, however, is derived from the silks of the Mediterranean, called
by the Italians _seta_ and by the Spanish _seda_, and the art of
making it was brought to perfection during the preceding century.
The art of making textiles ornamented with elaborate designs of animal
forms and of floral ornaments reached its highest perfection in the
Thirteenth Century. In one of the Chronicles we learn that in 1295 St.
Paul's in London owned a hanging "patterned with wheels and two-headed
birds." We have accounts of such elaborate textile ornamentation as
peacocks, lions, griffins and the like. Almeria in Andalusia was a
rich city in the Thirteenth Century, noted for its manufactures of
textiles. A historian of the period writes: "Christians of all nations
came to its port to buy and sell. Then they traveled to other parts of
the interior of the country, where they loaded their vessels with such
goods as they wanted. Costly silken robes of the brightest colors are
manufactured in Almeria." Marco-Polo says of the Persians that, when
he passed through that country (end of the Thirteenth Century), "there
are excellent artificers in the city who make wonderful things in
gold, silk and embroidery. The women make excellent needlework in silk
with all sorts of creatures very admirably wrought therein." He also
reports the King of Tartary as wearing on his birthday a most precious
garment of gold, and tells of the girdles of gold and silver, with
pearls and ornaments of great price on them.
Unfortunately English embroidery fell off very greatly at the time of
the Wars of the Roses. These wars constitute the main reason why
nearly every form of intellectual accomplishment and artistic
achievement went into decadence during the Fourteenth Century, from
which they were only just emerging when the so-called {455}
reformation, with its confiscation of monastic property, and its
destruction of monastic life, came to ruin schools of all kinds, and,
above all, those in which the arts and crafts had been taught so
successfully. France at the end of the Thirteenth Century saw a
similar rise to excellence of textile and embroidery work. In 1299
there is an allusion to one Clément le Brodeur who furnished a
magnificent cope for the Count of Artois. In 1316 a beautifully
decorated set of hangings was made for the Queen by Gautier de
Poulleigny. There are other references to work done in the early part
of the Fourteenth Century, which serve to show the height which art
had reached in this mode during the Thirteenth Century. In Ireland,
while the finer work had its due place, the making of woolens was the
specialty, and the dyeing of woolen cloth made the Irish famous and
brought many travelers from the continent to learn the secret.
The work done in England in embroidery attracted the attention of the
world. English needlework became a proverb. In the body of the book I
mentioned the cope of Ascoli, but there were many such beautiful
garments. The Syon cope is, in the opinion of Miss Addison, author of
"Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages," the most conspicuous example of
the medieval embroiderers' art. It was made by nuns about the middle
of the Thirteenth Century, that is, just about the same time as the
cope of Ascoli, but in a convent near Coventry. According to Miss
Addison "it is solid stitchery on a canvas ground, wrought about with
divers colors' on green. The design is laid out in a series of
interlacing square forms, with rounded and barbed sides and corners.
In each of these is a figure or a Scriptural scene. The orphreys, or
straight borders, which go down on both fronts of the cope, are
decorated with heraldic charges. Much of the embroidery is raised, and
wrought in the stitch known as Opus Anglicanum. The effect was
produced by pressing a heated metal knob into the work at such points
as were to be raised. The real embroidery was executed on a flat
surface, and then bossed up by this means until it looked like
bas-relief. The stitches in every part run in zig-zags, the vestments,
and even the nimbi about the heads, are all executed with the stitches
slanting in one direction, from the center of the cope outward,
without consideration of the positions of the figures. Each face is
worked in circular progression outward from the center, as well. The
interlaces are of crimson, and look well on the green ground. The
wheeled cherubim is well developed in the design of this famous cope,
and is a pleasing decorative bit of archaic ecclesiasticism. In the
central design of the Crucifixion, the figure of the Lord is rendered
in silver on a gold ground."
XXI. GLASS-MAKING.
A chapter might well have been devoted to Thirteenth Century
glass-making quite apart from the stained glass of the cathedral {456}
windows. All over Europe some of the most wonderful specimens of
colored glass we possess were made in the Thirteenth Century. Recently
Mr. Frederick Rolfe has looked up for me Venetian glass, of the three
centuries, the Twelfth, the Thirteenth and the Fourteenth. He says
Twelfth Century glass is small in form, simple and ignorant in model,
excessively rich and brilliant in colors; the artist evidently had no
ideal, but the Byzantine of jewels and emeralds.
"Thirteenth Century glass is absolutely different. The specimens are
pretty. The work of the Beroviero family is large and splendid in
form, exquisite and sometimes elaborate in model, mostly crystal
glass reticently studded with tiny colored gem-like knobs. There are
also fragments of two windows pieced together, and missing parts
filled with the best which modern Murano can do. These show the
celebrated Beroviero Ruby glass (secret lost) of marvelous depth and
brilliancy in comparison with which the modern work is merely
watery. The ancient is just like a decanter of port-wine.
"Fourteenth Century returns to the wriggling ideal and exiguous form
of the Twelfth Century, and fails woefully in brilliance of color.
It is small and dull and undistinguished. One may find out what war
or pest afflicted Murano at this epoch to explain the singular
degradation."
This same curious degradation took place in the manufacture of most
art objects during the Fourteenth Century. One would feel in Mr.
Rolfe's words like looking for some physical cause for it. The
decadence is so universal, however, that it seems not unlikely that it
follows some little known human law, according to which, after man has
reached a certain perfection of expression in an art or craft, there
comes, in the striving after originality yet variety, an overbalancing
of the judgment, a vitiation of the taste in the very luxuriance of
beauty discovered that leads to decay. It is the very contradiction of
the supposed progress of mankind through evolution, but it is
illustrated in many phases of human history and, above all, the
history of art, letters, education and the arts and crafts.
XXII. INVENTIONS.
Most people are sure to think that, at least in the matter of
inventions, ours is the only time worth considering. The people of the
Thirteenth Century, however, made many wonderful inventions and
adaptations of mechanical principles, as well as many ingenious
appliances. Their faculty of invention was mainly devoted to work in
other departments besides that of mechanics. They were inventors of
designs in architecture, in decoration, in furnishings, in textiles,
and in the beautiful things of life generally. Their inventiveness in
the arts and crafts was especially admirable and, indeed, has been
fruitful in our time, since, with the reawakening in this matter, we
have gone back to imitate their designs. Good authorities declare
these to be endless in number and variety. Such mechanical inventions
as were {457} needed for the building of their great cathedrals, their
municipal buildings, abbeys, castles, piers, bridges and the like were
admirably worked out. Necessity is the mother of invention, and
whenever needs asserted themselves, these old generations responded to
them, very successfully. There are, however, a number of inventions
that would attract attention even, in the modern time for their
practical usefulness and ingenuity. With the growth of the
universities writing became much more common, textbooks were needed,
and so paper was invented. With the increase of reading, to replace
teaching by hearing, spectacles were invented. Time became more
precious, clocks were greatly improved, and we hear of the invention
of something like an alarm clock, an apparatus which, after a fixed
number of hours, woke the monk of the abbey whose duty it was to
arouse the others. Organs for churches were greatly improved, bells
were perfected, and everything else in connection with the churches so
well fashioned that we still use them in their Thirteenth Century
forms. Gunpowder was not invented, but a great many new uses were
found for it, and Roger Bacon even suggested, as I have said, that
sometime explosives would enable boats to move by sea without sails or
oars, or carriages to move on land without horses or men. Roger Bacon
even suggested the possibility of airships, described how one might be
made, the wings of which would be worked by a windlass, and thought
that he could make it. His friend and pupil, Peregrinus, invented the
double pivoted compass, and, as the first perpetual-motion faddist,
described how he would set about making a magnetic engine that he
thought would run forever. When we recall how much they accomplished
mechanically in the construction of buildings, it becomes evident that
any mechanical problem that these generations wanted solved they
succeeded in solving very well. What they have left us as inventions
are among the most useful appliances that we have. Without paper and
without spectacles, the intellectual world would be in a sad case,
indeed. Many of the secrets of their inventions in the arts and crafts
have been lost, and, in spite of all our study, we have not succeeded
in rediscovering them.
XXIII. INDUSTRY AND TRADE.
We are rather inclined to think that large organizations of industry
and trade were reserved for comparatively modern times. To think so,
however, is to forget the place occupied by the monasteries and
convents in the olden time. We have heard much of the lazy monks, but
only from those who know nothing at all about them. Idleness in the
monasteries was one of the accusations made by the commission set to
furnish evidence to Henry VIII. on which he might suppress the
monasteries, but every modern historian has rejected the findings of
that commission as false. Many forms of manufacture were carried on in
the monasteries and convents. They were {458} the principal bookmakers
and bookbinders. To a great extent they were the manufacturers of art
fabrics and arts-and-crafts work intended for church use, but also for
the decoration of luxurious private apartments. Most of us have known
something of all this finer work, but not that they had much to do
with cruder industries also. They were millers, cloth-makers,
brush- and broom-makers, shoemakers for themselves and their tenantry;
knitting was done in the convents, and all the finer fancy work. A
recent meeting of the Institute of Mining Engineers in England brought
out some discussion of coal mining in connection with the early
history of the coal mines in England. The records of many of the
English monasteries show that in early times the monks knew the value
of coal, and used it rather freely. They also mined it for others. The
monks at Tynemouth are known to have been mining coal on the Manor of
Tynemouth in 1269, and shipping it to a distance. At Durham and at
Finchale Abbey they were doing this also about the same time. It would
require special study to bring out the interesting details, but there
is abundant material not alone for a chapter, but for a volume on the
industries of the Thirteenth Century, which, like the education and
the literature and the culture of the time, we have thought
undeveloped, because we knew nothing of them.
The relation of the monasteries to trade, domestic and foreign, is
very well brought out in a paragraph of Mr. Ralph Adams Cram's book on
"The Ruined Abbeys of Great Britain" (New York, The Churchman Co.,
1905), in which he describes the remains at Beaulieu, which show the
place of that monastery, not by any means one of the most important in
England, in trade. For the benefit of their tenantry others had done
even more.
"Some idea of the power of one of these great monasteries may be
gained from traces still existing of the center of trade built up by
the monks outside their gates. Here, at the head of tide water, in a
most out-of-the-way spot, a great stone quay was constructed, to
which came ships from foreign lands. Near by was a great
marketplace, now, as then, called Cheapside, though commerce exists
there no longer. At the height of monastic glory the religious
houses were actually the chief centers of industry and civilization,
and around them grew up the eager villages, many of which now exist,
even though their impulse and original inspiration have long since
departed. Of course, the possessions of the abbey reached far away
from the walls in every direction, including many farms even at a
great distance, for the abbeys were then the great landowners, and
beneficent landlords they were as well, even in their last days, for
we have many records of the cruelty and hardships that came to the
tenants the moment the stolen lands came into the hands of laymen."
XXIV. FAIRS AND MARKETS.
A chapter might well have been devoted to showing the significance of
those curious old institutions, the fairs and market days of the {459}
Middle Ages. The country folk flocked into town, bringing with them
their produce, and found there gathered from many parts merchants come
to exchange and barter. The expense of maintaining a store all the
year around was done away with, and profits did not have to be large.
Exchanges were direct, and the profits of the middlemen were to a
great extent eliminated. It was distinctly to the advantage of the
poor, for the expenses of commerce were limited to the greatest
possible extent, and every advantage accrued to the customer.
Besides, these market days became days of innocent merriment,
amusement and diversion. Wandering purveyors of amusement followed the
fairs, and obtained their living from the generosity of the people who
were amused. These amusements were conducted out of doors, and with
very few of the objectionable features as regards hygiene and morality
that are likely to attach themselves to the same things in our day.
The amusement was what we would call now vaudeville, singing, dancing,
the exhibition of trained animals, acrobatic feats of various kinds,
so that we cannot very well say that our people are in advance of
their medieval forbears in such matters, since their taste is about
the same. Fairs and market days made country life less monotonous by
their regular recurrence, and so prevented that emptying of the
country into the city which we deprecate in our time. They had
economic, social, even moral advantages, that are worth while
studying.
XXV. INTENSIVE FARMING.
We hear much of intensive farming in the modern time, and it is
supposed to be a distinctly modern invention mothered by the necessity
due to great increase of population. One of the most striking features
of the story of monasticism in the countries of Europe, however,
during the Middle Ages, and especially during the Thirteenth Century,
when so many of the greatest abbeys reached a climax of power and
influence and beauty of construction, is their successful devotion
paid to agriculture. In the modern time we are gradually learning the
lesson of growing larger and larger crops on the same area of ground
by proper selection of seed, and of developing cattle in such a way as
to make them most valuable as a by-product of farming. This is exactly
what the old monastic establishments did. At the beginning of the
Thirteenth Century many of them were situated in rather barren
regions, sometimes, indeed, surrounded by thick forests, but at the
end of the century all the great monastic establishments had succeeded
in making beautiful luxuriant gardens for themselves, and had taught
their numerous tenantry the great lessons of agricultural improvement
which made for plenty and happiness.
Many monasteries belonged to the same religious order, and the
traditions of these were carried from one to the other by visiting
{460} monks or sometimes by the transfer of members of one community
to another. The monastic establishments were the great farmers of
Europe, and it was their proud boast that their farming lands, instead
of being exhausted from year to year, were rather increasing in value.
They doubtless had many secrets of farming that were lost and had to
be rediscovered in the modern time, just as in the arts and crafts,
for their success in farming was as noteworthy. Their knowledge of
trees must have been excellent, since they surrounded themselves with
fine forests, at times arranged so as to provide shady walks and
charming avenues. Their knowledge of simple farming must have been
thorough, for the farms of the monasteries were always the most
prosperous, and the tenantry were always the happiest. With the
traditions that we have especially in English history, this seems
almost impossible to credit, but these traditions, manufactured for a
purpose, have now been entirely discredited. We have learned in recent
years what wonderful scholars, architects, painters, teachers,
engineers these monks were, and so it is not surprising to find that
they had magnificently developed agricultural knowledge as well as
that of every other department in which they were particularly
interested.
XXVI. CARTOGRAPHY AND THE TEACHING OF GEOGRAPHY.
In the chapter on Great Explorers and The Foundation of Geography, in
the body of the book, much might have been said about maps and
map-making, for the Thirteenth Century was a great period in this
matter. Lecoy de la Marche among his studies of the Thirteenth Century
has included a volume of a collection of the maps of the Thirteenth
Century. If the purpose had been to make this a work of erudition
rather than of popular information, much might have been said of the
cartography of the time even from this work alone (_Receuil de Charles
du XIII e Siècle_, Paris, 1878). One of the great maps of the
Thirteenth Century, that on the Cathedral wall of Hereford, deserves a
place here. It was made just at the end of the Thirteenth Century. The
idea of its maker was to convey as much information as possible about
the earth, and not merely indicate its political divisions and the
relative size and position of the different parts. It is to a certain
extent at least a resume of history, of physical geography, and even
of geographical biology and anthropology, for it has indications as to
the dwelling-place of animals and curious types of men. It contains,
besides, references to interesting objects of other kinds. Because of
its interest I have reproduced the map itself, and the key to it with
explanations published at Hereford.
{461}
[Illustration]
_Key to the Photograph of the Ancient Map of the World_.
PRESERVED IN HEREFORD CATHEDRAL.
[Illustration]
MAP OF THE WORLD (HEREFORD CATHEDRAL)
The Map is executed on a single sheet of vellum, 54 in. in breadth, by
63 in. in extreme height, it is fixed on a strong framework of oak. At
the top (Fig. 1) is a representation of the Last Judgment. Our Saviour
is represented in glory, and below is the Virgin Mary interceding for
mankind.
For convenience of reference the Key Map is divided into squares
marked by Roman capitals, with the more prominent objects in figures.
I.--Commencing with sq. 1. the circle marked by Fig. 2 represents the
Garden of Eden, with the four rivers, and Adam and Eve eating the
forbidden fruit. The remainder of the square, as also in II. and III.,
is occupied by India. At Fig. 3 is shown the expulsion of Adam and
Eve, to the right of which is shown a race of Giants, and to the left
the City of Enoch, and still further the Golden Mountains guarded by
Dragons. Below these mountains are shown a race of pigmies. In a space
bounded by two rivers is placed a crocodile, and immediately below a
female warrior. To the left of the latter are a pair of birds called
in the Map Alerions. The large {462} river to the left is the Ganges.
II.--Shows one of the inhabitants of this part of India, who are said
to have but one foot, which is sufficiently large to serve as an
umbrella to shelter themselves from the sun. The city in the center is
Samarcand. III.--In which is seen an Elephant, to the left a Parrot. A
part of the Red Sea is also shown with the Island of Taprobana
(Ceylon), on which are shown two Dragons. It also bears an inscription
denoting that dragons and elephants are found there. The small Islands
shown are Crise, Argire, Ophir, and Frondisia (Aphrodisia).
IV.--Contains the Caspian Sea, below which is a figure holding its
tail in his hand, and which the author calls the Minotaur. To the left
is shown one of the Albani, who are said to see better at night than
in the daytime. Below are two warriors in combat with a Griffin (Fig.
27). V.--In the upper part are Bokhara and Thrace, in the latter of
which (Fig. 29) is shown the Pelican feeding its young, to the left a
singular figure representing the Cicones, and to the right the Camel,
in Bactria. Below to the left is the Tiger, and on the right an animal
with a human head and the body of a lion, called the Mantichora. Still
lower is seen Noah's ark (Fig. 28), in which are shown three human
figures, with beasts, birds and serpents. In the lower corner, at Fig.
26, is the Golden Fleece. VI.--The upper parts contain Babylonia, with
the City of Babylon (Fig. 4) on the river Euphrates, below which is
the city of Damascus, which has on its right an unknown animal called
the Marsok. To the right is Lot's wife turned into a pillar of salt
(Fig. 8). Decapolis and the River Jordan are near the bottom of the
square. Above the River Euphrates is a figure in a frame representing
the Patriarch Abraham's residence at Ur of the Chaldees. VII.--The Red
Sea (Figs. 5, 5) is the most conspicuous object here. In the fork
formed by it is shown the giving of the Tables of The Law on Mount
Sinai. Below, and touching the line (Fig. 6) showing the wanderings of
the Israelites, is seen the worship of the Golden Calf. The Dead Sea
and submerged Cities are shown lower down to the left, and between
this and the Red Sea is the Phoenix. At the bottom is a mythical
animal with long horns, called the Eale. VIII.--In the upper part is
the Monastery of St. Anthony in Ethiopia. The river to the left is the
Nile, between this and a great interior lake (Figs. 7, 7) is a figure
of Satyr. Beyond the lake, and extending a distance down the Map
(Figs. 12, 12, 12), are various singular figures, supposed to
represent the races dwelling there. In a circular island to the left
(Meroe) is a man riding a crocodile, and at the bottom left-hand
corner is a centaur. IX.--The upper part is Scythia, and shows some
cannibals, below which (Fig. 25) are two Scythians in combat. Under
this again is a man leading a horse with a human skin thrown over it,
and to the right of the latter is placed the ostrich. X.--Asia Minor
with the Black Sea (Fig. 24). Many cities are shown prominent, among
which is Troy (Fig. 21), described as "_Troja civitas
bellicosissima_." Near the bottom to the left is Constantinople. The
lynx is shown near the center. XI.--Is nearly filled by the Holy Land.
In the center is Jerusalem (Fig. 23), the supposed center of the
world, surrounded by a high wall, and above is the Crucifixion. Below
Jerusalem to the right is Bethlehem with the manger. Near a circular
place to the right, called _"Puteus Juramenti"_ (well of the oath), is
an unknown bird, called on the Map Avis Cirenus. XII.--Egypt with the
Nile. At the upper part (Fig. 9) are Joseph's granaries, i.e., the
Pyramids, immediately below which is the Salamander, and to the right
of that the Mandrake. Fig. 10 denotes the Delta with its cities. {463}
On the other side of the Nile, and partly in sq. XIII., is the
Rhinoceros, and below it the Unicorn. XIII.--Ethiopia. In the upper
left-hand corner is the Sphinx, and near the bottom the Temple of
Jupiter Ammon, represented by a singular horse-shoe shaped figure. The
camp of Alexander the Great is in the bottom left-hand corner,
immediately above which is the boundary line between Asia and Africa,
XIV.--At the top of the left is Norway, in which the author has placed
the Monkey. The middle is filled by Russia. The small circular islands
on the left are the Orkneys, immediately below which is an inscription
relating to the Seven Sleepers, Scotland and part of England are shown
in the lower part, but the British Isles will be described in sq. XIX.
The singular triangular figure in the center of this square cannot be
identified. XV.--Germany, with part of Greece, in the upper part to
the right. The Danube and its tributaries are seen in the upper part,
in the lower is the Rhine. On the bank of the latter the scorpion is
placed; Venice is shown on the right, XVI.--Contains Italy and a great
part of the Mediterranean Sea (Fig. 14). About the center (Fig. 17) is
Rome, which bears the inscription, "Roma caput mundi tenet orbis frena
rotundi." In the upper part of the Mediterranean Sea is seen a
Mermaid, below (Fig. 11) is the Island of Crete, with its famous
labyrinth, to the left of which is the rock Scylla. Below Crete is
Sicily (Fig. 15), on which Mount Etna is shown; close to Sicily is the
whirlpool Charybdis, XVII.--Part of Africa; in the lower part to the
left, on a promontory, is seen Carthage; on the right the Leopard is
shown. XVIII.--Also part of Africa. The upper part is Fezzan, below is
shown the basilisk, and still lower some Troglodytes or dwellers in
caves. XIX.--On the left hand are the British Isles (Figs. 19, 20,
22), on the right France. Great Britain (Figs. 19, 22) is very fully
laid down, but of Ireland the author seemed to know but little. In
England twenty-six cities and towns are delineated, among which
Hereford (H'ford) is conspicuous. Twenty rivers are also seen, but the
only mountains shown are the Clee Hills. In Wales, Snowdon is seen,
and the towns of Carnarvon, Conway and St. David's. In Ireland four
towns, Armagh, Bangor, Dublin and Kildare, with two rivers, the Banne,
which, as shown, divides the island in two, and the Shannon. In
Scotland there are six towns. In France the City of Paris (Fig. 18) is
conspicuous. XX.--The upper part is Provence, the lower Spain. In the
Mediterranean Sea are laid down, among others, the Islands of Corsica,
Sardinia, Majorca, and Minorca. At the bottom are (Fig. 16) the
pillars of Hercules (Gibraltar), which were considered the extreme
western limits of the world. XXI.--At the top to the left (Fig. 13) is
St. Augustine of Hippo, in his pontifical habit. And at the opposite
corner the Lion, below which are the Agriophagi, a one-eyed people who
live on the flesh of lions and other beasts. The kingdoms on the shore
of the Mediterranean are Algiers, Setif, and Tangier.
{464}
APPENDIX III.
CRITICISMS, COMMENTS, DOCUMENTS.
HUMAN PROGRESS.
For most people the impossible would apparently be accomplished if a
century so far back as the Thirteenth were to be even seriously
thought of as the greatest of centuries. Evolution has come to be
accepted so unquestioningly, that of course "we are the heirs of all
the ages of the foremost files of time," and must be far ahead of our
forbears, especially of the distant past, in everything. When a man
talks glibly about great progress in recent times, he usually knows
only the history of his own time and not very much about that. Men who
have studied other periods seriously hesitate about the claim of
progress, and the more anyone knows about any other period, the less
does he think of his own as surpassing. There are many
exemplifications of this in recent literature. Because this was a
cardinal point in many criticisms of the book, it has seemed well to
illustrate the position here taken as to the absence of progress in
humanity by quotations from recognized authorities. Just as the first
edition of this book came from the press, Ambassador Bryce delivered
his address at Harvard on "What is Progress?" It appeared in the
_Atlantic Monthly_ for August, 1907. Mr. Bryce is evidently not at all
persuaded that there is human progress in any real sense of the word.
Some striking quotations may be made from the address, but to get the
full impression of Mr. Bryce's reasons for hesitation about accepting
any progress, the whole article needs to be read. For instance, he
said:
"It does not seem possible, if we go back to the earliest literature
which survives to us from Western Asia and Southeastern Europe, to
say that the creative powers of the human mind in such subjects as
poetry, philosophy, and historical narrative or portraiture, have
either improved or deteriorated. The poetry of the early Hebrews and
of the early Greeks has never been surpassed and hardly ever
equaled. Neither has the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, nor the
speeches of Demosthenes and Cicero. Geniuses like Dante, Chaucer,
and Shakespeare appear without our being able to account for them,
and for aught we know another may appear at any moment. It is just
as difficult, if we look back five centuries, to assert either
progress or decline in painting. Sculpture has never again risen to
so high a level as it touched in the fifth century, B. C, nor within
the last three centuries, to so high a level as it reached at the
end of the fifteenth. But we can found no generalizations upon that
fact. Music is the most inscrutable of the arts, and whether there
is any progress to be expected other {465} than that which may come
from a further improvement in instruments constituting an orchestra,
I will not attempt to conjecture, any more than I should dare to
raise controversy by inquiring whether Beethoven represents progress
from Mozart, Wagner progress from Beethoven."
Perhaps the most startling evidence on this subject of the absence of
evolution in humanity is the opinion of Prof. Flinders Petrie, the
distinguished English authority on Egyptology, who has added nearly a
millennium to the history of Egypt. His studies have brought him in
intimate contact with Egypt from 2,000 to 5,000 B. C. He has found no
reason at all for thinking that our generation is farther advanced in
any important qualities than men were during this period. In an
article on "The Romance of Early Civilization" (_The Independent_,
Jan. 7, 1909), he said:
"We have now before us a view of the powers of man at the earliest
point to which we can trace written history, and what strikes us
most is how very little his nature or abilities have changed in
seven thousand years; _what he admired we admire; what were his
limits in fine handiwork also are ours_. We may have a wider
outlook, a greater understanding of things; our interests may have
extended in this interval; but so far as human nature and tastes go,
man is essentially unchanged in this interval." . . . "This is the
practical outcome of extending our view of man three times as far
back as we used to look, and it must teach us how little material
civilization is likely in the future to change the nature, the
weaknesses, or the abilities of our ancestors in ages yet to come."
Those who think that man has advanced in practical wisdom during the
6,000 years of history, forget entirely the lessons of literature.
Whenever a great genius has written, he has displayed a knowledge of
human nature as great as any to be found at any other time in the
world's history. The wisdom of Homer and of Solomon are typical
examples. Probably the most striking evidence in this matter is to be
found in what is considered to be the oldest book ever written. This
is the Instructions of Ptah Hotep to his son. Ptah Hotep was the
vizier of King Itosi, of the Fifth Dynasty of Egypt (about 3650 B.C.).
There is nothing that a father of the modern time would wish to tell
his boy as the result of his own experience that is not to be found in
this wise advice of a father, nearly 6,000 years ago. This was written
longer before Solomon than Solomon is before us, yet no practical
knowledge to be gained from intercourse with men has been added to
what this careful father of the long ago has written out for his son.
THE CENTURY OF ORIGINS.
To many readers apparently, it has seemed that the main reason for
writing of The Thirteenth as the Greatest of Centuries was the fact
that the Church occupied so large a place in the life of that time,
and that, therefore, most of what was accomplished must naturally
revert {466} to her account. It is not only those who are interested
in the old Church, however, who have written enthusiastically about
the Thirteenth Century. Since writing this volume, I have found that
Mr. Frederick Harrison is almost, if not quite, as ardent in his
praise of it as I have been. There are many others, especially among
the historians of art and of architecture, who apparently have not
been able to say all that they would wish in admiration of this
supreme century. Most of these have not been Catholics; and if we
place beside Mr. Frederick Harrison, the great Positivist of our
generation, Mr. John Morley, the great Rationalist, the chorus of
agreement on the subject of the greatness of the Thirteenth Century
ought to be considered about complete. Mr. Morley, in his address on
Popular Culture, delivered as President of the Midland Institute,
England, October, 1876 (Great Essays. Putnam, New York), said:
"It is the present that really interests us; it is the present that
we seek to understand and to explain. I do not in the least want to
know what happened in the past, except as it enables me to see my
way more clearly through what is happening to-day. I want to know
what men thought and did in the Thirteenth Century, not out of any
dilettante or idle antiquarian's curiosity, but because the
Thirteenth Century is at the root of what men think and do in the
nineteenth."
EDUCATION.
Many even of the most benevolent readers of the book have been quite
sure that it exaggerated the significance of medieval education and,
above all, claimed too much for the breadth of culture given by the
early universities. Prof. Huxley is perhaps the last man of recent
times who would be suspected for a moment of exaggerating the import
of medieval education. In his Inaugural Address on Universities Actual
and Ideal, delivered as Rector of Aberdeen University, after
discussing the subject very thoroughly, he said:
"The scholars of the Medieval Universities seem to have studied
grammar, logic and rhetoric; arithmetic and geometry; astronomy,
theology and music. Thus their work, however imperfect and faulty,
judged by modern lights, it may have been, brought them face to face
with all the leading aspects of the many-sided mind of man. For
these studies did really contain, at any rate in embryo, sometimes
it may be in caricature, what we now call philosophy, mathematical
and physical science, and art. _And I doubt if the curriculum of any
modern university shows so clear and generous a comprehension of
what is meant by culture, as this old Trivium and Quadrivium does_."
(Italics ours.)
The results of this system of education may be judged best perhaps
from Dante as an example. In The Popes and Science (Fordham University
Press, N. Y., 1908) a chapter is devoted to Dante as the typical
university man of the time, above all in his knowledge of science as
displayed in his great poem. No poet of the modern time has {467}
turned with so much confidence to every phase of science for his
figures as this product of medieval universities. Anyone who thinks
that the study of science is recent, or that nature study was delayed
till our day, need only read Dante to be completely undeceived.
The fact that the scholars and the professors at the universities were
almost without exception believers in the possibility of the
transmutation of metals in the old days, used to be considered by many
educated people as quite sufficient to stamp them as lacking in
judgment and as prone to believe all sorts of incredible and even
impossible things without justification. Such supercilious
condemnation of the point of view of the medieval scholars in this
matter, however, has recently received a very serious jolt. Sometime
ago, Sir William Ramsey, the greatest of living English chemists,
announced at the meeting of the British Association for the
Advancement of Science, that he had succeeded in changing copper into
lithium. This created a sensation at the time, but represented, after
all, a culmination of effort in this direction that had long been
expected. More recently, Sir William has reported to the British
Chemical Society that he has succeeded in obtaining carbon from four
substances not containing this element--bismuth, hydro-fluo-silicic
acid, thorium and zirconium. An American professor of chemistry has
declared that he would like to remove all traces of silver from a
quantity of lead ore, and then, after allowing it to stand for some
years, have the opportunity to re-examine it, since he is confident
that he would find further traces of silver in it that had developed
in the meantime. He is sure that the reason why these two metals
always occur together, as do copper and, gold, is that they are
products of a developmental process, the precious metals being a step
farther on in that process than the so-called base metals. It would
seem, then, that the medieval scholars were not so silly as they used
to appear before we knew enough about the subject to judge them
properly. Only their supercilious critics were silly.
It is probably with regard to the exact sciences that most even
educated people are quite sure that the Thirteenth Century does not
deserve to be thought of as representing great human advance. For them
the Middle Ages were drowsily speculative, but never exact in
thinking. Of course, such people know nothing of the intense exactness
of thought of St. Thomas or Albertus Magnus or Duns Scotus. It would
be impossible, moreover, to make them realize, from the writings of
these men, how exact human thought actually was in the Thirteenth
Century, though the more that modern students devote themselves to
scholastic philosophy, the more surely do they appreciate and admire
this very quality in the medieval philosophy. For such people, very
probably, the only evidence that would have made quite an adequate
answer to their objection, would be a chapter on the mathematics of
the Thirteenth Century. {468} That might very easily have been made,
for Cantor, in his History of Mathematics (Vorlesungen Über Geschichte
der Mathematik, Leipzig, 1892), devotes nearly 100 pages of his second
volume to the mathematicians of the Thirteenth Century, two of whom,
Leonardo of Pisa and Jordanus Nemorarius, did so much in Arithmetic,
the Theory of Numbers, Algebra and Geometry, as to make a revolution
in mathematics. Cantor says that they accomplished so much, that their
contemporaries and successors could scarcely follow them, much less go
beyond them. They had great disciples, like John of Sacrobusco
(probably John of Holywood, near Dublin), Joannes Campanus and others.
Cantor calls attention particularly to the spread of arithmetical
knowledge among the masses, which is a well-deserved tribute to the
century, for it was a characteristic of the time that the new thoughts
and discoveries of scholars were soon made practical and penetrated
very widely among the people. Brewer, in the Preface to Roger Bacon's
works, quotes some of Bacon's expressions with regard to the value of
mathematics. The English Franciscan said: "For without mathematics,
nothing worth knowing in philosophy can be attained." And again: "For
he who knows not mathematics cannot know any other science; what is
more, he cannot discover his own ignorance or find its proper remedy."
The term mathematics, as used by Bacon, had a much wider application
then than now, and Brewer notes that the Thirteenth Century scientist
included therein Geometry, Arithmetic, Astronomy, and Music.
With regard to post-graduate education; the best evidence that, far
from any exaggeration of what was accomplished in the Thirteenth
Century, there has been a very conservative estimate of it made in the
book, may be gathered from the legally erected standards of the
medical schools and the legal status of the medical profession. In the
Appendix of The Popes and Science, two Bulls are published, issued by
Pope John XXII. (_Circa_, 1320), establishing medical schools in
Perugia, at that time in the Papal States, and in Cahors, the
birthplace of this pope. These bulls were really the formal charters
of the medical schools. They require three years of preliminary study
at the university and four or five years at medicine before the degree
of doctor may be granted, and in addition emphasized that the
curricula of the new medical schools must be equal to those of Paris
and Bologna. These bulls were issued in the early part of the
fourteenth century, and show the height to which the standards of
medical education had been raised. There will be found also a law of
Frederick II., issued 1241, requiring for all physicians who wished to
practice in the Two Sicilies three years of preliminary study--four
years at the medical school and a year of practice with a physician
before the diploma which constituted a license to practice would be
issued. This law is also a pure drug law forbidding the sale of impure
drugs under penalty of confiscation of goods, and the preparation of
them under penalty of death. Our pure drug law was passed about the
time of the issue of the first edition of this book.
{469}
Those who ask for the results of this post-graduate training may find
them in the story of Guy de Chauliac, the Father of Modern Surgery.
His life formed the basis of a lecture before the Johns Hopkins
Medical Club that is to be published in the Bulletin of John Hopkins
Hospital. It is incorporated in Catholic Churchmen in Science, Second
Series (The Dolphin Press, Phila., 1909). We know Chauliac's work not
by tradition, but from his great text-book on surgery. This great
Papal physician of the fourteenth century operated within the skull,
did not hesitate to open the thorax, sewed up wounds of the
intestines, and discussed such subjects as hernia, catheterization,
the treatment of fractures, and manipulative surgery generally with
wonderful technical ability. His book was the most used text-book for
the next two centuries, and has won the admiration of everyone who has
ever read it.
TECHNICAL EDUCATION OF THE MASSES.
Some of my friends courteously but firmly have insisted with me that I
have greatly exaggerated the technical abilities of the village
workmen of the Middle Ages. That every town of less than ten thousand
inhabitants in England was able to supply such workmen as we can
scarcely obtain in our cities of a million inhabitants, and in that
scanty population supply them in greater numbers than we can now
secure them from our teeming populations, seems to many simply
impossible.
What I have been trying to say, however, in the chapters on the Arts
and Crafts and on Popular Education, has been much better said by an
authority that will scarcely be questioned by my critics. The Rev.
Augustus Jessopp, D. D., who has been for twenty years the Rector of
Searning in England, who is an Honorary Fellow of St. John's College
and of Worcester College, Oxford, besides being an Honorary Canon in
the Cathedral of Norwich, has devoted much time and study to this
question of how the cathedrals were built and finished. Twenty years
of his life have been spent in the study of the old English parish and
of parish life. He has studied the old parish registers, and talks,
therefore, not from distant impressions, but from the actual facts as
they are recorded. If to his position as an antiquarian authority I
add the fact that he is not a member of the Roman Catholic Church, to
the credit of which so much of this popular education and
accomplishment in the arts and crafts of the century accrues, the
value of his evidence is placed entirely above suspicion of partisan
partiality. In his chapter on Parish Life in England, in his book
"Before the Great Pillage" (Before the Great Pillage with other
Miscellanies, by Augustus Jessopp, D. D., London. T. Fisher Unwin,
Paternoster Square, 1901), he says:
"The evidence is abundant and positive, and is increasing upon us
year by year, that the work done upon the fabrics of our churches,
and the other work done in the beautifying of the interior of our
churches, such as the woodcarving of our screens, the painting of
the lovely {470} figures in the panels of those screens, the
embroidery of the banners and vestments, the frescoes on the walls,
the engraving of the monumental brasses, the stained glass in the
windows, and all that vast aggregate of artistic achievements which
existed in immense profusion in our village churches till the
sixteenth century stripped them bare--all this was executed by local
craftsmen. The evidence for this is accumulating upon us every year,
as one antiquary after another succeeds in unearthing fragments of
pre-Reformation church-wardens' accounts.
"We have actual contracts for church building and church repairing
undertaken by village contractors. We have the cost of a rood screen
paid to a village carpenter, of painting executed by local artists.
We find the name of an artificer, described as aurifaber, or worker
in gold and silver, living in a parish which could never have had
five hundred inhabitants; we find the people in another place
casting a new bell and making the mould for it themselves; we find
the blacksmith of another place forging the iron work for the church
door, or we get a payment entered for the carving of the bench ends
in a little church five hundred years ago, which bench ends are to
be seen in that church at the present moment. And we get fairly
bewildered by the astonishing wealth of skill and artistic taste and
aesthetic feeling which there must have been in this England of
ours, in times which till lately we had assumed to be barbaric
times. Bewildered, I say, because we cannot understand how it all
came to a dead-stop in a single generation, not knowing that the
frightful spoliation of our churches and other parish buildings, and
the outrageous plunder of the parish gilds in the reign of Edward
the Sixth by the horrible band of robbers that carried on their
detestable work, effected such a hideous obliteration, such a clean
sweep of the precious treasures that were dispersed in rich
profusion over the whole land, that a dull despair of ever replacing
what had been ruthlessly pillaged crushed the spirit of the whole
nation, and art died out in rural England, and King Whitewash and
Queen Ugliness ruled supreme for centuries."
My argument is that a century which produced such artist-artisans
everywhere, had technical schools in great profusion, though they may
not have been called by any such ambitious name.
HOW IT ALL STOPPED.
To most people it seems impossible to understand how it is that, if
artistic evolution proceeded to the perfection which it now seems
clear that it actually attained in the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries, we are only just getting back to a proper state of public
taste and a right degree of artistic skill in many of these same
accomplishments at the present time. That thought has come to many
others who, knowing and appreciating medieval progress in art and
literature, have tried to work out the reasons for the gap that exists
between medieval art and modern artistic endeavor. Some of these
explanations, because they serve to make clear why art evolution
stopped so abruptly and we are retracing our steps and taking models
from the past rather than doing original work that is an advance, must
be quoted here. Many people will find in them, I think, the reasons
for their misunderstanding of the old times.
{471}
Gerhardt Hauptmann, who is very well known, even among
English-speaking people, as one of the great living German dramatists,
and whose "Sunken Bell" attracted considerable attention in both its
German and English versions here in New York, in a recent criticism of
a new German book, declared that the reason for the gap between modern
and medieval art was the movement now coming to be known as the
religious revolt in Germany in the sixteenth century. He said:
"I, as a Protestant, have often had to regret that we purchased our
freedom of conscience, our individual liberty, at entirely too high
a price. In order to make room for a small, mean little plant of
personal life, we destroyed a whole garden of fancy and hewed down a
virgin forest of aesthetic ideas. We went even so far in the
insanity of our weakness as to throw out of the garden of our souls
the fruitful soil that had been accumulating for thousands of years,
or else we plowed it under sterile clay.
"We have to-day, then, an intellectual culture that is well
protected by a hedge of our personality, but within this hedge we
have only delicate dwarf trees and unworthy plants, the poorer
progeny of great predecessors. We have telegraph lines, bridges and
railroads, but there grow no churches and cathedrals, only sentry
boxes and barracks. We need gardeners who will cause the present
sterilizing process of the soil to stop, and will enrich the surface
by working up into it the rich layers beneath. In my work-room there
is ever before me the photograph of Sebaldus' Tomb (model
Metropolitan Museum, New York). This rich German symbol rose from
the invisible in the most luxuriant developmental period of German
art. As a formal product of that art, it is very difficult to
appreciate it as it deserves. It seems to me as one of the most
wonderful bits of work in the whole field of artistic
accomplishment. The soul of all the great medieval period encircles
this silver coffin, wrapping it up into a noble unity, and enthrones
on the very summit of death. Life as a growing child. Such a work
could only have come to its perfection in the protected spaces of
the old Mother Church."
Rev. Dr. Jessopp, in his book, already cited, "The Great Pillage,"
does not hesitate to state in unmistakable terms the reason why all
the beauty and happiness went out of English country life some two
centuries after the Thirteenth Century, and how it came about that the
modern generations have had to begin over again from the beginning,
and not where our Catholic forefathers of the medieval period left us,
in what used to be the despised Middle Ages. He says:
"When I talk of the great pillage, I mean that horrible and
outrageous looting of our churches other than conventual, and the
robbing of the people of this country of property in land and
movables, which property had actually been inherited by them as
members of those organized religious communities known as parishes.
It is necessary to emphasize the fact that in the general scramble
of the Terror under Henry the Eighth, and of the Anarchy in the days
of Edward the Sixth, there was only one class that was permitted to
retain any large portion of its endowments. The monasteries were
plundered even to their very pots and pans. Almshouses in which old
men and women were fed and clothed were robbed to the last pound,
the poor alms-folk being turned out into the cold at an hour's
warning to beg their bread. {472} Hospitals for the sick and needy,
sometimes magnificently provided with nurses and chaplains, whose
very raison d'etre was that they were to look after and care for
those who were past caring for themselves--these were stripped of
all their belongings, the inmates sent out to hobble into some
convenient dry ditch to lie down and die in, or to crawl into some
barn or hovel, there to be tended, not without fear of consequences,
by some kindly man or woman who could not bear to see a suffering
fellow creature drop down and die at their own doorposts.
"We talk with a great deal of indignation of the Tweed ring. The day
will come when someone will write the story of two other rings--the
ring of the miscreants who robbed the monasteries in the reign of
Henry the Eighth was the first; but the ring of the robbers who
robbed the poor and helpless in the reign of Edward the Sixth was
ten times worse than the first.
"The Universities only just escaped the general confiscation; the
friendly societies and benefit clubs and the gilds did not escape.
The accumulated wealth of centuries, their houses and lands, their
money, their vessels of silver and their vessels of gold, their
ancient cups and goblets and salvers, even to their very chairs and
tables, were all set down in inventories and catalogues, and all
swept into the great robbers' hoard. Last, but not least, the
immense treasures in the churches, the joy and boast of every man
and woman and child in England, who day by day and week by week
assembled to worship in the old houses of God which they and their
fathers had built, and whose every vestment and chalice and
candlestick and banner, organs and bells, and picture and image and
altar and shrine they looked upon as their own and part of their
birthright--all these were torn away by the rudest spoilers, carted
off, they knew not whither, with jeers and scoffs and ribald
shoutings, while none dared raise a hand or let his voice be heard
above the whisper of a prayer of bitter grief and agony.
"One class was spared. The clergy of this Church of England of ours
managed to retain some of their endowments; but if the boy king had
lived another three years, there is good reason for believing that
these too would have gone."
Graft prevailed, and the old order disappeared in a slough of
selfishness.
COMFORT AND POVERTY.
A number of friendly critics have insisted that _of course_ the
Thirteenth Century was far behind later times in the comfort of the
people. Poverty is supposed to have been almost universal. Doubtless
many of the people were then very poor. Personally, I doubt if there
was as much poverty, that is, misery due to actual want of necessaries
of life, as there is at the present time. Certainly it was not
emphasized by having close to it, constantly rendering the pains of
poverty poignant by contrast, the luxury of the modern time. They had
not the large city, and people in the country do not suffer as much as
people in the city. In recent years, investigations of poverty in
England have been appalling in the statistics that they have
presented. Mr. Robert Hunter, in his book Poverty, has furnished us
with some details that make one feel that our generation should be the
last to say {473} that the Thirteenth Century was behind in progress,
because so many of the people were so poor. Ruskin once said that the
ideal of the great nation is one wherein there must be "as many as
possible full-breathed, bright-eyed and happy-hearted human
creatures." I am sure that, tried by this standard, the Thirteenth
Century in Merrie England is ahead of any other generation and, above
all, far in advance of our recent generations.
By contrast to what we know of the merrie English men and women of the
Thirteenth Century, I would quote Mr. Hunter's paragraphs on the
Poverty of the Modern English People. He says:
"A few years ago, England did not know the extent of her own
poverty. Economists and writers gave opinions of all kinds. Some
said conditions were 'bad,' others said such statements were
misleading; and here they were, tilting at each other, backward and
forward, in the most ponderous and serious way, until Mr. Booth, a
business man, undertook to get at the facts. _No one, even the most
radical economist, would have dared to have estimated the poverty of
London as extending to 30 per cent of the people_ (as it proved).
The extent of poverty--the number of underfed, underclothed in
insanitary houses--was greater than could reasonably have been
estimated."
Some of the details of this investigation by Mr. Booth were so
startling that some explanation had to be found. They could not deny,
in the face of Mr. Booth's facts, but they set up the claim that the
conditions in London were exceptional. Then Mr. Rountree made an
investigation in York with precisely the same results. More than one
in four of the population was in poverty. To quote Mr. Hunter once
more:
"As has been said, it was not until Mr. Charles Booth published, in
1891, the results of his exhaustive inquiries that the actual
conditions of poverty in London became known. About 1,000,000
people, or about thirty per cent of the entire population of London,
were found to be unable to obtain the necessaries for a sound
livelihood. They were in a state of poverty, living in conditions,
if not of actual misery, at any rate bordering upon it. In many
districts, considerably more than half of the population were either
in distress or on the verge of distress. When these results were
made public, the more conservative economists gave it as their
opinion that the conditions in London were, of course, exceptional,
and that it would be unsafe to make any generalizations for the
whole of England on the basis of Mr. Booth's figures for London.
About ten years later, Mr. B. S. Rountree, incited by the work of
Mr. Booth, undertook a similar inquiry in his native town, York, a
small provincial city, in most ways typical of the smaller towns of
England. In a large volume in which the results are published, it is
shown that the poverty in York was only slightly less extensive than
that of London. In the summary, Mr. Rountree compares the conditions
of London with those of York. His comments are as follows: 'The
proportions arrived at for the total populations living in poverty
in London and York respectively were as under:
London--30.7 per cent
York--27.84 per cent
{474}
The proportion of the population living in poverty in York may be
regarded as practically the same as in London, especially when we
remember that Mr. Booth's information was gathered in 1887-1892, a
period of only average trade prosperity, whilst the York figures were
collected in 1899, when trade was unusually prosperous.'"
He continues: "We have been accustomed to look upon the poverty in
London as exceptional, but when the result of careful investigation
shows that the proportion of poverty in London is practically equalled
in what may be regarded as a typical provincial town, we are faced by
the startling probability that from 25 to 30 per cent of the town
populations of the United Kingdom are living in poverty."
Most of us will be inclined to think that Mr. Rountree must
exaggerate, and what he calls poverty most of us would doubtless be
inclined to think a modest competency a little below respectability.
He fixed the standard of twenty-one shillings eight pence ($5.25) a
week as a necessary one for a family of ordinary size. He says:
"A family living upon the scale allowed for in this estimate, must
never spend a penny on railway fare or omnibus. They must never go
into the country unless they walk. They must never purchase a
half-penny newspaper or spend a penny to buy a ticket for a popular
concert. They must write no letters to absent children, for they
cannot afford to pay the postage. They must never contribute
anything to their church or chapel, nor give any help to a neighbor
which costs them money. They cannot save, nor can they join sick
club or trade union, because they cannot pay the necessary
subscription. The children must have no pocket money for dolls,
marbles or sweets. The father must smoke no tobacco nor drink no
beer. The mother must never buy any pretty clothes for herself or
for her children, the character for the family wardrobe, as for the
family diet, being governed by the regulation, 'Nothing must be
bought but that which is absolutely necessary for the maintenance of
physical health, and that which is bought must be of the plainest
and most economical description.' Should a child fall ill, it must
be attended by the family parish doctor; should it die, it must be
buried by the parish. Finally, the wage-earner must never be absent
from his work for a single day."
_More than one in four of the population living below this scale!_
Conditions are, if anything, worse on the Continent. In Germany,
industry is at the best. Conditions in Berlin have been recently
reported in the Daily Consular Reports by a U. S. Government official.
Of the somewhat more than two millions of people who live in Berlin,
1,125,000 have an income. Nearly one-half of the incomes, however, are
exempt from taxation because they do not amount to the minimum taxable
income, though that is only $214--$4 per week. Of the 600,000 who have
taxable incomes, nearly 550,000 have less than $700 a year; that is,
get about $2 a day or less. Less than sixty thousand out of the total
population get more than $2 a day. It is easy to say, but hard to
understand, that this is a living wage, because things are cheaper in
Germany. Meat is, however, nearly twice as dear; sugar is twice as
dear; bread is dearer than it is in this country; coffee is dearer;
and only rent is somewhat cheaper.
{475}
It is easy to talk about the spread of comfort among the people of our
generation and the raising of the standard of living, but if one
compares these wages with the price of things as they are now, it is
hard to understand on just what basis of fact the claim for betterment
in our time, meaning more general comfort and happiness, is made.
People always refuse to believe that conditions are as bad as they
really are in these matters. Americans will at once have the feeling,
on reading Mr. Hunter and Mr. Rountree's words and the account of the
American Consul at Berlin, that this may be true for England and
Germany, but that of course it is very different here in America. It
is extremely doubtful whether it is very different here in America. In
this matter, Mr. Hunter's opinion deserves weight. He has for years
devoted himself to gathering information with regard to this subject.
He seems to be sure that one in seven of our population is in poverty.
Probably the number is higher than this. Here is his opinion:
"How many people in the country are in poverty? Is the number yearly
growing larger? Are there each year more and more of the unskilled
classes pursuing hopelessly the elusive phantom of self-support and
independence? Are they, as in a dream, working faster, only the more
swiftly to move backward? Are there each year more and more hungry
children and more and more fathers whose utmost effort may not bring
into the home as much energy in food as it takes out in industry?
These are not fanciful questions, nor are they sentimental ones. I
have not the slightest doubt that there are in the United States ten
million persons in precisely these conditions of poverty, but I am
largely guessing, and there may be as many as fifteen or twenty
millions!"
Perhaps Mr. Hunter exaggerates. As a physician, I should be inclined
to think not; but certainly his words and, above all, the English
statistics will give any one pause who is sure, on general principles,
that the great mass of the people are happier now or more comfortable,
above all, in mind--the only real happiness--than they were in the
Thirteenth Century. After due consideration of this kind, no one will
insist on the comparative misery and suffering of the poor in old
times. England had less than 3,000,000 in the Thirteenth Century, and
probably there was never a time in her history when a greater majority
of her people fulfilled Ruskin's and Morris' ideals of happy-hearted
human beings. The two-handed worker got at least what the four-footed
worker, in Carlyle's words, has always obtained, due food and lodging.
England was not "a nation with sleek, well-fed English horses, and
hungry, dissatisfied Englishmen."
COMFORT AND HAPPINESS.
There is another side to the question of comparative happiness that
may be stated in the words of William Morris, when he says, in "Hopes
and Fears for Art," that a Greek or a Roman of the luxurious time (and
of course _a fortiori_ a medieval of the Thirteenth Century) would
{476} stare astonished could he be brought back again and shown the
comforts of a well-to-do middle-class house. This expression is often
re-echoed, and one is prone to wonder how many of those who use it
realize that it is a quotation, and, above all, appreciate the fact
that Morris made the statement in order to rebut it. His answer is in
certain ways so complete that it deserves to be quoted.
"When you hear of the luxuries of the Ancients, you must remember
that they were not like our luxuries, they were rather indulgence in
pieces of extravagant folly than what we to-day call luxury--which,
perhaps, you would rather call comfort; well, I accept the word, and
say that a Greek or a Roman of the luxurious time would stare
astonished could he be brought back again and shown the comforts of
a well-to-do middle-class house.
"But some, I know, think that the attainment of these very comforts
is what makes the difference between civilization and
uncivilization--that they are the essence of civilization. Is it so
indeed? Farewell my hope then! I had thought that civilization meant
the attainment of peace and order and freedom, of good-will between
man and man, of the love of truth and the hatred of injustice, and
by consequence the attainment of the good life which these things
breed, a life free from craven fear, but full of incident; that was
what I thought it meant, not more stuffed chairs and more cushions,
and more carpets and gas, and more dainty meat and drink--and
therewithal more and sharper differences between class and class.
"If that be what it is, I for my part wish I were well out of it and
living in a tent in the Persian desert, or a turf hut on the Iceland
hillside. But, however it be, and I think my view is the true view,
I tell you that art abhors that side of civilization; she cannot
breath in the houses that lie under its stuffy slavery.
"Believe me, if we want art to begin at home, as it must, we must
clear our houses of troublesome superfluities that are forever in
our way, conventional comforts that are no real comforts, and do but
make work for servants and doctors. If you want a golden rule that
will fit everybody, this is it: 'Have nothing in your houses that
you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.'"
COMFORT AND HEALTH.
A comment on William Morris's significant paragraphs may be summed up
in some reflections on the scornful expression of a friend who asked,
how is it possible to talk of happiness at a time when there were no
glass in windows and no heating apparatus except the open fireplace in
the great hall of the larger houses, or in the kitchen of the dwelling
houses. To this there is the ready answer that, in the modern time, we
have gone so far to the opposite extreme as to work serious harm to
health. When a city dweller develops tuberculosis, his physician now
sends him out to the mountains, asks him to sleep with his window wide
open, and requires him to spend just as much of his time as possible
in the open air, even with the temperature below zero. In our
hospitals, the fad for making patients comfortable by artificial heat
is passing, and that of stimulating them by cold, fresh air is gaining
ground. We know that, for all the fevers and all the respiratory {477}
diseases this brings about a notable reduction in the mortality.
Surely, what is good for the ailing must be even better to keep them
well from disease. Many a physician now arranges to sleep out of doors
all winter. Certainly all the respiratory diseases are rendered much
more fatal and modern liability to them greatly increased by our
shut-up houses. The medieval people were less comfortable, from a
sensual standpoint, but the healthy glow and reaction after cold
probably made them enjoy life better than we do in our steam-heated
houses. They secured bodily warmth by an active circulation of their
blood. We secure it by the circulation of hot water or steam in our
houses. Ours may be the better way, but the question is not yet
absolutely decided. A physician friend points to the great reduction
in the death-rate in modern times, and insists that this, of course,
means definite progress. Even this is not quite so sure as is often
thought. We are saving a great many lives that heretofore, in the
course of nature, under conditions requiring a more vigorous life,
passed out of existence early. It is doubtful, however, whether this
is an advantage for the race, since our insane asylums, our hospitals
for incurables and our homes of various kinds now have inmates in much
greater proportion to the population than ever before in history.
These are mainly individuals of lower resistive vitality, who would
have been allowed to get out of existence early, save themselves and
their friends from useless suffering, and whose presence in life does
not add greatly if at all to the possibilities of human
accomplishment. Our reduced death-rate is, because of comfort seeking,
more than counterbalanced by a reduced birth-rate, so that no
advantage is reaped for the race in the end. These reflections, of
course, are only meant to suggest how important it is to view such
questions from all sides before being sure that they represent
definite progress for humanity. Progress is much more elusive than is
ordinarily thought, and is never the simple, unmistakable movement of
advance it is often thought.
HYGIENE.
The objection that medical friends have had to the claims of The
Thirteenth as the Greatest of Centuries is that it failed to pay any
attention to hygiene. Here, once more, we have a presumption that is
not founded on real knowledge of the time. It is rather easy to show
that these generations were anticipating many of our solutions of
hygienic problems quite as well as our solutions of other social and
intellectual difficulties. In the sketch of Pope John XXI., the
physician who became Pope during the second half of the Thirteenth
Century, which was published in Ophthalmology, a quarterly review of
eye diseases (Jan., 1909), because Pope John wrote a little book on
this subject which has many valuable anticipations of modern
knowledge, I called attention to the fact that, while a physician and
professor of {478} medicine at the medical school of the University of
Sienna, this Pope, then known as Peter of Spain, had made some
contributions to sanitary science. Later he was appointed Archiater,
that is, Physician in charge of the City of Rome. As pointed out in
the sketch of him as enlarged for the volume containing a second
series of Catholic Churchmen in Science (The Dolphin Press, Phila.,
1909), he seems to have been particularly interested in popular
health, for we have a little book, Thesaurus Pauperum--The Treasure of
the Poor--which contains many directions for the maintenance of health
and the treatment of disease by those who are too poor to secure
physicians' advice. The fact that the head of the Bureau of Health in
Rome should have been made Pope in the Thirteenth Century, itself
speaks volumes for the awakening of the educated classes at least to
the value of hygiene and sanitation.
Their attention to hygiene can be best shown by a consideration of the
hospitals. Ordinarily it is assumed that the hospitals provided a roof
for the sick and the injured, but scarcely more. Most physicians will
probably be quite sure that they were rather hot-beds of disease than
real blessings to the ailing. That is not what we find when we study
them carefully. These generations gave us a precious lesson by
eradicating leprosy, which was quite as general as tuberculosis is
now, and they made special hospitals for erysipelas, which materially
lessened the diffusion of that disease. In rewriting the chapter on
The Foundation of City Hospitals for my book, The Popes and Science
(Fordham University Press, N. Y., 1908), I incorporated into it a
description of the hospital erected at Tanierre, in France, in 1293,
by Marguerite of Bourgogne, the sister of St. Louis. Of this hospital
Mr. Arthur Dillon, from the standpoint of the modern architect, says:
"It was an admirable hospital in every way, and it is doubtful if we
to-day surpass it. It was isolated, the ward was separated from the
other buildings; it had the advantage we often lose, of being but
one story high, and more space was given to each patient than we now
afford.
"The ventilation by the great windows and ventilators in the ceiling
was excellent; it was cheerfully lighted, and the arrangement of the
gallery shielded the patients from dazzling light and from draughts
from the windows, and afforded an easy means of supervision, while
the division by the roofless, low partitions isolated the sick and
obviated the depression that comes from the sight of others in pain.
"It was, moreover, in great contrast to the cheerless white wards of
to-day. The vaulted ceiling was very beautiful; the woodwork was
richly carved, and the great windows over the altars were filled
with colored glass. Altogether, it was one of the best examples of
the best period of Gothic architecture."
In their individual Hygiene there was, of course, much to be desired
among the people of the Thirteenth Century, and it has been declared
that the history of Europe from the fifth to the fifteenth century
might, from the hygienic standpoint, he summed up as a thousand years
without a bath. The more we know about this period, however, the less
of {479} point do we find in the epigram. Mr. Cram, in the Ruined
Abbeys of Great Britain (Pott & Co., N. Y., 1907), has described
wonderful arrangements within the monasteries (!) for the conduction
of water from long distances for all toilet purposes. There was much
more attention to sanitary details than we have been prone to think.
Mr. Cram, in describing what was by no means one of the greatest of
the English abbeys of the Thirteenth Century, says:
"Here at Beaulieu the water was brought by an underground conduit
from an unfailing spring a mile away, and this served for drinking,
washing and bathing, the supply of the fish ponds, and for a
constant flushing of the elaborate system of drainage. In sanitary
matters, the monks were as far in advance of the rest of society as
they were in learning and agriculture."
WAGES AND THE CONDITION OP WORKING PEOPLE.
What every reader of the Thirteenth Century seems to be perfectly sure
of is that, whatever else there may have been in this precious time,
at least the workmen were not well paid and men worked practically for
nothing. It is confessed that, of course, working as they did on their
cathedrals, they had a right to work for very little if they wished,
but at least there has been a decided step upward in evolution in the
gradual raising of wages, until at last the workman is beginning to be
paid some adequate compensation. There is probably no phase of the
life of the Middle Ages with regard to which people are more mistaken
than this supposition that the workmen of this early time were paid
inadequately. I have already called attention to the fact that the
workmen of this period claimed and obtained "the three eights"--eight
hours of work, eight hours of sleep and eight hours for recreation and
bodily necessities. They obtained the Saturday half-holiday, and also
release from work on the vigils of all feast days, and there were
nearly forty of these in the year. After the vesper hour, that is,
three in Summer and two in Winter, there was no work on the Eves of
Holy-days of Obligation. With regard to wages, there is just one way
to get at the subject, and that is, to present the legal table of
wages enacted by Parliament, placing beside it the legal maximum price
of necessities of life, as also determined by Parliamentary enactment.
An Act of Edward III. fixes the wages, without food, as follows. There
are many other things mentioned, but the following will be enough for
our purpose:
[Price in Shillings and Pence; s. d.] s. d.
A woman hay-making, or weeding corn for the day--0 1
A man filling dung-cart--0 3-1/2
A reaper--0 4
Mowing an acre of grass--0 4
Threshing a quarter of wheat--0 4
{480}
The price of shoes, cloth and provisions, throughout the time that
this law continued in force, was as follows:
[Price in Pounds, Shillings and Pence; s. d.] £. s. d.
A pair of shoes--0 0 4
Russet broadcloth, the yard--0 1 1
A stall fed ox--1 4 0
A grass fed ox--0 16 0
A fat sheep unshorn--0 1 8
A fat sheep shorn--0 1 2
A fat hog two years old--0 3 4
A fat goose--0 0 2-1/2.
Ale, the gallon, by proclamation--0 0 1
Wheat, the quarter--0 3 4
White wine, the gallon--0 0 6
Red wine--0 0 4
An Act of Parliament of the fourteenth century, in fixing the price of
meat, names the four sorts of meat--beef, pork, mutton and veal, and
sets forth in its preamble the words, "these being the food of the
poorer sort." The poor in England do not eat these kinds of meat now,
and the investigators of the poverty of the country declare that most
of the poor live almost exclusively on bread. The fact of the matter
is, that large city populations are likely to harbor many very
miserable people, while the rural population of England in the Middle
Ages, containing the bulk of the people, were happy-hearted and merry.
When we recall this in connection with what I have given in the text
with regard to the trades-unions and their care for the people, the
foolish notion, founded on a mere assumption and due to that
Aristophanic joke, our complacent self-sufficiency, which makes us so
ready to believe that our generation _must_ be better off than others
were, vanishes completely.
It is easy to understand that beef, pork, mutton, veal and even
poultry were the food of the poor, when a workman could earn the price
of a sheep in less than four days or buy nearly two fat geese for his
day's wages. A day laborer will work from forty to fifty days now to
earn the price of an ox on the hoof, and it was about the same at the
close of the Thirteenth Century. When a fat hog costs less than a
dollar, a man's wages, at eight cents a day, are not too low. When a
gallon of good ale can be obtained for two cents, no workman is likely
to go dry. When a gallon of red wine can be obtained for a day's
wages, it is hard to see any difference between a workman of the olden
time and the present in this regard. Two yards of cloth made a coat
for a gentleman and cost only a little over two shillings. The making
of it brought the price of it up to two shilling and six pence. These
prices are taken from the Preciosum of Bishop Fleetwood, who took them
from the accounts kept by the bursars of convents. Fleetwood's book is
accepted very generally as an excellent authority in the history of
economics.
{481}
Cobbett, in his History of the Protestant Reformation, has made an
exhaustive study of just this question of the material and economic
condition of the people of England before and since the reformation.
He says:
"These things prove, beyond all dispute, that England was, in
Catholic times, a real wealthy country; that wealth was generally
diffused; that every part of the country abounded in men of solid
property; and that, of course, there were always great resources at
hand in cases of emergency." ... "In short, everything shows that
England was then a country abounding in men of real wealth."
Fortesque, the Lord High Chancellor of England under Henry VI., king a
century after the Thirteenth, has this to say with regard to the legal
and economic conditions in England in his time. Some people may think
the picture he gives an exaggeration, but it was written by a great
lawyer with the definite idea of giving a picture of the times, and,
under ordinary circumstances, we would say that there could be no
better authority.
"The King of England cannot alter the laws, or make new ones,
without the express consent of the whole kingdom in Parliament
assembled. Every inhabitant is at his liberty fully to use and enjoy
whatever his farm produceth, the fruits of the earth, the increase
of his flock and the like--all the improvements he makes, whether by
his own proper industry or of those he retains in his service, are
his own, to use and enjoy, without the let, interruption or denial
of any. If he be in any wise injured or oppressed, he shall have his
amends and satisfactions against the party offending. Hence it is
that the inhabitants are rich in gold, silver, and in all the
necessaries and conveniences of life. They drink no water unless at
certain times, upon a religious score, and by way of doing penance.
They are fed in great abundance, with all sorts of flesh and fish,
of which they have plenty everywhere; they are clothed throughout in
good woollens, their bedding and other furniture in the house are of
wool, and that in great store. They are also well provided with all
sorts of household goods and necessary implements for husbandry.
Every one, according to his rank, hath all things which conduce to
make mind and life easy and happy."
INTEREST AND LOANS.
A number of commercial friends have been interested in the wonderful
story of business organizations traced in the chapter on Great
Beginnings of Modern Commerce. They have all been sure, however, that
it is quite idle to talk of great commercial possibilities at a time
when ecclesiastical regulations forbade the taking of interest. This
would seem to make it quite impossible that great commercial
transactions could be carried on, yet somehow these people succeeded
in accomplishing them. A number of writers on economics in recent
years have suggested that possibly one solution of the danger to
government and popular rights from the accumulation of large fortunes
might be avoided by a return to the system of prohibition of interest
taking. There is {482} much more in that proposition than might
possibly be thought by those who are unfamiliar with it from serious
consideration. They did succeed in getting on without it in the
Thirteenth Century, and at the same time they solved the other problem
of providing loans, not alone for business people, but for all those
who might need them. We are solving the "loan shark" evil at the
present time in nearly the same way that they solved it seven
centuries ago. Abbot Gasquet, in his "Parish Life in England Before
the Reformation," describes the methods of the early days as follows:
"The parish wardens had their duties towards the poorer members of
the district. In more than one instance they were guardians of the
common chest, out of which temporary loans could be obtained by
needy parishioners, to tide over persons in difficulties. These
loans were secured by pledges and the additional security of other
parishioners. No interest was charged for the use of the money, and
in case the pledge had to be sold, everything over and above the sum
lent was returned to the borrower."
THE EIGHTEENTH
LOWEST OF CENTURIES.
There is no doubt that the nineteenth century, and especially the
latter half of it, saw some very satisfactory progress over
immediately preceding times. With the recognition of this fact, that
the last century so far surpassed its predecessor there has been a
tendency to assume, because evolution occupies men's minds, that the
eighteenth must have quite as far surpassed the seventeenth, and the
seventeenth the sixteenth, and so on, so that of course we are far
ahead in everything of the despised Middle Ages. In recent years,
indeed, we have dropped the attitude of blaming the earlier ages, for
one of complacent pity that they were not born soon enough, and,
therefore, could not enjoy our advantages. Unfortunately for any such
conclusion as this, the term of comparison nearest to us, the
eighteenth century is without doubt the lowest hundred years in human
accomplishment, at least during the past seven centuries.
This is true for every form of human endeavor and every phase of human
existence. Prof. Goodyear, of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and
Science, the well-known author of a series of books on art and
history, in one of the chapters of his Handbook on Renaissance and
Modern Art (New York, The McMillan Co.), in describing the Greek
revival of the latter part of the eighteenth century says: "According
to our accounts so far throughout this whole book, either of
architecture, painting, or sculpture, it will appear that the earlier
nineteenth century represents the foot of a hill, whose gradual
descent began about 1530." As a matter of fact, in every department of
artistic expression the taste of the eighteenth century was almost the
worst possible. The monuments that we have from that time, in the
shape of churches and municipal buildings, are few, but such as they
are, they are the least {483} worthy of imitation, and the art ideas
they represent are most to be deprecated of any in the whole history
of modern art.
Perhaps the most awful arraignment of the eighteenth and early
nineteenth century that was ever made is that of Mr. Cram, in the
Ruined Abbeys of Great Britain, from which I have already quoted. He
calls attention to the fact that, during this century, some of the
most beautiful sculptured work that ever came from the hand of man was
torn out of the ruins of St. Mary's Abbey, York, to serve no better
purpose than to make lime. His description of the sculpture of the
Abbey will give some idea of its beauty and render all the more
poignant the loss that was thus inflicted on art. He says:
"Most wonderful of all amongst a horde of smaller statues, a
mutilated fragment of a statue of Our Lady and the Holy Child, so
consummate in its faultless art that it deserves a place with the
masterpieces of sculpture of every age and race. Here in this dim
and scanty undercraft is an epitome of the English art of four
centuries, precious and beautiful beyond the power of words to
describe.
"York Abbey was a national monument, the aesthetic and historic
value of which was beyond computation. It is with feelings of horror
and unutterable dismay that, as we stand beside the few existing
fragments, realizing the irreparable loss they make so clear, we
call into mind Henry's sacrilege in the sixteenth century, and his
silly palace doomed to instant destruction, and the crass ignorance
and stolidity of the eighteenth century with its grants of building
material, and the mercenary savagery of the nineteenth century when,
from smoking lime kilns rose into the air the vanishing ghosts of
the noblest creations that owed their existence to man.
"Nothing is sadder to realize than the failure of appreciation for
art of the early nineteenth and the eighteenth century. Men had
lost, apparently, all proper realization of the value of artistic
effort and achievement. It was an era of travel and commerce and,
unfortunately, of industrial development. As a consequence, in many
parts of Europe, and especially of England, art remains of
inestimable value suffered at the hands of utilitarians who found
them of use in their enterprises. We are accustomed to rail against
the barbarians and the Turks for their failure to appreciate the
remains of Latin and Greek art and for their wanton destruction of
them, but what shall we say of modern Englishmen, who quite as
ruthlessly destroyed objects of art of equal value at least with
Roman and Greek, while the great body of the nation made no
complaint, and no protest was heard anywhere in the kingdom."
What is so true of the arts is, as might be reasonably expected, quite
as true of other phases of intellectual development. Education, for
instance, is at the lowest ebb that it has reached since the
foundation of the Universities at the end of the twelfth century. In
Germany, there was only one university, that of Göttingen, in which
there was a professorship of Greek. When Winckelmann introduced the
study of Greek into his school at Seehausen, no school-books for this
language were available, and he was obliged to write out texts for his
students. What was the case in Germany was also true, to a great {484}
degree, of the rest of Europe. Leading French critics ridiculed the
Greek authors. Homer was considered a ballad singer and compared to
the street singers of Paris. Voltaire thought that the AEneid of
Virgil was superior to all that the Greek writers had ever done. No
edition of Plato had been published in Europe since the end of the
sixteenth century. Other Greek authors were almost as much neglected,
and of true scholarship there was very little. When Cardinal Newman,
in his Idea of a University, wants to find the lowest possible term of
comparison for the intellectual life of the university, he takes the
English universities of the middle of the eighteenth century.
With this neglect of education, and above all of the influence that
Greek has always had in chastening and perfecting taste, it is not
surprising that literature was in every country of Europe at a very
low ebb. It was not so feeble as art, but the two are interdependent,
much more than is usually thought. Only France has anything to show in
literature that has had an enduring influence in the subsequent
centuries. When we compare the French literature of the eighteenth
with that of the seventeenth century, however, it is easy to see how
much of a descent there has been from Corneille, Racine, Moliêre,
Boileau, La Fontaine, Bossuet, Bourdaloue, and Fénelon to Voltaire,
Marivaux, Lesage, Diderot, and Bernardin de St. Pierre. This same
decadence of literature can be noted even more strikingly in England,
in Spain, and in Italy. The seventeenth, especially the first half of
it, saw the origin of some of the greatest works of modern literature.
The eighteenth century produced practically nothing that was to live
and be a vital force in aftertimes.
What is true in art, letters and education is, above all, true in what
men did for liberty and for their fellow-men. Hospital organization
and the care of the ailing was at its lowest ebb during the eighteenth
century. Jacobson, the German historian of the hospitals, says:
[Footnote 36]
[Footnote 36: Beiträge zur Geschichte des Krankencomforts.
Deutsche Krankenpflege Zeitung, 1898, in 4 parts.]
"It is a remarkable fact that attention to the well-being of the
sick, improvements in hospitals and institutions generally and to
details of nursing care, had a period of complete and lasting
stagnation after the middle of the seventeenth century, or from the
close of the Thirty Years' War. Neither officials nor physicians
took any interest in the elevation of nursing or improving the
conditions of hospitals. During the first two-thirds of the
eighteenth century, nothing was done to bring either construction or
nursing to a better state. Solely among the religious orders did
nursing remain an interest, and some remnants of technique survive.
The result was that, in this period, the general level of nursing
fell far below that of earlier periods. The hospitals of cities were
like prisons, with bare, undecorated walls and little dark rooms,
small windows where no sun could enter, and dismal wards where fifty
or one hundred patients were crowded together, deprived of all
comforts and even of necessaries. In the municipal and state
institutions of this period, the beautiful gardens, roomy halls, and
{485} springs of water of the old cloister hospital of the Middle
Ages were not heard of, still less the comforts of their friendly
interiors."
As might be expected, with the hospitals so badly organized, the art
of nursing was in a decay that is almost unutterable. Miss Nutting, of
Johns Hopkins Hospital, the Superintendent of Nurses, and Miss Dock,
the Secretary of the International Council of Nurses, have in their
History of Nursing a chapter on the Dark Period of Nursing, in which
the decadence of the eighteenth century, in what regards the training
of nurses for the intelligent care of the sick, is brought out very
clearly. They say: [Footnote 37]
[Footnote 37: A History of Nursing, by M. Adelaide Nutting and
Lavinia L. Dock, in two volumes, illustrated. G. P. Putnam's Sons,
New York, 1907.]
"It is commonly agreed that the darkest known period in the history
of nursing was that from the latter part of the seventeenth up to
the middle of the nineteenth century. During the time, the condition
of the nursing art, the well-being of the patient, and the status of
the nurse, all sank to an indescribable level of degradation."
Taine, in his History of the Old Regimé of France, has told the awful
story of the attitude of the so-called better classes toward the poor.
While conditions were at their worst in France, every country in
Europe saw something of the same thing. In certain parts of Germany
conditions were, if possible, worse. It is no wonder that the French
Revolution came at the end of the eighteenth century, and that a
series of further revolutions during the nineteenth century were
required to win back some of the rights which men had gained for
themselves in earlier centuries and then lost, sinking into a state of
decadence out of which we are only emerging, though in most countries
we have not reached quite the level of human liberty and, above all,
of Christian democracy that our forefathers had secured seven
centuries ago.
With these considerations in mind, it is easier to understand how men
in the later nineteenth century and beginning twentieth century are
prone to think of their periods as representing an acme in the course
of progress. There is no doubt that we are far above the eighteenth
century. That, however, was a deep valley in human accomplishment,
indeed, a veritable slough of despond, out of which we climbed; and,
looking back, are prone to think how fortunate we are in having
ascended so high, though beyond our vision on the other side of the
valley the hills rise much higher into the clouds of human aspiration
and artistic excellence than anything that we have attained as yet.
Indeed, whenever we try to do serious work at the present time, we
confessedly go back from four to seven centuries for the models that
we must follow. With Renaissance art and Gothic architecture and the
literature before the end of the sixteenth century cut out of our
purview, we would have nothing to look to for models. This phase of
history needs to be recalled by all those who would approach with
equanimity the consideration of The Thirteenth as the Greatest of
Centuries.
{486}
INDEX.
A.
Abbey schools, 26;
of St. Victor, 150
Aberration of light, 44
Abingdon, Edmund of, 327
Adam of St. Victor, 204
Age of Students, 25-63
Albertus Magnus, 46
Alchemies, 93
Alfonso the Wise, 2
Aliens' rights, 358
Allbutt, Prof., 83
Amiens, 105
Andrew II, Golden Bull, 369
Angel Choir, 13, 108
Angelo on Dante, 305
Anselm, 80
Antipodes, 50, 392
Ants in Dante, 314
Appreciation of art, 146
Aquinas, 38;
and Albertus, 271;
appreciation of, 283;
capacity for work, 286;
education, 270;
on Existence of God, 276;
on liberty and society, 279;
at Paris, 272;
as a poet, 287;
and Pope Leo XIII, 374;
on Resurrection, 278;
tributes to, 281
Arbitration, 382
Arena Padua, 144
Arezzo, 23
Arnaud, Daniel, 189
Arnaud de Marveil, 189
Arnold, Matthew, and Francis, 256
Art and the Friars, 139
Artemus Ward, 52
Arts and Crafts, 124
Arthur Legends, 10, 173
Arundel, Countess of, 320
Asbestos, 398
Ascoli, Cope, 14, 134
Assisi, 144
Assizes of Clarendon, 351;
of Jerusalem, 365
Avignon, 24
B.
Bacon, 41
Barbarossa, 1
Barbizon School, 145
Basil Valentine, 94
Bateson, Miss, 328
Beau Dieu, 13
Beautiful God, 105
Beauty and usefulness, 113
Beauvoisis, Statutes of, 365
Bell-making, 133
Beowulf, 180
Berrengaria, Queen, 320
Bernardo del Carpio, 170
Bernart de Ventadorn, 183
Bernard of Cluny, or Morlaix, 205
Bertrand de Born, 191
Bestiarium, 164
Bible study, 234, 252
Blanche of Castile, 289, 320;
as a mother, 326;
as a ruler, 326
Blessed work, 125
Boileau, Stephen, 365
Boniface VII and American Revolution, 374
Books, beautiful, 150;
bequests, 155;
collecting, 154, 157;
great stone, 115
Booklovers, 155
Book-learning, 129
Book of Arts, Deeds, Words, 5
Borgo Allegri, 141
Botany, 149
Bracton, 361
Bracton's digest, 15, 82
Bremen, 420
Brook farm, 264
C.
Cahors, 34
Calendar, 43
Calvi, College of, 26
Capital, English, created, 357
Canon law, codified, 370
Canticle of Sun, 258
Carlyle,
Minnesong, 183;
Nibelungen, 178
Case histories, 84
Casimir the Great, 369
Caspian not a gulf, 406
Castles and armories, 120
Catalogues of libraries, 151
Cathedral Symbolism, 118
Cavalcanti, 10
Celano, 197
Chalices, 113
Charity organizations, 27, 345
Chartres, glass, 14;
windows, 111
Chauliac, 92
Chemistry, 46;
not forbidden, 93
Chester cycle, 240, 242
Chrestien de Troyes, 175
Chronicles, 224
Cid, El, 9
Cimabue, 2, 12, 140
Cino da Pistoia, 10
Circulating libraries, 149
Clare, St., and St. Francis, 322
Clare, St., 320;
character, 321;
happiness, 322;
life, 320
Clarendon assizes, 351;
constitutions, 351
Clerics at the universities, 71
Cloisters, Lateran, 121;
St. Paul's, Rome, 121
Coal, 397
Code of Hammurabi, 3
Coeducation, 330
Colleges, Origin of, 29
Cologne, 420
Common Law, 361
Commentaries on Law, 371
Common pleas, 35
Comparative university attendance, 61
Compayré, 67
Complaints of books, 158
Composition of matter, 38
Condorcet, 34
Conrad of Kirchberg, 188
Conservation of energy, 39
Cope of Ascoli, 115
Corrections, Optical, 131
{487}
Cost of books, 156
Crusades and democracy, 389;
Greene, on, 389;
Storrs on, 388;
Stubbs on, 298
Curtain lectures, 331
D.
Dante da Maiano, 10
Dante and children, 313;
and Milton, 315;
and Virgil, 316;
education, 300;
in America, 311;
in England, 305;
in Germany, 309;
in Italy, 304;
not alone, 300;
power of observation, 313;
present estimation, 317;
sonnets, 302;
troubadour, 303;
universality, 301
Dante-Gesellschaft, 310
Dean Church's Dante, 306
Decay of Philosophy, 282
Declaration of Independence, Swiss, 377
Degrees, 36
De Maistre, 66
Democracy and the Crusades, 388;
guilds, 378
Denifle, 35
De Roo on pre-Columbian America, 400
Dialectics, 33
Dies Irae, Admirers of, 199;
supreme, 197
Dietmar von Eist, 186
Digest of common law, 361
Discipline at universities, 73;
and democracy, 76
Disease segregation, 343
Dissection not forbidden, 91
Dominicans and art, 139;
and books, 156
St. Dominic, 266;
and St. Francis, 267
Donatus, Deposition for ignorance of, 30
Drama and St. Francis, 238
Durandus, 117, 234
E.
Education, classes, 7;
masses, 8;
popular, 129;
of women, four periods, 331
Edward I, 2, 361
Edward VI and charity, 340;
education, 386
El Cid, 169;
battle scene, 170;
daughters' innocence, 172;
marriage, 171;
single author, 169
Emulation of workers, 125
Encyclopedia, 231
Enforcement of law, 366
English democracy, 378
Enterprise, commercial, 421
Epic poetry, 167
Equality of women, 324, 389
Erysipelas segregated, 344
Evelyn's diary, 131
Evolution and man, 3
Experiment, 44
Explosives, 42
Exultet, 207
F.
Fehmic Courts, 368
Felix of Valois, 347
Feminine education, 330;
four periods, 331
reasons for decline, 333
Ferguson, 97
Francis, St., great disciples, 263;
in drama, 239;
influence still, 266;
life, 259;
literary man, 255;
modern interest in, 261;
Ruskin on, 260;
second order, 265;
third order, 265;
troubadour, 255
Franciscans and Art, 139;
explorers, 394
Fraternal insurance, 382
Fraternity, initiations, 425
Frederick II, 2
Freedom, development of, 375
Free cities, 377;
schools, 385
Freemen's rights, 358
Friars, 267;
Green's tribute to, 268;
explorers, 409
Froude, 97;
on Reynard, 211
Furniture, 122
Finsen anticipated, 89
Five Sisters, York, 14, 110
Founder of Hospitals, 337
G.
Gaddi, 2, 142
Galsang Gombeyev, 402
Geography, 50
German Guild-hall, London, 421
Gerontius' dream, 308
Gild merchant, 383
Giotto, 2, 12, 142;
appreciation of, 145;
immense work, 146
Giotto's tower, 122
Gladstone and Richard de Bury, 160
Glosses, Law, 371
Goethe's Reynard, 213
Goerres, 255
Gohier, Urbain, 379
Golden Bull, 369
Golden Legend, 213
Goodyear, 131
Gothic, development, 102;
English, 100;
French, North German, 167;
Sculpture, 105-107;
Spanish, 100;
varieties, 12, 100, 167
Grail Legends, 174
Gratian, 81
Gray, 32
Green on Matthew Paris, 229
Greatness of an epoch, 6
Gregorian chant, 207
Grotesque in Dante, 309
Grounds of ignorance, 41
Guido de Montpelier, 338
Guido, 142
Guilds, 132;
and the drama, 136;
and democracy, 378;
Boston, 382;
London, 382;
number, 381;
rules, 38;
list of, 245
H.
Hamburg, 420
Hamilton, 34
Hammurabi, 4
Hansa Alamanniae, 422;
and Denmark, 419;
geese cackle, 419;
obscurity of origin, 416
Harper, 52
Hartman von Aue, 186
Hayton, 412
Healing by first intention, 85
Herodotus and Marco Polo, 396
History, so-called, 127, appendix
Hollandus, 94
{488}
Homer, 3
Hospitals, earliest, 337;
England, 339
Hotel Dieu, 339;
endowment, 339
Human life, value, 367
Human rights, 366
Humboldt on Dante, 311-315
Humboldt, 47
Humor in mystery plays, 241
Humphreys, 162
Huysmans, 120
Hymns often heard, 195;
and languages, 203;
seven greatest, 199
I.
Ignorance and servitude, 127
Illuminated books, 162
Indestructibility of matter, 39
International court, 424;
comity, 428;
fraternity, 391
Irnerius, 18, 81
Iron work, 114
J.
Jenghis Khan, 2
Jerusalem the Golden, 205
Jessopp, Rev. Augustus, 133
Job, 3
Jocelyn of Brakelond, 226;
and Boswell, 227;
selection, 227
John of Carpini, 400
John of Matha, 347
John of Monte Corvino, 410-412
Joinville and the poor, 297;
selection, 228
Journeymen, 135
Justinian, English, 363
K.
Kenilworth, 121
Kidney disease, 84
L.
Lafenestre, 138-144
Lamentations, 207
Lanfranc, 37, 83
Lancelot, 175
Lateran, Council of, 28
Laurie, 59, 63, 65, 76
Law, Canon, 370;
French, 364;
German, 368;
Glosses, 371;
Hungarian, 369;
Polish, 369;
Spanish, 15
Lea, Henry C, 60
League, Lombard, 417
Legenda Aurea, 213
Lending of books, 152
Lending of professors, 56
Leo XIII, 81
Lepers, Louis IX and, 297
Leprosy eradicated, 343
Lerida, 24
Lhasa entered, 410
Liberties and customs, 360;
English, 358;
Hungary and Poland, 369
Library of La Ste. Chapelle, 152;
circulating, 152, 165;
of Hotel Dieu, 153;
of the Sorbonne, 153
Lincoln, 96
Lingard, 61
Literature for women, 334
Lodge, Sir Oliver, 40
Longfellow, 209;
Dante, 311
Louis IX, 289;
books, 164;
charity, 296;
crusades, 298;
education, 291;
father, 290-294;
husband, 289;
justice, 293, 294;
law, 365;
monks, 295;
son, 289
Lowell on Dante, 311
Lübeck punished, 418;
laws, 422
Lully, 57
Lunar rainbows, 48
M.
Mabel Rich, 327
MacCarthy, 201
Magna Charta, 1, 350;
development of, 353;
excerpts, 352, et seq.
Malory, 175
Mandeville, 408
Manning on Dante, 308
Map or Mapes, Walter, 174-176
March on Latin Hymns, 195
Marco Millioni, 396
Maria di Novella, 331
Masterpieces, 135
Matter and form, 40;
constitution of, 40
Matthew Paris, 229;
Green's tribute, 229
Meaning of Cathedral, 118
Meistersingers, 10
Merchants' privileges, 359
Merrie England, 126
Metaphysical speculations, 33-37
Method of study, 53
Meyer, 49
Middle Ages, place of, 5
Middle class students, 72
Mill, 34
Millet, 145
Minnesingers, 10
Modern war correspondents anticipated, 225, 228
Mondino, 93
Money and privileges, 426
Money grabbers, 217
Monks, Idle, 414;
explorers, 413
Monroe, 55
Montalembert, monks, 414;
laws, 364
Montpelier, 23
Morley, Henry, 42, 157, 173, 244
Most read books. Ten, 209
Motor cars, 43
Music, Church, 206;
part, 207
Mutual Aid, 379
Mystery plays, players, 247, 250;
bible study, 251;
influence, 252
N.
Names, Medieval, 331
Nations, 76
Neale, 206
Needlework, 14
Nerve suture, 86
Newman's tribute to Dante, 306
New York Times Building, 123
Nibelungen, 177
Noah and wife, 242
Nolasco, Peter, 348
Notebook, The elegant, 54
Novgorod founded, 421
Numbers of students, 63, et seq
Nurses' habits, 345
O.
Odoric, 409
One thing a day, 54
Optics, 44
{489}
Optical corrections, 131
Opus Majus, 45
Organized charity, 381
Osler, 108, 323
Oxford, 22
P.
Padua, 23
Pagel, 90;
on Vincent of Beauvais, 233
Palencia, 24
Pange Lingua, 199
Papal Court and academy, 31
Parliament, First English, 14
Parzifal, 188
Peace Burgs, 420
Pennell, Elizabeth Robbins, 98
Peregrinus, 37-44
Perugia, 23
Petroleum, 397
Peyrols, 192
Philobiblon, 157
Philosophic writers, 222
Phosphorescence in Dante, 315
Physical geography, 47
Place of women, 319
Plain Chant, 207
Plumptre's Dante, 310
Polo, Marco, 396
Poor students, 72
Poor, Washing feet of, 297
Popes and Laws, 370
Pope Alexander IV, 31;
Boniface VIII, 2;
Gregory IX, 2, 30;
Honorius IV, 2, 30;
Innocent III, 2, 30, 337
Population of England, 61
Potamian, Brother, 37
Piacenza, 23
Practical knowledge, 41
Preparatory schools, 26
Pre-renaissance, 5, 254
Professors' publications, 79
Progress of liberty, 386
Q.
Queen Berengaria, 320
Queen Blanche of Castile, 320
R.
Ransom of prisoners, 347
Raymond of Pennafort, 348
Real Estate Law, 362
Redemption of captives, 348
Red-light therapy, 89
Religious order for erysipelas, 345;
for slaves, 347
Reinach, 103, 116, 128
Representative government, 372, 386
Renaissance, 5
Reynard the Fox, 210;
original, 212
Rheims, 105, 107
Rhenish cities, 420
Rhymed Latin, 104
Rhyme, origin, 199
Richard Coeur de Lion, 1
Richard de Bury, 157;
as a churchman, 161;
chaplains, 160;
charity, 161;
place in history, 159
Rich, Mabel, 327;
and her sons, 327
Robinson, Fr. Paschal, 257, 261
Rod in school, 185
Roland, 181
Romance of Rose, 215;
charge of dullness, 216;
poor happy, 219;
misers miserable, 218;
satire on money grabbers, 217
Rossetti on Dante, 317
Rubruquis, 403;
on customs, 408;
on languages, 405, 407
Rucellai Madonna, 141
Rudolph of Hapsburg, 2, appendix
Ruskin, 6, 123, 260, 309
Rusticiano, 399
S.
Sadness absent in Gothic art, 147
Saintsbury, 34, 36, 175, 180, 197, 223, 226
Saladin, 1
Salamanca, 24
Salamander, asbestos, 398
Salicet, 83
Salimbene, Friar, 403
Salisbury, 129
Saturday, half-holiday, 379
Schaff, 198, 205
Scholasticism and style, 223
Sculpture, Amiens, 13, 105;
Rheims, 105
St. Denis, 13
Settlement work, 325;
Seneca, 53
Siena, 23
Sigbart, 47
Simon de Montfort, 361
Social unrest, 124
Sorbonne, Robert, 53
Sordello, 10
St. Bonaventure, 2, 203;
Clare, 2, 320;
Dominic, 267;
Edmund, 72, 327;
Elizabeth, 320, 325;
Ferdinand, 15;
Hugh, 2, 96;
Thomas, 203
St. Gall, 69
St. John, Lateran, 121
St. Mary's Abbey, 121
St. Paul's, Rome, 121
St. Victor, Adam and Hugh of, 204
Stabat Mater, 200;
translations, 201
Stained Glass, 14;
Lincoln, 109;
York, 110
Stevenson, R. M., 99
Storrs on Crusades, 388
Stubbs on Crusades, 298
Students, Support of, 65
Studies, 33
Studium generale, 21
Symbolism, 117
Systematizing thought, 80
T.
Tarragona, 101
Tartars, Book of, 402
Tasso and Nibelungen, 179
Taste, Popular, 112
Tate, 52
Taxation and representation, 336;
no, without representation, 374
"The Three Eights," 379
Thibet, 410
Thomas, St., See Aquinas
Thule, 51
Toledo, 101
Toulouse, 24
Towns and cathedrals, 9
Trade facilities, 415
Travel, medieval, 394
Troubadours, 190
Trouvères, 10
Turner, 35, 145
Training intellect
{490}
U.
Ungreek, only thing, 99
Universitas, 21
University, Bologna, 19, 58;
foundation, 18;
Orleans, 19;
Oxford, 58;
Paris, 18, 58;
Salernum, 20;
roughness, 73
V.
Vehmgerichte, 368
Vercelli, 23
Vicenza, 23
Vienna Cathedral, 168
Vigilance committees, 368
Vigils, holidays, 379
Villehardouin, 224;
and Xenophon, 225
Vincent of Beauvais, 231;
and historical writers, 231;
methods, 232;
style, 233
Virchow and evolution, 3;
on hospitals, 338;
on Pope Innocent, 342
Vocation for women, 322
Vogelweide, 185
Voragine, Jacobus de, 213
W.
Wandering students, 57
Wanderjahre, 135
Water cure, 427
Wernher, 187
Whewell, 45
Widows, Magna Charta, 354
William of Rubruk, 403
William of Salicet, 83
William of St. Gregory, 192
Wolfram von Eschenbach, 187
Women, in hospitals, 328;
in literature, 335;
occupations, 329;
position, 334
Working students, 60
Wounds of neck, 86
X.
Xenophon, and Villehardouin, 225
Y.
Yeats, 113
Yule, Colonel, 401;
on Odoric, 411;
on Rubruquis, 407
Z.
Zimmern, Miss, on Hansa, 415;
on medieval initiations, 425
[End text; advertisements]
Books by Dr. Walsh
---------------------------
Dear Dr. Walsh:
I beg to thank you for your interesting letter enclosing syllabus
of Advent Lectures and circular of your latest work. The highest
value attaches to historical research on the lines you so ably indicate,
especially at the present time, when the enemies of Holy
Church are making renewed efforts to show her antagonism to
science and human progress generally. I shall have much pleasure
in perusing your work entitled "The Thirteenth Greatest of Centuries."
Wishing you every blessing, I am, Yours sincerely in Xt.,
Rome, January 18th, 1908. R. Card. MERRY DEL VAL.
----------------------
_Fordham University Press Series_
MAKERS OF MODERN MEDICINE
A series of Biographies of the men to whom we owe the important
advances in the development of modern medicine. By James J. Walsh,
M. D., Ph. D., LL.D., Dean and Professor of the History of Medicine
at Fordham University School of Medicine, N. Y. Third Edition, 1914,
442 pp. Price, $3.00 net.
_The London Lancet_ said: "The list is well chosen, and we
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excellent idea of who made our modern medicine."
_The Church Standard_ (Protestant Episcopal): "There is
perhaps no profession in which the lives of its leaders would make
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_The New York Medical Journal_: "We welcome works of this
kind; they are evidence of the growth of culture within the medical
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Perhaps the most striking thing is that everyone of the men
described was of the Catholic faith, and the dominant idea is that
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MAKERS OF ELECTRICITY
By Brother Potamian, F. S. C, Sc. D. (London), Professor of Physics
in Manhattan College, and James J. Walsh, M. D., Ph. D., Litt. D.,
Dean and Professor of the History of Medicine and of Nervous
Diseases at Fordham University School of Medicine, New York. Fordham
University Press, 110 West 74th Street. Illustrated Price, $2.50
net. Postage, 15 Cents Extra.
_The Scientific American_: "One will find in this book very
good sketches of the lives of the great pioneers in Electricity, with a
clear presentation of how it was that these men came to make their
fundamental experiments, and how we now reach conclusions in
Science that would have been impossible until their work of revealing
was done. The biographies are those of Peregrinus, Columbus,
Norman and Gilbert, Franklin and some contemporaries, Galvini,
Volta, Coulomb, Oersted, Ampere, Ohm, Faraday, Clerk Maxwell,
and Kelvin."
_The Boston Globe_: "The book is of surpassing interest."
_The New York Sun_: "The researches of Brother Potamian
among the pioneers in antiquity and the Middle Ages are perhaps
more interesting than Dr. Walsh's admirable summaries of the
accomplishment of the heroes of modern science. The book testifies
to the excellence of Catholic scholarship."
_The Evening Post_: "It is a matter of importance that the work
and lives of men like Gilbert, Franklin, Galvini, Volta, Ampere and
others should be made known to the students of Electricity, and this
office has been well fulfilled by the present authors. The book is no
mere compilation, but brings out many interesting and obscure facts,
especially about the earlier men."
_The Philadelphia Record_: "It is a glance at the whole field of
Electricity by men who are noted for the thoroughness of their
research, and it should be made accessible to every reader capable
of taking a serious interest in the wonderful phenomena of nature."
_Electrical World_: "Aside from the intrinsic interest of its
matter, the book is delightful to read owing to the graceful literary
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knowledge of the main principles upon which almost all present-day
electrical development is based. It is a shining example of how
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a scholarly treatise on the evolution of electrical science, and a
most refreshing change from the "Engineering English" of the
typical technical writer."
EDUCATION, HOW OLD THE NEW
A Series of Lectures and Addresses on Phases of Education in the
Past Which Anticipate Most of Our Modern Advances, by James J.
Walsh, M. D., Ph. D., Litt. D., K. C. St. G. Dean and Professor of
the History of Medicine and of Nervous Diseases at Fordham
University School of Medicine. Fordham University Press, 1910. 470
pp. Price, $2.50 net. Postage, 15 Cents Extra.
Cardinal Moran (Sydney, Australia): "I have to thank you for the
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admirable, just the sort of reading we want for English readers of the
present day."
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erudition."
_The North American_ (Phila.): "Wide historical research, clear
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_Detroit Free Press_: "Full of interesting facts and parallels drawn
from them that afford much material for reflection."
_Chicago Inter-Ocean_: "Incidentally it does away with a number of
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_Wilkes-Barre Record_: "The volume is most interesting and shows deep
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_Pittsburg Post_: "There is no bitterness of controversy and one of
the first things to strike the reader is that the dean of Fordham
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_The Wall Street News_ (N. Y.): "The book is calculated to cause a
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_Rochester Post Express_: "The book is well worth reading."
_The New Orleans Democrat_: "The book makes very interesting reading,
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OLD TIME MAKERS OF MEDICINE
The Story of the Medical Sciences during the Middle Ages. By James
J. Walsh, K. C. St, G., M. D., Ph. D. Dean and Professor of the
History of Medicine and of Nervous Diseases at Fordham University
School of Medicine. Fordham University Press, 1911. Price, $2.50
net. Postage, 15 cents.
What we now know of art, architecture, literature, the arts and crafts
in the Middle Ages has almost won for them the name of the Bright Ages
instead of the Dark Ages. There seems just one dark spot--the neglect
of science. This book removes that. It tells the story of medieval
medical education with higher standards than ours, of medieval surgery
with anaesthesia and antisepsis, with beautiful hospitals and fine
nursing, and of medieval dentistry with gold fillings and bridgework.
_The Lancet_ (London): "We have said enough to whet the appetite of
all interested in the history of the early makers of medicine. We
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_The New York World_ said: "As in Dr. Walsh's 'Thirteenth The Greatest
of Centuries' he carries amazement with his revelations of how old are
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MODERN PROGRESS AND HISTORY:
Lectures on various academic occasions by James J. Walsh, M. D., Ph.
D., K. C. St. G., Litt, D., Sc. D. Dean and Professor of The History
of Medicine and of Functional Nervous Diseases at Fordham University
School of Medicine, Fordham University Press, 1912. Pp. 450 Twelve
illustrations. Price, $2.50 net. Postage, 15 cents.
Though delivered on various occasions, these lectures are all on the
theme that our modern progress is but a repetition of previous phases
of human accomplishment and that whenever men faced certain problems
they solved them as well at any time in history as they do now.
Educational problems are shown to have been the same in Greece and
Rome as in our own time. Old time prescriptions in medicine are
strangely like many that we have now. Old time dentists filled teeth
with gold and tin, did fine bridgework, invented movable dentures,
transplanted teeth successfully and anticipated our dental progress.
Pronunciation, Old and New, shows that the Irish brogue is
Shakespeare's pronunciation while The Women of Two Republics
demonstrates how old are our political problems, even suffragettism.
"The book is disillusioning, but marvelously illuminating."
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