Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume Ii Part 13

[3] A copy of Manfredi's "safe conduct" is given by Castellani, Lettere Inedite di F. P. S., p. 12, note. Nothing could be more explicit.

In the dispatches which now pa.s.sed, comedy was mingled with tragedy. Very unctuous was the expression by His Holiness of his apprehensions regarding "dangers to the salvation" and of his "fears for the souls" of the Venetian Senators, if they persisted in a.s.serting their own control of their own state. Hardly less touching were the fears expressed by the good Oratorian, Cardinal Baronius, that "a judgment might be brought upon the Republic" if it declined to let the Vatican have its way. But these expressions were not likely to prevail with men who had dealt with Machiavelli.

Uncompromising as ever, Father Paul continued to write letters and publish treatises which clenched more and more firmly into the mind of Venice and of Europe the political doctrine of which he was the apostle,--the doctrine that the State is rightfully independent of the Church,--and throughout the Christian world he was recognized as victor.

Nothing could exceed the bitterness of the attacks upon him, though some of them, at this day, provoke a smile. While efforts were made to discredit him among scholars by spurious writings or by interpolations in genuine writings, efforts equally ingenious were made to arouse popular hostility. One of these was a painting which represented him writhing amid the flames of h.e.l.l, with a legend stating, as a reason for his punishment, that he had opposed the Holy Father.

Now it was indeed, in the midst of ferocious attacks upon his reputation and cunning attempts upon his life, that he entered a new and most effective period of activity. For years, as the adviser of Venice, he had studied, both as a historian and as a statesman, the greatest questions which concerned his country, and especially those which related to the persistent efforts of the Vatican to encroach upon Venetian self-government. The results of these studies he had embodied in reports which had shaped the course of the Republic; and now, his learning and powers of thought being brought to bear upon the policy of Europe in general, as affected by similar papal encroachments, he began publishing a series of treatises, which at once attracted general attention.[1]

[1] For the extent to which these attacks were carried, see the large number in the Sarpi collection at the Cornell University Library, especially volume ix.

First of these, in 1608, came his work on the Interdict. Clearly and concisely it revealed the nature of the recent struggle, the baselessness of the Vatican claims, and the solidarity of interest between Venice and all other European states regarding the question therein settled. This work of his as a historian clenched his work as a statesman; from that day forward no nation has even been seriously threatened with an interdict.

Subsidiary works followed rapidly from his pen, strengthening the civil power against the clerical; but in 1610 came a treatise, which marked an epoch,--his History of Ecclesiastical Benefices.[2] In this he dealt with a problem which had become very serious, not only in Venice, but in every European state, showed the process by which vast treasures had been taken from the control of the civil power and heaped up for ecclesiastical pomp and intrigue, pointed out special wrongs done by the system to the Church as well as the State, and advocated a reform which should restore this wealth to better uses. His arguments spread widely and sank deep, not only in Italy, but throughout Europe, and the nineteenth century has seen them applied effectively in every European country within the Roman obedience.

[2] The old English translation of this book, published in 1736 at Westminster, is by no means a very rare book, and it affords the general reader perhaps the most accessible means of understanding Fra Paolo's simplicity, thoroughness, and vigor.

In 1611 he published his work on the Inquisition at Venice, presenting historical arguments against the uses which ecclesiasticism, under papal guidance, had made of that tribunal.

These arguments spread far, and developed throughout Europe those views of the Inquisition which finally led to its destruction.

Minor treatises followed, dealing with state questions arising between the Vatican and Venice, each treatise--thoroughly well reasoned and convincing--having a strong effect on the discussion of similar public questions in every other European nation.

In 1613 came two books of a high order, each marking an epoch.

The first of these was upon the Right of Sanctuary, and in it Sarpi led the way, which all modern states have followed, out of the old, vicious system of sanctioning crime by sheltering criminals. The cogency of his argument and the value of its application gained for him an especial tribute by the best authority on such questions whom Europe had seen,--Hugo Grotius.

Closely connected with this work was that upon the Immunity of the Clergy. Both this and the previous work were in the same order of ideas, and the second fastened into the European mind the reasons why no state can depend upon the Church for the punishment of clerical criminals. His argument was a triumphant vindication of Venice in her struggle with Paul V on this point; but it was more than that. It became the practical guide of all modern states. Its arguments dissipated the last efforts throughout Europe to make a distinction, in criminal matters, between the priestly caste and the world in general.

Among lesser treatises which followed is one which has done much to shape modern policy regarding public instruction. This was his book upon the Education given by the Jesuits. One idea which it enforced sank deep into the minds of all thoughtful men,--his statement that Jesuit maxims develop "sons disobedient to their parents, citizens unfaithful to their country, and subjects undutiful to their sovereign." Jesuit education has indeed been maintained, and evidences of it may be seen in various European countries. The traveler in Italy constantly sees in the larger Italian towns long lines of young men and boys, sallow, thin, and listless, walking two and two, with priests at each end of the coffle. These are students taking their exercise, and an American or Englishman marvels as he remembers the playing fields of his own country. Youth are thus brought up as milksops, to be graduated as scape-graces. The strong men who control public affairs, who lead men and originate measures in the open, are not bred in Jesuit forcing-houses. Even the Jesuits themselves have acknowledged this, and perhaps the strongest of all arguments supplementary to those given by Father Paul were uttered by Padre Curci, eminent in his day as a Jesuit gladiator, but who realized finally the impossibility of accomplishing great things with men moulded by Jesuit methods.

All these works took strong hold upon European thought. Leading men in all parts of Europe recognized Sarpi as both a great statesman and a great historian. Among his English friends were such men as Lord Bacon and Sir Henry Wotton; and his praises have been sounded by Grotius, by Gibbon, by Hallam, and by Macaulay.

Strong, lucid, these works of Father Paul have always been especially attractive to those who rejoice in the leadership of a master mind.

But in 1619 came the most important of all,--a service to humanity hardly less striking than that which he had rendered in his battle against the Interdict,--his history of the Council of Trent.

His close relations to so many of the foremost men of his day and his long study in public archives and private libraries bore fruit in this work, which takes rank among the few great, enduring historical treatises of the world. Throughout, it is vigorous and witty, but at the same time profound; everywhere it bears evidences of truthfulness and is pervaded by sobriety of judgment. Its pictures of the efforts or threats by representatives of various great powers to break away from the papacy and establish national churches; its presentation of the arguments of anti-papal orators on one side and of Laynez and his satellites on the other; its display of acts and revelations of pretexts; its penetration into the whole network of intrigue, and its thorough discussion of underlying principles,--all are masterly.

Though the name of the author was concealed in an anagram, the book was felt, by the Vatican party, to be a blow which only one man could have dealt, and the worst blow which the party had received since its author had defeated the Interdict at Venice.

Efforts were made, by outcries and calumnies, to discredit the work, and they have been continued from that day to this, but in vain. That there must be some gaps and many imperfections in it is certain; but its general character is beyond the reach of ultramontane weapons. The blow was felt to be so heavy that the Jesuit Pallavicini was empowered to write a history of the Council to counterbalance it, and his work was well done; but Ranke, the most unprejudiced of judges, comparing the two, a.s.signs the palm to Father Paul. His book was immediately spread throughout Europe; but of all the translations, perhaps the most noteworthy was the English. Sarpi had entrusted a copy of the original to his friend, Antonio de Dominis, Archbishop of Spalato, and he, having taken refuge in England, had it translated there, the authorship being ascribed on the t.i.tle-page to "Pietro Soave Polano." This English translation was, in vigor and pith, worthy of the original. In it can be discerned, as clearly as in the original, that atmosphere of intrigue and brutal a.s.sertion of power by which the Roman Curia, after packing the Council with petty Italian bishops, bade defiance to the Catholic world. This translation, more than all else, has enabled the English-speaking peoples to understand what was meant by the Italian historian when he said that Father Paul "taught the world how the Holy Spirit guides the Great Councils of the Church." It remains cogent down to this day; after reading it one feels that such guidance might equally be claimed for Tammany Hall.

Although Father Paul never acknowledged the authorship of the history of the Council of Trent, and although his original copy, prepared for the press, with his latest corrections, still remains buried in the archives at Venice, the whole world knew that he alone could have written it.

But during all these years, while elaborating opinions on the weightiest matters of state for the Venetian Senate, and sending out this series of books which so powerfully influenced the att.i.tude of his own and after generations toward the Vatican, he was working with great effect in yet another field. With the possible exception of Voltaire, he was the most vigorous and influential letter-writer during the three hundred years which separated Erasmus from Thomas Jefferson. Voltaire certainly spread his work over a larger field, lighted it with more wit, and gained by it more brilliant victories; but as regards accurate historical knowledge, close acquaintance with statesmen, familiarity with the best and worst which statesmen could do, sober judgment and cogent argument, the great Venetian was his superior. Curiously enough, Sarpi resembles the American statesman more closely than either of the Europeans. Both he and Jefferson had the intense practical interest of statesmen, not only in the welfare of their own countries, but in all the political and religious problems of their times. Both were keenly alive to progress in the physical sciences, wherever made. Both were wont to throw a light veil of humor over very serious discussions. Both could use, with great effect, curt, caustic description: Jefferson's letter to Governor Langdon satirizing the crowned heads of Europe, as he had seen them, has a worthy pendant in Fra Paolo's pictures of sundry representatives of the Vatican. In both these writers was a deep earnestness which, at times, showed itself in prophetic utterances. The amazing prophecy of Jefferson against American slavery, beginning with the words, "I tremble when I remember that G.o.d is just," which, in the light of our civil war, seems divinely inspired, is paralleled by some of Sarpi's utterances against the unmoral tendencies of Jesuitism and Ultramontanism; and these too seem divinely inspired as one reads them in the light of what has happened since in Spain, in Sicily, in Naples, in Poland, in Ireland, and in sundry South American republics.

The range of Sarpi's friendly relations was amazing. They embraced statesmen, churchmen, scholars, scientific investigators, diplomatists in every part of Europe, and among these Galileo and Lord Bacon, Grotius and Mornay, Salmasius and Casaubon, De Thou and Sir Henry Wotton, Bishop Bedell and Vossius, with a great number of others of nearly equal rank.

Unfortunately the greater part of his correspondence has perished. In the two small volumes collected by Polidori, and in the small additional volume of letters to Simon Contarini, Venetian Amba.s.sador at Rome, unearthed a few years since in the Venetian archives by Castellani, we have all that is known. It is but a small fraction of his epistolary work, but it enables us to form a clear opinion. The letters are well worthy of the man who wrote the history of the Council of Trent and the protest of Venice against the Interdict.

It is true that there has been derived from these letters, by his open enemies on one side and his defenders of a rather sickly conscientious sort on the other, one charge against him: this is based on his famous declaration, "I utter falsehood never, but the truth not to every one." ("La falsita non dico mai mai, ma la verita non a ogniuno.")[1] Considering his vast responsibilities as a statesman and the terrible dangers which beset him as a theologian; that in the first of these capacities the least misstep might wreck the great cause which he supported, and that in the second such a misstep might easily bring him to the torture chamber and the stake, normally healthful minds will doubtless agree that the criticism upon these words is more Pharisaic than wholesome.

[1] For this famous utterance, see notes of conversations given by Christoph, Burggraf von Dohna, in July, 1608, in Briefe und Acten zur Geschichte des Dreissigjahrigen Krieges, Munchen, 1874, p. 79.

Sarpi was now spoken of, more than ever, both among friends and foes, as the "terribile frate." Terrible to the main enemies of Venice he indeed was, and the machinations of his opponents grew more and more serious. Efforts to a.s.sa.s.sinate him, to poison him, to discredit him, to lure him to Rome, or at least within reach of the Inquisition, became almost frantic; but all in vain. He still continued his quiet life at the monastery of Santa Fosca, publishing from time to time discussions of questions important for Venice and for Europe, working steadily in the public service until his last hours. In spite of his excommunication and of his friendships with many of the most earnest Protestants of Europe, he remained a son of the church in which he was born. His life was shaped in accordance with its general precepts, and every day he heard ma.s.s. So his career quietly ran on until, in 1623, he met death calmly, without fear, in full reliance upon the divine justice and mercy. His last words were a prayer for Venice.

He had fought the good fight. He had won it for Venice and for humanity. For all this, the Republic had, in his later years, tried to show her grat.i.tude, and he had quietly and firmly refused the main gifts proposed to him. But now came a new outburst of grateful feeling. The Republic sent notice of his death to other powers of Europe through its Amba.s.sadors in the terms usual at the death of royal personages; in every way, it showed its appreciation of his character and services, and it crowned all by voting him a public monument.

Hardly was the decree known, when the Vatican authorities sent notice that, should any monument be erected to Sarpi, they would anew and publicly declare him excommunicate as a heretic. At this, the Venetian Senate hesitated, waited, delayed. Whenever afterwards the idea of carrying out the decree for the monument was revived, there set in a storm of opposition from Rome. Hatred of the terrible friar's memory seemed to grow more and more bitter. Even rest in the grave was denied him. The church where he was buried having been demolished, the question arose as to the disposition of his bones. To bury them in sacred ground outside the old convent would arouse a storm of ecclesiastical hostility, with the certainty of their dispersion and desecration; it seemed impossible to secure them from priestly hatred: therefore it was that his friends took them from place to place, sometimes concealing them in the wall of a church here, sometimes beneath the pavement of a church there, and for a time keeping them in a simple wooden box at the Ducal Library. The place where his remains rested became, to most Venetians, unknown. All that remained to remind the world of his work was his portrait in the Ducal Library, showing the great gash made by the Vatican a.s.sa.s.sins.

Time went on, and generations came which seemed to forget him.

Still worse, generation after generation came, carefully trained by clerical teachers to misunderstand and hate him. But these teachers went too far; for, in 1771, nearly one hundred and fifty years after his death, the monk Vaerini gathered together, in a pretended biography, all the scurrilities which could be imagined, and endeavored to bury the memory of the great patriot beneath them. This was too much. The old Venetian spirit, which had so long lain dormant, now a.s.serted itself: Vaerini was imprisoned and his book suppressed.

A quarter of a century later the Republic fell under the rule of Austria, and Austria's most time-honored agency in keeping down subject populations has always been the priesthood. Again Father Paul's memory was virtually proscribed, and in 1803 another desperate attempt was made to cover him with infamy. In that year appeared a book ent.i.tled The Secret History of the Life of Fra Paolo Sarpi, and it contained not only his pretended biography, but what claimed to be Sarpi's own letters and other doc.u.ments showing him to be an adept in scoundrelism and hypocrisy. Its editor was the archpriest Ferrara of Mantua; but on the t.i.tle-page appeared, as the name of its author, Fontanini, Archbishop of Ancira, a greatly respected prelate who had died nearly seventy years before, and there was also stamped, not only upon the preliminary, but upon the final page of the work, the approval of the Austrian government. To this was added a pious motto from St. Augustine, and the approval of Pius VII was distinctly implied, since the work was never placed upon the Index, and could not have been published at Venice, stamped as it was and registered with the privileges of the University, without the consent of the Vatican.

The memory of Father Paul seemed likely now to be overwhelmed.

There was no longer a Republic of Venice to guard the n.o.ble traditions of his life and service. The book was recommended and spread far and wide by preachers and confessors.

But at last came a day of judgment. The director of the Venetian archives discovered and had the courage to announce that the work was a pious fraud of the vilest type; that it was never written by Fontanini, but that it was simply made up out of the old scurrilous work of Vaerini, suppressed over thirty years before.

As to the correspondence served up as supplementary to the biography, it was concocted from letters already published, with the addition of Jesuitical interpolations and of forgeries.[1]

Now came the inevitable reaction, and with it the inevitable increase of hatred for Austrian rule and the inevitable question, how, if the Pope is the infallible teacher of the world in all matters pertaining to faith and morals, could he virtually approve this book, and why did he not, by virtue of his divine inerrancy, detect the fraud and place its condemnation upon the Index. The only lasting effect of the book, then, was to revive the memory of Father Paul's great deeds and to arouse Venetian pride in them. The fearful scar on his face in the portrait spoke more eloquently than ever, and so it was that, early in the nineteenth century, many men of influence joined in proposing a suitable and final interment for the poor bones, which had seven times been buried and reburied, and which had so long been kept in the sordid box at the Ducal Library. The one fitting place of burial was the cemetery of San Michele. To that beautiful island, so near the heart of Venice, had, for many years, been borne the remains of leading Venetians. There, too, in more recent days, have been laid to rest many of other lands widely respected and beloved.

[1] For a full and fair statement of the researches which exposed this pious fraud, see Castellani, Prefect of the Library of St.

Mark, preface to his Lettere Inedite di F. P. S., p. xvii. For methods used in interpolating or modifying pa.s.sages in Sarpi's writings, see Bianchi Giovini, Biografia di Sarpi, Zurigo, 1847, vol. ii. pp. 135, et seq.

But the same persistent hatred which, in our own day, grudged and delayed due honors at the tombs of Copernicus and Galileo among Catholics, and of Humboldt among Protestants, was still bitter against the great Venetian scholar and statesman. It could not be forgotten that he had wrested from the Vatican the most terrible of its weapons. But patriotic pride was strong, and finally a compromise was made: it was arranged that Sarpi should be buried and honored at his burial as an eminent man of science, and that no word should be spoken of his main services to the Republic and to the world. On this condition he was buried with simple honors.

Soon, however, began another chapter of hatred. There came a pope who added personal to official hostility. Gregory XVI, who in his earlier days had been abbot of the monastery of San Michele, was indignant that the friar who had thwarted the papacy should lie buried in the convent which he himself had formerly ruled, and this feeling took shape, first, in violent speeches at Rome, and next, in brutal acts at Venice. The monks broke and removed the simple stone placed over the remains of Father Paul, and when it was replaced, they persisted in defacing and breaking it, and were only prevented from dragging out his bones, dishonoring them and casting them into the lagoon, by the weight of the ma.s.sive, strong, well-anch.o.r.ed sarcophagus, which the wise foresight of his admirers had provided for them. At three different visits to Venice, the present writer sought the spot where they were laid, and in vain. At the second of these visits, he found the Patriarch of Venice, under whose rule various outrages upon Sarpi's memory had been perpetrated, pontificating gorgeously about the Grand Piazza; but at his next visit there had come a change. The monks had disappeared. Their insults to the ill.u.s.trious dead had been stopped by laws which expelled them from their convent, and there, little removed from each other in the vestibule and aisle of the great church, were the tombs of Father Paul and of the late Patriarch side by side; the great patriot's simple gravestone was now allowed to rest unbroken.

Better even than this was the reaction provoked by these outbursts of ecclesiastical hatred. It was felt, in Venice, throughout Italy, and indeed throughout the world, that the old decree for a monument should now be made good. The first steps were hesitating. First, a bust of Father Paul was placed among those of great Venetians in the court of the Ducal Palace; but the inscription upon it was timid and double-tongued. Another bust was placed on the Pincian Hill at Rome, among those of the most renowned sons of Italy. This was not enough: a suitable monument must be erected. Yet it was delayed, timid men deprecating the hostility of the Roman Court. At last, under the new Italian monarchy, the patriotic movement became irresistible, and the same impulse which erected the splendid statue to Giordano Bruno on the Piazza dei Fiori at Rome,--on the very spot where he was burned,--and which adorned it with the medallions of eight other martyrs to ecclesiastical hatred, erected in 1892, two hundred and seventy years after it had been decreed, a statue, hardly less imposing, to Paolo Sarpi, on the Piazza Santa Fosca at Venice, where he had been left for dead by the Vatican a.s.sa.s.sins. There it stands, n.o.ble and serene,--a monument of patriotism and right reason, a worthy tribute to one who, among intellectual prost.i.tutes and solemnly const.i.tuted impostors, stood forth as a true man, the greatest of his time,--one of the greatest of all times,--an honor to Venice, to Italy, and to humanity. Andrew D. White.

Then came the death of the Empress Frederick. Even during her tragic struggle with Bismarck, and the unpopularity which beset her during my former official term at Berlin, she had been kind to me and mine. At my presentation to her in those days, at Potsdam, when she stood by the side of her husband, afterward the most beloved of emperors since Marcus Aurelius, she evidently exerted herself to make the interview pleasant to me. She talked of American art and the Colorado pictures of Moran, which she had seen and admired; of German art and the Madonna painted by Knaus for the Russian Empress, which Miss Wolfe had given the Metropolitan Museum at New York; and in reply to my congratulations upon a recent successful public speech of her eldest son, a student at Bonn, she had dwelt, in a motherly way, upon the difficulties which environ a future sovereign at a great university. In more recent days, and especially during the years before her death, she had been, at her table in Berlin and at her castle of Kronberg, especially courteous. There comes back to me pleasantly a kindly retort of hers. I had spoken to her of a portrait of George III which had interested me at the old castle of Homburg nearly forty years before. It had been sent to his daughter, the Landgravine of Hesse-Homburg, who had evidently wished to see her father's face as it had really become; for it represented the King, not in the gold-laced uniform, not in the trim wig not in the jauntily tied queue of his official portraits and statues, but as he was: in confinement, wretched and demented; in a slouching gown, with a face sad beyond expression; his long, white hair falling about it and over it; of all portraits in the world, save that, at Florence, of Charles V in his old age, the saddest. So, the conversation drifting upon George III and upon the old feeling between the United States and Great Britain, now so happily changed, I happened to say, "It is a remembrance of mine, now hard to realize, that I was brought up to ABHOR the memory of George III." At this she smiled and answered, "That was very unjust; for I was brought up to ADORE the memory of Washington." Then she spoke at length regarding the feeling of her father and mother toward the United States during our Civil War, saying that again and again she had heard her father argue to her mother, Queen Victoria, for the Union and against slavery. She discussed current matters of world politics with the strength of a statesman; yet nothing could be more womanly in the highest sense. On my saying that I hoped to see the day when Germany, Great Britain, and the United States would stand together in guarding the peace of the world, she threw up her hands and replied, "Heaven grant it; but you forget j.a.pan."

The funeral at Potsdam dwells in my mind as worthy of her. There were, indeed, pomp and splendor, but subdued, as was befitting; and while the foreign representatives stood beside her coffin, the Emperor spoke to me, very simply and kindly, of his sorrow and of mine. Then, to the sound of funeral music and m.u.f.fled church bells, he, with the King of Great Britain and members of their immediate family just behind the funeral car, the amba.s.sadors accompanying them, and a long procession following, walked slowly along the broad avenue through that beautiful forest, until, in the Church of Peace, she was laid by the side of her husband, Emperor Frederick the n.o.ble.

CHAPTER XLIII

BERLIN, YALE, OXFORD, AND ST. ANDREWS--1901-1903

Darkest of all hours during my emba.s.sy was that which brought news of the a.s.sa.s.sination of President McKinley. It was on the very day after his great speech at Buffalo had gained for him the admiration and good will of the world. Then came a week of anxiety--of hope alternating with fear; I not hopeful: for there came back to me memories of President Garfield's a.s.sa.s.sination during my former official stay in Berlin, and of our hope against hope during his struggle for life: all brought to naught. Late in the evening of September 14 came news of the President's death--opening a new depth of sadness; for I had come not merely to revere him as a patriot and admire him as a statesman, but to love him as a man. Few days have seemed more overcast than that Sunday when, at the little American chapel in Berlin, our colony held a simple service of mourning, the imperial minister of foreign affairs and other representatives of the government having quietly come to us. The feeling of the German people--awe, sadness, and even sympathy--was real. Formerly they had disliked and distrusted the President as the author of the protective policy which had cost their industries so dear; but now, after his declaration favoring reciprocity,--with his full recognition of the brotherhood of nations,--and in view of this calamity, so sudden, so distressing, there had come a revulsion of feeling.