The Century of Columbus Part 30

St. Francis de Sales said of "The Imitation," "Its author is the Holy Spirit." Pascal said of it, "One expects only a book and finds a man."

De Quincey declared: "Next to the Bible in European publicity and currency this book came forward as an answer to the sighing of Christian Europe for light from heaven." Dr. Samuel Johnson declared that "Thomas a Kempis must be a good book, as the world has opened its arms to receive it." The sentence in it which he repeated most frequently and which evidently had come home to him is "Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be." Matthew Arnold, whose religious views might possibly be thought to bias his judgment with regard to it and whose feeling for style might be supposed to be deterred by its lack of finish in language, called the "Imitation" "The most exquisite doc.u.ment after those of the New Testament of all that the Christian spirit has ever inspired." What may be more surprising to some, he even did not hesitate to add that "Its moral precepts are equal to the best ever furnished by the great masters of morals--Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius."

Some of the expressions used with regard to the "Imitation" are among the most laudatory that have ever been used of any book. They come from men of all kinds, in all generations, {433} in all nations since, and many of them among the most respected of their time. Fontenelle declared the "Imitation" "the finest book ever issued from the hand of man." Caro, the French philosopher, compares it with other books famous in the same ethical line, only to put it on a pinnacle by itself. "Open the 'Imitation,'" he says, "after having read the _'De Officiis'_ of Cicero or the _'Enchiridion'_ of Epictetus, and you will feel yourself transported into another world as in a moment."

Lamennais declared that the "Imitation" "has made more saints than all the books of controversy. The more one reads, the more one marvels.

There is something celestial in the simplicity of this wonderful book." Henri Martin, the French historian, declared, "This book has not grown old and never will grow old, because it is the expression of the eternal tenderness of the soul. It has been the consolation of thousands--one might say of millions--of souls."

Lamartine in his "Jocelyn" (and it must not be forgotten that Lamartine was an historian and a critic as well as a poet) wrote:

"Hara.s.sed by an inward strife, I find in the 'Imitation' a new life-- Book obscure, unhonored, like to potter's clay.

Yet rich in Gospel truths as flowers in May.

Where loftiest wisdom, human and Divine, Peace to the troubled soul to speak, combine."

La Harpe, a dramatist as well as a critic, whose "Cours de Litterature" was a standard text-book for so long, was in prison and sadly in need of comfort and consolation when he began to appreciate the "Imitation." There is almost no limit to his praise of it, and praise under these circ.u.mstances must indeed be considered to come from the heart. He wrote: "Never before or since have I experienced emotion so violent and yet so unexpectedly sweet--the words, 'Behold I am here,' echoing unceasingly in my heart, awakening its faculties and moving it to the uttermost depths."

It is not surprising then to find that Dean Church says of it, "No book of human composition has been the companion of {434} so many serious hours, has been prized in widely different religious communions, has nerved and comforted so many and such different minds--preacher and soldier and solitary thinker--Christians, or even it may be those unable to believe." Dean Milman in his "Latin Christianity" declared "that this book supplies some imperious want in the Christianity of mankind, that it supplied it with a fulness and felicity which left nothing to be desired, its boundless popularity is the one unanswerable testimony." He even has some words of praise for a Kempis' style: "The style is ecclesiastical Latin, but the perfection of ecclesiastical Latin of pure and of sound construction."

Dean Plumptre, whose studies of Dante and the great Greek poets gave him so good a right to judge of the place of books in the world's literature, is one of the worshippers at the shrine of the "Imitation." The Rev. Dr. Liddon, the great Greek lexicographer, called it "the very choicest of devotional works, the product of the highest Christian genius and one of the books that have touched the heart of the world."

More than this could scarcely be said of any book. Was there ever a chorus of praise quite so harmonious? Did praise ever come from men by whom one could more wish to be praised? Evidently, the "Imitation of Christ" is for all men at all times. It is the poem of our common human nature.

When Sir John Lubbock included the "Imitation" in his list of the hundred best books some people expressed surprise. The editor of the _Pall Mall Gazette_ invited the opinions of his readers on the subject, and some of the most distinguished of English churchmen, as well as many English men of distinction, said their praise of it publicly. Archdeacon Farrar, whose sympathies with the fourth book of the "Imitation" would certainly be very slight and whose opposition to many Catholic doctrines that a Kempis received devoutly might possibly be expected to prejudice him somewhat against it, wrote that "If all the books in the world were in a blaze the first twelve I should s.n.a.t.c.h from the flames would be the Bible, 'The Imitation of Christ,'

'Homer,' 'AEschylus,' 'Thucydides,' 'Tacitus,' 'Virgil,' 'Marcus Aurelius,' 'Dante,' 'Shakespeare,' 'Milton' and 'Wordsworth.'" {435} The men with whom a Kempis is thus placed in a.s.sociation are among the accepted geniuses of literary history before as well as since his time. It would not be difficult to make a sheaf of quotations each one of them scarcely less laudatory than this of Archdeacon Farrar. They come from all manner of men, devout and undevout, bookish and practical, spiritual and worldly, men of wide experience in life, who have done things that the world will not soon forget, and who, if any, have the right to speak for the race as regards the significance of life and what any book can mean for direction and guidance in the living of it and consolation in its trials and difficulties.

Lamartine in his "Entretiens Familiers" called it "the poem of the soul," and declared that it "condensed into a few pages the practical philosophy of men of all climates and of all countries who have sought, have suffered, have studied and prayed in their tears ever since flesh suffered and the mind reflected."

To adopt his term, the "Imitation" is literally a great poem. It is a creation and it is a vision. The poet is the creator and the seer. The greater he is, the more capable he is of taking the ordinary materials of life and making great poetry of them. The greater the poet, the more of mankind he appeals to. It is the vision of the experiences of man and not of individual men that the poet sees. What all have seen and felt, but none so well expressed is the theme of poetry. The more one reads of the "Imitation," the more one realizes all the truth of this characterization of it as poetry. If one takes pa.s.sages of it as they have been put into rhythmic sentences the feeling of the poetry in them is brought home very clearly. For instance, this from Chapter XXII of the third book:

"Why one has less, another more; Not ours to question this, but Thine With Whom each man's deserts are strictly watched.

Wherefore, Lord G.o.d, I think it a great blessing Not to have much which outwardly seems worth Praise or glory--as men judge of them."

Or if the ode--for such it really is--on Love from the fifth chapter of the third book be read alongside one of the great {436} choruses from the Greek tragedians, as above all some of those of Sophocles in "Antigone" or the "Oedipus at Colonos," the lofty poetic quality will be easier to grasp:

"A great thing is love, A great good every way.

Making all burdens light, Bearing all that is unequal, Carrying a burden without feeling it.

Turning all bitterness to a sweet savor.

The n.o.ble love of Jesus Impelleth men to good deeds And exciteth them always To desire that which is better.

Love will tend upwards Nor be detained By things of earth It would be free.

Nothing is sweeter than love, Nothing stronger, nothing higher.

Nothing fuller, nothing better Nor more pleasant in heaven or earth.

For love is born of G.o.d Nor can it rest Except in Him Above all things created.

Love is swift, sincere.

Pious, pleasant and delightsome.

Brave, patient, faithful, Careful, long suffering, manly.

Never seeking its own good; For where a man looks for himself He falls away from love."

The next most significant book of the Latin literature of the time is Sir Thomas More's "Utopia." Few books are more surprising in the midst of their environment. Probably no one {437} has ever so risen above the social atmosphere around him and breathed the rarefied air of ideal social conditions as More in the "Utopia." It was written under the influence of his first acquaintance with Plato's "Republic" and as a result of his talks with that great French scholar and friend of Erasmus, Peter Giles, or as he is known in the history of scholarship, Aegidius. More discussed not merely literary topics, but the application of the Greek literature that they were both interested in to the contemporary politics of Europe and the social conditions of their time. Not yet thirty years of age, More's powers of observation were at their highest, and his principles of life had not yet been hardened into conventional form by actual contact with too many difficulties. With no experience as yet of government and with the highest ideals of fellowship and unselfishness, he wrote out a wonderful scheme of ideal government by which the happiness of mankind would be attained. He saw clearly through all the social illusions and the social problems, and with almost youthful enthusiasm put forth his solution of all the difficulties he saw.

Undoubtedly the "Utopia" is the main literary monument of Sir Thomas More's great genius. Sir Sidney Lee in his "Great Englishmen of the Sixteenth Century" (Scribner's, 1904) declares that "it is as admirable in literary form as it is original in thought. It displays a mind rebelling in the power of detachment from the sentiment and the prejudices which prevailed in his personal environment. To a large extent this power of detachment was bred of his study of Greek literature." There is, perhaps, no greater series of compliments for the significance of the cla.s.sics in education than the fact that these men of the Renaissance found in the Greek books not only the source of their literature, but also their art and architecture and even their science, and above all were given the breadth of mind to follow the suggestions that they met with. It must not be forgotten, however, that More was also deeply influenced by St. Augustine's _"De Civitate Dei"_ Evident traces of this can be found. It is known that he had been reading the work of the great Latin father of the Church and that he admired him very deeply. Without any narrowness or bigotry, inspired by Augustine's great work, it was a {438} Christian Republic of Plato that the future Lord Chancellor of England sketched for his generation.

"Utopia" was published at the end of 1516 in Louvain, then probably the most prominent and undoubtedly the most cosmopolitan centre of academic learning in Europe. There were perhaps 5,000 students at the University there at the moment, and it was one of the large universities of the world. A new edition was published only four months later from a famous press in Paris, and within the year the great scholar-printer, Froben of Basel, produced what we would now call an _edition de luxe_ at the suggestion and under the editorship of Erasmus, and with ill.u.s.trations by Erasmus' friend, for whom More was to be such a beneficent patron later in England--Hans Holbein.

It is not surprising to hear that the book was warmly welcomed by all the scholars of Europe. The epithets which the publishers bestowed on it in the t.i.tle page, _aureus, saluiatis, festivus_--a golden, wholesome, optimistic book--were adopted from expressions of opinion uttered by some of the best scholars of Europe. Erasmus was loud in his praise of it, it was warmly welcomed in France, it found its way everywhere among the scholars of Italy, it was read, though not too openly, in England, where there was some suspicion of its critical quality as regards English government and where Tudor wilfulness did not brook critical review of its acts.

The book was eminently interesting; there probably never has been a _social Tendens_ novel before or since that has been so full of interest. The preliminary chapter of the book is, as Sidney Lee says, "a vivid piece of fiction which Defoe could not have excelled." More relates how he accidentally came upon his scholarly friend, Peter Giles, in the streets of Antwerp in conversation with an old sailor named Raphael or Ralph Hythlodaye. This name means an observer of trifles. More takes advantage of the current interest in the discoveries of the Western Continent by making him a sailor lately returned from a voyage to the New World under the command of Amerigo Vespucci. The name America after Amerigo was just gaining currency at that time and this added to the interest. Ralph had been impressed by the beneficent forms of {439} government which prevailed in the New World. He had also visited England and had noticed social evils there which called for speedy redress. The poor were getting poorer, the rich were getting richer, the degradation of the ma.s.ses was sapping the strength of the country, the wrong things were in honor and social reform must come, it was hinted, or there would be social revolution.

The book contained a fearless exposure of the social evils very commonly witnessed in every country in Europe at that time, though tinged more by More's experience in England than anywhere else.

Since its publication, the book has been read in every generation that has taken its social problems seriously. It was not published in England until 1551, but was translated into English again by Bishop Burnet in a form that has made it an English cla.s.sic. It contains such a surprising antic.i.p.ation of so many suggestions for the relief of social evils that are now discussed that I have preferred to put a series of quotations from it in the Appendix in order to show how little there is new in human thinking, and above all how a sympathetic genius at any time succeeds in seeing clearly and solving as well the problems of mankind as at any other time, in utter contradiction of the so much talked of evolution that is presumed to bring these problems gradually before the bar of human justice and secure their amelioration. The book is worthy to be placed beside Plato's "Republic," and it will be more read in the near future than probably any other work of similar nature. In our own generation editions of it have been issued in every modern language and a number of editions in English. It is one of the enduring books of mankind that a scholar of any nation cannot afford to confess not having read and in which the social reformer will ever find suggestions for human uplift and the greatest happiness for the greatest number.

The third great book of the Latin literature of the century is St.

Ignatius's _"Exercitia Spiritualia."_ This is not a book to be read, however, but to be lived. It is a book of material for thought rather than of words to be conned. It has deeply influenced every generation of men ever since. If it had done nothing else but form all the members of his own order ever {440} since, that would be enough of itself to stamp it as a very great human doc.u.ment. It has, however, deeply influenced all the religious orders both of men and women since it was written, and is now the basis of nearly all of the formative exercises on which the modern religious life is based. It is undoubtedly the work of a great spiritual and intellectual genius who above all knew how to suppress himself. There is not a word too much in it, and the one complaint has been of an abbreviation beyond what would make it readily intelligible. Those who have studied it most deeply, however, find no difficulty of understanding, though they recognize the impossibility, unless perhaps after many years of devotion to it, of comprehending all of its precious significance. It is the directions for the spiritual life in shorthand, and it is surprising that a man should have committed it to all the possibilities of misunderstanding in its present form, but its lack of too great detail makes it all the more precious and leaves that room for the expression of the individuality of the one who gives the exercises that is so necessary.

The fourth book that deserves a place in any account of the Latin literature of this period is Erasmus' _"Colloquia"_ though doubtless some might plead for a place for the _"Encomium Moriae,"_ which has had an academic immortality at least. The _"Colloquia"_ is eminently a book for scholars written in the elegant Latin that Erasmus could employ so effectively, and it went through many editions in his lifetime and has had many reprints ever since. It was distinctly a book of style rather than of matter and of academic rather than popular interest. Scholars at all times have turned to its pages for refreshment and information and have been regaled by its charming style and its wit. It is entirely too bitter to be always admirable, but many of its satirical parts give an excellent idea, though undoubtedly exaggerated if taken as a picture of the times, of the conditions of education at the moment. It has not been often translated, and hence, in our generally complacent ignorance of Latin, is less known in our time than in any other since its publication. Its career in comparison with the three other volumes of Latin literature in this chapter, its contemporaries, emphasizes the difference between the place of {441} style and thought in the world literature. The scholars of the period doubtless looked upon Erasmus' book as a very triumph of scholarship, a great contribution to world literature. "The Imitation of Christ," "Utopia" and the "Spiritual Exercises" were read originally not for themselves, but for a purpose. These have maintained an active life, however, while at most the _"Colloquia"_ has enjoyed a rather inanimate academic existence.

This does not detract from the merit of the book, however, nor from that of Erasmus' other contributions to the Latin literature of the time. Latin was at best an adopted language, however, and the expression of native genius in it could scarcely be expected. The prose has been eminently more fortunate than the verse, and it is to the former, not the latter, that we turn in order to find some of the great contributions of the period to world literature.

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CHAPTER II

ITALIAN LITERATURE

As I have said in the Introduction, in spite of the supreme greatness of the artistic products of Columbus' Century, its paintings, sculpture and architecture, the literature of the time was not only not neglected, but occupies a place in the history of culture only second to that of the Periclean age of Athens. For a long time, indeed, the Age of Leo X, as it was called, was considered to be a serious rival in its literary treasures to that marvellous period of Greek thinking and writing. Subsequently the literary world pa.s.sed through a period of exaggerated critical depreciation of it. There has been, however, a growing tendency in recent years, indeed during the last half century, to restore older appreciation of the literature of this period and to value it highly.

In every country in Europe there were books written during this time which not only will never die, but which are part of the familiar reading of the scholars at least of all time. Not that there are not many popular elements in this literature, but its scholarliness has made it a special favorite, and there are not a few books written at this time which no one with any pretence to education would willingly confess to being ignorant of. Ariosto, Machiavelli, Rabelais, Villon, Sir Thomas More, Erasmus, St. Teresa, Marguerite of Navarre and the Pleiades, as well as the Collects of the English Prayer Book, all these have an enduring significance in the realm of world literature that has brought about the publication of editions and translations of them in every cultivated language even in our generation over four centuries after their original production.

[Ill.u.s.tration: t.i.tIAN, ARIOSTO ]

The Italian literature of the century is especially rich. It would be quite impossible to give it any adequate treatment in a chapter, for this is the Renaissance period, and the literature {443} of the Italian Renaissance has been treated in many volumes. The most important of the writers is undoubtedly Ariosto, who has been much more appreciated by his own people than by other countries, though at times of deep interest in literature he has always had a profound influence on writers beyond the bounds of Italy. Saintsbury, in "The Earlier Renaissance," has summed up his best qualities in some sentences that, considering the distance in time and place and temperament which separate poet and critic, may very well be taken as highest praise. Ariosto, he says, "is very nearly if not quite supreme in more than one respect. It may also be said that he never fails and that this freedom from failure is not due to tame faultlessness or a cowardly absence from the most difficult attempts--that it will go hard--but we must rank him, at lowest, just below the very greatest of all. Such a place is, I believe, his right even on the calculus of those who refuse the historic estimate or at least admit it with grudging. It has been said that as Rabelais he represents the greatest literature of his time penetrated most fully by the extra literary as well as the literary characteristics of that time; and it may be added not merely that few times have been so thoroughly represented, but that few have ever so thoroughly lent themselves to representation."

With what is perhaps almost pardonable compatriotic enthusiasm, considering his really great merits as a poet, he has been called the Italian Homer, and his great work, _"Orlando Furioso"_ has been called "the most beautiful and varied and wonderful romantic poem that the literature of the world can boast of." In it are woven together with charming art the two great romantic cycles of Charlemagne and Arthur.

It is the poetic apotheosis of chivalry written in wonderful perfection of style and taking form and with marvellous variety of incident. While the great poem has been a favorite rather with the Italians than with foreigners, when one realizes how deeply cultured Italian readers have been as a rule for all the centuries since Ariosto's time, it is probable that no higher compliment than this devotion of his compatriots could be paid to him. The "Orlando" has not been without honor, however, in foreign countries, among those whose opinion is most {444} to be valued. It cast into the shade the numberless poetical romances that had been written during the preceding century. None of the many imitations that it evoked have approached it either in beauty of form or style or in deep underlying human interest. Ariosto knew above all the human heart and had excellent control of pathos. He is especially capable in making the impossible or the improbable seem reasonable. Now, after four centuries, we know that he is of all time and belongs to the culture of all centuries.

Modern readers unacquainted with the writings of the older time are often inclined to think that the interests of the older writers were very different from those of humanity to-day and that, as a consequence, the reading of them would surely be a great bore. Even a little reading of Ariosto would show how eminently human and for all time a cla.s.sic writer is and how literally it is true that he is often a commentary on the morning paper. One or two of Ariosto's comparisons which show his interest in humanity and in life around him will serve to ill.u.s.trate this. His observation of children is as close as that of Dante:

"Like to a child that puts a fruit away When ripe, and then forgets where it is stored, If it should chance that after many a day Thither his step returns where is his h.o.a.rd.

He wonders to behold it in decay.

Rotten and spoiled, and richness all outpoured; And what he loved of old with keen delight He hates, spurns, loathes, and flings away in spite."

Like Dante, too, he was an observer of animals and noted especially the ways of dogs.

"And as we see two dogs the combat wage, Whether by envy moved, or other hate, Approaching whet the teeth, nor yet engage.

With eyes askance, and red as coals in grate, Then to their biting come, on fire with rage.

With bitter cries, and backs with spite elate, {445} So came with swords and cries and many a taunt Circa.s.sia's knight and he of Chiaramont."