The Thirteenth Part 46

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 acc.u.mulation 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 surpa.s.sed its predecessor there has been a tendency to a.s.sume, because evolution occupies men's minds, that the eighteenth must have quite as far surpa.s.sed 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 att.i.tude 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 Inst.i.tute 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 munic.i.p.al 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 cra.s.s 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 n.o.blest 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 Gottingen, 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, Moliere, Boileau, La Fontaine, Bossuet, Bourdaloue, and Fenelon 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: Beitrage 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 inst.i.tutions 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 munic.i.p.al and state inst.i.tutions 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, ill.u.s.trated. 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 Regime of France, has told the awful story of the att.i.tude of the so-called better cla.s.ses 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 p.r.o.ne 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 p.r.o.ne 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.

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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 Allb.u.t.t, 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 G.o.d, 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 a.s.sisi, 144 a.s.sizes 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 G.o.d, 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, gla.s.s, 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 a.s.sizes, 351; const.i.tutions, 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 Compayre, 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, cla.s.ses, 7; ma.s.ses, 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 antic.i.p.ated, 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.