traveling in Germany, and when he returned home started a press at
Westminster with a partner named Wynken de Worde. This was the first
English press, but others were quickly set up at Oxford and York,
Canterbury, Worcester, and Norwich, and books began to appear in a
steady stream.
The art of printing has seen great changes since Gutenberg’s day. The
type is now made by machinery, inked by machinery, set and distributed
again by machinery. The letters, when once set up, are cast in plates
of entire pages, so that they can be kept for use whenever they are
wanted. Stereotyping and electrotyping have made this possible. The
Mergenthaler Linotype machine sets and casts type in the form of solid
lines. The great presses of to-day can accomplish more in twelve hours
than the presses of 1480 in as many months.
But the great press we have is the direct descendant of the little one
that John Gutenberg built in the Zum Jungen at Mainz, and the letters
we read on the printed page are after all only another form of those
he cut out with so much patient labor on his wooden blocks in
Strasburg. Printing is one of the greatest inventions the world has
ever seen, but it had its beginning in the simple fact that a young
German polisher of gems fell to wondering how a rude playing-card had
been made.
II
PALISSY AND HIS ENAMEL
About 1510-1589
The discovery of a long-sought enamel and the successful manufacture
of a new and beautiful type of pottery can scarcely be ranked among
the great inventions of history, but the story of Bernard Palissy is
far too interesting to need any such excuse. He was a worker in the
fine arts, in a day when objects of beauty were considered of the
first importance, and his success was then regarded as almost as great
a thing as the building of the first McCormick reaper in another age.
This maker of a new and beautiful porcelain was a Frenchman, born
about 1510 at the little village of La Chapelle Biron, which lies
between the Lot and Dordogne, in Perigord. His parents were poor
peasants, without the means or the opportunity to give Bernard much of
a schooling, but he picked up a very fair knowledge of reading and
writing, and kept his eyes so wide open that he learned much more than
the average country boy. It was the age when the churches of France
were being made glorious with windows of many-colored glass, and
Bernard, watching the glass-workers, dared to ask if they would take
him as apprentice. One of them would, and so the boy of Perigord began
his career of artist, his field covering not only the manufacture of
glass, but its cutting, arranging, and sometimes its painting for the
rose-windows of the Gothic churches. And so skilled were those
glass-workers and so deeply in love with their art that their glass
has been the despair of the later centuries that have tried to copy
them.
Like a true artist he was very much in earnest. With his spare time
and such money as he could save he studied all subjects that seemed
apt to be of help to him. He learned geometry, and drawing, painting,
and modeling. In his desire for the greatest subjects for his windows
and the finest treatment of them, Bernard turned to Italy, the home of
the great painters, and copied their works. This led his eager mind to
delve into Italian literature, and shortly the young workman was not
only draughtsman and artist, but something of a man of letters as
well. The little village of La Chapelle Biron found that the peasant’s
son, without any education in the church schools, was already a man of
many talents and quite remarkable learning.
He had mastered his profession, and the town in Perigord was somewhat
too small for him. He must see something of that outer world where
many others were making works of art. His skill as a painter of glass,
as a draughtsman, and land-measurer, would earn him a living wherever
he might go. So he set forth on his travels, as many young scholars
and artisans were used to do in those days, working here and there,
collecting new ideas, talking with many men of different minds, and
gaining a first-hand knowledge of the world that lay about him. He
visited the chief provinces of France, saw something of Burgundy and
Flanders, and stayed for a time on the banks of the Rhine. His love of
acquiring knowledge grew as he traveled, and he studied natural
history, geology and chemistry. Where churches were being built he
painted glass, where towns or nobles needed measurers or surveyors of
their lands he worked for them. When he had seen as much of the world
as he wished, he went to the town of Saintes, married, and settled
there as a man of several trades.
It was in 1539 that Palissy became a citizen of Saintes, and several
years later that chance sent his way a beautiful cup of enameled
pottery. Some have said that the cup came from Italy, and some from
Nuremberg, but it was of a new pattern to Palissy, and the more he
looked at it and handled it the more he wanted to learn the secret of
its making, and duplicate it or improve on it. He had the artist’s
wish to create something beautiful, and with it was the belief that he
could provide well for his wife and children, and raise the potter’s
art to a new height if he could learn the secret of this enamel. That
thought became his lodestone, and he left all his other work to
accomplish it. Much as he knew about glass, he knew nothing about
enamel. He had no notion of the materials he should need, nor how he
was to combine them. He started to make earthen vessels without
knowing how other men had made them. He knew that he should need a
furnace, and so he built one, although he had never seen a furnace
fired.
The attempt seemed foolhardy from the start. What he had saved he
spent in his attempts to find the right materials. Soon his savings
were gone, and he had to look about for a new means of living. A
survey and plan of the great salt-marshes of Saintonge was wanted in
1543, and Palissy obtained the work. He finished it, was paid the
stipulated sum, and immediately spent it in fresh experiments to find
the coveted enamel. But he could not find it. One experiment after
another ended in rebuff. He labored day and night, and the result of
all his labors was the same. But the desire to find that enamel had
possessed Palissy’s mind, and it was not a mind to veer or change.
The man was beset by friends who told him he was mad to continue the
chase, and that his undoubted talents in other lines were being
wasted. He was implored, reproached, and belabored by his wife, who
begged him to leave his furnace, and turn to work that would feed and
clothe his growing family. He might well have seemed a fanatic, he
might well have seemed distraught and cruel to his family, but he met
each protest with a simple frankness that disarmed all attacks and
showed his indomitable purpose. Those were days of intense suffering
for Palissy, and later he described them in his own writings in a way
that showed his real depth of feeling and his constant struggle
against what he held to be temptations.
He borrowed money to build a new furnace, and when this was done he
lived by it, trying one combination of materials after another in his
search for the secret of the enamel. Those were superstitious days,
and some of his more ignorant neighbors thought that Bernard Palissy
must be in league with the devil, since he spent day and night feeding
fuel to his furnace, and sending a great volume of smoke and sparks
into the air. Some said he was an alchemist trying to turn base metals
into gold, some that he was discovering new poisons, some frankly
believed that his learning had turned his mind and made him mad. They
were all certain of one thing, and that was that his great fires were
providing very ill for his family, who became in time a charge on the
town’s charity.
For sixteen years Palissy experimented. For sixteen years he had to
resist the reproaches of wife and children, and the threats of
neighbors. That was an epic struggle, well worth the recording. We can
picture the little mediæval town, surrounded by its salt marshes, the
prosperous burghers, and the strange man, Bernard Palissy, at whom all
others scoffed, whose children played in the streets in rags and
tatters, but who, himself, was always working at his furnace with
demoniac zeal. “Too much learning,” says one burgher, shaking his
head. “What business had a simple glass-worker to study those texts
out of Italy?” “Seeking for more learning than other folk have is apt
to league one with the Evil One,” says number two. “Bernard has sold
his soul. He will fall in his furnace some day, and go up in smoke.”
“Nay,” says the third burgher, “he will live forever, to bring shame
to our town of Saintes. He is like one of those plagues the priests
tell us of.” And he crosses himself devoutly.
[Illustration: PALISSY, THE POTTER, AFTER AN UNSUCCESSFUL
EXPERIMENT]
But Palissy cared for nothing but to learn that secret. At first he
had had a workman to help him; now he let him go. He had no money to
pay him, and so gave him all his clothes except those he had on. He
knew his family were starving, and he dared not go out into the
streets for fear of the maledictions of his neighbors. But he fed that
furnace and he melted his different compositions. When he could get no
other fuel he turned to the scant furnishings of his house. He burned
his bed and chairs, his table, and everything that was made of wood.
He felt that he was now on the verge of his discovery; but he must
have more fire. He tore strips of board from the walls, and piled them
in the furnace. Still he needed more heat, and ran out into the yard
behind his dwelling. There were sticks that supported vines, and a
fence that ran between his land and the next. He took the wood of the
fence, the sticks of the vines, and hurried back with them to the
furnace. He threw them on the blaze, he bent over his composition, and
he found the secret answered for him. After sixteen years he learned
how to make that rare enamel.
It was a glorious achievement, and it brought Palissy fame and
fortune. With his new knowledge he had soon fashioned pottery,
decorated with rustic scenes, and exquisitely enameled, that all
lovers of works of art desired at any price. The first pieces of his
rustic pottery soon reached the court of France, and Henry II and his
nobles ordered vases and figures from him to ornament the gardens of
their châteaux. Catherine de’ Medici became his patron, and the
powerful Constable de Montmorenci sent to Saintes for Palissy to
decorate his château at Ecouen. Fragments of this work have been
preserved, exquisite painted tiles, and also painted glass, setting
forth the story of Psyche, which Palissy prepared for the château.
The people of Saintes now found that their madman, instead of bringing
obloquy upon their town, was to bring it fame. The Reformation had
made many Protestants in that part of France, and Palissy was one of
them. But when the Parliament of Bordeaux, in 1562, ordered the
execution of the edict of 1559, that had been directed against the
Protestants, the Catholic Duke of Montpensier gave him a special
safeguard, and ordered that his porcelain factory should be exempted
from the general proscription. Party feeling ran very high, however,
and in spite of the Duke’s safeguard Palissy was arrested, his
workshop ordered destroyed by the judges at Saintes, and the King
himself had to send a special messenger to the town and claim that
Palissy was his own servant, in order to save his life. The royal
family, in spite of their many faults, were sincere lovers of
beautiful workmanship, and they summoned Palissy to Paris, where they
could insure his safety. Catherine de’ Medici gave him a site for his
workshop on a part of the ground where the Palace of the Tuilleries
stood later, and used often to visit him and talk with him about his
art. He made the finest pieces of his porcelain here in Paris. Here he
also resumed his earlier studies, and came to lecture on natural
history and physics to all the great scholars of the day. When the
massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Eve deluged France with the blood of
Protestants Catherine saw that Palissy was spared from the general
destruction.
Palissy had shown the inborn courage of his nature during those
sixteen lean years in Saintes. The perilous ups and downs of life in
sixteenth century France were to show that courage in another light.
In spite of royal favor the Catholic League reached for him, and in
1588, when he was nearly eighty years old, he was arrested by order of
the Sixteen, thrown into the Bastille, and threatened with death.
Henry III, son of Catherine, and in his own way a friend of artists,
went to see Palissy in prison. “My good friend,” said the King, “you
have now been five and forty years in the service of my mother and
myself; we have allowed you to retain your religion in the midst of
fire and slaughter. Now I am so pressed by the Guises and my own
people that _I am constrained_ to deliver you up into the hands of
your enemies, and to-morrow you will be burned unless you are
converted.”
“Sire,” answered the old man, “I am ready to resign my life for the
glory of God. You have told me several times that you pity me, and I,
in my turn, pity you, who have used the words _I am constrained_. It
was not spoken like a king, sire; and these are words which neither
you nor those who constrain you, the Guisards and all your people,
will ever be able to make me utter, for I know how to die.”
The King, however, admiring Palissy’s talents, and remembering his
mother’s fondness for the artist, would not give him up to the party
of the League. Instead he let him remain in his dungeon in the
Bastille, where he died in 1589.
The maker of Palissy ware, as it is called, had many talents, and
among them was that of the writer. During his days in prison he busied
himself in penning his philosophic, religious, and artistic
meditations, as many other illustrious prisoners have done. His
autobiography is curious, and its note of sincerity has given it great
value as a human document. Says Lamartine of the writings of Palissy,
they are “real treasures of human wisdom, divine piety, and eminent
genius, as well as of great simplicity, vigor, and copiousness of
style. It is impossible, after reading them, not to consider the poor
potter one of the greatest writers of the French language. Montaigne
is not more free and flowing, Jean-Jacques Rousseau is scarcely more
graphic; neither does Bossuet excel him in poetical power.”
But Palissy did not explain his art of enamel in detail in any of his
writings, and after the death of his brothers or nephews, who
succeeded to his work, the secret of Palissy ware, like that of
certain other arts of the Renaissance, was lost.
Palissy did not decorate his porcelain with flat painting. His
figures, which usually dealt with historical, mythological, or
allegorical subjects, were executed in relief, and colored. These
colors were bright, and were generally yellows, blues, and grays,
although sometimes he used greens, violets, and browns. He never
acquired the pure white enamel of Luca della Robbia, nor that of the
faience of Nevers. His enamel is hard, but the glaze is not so fine
as that of Delft. The back of his ware is never all the same color,
but usually mottled with several colors, often yellow, blue, and
brown.
Palissy’s studies in natural history helped him when he came to
decorate his pottery. The figures are strikingly true in form and
color, and seem to have been moulded directly from nature, as they
probably were. Thus the fossil shells which he frequently used in his
border decorations are the shells found in the Paris basin, his fish
are those of the Seine, his plants, usually the watercress, the hart’s
tongue, and the maidenhair fern, are those which he found in the
country about Paris. His rustic scenes have that same charm of
fidelity to nature.
He also made very beautiful tiles to overlay walls, stoves, and
floors. The château at Ecouen has a large room entirely paved with
them, and many are to be seen in the chapel. They bear heraldic
designs, the devices of the Constable de Montmorenci, and the colors
are fresh and bright, due to the artist’s unique method of enameling.
Like so many Renaissance artists Palissy tried his skill in many
lines. If his most remarkable work was his “rustic pieces,” as they
are called, great dishes ornamented with fishes, reptiles, frogs,
shells, and plants in relief, intended to be used as ornaments and not
for service, scarcely less interesting were his statuettes, his stands
for fountains, his “rustic figures” for gardens, his candlesticks,
ewers and basins, saltcellars, ink-stands, and baskets. Large
collections of his work are to be found in the Louvre, the Hôtel de
Cluny, and at Sèvres. Many pieces have strayed into the hands of great
private collectors of rare porcelain, and both England and Russia have
many fine examples of his masterpieces.
He had two assistants, either brothers or nephews, and they knew the
secret of his process. They had worked with him, and they continued
his art into the reign of Henry IV. One of their productions shows
that king surrounded by his family. But these successors had not the
artistic instinct or touch of the master. They had little originality,
and speedily became servile copyists, so that Palissy ware for a time
lost the high place it had held. But these successors did not hand on
the secret, and when no more of the ware was forthcoming good judges
of the potter’s art found it easy to distinguish between the work of
Bernard and of his followers, and his own porcelain was again
enthroned among the greatest productions of French art. Connoisseurs
of to-day find it easy to know real Palissy ware.
Such is the story of a great artist of the Renaissance in France, of a
man born with the love of beauty, who found a new way of giving the
world delight, and who overcame what seemed almost superhuman trials.
III
GALILEO AND THE TELESCOPE
1564-1642
Three days before the death of the great Italian Michael Angelo, in
the year 1564, there was born in Pisa a boy who was given the name of
Galileo Galilei, and who was destined to become one of the greatest
philosophers and inventors the world has ever known. He came of a
noble family of Florence, which had originally borne the name of
Bonajuti, but had later changed it to that of Galilei, and he is
usually known by his baptismal name of Galileo, according to the
Italian custom of that age. His father was a merchant, engaged in
business in Pisa, a man well versed in the Latin and Greek tongues,
and well known for his knowledge of mathematics. He was anxious that
each of his three sons should have a good education, and so he sent
Galileo, his eldest boy, to the famous monastery of Vallombrosa,
situated in a beautiful wooded valley not far from Florence. But the
father did not intend his son to become a priest, and so, when he
found his thoughts tending in that direction, he took him away from
the monastery, planning to make him a merchant like himself.
But the mind of the young Galileo was already remarkably acute. He was
a good musician, a skilful draughtsman and painter, something of a
poet, and had shown considerable talent in designing and building a
variety of toy machines. His father soon decided that his son’s bent
did not lie in the direction of a dealer in cloths, and, casting about
for a scientific career, chose that of medicine for Galileo. So he
took up this study at the University of Pisa.
One afternoon the youth of eighteen went to the great Cathedral of the
city. He knelt to make his devotions. From the roof of the nave hung a
large bronze lamp, and as the boy watched he saw an attendant draw the
lamp toward him to light it, and then let it swing back again. The
swinging caught his attention, and he watched it with more and more
interest. At first the arc of the swinging lamp was wide, but
gradually it grew less and less. But what struck him as singular was
that the oscillations all seemed to be made in the same time. He had
no watch, so he put his fingers on his wrist in order to note the
pulse-beats. As nearly as he could determine the swings of the lamp as
they lessened were keeping the same times.
When he went home he began to experiment with this idea of the
swinging lamp, or pendulum as it came to be called, and soon had
constructed an instrument which marked with very fair accuracy the
rate and variation of the pulse-beats. It was imperfect in many
respects, but when he showed it to his teachers at the university they
were delighted with it, and it was soon generally used by the
physicians of the day under the name of the Pulsilogia.
But, to his father’s dismay, the young Galileo did not show great
interest in the study of medicine. Instead he spent his time studying
the mathematics of Euclid, and from them went on to the writings of
Archimedes and the laws of mechanics. These latter absorbed him, and
fresh from reading them he constructed for himself a hydrostatic
balance, the purpose of which was to ascertain accurately the relative
proportions of any two metals in an alloy. He wrote an essay on his
invention, and circulated it among his friends and teachers. This
added to his reputation as a scientist, but brought him no money. His
family were poor, and he needed a means of support, and so he applied
for, and after a time obtained, appointment to the post of Professor
of Mathematics at the University of Pisa.
For centuries the laws of mechanics as laid down by the Greek
Aristotle had been accepted without much dispute by the civilized
world. But a spirit of new thought and investigation was now rising in
Europe, and more especially in Italy. Galileo determined to study the
laws of mechanics by experiment, and not, as so many earlier
scientists had done, by argument or mere theoretical opinions.
Therefore he undertook to establish definitely the laws relating to
falling bodies.
Aristotle, almost two thousand years before, had announced that if two
bodies of different weights were dropped from the same height the
heavier would reach the ground sooner than the lighter, according to
the proportion of their weights. Galileo doubted this, and decided to
try it. Accordingly he assembled the teachers and students of the
university one morning about the base of the famous Leaning Tower of
Pisa. He himself climbed to the top, carrying with him a ten-pound
shot and a one-pound shot. He balanced them on the edge of the tower
and let them fall together. They struck the ground together. As a
result of this experiment Galileo declared three laws in relation to
falling bodies. He said that if one neglected the resistance of the
air, or in other words supposed the bodies to fall through a vacuum,
it would be found, first, that all bodies fall from the same height in
equal times; second, that in falling the final velocities are
proportional to the times; and third, that the spaces fallen through
are proportional to the squares of the times.
The first of these laws was shown by his experiment on the Leaning
Tower. To show the others he built a straight inclined plane with a
groove down its centre. A bronze ball was free to move in the groove
with the least possible friction. By means of this he showed that no
matter how much he inclined the plane, and so changed the time, the
ball would always move down it according to the laws he had stated.
But in disproving the accuracy of the old laws of Aristotle the young
scientist had raised a hornet’s nest about his ears. The men of the
old school would not believe him, a conspiracy was set on foot against
him, and finally the criticism of his new teachings grew so severe
that he was forced to resign his position, and move to Florence.