THE PEOPLE BEGAN TO FEEL THE NEED OF GIVING EXPRESSION TO THEIR NEWLY
DISCOVERED JOY OF LIVING. THEY EXPRESSED THEIR HAPPINESS IN POETRY AND
IN SCULPTURE AND IN ARCHITECTURE AND IN PAINTING AND IN THE BOOKS THEY
PRINTED
IN the year 1471 there died a pious old man who had spent seventy-two
of his ninety-one years behind the sheltering walls of the cloister of
Mount St. Agnes near the good town of Zwolle, the old Dutch Hanseatic
city on the river Ysel. He was known as Brother Thomas and because he
had been born in the village of Kempen, he was called Thomas a Kempis.
At the age of twelve he had been sent to Deventer, where Gerhard Groot,
a brilliant graduate of the universities of Paris, Cologne and Prague,
and famous as a wandering preacher, had founded the Society of the
Brothers of the Common Life. The good brothers were humble laymen who
tried to live the simple life of the early Apostles of Christ while
working at their regular jobs as carpenters and house-painters and stone
masons. They maintained an excellent school, that deserving boys of poor
parents might be taught the wisdom of the Fathers of the church. At this
school, little Thomas had learned how to conjugate Latin verbs and how
to copy manuscripts. Then he had taken his vows, had put his little
bundle of books upon his back, had wandered to Zwolle and with a sigh
of relief he had closed the door upon a turbulent world which did not
attract him.
Thomas lived in an age of turmoil, pestilence and sudden death. In
central Europe, in Bohemia, the devoted disciples of Johannus Huss,
the friend and follower of John Wycliffe, the English reformer, were
avenging with a terrible warfare the death of their beloved leader who
had been burned at the stake by order of that same Council of Constance,
which had promised him a safe-conduct if he would come to Switzerland
and explain his doctrines to the Pope, the Emperor, twenty-three
cardinals, thirty-three archbishops and bishops, one hundred and fifty
abbots and more than a hundred princes and dukes who had gathered
together to reform their church.
In the west, France had been fighting for a hundred years that she might
drive the English from her territories and just then was saved from
utter defeat by the fortunate appearance of Joan of Arc. And no sooner
had this struggle come to an end than France and Burgundy were at each
other's throats, engaged upon a struggle of life and death for the
supremacy of western Europe.
In the south, a Pope at Rome was calling the curses of Heaven down
upon a second Pope who resided at Avignon, in southern France, and who
retaliated in kind. In the far east the Turks were destroying the last
remnants of the Roman Empire and the Russians had started upon a final
crusade to crush the power of their Tartar masters.
But of all this, Brother Thomas in his quiet cell never heard. He had
his manuscripts and his own thoughts and he was contented. He poured his
love of God into a little volume. He called it the Imitation of Christ.
It has since been translated into more languages than any other book
save the Bible. It has been read by quite as many people as ever studied
the Holy Scriptures. It has influenced the lives of countless millions.
And it was the work of a man whose highest ideal of existence was
expressed in the simple wish that "he might quietly spend his days
sitting in a little corner with a little book."
Good Brother Thomas represented the purest ideals of the Middle Ages.
Surrounded on all sides by the forces of the victorious Renaissance,
with the humanists loudly proclaiming the coming of modern times,
the Middle Ages gathered strength for a last sally. Monasteries
were reformed. Monks gave up the habits of riches and vice. Simple,
straightforward and honest men, by the example of their blameless
and devout lives, tried to bring the people back to the ways of
righteousness and humble resignation to the will of God. But all to no
avail. The new world rushed past these good people. The days of quiet
meditation were gone. The great era of "expression" had begun.
Here and now let me say that I am sorry that I must use so many "big
words." I wish that I could write this history in words of one syllable.
But it cannot be done. You cannot write a text-book of geometry
without reference to a hypotenuse and triangles and a rectangular
parallelopiped. You simply have to learn what those words mean or do
without mathematics. In history (and in all life) you will eventually
be obliged to learn the meaning of many strange words of Latin and Greek
origin. Why not do it now?
When I say that the Renaissance was an era of expression, I mean this:
People were no longer contented to be the audience and sit still while
the emperor and the pope told them what to do and what to think. They
wanted to be actors upon the stage of life. They insisted upon giving
"expression" to their own individual ideas. If a man happened to be
interested in statesmanship like the Florentine historian, Niccolo
Macchiavelli, then he "expressed" himself in his books which revealed
his own idea of a successful state and an efficient ruler. If on the
other hand he had a liking for painting, he "expressed" his love for
beautiful lines and lovely colours in the pictures which have made the
names of Giotto, Fra Angelico, Rafael and a thousand others household
words wherever people have learned to care for those things which
express a true and lasting beauty.
If this love for colour and line happened to be combined with an
interest in mechanics and hydraulics, the result was a Leonardo da
Vinci, who painted his pictures, experimented with his balloons and
flying machines, drained the marshes of the Lombardian plains and
"expressed" his joy and interest in all things between Heaven and Earth
in prose, in painting, in sculpture and in curiously conceived engines.
When a man of gigantic strength, like Michael Angelo, found the brush
and the palette too soft for his strong hands, he turned to sculpture
and to architecture, and hacked the most terrific creatures out of heavy
blocks of marble and drew the plans for the church of St. Peter, the
most concrete "expression" of the glories of the triumphant church. And
so it went.
All Italy (and very soon all of Europe) was filled with men and women
who lived that they might add their mite to the sum total of our
accumulated treasures of knowledge and beauty and wisdom. In Germany,
in the city of Mainz, Johann zum Gansefleisch, commonly known as Johann
Gutenberg, had just invented a new method of copying books. He had
studied the old woodcuts and had perfected a system by which individual
letters of soft lead could be placed in such a way that they formed
words and whole pages. It is true, he soon lost all his money in a
law-suit which had to do with the original invention of the press. He
died in poverty, but the "expression" of his particular inventive genius
lived after him.
Soon Aldus in Venice and Etienne in Paris and Plantin in Antwerp and
Froben in Basel were flooding the world with carefully edited editions
of the classics printed in the Gothic letters of the Gutenberg Bible,
or printed in the Italian type which we use in this book, or printed in
Greek letters, or in Hebrew.
Then the whole world became the eager audience of those who had
something to say. The day when learning had been a monopoly of a
privileged few came to an end. And the last excuse for ignorance was
removed from this world, when Elzevier of Haarlem began to print his
cheap and popular editions. Then Aristotle and Plato, Virgil and
Horace and Pliny, all the goodly company of the ancient authors and
philosophers and scientists, offered to become man's faithful friend in
exchange for a few paltry pennies. Humanism had made all men free and
equal before the printed word.