CARICATURES PRECEDING THE REFORMATION.
[Illustration: Luther inspired by Satan.]
We have in this strange, rude picture[8] a device of contemporary
caricature to cast ridicule upon the movement of which Martin Luther was
the conspicuous figure. It is reduced from a large wood-cut which
appeared in Germany at the crisis of the lion-hearted reformer's career,
the year of his appearance at the Diet of Worms, when he said to
dissuading friends, "If I knew there were as many devils at Worms as
there are tiles upon the houses, I would go." The intention of the
artist is obvious; but, in addition to the leading purpose, he desired,
as Mr. Chatto conjectures, to remind his public of the nasal drawl of
the preaching friars of the time, for which they were as proverbial as
the Puritans of London in Cromwell's day. Such is the poverty of human
invention that the idea of this caricature has been employed several
times since Luther's time--even as recently as 1873, when a London
draughtsman made it serve his turn in the contentions of party politics.
[Footnote 8: From "A Treatise on Wood-engraving," p. 268, by Jackson and
Chatto, London, 1866.]
The best humorous talent of Christendom, whether it wrought with pencil
or with pen, whether it avowed or veiled its sympathy with reform, was
on Luther's side. It prepared the way for his coming, co-operated with
him during his life-time, carried on his work after he was gone, and
continues it to the present hour.
Recent investigators tell us, indeed, that the Reformation began in
laughter, which the Church itself nourished and sanctioned. M.
Viollet-le-Duc, author of the "Dictionnaire d'Architecture," discourses
upon the gradual change which church decorators of the Middle Ages
effected in the figure of the devil. Upon edifices erected before the
year 1000 there are few traces of the devil, and upon those of much
earlier date none at all; but from the eleventh century he "begins to
play an important _role_," artists striving which should give him the
most hideous form. No one was then audacious enough to take liberties
with a being so potent, so awful, so real, the competitor and antagonist
of the Almighty Lord of Heaven and Earth. But mortals must laugh, and
familiarity produces its well-known effect. In the eyes of men of the
world the devil became gradually less terrible and more grotesque,
became occasionally ridiculous, often contemptible, sometimes silly. His
tricks are met by tricks more cunning than his own; he is duped, and
retires discomfited. Before Luther appeared on the scene, the painters
and sculptors, not to mention the authors and poets, had made progress
in reducing the devil from the grade of an antagonist of deity and
arch-enemy of men to that of a cunning and amusing deceiver of
simpletons. "The great devil," as the author just mentioned remarks,
"sculptured over the door of the Autun Cathedral in the twelfth century
is a frightful being, well designed to strike terror to unformed souls;
but the young devils carved in bas-reliefs of the fifteenth century are
more comic than terrible, and it is evident that the artists who
executed them cared very little for the wicked tricks of the Evil
Spirit." We may be sure that the artist who could sketch the devil
fiddling upon a pair of bellows with a kitchen dipper had outgrown the
horror which that personage had once excited in all minds. Such a sketch
is here reproduced from a Flemish MS. in the library of Cambrai.
[Illustration: Devil fiddling upon a Pair of Bellows.]
But this could not be said of the great mass of Christian people for
centuries after. Luther, as the reader is aware, speaks of the devil
with as absolute an assurance of his existence, activity, and nearness
as if he were a member of his own household. God, he once said, mocks
and scorns the devil by putting under his nose such a weak creature as
man; and at other times he dwelt upon the hardness of the conflict which
the devil has to maintain. "It were not good for us to know how
earnestly the holy angels strive for us against the devil, or how hard a
combat it is. If we could see for how many angels one devil makes work,
we should be in despair." Many devils, he remarks with curious
certainty, are in forests, in waters, in wildernesses, in dark pooly
places, ready to hurt and prejudice people; and there are some in the
thick black clouds, which cause hail, lightnings, and thunderings, and
poison the air, the pastures, and grounds. He derides the philosophers
and physicians who say that these things have merely natural causes; and
as to the witches who torment honest people, and spoil their eggs, milk,
and butter, "I should have no compassion upon them--I would burn them
all." The Table-talk of the great reformer is full of such robust
credulity.
Luther represented, as much as he reformed, his age and country. In
these utterances of his we discern the spirit against which the humor
and gayety of art had to contend, and over which it has gained a tardy
victory, not yet complete. Let us keep in mind also that in those
twilight ages, as in all ages, there were the two contending influences
which we now call "the world" and "the church." In other words, there
were people who took the devil lightly, as they did all invisible and
spiritual things, and there were people who dreaded the devil in every
"dark pooly place," and to whom nothing could be a jest which
appertained to him. Humorous art has in it healing and admonition for
both these classes.
[Illustration: Oldest Drawing in the British Museum, A.D. 1320.]
It was in those centuries, also, that men of the world learned to laugh
at the clergy, and, again, not without clerical encouragement. In the
brilliantly illuminated religious manuscripts of the two centuries
preceding Luther, along with other ludicrous and absurd images, of which
specimens have been given, we find many pictures in which the vices of
the religious orders are exhibited. The oldest drawing in the British
Museum, one of the only two that bear the date 1320, shows us two devils
tossing a monk headlong from a bridge into a rough and rapid river, an
act which they perform in a manner not calculated to excite serious
thought in modern minds.
In the old Strasburg Cathedral there was a brass door, made in 1545,
upon which was engraved a convent with a procession of monks issuing
from it bearing the cross and banners. The foremost figure of this
procession was a monk carrying a girl upon his shoulders. This was not
the coarse fling of an enemy. It was not the scoff of an Erasmus, who
said once, "These paunchy monks are called _fathers_, and they take good
care to deserve the name." It was engraved on the eternal brass of a
religious edifice for the warning and edification of the faithful.
Nothing more surprises the modern reader than the frequency and severity
with which the clergy of those centuries were denounced and satirized,
as well by themselves as by others. A Church which showed itself
sensitive to the least taint of what it deemed heresy appears to have
beheld with indifference the exhibition of its moral delinquencies--nay,
taken the lead in exposing them. It was a clergyman who said, in the
Council of Siena, fifty years before Luther was born: "We see to-day
priests who are usurers, wine-shop keepers, merchants, governors of
castles, notaries, stewards, and debauch brokers. The only trade which
they have not yet commenced is that of executioner. The bishops surpass
Epicurus himself in sensuality, and it is between the courses of a
banquet that they discuss the authority of the Pope and that of the
Council." The same speaker related that St. Bridget, being in St.
Peter's at Rome, looked up in a religious ecstasy, and saw the nave
filled with mitred hogs. She asked the Lord to explain this fantastic
vision. "These," replied the Lord, "are the bishops and abbes of
to-day." M. Champfleury, the first living authority on subjects of this
nature, declares that the manuscript Bibles of the century preceding
Luther are so filled with pictures exhibiting monks and nuns in
equivocal circumstances that he was only puzzled to decide which
specimens were most suitable to give his readers an adequate idea of
them.
From mere gayety of heart, from the exuberant jollity of a
well-beneficed scholar, whose future was secure and whose time was all
his own, some of the higher clergy appear to have jested upon themselves
and their office. Two finely engraved seals have been found in France,
one dating as far back as 1300, which represent monkeys arrayed in the
vestments of a Church dignitary. Upon one of them the monkey wears the
hood and holds the staff of an abbot, and upon the other the animal
appears in the character of a bishop.
[Illustration: Bishop's Seal, A.D. 1300.]
One of these seals is known to have been executed at the express order
of an abbot. The other, a copy of which is given here, was found in the
ruins of an ancient chateau of Picardy, and bears the inscription, "LE:
SCEL: DE: LEUECQUE: DE: LA: CYTE: DE: PINON"--"The seal of the bishop of
the city of Pinon." This interesting relic was at first thought to be
the work of some scoffing Huguenot, but there can now be no doubt of its
having been the merry conceit of the personage whose title it bears. The
discovery of the record relating to the monkey seal of the abbot,
showing it to have been ordered and paid for by the actual head of a
great monastery, throws light upon all the grotesque ornamentation of
those centuries. It suggests to us also the idea that the clergy joined
in the general ridicule of their order as much from a sense of the
ludicrous as from conviction of its justice. In the British Museum there
is a religious manuscript of the thirteenth century, splendidly
illuminated, one of the initial letters of which represents a young
friar drawing wine from a cask in a cellar, that contains several
humorous points. With his left hand he holds the great wine-jug, into
which the liquid is running from the barrel; with his right he lifts to
his lips a bowlful of the wine, and from the same hand dangle the large
keys of the cellar. If this was intended as a hint to the younger
brethren how they ought not to behave when sent to the cellar for wine,
the artist evidently felt also the comic absurdity of the situation.
The vast cellars still to be seen under ancient monasteries and
priories, as well as the kitchens, not less spacious, and supported by
archways of the most massive masonry, tell a tale of the habits of the
religious orders which is abundantly confirmed in the records and
literature of the time. "Capuchins," says the old French doggerel,
"drink poorly, Benedictines deeply, Dominicans pint after pint, but
Franciscans drink the cellar dry." The great number of old taverns in
Europe named the Mitre, the Church, the Chapel-bell, St. Dominic, and
other ecclesiastical names, point to the conclusion that the class that
professed to dispense good cheer for the soul was not averse to good
cheer for the body.[9]
[Footnote 9: "History of Sign-boards," p. 319, by Larwood and Hotten,
London.]
If the clergy led the merriment caused by their own excesses, we can not
wonder they should have had many followers. In the popular tales of the
time, which have been gathered and made accessible in recent years, we
find the priest, the monk, the nun, the abbot, often figuring in absurd
situations, rarely in creditable ones. The priest seems to have been
regarded as the satirist's fair game, the common butt of the jester. In
one of these stories a butcher, returning home from a fair, asks a
night's lodging at the house of a priest, who churlishly refuses it. The
butcher, returning, offers in recompense to kill one of his fine fat
sheep for supper, and to leave behind him all the meat not eaten. On
this condition he is received, and the family enjoy an excellent supper
in his society. After supper he wins the favor first of the priest's
concubine and afterward of the maid-servant by secretly promising to
each of them the skin of the sheep. In the morning, after he has gone, a
prodigious uproar arises, the priest and the two women each vehemently
claiming the skin, in the midst of which it is discovered that the
butcher had stolen the sheep from the priest's own flock.
From a merry tale of these ages a jest was taken which to-day forms one
of the stock dialogues of our negro-minstrel bands. The story was
apparently designed to show the sorry stuff of which priests were
sometimes made. A farmer sends a lout of a son to college, intending to
make a priest of him, and the lad was examined as to the extent of his
knowledge. "Isaac had two sons, Esau and Jacob," said the examiner: "who
was Jacob's father?" The candidate, being unable to answer this
question, is sent home to his tutor with a letter relating his
discomfiture. "Thou foole and ass-head!" exclaims the tutor. "Dost thou
not know Tom Miller of Oseney?" "Yes," answered the hopeful scholar.
"Then thou knowest he had two sons, Tom and Jacke: who is Jacke's
father?" "Tom Miller." Back goes the youth to college with a letter to
the examiner, who, for the tutor's sake, gives him another chance, and
asks once more who was Jacob's father. "Marry!" cries the candidate, "I
can tell you now: that was Tom Miller of Oseney."
We must be cautious in drawing inferences from the popular literature of
a period, since there is in the unformed mind a propensity to circulate
amusing scandal, and the satirist is apt to aim his shaft at characters
and actions which are exceptional, not representative. In some of the
less frequented nooks of Europe, where the tone of mind among the people
has not materially changed since the fifteenth century, we still find
priests the constant theme of scandal. The Tyrolese, for example, as
some readers may have observed, are profuse in their votive offerings,
and indefatigable in their pilgrimages, processions, and
observances--the most superstitious people in Europe; but a recent
writer tells us that they "have a large collection of anecdotes,
humorous and scandalous, about their priests, and they take infinite
delight in telling them." They are not pious, as the writer remarks,
"but magpious." The Tyrolese may judge their priests correctly, but a
person who believes in magpious humbug may be expected to lend greedy
ears to comic scandal, and what the Tyrolese do to-day, their ancestors
may have done when Luther was a school-boy.
But of late years the exact, methodical records of the past, the laws,
law-books, and trials, which are now recognized to be among the most
trustworthy guides to a correct interpretation of antiquity, have been
diligently scrutinized, and we learn from them that it was among the
commonest of criminal events for clergymen, in the time of Edward III.
of England, to take part in acts of brigandage. A band of fifty men, for
example, broke into the park and warren of a lady, the Countess of
Lincoln, killed her game, cut down two thousand pounds' worth of timber,
and carried it off. In the list of the accused are the names of two
abbots and a prior. Several chaplains were in a band of knights and
squires who entered an inclosure belonging to the Archbishop of
Canterbury, drove off his cattle, cut down his trees, harvested his
wheat, and marched away with their booty. In a band of seventy who
committed a similar outrage at Carlton there were five parsons. Two
parsons were accused of assisting to break into the Earl of
Northampton's park and driving off his cattle. The prior of Bollington
was charged with a robbery of horses, cattle, sheep, and pigs. Five
clergymen were in the band that damaged the Bishop of Durham's park to
the extent of a thousand pounds. These examples and others were drawn
from a single roll of parchment of the year 1348; and that roll, itself
one of three, is only one of many sources of information. The author of
the "History of Crime" explains that the rolls of that year consist of
more than one hundred and twenty skins of parchment, among which there
are few that do not contain a reference to some lawless act committed
by knights or priests, or by a band consisting of both.[10]
[Footnote 10: "History of Crime in England," p. 248, by L. O. Pike,
London, 1873.]
This is record, not gossip, not literature; and it may serve to indicate
the basis of truth there was for the countless allusions to the
dissoluteness of the clergy in the popular writings and pictures of the
century that formed Luther and the Lutherans.
[Illustration: Pastor and Flock. (From the Window of a French Church,
Sixteenth Century.)]
It is scarcely possible in the compass of a chapter to convey an idea of
the burst of laughter that broke the long spell of superstitious terror,
and opened the minds of men to receive the better light. Such works as
the "Decameron" of Boccaccio, which to modern readers is only
interesting as showing what indecency could be read and uttered by fine
ladies and gentlemen on a picnic in 1350, had one character that
harmonized with the new influence. Their tone was utterly at variance
with the voice of the priest. The clergy, self-indulgent, preached
self-denial; practicing vice, they exaggerated human guilt. But the
ladies and gentlemen of the "Decameron," while practicing virtue, made
light of vice, and brought off the graceful profligate victorious. Later
was circulated in every land and tongue the merry tale of "Reynard the
Fox," which children still cherish among the choicest of their literary
treasures. Reynard, who appears in the sculptures of so many convents
and in the illuminations of so many pious manuscripts, whom monks loved
better than their missal, exhibits the same moral: witty wickedness
triumphant over brute strength. The fox cheats the wolf, deludes the
bear, lies to King Lion, turns monk, gallops headlong up and down the
commandments, only to be at last taken into the highest favor by the
king and made Prime Minister. It is not necessary to discover allegory
in this tale. What made it potent against the spell of priestly
influence was the innocent and boisterous merriment which it excited,
amidst which the gloom evoked by priestly arts began to break away.
Innocent mirth, next to immortal truth, is the thing most hostile to
whatever is mingled with religion which is hostile to the interests of
human nature.
And "Reynard," we must remember, was only the best and gayest of a large
class of similar fables that circulated during the childhood of Columbus
and of Luther. In one of the Latin stories given by Mr. Wright in his
"Selection," we have an account of the death and burial of the wolf, the
hero of the tale, which makes a most profane use of sacred objects and
rites, though it was written by a priest. The holy water was carried by
the hare, hedgehogs bore the candles, goats rang the bell, moles dug the
grave, foxes carried the bier, the bear celebrated mass, the ox read the
gospel, and the ass the epistle. When the burial was complete, the
animals sat down to a splendid banquet, and wished for another grand
funeral. Mark the moral drawn by the priestly author: "So it frequently
happens that when some rich man, an extortionist or a usurer, dies, the
abbot or prior of a convent of beasts [_i. e._, of men living like
beasts] causes them to assemble. For it commonly happens that in a great
convent of black or white monks [Benedictines or Augustinians] there are
none but beasts--lions by their pride, foxes by their craftiness, bears
by their voracity, stinking goats by their incontinence, asses by their
sluggishness, hedgehogs by their asperity, hares by their timidity
(because they were cowardly when there was no fear), and oxen by their
laborious cultivation of their land." Unquestionably this author
belonged to another order than those named in his tirade.
A book with original life in it becomes usually the progenitor of a line
of books. Brandt's "Ship of Fools," which was published when Luther was
eleven years old, gave rise to a literature. As soon as it appeared it
kindled the zeal of a noted preacher of Strasburg, Jacob Geiler by name,
who turned Brandt's gentle satire into fierce invective, which he
directed chiefly against the monks. The black friars, he said, were the
devil, the white friars his dame, and the others were their chickens.
The qualities of a good monk, he declared, were an almighty belly, an
ass's back, and a raven's mouth. From the pulpit, on another occasion,
he foretold a coming reformation in the Church, adding that he did not
expect to live to see it, though some that heard him might. The monks
taunted him with looking into the "Ship of Fools" for his texts instead
of the Scripture; but the people heard him eagerly, and one of his
pupils gave the public a series of his homely, biting sermons,
illustrated by wood-cuts, which ran through edition after edition.
Badius, a noted scholar of the time, was another who imitated the "Ship
of Fools," in a series of satirical pieces entitled "The Boats of
Foolish Women," in which the follies of the ladies of the period were
ridiculed.
[Illustration: Confessing to God. (Holbein, 1520.) Sale of Indulgences.]
Among the great number of works which the "Ship of Fools" suggested,
there was one which directly and powerfully prepared the way for Luther.
Erasmus, while residing in England, from 1497 to 1506, Luther being
still a student, read Brandt's work, and was stirred by it to write his
"Praise of Folly," which, under the most transparent disguise, is
chiefly a satire upon the ecclesiastics of the day. We may at least say
that it is only in the passages aimed at them that the author is at his
best. Before Luther had begun to think of the abuses of the Church,
Erasmus, in his little work, derided the credulous Christians who
thought to escape mishaps all day by paying devotion to St. Christopher
in the morning, and laughed at the soldiers who expected to come out of
battle with a whole skin if they had but taken the precaution to "mumble
over a set prayer before the picture of St. Barbara." He jested upon the
English who had constructed a gigantic figure of their patron saint as
large as the images of Hercules; only the saint was mounted upon a horse
"very gloriously accoutred," which the people scarcely refrained from
worshiping. But observe this passage in the very spirit of Luther,
though written fifteen years before the reformer publicly denounced
indulgences:
"What shall I say of such as cry up and maintain the cheat of pardons
and indulgences? who by these compute the time of each soul's residence
in purgatory, and assign them a longer or shorter continuance, according
as they purchase more or fewer of these paltry pardons and salable
exemptions?... By this easy way of purchasing pardon, any notorious
highwayman, any plundering soldier, or any bribe-taking judge shall
disburse some part of their unjust gains, and so think all their
grossest impieties sufficiently atoned for.... And what can be more
ridiculous than for some others to be confident of going to heaven by
repeating daily those seven verses out of the Psalms?"
These "fooleries," which Erasmus calls most gross and absurd, he says
are practiced not merely by the vulgar, but by "such proficients in
religion as one might well expect should have more wit." He ridicules
the notion of each country and place being under the special protection
of a patron saint, as well as the kindred absurdity of calling upon one
saint to cure a toothache, upon another to restore lost goods, upon
another to protect seamen, and upon another to guard cows and sheep. Nor
does he refrain from reflecting upon the homage paid to the Virgin Mary,
"whose blind devotees think it manners now to place the mother before
the Son." He utterly scouts and reviles the folly of hanging up
offerings at the shrines of saints for their imaginary aid in getting
the donors out of trouble or danger. The responsibility of all this
folly and delusion he boldly assigns to the priests, who gain money by
them. "They blacken the darkness and promote the delusion, wisely
foreseeing that the people (like cows which never give down their milk
so well as when they are gently stroked) would part with less if they
knew more." If any serious and wise man, he adds, should tell the people
that a pious life is the only way of securing a peaceful death, that
repentance and amendment alone can procure pardon, and that the best
devotion to a saint is to imitate his example, there would be a very
different estimate put upon masses, fastings, and other austerities.
Erasmus saw this prophecy fulfilled before many years had rolled over
his head.
[Illustration: Christ, the True Light. (Holbein, about 1520.)]
It is, however, in his chapters upon the amazingly ridiculous subtleties
of the monastic theology of his time that Erasmus gives us his most
exquisite fooling. Here he becomes, indeed, the merry Erasmus who was so
welcome at English Cambridge, at Paris, at Rome, in Germany, in Holland,
wherever there were good scholars and good fellows. He pretends to
approach this part of his subject with fear; for divines, he says, are
generally very hot and passionate, and when provoked they set upon a man
in full cry, and hurl at him the thunders of excommunication, that being
their spiritual weapon to wound such as lift up a hand against them. But
he plucks up courage, and proceeds to discourse upon the puerilities
which absorbed their minds. Among the theological questions which they
delighted to discuss were such as these: the precise manner in which
original sin was derived from our first parents; whether time was an
element in the supernatural generation of our Lord; whether it would be
a thing possible for the first person in the Trinity to hate the second;
whether God, who took our nature upon him in the form of a man, could as
well have become a woman, a beast, an herb, or a stone; and if he could,
how could he have then preached the gospel, or been nailed to the cross?
whether if St. Peter had celebrated the eucharist at the time when our
Saviour was upon the cross, the consecrated bread would have been
transubstantiated into the same body that remained on the tree; whether,
in Christ's corporal presence in the sacramental wafer, his humanity was
not abstracted from his Godhead; whether, after the resurrection, we
shall carnally eat and drink as we do in this life; how it is possible,
in the transubstantiation, for one body to be in several places at the
same time; which is the greater sin, to kill a hundred men, or for a
cobbler to set one stitch in a shoe on Sunday? Such subtleties as these
alternated with curious and minute delineations of purgatory, heaven,
and hell, their divisions, subdivisions, degrees, and qualities.
He heaps ridicule also upon the public preaching of those profound
theologians. It was mere stage-playing; and their delivery was the very
acme of the droll and the absurd. "Good Lord! how mimical are their
gestures! What heights and falls in their voice! What toning, what
bawling, what singing, what squeaking, what grimaces, what making of
mouths, what apes' faces and distorting of their countenances!" And
their matter was even more ridiculous than their manner. One of these
absurd divines, discoursing upon the name of Jesus, subtly pretended to
discover a revelation of the Trinity in the very letters of which the
name was composed. It was declined only in _three_ cases. That was one
mysterious coincidence. Then the nominative ended in S, the accusative
in M, and the ablative in U, which obviously indicated Summus, the
beginning; Medius, the middle; and Ultimus, the end of all things. Other
examples he gives of the same profound nature. Nor did the different
orders of monks escape his lash. He dwelt upon the preposterous
importance they attached to trifling details of dress and ceremonial.
"They must be very critical in the precise number of their knots, in the
tying-on of their sandals, of what precise colors their respective
habits should be made, and of what stuff; how broad and long their
girdles, how big and in what fashion their hoods, whether their bald
crowns be of the right cut to a hair's-breadth, how many hours they must
sleep, and at what minute rise to prayers."
In this manner he proceeds for many a sprightly page, rising from monks
to bishops and cardinals, and from them to popes, "who _pretend_
themselves Christ's vicars," while resembling the Lord in nothing.
Luther never went farther, never was bolder or more biting, than Erasmus
in this essay. But all went for nothing with the great leader of reform,
because Erasmus refused to abandon the Church, and cast in his lot
openly with the reformers. Luther calls him "a mere Momus," who laughed
at Catholic and Protestant alike, and looked upon the Christian religion
itself very much as Lucian did upon the Greek. "Whenever I pray," said
Luther once, "I pray for a curse upon Erasmus." It was certainly a
significant fact that in the heat of that contest Erasmus should have
given the world a translation of Lucian. But he was a great, wise,
genial soul, whose fame will brighten as that age becomes more justly
and familiarly known to us.
The first place in the annals of such a warfare belongs of right to the
soldiers who took their lives in their hands and went forth to meet the
foe in the open field, braving torture, infamy, and death for the cause.
Such were Luther and his followers. But there is a place in human memory
for the philosopher and the humorist who first made the contest
possible, and then rendered it shorter and easier.