Strasbourg and its Cathedral.--Gutenberg’s Early Life.--Civil
Strife.--Romantic Lawsuit.
Who has not heard of the noble Rhine, which winds many hundred miles
through Central Europe? Castles, vineyards, farms, and forests, with
now and then a village or a city, diversify its banks.
Prominent among its cities is Strasbourg; a strongly fortified border
town, founded ages ago by the Romans, but held recently by France. It
was an imperial city of the German empire in 1681, when Louis XIV. got
possession of it, by an unwarrantable attack in a time of peace. It is
in shape a triangle, with walls six miles in circuit, entered by seven
gates. The fortifications extend to the Rhine, although the main city,
of 85,000 inhabitants, is situated a mile and a half back on the Ill,
a branch of the Rhine. The tourist, while still far distant, sees the
spire of the famous Cathedral, Nôtre Dame. It is the highest spire in
the world, a masterpiece of airy open-work, of elaborate tracery and
delicate workmanship, towering aloft four hundred and sixty-six feet,
twenty-four feet higher than the great Pyramid of Egypt, and more than
twice as high as Bunker Hill Monument. The great Minster of which
it is a part, was nine hundred years in building, and was finished
shortly before our story begins. When the late war came, the Rhine,
Strasbourg, and its Cathedral, were not wholly unlike what they were
at that time,--four hundred and thirty-five years ago. It is true,
railroad trains would shriek on either side of the river, and gaudy
steamers bustle up and down, and occasionally a “water-cure” or a
“juvenile reformatory” meet the eye, signs of modern progress; but in
strange contrast with these the Roman and mediæval remains. Rhineland
is at once ancient and modern. Here are “ruins of the Middle Ages, and
marks of the French Revolution; the bones of great feudal giants, and
scars of modern disturbance.” The old homes of the warlike barons still
stand, and the incense-flavored churches, whose corner-stones were laid
in the dim past.
It is in the year 1436; and the visitor, if he approaches the city
from the French side, before entering the west gate will be sure
to seek out John Gutenberg, a noted man who lives in the suburbs in
yonder pretty cottage, half hidden in ivy and honeysuckle, and the
ancient turrets of St. Arbogast Monastery, not a stone’s throw distant,
frowning upon it. There is a woman of taste within; the well-trained
vines speak of her, as do the tulips and wall-flowers. And the eye
glances admiringly from these to the apple-trees, with their wealth of
blossoms, and the lilacs, jubilant with plumes.
Gutenberg was born at Mentz, a free and rich city on the Rhine,
about the year 1400, and, when yet a young man, fled, on account of
political dissensions, to Strasbourg, sixty miles distant. Of his
childhood little is known; yet some German and other writers draw
pleasing pictures of his youth. They represent him as high-spirited,
thoughtful, and devout; influenced by a desire that good books might
be made common, and as having “a foreseeing consciousness” of the
part he was to act in bringing it about. “He said to himself, from
his earliest years,” says one of his biographers, “God suffers in the
great multitudes whom his sacred word cannot reach. Religious truth is
captive in a small number of manuscript books, which guard the common
treasure, instead of diffusing it. Let us break the seal which holds
the holy things; give wings to the truth, that by means of speech, no
longer written at great expense by the hand that wearies itself, but
multiplied as the air by an unwearied machine, it may fly to seek every
soul born into the world!”
If this was true of Gutenberg while young, no wonder that his manhood
was crowned so gloriously. He placed before himself at the outset
a great and worthy object; he felt through life the thrill of an
inspiring purpose, which stimulated and ennobled his nature, and tended
naturally to success. Had he, like thousands, been contented to drift
through the world with the current wherever it chanced to bear him,
living for himself and the fleeting present, never should we have heard
of John Gutenberg.
But there is a fact in Gutenberg’s early history which does not seem
to present him in an amiable light, as he figures in a lawsuit,
having been sued by the father of his betrothed, to compel him to
fulfill his promise of marriage. There is, however, no evidence that
Gutenberg intended any wrong in this affair, as he sincerely loved
Anna von Isernen Thür,[1] the young lady to whom he was engaged. She
was of noble family, of the city of Strasbourg. His property had been
confiscated in Mentz in the struggle between the plebeians and the
nobility, and his failure in keeping his troth is attributed to his
sensitiveness to his misfortunes.
[1] Family name, it is said, from the possession of a feudal
castle on the heights of the Rhine.
It has been remarked, that if Mentz, Gutenberg’s native place, had
not been a free city, he might not have conceived or executed his
invention; for despotism, like superstition, imposes silence. “It was
fitting that printing and liberty should be born of the same sun and
the same air.” Mentz, Strasbourg, Worms, and other municipal cities of
the Rhine, were small federative republics; as Florence, Genoa, Venice,
and the republics of Italy. The youth of our country find freedom
favorable to thought and invention; thus young Gutenberg found it. Yet
civil strife marked the history of those cities. “In them were the
warlike nobility, the aspiring burghers, and the laboring people, who
floated between these two contending classes, alternately caressed and
oppressed by them, yet at times themselves striving for the supremacy.
In these commotions, victory rested sometimes with the patrician,
sometimes with the plebeian, and numbers on either side were from
time to time outlawed. But these had not the sea to cross to fly the
country; they traversed the Rhine. Those banished from Strasbourg, went
to Mentz; those from Mentz, to Strasbourg, to await a turn of events,
or the recall of the exiles.”
In these intestine quarrels, young Gutenberg, himself of the nobility,
“and naturally combating for the cause most holy in the eyes of a son,
that of a father,” was twice vanquished and expelled by the burghers,
with all the chevaliers of the family,--his mother and sisters being
permitted to remain in possession of their property. Later, the
free city of Frankfort offering to mediate between the nobles and
plebeians, it obtained the return of those who had been banished, on
condition of the equality of the two classes in the administration
of the government. Meanwhile Gutenberg, having become absorbed in
his inventive studies, did not return; and his mother petitioned the
Republic to give him as a pension a portion of the revenue of his
confiscated property. Answer was given, that the refusing to return
to his own country, by the young patrician, was a declaration of
hostility; and he must therefore be treated as one of its enemies. So
his mother continued to send him secret supplies from her own resources.
But the faithful Lady Anna did not seek to free herself from her
plighted faith, because of the adversities of her lover. If he
shrank from receiving her to the humble circumstances in which he
had been thrown, she was still true to her vows. And as his humility
and thoughtful scruples could not be overcome in any other way, she
vanquished them by a legal summons; her father citing him before a
magistrate of Strasbourg, to cause him to fulfill his promise of
marriage. This summons of the Lady Anna to Gutenberg remains to-day
as an authentic memorial of his marriage. For the faltering artisan
yielded to “this generous violence of affection,” and consummated his
happiness by marrying the fair plaintiff in the suit.
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