Beziers. "A fervent Cistercian contemporary informs us that when Arnaud
was asked whether the Catholics should be spared, he feared the heretics
would escape by feigning orthodoxy, and fiercely replied, 'Kill them
all, for God knows his own.'" Caesarius, to whom we owe the _locus
classicus_, was a Cistercian and a contemporary, but he was not so
fervent as that, for he tells it as a report, not as a fact, with a
caution which ought not to have evaporated. "Fertur dixisse: Caedite
eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius!" The Catholic defenders had been
summoned to separate from the Cathari, and had replied that they were
determined to share their fate. It was then resolved to make an example,
which we are assured bore fruit afterwards. The hasty zeal of Citeaux
adopted the speech of the abbot and gave it currency. But its rejection
by the French scholars, Tamizey de Larroque and Auguste Molinier, was a
warning against presenting it with a smooth surface, as a thing tested
and ascertained. Mr. Lea, in other passages, has shown his disbelief in
Caesarius of Heisterbach, and knows that history written in reliance
upon him would be history fit for the moon. Words as ferocious are
recorded of another legate at a different siege (Langlois, _Regne de
Philippe le Hardi_, p. 156). Their tragic significance for history is
not in the mouth of an angry crusader at the storming of a fortress, but
in the pen of an inoffensive monk, watching and praying under the
peaceful summit of the Seven Mountains.
Mr. Lea undertakes to dispute no doctrine and to propose no moral. He
starts with an avowed desire not to say what may be construed
injuriously to the character or feelings of men. He writes pure history,
and is methodically oblivious of applied history. The broad and
sufficient realm of fact is divided by a scientific frontier from the
outer world of interested argument. Beyond the frontier he has no
cognisance, and neither aspires to inflame passions nor to compose the
great eirenikon. Those who approach with love or hatred are to go empty
away; if indeed he does not try by turns to fill them both. He seeks his
object not by standing aloof, as if the name that perplexed Polyphemus
was the proper name for historians, but by running successively on
opposing lines. He conceives that civilised Europe owes its preservation
to the radiant centre of religious power at Rome, and is grateful to
Innocent III. for the vigour with which he recognised that force was the
only cure for the pestiferous opinions of misguided zealots. One of his
authorities is the inquisitor Bernardus Guidonis, and there is no writer
whom, in various shapes, he quotes so often. But when Guidonis says that
Dolcino and Margarita suffered _per juditium ecclesie_, Mr. Lea is
careful to vindicate the clergy from the blame of their sufferings.
From a distinction which he draws between despotism and its abuse, and
from a phrase, disparaging to elections, about rivers that cannot rise
above the level of their source, it would appear that Mr. Lea is not
under compulsion to that rigid liberalism which, by repressing the
time-test and applying the main rules of morality all round, converts
history into a frightful monument of sin. Yet, in the wake of passages
which push the praises of authority to the verge of irony, dire
denunciations follow. When the author looks back upon his labours, he
discerns "a scene of almost unrelieved blackness." He avers that "the
deliberate burning alive of a human being simply for difference of
belief, is an atrocity," and speaks of a "fiendish legislation," "an
infernal curiosity," a "seemingly causeless ferocity which appears to
persecute for the mere pleasure of persecuting." The Inquisition is
"energetic only in evil"; it is "a standing mockery of justice, perhaps
the most iniquitous that the arbitrary cruelty of man has ever
devised."
This is not the protest of wounded humanity. The righteous resolve to
beware of doctrine has not been strictly kept. In the private judgment
of the writer, the thinking of the Middle Ages was sophistry and their
belief superstition. For the erring and suffering mass of mankind he has
an enlightened sympathy; for the intricacies of speculation he has none.
He cherishes a disbelief, theological or inductive it matters not, in
sinners rescued by repentance and in blessings obtained by prayer.
Between remitted guilt and remitted punishment he draws a vanishing line
that makes it doubtful whether Luther started from the limits of
purgatory or the limits of hell. He finds that it was a universal
precept to break faith with heretics, that it was no arbitrary or
artificial innovation to destroy them, but the faithful outcome of the
traditional spirit of the Church. He hints that the horror of sensuality
may be easily carried too far, and that Saint Francis of Assisi was in
truth not very much removed from a worshipper of the devil. Prescott, I
think, conceived a resemblance between the god of Montezuma and the god
of Torquemada; but he saw and suspected less than his more learned
countryman. If any life was left in the Strappado and the Samarra, no
book would deserve better than this description of their vicissitudes to
go the way of its author, and to fare with the flagrant volume, snatched
from the burning at Champel, which is still exhibited to Unitarian
pilgrims in the Rue de Richelieu.
In other characteristic places we are taught to observe the agency of
human passion, ambition, avarice, and pride; and wade through oceans of
unvaried evil with that sense of dejection which comes from Digby's
_Mores Catholici_ or the _Origines de la France Contemporaine_, books
which affect the mind by the pressure of repeated instances. The
Inquisition is not merely "the monstrous offspring of mistaken zeal,"
but it is "utilised by selfish greed and lust of power." No piling of
secondary motives will confront us with the true cause. Some of those
who fleshed their swords with preliminary bloodshed on their way to the
holy war may have owed their victims money; some who in 1348 shared the
worst crime that Christian nations have committed perhaps believed that
Jews spread the plague. But the problem is not there. Neither credulity
nor cupidity is equal to the burden. It needs no weighty scholar,
pressed down and running over with the produce of immense research, to
demonstrate how common men in a barbarous age were tempted and
demoralised by the tremendous power over pain, and death, and hell. We
have to learn by what reasoning process, by what ethical motive, men
trained to charity and mercy came to forsake the ancient ways and made
themselves cheerfully familiar with the mysteries of the
torture-chamber, the perpetual prison, and the stake. And this cleared
away, when it has been explained why the gentlest of women chose that
the keeper of her conscience should be Conrad of Marburg, and,
inversely, how that relentless slaughterer directed so pure a penitent
as Saint Elizabeth, a larger problem follows. After the first
generation, we find that the strongest, the most original, the most
independent minds in Europe--men born for opposition, who were neither
awed nor dazzled by canon law and scholastic theology, by the master of
sentences, the philosopher and the gloss--fully agreed with Guala and
Raymond. And we ask how it came about that, as the rigour of official
zeal relaxed, and there was no compulsion, the fallen cause was taken up
by the Council of Constance, the University of Paris, the
States-General, the House of Commons, and the first reformers; that
Ximenes outdid the early Dominicans, while Vives was teaching
toleration; that Fisher, with his friend's handy book of revolutionary
liberalism in his pocket, declared that violence is the best argument
with Protestants; that Luther, excommunicated for condemning
persecution, became a persecutor? Force of habit will not help us, nor
love and fear of authority, nor the unperceived absorption of
circumambient fumes.
Somewhere Mr. Lea, perhaps remembering Maryland, Rhode Island, and
Pennsylvania, speaks of "what was universal public opinion from the
thirteenth to the seventeenth century." The obstacle to this theory, as
of a ship labouring on the Bank, or an orb in the tail of a comet, is
that the opinion is associated with no area of time, and remains
unshaken. The Dominican democrat who took his seat with the Mountain in
1848 never swerved from the principles of his order. More often, and, I
think, more deliberately, Mr. Lea urges that intolerance is implied in
the definition of the mediaeval Church, that it sprang from the root and
grew with "the very law of its being." It is no desperate expedient of
authority at bay, for "the people were as eager as their pastors to send
the heretic to the stake." Therefore he does not blame the perpetrator,
but his inherited creed. "No firm believer in the doctrine of exclusive
salvation could doubt that the truest mercy lay in sweeping away the
emissaries of Satan with fire and sword." What we have here is the logic
of history, constraining every system to utter its last word, to empty
its wallets, and work its consequences out to the end. But this radical
doctrine misguides its author to the anachronism that as early as the
first Leo "the final step had been taken, and the Church was definitely
pledged to the suppression of heresy at whatever cost."
We do not demand that historians shall compose our opinions or relieve
us from the purifying pains of thought. It is well if they discard
dogmatising, if they defer judgment, or judge, with the philosopher, by
precepts capable of being a guide for all. We may be content that they
should deny themselves, and repress their sentiments and wishes. When
these are contradictory, or such as evidently to tinge the medium, an
unholy curiosity is engendered to learn distinctly not only what the
writer knows, but what he thinks. Mr. Lea has a malicious pleasure in
baffling inquiry into the principle of his judgments. Having found, in
the Catechism of Saint Sulpice, that devout Catholics are much on a par
with the fanatics whose sympathy with Satan made the holy office a
requisite of civilisation, and having, by his exuberant censure,
prepared us to hear that this requisite of civilisation "might well seem
the invention of demons," he arrives at the inharmonious conclusion that
it was wrought and worked, with benefit to their souls, by sincere and
godly men. The condemnation of Hus is the proper test, because it was
the extreme case of all. The council was master of the situation, and
was crowded with men accustomed to disparage the authority of the Holy
See and to denounce its acts. Practically, there was no pope either of
Rome or Avignon. The Inquisition languished. There was the plausible
plea of deference to the emperor and his passport; there was the
imperative consideration for the religious future of Bohemia. The
reforming divines were free to pursue their own scheme of justice, of
mercy, and of policy. The scheme they pursued has found an assiduous
apologist in their new historian. "To accuse the good fathers of
Constance of conscious bad faith" is impossible. To observe the
safe-conduct would have seemed absurd "to the most conscientious jurists
of the council." In a nutshell, "if the result was inevitable, it was
the fault of the system and not of the judges, and their conscience
might well feel satisfied."
There may be more in this than the oratorical precaution of a scholar
wanting nothing, who chooses to be discreet rather than explicit, or the
wavering utterance of a mind not always strung to the same pitch. It is
not the craving to rescue a favourite or to clear a record, but a fusion
of unsettled doctrines of retrospective contempt. There is a
demonstration of progress in looking back without looking up, in finding
that the old world was wrong in the grain, that the kosmos which is
inexorable to folly is indifferent to sin. Man is not an abstraction,
but a manufactured product of the society with which he stands or falls,
which is answerable for crimes that are the shadow and the echo of its
own nobler vices, and has no right to hang the rogue it rears. Before
you lash the detected class, mulct the undetected. Crime without a
culprit, the unavenged victim who perishes by no man's fault, law
without responsibility, the virtuous agent of a vicious cause--all these
are the signs and pennons of a philosophy not recent, but rather
inarticulate still and inchoate, which awaits analysis by Professor
Flint.
No propositions are simpler or more comprehensive than the two, that an
incorrigible misbeliever ought to burn, or that the man who burns him
ought to hang. The world as expanded on the liberal and on the hegemonic
projection is patent to all men, and the alternatives, that Lacordaire
was bad and Conrad good, are clear in all their bearings. They are too
gross and palpable for Mr. Lea. He steers a subtler course. He does not
sentence the heretic, but he will not protect him from his doom. He does
not care for the inquisitor, but he will not resist him in the discharge
of his duty. To establish a tenable footing on that narrow but needful
platform is the epilogue these painful volumes want, that we may not be
found with the traveller who discovered a precipice to the right of him,
another to the left, and nothing between. Their profound and admirable
erudition leads up, like Hellwald's _Culturgeschichte_, to a great note
of interrogation. When we find the Carolina and the savage justice of
Tudor judges brought to bear on the exquisitely complex psychological
revolution that proceeded, after the year 1200, about the Gulf of Lyons
and the Tyrrhene Sea, we miss the historic question. When we learn that
Priscillian was murdered (i. 214), but that Lechler has no business to
call the sentence on John Hus "ein wahrer Justizmord" (ii. 494), and
then again that the burning of a heretic is a judicial murder after all
(i. 552), we feel bereft of the philosophic answer.
Although Mr. Lea gives little heed to Pani and Hefele, Gams and Du Boys,
and the others who write for the Inquisition without pleading ignorance,
he emphasises a Belgian who lately wrote that the Church never employed
direct constraint against heretics. People who never heard of the
Belgian will wonder that so much is made of this conventional figleaf.
Nearly the same assertion may be found, with varieties of caution and of
confidence, in a catena of divines, from Bergier to Newman. To appear
unfamiliar with the defence exposes the writer to the thrust that you
cannot know the strength or the weakness of a case until you have heard
its advocates. The liberality of Leo XIII., which has yielded a
splendid and impartial harvest to Ehrle, and Schottmueller, and the
Ecole Francaise, raises the question whether the Abbe Duchesne or Father
Denifle supplied with all the resources of the archives which are no
longer secret would produce a very different or more complete account.
As a philosophy of religious persecution the book is inadequate. The
derivation of sects, though resting always upon good supports, stands
out from an indistinct background of dogmatic history. The intruding
maxims, darkened by shadows of earth, fail to ensure at all times the
objective and delicate handling of mediaeval theory. But the vital parts
are protected by a panoply of mail. From the Albigensian crusade to the
fall of the Templars and to that Franciscan movement wherein the key to
Dante lies, the design and organisation, the activity and decline of the
Inquisition constitute a sound and solid structure that will survive the
censure of all critics. Apart from surprises still in store at Rome, and
the manifest abundance of Philadelphia, the knowledge which is common
property, within reach of men who seriously invoke history as the final
remedy for untruth and the sovereign arbiter of opinion, can add little
to the searching labours of the American.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 401: _English Historical Review_, 1888.]
XVI
THE AMERICAN COMMONWEALTH. By JAMES BRYCE[402]
_THE AMERICAN COMMONWEALTH_ cancels that sentence of Scaliger which
Bacon amplifies in his warning against bookish politicians: "Nec ego nec
alius doctus possumus scribere in politicis." The distinctive import of
the book is its power of impressing American readers. Mr. Bryce is in a
better position than the philosopher who said of another, "Ich hoffe,
wir werden uns recht gut verstaendigen koennen; und wenn auch keiner den
andern ganz versteht, wird doch jeder dem andern dazu helfen, dass er
sich selbst besser verstehe." He writes with so much familiarity and
feeling--the national, political, social sympathy is so spontaneous and
sincere--as to carry a very large measure indeed of quiet reproach. The
perfect tone is enough to sweeten and lubricate a medicine such as no
traveller since Hippocrates has administered to contrite natives. Facts,
not comments, convey the lesson; and I know no better illustration of a
recent saying: "Si un livre porte un enseignement, ce doit etre malgre
son auteur, par la force meme des faits qu'il raconte."
If our countryman has not the chill sententiousness of his great French
predecessor, his portable wisdom and detached thoughts, he has made a
far deeper study of real life, apart from comparative politics and the
European investment of transatlantic experience. One of the very few
propositions which he has taken straight from Tocqueville is also one of
the few which a determined fault-finder would be able to contest. For
they both say that the need for two chambers has become an axiom of
political science. I will admit that the doctrine of Paine and Franklin
and Samuel Adams, which the Pennsylvanian example and the authority of
Turgot made so popular in France, is confuted by the argument of
Laboulaye: "La division du corps legislatif est une condition
essentielle de la liberte. C'est la seule garantie qui assure la nation
contre l'usurpation de ses mandataires." But it may be urged that a
truth which is disputed is not an axiom; and serious men still imagine a
state of things in which an undivided legislature is necessary to resist
a too powerful executive, whilst two chambers can be made to curb and
neutralise each other. Both Tocqueville and Turgot are said to have
wavered on this point.
It has been said that Tocqueville never understood the federal
constitution. He believed, to his last edition, that the opening words
of the first section, "all legislative powers herein granted," meant
"tous les pouvoirs legislatifs determines par les representants." Story
thought that he "has borrowed the greater part of his reflections from
American works [meaning his own and Lieber's] and little from his own
observation." The French minister at Washington described his book as
"interessant mais fort peu exact"; and even the _Nation_ calls it
"brilliant, superficial, and attractive." Mr. Bryce can never be accused
of imperfect knowledge or penetration, of undue dependence upon others,
or of writing up to a purpose. His fault is elsewhere. This scholar,
distinguished not only as a successful writer of history, which is said
to be frequent, but as a trained and professed historian, which is rare,
altogether declines the jurisdiction of the HISTORICAL REVIEW. His
contumacy is in gross black and white: "I have had to resist another
temptation, that of straying off into history." Three stout volumes tell
how things are, without telling how they came about. I should have no
title to bring them before this tribunal, if it were not for an
occasional glimpse at the past; if it were not for a strongly marked
and personal philosophy of American history which looms behind the Boss
and the Boom, the Hoodlum and the Mugwump.
There is a valid excuse for preferring to address the unhistoric mind.
The process of development by which the America of Tocqueville became
the America of Lincoln has been lately described with a fulness of
knowledge which no European can rival. Readers who thirst for the
running stream can plunge and struggle through several thousand pages of
Holst's _Verfassungsgeschichte_, and it is better to accept the division
of labour than to take up ground so recently covered by a work which, if
not very well designed or well composed, is, by the prodigious digestion
of material, the most instructive ever written on the natural history of
federal democracy. The author, who has spent twenty years on American
debates and newspapers, began during the pause between Sadowa and Woerth,
when Germany was in the throes of political concentration that made the
empire. He explains with complacency how another irrepressible conflict
between centre and circumference came and went, and how the welfare of
mankind is better served by the gathering than by the balance or
dispersion of forces. Like Gneist and Tocqueville, he thinks of one
country while he speaks of another; he knows nothing of reticence or
economy in the revelation of private opinion; and he has none of Mr.
Bryce's cheery indulgence for folly and error. But when the British
author refuses to devote six months to the files of Californian
journalism, he leaves the German master of his allotted field.
The actual predominates so much with Mr. Bryce that he has hardly a word
on that extraordinary aspect of democracy, the union in time of war; and
gives no more than a passing glance at the confederate scheme of
government, of which a northern writer said: "The invaluable reforms
enumerated should be adopted by the United States, with or without a
reunion of the seceded States, and as soon as possible." There are
points on which some additional light could be drawn from the roaring
loom of time. In the chapter on Spoils it is not stated that the idea
belongs to the ministers of George III. Hamilton's argument against
removals is mentioned, but not the New York edition of _The Federalist_
with the marginal note that "Mr. H. had changed his view of the
constitution on that point." The French wars of speculation and plunder
are spoken of; but, to give honour where honour is due, it should be
added that they were an American suggestion. In May 1790, Morris wrote
to two of his friends at Paris: "I see no means of extricating you from
your troubles, but that which most men would consider as the means of
plunging you into greater--I mean a war. And you should make it to
yourselves a war of men, to your neighbours a war of money.... I hear
you cry out that the finances are in a deplorable situation. This should
be no obstacle. I think that they may be restored during war better than
in peace. You want also something to turn men's attention from their
present discontents." There is a long and impartial inquiry into
parliamentary corruption as practised now; but one wishes to hear so
good a judge on the report that money prevailed at some of the
turning-points of American history; on the imputations cast by the
younger Adams upon his ablest contemporaries; on the story told by
another president, of 223 representatives who received accommodation
from the bank, at the rate of a thousand pounds apiece, during its
struggle with Jackson.
America as known to the man in the cars, and America observed in the
roll of the ages, do not always give the same totals. We learn that the
best capacity of the country is withheld from politics, that there is
what Emerson calls a gradual withdrawal of tender consciences from the
social organisation, so that the representatives approach the level of
the constituents. Yet it is in political science only that America
occupies the first rank. There are six Americans on a level with the
foremost Europeans, with Smith and Turgot, Mill and Humboldt. Five of
these were secretaries of state, and one was secretary of the treasury.
We are told also that the American of to-day regards the national
institutions with a confidence sometimes grotesque. But this is a
sentiment which comes down, not from Washington and Jefferson, but from
Grant and Sherman. The illustrious founders were not proud of their
accomplished work; and men like Clay and Adams persisted in desponding
to the second and third generation. We have to distinguish what the
nation owes to Madison and Marshall, and what to the army of the
Potomac; for men's minds misgave them as to the constitution until it
was cemented by the ordeal and the sacrifice of civil war. Even the
claim put forward for Americans as the providers of humour for mankind
seems to me subject to the same limitation. People used to know how
often, or how seldom, Washington laughed during the war; but who has
numbered the jokes of Lincoln?