Part 54 (2/2)
But the little finger of the reforming pope was thicker than the Puritan's loins; where Calvin had chastised with whips Sixtus V chastised with scorpions. Adrian VI, the first Catholic Reformer after Luther, could not away with ”those idols of the heathen,” the ancient statues.
Clement VII for a moment restored the old regime of art and licentiousness together, having Perino del Vaga paint his bathroom with scenes from the life of Venus in the manner of Giulio Romano. But the Council of Trent made severe regulations against nude pictures, in pursuance of which Daniel da Volterra was appointed to paint breeches on all the naked figures of Michelangelo's Last Judgment and on similar paintings. Sixtus V, who could hardly endure the Laoc.o.o.n and Apollo Belvidere, was bent on destroying the monuments of heathendom. The ruin was complete when to her cruel hate the church added {691} her yet more cruel love. Along came the Jesuits offering, like pedlars, instead of the good old article a subst.i.tute guaranteed by them to be ”just as good,” and a great deal cheaper. Painting was sentimentalized and ”moralized” under their tuition; architecture adopted the baroque style, gaudy and insincere. The church was stuffed with gewgaws and tinsel; marble was replaced by painted plaster and saintliness by sickliness.
SECTION 5. BOOKS
[Sidenote: Numbers of books published]
The sixteenth was the first really bookish century. There were then in Germany alone about 100,000 works printed, or reprinted. If each edition amounted to 1000--a fair average, for if many editions were smaller, some were much larger--that would mean that about a million volumes were offered to the German public each year throughout the century. There is no doubt that the religious controversy had a great deal to do with the expansion of the reading public, for it had the same effect on the circulation of pamphlets that a political campaign now has on the circulation of the newspaper. The following figures show how rapidly the number of books published in Germany increased during the decisive years. In 1518 there were 150, in 1519 260, in 1520 570, 1521 620, in 1522 680, 1523 935, and 1524 990.
Many of these books were short, controversial tracts; some others were intended as purveyors of news pure and simple. Some of these broadsides were devoted to a single event, as the _Neue Zeitung: Die Schlacht des turkischen Kaisers_, [Sidenote: 1526] others had several items of interest, including letters from distant parts. Occasionally a mere lampoon would appear under the t.i.tle of _Neue Zeitung_, corresponding to our funny papers. But these subst.i.tutes for modern journals were both rare and irregular; the world then got along with much {692} less information about current events than it now enjoys.
Nor was there anything like our weekly and monthly magazines.
The new age was impatient of medieval literature. The schoolmen, never widely read, were widely mocked. The humanists, too, fell into deep disgrace, charged with self-conceit, profligacy and irreligion. They still wandered around, like the sophists in ancient Greece, bemoaning their hard lot and deploring the coa.r.s.eness of an unappreciative time.
Their real fault was that they were, or claimed to be, an aristocracy, and the people, who could read for themselves, no longer were imposed on by pretensions to esoteric learning and a Ciceronian style.
Even the medieval vernacular romances no longer suited the taste of the new generation. A certain cla.s.s continued to read _Amadis of Gaul_ or _La Morte d'Arthur_ furtively, but the arbiters of taste declared that they would no longer do. The Puritan found them immoral; the man of the world thought them ridiculous. Ascham a.s.serts that ”the whole pleasure” of _La Morte d'Arthur_, ”standeth in two special points, in open manslaughter and bold bawdry.” The century was hardly out when Cervantes published his famous and deadly satire on the knight errant.
[Sidenote: Poetry]
But as the tale of chivalry decayed, the old metal was trans.m.u.ted into the pure gold of the poetry of Ariosto, Ta.s.so and Spenser. The claim to reality was abandoned and the poet quite frankly conjured up a fantastic, fairy world, full of giants and wizards and enchantments and hippogryphs, and knights of incredible pugnacity who rescue damsels of miraculous beauty. Well might the Italian, before Luther and Loyola came to take the joy out of life, lose himself in the honeyed words and the amorous adventures of the hero who went mad for love. Another generation, and {693} Ta.s.so must wind his voluptuous verses around a religious epic. Edmund Spenser, the Puritan and Englishman, allegorized the whole in such fas.h.i.+on that while the conscience was soothed by knowing that all the knights and ladies represented moral virtues or vices, the senses were t.i.tillated by mellifluous cadences and by naked descriptions of the temptations of the Bower of Bliss.
And how British that Queen Elizabeth of England should impersonate the princ.i.p.al virtues!
Poetry was in the hearts of the people; song was on their lips. The early spring of Italy came later to the northern lat.i.tudes, but when it did come, it brought with it Marot and Ronsard in France, Wyatt and Surrey in England. More significant than the output of the greater poets was the wide distribution of lyric talent. Not a few compilations of verses offer to the public the songs of many writers, some of them unknown by name. England, especially, was ”a nest of singing birds,” rapturously greeting the dawn, and the rimes were mostly of ”love, whose month is always May.” Each songster poured forth his heart in fresh, frank praise of his mistress's beauty, or in chiding of her cruelty, or in lamenting her unfaithfulness. There was something very simple and direct about it all; nothing deeply psychological until at the very end of the century Shakespeare's ”sugared sonnets” gave his ”private friends” something to think about as well as something to enjoy.
[Sidenote: Wit]
If life could not be all love it could be nearly all laughter. Wit and humor were appreciated above all things, and Satire awoke to a sense of her terrible power. Two statues at Rome, called Pasquino and Marforio, were used as billboards to which the people affixed squibbs and lampoons against the government and public men. Erasmus laughed at everything; {694} Luther and Murner belabored each other with ridicule; a man like Peter Aretino owed his evil eminence in the art of blackmailing to his wit.
[Sidenote: Rabelais, c. 1490-1553]
But the ”master of scoffing,” as Bacon far too contemptuously called him, was Rabelais. His laughter is as mult.i.tudinous as the ocean billows, and as wholesome as the suns.h.i.+ne. He laughed not because he scorned life but because he loved it; he did not ”warm both hands”
before the fire of existence, he rollicked before its blaze. It cannot be said that he took a ”slice of life” as his subject, for this would imply a more exquisite excision than he would care to make; rather he reached out, in the fas.h.i.+on of his time, and pulled with both hands from the dish before him, the very largest and fattest chunk of life that he could grasp. ”You never saw a man,” he said of himself, ”who would more love to be king or to be rich than I would, so that I could live richly and not work and not worry, and that I might enrich all my friends and all good, wise people.” Like Whitman he was so in love with everything that the mere repet.i.tion of common names delighted him.
It took pages to tell what Pantagruel ate and still more pages to tell what he drank. This giant dressed with a more than royal lavishness and when he played cards, how many games do you suppose Rabelais enumerated one after the other without pausing to take breath? Two hundred and fourteen! So he treated everything; his appet.i.te was like Gargantua's mouth. This was the very stamp of the age; it was gluttonous of all pleasures, of food and drink and gorgeous clothes and fine dwellings and merry-making without end, and adventure without stint or limit. Almost every sixteenth-century man was a Pantagruel, whose l.u.s.t for living fully and hotly no satiety could cloy, no fear of consequences {695} dampen. The ascetic gloom and terror of the Middle Ages burned away like an early fog before the summer sun. Men saw the world unfolding before them as if in a second creation, and they hurled themselves on it with but one fear, that they should be too slow or too backward to garner all its wonder and all its pleasure for themselves.
[Sidenote: Tales of vagabonds]
And the people were no longer content to leave the glory of life to their superiors. They saw no reason why all the good things should be preserved like game for the n.o.bles to hunt, or inclosed like commons, for the pasturage of a few aristocratic mutton-heads. So in literature they were quite content to let the fastidious gentry read their fill of poetry about knights wandering in fairy-lands forlorn, while they themselves devoured books about humbler heroes. The Picaresque novel in Spain and its counterparts, Till Eulenspiegel or Reinecke Vos in the north, told the adventures of some rascal or vagabond. Living by his wits he found it a good life to cheat and to gamble, to drink and to make love.
[Sidenote: Plays]
For those who could not concentrate on a book, there was the drama.
From the Middle Ages, when the play was a vehicle of religious instruction, it developed in the period of the Renaissance into a completely secular mirror of life. In Italy there was an exquisite literary drama, turning on some plot of love or tale of seduction, and there was alongside of this a popular sort of farce known as the Commedia dell' Arte, in which only the outline of the plot was sketched, and the characters, usually typical persons as the Lover, his Lady, the Bragging Captain, the Miser, would fill in the dialogue and such comic ”business” as tickled the fancy of the audience.
Somewhat akin to these pieces in spirit were the {696} Shrovetide Farces written in Germany by the simple Nuremberger who describes himself in the verses, literally translatable:
Hans Sachs is a shoe- Maker and poet, too.
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