Albert Durer
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T. Sturge Moore >> Albert Durer
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"The kingdom of heaven is within you," but hell is also within.
"Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed
In one self place; for where we are is hell
And where hell is, must we for ever be:
And, to conclude, when all the world dissolves,
And every creature shall be purified,
All places shall be hell that are not heaven,"
as Marlowe makes his Mephistophilis say: and the best art is the most
perfect expression of that which is within, of heaven or of hell.
Goethe said:
"In the Greeks, whose poetry and rhetoric was simple and positive, we
encounter expressions of approval more often than of disapproval. With
the Romans, on the other hand, the contrary holds good; and the more
corrupted poetry and rhetoric become, the more will censure grow and
praise diminish."
I have sometimes thought that the difference between classic and more or
less decadent art lies in the fact that by the one things are
appreciated for what they most essentially are--a young man, a swift
horse, a chaste wife, &c.--by the other for some more or less peculiar
or accidental relation that they hold to the creator. Such writers
lament that the young are not old, the old not young, prostitutes not
pure, that maidens are cold and modest or matrons portly. They complain
of having suffered from things being cross, or they take malicious
pleasure in pointing that crossness out; whereas classical art always
rebounds from the perception that things are evil to the assertion of
what ought to be or shall be. It triumphs over the Prince of Darkness,
and covers a multitude of sins, as dew or hoar frost cover and make
beautiful a dunghill. Dunghills exist; but he who makes of Macbeth's or
Clytemnestra's crimes an elevating or exhilarating spectacle triumphs
over the god of this world, as Jesus did when he made the most
ignominious death the symbol, of his victory and glory. Little wonder
that Albert Duerer, and Michael Angelo found such deep satisfaction in
Him as the object of their worship--his method of docility was
next-of-kin to that of their art. Respect and solicitude create the
soul, and these two pre-eminently docile passions preside over the
soul's creation, whether it be a society, a life, or a thing of beauty.
V
Here, when art was still religion, with a simple, reverent heart,
Lived and laboured Albrecht Duerer, the Evangelist of Art.
These jingling lines would scarcely merit consideration but that they
express a common notion which has its part of truth as well as of error.
Let us examine the first assertion (that art has been religion.)
Baudelaire, in his _Curiosites Esthetiques_ says: _La premiere affaire
d'un artiste est de substituer l'homme a la nature et de protester
contre elle_. ("The first thing for an artist is to substitute man for
nature and to protest against her.") The beginners and the smatterers
are always "students of nature," and suppose that to be so will suffice;
but when the understanding and imagination gain width and elasticity,
life is more and more understood as a long struggle to overcome or
humanise nature by that which most essentially distinguishes man from
other animals and inanimate nature. Religion should be the drill and
exercise of the human faculties to fit them and maintain them in
readiness for this struggle; the work of art should be the assertion of
victory. A life worthy of remembrance is a work of art, a life worthy of
universal remembrance is a masterpiece: only the materials employed
differentiate it from any other work of art. The life of Jesus is
considered as such a masterpiece. Thus we can say that if art has never
been religion, religion has always been and ever will be an art.
Now let us examine the second assertion that Duerer was an evangelist.
What kind of character do we mean to praise when we say a man is an
evangelist? Two only of the four evangelists can be said to reveal any
ascertainable personality, and only St. John is sufficiently outlined to
stand as a type; but I do not think we mean to imply a resemblance to
St. John. The bringer of good news, the evangelist par excellence, was
Jesus. He it was who made it evident that the sons of men have power to
forgive sins. Victory over evil possible--this was the good news. No
doubt every sincere Christian is supposed to be a more or less
successful imitator of Jesus; and as such, Duerer may rightly be called
an evangelist. But more than this is I think, implied in the use of the
word; an evangelist is, for us above all a bringer of good news in
something of the same manner as Jesus brought it, by living among
sinners for those sinners' sake, among paupers for those paupers' sake;
to see a man sweet, radiant, and victorious under these circumstances,
is to see an evangelist. Goethe's final claim is that, "after all, there
are honest people up and down the world who have got light from my
books; and whoever reads them, and gives himself the trouble to
understand me, will acknowledge that he has acquired thence a certain
inward freedom"; and for this reason I have been tempted to call him the
evangelist of the modern world. But it is best to use the word as I
believe it is most correctly employed, and not to yield to the
temptation (for tempting it is) to call men like Duerer and Goethe
evangelists. They are teachers who charm as well as inform us, as Jesus
was; but they are not evangelists in the sense that he was, for they did
not deal directly with human life where it is forced most against its
distinctive desire for increase in nobility, or is most obviously
degraded by having betrayed it.'[11]
VI
I have often heard it objected that Jesus is too feminine an ideal, too
much based on renunciation and the effort to make the best of failure.
No doubt that as women are, by the necessity of their function, more
liable to the ship-wreck of their hopes, the bankruptcy of their powers,
they have been drawn to cling to this hope of salvation in greater
numbers, and with more fervour; so that the most general idea of Jesus
may be a feminine one. It does not follow that this is the most correct
or the best: every object, every person will appear differently to
different natures. And it still remains true that there have been a
great many men of very various types who have drawn strength and beauty
from the contemplation and reverence of Jesus. That this ideal is too
much based on making the best of failure is an objection that makes very
little impression on me, for I think I perceive that failure is one of
the most constant and widespread conditions of the universe, and even
more certainly of human life.
VII
It remains now to see in what degree these ideas were felt or made
themselves felt through the Romanism and Lutheranism of the Renascence
period. Perhaps we English shall best recognise the presence of these
ideas, the working of this leaven--this docility, the necessary midwife
of 'genius, who transforms the difficult tasks which the human reason
sets herself into labours of love--in an Englishman; so my first example
shall be taken from Erasmus' portrait of Dean Colet.
It was then that my acquaintance with him began, he being then thirty, I
two or three months his junior. He had no theological degree, but the
whole University, doctors and all, went to hear him. Henry VII took note
of him, and made him Dean of St. Paul's. His first step was to restore
discipline in the Chapter, which had all gone to wreck. He preached
every saint's day to great crowds. He cut down household expenses, and
abolished suppers and evening parties. At dinner a boy reads a chapter
from Scripture; Colet takes a passage from it and discourses to the
universal delight. Conversation is his chief pleasure, and he will keep
it up till midnight if he finds a companion. Me he has often taken with
him on his walks, and talks all the time of Christ. He hates coarse
language, furniture, dress, food, books, all clean and tidy, but
scrupulously plain; and he wears grey woollen when priests generally go
in purple. With the large fortune which he inherited from his father, he
founded and endowed a school at St. Paul's entirely at his own cost--
masters, houses, salaries, everything.
He is a man of genuine piety. He was not born with it. He was naturally
hot, impetuous and resentful--indolent, fond of pleasure and of women's
society--disposed to make a joke of everything. He told me that he had
fought against his faults with study, fasting and prayer, and thus his
whole life was in fact unpolluted with the world's defilements. His
money he gave all to pious uses, worked incessantly, talked always on
serious subjects, to conquer his disposition to levity; not but what you
could see traces of the old Adam when wit was flying at feast or
festival. He avoided large parties for this reason. He dined on a single
dish, with a draught or two of light ale. He liked good wine, but
abstained on principle. I never knew a man of sunnier nature. No one
ever more enjoyed cultivated society; but here, too, he denied himself,
and was always thinking of the life to come.
His opinions were peculiar, and he was reserved in expressing them for
fear of exciting suspicion. He knew how unfairly men judge each other,
how credulous they are of evil, how much easier it is for a lying tongue
to stain a reputation than for a friend to clear it. But among his
friends he spoke his mind freely.
He admitted privately that many things were generally taught which he
did not believe, but he would not create a scandal by blurting out his
objections. No book could be so heretical but he would read it, and read
it carefully. He learnt more from such books than he learnt from
dogmatism and interested orthodoxy.[12]
Some may wonder what Colet could have found to say about Christ which
could not only interest but delight the young and witty Erasmus; and may
judge that at any rate to-day such a subject is sufficiently fly-blown.
The proper reflection to make is, "A rose by any other name would smell
as sweet."
Whether we say Christ or Perfection does not matter, it is what we mean
which is either enthralling or dull, fresh or fusty; "there's nothing
in a name."
"When Colet speaks I might be listening to Plato," says Erasmus in
another place, at a time when he was still younger and had just come
from what had been a gay and perhaps in some measure a dissolute life in
Paris: not that it is possible to imagine Erasmus as at any time
committing great excesses, or deeply sinning against the sense of
proportion and measure.
Success is the only criterion, as in art, so in religion: the man that
plucks out his eye and casts it from him, and remains the dull, greedy,
distressful soul he was before, is a damned fool; but the man who does
the same and becomes such that his younger friends report of him, "I
never knew a sunnier nature," is an artist in life, a great artist in
the sense that Christ is supposed to have been a great master; one who
draws men to him, as bees are drawn to flowers. Colet drew the young
Henry the Eighth as well as Erasmus. "The King said: 'Let every man
choose his own doctor. Dean Colet shall be mine!'" Though no doubt
charlatans have often fascinated young scholars and monarchs, yet it is
peculiarly impossible to think of Colet as a charlatan.
VIII
Next let us take a sonnet and a sentence from Michael Angelo:
Yes! hope may with my strong desire keep pace,
And I be undeluded, unbetrayed;
For if of our affections none finds grace
In sight of heaven, then, wherefore hath God made
The world which we inhabit? Better plea
Love cannot have than that in loving thee
Glory to that eternal peace is paid,
Who such divinity to thee imparts,
As hallows and makes pure all gentle hearts.
His hope is treacherous only whose love dies
With beauty, which is varying every hour;
But in chaste hearts, uninfluenced by the power
Of outward change, there blooms a deathless flower,
That breathes on earth the air of paradise.[13]
It is very remarkable how strongly the conviction of permanence, and the
preference for the inward conception over external beauty are expressed
in this fine sonnet; and also that the reason given for accepting the
discipline of love is that experience shows how it "hallows and makes
pure all gentle hearts." In such a love poem--the object of which might
very well have been Jesus--I seem to find more of the spirit of his
religion, whereby he binds his disciples to the Father that ruled within
him, till they too feel the bond of parentage as deeply as himself and
become sons with him of his Father;--more of that binding power of Jesus
is for me expressed in this fine sonnet than in Luther's Catechism. The
religion that enables a great artist to write of love in this strain, is
the religion of docility, of the meek and lowly heart. For Michael
Angelo was not a man by nature of a meek and lowly heart, any more than
Colet was a man naturally saintly or than Luther was a man naturally
refined. But because Michael Angelo thus prefers the kingdom of heaven
to external beauty, one must not suppose that he, its arch high-priest,
despised it. Nobody had a more profound respect for the thing of beauty,
whether it was the creation of God or man. He said:
"Nothing makes the soul so pure, so religious, as the endeavour to
create something perfect; for God is perfection, and whoever strives for
perfection, strives for something that is God-like."
Now we can perceive how the same spirit worked in a great artist, not at
Nuremberg or London, but at Rome, the centre of the world, where a
Borgia could be Pope.
IX
Erasmus, the typical humanist, the man who loved humanity so much that
he felt that his love for it might tempt him to fight against God,
travelled from the one world to the other; passed from the society of
cardinals and princes to the seclusion of burgher homes in London, or to
chat with Duerer at Antwerp. He belonged perhaps to neither world at
heart; but how greatly his love and veneration of the one exceeded his
admiration and sense of the practical utility of the other, a comparison
of his sketch of Colet with such a note as this from his New Testament
makes abundantly plain:
"I saw with my own eyes Pope Julius II. at Bologna, and afterwards at
Rome, marching at the head of a triumphal procession as if he were
Pompey or Caesar. St. Peter subdued the world with faith, not with arms
or soldiers or military engines. St. Peter's successors would win as
many victories as St. Peter won if they had Peter's spirit."
But we must not forget that the book in which these notes appeared was
published with the approval of a Pope, and that he and others sought its
author for advice as to how to cope best with their more hot-headed
enemy Martin Luther. We must also remember that we are told that Colet
"was not very hard on priests and monks who only sinned with women. He
did not make light of impurity, but thought it less criminal than spite
and malice and envy and vanity and ignorance. The loose sort were at
least made human and modest by their very faults, and he regarded
avarice and arrogance as blacker sins in a priest than a hundred
concubines." This spirit was not that of the Reformation which came to
stop, yet it existed and was widespread at that time; it was I think the
spirit which either formed or sustained most of the great artists. At
any rate it both formed and sustained Albert Duerer. Yet the true nature
of these ideas, derived from Jesus, could not be understood even by
Colet, even by Erasmus. For them it was tradition which gave value and
assured truth to Christ's ideas, not the truth of those ideas which gave
value to the traditions and legends concerning him. The value of those
ideas was felt, sometimes nearer, sometimes further off; it was loved
and admired; their lives were apprehended by it, and spent in
illustrating and studying it, as were also those of Albert Duerer and
Michael Angelo. To understand the life and work of such men, we must
form some conception of the true nature and value of those ideas, as I
have striven to do in this chapter. Otherwise we shall merely admire and
love them, as they admired and loved Jesus; and it has now become a
point of honour with educated men not only to love and admire, but to
make the effort to understand. Even they desired to do this. And I think
we may rejoice that the present time gives us some advantage over those
days, at least in this respect.
X
And lastly, in order to bring us back to our main subject, let us quote
from a stray leaf of a lost MS. Book of Duerer's, which contains the
description of his father's death.
... desired. So the old wife helped him up, and the night-cap
on his head had suddenly become wet with drops of sweat. Then
he asked to drink, so she gave him a little Reinfell wine. He
took a very little of it, and then desired to get into bed
again and thanked her. And when he had got into bed he fell
at once into his last agony. The old wife quickly kindled the
candle for him and repeated to him S. Bernard's verses, and
ere she had said the third he was gone. God be merciful to
him! And the young maid, when she saw the change, ran quickly
to my chamber and woke me, but before I came down he was
gone. I saw the dead with great sorrow, because I had not
been worthy to be with him at his end.
And thus in the night before S. Matthew's eve my father
passed away, in the year above mentioned (Sept. 20, 1502)
--the merciful God help me also to a happy end--and he left
my mother an afflicted widow behind him. He was ever wont to
praise her highly to me, saying what a good wife she was,
wherefore I intend never to forsake her. I pray you for God's
sake, all ye my friends, when you read of the death of my
father, to remember his soul with an "Our Father" and an "Ave
Maria"; and also for your own sake, that we may so serve God
as to attain a happy life and the blessing of a good end. For
it is not possible for one who has lived well to depart ill
from this world, for God is full of compassion. Through which
may He grant us, after this pitiful life, the joy of
everlasting salvation--in the name of the Father, the Son,
and the Holy Ghost, at the beginning and at the end, one
Eternal Governor. Amen.
The last sentences of this may seem to share in the character of the
vain repetitions of words with which professed believers are only too
apt to weary and disgust others. They are in any case commonplaces: the
image has taken the place of the object; the Father in heaven is not
considered so much as the paternal governor of the inner life as the
ruler of a future life and of this world. The use of such phrases is as
much idolatry as the worship of statue and picture, or as little, if the
words are repeated, as I think in this case they were, out of a feeling
of awe and reverence for preceding mental impressions and experiences,
and not because their repetition in itself was counted for
righteousness. Their use, if this was so, is no more to be found fault
with than the contemplation of pictures or statues of holy personages in
order to help the mind to attend to their ensample, or the reading of a
poem, to fill the mind with ennobling emotions. Idolatry is natural and
right in children and other simple souls among primitive peoples or
elsewhere. It is a stage in mental development. Lovers pass through the
idolatrous stage of their passion just as children cut their teeth. It
is a pity to see individuals or nations remain childish in this respect
just as much as in any other, or to see them return to it in their
decrepitude. But a temper, a spirit, an influence cannot easily be
apprehended apart from examples and images; and perhaps the clearest
reason is only the exercise of an infinitely elastic idolatry, which
with sprightly efficiency finds and worships good in everything, just as
the devout, in Duerer's youth, found sermons in stones, carved stones
representing saint, bishop, or Virgin. And Duerer all his life long
continued to produce pictures and engravings which were intended to
preach such sermons.
Goethe admirably remarks:
"_Superstition_ is the poetry of life; the poet therefore suffers no
harm from being _superstitious_." (Aberglaube.)
Superstition and idolatry are an expenditure of emotion of a kind and
degree which the true facts would not warrant; poetry when least
superstitious is a like exercise of the emotions in order to raise and
enhance them; superstition when most poetical unconsciously effects the
same thing.
This glimpse he gives of the way in which death visited his home, and
how the visitation impressed him, is coloured and glows with that temper
of docility which made Colet school himself so severely, and was the
source of Michael Angelo's so fervent outpourings. And all through the
accounts which remain of his life, we may trace the same spirit ever
anew setting him to school, and renewing his resolution to learn both
from his feelings and from his senses.
XI
As I took a sentence from Michael Angelo, I will now take a sentence
from Duerer, one showing strongly that evangelical strain so
characteristic of him, born of his intuitive sense for human solidarity.
After an argument, which will be found on page 306, he concludes: "It is
right, therefore, for one man to teach another. He that doeth so
joyfully, upon him shall much be bestowed by God."[14] These last words,
like the last phrases of my former quotation from him, may stand perhaps
in the way of some, as nowadays they may easily sound glib or
irreverent. But are we less convinced that only tasks done joyfully, as
labours of love, deserve the reward of fuller and finer powers, and
obtain it? When Duerer thought of God, he did not only think of a
mythological personage resembling an old king; he thought of a mind, an
intention, "for God is perfect in goodness." Words so easily come to
obscure what they were meant to reveal; and if we think how the notion
of perfect goodness rules and sways such a man's mind, we shall not
wonder that he did not stumble at the omnipotency which revolts us,
cowed as we are by the presence of evil. The old gentleman dressed like
a king;--this was not the part of his ideas about God which occupied
Duerer's mind. He accepted it, but did not think about it: it filled what
would otherwise have been a blank in his mind and in the minds of those
about him. But he was constantly anxious about what he ought to do and
study in order to fulfil the best in himself, and about what ought to be
done by his town, his nation, and the civilisation that then was, in
order to turn man's nature and the world to an account answerable to the
beauty of their fairer aspects. God was the will that commanded that
"consummation devoutly to be wished." Obedience to His law revealed in
the Bible was the means by which this command could be carried out; and
to a man turning from the Church as it then existed to the newly
translated Bible texts, the commands of God as declared in those texts
seemed of necessity reason itself compared with the commands of the
Popes; were, in fact, infinitely more reasonable, infinitely more akin
to a good man's mind and will. Luther's revolt is for us now
characterised by those elements in it which proved inadequate--were
irrational; but then these were insignificant in comparison with the
light which his downright honesty shed on the monstrous and amazingly
irrational Church. This huge closed society of bigots and worldlings
which arrogated to itself all powers human and divine, and used them
according to the lusts and intemperance of an Alexander Borgia, a Julius
II., and a Leo X., was that farce perception of which made Rabelais
shake the world with laughter, and which roused such consuming
indignation in Luther and Calvin that they created the gloomy
puritanical asylums in which millions of Germans, English, and Americans
were shut up for two hundred years, as Matthew Arnold puts it. But Duerer
was not so immured: even Luther at heart neither was himself, nor
desired that others should be, prevented from enjoying the free use of
their intellectual powers. It was because he was less perspicacious than
Erasmus that he did not see that this was what he was inevitably doing
in his wrath and in his haste.
XII
Erasmus was, perhaps, the man in Europe who at that time displayed most
docility; the man whom neither sickness, the desire for wealth and
honour, the hope to conquer, the lust to engage in disputes, nor the
adverse chances that held him half his life in debt and necessitous
straits, and kept him all his life long a vagrant, constantly upon the
road--the man in whom none of these things could weaken a marvellous
assiduity to learn and help others to learn. He it was who had most
kinship with Duerer among the artists then alive; for Duerer is very
eminent among them for this temper of docility. It is interesting to see
how he once turned to Erasmus in a devout meditation, written in the
journal he kept during his journey to the Netherlands. His voice comes
to us from an atmosphere charged with the electric influence of the
greatest Reformer, Martin Luther, who had just disappeared, no man knew
why or whither; though all men suspected foul play. In his daily life,
by sweetness of manner, by gentle dignity and modesty, Duerer showed his
religion, the admiration and love that bound his life, in a way that at
all times and in all places commands applause. The burning indignation
of the following passage may in times of spiritual peace or somnolence
appear over-wrought and uncouth. We must remember that all that Duerer
loved had been bound by his religion to the teaching and inspiration of
Jesus, and had become inseparable from it. All that he loved--learning,
clear and orderly thought, honesty, freedom to express the worship of
his heart without its being turned to a mockery by cynical monk, priest,
or prelate;--these things directly, and indirectly art itself, seemed to
him threatened by the corruption of the Papal power. We must remember
this; for we shall naturally feel, as Erasmus did, that the path of
martyrdom was really a short cut, which a wider view of the surrounding
country would have shown him to be likely to prove the longest way in
the end. Indeed the world is not altogether yet arrived where he thought
Erasmus could bring it in less than two years. And Luther himself
returned to the scene and was active, without any such result, a dozen
years and more.
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