Albert Dürer. T. Sturge Moore
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 Dürer's youth, found sermons in stones, carved stones representing saint, bishop, or Virgin. And Dürer 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 Dürer, 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 Dürer 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 Dürer'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 Dürer 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