BACKWARD. THE RELIGIOUS INDIFFERENCE

AND THE ARTISTIC AND LITERARY
ENTHUSIASM OF THE RENAISSANCE

WERE FOLLOWED BY THE ARTISTIC AND
LITERARY INDIFFERENCE AND THE RELIGIOUS

ENTHUSIASM OF THE REFORMATION
OF course you have heard of the Reformation. You think

of a small but courageous group of pilgrims who crossed the
ocean to have ``freedom of religious worship.'' Vaguely in the

course of time (and more especially in our Protestant countries)
the Reformation has come to stand for the idea of

``liberty of thought.'' Martin Luther is represented as the
leader of the vanguard of progress. But when history is

something more than a series of flattering speeches addressed
to our own glorious ancestors, when to use the words of the

German historian Ranke, we try to discover what ``actually
happened,'' then much of the past is seen in a very different

light.
Few things in human life are either entirely good or entirely

bad. Few things are either black or white. It is the duty of
the honest chronicler to give a true account of all the good and

bad sides of every historical event. It is very difficult to do
this because we all have our personal likes and dislikes. But

we ought to try and be as fair as we can be, and must not allow
our prejudices to influence us too much.

Take my own case as an example. I grew up in the very
Protestant centre of a very Protestant country. I never saw

any Catholics until I was about twelve years old. Then I felt
very uncomfortable when I met them. I was a little bit afraid.

I knew the story of the many thousand people who had been
burned and hanged and quartered by the Spanish Inquisition

when the Duke of Alba tried to cure the Dutch people of their
Lutheran and Calvinistic heresies. All that was very real

to me. It seemed to have happened only the day before. It
might occur again. There might be another Saint Bartholomew's

night, and poor little me would be slaughtered in my
nightie and my body would be thrown out of the window, as

had happened to the noble Admiral de Coligny.
Much later I went to live for a number of years in a Catholic

country. I found the people much pleasanter and much
more tolerant and quite as intelligent as my former countrymen.

To my great surprise, I began to discover that there
was a Catholic side to the Reformation, quite as much as a

Protestant.
Of course the good people of the sixteenth and seventeenth

centuries, who actually lived through the Reformation, did
not see things that way. They were always right and their

enemy was always wrong. It was a question of hang or be
hanged, and both sides preferred to do the hanging. Which

was no more than human and for which they deserve no blame.
When we look at the world as it appeared in the year 1500,

an easy date to remember, and the year in which the Emperor
Charles V was born, this is what we see. The feudaldisorder

of the Middle Ages has given way before the order of a number
of highly centralised kingdoms. The most powerful of

all sovereigns is the great Charles, then a baby in a cradle.
He is the grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella and of Maxi-

milian of Habsburg, the last of the mediaeval knights, and of
his wife Mary, the daughter of Charles the Bold, the ambitious

Burgundian duke who had made successful war upon France
but had been killed by the independent Swiss peasants. The

child Charles, therefore, has fallen heir to the greater part of
the map, to all the lands of his parents, grandparents, uncles,

cousins and aunts in Germany, in Austria, in Holland, in
Belgium, in Italy, and in Spain, together with all their colonies

in Asia, Africa and America. By a strange irony of fate, he
has been born in Ghent, in that same castle of the counts of

Flanders, which the Germans used as a prison during their
recent occupation of Belgium, and although a Spanish king

and a German emperor, he receives the training of a Fleming.
As his father is dead (poisoned, so people say, but this is

never proved), and his mother has lost her mind (she is travelling
through her domains with the coffin containing the body

of her departed husband), the child is left to the strict
discipline of his Aunt Margaret. Forced to rule Germans and

Italians and Spaniards and a hundred strange races, Charles
grows up a Fleming, a faithful son of the Catholic Church,

but quite averse to religious intolerance. He is rather lazy,
both as a boy and as a man. But fate condemns him to rule

the world when the world is in a turmoil of religious fervour.
Forever he is speeding from Madrid to Innsbruck and from

Bruges to Vienna. He loves peace and quiet and he is always
at war. At the age of fifty-five, we see him turn his back upon

the human race in utter disgust at so much hate and so much
stupidity. Three years later he dies, a very tired and disappointed

man.
So much for Charles the Emperor. How about the Church,

the second great power in the world? The Church has changed
greatly since the early days of the Middle Ages, when it started

out to conquer the heathen and show them the advantages of
a pious and righteous life. In the first place, the Church has

grown too rich. The Pope is no longer the shepherd of a flock
of humble Christians. He lives in a vast palace and surrounds

himself with artists and musicians and famous literary men.
His churches and chapels are covered with new pictures in

which the saints look more like Greek Gods than is strictly
necessary. He divides his time unevenly between affairs of

state and art. The affairs of state take ten percent of his time.
The other ninety percent goes to an active interest in Roman

statues, recently discovered Greek vases, plans for a new summer
home, the rehearsal of a new play. The Archbishops and

the Cardinals follow the example of their Pope. The Bishops
try to imitate the Archbishops. The village priests, however,

have remained faithful to their duties. They keep themselves
aloof from the wicked world and the heathenish love of beauty

and pleasure. They stay away from the monasteries where
the monks seem to have forgotten their ancient vows of simplicity

and poverty and live as happily as they dare without
causing too much of a public scandal.

Finally, there are the common people. They are much
better off than they have ever been before. They are more

prosperous, they live in better houses, their children go to better
schools, their cities are more beautiful than before, their

firearms have made them the equal of their old enemies, the
robber-barons, who for centuries have levied such heavy taxes

upon their trade. So much for the chief actors in the
Reformation.

Now let us see what the Renaissance has done to Europe,
and then you will understand how the revival of learning and

art was bound to be followed by a revival of religious interests.
The Renaissance began in Italy. From there it spread

to France. It was not quite successful in Spain, where
five hundred years of warfare with the Moors had made the

people very narrow minded and very fanatical in all religious
matters. The circle had grown wider and wider, but once the

Alps had been crossed, the Renaissance had suffered a change.
The people of northern Europe, living in a very different

climate, had an outlook upon life which contrasted strangely
with that of their southern neighbours. The Italians lived out

in the open, under a sunny sky. It was easy for them to laugh
and to sing and to be happy. The Germans, the Dutch, the

English, the Swedes, spent most of their time indoors, listening
to the rain beating on the closed windows of their comfortable

little houses. They did not laugh quite so much. They
took everything more seriously. They were forever conscious

of their immortal souls and they did not like to be funny about
matters which they considered holy and sacred. The ``humanistic''

part of the Renaissance, the books, the studies of ancient
authors, the grammar and the text-books, interested them

greatly. But the general return to the old pagan civilisation
of Greece and Rome, which was one of the chief results of the

Renaissance in Italy, filled their hearts with horror.
But the Papacy and the College of Cardinals was almost

entirely composed of Italians and they had turned the Church
into a pleasant club where people discussed art and music and

the theatre, but rarely mentioned religion. Hence the split
between the serious north and the more civilised but easy-going

and indifferent south was growing wider and wider all the
time and nobody seemed to be aware of the danger that threatened

the Church.
There were a few minor reasons which will explain why the

Reformation took place in Germany rather than in Sweden
or England. The Germans bore an ancient grudge against

Rome. The endless quarrels between Emperor and Pope had
caused much mutualbitterness. In the other European countries

where the government rested in the hands of a strong
king, the ruler had often been able to protect his subjects

against the greed of the priests. In Germany, where a shadowy
emperor ruled a turbulent crowd of little princelings, the good

burghers were more directly at the mercy of their bishops and
prelates. These dignitaries were trying to collect large sums

of money for the benefit of those enormous churches which
were a hobby of the Popes of the Renaissance. The Germans

felt that they were being mulcted and quite naturally they did
not like it.

And then there is the rarely mentioned fact that Germany
was the home of the printing press. In northern Europe books

were cheap and the Bible was no longer a mysterious manu-
script owned and explained by the priest. It was a household