Albert Dürer

by T. Sturge Moore

I

But while Dürer was thus busily at work or dunning his great debtors, Luther had appeared. In 1517 he nailed his ninety-five theses to the door of Wittenberg church, and Cardinal Caietan by the unlucky Leo X. was poured like oil upon the fire which they had lighted. Luther had been summoned to meet the Cardinal at the Diet of Augsburg, where Dürer went to see Maximilian, though he only arrived there after our friends from Nuremberg had departed. However, Luther passed through Nuremberg on foot, and borrowed a coat of a friend there in order to figure with decency before the Diet. Yet Dürer probably did not meet him, although the words in the letter to George Spalatin, quoted above, "If ever I meet Dr. Martin Luther, I intend to draw a careful portrait of him and engrave it on copper," do not forbid the possibility of this early meeting before the Reformer had become so famous. Next the Pope tried to soothe by sending Miltitz with flatteries and promises--a man that could smile and weep to order, but who succeeded neither with the Elector Frederic, nor with Luther, nor with Germany. At Nuremberg the preacher Wenzel Link soon formed a little reformed congregation, to which Dürer, Pirkheimer, Spengler, Nützel, Scheurl, Ebner, Holzschurher, and others belonged. We have already seen how, soon after this, Dürer was anxious for Luther's safety, by the letter to the wise Elector, quoted above; and in 1518 he sent Luther a number of his prints, and soon after joined with others of Link's hearers to send a greeting of encouragement. And before long we find him jotting down a list of sixteen of Luther's tracts, either because he intended to get and read them, or because they were already his; and on the back of a drawing we find the following outline of the faith such as he then apprehended it, in which we see clearly that Christ has become the voice of conscience--the power in a man by which he recognises and creates good.

Seeing that through disobedience of sin we have fallen into everlasting Death, no help could have reached us save through the incarnation of the Son of God, whereby He through His innocent suffering might abundantly pay the Father all our guilt, so that the Justice of God might be satisfied. For He has repented, of and made atonement for the sins of the whole world, and has obtained of the Father Everlasting Life. Therefore Christ Jesus is the Son of God, the highest power, who can do all things, and He is the Eternal life. Into whomsoever Christ comes he lives, and himself lives in Christ. Therefore all things are in Christ good things. There is nothing good in us except it becomes good in Christ. Whosoever, therefore, will altogether justify himself is unjust. If we will what is good, Christ wills it in us. No human repentance is enough to equalise deadly sin and be fruitful.

In this the old mythological language is retained, but it has received a new interpretation or significance, and this quite without the writer's perceiving what he is doing. Christ is affirmed to have repented of the sins of the whole world. Among the early heresiarchs there were, I believe, some who went so far as to hold that he had committed the sins before he repented of them, and triumphed over their effects by his sufferings and death. In any case, a similar feeling is expressed by our odd mystic Blake in his "Everlasting Gospel":

"If He (Jesus) intended to take on sin,

His mother should an harlot have bin."

The actual records of Christ are too meagre the moment he is regarded as an allegory of human life; and such additions to the creed spring naturally out of the ardent seeker's desire to realise the universality implied in the dogma of his Godhead, which is accepted even by Blake as a historical fact beyond question. It was not the character of so much as can be perceived of the universe which daunted Luther and Dürer, as it daunts the serious man to-day. They accepted what appears to us a cheap and easy subterfuge, because they believed it to have been prescribed by God; the ambiguous inferences which such a prescription must logically cast on the Divine character did not arrest their attention. What they gained was a free conscience, a conscience in which Christ was, to use their language, and which was in Christ; and for practical piety this was sufficient. They themselves had not made up their minds on theoretical points; it was only in the face of their opponents that they thought of arming themselves with like weapons, and sought a mechanical agreement upon questions about which no one ever has known, or probably ever can know, anything at all. This was where Luther's pugnacity betrayed him; so that little by little he seems to lose spiritual beauty, as the monk, all fire and intensity, is transformed into the "plump doctor," and again into the bird of ill omen who croaked.

"The arts are growing as if there was to be a new start and the world was to become young again. I hope God will finish with it. We have come already to the White Horse. Another hundred years and all will be over."

Compare this with Dürer's:

"Sure am I that many notable men will arise, all of whom will write both well and better about this art than I."

"Would to God that it were possible for me to see the work and art of the mighty masters to come, who are yet unborn, for I know that I might be improved."

I do not want to judge Luther harshly; he had done splendidly, and it is difficult to meddle with worldly things without soiling one's fingers and depressing one's heart; but I ask which of these two quotations expresses man's most central character best--the desire for nobler life--which reveals the more admirable temper? (Dürer had been touched by the spirit of the Renaissance as well as by that of the Reformation; we can distinguish easily when he is speaking under the one influence, when under the other, and the contrast often impresses one as the contrast between the above quotations. And it gives us great reason to deplore that the two spirits could not work side by side as they did in Dürer and a few rare souls, but that in the world there was war between them.) It seems inevitable that the things men fight about should always be spoiled. The best part of written thought is something that cannot be analysed, cannot therefore be defended or used for offence; it is a spirit, an emanation, something that influences us more subtly than we know how to describe.

We see by the passage quoted that Dürer was not only influenced by Luther's heroism, but by his doctrinal theorising. Unfortunately we do not know whether he outgrew this second and less admirable influence. Did he feel like his friend Pirkheimer in the end, that "the new evangelical knaves made the old popish knaves seem pious by contrast?" Milton under similar circumstances came to think that "New Presbyter is but old Priest writ large." Probably not; for just as we know he did not abandon what seemed to him beautiful and helpful in old Catholic ceremonies, usages, and conceptions, so probably he would not confuse what had been real gain in the Reformation with the excesses of Anabaptists or Socialists, or even of Luther himself or his followers. There is no reason to suppose he would have judged so hastily as the gouty irascible Pirkheimer, however much he may have deplored the course of events. It must have been evident to thoughtful men, then, that it was impossible for so large an area to be furnished with properly trained pastors in so short a time, and that therefore more or less deplorable material was bound to be mingled in the official personnel of the new sect. It is impossible, when we consider how he solved the precisely parallel difficulty in aesthetics, not to feel that if he had had time given him, he would have arrived in point of doctrine at a moderation similar to that of Erasmus.

Men deliberate and hold numberless differing opinions about beauty.... Being then, as we are, in such a state of error, I know not certainly what the ultimate measure of true beauty is.... Because now we cannot altogether attain unto perfection shall we, therefore, wholly cease from learning? By no means ... for it behoveth the rational man to choose the good. (See the passage complete on page 15.)

Luther imagined that the faith that saved was entire confidence in the fact that a bargain had been struck between the Persons of the Trinity, according to which Christ's sacrifice should be accepted as satisfying the justice of his Father, outraged by Adam's fault. To-day this appears to the majority of educated men a fantastic conception. For them the faith that saves is love of goodness, as love of beauty saves the artist from mistakes into which his intelligence would often plunge him. Jesus has no claim upon us superior to his goodness and his beauty; nor can we conceive of the possibility of such a claim. But we recognise with Dürer that we do not know what the true measure of goodness and beauty is, and all that we can do is to choose always the good and the beautiful according to the measure of our reason--to the fulness of the light at present granted to us.