“The devil’s jests are for us Christians a very serious matter”; having a great multitude of kings, princes, bishops and clergy on his side he makes bold to mock at Christ; but let us pray that he may soil himself even as he soiled himself in Paradise; our joy, our consolation and our hope is, that the seed of the woman shall crush his head. Hence, so he exclaims, the above absolution sent to Amsdorf is amply justified. Like confession, like absolution; “as the prayer, so the incense,” with which words he turns to another diabolical apparition, which a drunken parson had in bed; he had meant to conclude the canonical hours by reciting Compline in bed, and, while doing so, “se concacavit,”[1280] whereupon the devil appeared to him and said: “As the prayer, so also is the incense.”[1281]
He applies the same “humorous” story to the Pope and his praying monks in his “An den Kurfursten zu Sachsen und Landgraven zu Hesse von dem gefangenen H. von Brunswig” (1545).[1282] “They neither can pray nor want to pray, nor do they know what it is to pray nor how one ought to pray, because they have not the Word and the faith”; moreover, their only aim is to make the “kings and lords” believe they are devout and holy.[1283] “On one occasion when a tipsy priest was saying Compline in bed, he heaved during the recital and gave vent to a big ‘bombart’; Ah, said the devil, that’s just right, as the prayer so also is the incense!” All the prayers of the Pope and “his colleges and convents” are not one whit better “than that drunken priest’s Compline and incense. Nay, if only they were as good there might still be some hope of the Pope growing sober, and of his saying Matins better than he did his stinking Compline. But enough of this.”[1284]
Of this form of humour we have many specimens in Luther’s books, letters and Table-Talk, which abound in unsavoury anecdotes, particularly about the clergy and the monks. He and his friends, many of whom had at one time themselves been religious, seem to have had ready an inexhaustible fund of such stories. Some Protestants have even argued that it was in the convent that Luther and his followers acquired this taste, and that such was the usual style of conversation among “monks and celibates.” It is indeed possible that the sweepings of the monasteries and presbyteries may have furnished some contributions to this store, but the truth is that in many cases the tales tell directly against the monks and clergy, and are really inventions made at their expense, some of them in pre-Reformation times. Frequently they can be traced back to those lay circles in which it was the fashion to scoff at the clergy. In any case it would be unjust, in order to excuse Luther’s manner of speech, to ascribe it simply to “cloistral humour” and the “jokes of the sacristy.” The evil had its root far more in the coarseness on which Luther prided himself and in the mode of thought of his friends and table companions, than in the monastery or among the clergy. Nearly everywhere there were regulations against foul speaking among the monks, and against frivolous conversation on the part of the clergy, though, of course, the existence of such laws does not show that they were always complied with. That Luther’s manner of speech was at all general has still to be proved. Moreover, the reference to Luther’s “monkish” habits is all the less founded, seeing that the older he gets and the dimmer his recollections become, the stronger are the proofs he gives of his love for such seasoning; nor must we forget that, even in the monastery, he did not long preserve the true monastic spirit, but soon struck out a way of his own and followed his own tastes.
Luther was in high spirits when he related in his Table-Talk the following tales from the Court of Brandenburg and the city of Florence. At the Offertory of the Mass the grandfather of Margrave Casimir of Brandenburg, attended by a trusty chamberlain, watching the women as they passed up to make their offering at the altar, amused themselves by counting up the adulteresses, supposed or real; as each passed the Margrave told the chamberlain to “draw” a bead of his rosary. The chamberlain’s wife happening to pass, the Margrave, to his courtier’s mortification, told him to draw a bead also for her. When, however, the Margrave’s mother came forward the chamberlain had his revenge and said: Now it’s your turn to draw. Upon which the Margrave gathered up his rosary indignantly with the words: “Let us lump all the whores together!”[1285]—The Florentine storiette he took from a book entitled “The Women of Florence.” An adulteress was desirous of entering into relations with a young man. She accordingly complained quite untruthfully to his confessor, that he had been molesting her against her will; she also brought the priest the presents she alleged he had brought her, and described how by night he climbed up to her window by means of a tree that stood beneath it. The zealous confessor thereupon, no less than three times, takes the supposed peccant lover to task; finally he speaks of the tree. Ah, thinks the young man, that’s rather a good idea, I might well try that tree. Having learned of this mode of entry he accordingly complies with the lady’s wishes. “And so,” concludes Luther, “the confessor, seeking to separate them, actually brought them together. Boundless indeed is the poetic ingenuity and cunning of woman.”[1286]
Strong as was Luther’s whimsical bent, yet we are justified in asking whether the delightful and morally so valuable gift of humour in its truest sense was really his.
“Genuine humour is ever kindly,” rightly says Alb. Roderich, “and only savages shoot with poisoned darts.” Humour as an ethical quality is the aptitude so to rise above this petty world as to see and smile at the follies and light sides of human life; it has been defined as an optimistic kind of comedy which laughs at what is funny without, however, hating it, and which lays stress on the kindlier side of what it ridicules.
Of this happy, innocent faculty gently to smooth the asperities of life Luther was certainly not altogether devoid, particularly in private life. But if we take him as a whole, we find that his humour is as a rule disfigured by a bitter spirit of controversy, by passion and by hate. His wit tends to pass into satire and derision. Here we have anything but the overflowing of a contented heart which seeks to look at everything from the best side and to gratify all. He may have delighted his own followers by his unmatched art of depreciating others in the most grotesque of fashions, of exaggerating their foibles, and, with his keen powers of imagination, of giving the most amusingly ignominious account of their undoing, but, when judged impartially from a literary and moral standpoint, his output appears more as irritating satire, as clever, bitter word-play and sarcasm, rather than as real humour.