"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.
II
The curiosity of the modern man of science no doubt is descended from that of men like Leonardo and the early Humanists, but it differs from almost more than it resembles it. The motive power behind both is no doubt the confidence of the healthy mind that the human intelligence will ultimately prove adequate to comprehend the spectacle of the universe. But for the Humanists, for Dürer and his friends, the consciousness of the irreconcilableness of that spectacle with the necessary ideals of human nature had not produced, as in our contemporaries and our immediate forerunners it has produced, either the atrophy of expectation which afflicts some, or the extravagance of ingenuity that cannot rest till it has rationalised hope, which torments others. They were saddled with neither the indifference nor the restlessness of the modern intellect. They escaped like boys on a holiday. They felt conscious of doing what their schoolmaster meant them to do, though they were actually doing just what they liked. It was all for the glory of God in Dürer's mind; but how or why God should be pleased with what he did, did not trouble him. He engraved and sold impressions of a plate representing a sow with eight legs; he made a drawing, which is at Oxford, of an infant girl with two heads and four arms, and calmly wrote beneath it:--
Item, in the year reckoned 1512, after the birth of Christ, such a creature (Frucht) as is represented above, was born in Bavaria, on the Lord of Werdenberg's land, in a village named Ertingen over against Riedlingen. It was on the 20th of the hay month (July), and they were baptized, the one head Elspett, the other Margrett.
Just so, Luther is no more than St. Paul abashed to say that God had need of some men intended for dishonour, as a potter makes some vessels for honourable, some for dishonourable uses. The modern mind at once reflects: "If that is the case, so much the worse for God; by so much is it impossible that I should ever worship Him;" and it will prefer any prolongation of "that most wholesome frame of mind, a suspended judgment," to accepting a solution so cheap as that offered by the Apostle and Reformer, which has come to seem simply injurious.