Ulrich von Hutten

Review of:
Ulrich von Hutten, Imperial Poet and Orator (by Archibald Young, 1863)

It is but seldom that a translation is readable, but Mr. Young's translation of M. Chauffour-Kestner's Life of Ulrich Von Hutten forms an exception to the rule. It is well and vigorously written, and the fact that it is a translation does not, as is generally the case, make itself felt at every sentence, and might perhaps escape notice altogether if it were not recorded in the title-page. The book itself is one of a class which is by no means so well filled as it ought to be. It is the life of a very remarkable man, telling all that any one really cares to know about him, and compressed into a very moderate compass. In the translation, it fills something less than one hundred and fifty small pages. The contrast between this and the many-volume biographies which, in these days, are so frequently dedicated to the memory of some leader of a religious party or tenth-rate literary man, excites in the reader a sensible amount of gratitude towards the parties concerned.

Ulrich von Hutten was perhaps the best representative of what may be called the lay side of the Reformation—the aspect of it which addressed itself to politicians and men of the world. He was born on the 21st of April, 1488, at the Castle of Stecelberg, near Fulda, in Franconia. The castle belonged to his father, one of the highest in rank of the Franconian aristocracy. In these travelling days, most of us have seen the ruins of feudal castles scattered about as thickly as suburban villas over parts of Germany and Switzerland—the Grisons, for instance—and it has no doubt occurred to many of us to wonder how people ever managed to live in such inconvenient places, and what their life there was like. Hutten gives a wonderfully lifelike description of their every-day appearance, such as it was, before time had made it romantic:—

'Our castles are constructed, not for pleasure, but for security. All is sacrificed to the necessity of defence. They are contracted between ramparts and ditches; armouries and stables usurp the place of apartments.  Everywhere the smell of powder, horses, cattle, the noise of dogs and oxen, and, upon the margin of the mighty forests which surround us, the cries of wolves. Always agitation; perpetual coming and going; our gates, open to all, often permit assassins and thieves to enter. Each day there is a new care.  If we maintain our independence we risk being crushed between two powerful enemies; if we put ourselves under the protection of some prince we are forced to espouse his quarrels. We cannot sally forth without an escort.  In order to hunt or to visit a neighbour we must don casque and cuirass. Always everywhere war.’

Hutten, a born reformer, was given to see the dark side of things, and from his infancy appears to have hated the kind of life to which he was born. He, however, fully imbibed its spirit. Though somewhat delicate in body, and keenly alive to the miseries which he could describe so graphically, he was as fierce and pugnacious a Franconian noble as any one of his neighbours. His whole life was spent in carrying on war against some one or other, either by the sword or the pen, and in those days the boundary line between the two weapons was by no means so plainly marked as it is at present. Hutten's family wished to make a monk of him, and on his refusal to enter that profession he appears to have been thrown upon his own resources; and from his eighteenth to his twenty-sixth year he wandered over a great part of Europe—half scholar, half soldier, and altogether a vagabond— though from time to time his talents and learning brought him into the society of rich or great people who treated him with distinction. During part of the time, he served as a common, soldier in Italy. His wanderings appear to have ended by a deadly feud in which his resentment brought a Duke of Wurtemberg to well-deserved punishment. The Duke seduced the wife of Hans von Hutten, a cousin of Ulrich's, and treacherously murdered the husband with his own hand Ulrich von Hutten reconciled himself with his family, and published five orations against the Duke, who was at last expelled from his dominions by a rising of the people, assisted by an armed force commanded by Franz von Sickingen—a man whose career as a soldier much resembled the career of Hutten as a writer, and who on this occasion formed an intimate alliance with. him. The result was due principally to Hutten's fierce denunciations. This was the first event which brought him into public notice.

He next distinguished himself by the part he took in a controversy excited by John Reuchlin, known, according to the fashion of that day, by the then classical name of Capnio. Reuchlin was the first reviver of the study of Hebrew; and he was accused by the Dominicans, who at that time managed the Inquisition in the ecclesiastical Electorates, with designs against Christianity. A furious controversy ensued, in which Hutten distinguished himself by denouncing the inquisitors in the most vehement language. For instance, he thus describes Hochstraten, the head of their party:—

‘Are God or religion spoken of? On a sudden he cries out, To the fire! to the fire I Does one write some book? To the fire with the book and the author. Do you speak truth? To the fire! Do you utter falsehood? To the fire! Do you act justly? To the fire! Do you commit imposture? To the fire! He is all over fire, he breathes fire, he lives on fire. To the fire! to the fire! Such is his first and last word.’

The “triumph of Capnio,” as this performance was called, was soon followed by Hutten's great work, the Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum of which, if not the sole, Hutten was the chief author. It produced an immense effect, though the irony was so good, and the persons at whom it was levelled so stupid, that several of them took it for a serious book written in praise of the monks. In the beginning of the eighteenth century an edition of the letters was published by Mattaire, under the impression that the letters were genuine. It was dedicated to Steele, and Steele, under the same impression, reviewed the book in the Tatler without ever suspecting its true character. Both Swift and Defoe were misunderstood in the same way. After the publication of the letters of obscure men, Hutten went to Italy, with the intention of becoming a doctor of law. His studies for that purpose had no other effect than that of extending his discontent to a new class of subjects. He was disgusted with the pedantic and tyrannical views of law then taught in the Italian universities, and he returned without the degree which he had gone to seek. He was, however, as a sort of compensation knighted, and decorated with the title of Imperial Orator by the Emperor Maximilian. This was in 1517, when Hutten was twenty-nine years of age. The remaining seven years of his life were spent in producing a succession of pamphlets in which he attacked the Roman power and the clerical opponents of learning on the different points which arose from time to time in the great controversy of the century. His writings brought him into relations with Luther, and in the latter part of his career he appears to have been more especially and intimately connected with his old friend Sickingen. Two dialogues which he published, called The Monitor and The Brigands, from which M. Chauffour-Kestner gives long extracts, throw great light on his general views at this time. The leading notion of them is, that the merchants ought to carry on the commerce of the country, and that the private nobility—men like Hutten and Sickingen themselves, who, though not princes, possessed a strange wild sort of independence—ought to keep the peace, and protect the public against the tyranny of the priests and the princes, their allies. Sickingen carried out his theory in practice. He made war on the Archbishop of Trèves, against whom he had various causes of complaint, public and was defeated with all his adherents, and at last lost his life. Hutten betook himself to Switzerland, where, after a time, he died at the age of thirty-six.

Such is a short outline of the life of one of the most remarkable of the reformers. He was, above everything, a soldier and a politician, though his wars were for the most part waged with the pen instead of the sword. He would seem to have been much the sort of man who in all ages is marked out by nature as a malcontent and reformer. He would never have been satisfied, in any age, with any actually existing state of things. He had obviously one of those nervous, sensitive, combative dispositions which, being in themselves restless and uneasy, are the natural enemies of the age in which they live, though they might probably be altogether unfit for any other. It is not unlikely that indignation would have vexed him nearly as much if he had lived in our own times, though in a different direction. Like all good biographies, his life gives an interesting glimpse into the passions and questions of the age to which he belonged. It has been so overlaid with common-places that it is by no means easy to get clear notions about it, but it must have been a marvellous period.  It united the most unbridled political liberty with unsparing intellectual despotism. A Franconian noble, like the nobility of many other parts of the world, seems to have done pretty much as he pleased, fearing no one unless his resentment was powerful enough to bring down the castle walls. Nothing is more singular in the history of every part of Europe than the complete absence of that steady equable pressure of authority which in modern times affects us all alike. Power acted by fits and starts. When it did act it was unrestrained, and might inflict any amount of hardship and cruel suffering; but in the interval it would seem as if there must have been a marvellous quantity of unbridled licence, which must have been very pleasant to men of small knowledge and great energy. On the other hand, the deadness and narrowness of the intellectual world must have been enough to goad almost to madness any one whose tastes lay in that direction. Unless a man were prepared to be a monk, and to submit himself to the fetters which that way of life involved, he had not only no opportunity of using his mind, but he was positively despised if he did so. Hutten himself was for a length of time the object of the contempt of his relations on account of his literary eminence. The furious contests which resulted from the struggles of men like Hutten and Luther to change this state of things, are the great landmarks of modern history. The French Revolution, with all its dramatic episodes, did not produce so great a change in the face of the world as the Reformation; and when we remember that, after it had produced its effects, the world, though circumstantially different from what it had been before, remained substantially the same, neither much happier nor much less happy—in some ways, neither much wiser nor much more foolish,—we may form a rational estimate of the degree in which it is likely to be permanently altered by some of the reforms which attract so much attention in our own days. Society at large is like a man who, by taking thought, can add, not a cubit, but (say) an inch and a half to his stature.

Saturday Review, May 2, 1863.

A Practical Man

Review of:

“The European Revolutions of 1848” (by Edward Stillingfleet Cayley, 1856)

We greatly want a second Sydney Smith to write a new edition of the Noodle's Oration. Far be it from us to attempt more than a most distant imitation of that great original; but if such a work were executed, it would perhaps run somewhat as follows:——“The political events of the last eight years show the immense difference between theory and practice. Englishmen are practical—foreigners are theoretical. It may not be true that Frenchmen live principally upon frogs, but they are nourished by abstractions. They use such abominable words as Liberty, Order, and Principle, which no Christian man can endure. They believe that some things are false and other things true, and that some things are right and other things wrong— whereas, as Sir Archibald Alison has conclusively proved, that makes no difference at all. The one thing needful is what is practically right, and the one thing to be avoided is what is practically wrong. Though the vulgar herd deny it, the philosophic mind triumphantly and profoundly asserts that the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Now whatever is eaten is pudding, and if you think it bad pudding, that shows that you are not practical, for you could not eat it if it was not there. You cannot say that it might have been better, except upon theoretical grounds. To say so would justly offend the cook, and inasmuch as the comfort of the servants is the ultimate object of all housekeeping, nobody can wish to offend the cook, who does not want to drive the family into the streets or the workhouse. A great philosopher of ancient times remarked that bad workmen complained of their tools. But foreigners always complain of the instruments of government, therefore all foreigners are bad workmen. It is true that the English have occasionally done so too, but they have been either respectable people or rabble. Apply our principle to the first, and the exception proves the rule—apply it to the second, and we have a striking confirmation of our statement. Shallow objectors have sometimes said that some foreign countries have put up with bad government too long ; but—besides that this would, if true, only prove the general corruption of man, which is the cornerstone of revelation—in all the cases in which foreigners have resisted, they have done so either prematurely or too late; and in the cases in which they have submitted, they have given way to that base timidity of disposition which is so strikingly contrasted with the stubborn gallantry of the Anglo-Norman race.  A careful observer of history will not fail to see that the national character of England has arisen from its institutions, for we are all the creatures of circumstances; and also that our institutions are the expression of our national character, for the great truth of moral responsibility depends upon the recognition—of course in its right place and degree—of free will. The theorist will easlily consider these great principles contradictory, but a practical men well knows that it is quite possible to believe contradictions by only looking at half of them at a time. In the case of the Continent the same principles apply, though the results are different.  There, a bad national character produced a corresponding government, which, attempting to elevate those who had erected it, was overthrown by the rash theorists who could not comprehend that the best institutions for a nation are those which suit it—in other words, those which it has already got, for if these not suit it they would not be there.  Theories are of no value unless they are supported by facts. Therefore, all theories which condemn existing facts go for nothing, and none are true except those which justify what exists. One subject, no doubt, there is, which constitutes an exception to this rule, and is therefore the strongest proof of its truth which the nature of the case admits. Several minds of the deepest philosophical attainments—so deep that, upon all other subjects, public envy, that sure attendant of greatness, considers them illogical and unintelligible —have discovered that the great instrument in the providential government of the world, that which, as the poet observes, strikes with equal blows pauperum tabernas regumque turres, is the currency. An incontrovertible paper pound 

We draw a veil over the rest; but we do not think that what we have written is at all an unfair representation of a kind of speculation of which Mr. Cayley’s book is one of the most complete specimens that we have lately met with. Again and again, in reading his constitutional theories, have we been reminded of that famous burst of elephantine playfulness which is almost the only lively point of one of our most valuable and philosophical law books. Austin's Lectures on Jurisprudence—“Thus saith Noodle, and he saith it with a gravity would make ye split.” If Mr. Cayley's statement in his preface, that “he collected most of the historical works bearing on the subject, as well as all the printed political articles and pamphlets that could be procured, both foreign and English," is correct, he has missed an excellent opportunity of making a very good book. He has, in fact, made a very bad one. He has attempted what for the resent is an impossibility. What Emmett said of his epitaph is true of the Revolutions of 1848 —-no one is competent as yet to write their history, especially if his political views are such as to lead him to consider that he is only writing an epitaph. If Mr. Cayley had republished, in a permanent and connected form, such of his materials as were not generally accessible, he would have made a useful contribution to literature; but he has succeeded only in re-stating facts which we all remember reading in the newspapers, and in interlarding them with a set of reflections which might all have been compressed into two short sentences:-—“ If anybody has an curiosity to know what Mr. Cayley, of the Inner Temple, thinks upon the subject of the Revolutions of 1848, he will find his opinions expressed in the political reflections of Sir A. Alison and of Mr. Samuel Laing. Mr. Cayley informs his readers that, if he chose, he could make jokes, and that he believes in an inconvertible paper currency." This would have exhausted pretty nearly all that is to be got out of these two volumes. In so far as their author is personally concerned, we should not consider it necessary to criticize his work at any length; but it is not unimportant to take every opportunity of protesting against books which have a tendency to give false impressions of the feelings with which Englishmen regard their neighbours. According to Mr. Cayley‘s view of the matter, the whole history and mystery of the French Revolution of 1848 is contained in a few commonplaces about the Government being corrupt, the King undecided, the bourgeoisie selfish, and the mob hungry, discontented, and furious. This kind of sweeping criticism is mixed up with the most commonplace trivialities about the essential identity of democracy and despotism, the inconveniences of republicanism, and the folly of "visionary theories." This is not the way in which history is written. If, for any inconceivable reason, anybody should ever wish to see what is to be said in this way, he has only to open at random any one of Sir Archibald Alison’s innumerable volumes, and he will find a perfect quarry of the material. A man ought to have larger sympathies, and opinions less cut and dried, before he can pretend to write upon such subjects. It is easy to lavish “fool," and “knave,” and “nonsense" on all persons and opinions which do not exactly reproduce the views of that particular phase of English society to which the critic has been accustomed; but it is irritating to read such writing, and it tends to give those to whom it is addressed perfectly false notions of the society from which it proceeds.

We will give a very few specimens of Mr. Cayley’s qualifications for his task. He is, in the first place, quite untrustworthy. Throughout his two volumes there is hardly a single reference to any book, pamphlet, newspaper, or other authority of any kind whatever, though the excuse which he gives for his publication is that he has amassed a great quantity of material. We will take a single illustration of this. In vol. II, pp. 34—8, he gives an account of the revolt in Berlin on the 18th of March, 1848. It is briefly this:—-The King issued a proclamation which was very popular, and the mob went to the palace to applaud. Two regiments of dragoons “unluckily" mistook the cheering for an attack, and began pushing the people back with their horses without orders. Accidentally, two muskets went off; and the people thereupon “imagined there was a design to slaughter them. At once the rushed to arms; barricades were thrown up in every street, of sorts of materials; a cab with the fare inside was made use of for one, and the fare not extracted till the town was pacified. When the barricade was taken down, he put his head out of the window and coolly requested that the door might be opened. Sharpshooters placed themselves in the windows," &c., &c. And after a sharp fight, 200 of the populace were killed, and about 300 of the tree s killed and wounded. What right has any man to put forward such a statement as this —-in which an absurd fable is recorded with as much gravity as the most important facts—on his own personal unsupported authority, when he does not even say that he was there himself, or that he ever spoke to any one who was? Possibly the account, which strikes us as monstrously improbable, may be true; but we should only believe it on the most cogent evidence, and of that Mr. Cayley does not give a single scrap. Every one knows that the origin of the Berlin insurrection is involved in great mystery. The Government and the Republicans have both, we believe, been accused of bringing it about for their own purposes. It is, therefore, most important that we should learn what the evidence upon the subject is, in order that we may form a just conclusion ; but to put forward a gratuitous statement like Mr. Cayley’s, is a very grave impertinence. Every other transaction mentioned in this book is related in the same style.

Mr. Cayley’s logic is as bad as his facts are questionable. After telling the above story, he goes on to say that the authorities withdrew the troops because there was nothing to fight about— that the troops, when fired upon, had “an innate right to resist—" and that it may be questionable whether “ it would not have been better for the advance of civilization and liberal institutions if the troops had finished the work they had begun." Surely, if Mr. Cayley is right in supposing that the whole fight originated in an unfortunate mistake, it is perfectly monstrous to doubt that the authorities ought to have withdrawn the troops at once. That they had a right to resist is no doubt true, but that right only justified acts necessary for self-defence. To repel an attack is one thing; but to storm barricade after barricade——raised, according to Mr. Cayley, for the legitimate purpose of defeating “a design to slaughter” the defenders of the barricades—is quite another. We are ashamed to think that an Englishman can be found to publish the opinion that if, by an unfortunate accident, a crowd and a body of troops are brought into collision, it is the duty of the crowd, under all circumstances, to submit to military execution. It is even more monstrous that the same writer should express a doubt whether, if the crowd should resist, it is not the duty of the authorities to encourage the troops “to finish what they have begun"—in other words, to perpetrate an indiscriminate and causeless massacre. We express no opinion upon a subject of which we know so little as the Berlin insurrection; but we feel no hesitation in saying that, if Mr. Cayley states the facts correctly, all the persons who permitted the fighting to continue were deliberate and wilful murderers. A still more outrageous piece of audacity of the same nature is to be found at page 188 of the same volume. Mr. Cayley there maintains that the Emperor of Russia was guilty of no breach of international law in invading Hungary, because Hungary had made itself an independent nation, and was therefore in the position of a country at war with Austria, the ally of Russia, which was thus within the law of nations in taking whichever side in the dispute it pleased.  We shall not stop to show how completely Mr. Cayley misunderstands the very first principles of his subject—we will merely remark that the defence which he sets up for the Czar implies that the power interfering between two belligerents should bona fide consider them as independent nations. But the Emperor of Russia entered Hungary notoriously in order to subdue a rebellious province, not in order to conquer a foreign enemy. He never in any way recognised its independence, but invaded it expressly on the ground that it was not, and ought not to become, independent. In fact, Mr. Cayley's view is, that because Hungary was an independent nation, it was lawful for the Emperor of Russia to crush its independence. Writers like Mr. Cayley would soon change international law into a paltry pettifogging system of which our own conveyancers would be ashamed. If possible, a still more impudent quibble is that by which he attempts to show that, when Louis Napoleon executed the coup d'état, he was guilty of no violation of his oath to remain faithful to the “democratic republic." As his treatment of this subject gives a gauge of his capacity, we will republish it entire:—

‘What is a “democratic republic?" What a republic is we all know. It is another word for a state. All states are republics, properly so called. Some states are kingdoms, some are empires; some are neither one nor the other; and for the lack of any other term, the have been called indiiferently republics or states. The word “democratic,”' as a qualification of republic, signifies that the people can be governed as they like, and not as anybody else likes. Now the meaning of the oath to remain faithful to the democratic republic, if it meant anything at all, was to remain faithful to the state in which the people had their own way.’

Mr. Cayley is very wise in saying, “if it meant anything at all;" for certainly, if the words of an oath are to be construed according to their etymological origin, we shall doubt whether any words ever have a meaning. Does "Revolution,” for example, mean, a turning again? Does “Count" mean companion? or “ Marquis," one who rules border districts? or “Empire," military rule over an army? Has Mr. Cayley sufficient confidence in this wonderful theory to go to Paris and cry in the streets, “Vive la République Démocratique?" If so, why does he constantly inveigh against republicanism and democracy throughout the whole of his two volumes? Or is it his real deliberate opinion that words are always to be used in a sense which will justify the conduct of a single individual, or of a few individuals, and condemn the acts of a great number? “Democracy" means the government which people adopt, when Napoleon is to be justified—it retains its ordinary meaning in the phrases, “a democratic profligate mob," and “democrats—they ought not to be called men."

The style in which this book is written is admirably suited to its general character. It is full of bad grammar and bad English. We have “prudenter" for “more prudent," and “the opponents of those classes not noble" for “Opponents of the classes which did not form part of the nobility." Among other beauties of Cayley, we find such sentences as the following:— “The love of her subjects would be turned to hatred, their trust in her changed to suspicion, and their obedience cold." "The counts and barons are much more characteristic," meaning “original.” “The quarrel was tried to be patched up." “He was acting against them, without the Emperor having discharged them from their offices." Elsewhere we have “impracticable persons,” for “unpractical.”  We must not, however, forget the principle characteristic of this particular historian, which is his constant affection of a certain dry, caustic humour.  This conception is carried out by putting an exceedingly commonplace remark in a very short form, and in an unexpected place. Thus, “Freedom in the mouth of an Englishman does not mean either license or pillage” – “Practical common sense is our safeguard” – “This practical turn of mind is an English characteristic, and is one of the most stable elements of our constitution, and is much more important than at first appears to national prosperity”—“Undergraduates are not fit repositories for political power” – “Gentlemen do not usually lie” – “Talent without principle does not, on the whole, seem to operate for the tranquility or permanency of the States.” In short, if any one wishes to read 688 pages of the coarsest flattery of his own country, and the narrowest criticism of all others, ill-stated, ill-written, and ill-argued, we can conscientiously recommend to him – but to no one else – Mr. Cayley’s Revolutions of 1848. 

Saturday Review, March 29, 1856.