Civilisation (1969–1970): Season 1, Episode 6 - Protest and Communication - full transcript
Modern Protestant Movement and its Printing Press.
(BELLS PEAL)
KENNETH CLARK: It looks
solid enough, doesn't it?
In the late Middle Ages,
the civilisation of Northern Europe
seemed designed to last for ever.
Rich merchants, self-satisfied guilds,
a conveniently loose
political organisation,
no material reasons for change.
And yet, in a few years,
in a single generation,
came the first of those explosions
that were to create contemporary man -
what we call the Reformation.
What went wrong
with that solid-looking world?
I can't see the answer
outside the Fortress of Wurzburg.
But inside it, in this room,
one gets a hint of trouble.
It contains carvings by a sculptor
named Tilman Riemenschneider,
perhaps the best of the many skilful
craftsmen in late-15th-century Germany.
These carvings are not only moving
as works of art, they show very clearly
the character of North-European man
about the year 1500.
They show, to begin with,
his serious personal piety -
a quality quite different from
the bland, conventional piety that
one finds in a great deal of Italian art.
And then a serious approach
to life itself.
These men were not to be fobbed off
by forms and ceremonies.
They believed there was such a thing
as truth, and they wanted to get at it.
What they heard from papal legates -
who did a lot of travelling
in Germany at this time -
didn't convince them that there was
the same desire for truth in Rome,
and they had a rough, raw-boned,
peasant tenacity of purpose.
So far so good.
But these faces reveal
a more dangerous characteristic -
a vein of hysteria.
The 15th century
had been the century of revivalism -
religious movements on the fringe
of the Catholic church.
Even in Italy,
Savonarola persuaded his hearers
to make a bonfire
of their so-called vanities,
including pictures by Botticelli,
which, I suppose,
was a bad day for civilisation.
The Germans were much more easily excited.
Look at this Italian cardinal by Raphael.
He is not only a man of high culture,
but completely self-contained.
And compare him with one of
the greatest of German portraits -
Dürer's Oswald Krell.
Those staring eyes,
that look of self-conscious introspection,
that uneasiness,
marvellously conveyed by Dürer
through the uneasiness
of the planes and the modelling.
How German it is,
and what a nuisance
for the rest of the world.
However, in the 1490s, these
destructive, national characteristics
hadn't yet shown themselves.
It was still an age of internationalism.
And in 1498, there arrived in Oxford
a poor scholar who was destined to become
the spokesman of northern civilisation,
and the greatest internationalist
of his day - Erasmus.
Erasmus was a Dutchman -
he came from Rotterdam -
but he never went back to live in Holland.
He'd been in a monastery there
and he'd hated it.
And he had also hated
the coarse, convivial life
of the average Netherlander.
He was always complaining
that they drank too much.
He himself had a delicate digestion
and would drink
only a special kind of Burgundy.
All his life he moved from place to place,
partly to avoid the plague,
because that "king of terrors”
kept all free men on the move
throughout the early 16th century -
and partly due to
a restlessness that overcame him
if he stayed anywhere too long.
However, in his earlier life,
he seems to have liked England
and he had a successful stay
in Magdalen College,
and so this country
makes a brief appearance
in our survey of civilisation.
(ORGAN PLAYS)
Considering the barbarous and disorderly
state of England in the 15th century,
Oxford and Cambridge
are astonishing creations.
And the Oxford that welcomed Erasmus
still contained a few - not very many,
I suppose - pious and enlightened men.
Of course, the atmosphere must have been
somewhat provincial and unsophisticated
compared to Florence, even Bologna.
And yet, about the year 1500,
this kind of naivety had its value,
and Erasmus - who was
anything but naive - recognised it.
He'd seen enough of religious life to know
that the Church must be reformed
not only in its institutions,
but in its teachings.
It was once the great civiliser of Europe
and now it was aground,
stranded on forms and vested interests,
and he knew that
there was more hope of reform
from the teachings of a man like Colet -
the Dean of St Paul's -
who simply wanted people
to read the Bible as if it were true,
than from the sharp wits of Florence.
The intelligence and the tact
by which Erasmus
made himself so immediately welcomed
by the finest minds in England
are alive to us in his letters.
And by great good fortune,
we can supplement these letters
by visible evidence,
because he was the friend of the most
incisive portrait painter of the time -
Hans Holbein.
Holbein's portraits show Erasmus
when he had become famous and elderly,
but they have
so complete a grasp of his character
that we can imagine him at every age.
Like all humanists - I might almost say,
"Like all civilised men" -
Erasmus set a high value on friendship
and he was anxious
that Holbein should go to England
to paint pictures of his friends,
and finally, in 1526, Holbein went
and was introduced into the circle
of Sir Thomas More.
The brilliant youth - with whom 20 years
earlier Erasmus had fallen in love -
was now Lord Chancellor.
He was also author of The Utopia,
where, in rather a quaint style,
he recommends almost everything
that was believed in
by enlightened reformers in the 1890s.
Holbein painted a large picture
of Sir Thomas More and his family.
Erasmus was staying in his house
at the time. Alas, the picture was burnt,
but the original drawing remains
with the names of the sitters written in.
Erasmus used to say that More's family
were like the Academy Of Plato.
Well, in Holbein's studies of the heads,
they don't look oppressively intellectual,
but alert, sensible people of any epoch.
Thomas More himself, of course,
was a noble idealist,
too good for the world of action
where he sometimes lost his way.
It shows how quickly
civilisations can appear and disappear
that the author of The Utopia
should have flourished,
should have become, in spite of himself,
First Minister of the Crown -
halfway between the death of Richard III
and the judicial murders of Henry VIII,
of which he, of course,
was to be the most distinguished victim.
Holbein depicted other members
of Erasmus's circle in England,
and I'm bound to say that some of them,
like the Archbishops Wareham and Fisher,
look as if they had no illusions about
the transitory nature of civilisation
at the court of Henry VIII.
They look defeated.
And they were defeated.
In 1506, Erasmus went to Italy.
He was in Bologna at the exact time
of Julius II's famous quarrel
with Michelangelo.
He was in Rome when Raphael began work
on the papal apartments.
But none of this seems to have made
any impression on him.
His chief interest was in printing,
in the publication of his works
by the famous Venetian printer
and pioneer of popular editions,
Aldus Manutius.
Whereas in talking about Italy,
one is concerned with
the enlargement of man's spirit
through the visual image,
in the north, one's chiefly concerned with
the extension of his mind
through the word.
And this was made possible
by the invention of printing.
In the 19th century, people used to
think of the invention of printing
as the linchpin in the history
of civilisation.
Well, 5th-century Greece
and 12th-century Chartres
and 15th-century Florence
got on very well without it,
and who shall say
that they were less civilised than we are?
Still, on balance, I suppose that
printing has done more good than harm.
One certainly feels that way
in the beautiful, humanised workshop
of the Plantin Press in Antwerp.
One can't but look with awe
on this simple-seeming invention.
It looks so easy to work.
Well, it is easy to work.
Roll it in like that...
take this arm,
pull as hard as you can - very hard.
Roll it back...
...open it up...
...and you take out your printed sheet.
How easy they are to operate.
You would have thought anyone
could have thought of it, like the wheel.
Yet it was so effective
that it remained practically unchanged
for about 400 years.
And perhaps one's doubts
about the civilising effect of printing
have been aroused by
a later development of the craft.
Of course, printing had been invented
long before the time of Erasmus.
Gutenberg's Bible was printed in 1456.
But these early printed books
were sumptuous and expensive,
done in competition with manuscripts.
Men only gradually realised
that printed books should reach
as many people as possible,
and it took preachers and persuaders
almost 30 years to recognise
what a formidable new instrument
had come into their hands,
just as it took politicians 20 years
to recognise the value of television.
The first man to take advantage of
the printing press was Erasmus.
It made him...and unmade him
because, in a way,
he became the first journalist.
He had all the qualifications -
a clear elegant style -
in Latin, of course,
which meant that he could be read
everywhere, but not by everyone -
opinions on every subject,
even the gift of putting things
so that they could be interpreted
in different ways.
Early in his journalistic career,
he produced a masterpiece,
The Praise Of Folly.
He wrote it staying with his friend
Thomas More. He said it took him a week.
I dare say it's true -
he had an amazing fluency
and this time his whole being was engaged.
You know, to an intelligent man,
human beings and human institutions
sometimes seem intolerably stupid,
and there are times when one's pent-up
feelings of impatience and annoyance
can't be contained any longer.
Erasmus's Praise Of Folly
was an outburst of this kind.
It washed away everything -
popes, kings, monks, of course,
scholars, war, theology. The whole works.
This is a page from it
with a marginal drawing by Holbein,
showing Erasmus at his desk.
Over the drawing, Erasmus has written
that if he was really as handsome as this
he wouldn't lack for a wife. Hmm.
In the ordinary way,
satire is a negative activity,
but there are times
in the history of civilisation
when it has a positive value -
times when the flypaper of complacency
holds down the free spirit.
This was the first time in history
that a bright-minded
intellectual exercise -
something to make people
stretch their minds
and think for themselves
and question everything -
had been made available
to thousands of readers all over Europe.
It happened that
during the same period in which Erasmus
was spreading enlightenment
through the word,
another development of the art of printing
was nourishing the imagination -
the illustrated book,
engraved on a wooden block like this.
Of course, the illiterate faithful
had for centuries been instructed
by wall paintings and stained glass,
but the vast multiplication of images
made possible by the printed woodcut
put this form of communication
on quite a different footing,
at once more widespread
and more intimate.
As usual, the invention
coincided with the man,
and the man was Albrecht Dürer.
(BELLS PEAL)
He was born and brought up in Nuremberg,
the town of the Meistersingers.
That's his house just behind me, there.
The great German myth
of the worthy craftsman
can still be felt in such of its streets
and squares that are still left standing.
But Dürer, whose father had come
to Nuremberg from Hungary,
was not at all the pious, German craftsman
figure he was once supposed to be.
He was a strange, uneasy character,
intensely self-conscious
and inordinately vain.
This is his self-portrait, now in Madrid.
You might think that self-love
couldn't go much further, but it could,
because two years later
he did another self-portrait,
in which he deliberately painted himself
in the traditional pose of Christ.
Well, this seems to us rather blasphemous
and Dürer's admirers don't make it
much better
by explaining that he thought
creative power was a divine quality,
and that he wished to pay homage
to his own genius
by depicting himself as God.
Well, it's true that this belief
in the artist as inspired creator
was part of the Renaissance spirit.
Leonardo talks a lot about it
in his Treatise On Painting,
but one can't imagine Aim
painting himself as Christ.
However, Dürer had certain qualities
in common with Leonardo.
Although he didn't share Leonardo's
positive distaste for women,
he wasn't far short of it
and he would certainly never have married
if the bourgeois conventions of Nuremberg
hadn't compelled him to do so.
And then Dürer shared
Leonardo's curiosity,
but it was a curiosity about appearances,
not about causes.
He was almost entirely without
Leonardo's determination
to find out how things worked.
He collected rarities
and monstrosities of a kind,
which 100 years later
were to furnish the first museums.
He would go anywhere to see them.
Eventually he died
as the result of an expedition
to see a stranded whale in Zeeland.
He never saw it. It had been washed away
before he got there.
However, he did see a walrus,
whose shiny snout delighted him.
Dürer's curiosity about nature
had less questionable results
in the drawings he did
of flowers and grasses and animals.
No man has ever described
natural objects more minutely.
And yet, to my eye,
something is missing - the inner life.
This drawing of blades of grass,
which is greatly admired,
looks to me like the back of a case
containing a stuffed animal.
But if Dürer didn't try to peer so deeply
into the inner life of nature,
nor feel, as Leonardo did,
its appalling independence of mankind,
he was deeply engaged
by the mystery of the human psyche.
His obsession with his own personality
was part of a passionate interest
in psychology in general.
This led him to produce one of the great,
prophetic documents of Western man -
the engraving he entitled Melancholia I.
In the Middle Ages "melancholia” had meant
a simple combination of sloth,
boredom and despondency,
that must have been quite common
when people couldn't read
or were cooped up together in monasteries.
But Dürer's application
is far from simple.
This figure is humanity
at its most evolved,
with wings to carry her upwards.
She sits in the attitude
of Rodin's Penseur
and still holds in her hands
the compasses -
symbols of measurement
by which science will conquer the world.
Around her are all the emblems
of constructive action -
a saw, a plane, pincers,
and those two prime elements
in solid geometry - the sphere
and the dodecahedron.
And yet, all these aids to construction
are abandoned,
and she sits there,
brooding on the futility of human effort.
Her obsessive stare reflects
some deep psychic disturbance.
The German mind that produced
Dürer and the Reformation
also produced psychoanalysis.
I began by mentioning
the enemies of civilisation.
Well, here in Dürer's prophetic vision,
is one more way in which
it can be destroyed from within.
However, what made Direr
so important in his own age
was that he combined an iron grip
on the facts of appearance
with an extremely fertile invention,
and, as time went on,
he became absolute master
of all the techniques of his day,
and in particular
the science of perspective,
which he used
not simply as an intellectual game,
but in order to increase
the sense of reality.
His woodcuts diffused
a new way of looking at art -
not as something magical or symbolic,
but as something accurate and factual.
His treatment of sacred subjects
carried absolute conviction.
I don't doubt that the many simple people
who bought his woodcuts
of The Life Of The Virgin
accepted them as a correct record.
Dürer was immersed in
the intellectual life of his time.
In the same year that Erasmus completed
his translation of St Jerome's letters,
Dürer did this delicate engraving
of his hero at work.
What an Erasmian room - clear, sunny,
orderly, with its reminder of death,
but also with lots of cushions,
which they don't give you in monasteries.
And Dürer made an even more striking
reference to Erasmus
in the engraving of
The Knight With Death And The Devil.
One of Erasmus's most widely read books
was called
The Handbook Of The Christian Knight,
and it was almost certainly in the
artist's mind when he did this engraving
because he writes in a diary
that refers to the engraving,
"O, Erasmus of Rotterdam,
"when wilt thou take thy stand?
"Hark, thou knight of Christ,
"ride forth
at the side of Christ Our Lord.
"Protect the truth,
obtain the martyr's crown."”
Well, that wasn't at all Erasmus's line,
and this grimly determined knight
with his heavy Gothic armour,
forging ahead, oblivious of the rather
grotesque terrors that accost him,
is as far removed as possible
from the agile intelligence and the
nervous side glances of the great scholar.
For 15 years, Dürer's cry to Erasmus
was echoed by his contemporaries
all over Europe,
and it still appears
in old-fashioned history books.
Why didn't Erasmus intervene?
Well, he wanted above all
to avoid a violent split
down the middle of the civilised world.
He didn't think a revolution
would make people happier.
In fact, revolutions seldom do.
In one of his letters, written soon after
Dürer had done his portrait,
he says of the Protestants,
"I have seen them return
from hearing a sermon
"as if inspired by an evil spirit.
"The faces of all showed
a curious wrath and ferocity."
Although Erasmus seems to us so modern,
he actually lived beyond his time.
He was by nature a humanist
of the early Renaissance.
The heroic world of the 16th century
was not his climate.
To my mind, the extraordinary thing is
what a huge following he had,
and how close Erasmus - at least, the
Erasmian point of view - came to success.
It shows how many people,
even in a time of crisis,
yearn for tolerance and reason
and simplicity of life -
in fact, for civilisation.
But on the tide of fierce emotional
and biological impulses,
they are powerless.
So almost 20 years after the heroic spirit
was made visible
in the work of Michelangelo,
it appears in Germany
in the words and actions of Luther.
Whatever else he may have been,
Luther was a hero,
and after all the doubts
and hesitation of the humanists,
and the hovering flight of Erasmus,
it is with a real sense
of emotional relief
that we hear Luther say, "Here I stand."”
(# MARTIN LUTHER: Ein Feste Burg
Ist Unser Gott)
We can see
what this burning spirit was like
because the local painter
of Wittenberg, Lucas Cranach,
was one of Luther's most trusted friends,
and Cranach portrayed Luther
in all his changing aspects.
The tense, spiritually struggling monk.
The great theologian
with the brow of Michelangelo.
The emancipated layman.
Cranach was a witness at Luther's marriage
and painted the portrait of his bride,
an admirable and intelligent nun.
Even in the disguise he wore
when he escaped incognito to Wittenberg.
No doubt he was extremely impressive.
The leader for which the earnest
German people is always waiting.
Unfortunately for civilisation,
he not only settled their doubts and gave
them the courage of their convictions,
he also released
their latent violence and hysteria.
And beyond this was another
Northern characteristic
that was fundamentally opposed
to civilisation -
an earthy, animal hostility
to reason and decorum.
One fancies that Nordic man took a long
time to emerge from the primeval forest.
Look at this old troll king
who seems to have grown out of the earth.
That's Luther's father,
painted by Cranach.
He was a miner, with a miner's
independence and strength of will.
HG Wells once made a useful distinction
between what he called
communities of obedience
and communities of will.
He thought that the first -
the communities of obedience -
produced the stable societies,
like Egypt and Mesopotamia,
the original homes of civilisation,
and that the second -
the communities of will -
produced the restless nomads of the north.
He may be right.
Anyway, the community of will
that we call the Reformation
was basically a popular movement.
At the end of Erasmus's letter
in which he describes the surly
Protestants coming out of church,
he adds that none of them,
except one old man, raised his hat.
Erasmus was against
forms and ceremonies in religion,
but when it came to society
he felt differently.
And so, strangely enough, did Luther.
The great popular uprising
known as the Peasants' Revolt
filled him with horror
and he urged his princely patrons
to put it down with the utmost ferocity.
Luther didn't approve of destruction -
even the destruction of images -
but most of his followers were men
who owed nothing to the past,
to whom it meant
no more than an intolerable servitude.
And so Protestantism
became destructive,
and from the point of view of
those who love what they see,
it was a good deal of a disaster.
Well, we all know about
the destruction of images,
what we nowadays call works of art.
How commissioners went round
not only to cathedrals like Ely,
but even to the humblest parish churches
and smashed everything of beauty
that they contained,
knocked the heads off statues,
smashed up the carved font covers,
broke the reredoses,
broke anything within reach.
It didn't pay them
to stay too long on a single job.
You can see the results here
in the Lady Chapel at Ely.
All the painted glass, smashed,
and unfortunately
the beautiful series of carvings
of the life of the Virgin
was within reach,
and they've knocked off every head!
Made a marvellous job of it.
There wasn't much religion about it.
It was an instinct -
an instinct to destroy anything comely,
anything that reflected a state of mind
that ignorant people couldn't share.
The very existence of these
incomprehensible values enraged them.
The visible aspect of civilisation
took a hard knock from Protestantism,
or if you prefer it,
from HG Wells's community of will.
And in some ways it never recovered.
For example,
one can't point to a single piece
of specifically Protestant
architecture or sculpture,
which shows how much
these expressions of civilisation
depended on the Catholic Church.
But it had to happen.
If Western civilisation
was not to wither or petrify
like the civilisation of ancient Egypt,
it had to draw life from a larger area
than that which had nourished
the intellectual and artistic triumphs
of the Renaissance.
And ultimately a new civilisation emerged,
but it was a civilisation
not of the image, but of the word.
Luther gave his countrymen words.
Erasmus had written solely in Latin.
Luther translated the Bible into German -
noble German too, as far as I can judge -
and so gave people not only a chance
to read holy writ for themselves,
but the tools of thought.
And the medium of printing
was there to make it accessible.
The translations of the Bible -
by Calvin into French,
by Tyndale and Coverdale into English -
were crucial in the development
of the Western mind.
If I hesitate to say
"to the development of civilisation”,
it's because they were also a stage
in the growth of nationalism.
As I have said, and shall go on saying
in this series,
nearly all the steps upward
in civilisation
have been in periods of internationalism.
Well, whatever the long-term effects
of Protestantism,
the immediate results were very bad -
not only bad for art, but bad for life.
The North was full of bully boys.
They appear frequently
in 16th-century German art,
very pleased with themselves
and apparently much admired.
They rampaged about the country
and took any excuse to beat people up.
All the elements of destruction
were let loose.
30 years earlier, Dürer had done
a series of wood engravings
illustrating the Apocalypse.
You can say that they express
the Gothic side of his nature,
or you can regard them as prophetic
because they show
with terrifyingly effective precision
the horrors that were to descend
on Western Europe,
both sides proclaiming themselves
as the instruments of God's wrath.
Fire rains down from Heaven
on kings, popes, monks
and poor families.
And those who escape the fire
fall victim to the avenging sword.
It's a terrible thought
that so-called wars of religion -
religion, of course, being used
as a pretext for political ambitions
but still providing
a sort of emotional dynamo -
that wars of religion went on
for 120 years
and were accompanied by
such revolting episodes
as the Massacre of St Bartholomew.
What could an intelligent, human,
open-minded man do
in mid-16th-century Europe?
Keep quiet, work in solitude,
outwardly conform, inwardly remain free.
The wars of religion evoked a figure
new to European civilisation,
although familiar
in the great ages of China,
the intellectual recluse.
Petrarch and Erasmus had used their brains
at the highest level of politics.
They had been advisers of princes.
Their successor, the greatest humanist
of the mid-16th century,
retreats into his tower -
it was a real tower, not the "ivory" tower
of cliché language.
This man who retreated into his tower
was Michel de Montaigne.
He was a fairly conscientious
mayor of Bordeaux
but he refused to go any nearer
to the centre of power.
He preferred his tower,
where, through his window,
in his own words,
he enjoyed, "A far-extending,
rich and unresisted prospect.
"There is my seat, there is my throne."”
He was born in southern France in 1533.
His mother was a Jewish Protestant,
his father a Catholic.
He had no illusions about the effect
of the religious convictions
released by the Reformation.
He said,
"In trying to make themselves angels
"men transform themselves into beasts."
But Montaigne was not only detached
from the two religious factions,
he was slightly sceptical
about the Christian religion altogether.
He said, "I would willingly carry
a candle in one hand for St Michael,
"and in the other for his dragon.”
Actually, he was thinking of a picture
of his patron saint that hung in his room.
His essays are as crammed with quotations
as are the tracts of the warring priests.
But instead of being texts from the Bible,
they are quotations
from the authors of Greece and Rome
whose works he seems to have known
almost by heart.
He had his favourite quotations
written on the beams of his study.
The one above my head says,
"Homo sum humani a me nihil
alienum puto.”
"I am a man
"and think that nothing human
is foreign to me."
He used these texts, as the reformers
had used the Bible, to find out the truth.
But it was a concept of truth
very different from that
which serious men had sought in Colot's
sermons, or Erasmus's New Testament.
It involved always looking
at the other side of every question,
however shocking, by conventional
standards, that other side might be.
Burning a candle both to St Michael
and his dragon.
It was a truth that depended
on the testimony of the only person
he could examine without shame
or scruple - himself.
In the past, self-examination
had been painful and penitential.
To Montaigne it was a pleasure.
But as he says, "No pleasure hath savour
unless I can communicate it."
And in order to do so
he invented the essay,
which was to remain the accepted form
of humanist communication
for three centuries.
These self-searchings really marked
the end of the heroic spirit.
As Montaigne says,
"Sit we upon the highest throne
in the world
"yet sit we only upon our own tails."
The strange thing is that people
on high thrones didn't resent Montaigne.
On the contrary. They sought his company.
Had he lived, his friend Henry IV
might have forced him
to become Chancellor of France.
But he preferred to remain here -
in his tower.
Such was the egocentric isolation
that the wars of religion
forced on the most civilised man
in late-16th-century Europe.
But there was one country
in which, after 1570,
men could live without fear
of civil war or sudden revenge -
unless they happened to be
Jesuit priests -
England.
England, which was almost untouched
by the visible signs of the Renaissance,
which had little painting
and no sculpture,
but had developed
a fantastic architecture of its own.
I suppose it's debatable
how far Elizabethan England
can be called civilised.
Certainly, it doesn't provide
a reproducible pattern of civilisation,
as does, for example, 18th-century France.
It was brutal, unscrupulous
and disorderly.
But if, as I've suggested,
the first requisites of civilisation
are intellectual energy, freedom of mind,
a sense of beauty
and a craving for immortality
then the age of Spenser and Marlowe,
of Dowland and Byrd,
was a kind of civilisation.
This is the background of Shakespeare.
Well, of course,
we can't compress Shakespeare
into the scale of the programme.
But I can't altogether omit him,
because one of the first ways
in which I would justify civilisation
is that it can produce a genius
on this scale.
In his freedom of mind,
in his power of self-identification,
in his complete absence of any dogma,
Shakespeare sums up and illuminates
the piece of history
that I have just described.
His mature plays are,
amongst other things,
the poetical fulfilment of Montaigne's
intellectual honesty.
In fact, we know that the first
English edition of Montaigne
made a deep impression on Shakespeare.
But Shakespeare's scepticism
was more complete
and more uncomfortable.
Instead of Montaigne's detachment,
there's a spirit of passionate engagement.
And instead of the essay,
there's the urgent communication
of the stage.
What! Art mad?
A man may see how this world goes
without eyes.
Look with thine ears.
Thou rascal beadle,
hold thy bloody hand!
Why doest thou lash that whore?
Strip thine own back!
Thou hotly lusts to use her in that kind
For which thou whipst her
The usurer hangs the cozener.
Through tatter'd clothes
small vices do appear.
Robes and furr'd gowns hide all.
Plate sin with gold!
And the strong lance of justice
hurtless breaks.
Arm it in rags, a pigmy's straw
does pierce it.
None does offend.
None, I say.
- None.
- Pure Montaigne...with a difference.
You know, this must be the first time,
and may well be the last time,
that a supremely great poet
has been without religion.
MACBETH: Tomorrow...and tomorrow...
and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace
from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.
Out out brief candle.
Life's but a walking shadow
A poor player that struts
and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more.
It is a tale told by an idiot
Full of sound and fury
Signifying...nothing.
How unthinkable
before the break-up of Christendom,
the tragic split
that followed the Reformation.
And yet, I feel that the human mind
has gained a new strength
by outstaring this emptiness.
How long will a man lie
i'the earth ere he rot?
In faith,
if he be not rotten before 'e die,
as we have many pocky corses
now-a-days
as will scarce hold the lying-in,
ah, last you eight year or nine year.
- A tanner will last you nine year.
- Why he more than another?
Why sir, his hide is so tanned
with his trade
as will keep out water a great while.
And your water is a sore decayer
of your whoreson dead body.
Here is a skull hath lain you I'the earth
three and twenty year.
- Whose was it?
- A whoreson mad fellow it was.
- Whose do you think it was?
- Nay, I know not.
A pestilence on him for a mad rogue!
Poured a flagon of Rhenish
on my head once.
This same skull, sir
was Yorick's skull.
The King's jester.
- This?
- E'en that.
Let me see.
Alas, poor Yorick!
I knew him, Horatio.
A fellow of infinite jest,
of most excellent fancy.
He hath borne me on his back
a thousand times.
And now,
how abhorr'd in my imagination it is!
My gorge rises at it.
Here hung those lips
that I have kissed
I know not how oft.
Where be your jibes now?
Your gambols?
Your songs?
Your flashes of merriment
that were won't to set
the table on a roar?
Not one now to mock your own grinning?
Quite...chap-fall'n?
Now get thee to my lady's chamber,
and tell her,
let her paint an inch thick,
to this favour she must come;
make her laugh at that.
Prithee, Horatio,
tell me one thing.
- What's that, my lord?
- Dost thou think
Alexander looked o' this fashion
I'the earth?
E'en so.
And smelt so? Pah!
E'en so, my lord.
To what base uses we may return, Horatio!
Why may not imagination trace
the noble dust of Alexander
till he find it stopping a bung-hole?
Twere to consider too curiously
- to consider so.
- No, faith, not a jot
But to follow him thither with modesty
enough, and likelihood to lead it,
as thus Alexander died.
Alexander was buried.
Alexander returneth to dust.
The dust is earth.
Of earth we make loam.
And why of that loam
whereto he was converted,
might they not stop a beer barrel?
Imperious Caesar,
dead and turned to clay
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.
Oh, that that earth
which held the world in awe,
Might patch a wall
to expel the winter's flaw.
KENNETH CLARK: It looks
solid enough, doesn't it?
In the late Middle Ages,
the civilisation of Northern Europe
seemed designed to last for ever.
Rich merchants, self-satisfied guilds,
a conveniently loose
political organisation,
no material reasons for change.
And yet, in a few years,
in a single generation,
came the first of those explosions
that were to create contemporary man -
what we call the Reformation.
What went wrong
with that solid-looking world?
I can't see the answer
outside the Fortress of Wurzburg.
But inside it, in this room,
one gets a hint of trouble.
It contains carvings by a sculptor
named Tilman Riemenschneider,
perhaps the best of the many skilful
craftsmen in late-15th-century Germany.
These carvings are not only moving
as works of art, they show very clearly
the character of North-European man
about the year 1500.
They show, to begin with,
his serious personal piety -
a quality quite different from
the bland, conventional piety that
one finds in a great deal of Italian art.
And then a serious approach
to life itself.
These men were not to be fobbed off
by forms and ceremonies.
They believed there was such a thing
as truth, and they wanted to get at it.
What they heard from papal legates -
who did a lot of travelling
in Germany at this time -
didn't convince them that there was
the same desire for truth in Rome,
and they had a rough, raw-boned,
peasant tenacity of purpose.
So far so good.
But these faces reveal
a more dangerous characteristic -
a vein of hysteria.
The 15th century
had been the century of revivalism -
religious movements on the fringe
of the Catholic church.
Even in Italy,
Savonarola persuaded his hearers
to make a bonfire
of their so-called vanities,
including pictures by Botticelli,
which, I suppose,
was a bad day for civilisation.
The Germans were much more easily excited.
Look at this Italian cardinal by Raphael.
He is not only a man of high culture,
but completely self-contained.
And compare him with one of
the greatest of German portraits -
Dürer's Oswald Krell.
Those staring eyes,
that look of self-conscious introspection,
that uneasiness,
marvellously conveyed by Dürer
through the uneasiness
of the planes and the modelling.
How German it is,
and what a nuisance
for the rest of the world.
However, in the 1490s, these
destructive, national characteristics
hadn't yet shown themselves.
It was still an age of internationalism.
And in 1498, there arrived in Oxford
a poor scholar who was destined to become
the spokesman of northern civilisation,
and the greatest internationalist
of his day - Erasmus.
Erasmus was a Dutchman -
he came from Rotterdam -
but he never went back to live in Holland.
He'd been in a monastery there
and he'd hated it.
And he had also hated
the coarse, convivial life
of the average Netherlander.
He was always complaining
that they drank too much.
He himself had a delicate digestion
and would drink
only a special kind of Burgundy.
All his life he moved from place to place,
partly to avoid the plague,
because that "king of terrors”
kept all free men on the move
throughout the early 16th century -
and partly due to
a restlessness that overcame him
if he stayed anywhere too long.
However, in his earlier life,
he seems to have liked England
and he had a successful stay
in Magdalen College,
and so this country
makes a brief appearance
in our survey of civilisation.
(ORGAN PLAYS)
Considering the barbarous and disorderly
state of England in the 15th century,
Oxford and Cambridge
are astonishing creations.
And the Oxford that welcomed Erasmus
still contained a few - not very many,
I suppose - pious and enlightened men.
Of course, the atmosphere must have been
somewhat provincial and unsophisticated
compared to Florence, even Bologna.
And yet, about the year 1500,
this kind of naivety had its value,
and Erasmus - who was
anything but naive - recognised it.
He'd seen enough of religious life to know
that the Church must be reformed
not only in its institutions,
but in its teachings.
It was once the great civiliser of Europe
and now it was aground,
stranded on forms and vested interests,
and he knew that
there was more hope of reform
from the teachings of a man like Colet -
the Dean of St Paul's -
who simply wanted people
to read the Bible as if it were true,
than from the sharp wits of Florence.
The intelligence and the tact
by which Erasmus
made himself so immediately welcomed
by the finest minds in England
are alive to us in his letters.
And by great good fortune,
we can supplement these letters
by visible evidence,
because he was the friend of the most
incisive portrait painter of the time -
Hans Holbein.
Holbein's portraits show Erasmus
when he had become famous and elderly,
but they have
so complete a grasp of his character
that we can imagine him at every age.
Like all humanists - I might almost say,
"Like all civilised men" -
Erasmus set a high value on friendship
and he was anxious
that Holbein should go to England
to paint pictures of his friends,
and finally, in 1526, Holbein went
and was introduced into the circle
of Sir Thomas More.
The brilliant youth - with whom 20 years
earlier Erasmus had fallen in love -
was now Lord Chancellor.
He was also author of The Utopia,
where, in rather a quaint style,
he recommends almost everything
that was believed in
by enlightened reformers in the 1890s.
Holbein painted a large picture
of Sir Thomas More and his family.
Erasmus was staying in his house
at the time. Alas, the picture was burnt,
but the original drawing remains
with the names of the sitters written in.
Erasmus used to say that More's family
were like the Academy Of Plato.
Well, in Holbein's studies of the heads,
they don't look oppressively intellectual,
but alert, sensible people of any epoch.
Thomas More himself, of course,
was a noble idealist,
too good for the world of action
where he sometimes lost his way.
It shows how quickly
civilisations can appear and disappear
that the author of The Utopia
should have flourished,
should have become, in spite of himself,
First Minister of the Crown -
halfway between the death of Richard III
and the judicial murders of Henry VIII,
of which he, of course,
was to be the most distinguished victim.
Holbein depicted other members
of Erasmus's circle in England,
and I'm bound to say that some of them,
like the Archbishops Wareham and Fisher,
look as if they had no illusions about
the transitory nature of civilisation
at the court of Henry VIII.
They look defeated.
And they were defeated.
In 1506, Erasmus went to Italy.
He was in Bologna at the exact time
of Julius II's famous quarrel
with Michelangelo.
He was in Rome when Raphael began work
on the papal apartments.
But none of this seems to have made
any impression on him.
His chief interest was in printing,
in the publication of his works
by the famous Venetian printer
and pioneer of popular editions,
Aldus Manutius.
Whereas in talking about Italy,
one is concerned with
the enlargement of man's spirit
through the visual image,
in the north, one's chiefly concerned with
the extension of his mind
through the word.
And this was made possible
by the invention of printing.
In the 19th century, people used to
think of the invention of printing
as the linchpin in the history
of civilisation.
Well, 5th-century Greece
and 12th-century Chartres
and 15th-century Florence
got on very well without it,
and who shall say
that they were less civilised than we are?
Still, on balance, I suppose that
printing has done more good than harm.
One certainly feels that way
in the beautiful, humanised workshop
of the Plantin Press in Antwerp.
One can't but look with awe
on this simple-seeming invention.
It looks so easy to work.
Well, it is easy to work.
Roll it in like that...
take this arm,
pull as hard as you can - very hard.
Roll it back...
...open it up...
...and you take out your printed sheet.
How easy they are to operate.
You would have thought anyone
could have thought of it, like the wheel.
Yet it was so effective
that it remained practically unchanged
for about 400 years.
And perhaps one's doubts
about the civilising effect of printing
have been aroused by
a later development of the craft.
Of course, printing had been invented
long before the time of Erasmus.
Gutenberg's Bible was printed in 1456.
But these early printed books
were sumptuous and expensive,
done in competition with manuscripts.
Men only gradually realised
that printed books should reach
as many people as possible,
and it took preachers and persuaders
almost 30 years to recognise
what a formidable new instrument
had come into their hands,
just as it took politicians 20 years
to recognise the value of television.
The first man to take advantage of
the printing press was Erasmus.
It made him...and unmade him
because, in a way,
he became the first journalist.
He had all the qualifications -
a clear elegant style -
in Latin, of course,
which meant that he could be read
everywhere, but not by everyone -
opinions on every subject,
even the gift of putting things
so that they could be interpreted
in different ways.
Early in his journalistic career,
he produced a masterpiece,
The Praise Of Folly.
He wrote it staying with his friend
Thomas More. He said it took him a week.
I dare say it's true -
he had an amazing fluency
and this time his whole being was engaged.
You know, to an intelligent man,
human beings and human institutions
sometimes seem intolerably stupid,
and there are times when one's pent-up
feelings of impatience and annoyance
can't be contained any longer.
Erasmus's Praise Of Folly
was an outburst of this kind.
It washed away everything -
popes, kings, monks, of course,
scholars, war, theology. The whole works.
This is a page from it
with a marginal drawing by Holbein,
showing Erasmus at his desk.
Over the drawing, Erasmus has written
that if he was really as handsome as this
he wouldn't lack for a wife. Hmm.
In the ordinary way,
satire is a negative activity,
but there are times
in the history of civilisation
when it has a positive value -
times when the flypaper of complacency
holds down the free spirit.
This was the first time in history
that a bright-minded
intellectual exercise -
something to make people
stretch their minds
and think for themselves
and question everything -
had been made available
to thousands of readers all over Europe.
It happened that
during the same period in which Erasmus
was spreading enlightenment
through the word,
another development of the art of printing
was nourishing the imagination -
the illustrated book,
engraved on a wooden block like this.
Of course, the illiterate faithful
had for centuries been instructed
by wall paintings and stained glass,
but the vast multiplication of images
made possible by the printed woodcut
put this form of communication
on quite a different footing,
at once more widespread
and more intimate.
As usual, the invention
coincided with the man,
and the man was Albrecht Dürer.
(BELLS PEAL)
He was born and brought up in Nuremberg,
the town of the Meistersingers.
That's his house just behind me, there.
The great German myth
of the worthy craftsman
can still be felt in such of its streets
and squares that are still left standing.
But Dürer, whose father had come
to Nuremberg from Hungary,
was not at all the pious, German craftsman
figure he was once supposed to be.
He was a strange, uneasy character,
intensely self-conscious
and inordinately vain.
This is his self-portrait, now in Madrid.
You might think that self-love
couldn't go much further, but it could,
because two years later
he did another self-portrait,
in which he deliberately painted himself
in the traditional pose of Christ.
Well, this seems to us rather blasphemous
and Dürer's admirers don't make it
much better
by explaining that he thought
creative power was a divine quality,
and that he wished to pay homage
to his own genius
by depicting himself as God.
Well, it's true that this belief
in the artist as inspired creator
was part of the Renaissance spirit.
Leonardo talks a lot about it
in his Treatise On Painting,
but one can't imagine Aim
painting himself as Christ.
However, Dürer had certain qualities
in common with Leonardo.
Although he didn't share Leonardo's
positive distaste for women,
he wasn't far short of it
and he would certainly never have married
if the bourgeois conventions of Nuremberg
hadn't compelled him to do so.
And then Dürer shared
Leonardo's curiosity,
but it was a curiosity about appearances,
not about causes.
He was almost entirely without
Leonardo's determination
to find out how things worked.
He collected rarities
and monstrosities of a kind,
which 100 years later
were to furnish the first museums.
He would go anywhere to see them.
Eventually he died
as the result of an expedition
to see a stranded whale in Zeeland.
He never saw it. It had been washed away
before he got there.
However, he did see a walrus,
whose shiny snout delighted him.
Dürer's curiosity about nature
had less questionable results
in the drawings he did
of flowers and grasses and animals.
No man has ever described
natural objects more minutely.
And yet, to my eye,
something is missing - the inner life.
This drawing of blades of grass,
which is greatly admired,
looks to me like the back of a case
containing a stuffed animal.
But if Dürer didn't try to peer so deeply
into the inner life of nature,
nor feel, as Leonardo did,
its appalling independence of mankind,
he was deeply engaged
by the mystery of the human psyche.
His obsession with his own personality
was part of a passionate interest
in psychology in general.
This led him to produce one of the great,
prophetic documents of Western man -
the engraving he entitled Melancholia I.
In the Middle Ages "melancholia” had meant
a simple combination of sloth,
boredom and despondency,
that must have been quite common
when people couldn't read
or were cooped up together in monasteries.
But Dürer's application
is far from simple.
This figure is humanity
at its most evolved,
with wings to carry her upwards.
She sits in the attitude
of Rodin's Penseur
and still holds in her hands
the compasses -
symbols of measurement
by which science will conquer the world.
Around her are all the emblems
of constructive action -
a saw, a plane, pincers,
and those two prime elements
in solid geometry - the sphere
and the dodecahedron.
And yet, all these aids to construction
are abandoned,
and she sits there,
brooding on the futility of human effort.
Her obsessive stare reflects
some deep psychic disturbance.
The German mind that produced
Dürer and the Reformation
also produced psychoanalysis.
I began by mentioning
the enemies of civilisation.
Well, here in Dürer's prophetic vision,
is one more way in which
it can be destroyed from within.
However, what made Direr
so important in his own age
was that he combined an iron grip
on the facts of appearance
with an extremely fertile invention,
and, as time went on,
he became absolute master
of all the techniques of his day,
and in particular
the science of perspective,
which he used
not simply as an intellectual game,
but in order to increase
the sense of reality.
His woodcuts diffused
a new way of looking at art -
not as something magical or symbolic,
but as something accurate and factual.
His treatment of sacred subjects
carried absolute conviction.
I don't doubt that the many simple people
who bought his woodcuts
of The Life Of The Virgin
accepted them as a correct record.
Dürer was immersed in
the intellectual life of his time.
In the same year that Erasmus completed
his translation of St Jerome's letters,
Dürer did this delicate engraving
of his hero at work.
What an Erasmian room - clear, sunny,
orderly, with its reminder of death,
but also with lots of cushions,
which they don't give you in monasteries.
And Dürer made an even more striking
reference to Erasmus
in the engraving of
The Knight With Death And The Devil.
One of Erasmus's most widely read books
was called
The Handbook Of The Christian Knight,
and it was almost certainly in the
artist's mind when he did this engraving
because he writes in a diary
that refers to the engraving,
"O, Erasmus of Rotterdam,
"when wilt thou take thy stand?
"Hark, thou knight of Christ,
"ride forth
at the side of Christ Our Lord.
"Protect the truth,
obtain the martyr's crown."”
Well, that wasn't at all Erasmus's line,
and this grimly determined knight
with his heavy Gothic armour,
forging ahead, oblivious of the rather
grotesque terrors that accost him,
is as far removed as possible
from the agile intelligence and the
nervous side glances of the great scholar.
For 15 years, Dürer's cry to Erasmus
was echoed by his contemporaries
all over Europe,
and it still appears
in old-fashioned history books.
Why didn't Erasmus intervene?
Well, he wanted above all
to avoid a violent split
down the middle of the civilised world.
He didn't think a revolution
would make people happier.
In fact, revolutions seldom do.
In one of his letters, written soon after
Dürer had done his portrait,
he says of the Protestants,
"I have seen them return
from hearing a sermon
"as if inspired by an evil spirit.
"The faces of all showed
a curious wrath and ferocity."
Although Erasmus seems to us so modern,
he actually lived beyond his time.
He was by nature a humanist
of the early Renaissance.
The heroic world of the 16th century
was not his climate.
To my mind, the extraordinary thing is
what a huge following he had,
and how close Erasmus - at least, the
Erasmian point of view - came to success.
It shows how many people,
even in a time of crisis,
yearn for tolerance and reason
and simplicity of life -
in fact, for civilisation.
But on the tide of fierce emotional
and biological impulses,
they are powerless.
So almost 20 years after the heroic spirit
was made visible
in the work of Michelangelo,
it appears in Germany
in the words and actions of Luther.
Whatever else he may have been,
Luther was a hero,
and after all the doubts
and hesitation of the humanists,
and the hovering flight of Erasmus,
it is with a real sense
of emotional relief
that we hear Luther say, "Here I stand."”
(# MARTIN LUTHER: Ein Feste Burg
Ist Unser Gott)
We can see
what this burning spirit was like
because the local painter
of Wittenberg, Lucas Cranach,
was one of Luther's most trusted friends,
and Cranach portrayed Luther
in all his changing aspects.
The tense, spiritually struggling monk.
The great theologian
with the brow of Michelangelo.
The emancipated layman.
Cranach was a witness at Luther's marriage
and painted the portrait of his bride,
an admirable and intelligent nun.
Even in the disguise he wore
when he escaped incognito to Wittenberg.
No doubt he was extremely impressive.
The leader for which the earnest
German people is always waiting.
Unfortunately for civilisation,
he not only settled their doubts and gave
them the courage of their convictions,
he also released
their latent violence and hysteria.
And beyond this was another
Northern characteristic
that was fundamentally opposed
to civilisation -
an earthy, animal hostility
to reason and decorum.
One fancies that Nordic man took a long
time to emerge from the primeval forest.
Look at this old troll king
who seems to have grown out of the earth.
That's Luther's father,
painted by Cranach.
He was a miner, with a miner's
independence and strength of will.
HG Wells once made a useful distinction
between what he called
communities of obedience
and communities of will.
He thought that the first -
the communities of obedience -
produced the stable societies,
like Egypt and Mesopotamia,
the original homes of civilisation,
and that the second -
the communities of will -
produced the restless nomads of the north.
He may be right.
Anyway, the community of will
that we call the Reformation
was basically a popular movement.
At the end of Erasmus's letter
in which he describes the surly
Protestants coming out of church,
he adds that none of them,
except one old man, raised his hat.
Erasmus was against
forms and ceremonies in religion,
but when it came to society
he felt differently.
And so, strangely enough, did Luther.
The great popular uprising
known as the Peasants' Revolt
filled him with horror
and he urged his princely patrons
to put it down with the utmost ferocity.
Luther didn't approve of destruction -
even the destruction of images -
but most of his followers were men
who owed nothing to the past,
to whom it meant
no more than an intolerable servitude.
And so Protestantism
became destructive,
and from the point of view of
those who love what they see,
it was a good deal of a disaster.
Well, we all know about
the destruction of images,
what we nowadays call works of art.
How commissioners went round
not only to cathedrals like Ely,
but even to the humblest parish churches
and smashed everything of beauty
that they contained,
knocked the heads off statues,
smashed up the carved font covers,
broke the reredoses,
broke anything within reach.
It didn't pay them
to stay too long on a single job.
You can see the results here
in the Lady Chapel at Ely.
All the painted glass, smashed,
and unfortunately
the beautiful series of carvings
of the life of the Virgin
was within reach,
and they've knocked off every head!
Made a marvellous job of it.
There wasn't much religion about it.
It was an instinct -
an instinct to destroy anything comely,
anything that reflected a state of mind
that ignorant people couldn't share.
The very existence of these
incomprehensible values enraged them.
The visible aspect of civilisation
took a hard knock from Protestantism,
or if you prefer it,
from HG Wells's community of will.
And in some ways it never recovered.
For example,
one can't point to a single piece
of specifically Protestant
architecture or sculpture,
which shows how much
these expressions of civilisation
depended on the Catholic Church.
But it had to happen.
If Western civilisation
was not to wither or petrify
like the civilisation of ancient Egypt,
it had to draw life from a larger area
than that which had nourished
the intellectual and artistic triumphs
of the Renaissance.
And ultimately a new civilisation emerged,
but it was a civilisation
not of the image, but of the word.
Luther gave his countrymen words.
Erasmus had written solely in Latin.
Luther translated the Bible into German -
noble German too, as far as I can judge -
and so gave people not only a chance
to read holy writ for themselves,
but the tools of thought.
And the medium of printing
was there to make it accessible.
The translations of the Bible -
by Calvin into French,
by Tyndale and Coverdale into English -
were crucial in the development
of the Western mind.
If I hesitate to say
"to the development of civilisation”,
it's because they were also a stage
in the growth of nationalism.
As I have said, and shall go on saying
in this series,
nearly all the steps upward
in civilisation
have been in periods of internationalism.
Well, whatever the long-term effects
of Protestantism,
the immediate results were very bad -
not only bad for art, but bad for life.
The North was full of bully boys.
They appear frequently
in 16th-century German art,
very pleased with themselves
and apparently much admired.
They rampaged about the country
and took any excuse to beat people up.
All the elements of destruction
were let loose.
30 years earlier, Dürer had done
a series of wood engravings
illustrating the Apocalypse.
You can say that they express
the Gothic side of his nature,
or you can regard them as prophetic
because they show
with terrifyingly effective precision
the horrors that were to descend
on Western Europe,
both sides proclaiming themselves
as the instruments of God's wrath.
Fire rains down from Heaven
on kings, popes, monks
and poor families.
And those who escape the fire
fall victim to the avenging sword.
It's a terrible thought
that so-called wars of religion -
religion, of course, being used
as a pretext for political ambitions
but still providing
a sort of emotional dynamo -
that wars of religion went on
for 120 years
and were accompanied by
such revolting episodes
as the Massacre of St Bartholomew.
What could an intelligent, human,
open-minded man do
in mid-16th-century Europe?
Keep quiet, work in solitude,
outwardly conform, inwardly remain free.
The wars of religion evoked a figure
new to European civilisation,
although familiar
in the great ages of China,
the intellectual recluse.
Petrarch and Erasmus had used their brains
at the highest level of politics.
They had been advisers of princes.
Their successor, the greatest humanist
of the mid-16th century,
retreats into his tower -
it was a real tower, not the "ivory" tower
of cliché language.
This man who retreated into his tower
was Michel de Montaigne.
He was a fairly conscientious
mayor of Bordeaux
but he refused to go any nearer
to the centre of power.
He preferred his tower,
where, through his window,
in his own words,
he enjoyed, "A far-extending,
rich and unresisted prospect.
"There is my seat, there is my throne."”
He was born in southern France in 1533.
His mother was a Jewish Protestant,
his father a Catholic.
He had no illusions about the effect
of the religious convictions
released by the Reformation.
He said,
"In trying to make themselves angels
"men transform themselves into beasts."
But Montaigne was not only detached
from the two religious factions,
he was slightly sceptical
about the Christian religion altogether.
He said, "I would willingly carry
a candle in one hand for St Michael,
"and in the other for his dragon.”
Actually, he was thinking of a picture
of his patron saint that hung in his room.
His essays are as crammed with quotations
as are the tracts of the warring priests.
But instead of being texts from the Bible,
they are quotations
from the authors of Greece and Rome
whose works he seems to have known
almost by heart.
He had his favourite quotations
written on the beams of his study.
The one above my head says,
"Homo sum humani a me nihil
alienum puto.”
"I am a man
"and think that nothing human
is foreign to me."
He used these texts, as the reformers
had used the Bible, to find out the truth.
But it was a concept of truth
very different from that
which serious men had sought in Colot's
sermons, or Erasmus's New Testament.
It involved always looking
at the other side of every question,
however shocking, by conventional
standards, that other side might be.
Burning a candle both to St Michael
and his dragon.
It was a truth that depended
on the testimony of the only person
he could examine without shame
or scruple - himself.
In the past, self-examination
had been painful and penitential.
To Montaigne it was a pleasure.
But as he says, "No pleasure hath savour
unless I can communicate it."
And in order to do so
he invented the essay,
which was to remain the accepted form
of humanist communication
for three centuries.
These self-searchings really marked
the end of the heroic spirit.
As Montaigne says,
"Sit we upon the highest throne
in the world
"yet sit we only upon our own tails."
The strange thing is that people
on high thrones didn't resent Montaigne.
On the contrary. They sought his company.
Had he lived, his friend Henry IV
might have forced him
to become Chancellor of France.
But he preferred to remain here -
in his tower.
Such was the egocentric isolation
that the wars of religion
forced on the most civilised man
in late-16th-century Europe.
But there was one country
in which, after 1570,
men could live without fear
of civil war or sudden revenge -
unless they happened to be
Jesuit priests -
England.
England, which was almost untouched
by the visible signs of the Renaissance,
which had little painting
and no sculpture,
but had developed
a fantastic architecture of its own.
I suppose it's debatable
how far Elizabethan England
can be called civilised.
Certainly, it doesn't provide
a reproducible pattern of civilisation,
as does, for example, 18th-century France.
It was brutal, unscrupulous
and disorderly.
But if, as I've suggested,
the first requisites of civilisation
are intellectual energy, freedom of mind,
a sense of beauty
and a craving for immortality
then the age of Spenser and Marlowe,
of Dowland and Byrd,
was a kind of civilisation.
This is the background of Shakespeare.
Well, of course,
we can't compress Shakespeare
into the scale of the programme.
But I can't altogether omit him,
because one of the first ways
in which I would justify civilisation
is that it can produce a genius
on this scale.
In his freedom of mind,
in his power of self-identification,
in his complete absence of any dogma,
Shakespeare sums up and illuminates
the piece of history
that I have just described.
His mature plays are,
amongst other things,
the poetical fulfilment of Montaigne's
intellectual honesty.
In fact, we know that the first
English edition of Montaigne
made a deep impression on Shakespeare.
But Shakespeare's scepticism
was more complete
and more uncomfortable.
Instead of Montaigne's detachment,
there's a spirit of passionate engagement.
And instead of the essay,
there's the urgent communication
of the stage.
What! Art mad?
A man may see how this world goes
without eyes.
Look with thine ears.
Thou rascal beadle,
hold thy bloody hand!
Why doest thou lash that whore?
Strip thine own back!
Thou hotly lusts to use her in that kind
For which thou whipst her
The usurer hangs the cozener.
Through tatter'd clothes
small vices do appear.
Robes and furr'd gowns hide all.
Plate sin with gold!
And the strong lance of justice
hurtless breaks.
Arm it in rags, a pigmy's straw
does pierce it.
None does offend.
None, I say.
- None.
- Pure Montaigne...with a difference.
You know, this must be the first time,
and may well be the last time,
that a supremely great poet
has been without religion.
MACBETH: Tomorrow...and tomorrow...
and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace
from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.
Out out brief candle.
Life's but a walking shadow
A poor player that struts
and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more.
It is a tale told by an idiot
Full of sound and fury
Signifying...nothing.
How unthinkable
before the break-up of Christendom,
the tragic split
that followed the Reformation.
And yet, I feel that the human mind
has gained a new strength
by outstaring this emptiness.
How long will a man lie
i'the earth ere he rot?
In faith,
if he be not rotten before 'e die,
as we have many pocky corses
now-a-days
as will scarce hold the lying-in,
ah, last you eight year or nine year.
- A tanner will last you nine year.
- Why he more than another?
Why sir, his hide is so tanned
with his trade
as will keep out water a great while.
And your water is a sore decayer
of your whoreson dead body.
Here is a skull hath lain you I'the earth
three and twenty year.
- Whose was it?
- A whoreson mad fellow it was.
- Whose do you think it was?
- Nay, I know not.
A pestilence on him for a mad rogue!
Poured a flagon of Rhenish
on my head once.
This same skull, sir
was Yorick's skull.
The King's jester.
- This?
- E'en that.
Let me see.
Alas, poor Yorick!
I knew him, Horatio.
A fellow of infinite jest,
of most excellent fancy.
He hath borne me on his back
a thousand times.
And now,
how abhorr'd in my imagination it is!
My gorge rises at it.
Here hung those lips
that I have kissed
I know not how oft.
Where be your jibes now?
Your gambols?
Your songs?
Your flashes of merriment
that were won't to set
the table on a roar?
Not one now to mock your own grinning?
Quite...chap-fall'n?
Now get thee to my lady's chamber,
and tell her,
let her paint an inch thick,
to this favour she must come;
make her laugh at that.
Prithee, Horatio,
tell me one thing.
- What's that, my lord?
- Dost thou think
Alexander looked o' this fashion
I'the earth?
E'en so.
And smelt so? Pah!
E'en so, my lord.
To what base uses we may return, Horatio!
Why may not imagination trace
the noble dust of Alexander
till he find it stopping a bung-hole?
Twere to consider too curiously
- to consider so.
- No, faith, not a jot
But to follow him thither with modesty
enough, and likelihood to lead it,
as thus Alexander died.
Alexander was buried.
Alexander returneth to dust.
The dust is earth.
Of earth we make loam.
And why of that loam
whereto he was converted,
might they not stop a beer barrel?
Imperious Caesar,
dead and turned to clay
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.
Oh, that that earth
which held the world in awe,
Might patch a wall
to expel the winter's flaw.