BOOKS AND WRITERS
IT is with a frame of mind in which regret is mingled with a kind of shame that a reviewer approaches a book by Dr. Coulton when that doughty jouster stands no more accoutred in the lists, his gauntlet raised and his cartel—the postcard or registered letter which only a very Eminent personage could neglect —all ready for despatch. For Coulton, so courteous, so generous in daily' life, gloried in a fight in print or on the platform, and a critic was well advised to make sure that his own harness was in good repair before he took the field. The present volume*, eight hundred pages strong, is the com- pletion of a work which general favour has long justified the publishers in calling his masterpiece. Though many eventful years have passed since the third volume appeared, and some of the present chapters give the impression of having stood for some time, the book as a whole in its scope, its zest, its earnestness and in the force' and justice of many of its judgements and criticisms, is an impressive and characteristic monument of an unforgettable personality and of a mind that did not -grow old. Unlike many posthumous books, it is not only a notable addition to, but is in many ways the crown of, Coulton's work. In it he sets out to throw the beams of a great searchlight over the dark places of religious life in continental Europe, before he focuses on the English scene in the years immediately before the Dissolution and at its crisis.
Historians by profession have often shown themselves pedantically reserved towards Coulton. Their quarrel has been twofold ; that an atmosphere of controversy has never been far from his treatment of mediaeval history ; and that he saw the past, not as an ever-moving stream, giving to the historian the task of surveying its course and tracing the causes of its meanderings, its still pools and its sudden rapids, but rather as a collection of instances, spread over a dozen centuries, whence arguments on moral and social issues could be quarried. The first impeachment Coulton admitted gladly ; the second he denied.
The present volume, though not divided into parts, falls logically into two divisions. The first five hundred pages treat of continental Europe ; the remainder deal with England. The survey of Europe is in many ways a remarkable tour de force. Using the literature, printed sources and modern work of five or six countries, Coulton depicts the lamentable state of the religious life and describes the attempts, often heroic and sometimes successful, at reform. The, field will be unfamiliar to many English readers, and the vivid and often sympathetic treatment Voids the attention throughout. It would be too much to say that specialists in the countries concerned will be wholly satisfied. The evidence is partial, and too much reliance is laid on outmoded critics such as Burckhardt or (in a different context later in the book) eccentrics such as Scipione de' Ricci. Nevertheless, partly perhaps because the sources used are either the accounts of the reformers themselves—a Busch, a Cusanus, a Traversari—or the work of trained ecclesiastical historians, there is a solidity, a moderation—one had almost said a geniality—which retain the reader's sympathy.
Of the second, slightly shorter, division the same cannot be said. The Dissolution of the Monasteries has long attracted more atten- tion than its historical importance, or even its intrinsic interest, deserves. Quite apart from clear-cut confessional loyalties, Englishmen have for centuries been divided into those with a Catholic-romantic bias and those with a Protestant-nationalistic attitude to the past, and the monasteries, still a mute ruined challenge throughout the island, stir emotions and debates that are not purely historical. The story of that debate from Spelman to Coulton would make an interesting chapter of historiography. Fifty years ago the tide was flowing in favour of the monks ; if it hangs now or ebbs, that is largely due to Coulton.
In this matter, therefore, he is once more at grips with the old enemy, compounded of Catholicism, romanticism and slipshod scholarship, taking visible shape most clearly in Cardinal Gasquet. Here no risks could be taken. Stone dead hath no fellow. And in a * Five centuries of Religion: IV. The last days of Medieval Mona- chism. By G. G. Coulton (Cambridge thiversity Press. 45s.) series of fuliginous chapters the vials are poured out one by one —the St. Albans case, the Wigmore case, the Lincoln visitations, the Norwich visitations, the Premonstratensian visitations, the Crom- wellian visitations, the Comperta, the Black Book, exemption, vagrancy, women. The monks are even pursued into the realm of the might-have-been, and glimpses of France and Italy a century and two centuries-later are given to show that the monasteries, even if spared or reformed, would have been worse than ever in no time.
These English chapters will doubtless be treated with the care they deserve in learned historical journals. They are in many ways open to criticism. Internal evidence would suggest that they were com- posed as separate studies and never finally co-ordinated ; some important references are missing and there are a number of slips which are probably due to faulty typescript. The tangled cases of St. Albans and Wigmore are left confused. Henry VIII and Cromwell, their motives, methods and-agents, are treated unrealistic- ally, and whatever the precise evidential value of the Cromwellian comperta may be, many readers will feel that statistics of the various kinds of immorality touch upon problems which the divine and the physician, rather than the historian, must solve. Neverthe- less, the task of the apologist of the Tudor monks has not been rendered easier by the evidence, here collected for the first time, that the records of the visitations provide. If there was deep spiritual life in the monasteries, outside Charterhouse and Sion, it remained hidden both in word and deed.
In showing this, Coulton has added, if not precisely to our know- ledge, yet certainly to our awareness, and has served the interests of historical truth. Yet in the last resort this book, and indeed all his writings on monastic history, will be judged on a plane not purely historical. Like other great controversialists, he protects his attacking force with a strong rearguard, and his pages of introduc- tion and many other passages give in true perspective a just and reasoned verdict on monastic history. Nevertheless, the abiding impression of one who has read the four volumes of Five Centuries of Religion will not be this. Rather, he will be tempted to exclaim with the Roman poet that all this sea of iniquities must spring necessarily from the nature of the monastic life. Tantum religio potuit suadere maloruni. Coulton's thesis put crudely is that the history of every form of the religious life has been a long tale of inevitable decadence and vice, vainly combated by a few reformers, and abetted by the inefficiency or venality of the papacy. To this iniquity, as old as monachism itself, a term was put here and in other countries by the Reformation, elsewhere by the French Revo- lution. The monks of today, few in number and more adequately controlled by public opinion and the law of the land, are on the whole respectable citizens.
Many will not be satisfied with this verdict. They will feel that the history of monasticism is not so much a losing fight of authority against decadence as the appearance, again and again in every age, of a man or a group of men who can see and attain holiness of life, and lead others to it. There is a scholastic adage to the effect that all the good there is in a being comes from its life-giving cause ; the evil from its failure to accept that good fully. Bonurn ex integra causa ; malum ex quocuinque defectu. Coulton does not see things thus. The imitation of Christ, the attainment to union with Him, the one real message of Benedict, Bernard and Francis, is not part of his picture ; the many forms of human weakness fill the canvas, and seem to flow from some poisoned well. Those who knew the man himself, his sensitive appreciation, his inspiring and generous encouragement, his warm affection, must wonder at this, and regret that one to whom religious history was such a magnet should have failed to see monasticism as a way of life that in one form or another has throughout the centuries appeared as an expression of the following of Christ. Coulton, like his contemporary in years and at Cam- bridge, A. E. Housman, was a personality and a myth, as well as a scholar. In each of them we feel that there was a spring of thought and action that lay deeper than biography or autobiography
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