BOOKS.
THE HUMANIST POPE*
This admirable biography of a great Pope is one of the most interesting books of the present season. The life of /Eneas Silvius is one of the romantic stories of the Papacy, and his character and career possess an attraction for many who are outside the circle of professed students of history. As a young diplomat he was sent from the Congress of Arms on a mission to James I. of Scotland, and he attempted to go to Scotland yid England. Cardinal Beaufort befriended him when be found himself in trouble in the English town of Calais, but he crossed the Channel only to be turned back. He was glad, he tells us in his Commentaries, "to have seen the most wealthy and populous city of London, and the noble church of St. Paul's, and the splendid tombs of the kings; and the river Thames, which ebbs back from the sea more quickly than it flows into it, and is spanned by a bridge that resembles a city." A rough passage from Sluys to Dunbar led him to vow a barefoot pilgrimage to the nearest shrine of the Blessed Virgin. It was ten miles away, at White. kirk, the beautiful church which has recently been destroyed by the mad wickedness of some misguided women. The season was winter, and his feet suffered so much from the cold that they troubled him for the rest of his life. He bad heard the tale of the barnacles which produced geese, "but when I made inquiries regarding this story, I learned that the miracle was always referred to some place further off." His reference to the use of coal is well known. "In this country I saw the poor, who almost in a state of nakedness begged at the church doors, depart with joy on their faces on receiving stones as alms. This stone, whether by reason of sulphurous or some fatter matter in it, is burned in place of wood, of which the country is destitute." When he had accomplished his Scottish mission, 2Eneas declined a passage in the boat which had brought him to Dunbar— fortunately, for it was wrecked in sight of land. He travelled through England disguised as a merchant, and he tells how the men of a Northumbrian village took refuge at night in a tower for fear of the Scots. He himself was left with the women 'They say that strangers are safe at the hands of the Scots; and as for the women, they do not regard injury done to them as any great misfortune." Nothing more serious • Pius I/. (Aut. Sihi,, Piccolomini). B,7 Cecilia N. ear. Lemlos
Zdethuee and co. [10s, ed, net.] .
happened than a false alarm, and /Eneas made his way to York, where he admired "the glass walls held together by slender columns" in the minster. He had the luck to fall in with an Itinerant Justice, who conducted him to London, unaware that the Italian merchant was really the secretary of Cardinal Albergata, whose policy he denounced.
His travels in England and Scotland, though valuable as historical evidence for modern students, are but an unimpor. tant episode in his life, and Miss Ady rightly dismisses them very briefly, and proceeds to deal with his great achievement —" the restoration of the Papal power upon the ruins of the Council of Basel." He was in some ways a strange champion for the Papacy:— " From a member of the moderate party he became a champion of the extreme anti-Papalists, and then an instrument in the downfall of his sometime allies. Finally, his political work as Pope consisted to a large extent in undoing the effects of the Council of Basel. . . . Nevertheless, his apostasy is not so black as it seems. When he first threw in his lot with the Council, there was good hope that it might effect a real reformation in the Church. When he severed his connexion with it, that hope was lost."
It is impossible in the limits of a review to deal with Miss Ady's clear and well-informed exposition of this somewhat tortuous political career, or with the measures by which, as Pope Pius II., /Eneas Saville reversed the policy of the com- pacts with the Hussites in Bohemia, the Pragmatic Sanction of Bonrges, and the German neutrality. In the mazes of the general history of the period Miss Ady is a most competent guide, and what we may describe as her almost hereditary knowledge of Italy makes her book a real contribution to English sources of Italian history.
Many of her readers will find more enthralling her clever and sympathetic sketch of the personality of her subject—a Gil Bias on the Papal throne, he has been called. She does not attempt to defend him, for she shows how "his outlook on life grew oynical, while personal ambition became the ruling motive of his political career "; and when in 1456 he was made a Cardinal, she tells us that he contemplated a life of culti. voted ease and pleasant companionship in Rome. Be was to obtain position, but not ease, for in 1458 he became Pius II. Miss Ady's account of the Papal election reads like a chapter out of a thrilling novel. The daring and brilliant mameuvre by which ./Eneas succeeded in his attempt "to rally the Italian Cardinals in defence of their nation and to defeat the French conspiracy" is described, very frankly, in his own Common. taries, and he tells how, at the fateful moment when the last three votes had to be given, "all sat still in their places, as if rapt by the Holy Spirit. No one spoke, no one opened his mouth or moved any part of his body save his eyes, which rolled in every direction. Wonderful indeed was the silence and strange the appearance of the men from whom .pro- ceeded neither voice nor movement." Then two more votes were given for .tEneas, the Cardinal of Siena. If he secured the remaining voice, he would have twelve votes out of eighteen, the necessary majority of two-thirds. Cardinal Colonna rose to speak, and an attempt was made by the enemies of Aneas to drag him from the Conclave. "I too accede to the Cardinal of Siena and make him Pope," be shouted, and in another minute seventeen Cardinals were prostrate before the new Pontiff.
2Eneas chose to be known as Pius II., in honour of the Pius .2Eneas of Virgil; but politics were henceforth to absorb his energies and to leave small space for literature. Like many men of his type, he was ennobled by success and by responsi- bility. "Now," he said, "I must show to others all that I have so often demanded of them." He was doomed to many disappointments. From the first he set his heart upon the vigorous prosecution of the war with the Turks, but Europe was in no mood for a new Crusade. In Italy he was happier, for, "owing to Pins II. and those who worked with him, Italy enjoyed those thirty years of peace ttnd freedom from foreign interference which lay between the close of the Neapolitan War and the invasion of Charles VIII.," the great years of the Italian Renaissance; but this success came after many troubles, and Pius did not live to witness the results of his work. With France his relations were always strained, and be won only a fleeting triumph ; he failed to solve the Bohemian problem ; and his • early career had left legacies which hampered his German policy. Mies Ady, gives us a fascinating account of the Papal Court under his rule, and
it is interesting to find Pius, no Puritan in his youth, adminis- tering a well-deserved rebuke to Rodrigo Borgia, the future Alexander VI, for conduct unbecoming the clerical charatter. The reproof was honestly administered, even if it is true that in the politics of the Curia "a good deal of the old /Emits survived his elevation to the Papacy." It was the old ./Eneas, too, who found innocent pleasure in "the gay, warm-hearted circle of friends that snrrounded this most unconventional of Popes," when impromptu rhymes and light verses were bandied from mouth to mouth. His love of literature did not interfere with his horror of heresy, and he ordered a retrial of the English heretic Reginald Pecock, Bishop of • Chichester, who denied the traditional authorship of the Apostles' Creed. His brief was not acted upon, but Miss Ady records that he issued a Bull against the Bishop, who had already been dealt with by Calixtus IIL Pine loved the emotional side alike of art, of literature, and of religion. "If you once saw the Pope celebrating Mass tr assiSting at the Divine Office," he wrote as a Cardinal, "you would confess that there is no order, or pomp, or splendour save with the Roman Pontiff. . . Surely you would recognize that the Papal Court resembles the celestial hierarchy, where all is fair to the eye, and all is done according to rule and law." He wrote Latin verses and hymns, but his biographer decides that he was no poet. "He writes as a clever man of letters, as a scholar and a stylist, but his poems lack spontaneity. The vein of true poetry which he undoubtedly possessed appears not in his verse, but in the unique and altogether charming descriptions of natural scenery which are inter- spersed in his prose writings." His outlook upon the Papacy, upon the Empire, and upon the world of literature was always touched by emotion, and in the rapid succession of emotions it is difficult to retain sincerity and consistency. "The sincerity of lEneas Silvius," says Miss Ady, "in the sphere of letters as in practical life, will always remain more or less of a problem, and varied as are the solutions offered, certain obvious flaws in his character prevent the question from being answered entirely in his favour."
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