THOMAS A KEMPLS.*
READERS of French memoirs may probably remember Madame de Motteville's pathetic account of the last illness of Anne of Austria, and how the dying Queen was soothed and consoled, in the midst of terrible suffering without modern alleviations, by the reading aloud of a famous book :— "Cette admirable prinoesse desire, qua je lui lease quelques chapitres de Gerson : car elle avoit toujours aime ce livre. Is is Ss, at je lui cherchai, en presence de l'archeveque d'Auch, ceux qui parloient de la mort at de in necessite de souffrir pour Jesus- Christ. J'en trouvai de beaux et propres a consoler son lime. Elle en gotta In beaute, at souvent one disoit avec consolation :
• Ah ! qua eela eat bean !' at me commandoit de recommencer les endroits qui in touchoient le plus."
And again later:—" Apres avoir prie de la nourriture et repu son tine de quelques chapitres de l'Imitation Tie je lui Ins, elle s'endormit."
Such a scene from real life seems a fitting illustration to Mr. de Montmorency's interesting and learned book, in which the different theories as to the authorship of the Imitation of Christ, or the three books known as Musiaa Beelesiastica, are very thoroughly treated. Here we see the French tradi- tion at its full strength, in the middle of the seventeenth century. Jean le Charlier de Gerson, Chancellor of the University of Paris during the early years of the fifteenth century, a great preacher, a devout theologian and mystical writer of the first eminence, who led two hundred Doctors of Paris to the Council of Constance, being there known as the Most Christian Doctor, and who earned disgrace and exile by the honest reforming spirit which defended the Brothers of Common Life—the very Order which produced Thomas h Kempis—against the assaults of a narrow ecaleslitaticism ; this was the man to whom the authorship of the Imitation was generally attributed. In France especially the tradition took long in dying; we are not sure that it is dead yet. There were many reasons for its existence. The earliest manuscript at the British Museum (1419 or earlier) bears Gerson's name as the author. It also appears on most of the early printed editions. Paris, Venice, Milan, Florence, Louvain, were all in his favour. The world was not ignorant of the claims of Thomas Kempis, but the printers had their own point of view, for "there was neither copyright nor conscience in these matters during the Middle Ages." "The great centres of culture and literary movement with one voice rejected is Kemple: and adopted Gerson. It was not necessary to make enquiry. A book by Gerson the famous Chancellor and theologian would sell, but the name of Thomas is Kemple was no voucher of literary merit."
Confusion was increased by the Nuremberg edition of 1494, which, while purporting to give the work of Thomas is Kempis, included in the same volume works by Gerson and Gerard Groote. The spirit of the "Invisible Church," the true "ecclesiastical music," was to be found in all these writers and many more. These mediaeval mystics were a wonderful band, a "Church within the Church," keeping true personal religion alive, preserving, as Mr. de Montmorency says, "the organisation of Christianity in Europe from dissolution." He writes of them with a real, understanding charm, tracing them back through St. Bernard and St. Augustine to the old philosophers. The whole of his chapter on "The Content of the Imitation" is very attractive and interesting. The note of poetic romance is not absent from the pages in which such a picture as this is to be found :—" The cleansing midwinter night of the early Middle Ages has closed round Christendom, and while the midnight bell is sounding the Contemplatives keep watch upon the heaven where they would be." It is • Thomas Kiwis: kis Age and Book. By J. E.G. de Montmon3ney. ISE. With 22 Illustautione. London Methuen and Co. re. 65. net.]
pleasant, in a book of calm and careful research and criticism, to find a writer carried away now and then by the imaginative value of his subject.
To return to the vexed question of authorship. England, too, had a tradition of her own, attributing the three books called Mimi= Reclesiastiea (placed by Thomas is Kempis in his own copy first, second, and fourth) to Walter Hilton of Thurgarton, an Augustinian Canon, who died in 1395. There is a good deal of curious evidence in favour of Hilton, which will be quite new to many readers. Mr. de Montmorency, though loyal to Thomas is Kempis, finds himself obliged to confess that the problem is not yet positively solved. He says, at least, that it is more reasonable to attribute three books of the Imitation to Walter Hilton than to attribute the plays of Shakespeare to Francis Bacon. As to whether such a saying is any serious threat to the fame of Thomas is Kempis, his readers may perhaps differ among themselves. If Hilton were the author, Mr. de Montmorency might be justified in demanding for "ear and heart" "the roll of an Elizabethan version, of one contemporary with the Authorised Version of the Bible." The thought is suggested to him by the fact that the imitation—not three books only, but four—is really "a marvellous mosaic, largely compiled from the actual text of the Bible. There are more than one thousand direct references to the Bible in the four little treatises." He is right : the book in Elizabethan English would be a beautiful book indeed. There might probably be the curious con- sequence that we should take it, like the Bible in our own inimitable translation, as originally and specially written for the English since the Reformation; but that would be our own affair. Thomas's third book, "De Sacramento Altaris," might be, and is, a difficulty to Protestant readers. But various English editions have already been pub- lished without it ; and to notice a modern example which Mr. de Montmorency makes a good deal of, Matthew Arnold, filling his notebooks with quotations from the Imitation, never touches that book at all. Of course, without it one might almost forget that the author, if Thomas is Kempis or Walter Hilton, was a mediaeval priest and monk ; if Gerson, priest and schoolman. Whether such eclectic treatment is in the interests of honest criticism and reality the public must decide for itself. No varying opinions can affect the place of the De Imitatione Midi in the literature of the world. Ever since monastery walls first saw it written, its universal appeal to all spiritual minds has removed it from the atmosphere of controversy and lifted it to a level only short of the highest.
There is no room here to follow in the path of the critics who have decided that Thomas Hiimmerlein or Hemerken, of Kempen, who began life under the care of the Brothers of Common Life at Deventer, and afterwards entered the Monastery of the Canons Regular of St. Augustine at Mount St. Agnes or Agnetenberg, in the diocese of Utrecht, was almost certainly the author of the Imitation. It needs an accomplished scholar to enter fully into the various argu- ments, which are largely concerned with contemporary witness, style, rhythm, even punctuation. As Dr. Bigg remarks in the introduction to his beautiful translation, "a good-sized library might be filled with books on the subject." All the best criticism for many years past has been in favour of Thomas. But Mr. de Montmorency, well armed and caxer for the fray, thinks it is time for the controversy to be reopened. Walter Hilton's claims, he says, should be re-examined. It seems to us that those claims will need a truly courageous champion.
Some readers will find considerable interest in the author's study of the effect of the Imitation on various distinguished minds down to our own day. The list of its lovers, as he says, might have been made much longer, and the exceptions are very few. He takes the trouble, wisely no doubt, for they cannot be called unrepresentative men, to point out the unfairness of Dean Milman's and Thackemy's criticism. They treated the book as a sort of primer of selfishness, "the monastic gospel of a pious zealot," from which "the Love of Man is entirely and absolutely left out." "So far," says Mr. de Montmorency, "from the philosophy of Thomas Hammerlein being a selfish philosophy, it is in fact the cult of selflessness and of the highest altruism." His fellow-men would not find much to complain of in a man whose life was lived in harmony with this Ecclesiastical Music We have only to add that the illustrations are well worth careful attention, being mostly reproductions from early manuscript or printed editions of the work.
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