THE END OF THE MIDDLE AGES.*
THE meaning and end of these essays in history, which deal with such widely different subjects as the early Beguines of
Liege and the Malatestas of Rimini, is explained by Madame Darmesteter in her dedication to Mr. J. A. Symonds, her "master," which forms a sort of introduction to the book. "Shall I avow," she says, "that the volume is really the fragmentary essays towards two unwritten histories,—one of the house of Hohenstaufen, the other of the French in Italy?" We easily see that the three first essays belong to one book, the seven last—the lion's share in research, in exciting incident, in character, in vivid realisation of scene and atmosphere, in interest for most people—to the other. As to the name of her book, too, Madame Darmesteter explains her view. In some things, she thinks, and she is no doubt right,
the Middle Ages are not over yet. This might easily be proved, even in many a modern corner of our modern world, and we hope it may be true for long yet. The glories of our
heritage from the Middle Ages are at least as great as its defects. But, on the other hand, the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries saw the rise of that new spirit which was in a great measure to transform the world. "The world awoke from its long and dreamless sleep :"—
" You will agree with me that the personages of my essays belong no longer wholly to the age in which they lived. Something came to an end then ; something slowly began. Race of Cain and race of Abel, mystics lost in ecstasy, or captains of prey and plunder,— yet Eckhart, the forerunner of Hegel, and the sinister Gian- galeazzo dreaming in a different fashion the dream of Count Cavour, was each unconsciously a precursor of the Modern Age.
The Beguines, bringing the dissolvent of mysticism to the authority of Rome ; the Pope, in quitting his true capital for Avignon ; the Cardinals by opening the Schism : these, between
them, have invented the Reformation Giangaloazzo Visconti, when he made his daughter of Orleans his heir, pre- pared the battles of Marignano and Pavia, and condemned Francis I. to his captivity in Spain. Even as the feud of Orleans and Burgundy began the long rivalry of Francis and the Emperor,
the great descendants of those angry houses Meanwhile, the numerous invasions of Italy under the Dukes of Orleans, and still later, the triumphal journey of Charles VIII., brought back to France the splendour of the Renaissance."
This extract gives a fair idea of the scope of the book. We travel from convent to palace, and find ourselves among all
the goodness, the wisdom, the wildness, the wickedness, the worst and the best of that wonderful time. We meet with devoted saints and desperate sinners. Italy, with all her mag- nificence and terrible vices, splendid, hard and matter-of-fact among her poisons and her witchcrafts, laughing at the super- stitions of France, has naturally an immense fascination for poetical and imaginative writers of the school of Mr. Symonds.
Not that these studies are by any means entirely personal and picturesque. Politics have a great deal to do with them, and that most complicated piece of history, the claim of the House of Orleans to Milan, with its manifold phases and windings, is worked out with a vivid clearness, among all the crossing threads of battle and intrigue, which makes us hope sincerely that the author will be able to carry out her projected book, the History of the French in Italy.
But for us, in spite of all the brilliancy, personal and historic, of the later essays, the first ones, dealing with the strange religious movement of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, have a deeper interest. The poor Beghards and Beguines, uncloistered monks and nuns living in the world, a reproach to those of more regular religion in their lives of active charity and spiritual exaltation, with their prophetess, Mechtild of Magdeburg, truly "one of the most remarkable women of her
• The End of the Middle Ages Essays and Questions in History. By A. Mary F. Robinson (Madame James Darmesteter). London : T. Fisher Enwin. 1859. century ;" such people as these, with their mystical piety, their extravagant self-surrender, seem to us a more remark- able study than all the ambitions and crimes of French or Italian Princes. They did much, little knowing it, to prepare the Reformation. And one cannot read of their wild ideas, of the mad heresies into which their unguided enthusiasm led them, without feeling that the Church had very good reason for her disapproval of them. If the mysticism of the Beguines —afterwards, one must remember, rising again as the ' Quietism ' of later centuries—led them on into such bare pantheism as this : ‘. We do not believe in God, and we do not love Him, and we do not adore Him, and we do not hope in Him, for this would be to avow that He is other than ourselves," then even persecution ceases to be a thing to be wondered at. The Church in those days could not consistently sit still and allow such doctrines to be preached within her own fold. But though some such end as this must have been certain from the beginning, and though as long as humanity lasts some souls will feel what Madame Darmesteter calls "the Attrac- tion of the Abyss," and will find themselves in an incom- prehensible world of nothingness, we cannot doubt that Mechtild of Magdeburg, Gertrude and Mechtild of Helfta, and Katrei of Strasburg, possessed some of the finest natures of their time. Madame Darmesteter's studies of them and their ideas are deeply interesting ; but perhaps some readers may feel, as we do, that these are hardly subjects to be approached and understood from outside. If the strained mystic fancy of absorption in God, an exag- gerated and mistaken form of the noblest reaching after per- fection possible to the human mind, is to be placed on the same level with the universal hope of immortality, both alike being explained as a consequence of the trouble and bitterness of life on earth—" the Immortality of the Soul, that golden mirage-fountain of our thirsty modern world "—can we help disbelieving in this writer's power of understanding the religion of the Middle Ages, just as we disbelieve M. Renan's compre- hension of our Lord or of St. Paul? One knows well the touch of scorn that mingles here with the description of St. Gertrude's :sufferings, "this poor ailing and aimmic girl." It is the same when we hear of Galeotto Malatesta, "a wan, emaciated youth, half-crazed, half-saint," flying from the heathenism and vice of Rimini to the monastery of Arcangelo outside the gates, and dying there at twenty. "No hermit of the Thebaid had lived more sparsely or hardly than this Prince of the pagan renaissance They laid him to rest, the poor half-mad, self-absorbed visionary." All the admiration now, it seems, is to be given to that monster of wickedness, his brother Sigismond, murderer, traitor, desperate villain, builder of the temple to Isotta, still a monument of his utterly shameless paganism. In those days, in truth, there was little virtue of any sort, certainly very little holiness, outside the cloister, and those few who acted on the knowledge and experience of this are not deserving of scorn. But our pro- found difference with the author on many points of religion and morality does not prevent us from enjoying her vivid studies of France and Italy in those wonderful centuries. We .seem to have made many new acquaintances, whom before we only knew by name among the names of history. The sad story of Charles VI. becomes sadder still, now that we know him personally, the poor honest young King. Valentine Visconti, broken-hearted, the mother of so much fighting and trouble, is no longer a shadow to us, and we are particularly glad to be justified in a somewhat unreasoning fancy for Charles VIII., a fancy as to which, till we read these essays on " The Flight of Piero de' Medici" and "The French at Pisa," we had never been able to give any clear account.
We can heartily recommend this book to every one who cares for the study of history, especially in its most curious .and fascinating period, the later Middle Age.
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