A PORTRAIT OF THOMAS MORE

A Portrait of Thomas More : Scholar, Statesman, Saint. By Algernon Cecil. (Eyre and Spottiswoode. As.)

IT should be impossible for any man, however long he may

have been working on the life and writings of More, however great his admiration of the saint, to read this noble book, without his knowledge of More being deepened, and his love increased. The lives of More (of which at least thirty, great and small, must now be in existence) fall obviously into two classes— those which are written by members of the Church for which More died, and those which are not. Mr. Cecil's ' Portrait ' belongs to the first class. To that class also belong the memor- able sixteenth-century lives by Roper, Harpsfield, Stapleton and Ro. Ba., and modern lives by Father Bridgett, Mr. C:hristo, pher Hollis, the Rev. Sir John R. O'Connell and•others. It is obvious that in such lives a depth of understanding and sym- pathy may be looked for, which can scarcely be expected from the general body of English biographers and historians, who can hardly deal with the lives and sufferings of the Roman Catholic martyrs without feeling that they are but building the sepulchres of the prophets whom their fathers slew.

Even after the lives enumerated above, each of which had its own particular virtues, and its own special contribution to make to our national estimate of More, there remained, as Mr. Cecil rightly saw, much for him to do. He writes :

" In the case of a nature so finely integrated as his [More's], and so little patient of any eclectic treatment, there seems room for something further in the way of detailed analysis, commentary and criticism of his works, and perhaps too, for some closer inter- weaving of his inner with his outer life, if his figure is to stand out in its full distinction upon the large tapestry of his time."

Accordingly, in this biography, many of More's works receive a detailed (and a welcome) analysis. But the peculiar virtue of the book lies in the " closer interweaving of More's inner

with his outer life." It is above all as a saint that Mr. Cecil depicts More, and he is obviously a little nettled by a flippant remark once made by the present reviewer, that More's blame- lessness is the greatest difficulty with which his biographer has to cope. The remark was never intended to be taken too seriously ; and to one who approaches his subject with the deep reverence and understanding which Mr. Cecil shows, More's blamelessness seems to present no difficulty at all.

Mr. Cecil sees that we have got to get back, not merely to the great leaders of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, but behind them to the actors who were already on the stage when these leaders made their entrance : in other words, we must get behind Luther to the Age of Erasmus :

" For to that unity of religious faith which has become so desper- ately necessary to us as the political and moral disintegration of our society advances, we shall, so far as the human eye can see come only, if we come at all, through the courtesy of many individual minds seeking one another, no longer across the strong barriers which use and wont have raised, but at the very fork of the road where their intellectual forbears parted."

It is now more than half a century since Charles Beard said, in those Hibbert lectures which some have considered to be

the best English book on the Reformation, " the Reformation that has been, is Luther's monument : perhaps the Reformation that is to be, will trace itself back to Erasmus." These words are capable of very varied interpretation : but they certainly mean that we must seek each other " at the very fork of the road " : we must look back to Erasmus.

No one can have studied Thomas More carefully without noting the change which comes over him after that passage of the river. from Chelsea to Lambeth in which " the field is won." But never before has this change (from " Catholic champion " to " Catholic saint," to quote Mr. Cecil's words) been brought out as clearly as it is in the closing pages of Mr. Cecil's book. In The First Book of Comfort against Tribulation, More gives three reasons for abandoning the controversy which he had been persistently waging :

• " The first is, that in some communications had of late together, bath appeared good likelihood of some good agreement to grow together in one accord of our faith. The second, that in the mean- while till this may come to pass, contention, despicion, [i.e. dis- putation] with uncharitable behaviour, is prohibited and forbidden, in effect, upon-all- parties. . . . The third is, that all Germany for all their diverse opinions, yet as they agree together in profession of Christ's name, so agree they now in preparation of a common power, in defence of Christendom against our common enemy the

Turk. . . - - - " Therefore will I let. God work, and leave off contention."

More put these words, in his Dialogue, into- the mouth of

a Hungarian gentleman. But there is no doubt that he is speaking for himself, and is giving the reason why he has ' abandoned the writing of works of controversy, and is devoting his time to writing books which are all of them books of " comfort against tribulation." The change in subject must proceed from a teal change in More's inclination, and not from any prudential motive. For More might have written an imaginary dialogue with a heretic, and chosen ground where the king would have been altogether on his side and altogether against the heretic ; whereas King Henry, had he known of More's words of comfort, could hardly have failed to construe them as comforting traitors in resisting the will of the King.

But, as it became more and more clear that Henry intended to push to. extremes his quarrel with his faithful servant, and as More, seeing his own agonies drawing nearer, passed from the Dialogue of Comfort to the Treatise upon the Passion of Christ, all bitterness against others passed from him. Mr. Cecil draws attention to

" the little vignette that More, as he meditated upon Christ's action in washing the feet of His disciples, found himself making of Henry. ' None, I suppose, nowhere,' he writes, ' use that godly ceremony more goodly than our Sovereign lord, the King's Grace here of this realm, both in humble manner washing and wiping, and kissing also, many poor folks feet after the number of the years of his age ' . . ."

Mr. Cecil sums up these final scenes of More, visited by his daughter in prison : " Tragedies enough as there are to give us pause on every page of the long tale, it is not easy to think in English history of another where the circumstances are so poignant, the suffering so free from blame, and the sentiment so gracious, charming, authentic and detailed. We can see the father and daughter, if we choose, no less clearly than we see Lear and Cordelia, sitting alone like birds in the cage ' praying and repeating, as we know they did, the im- memorial laments of the Hebrew Psalmist, and telling old talcs, and making merry over gilded butterflies, and talking Court news, and taking upon them the mystery of things, like God's spies, in a wall'd prison."

The illustrations are not quite worthy of so outstanding a book. Why do we go on reproducing engravings of the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries, though photography makes it quite easy to go back to the originals ? The yorster. man engraving of Holbein's "Erasmus" is an excellent print, but it is far from reproducing the vivid features and the

sensitive mouth of its " Greystole " original, which passed to the Pierpont Morgan collection. Katharine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn are given " After the Holbein portraits," though it is pretty certain that no portrait of either queen by Holbein is extant. The reproduction of " the passage of the rivers " is welcome, but otherwise the illustrations might mislead a casual observer : he would hardly expect from them a biography of the depth, insight, learning and scholarship which characterise Mr. Cecil's book from its first to' its last