| <The Saturday Review April 18, 1857>
| <The Life of Martin Luther>
| <Lord Robert Cecil>
| <pb n="364>
| Mr. Worsley professes to supply a desideratum which 
| exists, he says, not only here, but on the Continent.  Many 
| lives of Luther have appeared; but he complains that they 
| have all been engrossed with the stirring scenes which 
| accompanied the outburst of the great religious revolution.  
| As soon as the star of the Reformation begins to wane, 
| the biographers of Luther get tired of the subject, and 
| dismiss their hero in a few summary pages.  We cordially 
| sympathize with Mr. Worsley's complaint; but we are 
| constrained to say that he is equally obnoxious to it 
| himself.  When he wrote his preface, only his first 
| volume was ready, and the composition of that is 
| admirable.  Luther's early groping after truth, the gradual 
| steps of his enlightenment, his indignation at the 
| enormities of Tetzel; the burning of the bull, the Diet of 
| Worms, and the romantic retreat in the Wartburg, are told 
| with a life and vigour which give to the biography almost 
| the interest of a novel.  Mr. Worsley has a vivid, sketchy 
| manner, and an easy style; and in this first volume he is at 
| his ease, and takes his time.  All the parts of the picture 
| are brought out and well finished, and the individuality of 
| the various characters is artistically maintained.  And 
| doubtless the author imagined that he would be able to 
| work out the rest of Luther's life with equal elaboration.  
| He little counted on the conferences and controversies, 
| the Diets and the Leagues, which lay before him to 
| describe.  It is no wonder that historian after historian has 
| recoiled from detailing the intricate and profitless 
| complication of manoevres of which the later annals of 
| the Reformation consist.  When Mr. Worsley came to this 
| part of his task, he must have felt more sympathy for the 
| predecessors whose omissions he condemns.  As the 
| biography proceeds, it gradually quickens in pace.  The 
| space that in the first volume is allotted to three years, in 
| the second suffices for sixteen.  The history, in order to 
| be readable, must be compressed.  The author admits this, 
| but he admits it with reluctance; and the constant conflict 
| between the necessity for compression and the inclination 
| to enlarge exercises a most infelicitous influence upon his 
| style.  He will omit no detail ~~ he will spare us no 
| controversial episode, no diplomatic manoeuvre.  But, in 
| his hurry, he is obliged to leap abruptly from one to the 
| other, till at last the narrative degenerates into a 
| schoolboy's notion of an abstract ~~ a string of 
| <hi rend="italic"> purpurei punni. </hi>
| The point in which Mr. Worsley has shown most power is 
| in his rare talent of breathing life into the dry bones of 
| controversy.  He describes with considerable minuteness 
| the ever-varying phases of opinion which sprang up in 
| such rapid succession on the subject of the Sacrament, 
| and the still more wearisome subtleties of the 
| Justification controversy; and yet his summaries are so 
| brief and so clear that they almost equal the narrative in 
| interest.  Those who in the present day have handled the 
| thorny literature of the Denison case will fully appreciate 
| the value of a talent which can put the microscopic 
| distinctions of the professional controversialist within 
| reach of the million.  In illustration, we will quote our 
| author's description of part of the conference of Marburg 
| ~~ not because it is absolutely his best performance, but 
| because it is the most available for citation.
| <q> </q>
| One minor defect in Mr. Worsley's style we must notice 
| in passing.  It is strange that an author whose language is 
| so remarkable for gracefulness and ease should think it 
| necessary to affect those qualities by the introduction 
| qualities of slipshod.  The Emperor is made to take a <p> 
| "sound nap" </p> at the Diet of Augsburg.  In another 
| place, he <p> "rates" </p> the Elector ~~ not in the way 
| in which vestries rate, but in the way in which old women 
| rate; and elsewhere, Luther is said to regret that 
| Melanethon <q> </q>.  Mr. Worsley seems to think that 
| the fact of Luther's having been fond of slang is a 
| sufficient excuse to him for indulging in it himself.
| Notwithstanding the general excellence of our author's 
| style, which we readily admit, this is not a satisfactory 
| biography ~~ probably for the same reason that none of 
| its predecessors have been satisfactory.  Luther's life 
| encroaches too much on the domain of history; and the 
| domains of history and biography are very distinct.  It is 
| the office of history to record how a man acts under the 
| public eye; and therefore it paints him as he thinks he 
| ought to be, rather than as he is.  But biography 
| chronicles his life as it passes when he is under no check 
| to public opinion, no load of public responsibility.  It tells 
| how he acts towards those who can make no outcry ~~ 
| how he speaks when his words are free to flow from the 
| abundance of his heart.  Now there never was a man who 
| had so little private life as Luther.  Most public men ~~ 
| even those who have most powerfully influenced the 
| fortunes of our race ~~ have done so almost entirely by 
| their speeches, their writings, or their public acts.  What 
| Napoleon, or Peter the Great, or Hildebrand might do or 
| say in their own private circles, had no direct effect on 
| their contemporaries, and therefore has a personal rather 
| than an historic interest.  But it was not so with an apostle 
| of new ideas that revolutionized the world.  In the 
| dissemination of his opinions lay his gigantic power; and 
| every conversation, every letter, every journey he made, 
| was means to the great end of his life.  His words became 
| oracles, no matter when or where uttered.  Consequently, 
| nothing in his life was private.  The full glare of 
| European publicity was turned on every circumstance of 
| his domestic life.  His most private acts became public ~~ 
| they had a meaning for his fellow men, and a bearing on 
| the crisis of which he was the guide.  His very marriage 
| was a controversial manifesto.
| A Life of Luther, therefore, is in truth only a chapter out 
| of the history of the sixteenth century; and if written in 
| the spirit and under the responsibilities of history, it 
| might be as valuable a contribution to literature as a Life 
| of Philip the Second or of
| <pb n="365">
| Cardinal Wolsey. But Mr. Worsley does not profess to 
| write as an historian.  There is no trace of critical research 
| or of laborious accuracy in his pages.  His object is 
| merely to entertain and to inform ~~ he takes no notice of 
| the historical disputes which honeycomb the ground over 
| which he walks.  He dismisses the case of the Landgrave 
| of Hesse with a few caustic remarks against Luther's 
| detractors, without attempting to discuss the merits of the 
| charges brought against him.  He tells again the old story 
| of Luther's finding a Bible in a library at Wittenberg, and 
| his exultation at discovering that it contained <q> </q>.  
| We should have thought that Dr. Maitland had disposed 
| of that fable for ever; but our author does not seem to be 
| aware that Dr. Maitland ever wrote upon the subject.  So 
| little does he assume a critical attitude that, among the 
| crowd of anecdotes which he relates, he gives no hint to 
| his readers of what he wishes them to believe. He tells the 
| following with as unwavering a gravity as he exhibits in 
| chronicling the Diet of Augsburg:  ~~
| <q> </q>
| With a similar disdain of pedantic accuracy, he accuses 
| (vol. i. p. 308) the Holy See of levying a tax on priests' 
| concubines ~~ and then, in justification, cites a passage at 
| length from the <hi rend="italic"> Centum Gravamina, 
| </hi> which does not even mention the Holy See.  But 
| though Mr. Worsley is not fastidious about accuracy 
| himself, he by no means spares those of his predecessors 
| who have been guilty of a similar failing.  He falls on the 
| unfortunate Audin ~~ who, as a Frenchman and an 
| Ultramontane, has a double right to blunder ~~ with all 
| the fury of an indignant Protestant.  Luther stopped at 
| Erfurth on his way to the Diet of Worms, and being 
| applied to by some of the inhabitants, consented to preach.  
| On this Mr. Worsley has an indignant note:  ~~
| <q> </q>
| The mistake is not a very serious one, even if Audin 
| made it.  But there is nothing in the least irreconcilable in 
| the accounts.  What could be more likely than that, 
| having been begged by the inhabitants to preach, Luther 
| should apply to the authorities for permission?  
| Biographers are well known for a servile race; but Mr. 
| Worsley out-Boswells Boswell.  He is the pattern of all 
| biographers.  He not only justifies his hero's faults ~~ he 
| will not be content unless he imitates them in practice.  It 
| is told of the last days of the <hi rend="italic"> ancien 
| regime, </hi> that Marie-Antoinette, having sprained her 
| ankle one day, was reduced to a hobble; whereupon the 
| obsequious courtiers straightway took to limping into the 
| presence-chamber.  Allowing for difference of age and 
| country, Mr. Worsley has caught Luther's <p> "hobble" 
| </p> to a nicety.  Perhaps his bad language, like his 
| master's, is susceptible of a controversial interpretation.  
| There is a large <hi rend="italic"> consensus </hi> 
| among theologians ~~ at least in practice ~~ polemical 
| difference suspends altogether the ordinary laws of 
| courtesy and charity, and very considerably relaxes these 
| of truth.  Being aware of this ruling, which during the last 
| twenty years has been extensively acted on, we were not 
| startled at the assertion (vol. i. p. 49), that <q> </q>.  We 
| wondered, indeed, where Mr. Worsley procured his 
| intimate acquaintance with the <p> "usual sins of 
| monks;" </p> but we are aware that both these assertions 
| were strictly orthodox, and that Exeter Hall would 
| support them as one man.  But we came across a 
| definition of Christian worth, which certainly struck us as 
| a new and compendious view of the whole duty of man; 
| and we do not think that it has as yet been authoritatively 
| accepted by any class of theologians:  ~~
| <q> </q>
| If Mr. Worsley had professed to be an historian, the value 
| of his work would have been considerably modified by 
| the above sentiments.  But in a mere biography, the 
| heartiness with which he throws himself into one side of 
| the question adds considerably to the vigour of the 
| narrative, without doing any serious injury to truth.  In his 
| preface, he tells us that his only aim has been to cast the 
| work in a <q> </q>.  And he has so far succeeded in his 
| aim, that one-half of the work is readable if it is not 
| succinct, and the other half is succinct if it is not readable.