it was difficult to look at them fixedly.”[412] (J. Kessler.) As remarked above, his deportment was upright and almost defiant.
Of what Luther must have been, judging by his descriptions, not one of the portraits which have come down to us gives any good idea.[413] This sounds strange, as the art of portrait painting was already very highly developed in Luther’s day, whilst his likenesses were in great demand and were despatched from Wittenberg to every quarter in order to increase his popularity. Dürer and Holbein, who have left us characteristic and faithful likenesses of Melanchthon, never employed their brush or pencil in depicting Luther. The death-mask which we still have was not taken till four days after Luther’s death from a stroke, i.e. after decomposition had already made some progress, while the portrait of the dead man painted in haste by Lucas Fortenagel is almost terrifying and betrays a very unpractised hand.[414]
Lucas Cranach the elder, as is well known, sketched or painted several likenesses of Luther, and as the two were very intimate with each other we might have anticipated something reliable. He was, however, not sufficiently true to life; he suppressed what he considered to be defects in his sitter, and, in spite of his artistic talent, he did not possess the special qualifications for faithfully reproducing in a portrait the expression of the soul. In his pictures of Luther we are at a loss to find certain traits mentioned in the accounts we possess; the artist introduces into the face an expression of mildness and tenderness which was foreign to Luther. Neither is it a fact that we have hundreds of pictures from his studio, as is so often stated, for of all the portraits and engravings ascribed to Cranach only five can be considered as absolutely genuine, the copper plates of 1520 and 1521,[415] then the “Squire George” of the Wartburg in the Leipzig Town Library, and two portraits in the Kaufmann Gallery in Berlin. “If we examine the absolutely genuine ‘Cranachs’ we at once notice that they have nothing in common with the typical Luther features [of a later day].” From these original likenesses down to the pictures of Luther which circulate to-day there are many steps. The transformation was carried further and further, though the “broad, peasant face” and the “powerful jaw” were destined to remain. Nearly all these pictures represent an elderly man, inclined to corpulence, with somewhat blurred features, with surprisingly abundant curly hair and small, kindly eyes.
This, the typical Luther of to-day, appears perhaps for the first time in the so-called “Epitaphium Lutheri,” a woodcut which was made after Luther’s death by the elder Cranach’s son, Lucas Cranach the younger. The type in question became very generally known owing to the picture of Luther painted nine years after his death by the younger Cranach for an altar-piece in the parish church at Weimar, although in this likeness, which has been so frequently copied, there may still be found some traces of the bold, warrior features of the real Luther. Böhmer, the Protestant historian, remarks: “In the most popular of these modern ‘ideal pictures,’ viz. the oleograph of Luther in the fur cappa which ‘adorns’ so many churches, even the Doctor’s own Catherine would be unable to recognise her Martin.”
The pictured Luther has become almost a fable among Protestants. This may well make us suspicious of the pen-picture of him now spread abroad by so many of his followers and admirers. Is it in the least trustworthy? Here again it is the Protestant authority cited above who complains: “The literary Luther-portraits, though strikingly similar, are all more or less unlike the original. In the strict sense they are not portraits at all, but presentments of a type.”
The strain of such strenuous literary work, in the case of one whose public life was so full of commotion as Luther’s, could not fail to tax the most healthy nervous system. We can only wonder how he contrived to cope with the excitement and incessant labour of the years from 1520 to 1525 and to continue tirelessly at the task till his life’s end.
Amongst his works in those years were various controversial writings printed in 1523, for instance, that against Cochlæus; also tracts such as those “On the Secular Power” and “On the Adoration of the Sacrament”; also the Instructions on the Supper, on Baptism and on the Liturgy, etc., and, besides these, voluminous circular-letters, translations from, and extensive commentaries on, the Bible. There was also a vast multitude of sermons and private letters. Among the writings on widely differing subjects dealt with by Luther in 1524–25 the following may be specified: “On Christian Schools,” “Two Unequal Commands of the Emperor,” “On Trade and Usury,” “On the Abomination of silent Mass,” “Against the Heavenly Prophets,” “Against the Murderous Peasants,” “On the Unfreedom of the Will.” His publications in the three years 1523–25 number no less than seventy-nine. His attacks on the vow of chastity, and on celibacy, constitute a striking feature of many of his then writings. Obstinacy in the pursuit of one idea, which characterises the German, degenerates in Luther’s case into a sort of monomania, which would have made his writings unreadable, or at least tedious, had not the author’s literary gifts and unfortunately the prurient character of the subject-matter appealed to many. The haste in which all this was produced has left its mark everywhere.[416]
In those years Luther’s nerves frequently avenged themselves by headaches and attacks of giddiness for the unlimited demands made upon them. Irregular meals and the want of proper attention to the body in the desolate “black monastery” of Wittenberg also contributed their quota. Among the bodily disorders which often troubled him we find him complaining of a disagreeable singing in the ears; then it was that he began to suffer from calculus, a malady which caused him great pains in later years and of which we first hear in 1526. We reserve, however, our treatment of Luther’s various ailments till we come to describe the close of his life. (See vol. v., xxxv. 1.)
We cannot, however, avoid dealing here with a matter connected with his pathology, which has frequently been discussed in recent times. The delicate question of his having suffered from syphilis was first broached by the Protestant physician, Friedrich Küchenmeister, in 1881, and another Protestant, the theologian and historian Theodore Kolde, has brought it into more prominent notice by the production of a new document, which in 1904 was unfortunately submitted to noisy discussion by polemical writers and apologists in the public press.
Küchenmeister wrote: “As a student Luther was on the whole healthy. From syphilis, the scourge of the students and knights at that time (we have only to think of Ulrich von Hutten), he never suffered, ‘I preserved,’ he says, ‘my chastity.’ ”[417]
The inference is, however, not conclusive, since syphilis is now looked upon as an illness which can be contracted not merely by sexual intercourse, but also in other ways. There was therefore no real reason to introduce the question of chastity, which the physician here raises.
As regards, however, the question of infection, every unbiassed historian will make full allowance for the state of that age. Owing to the great corruption of morals which prevailed, syphilis, or the “French sickness, malum Franciæ,” as it was called, raged everywhere, but especially in France and Italy. The danger of infection was, as Luther himself points out, extremely great, so that, as he says, even “boys in the cradle are plagued with this disease.” So prevalent was this formerly unknown malady that “friends wished it to each other in jest.”[418] He sees in the spread of the “scabies gallica” a manifest Divine judgment for the growing lack of the fear of God, and looks upon it as a sign of the approaching end of the world.[419] In his “Chronicle” he says that, in 1490, a new illness, the French sickness, made its appearance, “one of the great signs of the coming of the Last Day.”[420]
The new material furnished by Theodore Kolde in his “Analecta Lutherana” consists of a medical letter of Wolfgang Rychardus to Johann Magenbuch dated June 11, 1523, taken from the Hamburg Town Library, and is of a character to make one wonder whether Luther did not at one period suffer from syphilis, at any rate in a mild form.[421]
The circumstances of the letter are as follows: Luther was recovering from a serious attack of illness which he himself believed to be due to a bath.[422] We learn from Melanchthon that this indisposition was accompanied by high fever.[423] On May 24, however, the patient was able to report that he was better, but that he “was over-burdened with distracting labours.”[424] At that time a certain Apriolus, a renegade Franciscan and zealous disciple of Luther’s (his real name was Johann Eberlin),