CLOISTER AND THE HEARTH, The.
Charles Reade's 'The Cloister and the Hearth> (1861), like George Eliot's (Romola' (1863), is a very great historical novel dealing with the Renaissance. George Eliot confines her theme to Italy, making a profound psychological study of a few typical characters. Charles Reade gives a broad picture of the life of the period not only in Italy but in France,.Germany and especially Holland. Each novelist is su preme in the field chosen.
The events of Reade's novel are supposed to have occurred toward the close of the 15th century. The hero is one Gerard Eliassoen, a Dutch boy of humble birth, who displays in his youth a wonderful talent as a copyist and illuminator of Latin and Greek manuscripts. He is desperately in love with Margaret Brandt, the beautiful daughter of a physician—half alchemist, half magician. The lovers are form ally betrothed, but their marriage is prevented, and Gerard flees to Rome, the centre of the new art and learning, with the intention of re turning to Margaret after his fortune has been made and his fame has been established. The long journey to Rome on foot through dense forests infested with wolves and robbers, the association with other travelers met or over taken by the way, the motley groups encoun tered at inns, and the varied life of the Eternal City, enabled the author to unfold a panorama such as fiction had never known. All the pic turesque elements of the Renaissance are in Reade's novel. In his pages we see, too, just how the people lived, what they did, what they thought, amid the uncertainty and turmoil when ancient ideas were coming into conflict with the ideals of the medizval church. There is the household of a Dutch shopkeeper in contrast with the sumptuous court; the village curate, the hermit, the great monasteries and the great unfinished churches with nave and chancel open to the sky, and•Dominican friars travers ing the banks of the Rhine and preaching to the people. We witness the cruel administra
tion of the law, we see the wheel and the rack and gibbets, from which dangle robbers hung by the neck. There is a thrilling .escape from the tqwer of a prison, and a desperate en counter with bears, and a castle stormed and besieged, and a shipwrecic— all in the medim val style of wild adventure.
The world is in utter confusion. The bow and arrow are still used, but gunpowder is coming in; manuscripts are copied and illumi nated, but books have been printed in a strange new manner. There is no faith; there is only superstition, fanaticism and sorcery. The Pope has written an indecent novel; the ritual of the Church is only a revival of pagan worship in a new form, and the scholar in the presence of cardinals denounces the Church and lauds Greek hedonism above all else. Finally, the deep tragedy of the age is depicted in the story of the lovers. While in Rome, Gerard hears that Margaret is dead, and, hopeless of further hap piness in this world, he becomes a Dominican friar. And then he returns to Holland and finds that she is still alive and the mother of a boy. But there can now be no life together,' for he has given himself to the Church, which permits no union between the cloister and the hearth. The beauty, the conduct and the temper of Margaret are beyond all praise. There is no finer feminine character in fiction. The golden haired son of Margaret and Gerard lived to be Erasmus, the great scholar and divine whose name soon resounded through the Western world. With Erasmus dawned a new civiliza tion.