Emily C. Pearson

Strasbourg and its Cathedral.—Gutenberg’s Early Life.—Civil Strife.—Romantic Lawsuit.

Who has not heard of the noble Rhine, which winds many hundred miles through Central Europe? Castles, vineyards, farms, and forests, with now and then a village or a city, diversify its banks.

Prominent among its cities is Strasbourg; a strongly fortified border town, founded ages ago by the Romans, but held recently by France. It was an imperial city of the German empire in 1681, when Louis XIV. got possession of it, by an unwarrantable attack in a time of peace. It is in shape a triangle, with walls six miles in circuit, entered by seven gates. The fortifications extend to the Rhine, although the main city, of 85,000 inhabitants, is situated a mile and a half back on the Ill, a branch of the Rhine. The tourist, while still far distant, sees the spire of the famous Cathedral, NÔtre Dame. It is the highest spire in the world, a masterpiece of airy open-work, of elaborate tracery and delicate workmanship, towering aloft four hundred and sixty-six feet, twenty-four feet higher than the great Pyramid of Egypt, and more than twice as high as Bunker Hill Monument. The great Minster of which it is a part, was nine hundred years in building, and was finished shortly before our story begins. When the late war came, the Rhine, Strasbourg, and its Cathedral, were not wholly unlike what they were at that time,—four hundred and thirty-five years ago. It is true, railroad trains would shriek on either side of the river, and gaudy steamers bustle up and down, and occasionally a “water-cure” or a “juvenile reformatory” meet the eye, signs of modern progress; but in strange contrast with these the Roman and mediÆval remains. Rhineland is at once ancient and modern. Here are “ruins of the Middle Ages, and marks of the French Revolution; the bones of great feudal giants, and scars of modern disturbance.” The old homes of the warlike barons still stand, and the incense-flavored churches, whose corner-stones were laid in the dim past.

It is in the year 1436; and the visitor, if he approaches the city from the French side, before entering the west gate will be sure to seek out John Gutenberg, a noted man who lives in the suburbs in yonder pretty cottage, half hidden in ivy and honeysuckle, and the ancient turrets of St. Arbogast Monastery, not a stone’s throw distant, frowning upon it. There is a woman of taste within; the well-trained vines speak of her, as do the tulips and wall-flowers. And the eye glances admiringly from these to the apple-trees, with their wealth of blossoms, and the lilacs, jubilant with plumes.

Gutenberg was born at Mentz, a free and rich city on the Rhine, about the year 1400, and, when yet a young man, fled, on account of political dissensions, to Strasbourg, sixty miles distant. Of his childhood little is known; yet some German and other writers draw pleasing pictures of his youth. They represent him as high-spirited, thoughtful, and devout; influenced by a desire that good books might be made common, and as having “a foreseeing consciousness” of the part he was to act in bringing it about. “He said to himself, from his earliest years,” says one of his biographers, “God suffers in the great multitudes whom his sacred word cannot reach. Religious truth is captive in a small number of manuscript books, which guard the common treasure, instead of diffusing it. Let us break the seal which holds the holy things; give wings to the truth, that by means of speech, no longer written at great expense by the hand that wearies itself, but multiplied as the air by an unwearied machine, it may fly to seek every soul born into the world!”

If this was true of Gutenberg while young, no wonder that his manhood was crowned so gloriously. He placed before himself at the outset a great and worthy object; he felt through life the thrill of an inspiring purpose, which stimulated and ennobled his nature, and tended naturally to success. Had he, like thousands, been contented to drift through the world with the current wherever it chanced to bear him, living for himself and the fleeting present, never should we have heard of John Gutenberg.

But there is a fact in Gutenberg’s early history which does not seem to present him in an amiable light, as he figures in a lawsuit, having been sued by the father of his betrothed, to compel him to fulfill his promise of marriage. There is, however, no evidence that Gutenberg intended any wrong in this affair, as he sincerely loved Anna von Isernen ThÜr,1 the young lady to whom he was engaged. She was of noble family, of the city of Strasbourg. His property had been confiscated in Mentz in the struggle between the plebeians and the nobility, and his failure in keeping his troth is attributed to his sensitiveness to his misfortunes.

It has been remarked, that if Mentz, Gutenberg’s native place, had not been a free city, he might not have conceived or executed his invention; for despotism, like superstition, imposes silence. “It was fitting that printing and liberty should be born of the same sun and the same air.” Mentz, Strasbourg, Worms, and other municipal cities of the Rhine, were small federative republics; as Florence, Genoa, Venice, and the republics of Italy. The youth of our country find freedom favorable to thought and invention; thus young Gutenberg found it. Yet civil strife marked the history of those cities. “In them were the warlike nobility, the aspiring burghers, and the laboring people, who floated between these two contending classes, alternately caressed and oppressed by them, yet at times themselves striving for the supremacy. In these commotions, victory rested sometimes with the patrician, sometimes with the plebeian, and numbers on either side were from time to time outlawed. But these had not the sea to cross to fly the country; they traversed the Rhine. Those banished from Strasbourg, went to Mentz; those from Mentz, to Strasbourg, to await a turn of events, or the recall of the exiles.”

In these intestine quarrels, young Gutenberg, himself of the nobility, “and naturally combating for the cause most holy in the eyes of a son, that of a father,” was twice vanquished and expelled by the burghers, with all the chevaliers of the family,—his mother and sisters being permitted to remain in possession of their property. Later, the free city of Frankfort offering to mediate between the nobles and plebeians, it obtained the return of those who had been banished, on condition of the equality of the two classes in the administration of the government. Meanwhile Gutenberg, having become absorbed in his inventive studies, did not return; and his mother petitioned the Republic to give him as a pension a portion of the revenue of his confiscated property. Answer was given, that the refusing to return to his own country, by the young patrician, was a declaration of hostility; and he must therefore be treated as one of its enemies. So his mother continued to send him secret supplies from her own resources.

But the faithful Lady Anna did not seek to free herself from her plighted faith, because of the adversities of her lover. If he shrank from receiving her to the humble circumstances in which he had been thrown, she was still true to her vows. And as his humility and thoughtful scruples could not be overcome in any other way, she vanquished them by a legal summons; her father citing him before a magistrate of Strasbourg, to cause him to fulfill his promise of marriage. This summons of the Lady Anna to Gutenberg remains to-day as an authentic memorial of his marriage. For the faltering artisan yielded to “this generous violence of affection,” and consummated his happiness by marrying the fair plaintiff in the suit.