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Erasmus and the Age of Reformation

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Title: Erasmus and the Age of Reformation

Author: Johan Huizinga

Author of introduction, etc.: Sir G. N. Clark


        
Release date: October 5, 2007 [eBook #22900]

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ERASMUS AND THE AGE OF REFORMATION ***




Produced by John Hagerson, Juliet Sutherland, David King,
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ERASMUS AND THE AGE OF REFORMATION


JOHAN HUIZINGA

_with a selection from the letters of Erasmus_


HARPER TORCHBOOKS / The Cloister Library

HARPER & ROW, PUBLISHERS

NEW YORK, EVANSTON, AND LONDON

[Illustration: WOODCUT BY HANS HOLBEIN. 1535]



ERASMUS AND THE AGE OF REFORMATION

_Printed in the United States of America_

Huizinga's text was translated from the Dutch by F. Hopman and first
published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1924. The section from the
Letters of Erasmus was translated by Barbara Flower.

Reprinted by arrangement with Phaidon Press, Ltd., London

Originally published under the title: "Erasmus of Rotterdam"

First HARPER TORCHBOOK edition published 1957

Library of Congress catalogue card number 57-10119




CONTENTS

_Preface by G. N. Clark_ xi

CHAP.

    I CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YOUTH, 1466-88 1

   II IN THE MONASTERY, 1488-95 10

  III THE UNIVERSITY OF PARIS, 1495-9 20

   IV FIRST STAY IN ENGLAND, 1499-1500 29

   V ERASMUS AS A HUMANIST 39

   VI THEOLOGICAL ASPIRATIONS, 1501 47

  VII YEARS OF TROUBLE--LOUVAIN, PARIS, ENGLAND, 1502-6 55

 VIII IN ITALY, 1506-9 62

   IX THE PRAISE OF FOLLY 69

    X THIRD STAY IN ENGLAND, 1509-14 79

   XI A LIGHT OF THEOLOGY, 1514-16 87

  XII ERASMUS'S MIND 100

 XIII ERASMUS'S MIND (_continued_) 109

  XIV ERASMUS'S CHARACTER 117

   XV AT LOUVAIN, 1517-18 130

  XVI FIRST YEARS OF THE REFORMATION 139

 XVII ERASMUS AT BASLE, 1521-9 151

XVIII CONTROVERSY WITH LUTHER AND GROWING CONSERVATISM, 1524-6 161

  XIX AT WAR WITH HUMANISTS AND REFORMERS, 1528-9 170

   XX LAST YEARS 179

  XXI CONCLUSION 188

SELECTED LETTERS OF ERASMUS 195

_List of Illustrations_ 257

_Index of Names_ 263




PREFACE

_by G.N. Clark, Provost of Oriel College, Oxford_


Rather more than twenty years ago, on a spring morning of alternate
cloud and sunshine, I acted as guide to Johan Huizinga, the author of
this book, when he was on a visit to Oxford. As it was not his first
stay in the city, and he knew the principal buildings already, we looked
at some of the less famous. Even with a man who was well known all over
the world as a writer, I expected that these two or three hours would be
much like the others I had spent in the same capacity with other
visitors; but this proved to be a day to remember. He understood the
purposes of these ancient buildings, the intentions of their founders
and builders; but that was to be expected from an historian who had
written upon the history of universities and learning. What surprised
and delighted me was his seeing eye. He told me which of the decorative
_motifs_ on the Tower of the Four Orders were usual at the time when it
was built, and which were less common. At All Souls he pointed out the
seldom appreciated merits of Hawksmoor's twin towers. His eye was not
merely informed but sensitive. I remembered that I had heard of his
talent for drawing, and as we walked and talked I felt the influence of
a strong, quiet personality deep down in which an artist's
perceptiveness was fused with a determination to search for historical
truth.

Huizinga's great success and reputation came suddenly when he was over
forty. Until that time his powers were ripening, not so much slowly as
secretly. His friends knew that he was unique, but neither he nor they
foresaw what direction his studies would take. He was born in 1872 in
Groningen, the most northerly of the chief towns of the Netherlands, and
there he went to school and to the University. He studied Dutch history
and literature and also Oriental languages and mythology and sociology;
he was a good linguist and he steadily accumulated great learning, but
he was neither an infant prodigy nor a universal scholar. Science and
current affairs scarcely interested him, and until his maturity
imagination seemed to satisfy him more than research. Until he was over
thirty he was a schoolmaster at Haarlem, a teacher of history; but it
was still uncertain whether European or Oriental studies would claim him
in the end. For two or three years before giving up school-teaching he
lectured in the University of Amsterdam on Sanskrit, and it was almost
an accident that he became professor of history in the University of his
native town. All through his life it was characteristic of him that
after a spell of creative work, when he had finished a book, he would
turn aside from the subject that had absorbed him and plunge into some
other subject or period, so that the books and articles in the eight
volumes of his collected works (with one more volume still to come)
cover a very wide range. As time went on he examined aspects of history
which at first he had passed over, and he acquired a clear insight into
the political and economic life of the past. It has been well said of
him that he never became either a pedant or a doctrinaire. During the
ten years that he spent as professor at Groningen, he found himself. He
was happily married, with a growing family, and the many elements of his
mind drew together into a unity. His sensitiveness to style and beauty
came to terms with his conscientious scholarship. He was rooted in the
traditional freedoms of his national and academic environment, but his
curiosity, like the historical adventures of his people and his
profession, was not limited by time or space or prejudice. He came more
and more definitely to find his central theme in civilization as a
realized ideal, something that men have created in an endless variety of
forms, but always in order to raise the level of their lives.

While this interior fulfilment was bringing Huizinga to his best, the
world about him changed completely. In 1914, Holland became a neutral
country surrounded by nations at war. In 1914, also, his wife died, and
it was as a lonely widower that he was appointed in the next year to the
chair of general history at Leyden, which he was to hold for the rest of
his academic life. Yet the year after the end of the war saw the
publication of his masterpiece, the book which gave him his high place
among historical writers and was translated as _The Waning of the Middle
Ages_. This is a study of the forms of life and thought in France and
the Netherlands in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the last
phase of one of the great European eras of civilization. In England,
where the Middle Ages had been idealized for generations, some of its
leading thoughts did not seem so novel as they did in Holland, where
many people regarded the Renaissance and more still regarded the
Reformation as a new beginning of a better world; but in England and
America, which had been drawn, unlike Holland, into the vortex of war,
it had the poignancy of a recall to the standards of reasonableness. It
will long maintain its place as a historical book and as a work of
literature.

The shorter book on Erasmus is a companion to this great work. It was
first published in 1924 and so belongs to the same best period of the
author. Its subject is the central intellectual figure of the next
generation after the period which Huizinga called the waning, or rather
the autumn, of the Middle Ages; but Erasmus was also, as will appear
from many of its pages, a man for whom he had a very special sympathy.
Something of what he wrote about Erasmus might also have been written
about himself, or at least about his own response to the transformation
of the world that he had known.

This is not the place for an analysis of that questioning and
illuminating response, nor for a considered estimate of Huizinga's work
as a whole; but there is room for a word about his last years. He was
recognized as one of the intellectual leaders of his country, and a
second marriage in 1937 brought back his private happiness; but the
shadows were darkening over the western world. From the time when
national socialism began to reveal itself in Germany, he took his stand
against it with perfect simplicity and calm. After the invasion of
Holland he addressed these memorable words to some of his colleagues:
'When it comes, as it soon will, to defending our University and the
freedom of science and learning in the Netherlands, we must be ready to
give everything for that: our possessions, our freedom, and even our
lives'. The Germans closed the University. For a time they held Johan
Huizinga, now an old man and in failing health, as a hostage; then they
banished him to open arrest in a remote parish in the eastern part of
the country. Even in these conditions he still wrote, and wrote well. In
the last winter of the war the liberating armies approached and he
suffered the hardships of the civilian population in a theatre of war;
but his spirit was unbroken. He died on 1 February 1945, a few weeks
before his country was set free.

G. N. CLARK

Oriel College, Oxford

April 1952




ERASMUS

_and the Age of Reformation_




CHAPTER I

CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YOUTH

1466-88

    The Low Countries in the fifteenth century--The Burgundian
    power--Connections with the German Empire and with France--The
    northern Netherlands outskirts in every sense--Movement of
    _Devotio moderna_: brethren of the Common Life and Windesheim
    monasteries--Erasmus's birth: 1466--His relations and name--At
    school at Gouda, Deventer and Bois-le-Duc--He takes the vows:
    probably in 1488


When Erasmus was born Holland had for about twenty years formed part of
the territory which the dukes of Burgundy had succeeded in uniting under
their dominion--that complexity of lands, half French in population,
like Burgundy, Artois, Hainault, Namur; half Dutch like Flanders,
Brabant, Zealand, Holland. The appellation 'Holland' was, as yet,
strictly limited to the county of that name (the present provinces of
North and South Holland), with which Zealand, too, had long since been
united. The remaining territories which, together with those last
mentioned, make up the present kingdom of the Netherlands, had not yet
been brought under Burgundian dominion, although the dukes had cast
their eyes on them. In the bishopric of Utrecht, whose power extended to
the regions on the far side of the river Ysel, Burgundian influence had
already begun to make itself manifest. The projected conquest of
Friesland was a political inheritance of the counts of Holland, who
preceded the Burgundians. The duchy of Guelders, alone, still preserved
its independence inviolate, being more closely connected with the
neighbouring German territories, and consequently with the Empire
itself.

All these lands--about this time they began to be regarded collectively
under the name of 'Low Countries by the Sea'--had in most respects the
character of outskirts. The authority of the German emperors had for
some centuries been little more than imaginary. Holland and Zealand
hardly shared the dawning sense of a national German union. They had too
long looked to France in matters political. Since 1299 a French-speaking
dynasty, that of Hainault, had ruled Holland. Even the house of Bavaria
that succeeded it about the middle of the fourteenth century had not
restored closer contact with the Empire, but had itself, on the
contrary, early become Gallicized, attracted as it was by Paris and soon
twined about by the tentacles of Burgundy to which it became linked by
means of a double marriage.

The northern half of the Low Countries were 'outskirts' also in
ecclesiastical and cultural matters. Brought over rather late to the
cause of Christianity (the end of the eighth century), they had, as
borderlands, remained united under a single bishop: the bishop of
Utrecht. The meshes of ecclesiastical organization were wider here than
elsewhere. They had no university. Paris remained, even after the
designing policy of the Burgundian dukes had founded the university of
Louvain in 1425, the centre of doctrine and science for the northern
Netherlands. From the point of view of the wealthy towns of Flanders and
Brabant, now the heart of the Burgundian possessions, Holland and
Zealand formed a wretched little country of boatmen and peasants.
Chivalry, which the dukes of Burgundy attempted to invest with new
splendour, had but moderately thrived among the nobles of Holland. The
Dutch had not enriched courtly literature, in which Flanders and Brabant
zealously strove to follow the French example, by any contribution worth
mentioning.

Whatever was coming up in Holland flowered unseen; it was not of a sort
to attract the attention of Christendom. It was a brisk navigation and
trade, mostly transit trade, by which the Hollanders already began to
emulate the German Hansa, and which brought them into continual contact
with France and Spain, England and Scotland, Scandinavia, North Germany
and the Rhine from Cologne upward. It was herring fishery, a humble
trade, but the source of great prosperity--a rising industry, shared by
a number of small towns.

Not one of those towns in Holland and Zealand, neither Dordrecht nor
Leyden, Haarlem, Middelburg, Amsterdam, could compare with Ghent,
Bruges, Lille, Antwerp or Brussels in the south. It is true that in the
towns of Holland also the highest products of the human mind germinated,
but those towns themselves were still too small and too poor to be
centres of art and science. The most eminent men were irresistibly drawn
to one of the great foci of secular and ecclesiastical culture. Sluter,
the great sculptor, went to Burgundy, took service with the dukes, and
bequeathed no specimen of his art to the land of his birth. Dirk Bouts,
the artist of Haarlem, removed to Louvain, where his best work is
preserved; what was left at Haarlem has perished. At Haarlem, too, and
earlier, perhaps, than anywhere else, obscure experiments were being
made in that great art, craving to be brought forth, which was to change
the world: the art of printing.

There was yet another characteristic spiritual phenomenon, which
originated here and gave its peculiar stamp to life in these countries.
It was a movement designed to give depth and fervour to religious life;
started by a burgher of Deventer, Geert Groote, toward the end of the
fourteenth century. It had embodied itself in two closely connected
forms--the fraterhouses, where the brethren of the Common Life lived
together without altogether separating from the world, and the
congregation of the monastery of Windesheim, of the order of the regular
Augustinian canons. Originating in the regions on the banks of the Ysel,
between the two small towns of Deventer and Zwolle, and so on the
outskirts of the diocese of Utrecht, this movement soon spread, eastward
to Westphalia, northward to Groningen and the Frisian country, westward
to Holland proper. Fraterhouses were erected everywhere and monasteries
of the Windesheim congregation were established or affiliated. The
movement was spoken of as 'modern devotion', _devotio moderna_. It was
rather a matter of sentiment and practice than of definite doctrine. The
truly Catholic character of the movement had early been acknowledged by
the church authorities. Sincerity and modesty, simplicity and industry,
and, above all, constant ardour of religious emotion and thought, were
its objects. Its energies were devoted to tending the sick and other
works of charity, but especially to instruction and the art of writing.
It is in this that it especially differed from the revival of the
Franciscan and Dominican orders of about the same time, which turned to
preaching. The Windesheimians and the Hieronymians (as the brethren of
the Common Life were also called) exerted their crowning activities in
the seclusion of the schoolroom and the silence of the writing cell. The
schools of the brethren soon drew pupils from a wide area. In this way
the foundations were laid, both here in the northern Netherlands and in
lower Germany, for a generally diffused culture among the middle
classes; a culture of a very narrow, strictly ecclesiastical nature,
indeed, but which for that very reason was fit to permeate broad layers
of the people.

What the Windesheimians themselves produced in the way of devotional
literature is chiefly limited to edifying booklets and biographies of
their own members; writings which were distinguished rather by their
pious tenor and sincerity than by daring or novel thoughts.

But of them all, the greatest was that immortal work of Thomas a Kempis,
Canon of Saint Agnietenberg, near Zwolle, the _Imitatio Christi_.

Foreigners visiting these regions north of the Scheldt and the Meuse
laughed at the rude manners and the deep drinking of the inhabitants,
but they also mentioned their sincere piety. These countries were
already, what they have ever remained, somewhat contemplative and
self-contained, better adapted for speculating on the world and for
reproving it than for astonishing it with dazzling wit.

       *       *       *       *       *

Rotterdam and Gouda, situated upward of twelve miles apart in the lowest
region of Holland, an extremely watery region, were not among the first
towns of the county. They were small country towns, ranking after
Dordrecht, Haarlem, Leyden, and rapidly rising Amsterdam. They were not
centres of culture. Erasmus was born at Rotterdam on 27 October, most
probably in the year 1466. The illegitimacy of his birth has thrown a
veil of mystery over his descent and kinship. It is possible that
Erasmus himself learned the circumstances of his coming into the world
only in his later years. Acutely sensitive to the taint in his origin,
he did more to veil the secret than to reveal it. The picture which he
painted of it in his ripe age was romantic and pathetic. He imagined
that his father when a young man made love to a girl, a physician's
daughter, in the hope of marrying her. The parents and brothers of the
young fellow, indignant, tried to persuade him to take holy orders. The
young man fled before the child was born. He went to Rome and made a
living by copying. His relations sent him false tidings that his beloved
had died; out of grief he became a priest and devoted himself to
religion altogether. Returned to his native country he discovered the
deceit. He abstained from all contact with her whom he now could no
longer marry, but took great pains to give his son a liberal education.
The mother continued to care for the child, till an early death took her
from him. The father soon followed her to the grave. To Erasmus's
recollection he was only twelve or thirteen years old when his mother
died. It seems to be practically certain that her death did not occur
before 1483, when, therefore, he was already seventeen years old. His
sense of chronology was always remarkably ill developed.

Unfortunately it is beyond doubt that Erasmus himself knew, or had
known, that not all particulars of this version were correct. In all
probability his father was already a priest at the time of the
relationship to which he owed his life; in any case it was not the
impatience of a betrothed couple, but an irregular alliance of long
standing, of which a brother, Peter, had been born three years before.

We can only vaguely discern the outlines of a numerous and commonplace
middle-class family. The father had nine brothers, who were all married.
The grandparents on his father's side and the uncles on his mother's
side attained to a very great age. It is strange that a host of
cousins--their progeny--has not boasted of a family connection with the
great Erasmus. Their descendants have not even been traced. What were
their names? The fact that in burgher circles family names had, as yet,
become anything but fixed, makes it difficult to trace Erasmus's
kinsmen. Usually people were called by their own and their father's
name; but it also happened that the father's name became fixed and
adhered to the following generation. Erasmus calls his father Gerard,
his brother Peter Gerard, while a papal letter styles Erasmus himself
Erasmus Rogerii. Possibly the father was called Roger Gerard or Gerards.

Although Erasmus and his brother were born at Rotterdam, there is much
that points to the fact that his father's kin did not belong there, but
at Gouda. At any rate they had near relatives at Gouda.

Erasmus was his Christian name. There is nothing strange in the choice,
although it was rather unusual. St. Erasmus was one of the fourteen Holy
Martyrs, whose worship so much engrossed the attention of the multitude
in the fifteenth century. Perhaps the popular belief that the
intercession of St. Erasmus conferred wealth, had some weight in
choosing the name. Up to the time when he became better acquainted with
Greek, he used the form Herasmus. Later on he regretted that he had not
also given that name the more correct and melodious form Erasmius. On a
few occasions he half jocularly called himself so, and his godchild,
Johannes Froben's son, always used this form.

It was probably for similar aesthetic considerations that he soon
altered the barbaric Rotterdammensis to Roterdamus, later Roterodamus,
which he perhaps accentuated as a proparoxytone. Desiderius was an
addition selected by himself, which he first used in 1496; it is
possible that the study of his favourite author Jerome, among whose
correspondents there is a Desiderius, suggested the name to him. When,
therefore, the full form, Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus, first appears,
in the second edition of the _Adagia_, published by Josse Badius at
Paris in 1506, it is an indication that Erasmus, then forty years of
age, had found himself.

Circumstances had not made it easy for him to find his way. Almost in
his infancy, when hardly four years old, he thinks, he had been put to
school at Gouda, together with his brother. He was nine years old when
his father sent him to Deventer to continue his studies in the famous
school of the chapter of St. Lebuin. His mother accompanied him. His
stay at Deventer must have lasted, with an interval during which he was
a choir boy in the minster at Utrecht, from 1475 to 1484. Erasmus's
explicit declaration that he was fourteen years old when he left
Deventer may be explained by assuming that in later years he confused
his temporary absence from Deventer (when at Utrecht) with the definite
end of his stay at Deventer. Reminiscences of his life there repeatedly
crop up in Erasmus's writings. Those concerning the teaching he got
inspired him with little gratitude; the school was still barbaric, then,
he said; ancient medieval text-books were used there of whose silliness
and cumbrousness we can hardly conceive. Some of the masters were of the
brotherhood of the Common Life. One of them, Johannes Synthen, brought
to his task a certain degree of understanding of classic antiquity in
its purer form. Toward the end of Erasmus's residence Alexander Hegius
was placed at the head of the school, a friend of the Frisian humanist,
Rudolf Agricola, who on his return from Italy was gaped at by his
compatriots as a prodigy. On festal days, when the rector made his
oration before all the pupils, Erasmus heard Hegius; on one single
occasion he listened to the celebrated Agricola himself, which left a
deep impression on his mind.

His mother's death of the plague that ravaged the town brought Erasmus's
school-time at Deventer to a sudden close. His father called him and his
brother back to Gouda, only to die himself soon afterwards. He must have
been a man of culture. For he knew Greek, had heard the famous humanists
in Italy, had copied classic authors and left a library of some value.

Erasmus and his brother were now under the protection of three guardians
whose care and intentions he afterwards placed in an unfavourable light.
How far he exaggerated their treatment of him it is difficult to decide.
That the guardians, among whom one Peter Winckel, schoolmaster at Gouda,
occupied the principal place, had little sympathy with the new
classicism, about which their ward already felt enthusiastic, need not
be doubted. 'If you should write again so elegantly, please to add a
commentary', the schoolmaster replied grumblingly to an epistle on which
Erasmus, then fourteen years old, had expended much care. That the
guardians sincerely considered it a work pleasing to God to persuade the
youths to enter a monastery can no more be doubted than that this was
for them the easiest way to get rid of their task. For Erasmus this
pitiful business assumes the colour of a grossly selfish attempt to
cloak dishonest administration; an altogether reprehensible abuse of
power and authority. More than this: in later years it obscured for him
the image of his own brother, with whom he had been on terms of cordial
intimacy.

Winckel sent the two young fellows, twenty-one and eighteen years old,
to school again, this time at Bois-le-Duc. There they lived in the
Fraterhouse itself, to which the school was attached. There was nothing
here of the glory that had shone about Deventer. The brethren, says
Erasmus, knew of no other purpose than that of destroying all natural
gifts, with blows, reprimands and severity, in order to fit the soul for
the monastery. This, he thought, was just what his guardians were aiming
at; although ripe for the university they were deliberately kept away
from it. In this way more than two years were wasted.

One of his two masters, one Rombout, who liked young Erasmus, tried hard
to prevail on him to join the brethren of the Common Life. In later
years Erasmus occasionally regretted that he had not yielded; for the
brethren took no such irrevocable vows as were now in store for him.

An epidemic of the plague became the occasion for the brothers to leave
Bois-le-Duc and return to Gouda. Erasmus was attacked by a fever that
sapped his power of resistance, of which he now stood in such need. The
guardians (one of the three had died in the meantime) now did their
utmost to make the two young men enter a monastery. They had good cause
for it, as they had ill administered the slender fortune of their wards,
and, says Erasmus, refused to render an account. Later he saw everything
connected with this dark period of his life in the most gloomy
colours--except himself. Himself he sees as a boy of not yet sixteen
years (it is nearly certain that he must have been twenty already)
weakened by fever, but nevertheless resolute and sensible in refusing.
He has persuaded his brother to fly with him and to go to a university.
The one guardian is a narrow-minded tyrant, the other, Winckel's
brother, a merchant, a frivolous coaxer. Peter, the elder of the youths,
yields first and enters the monastery of Sion, near Delft (of the order
of the regular Augustinian canons), where the guardian had found a place
for him. Erasmus resisted longer. Only after a visit to the monastery of
Steyn or Emmaus, near Gouda, belonging to the same order, where he found
a schoolfellow from Deventer, who pointed out the bright side of
monastic life, did Erasmus yield and enter Steyn, where soon after,
probably in 1488, he took the vows.




CHAPTER II

IN THE MONASTERY

1488-95

    Erasmus as an Augustinian canon at Steyn--His friends--Letters
    to Servatius--Humanism in the monasteries: Latin poetry--
    Aversion to cloister-life--He leaves Steyn to enter the
    service of the Bishop of Cambray: 1493--James Batt--
    _Antibarbari_--He gets leave to study at Paris: 1495


In his later life--under the influence of the gnawing regret which his
monkhood and all the trouble he took to escape from it caused him--the
picture of all the events leading up to his entering the convent became
distorted in his mind. Brother Peter, to whom he still wrote in a
cordial vein from Steyn, became a worthless fellow, even his evil
spirit, a Judas. The schoolfellow whose advice had been decisive now
appeared a traitor, prompted by self-interest, who himself had chosen
convent-life merely out of laziness and the love of good cheer.

The letters that Erasmus wrote from Steyn betray no vestige of his
deep-seated aversion to monastic life, which afterwards he asks us to
believe he had felt from the outset. We may, of course, assume that the
supervision of his superiors prevented him from writing all that was in
his heart, and that in the depths of his being there had always existed
the craving for freedom and for more civilized intercourse than Steyn
could offer. Still he must have found in the monastery some of the good
things that his schoolfellow had led him to expect. That at this period
he should have written a 'Praise of Monastic Life', 'to please a friend
who wanted to decoy a cousin', as he himself says, is one of those naive
assertions, invented afterwards, of which Erasmus never saw the
unreasonable quality.

He found at Steyn a fair degree of freedom, some food for an intellect
craving for classic antiquity, and friendships with men of the same turn
of mind. There were three who especially attracted him. Of the
schoolfellow who had induced him to become a monk, we hear no more. His
friends are Servatius Roger of Rotterdam and William Hermans of Gouda,
both his companions at Steyn, and the older Cornelius Gerard of Gouda,
usually called Aurelius (a quasi-latinization of Goudanus), who spent
most of his time in the monastery of Lopsen, near Leyden. With them he
read and conversed sociably and jestingly; with them he exchanged
letters when they were not together.

Out of the letters to Servatius there rises the picture of an Erasmus
whom we shall never find again--a young man of more than feminine
sensitiveness; of a languishing need for sentimental friendship. In
writing to Servatius, Erasmus runs the whole gamut of an ardent lover.
As often as the image of his friend presents itself to his mind tears
break from his eyes. Weeping he re-reads his friend's letter every hour.
But he is mortally dejected and anxious, for the friend proves averse to
this excessive attachment. 'What do you want from me?' he asks. 'What is
wrong with you?' the other replies. Erasmus cannot bear to find that
this friendship is not fully returned. 'Do not be so reserved; do tell
me what is wrong! I repose my hope in you alone; I have become yours so
completely that you have left me naught of myself. You know my
pusillanimity, which when it has no one on whom to lean and rest, makes
me so desperate that life becomes a burden.'

Let us remember this. Erasmus never again expresses himself so
passionately. He has given us here the clue by which we may understand
much of what he becomes in his later years.

These letters have sometimes been taken as mere literary exercises; the
weakness they betray and the complete absence of all reticence, seem to
tally ill with his habit of cloaking his most intimate feelings which,
afterwards, Erasmus never quite relinquishes. Dr. Allen, who leaves this
question undecided, nevertheless inclines to regard the letters as
sincere effusions, and to me they seem so, incontestably. This exuberant
friendship accords quite well with the times and the person.

Sentimental friendships were as much in vogue in secular circles during
the fifteenth century as towards the end of the eighteenth century. Each
court had its pairs of friends, who dressed alike, and shared room, bed,
and heart. Nor was this cult of fervent friendship restricted to the
sphere of aristocratic life. It was among the specific characteristics
of the _devotio moderna_, as, for the rest, it seems from its very
nature to be inseparably bound up with pietism. To observe one another
with sympathy, to watch and note each other's inner life, was a
customary and approved occupation among the brethren of the Common Life
and the Windesheim monks. And though Steyn and Sion were not of the
Windesheim congregation, the spirit of the _devotio moderna_ was
prevalent there.

As for Erasmus himself, he has rarely revealed the foundation of his
character more completely than when he declared to Servatius: 'My mind
is such that I think nothing can rank higher than friendship in this
life, nothing should be desired more ardently, nothing should be
treasured more jealously'. A violent affection of a similar nature
troubled him even at a later date when the purity of his motives was
questioned. Afterwards he speaks of youth as being used to conceive a
fervent affection for certain comrades. Moreover, the classic examples
of friends, Orestes and Pylades, Damon and Pythias, Theseus and
Pirithous, as also David and Jonathan, were ever present before his
mind's eye. A young and very tender heart, marked by many feminine
traits, replete with all the sentiment and with all the imaginings of
classic literature, who was debarred from love and found himself placed
against his wish in a coarse and frigid environment, was likely to
become somewhat excessive in his affections.

He was obliged to moderate them. Servatius would have none of so jealous
and exacting a friendship and, probably at the cost of more humiliation
and shame than appears in his letters, young Erasmus resigns himself, to
be more guarded in expressing his feelings in the future. The
sentimental Erasmus disappears for good and presently makes room for the
witty latinist, who surpasses his older friends, and chats with them
about poetry and literature, advises them about their Latin style, and
lectures them if necessary.

The opportunities for acquiring the new taste for classic antiquity
cannot have been so scanty at Deventer, and in the monastery itself, as
Erasmus afterwards would have us believe, considering the authors he
already knew at this time. We may conjecture, also, that the books left
by his father, possibly brought by him from Italy, contributed to
Erasmus's culture, though it would be strange that, prone as he was to
disparage his schools and his monastery, he should not have mentioned
the fact. Moreover, we know that the humanistic knowledge of his youth
was not exclusively his own, in spite of all he afterwards said about
Dutch ignorance and obscurantism. Cornelius Aurelius and William Hermans
likewise possessed it.

In a letter to Cornelius he mentions the following authors as his poetic
models--Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Juvenal, Statius, Martial, Claudian,
Persius, Lucan, Tibullus, Propertius. In prose he imitates Cicero,
Quintilian, Sallust, and Terence, whose metrical character had not yet
been recognized. Among Italian humanists he was especially acquainted
with Lorenzo Valla, who on account of his _Elegantiae_ passed with him
for the pioneer of _bonae literae_; but Filelfo, Aeneas Sylvius,
Guarino, Poggio, and others, were also not unknown to him. In
ecclesiastical literature he was particularly well read in Jerome. It
remains remarkable that the education which Erasmus received in the
schools of the _devotio moderna_ with their ultra-puritanical object,
their rigid discipline intent on breaking the personality, could produce
such a mind as he manifests in his monastic period--the mind of an
accomplished humanist. He is only interested in writing Latin verses and
in the purity of his Latin style. We look almost in vain for piety in
the correspondence with Cornelius of Gouda and William Hermans. They
manipulate with ease the most difficult Latin metres and the rarest
terms of mythology. Their subject-matter is bucolic or amatory, and, if
devotional, their classicism deprives it of the accent of piety. The
prior of the neighbouring monastery of Hem, at whose request Erasmus
sang the Archangel Michael, did not dare to paste up his Sapphic ode: it
was so 'poetic', he thought, as to seem almost Greek. In those days
poetic meant classic. Erasmus himself thought he had made it so bald
that it was nearly prose--'the times were so barren, then', he
afterwards sighed.

These young poets felt themselves the guardians of a new light amidst
the dullness and barbarism which oppressed them. They readily believed
each other's productions to be immortal, as every band of youthful poets
does, and dreamt of a future of poetic glory for Steyn by which it would
vie with Mantua. Their environment of clownish, narrow-minded
conventional divines--for as such they saw them--neither acknowledged
nor encouraged them. Erasmus's strong propensity to fancy himself
menaced and injured tinged this position with the martyrdom of oppressed
talent. To Cornelius he complains in fine Horatian measure of the
contempt in which poetry was held; his fellow-monk orders him to let his
pen, accustomed to writing poetry, rest. Consuming envy forces him to
give up making verses. A horrid barbarism prevails, the country laughs
at the laurel-bringing art of high-seated Apollo; the coarse peasant
orders the learned poet to write verses. 'Though I had mouths as many as
the stars that twinkle in the silent firmament on quiet nights, or as
many as the roses that the mild gale of spring strews on the ground, I
could not complain of all the evils by which the sacred art of poetry is
oppressed in these days. I am tired of writing poetry.' Of this effusion
Cornelius made a dialogue which highly pleased Erasmus.

Though in this art nine-tenths may be rhetorical fiction and sedulous
imitation, we ought not, on that account, to undervalue the enthusiasm
inspiring the young poets. Let us, who have mostly grown blunt to the
charms of Latin, not think too lightly of the elation felt by one who,
after learning this language out of the most absurd primers and
according to the most ridiculous methods, nevertheless discovered it in
its purity, and afterwards came to handle it in the charming rhythm of
some artful metre, in the glorious precision of its structure and in all
the melodiousness of its sound.

[Illustration: I. ERASMUS AT THE AGE OF 51]

[Illustration: II. VIEW OF ROTTERDAM, EARLY SIXTEENTH CENTURY]

  Nec si quot placidis ignea noctibus
  Scintillant tacito sydera culmine,
  Nec si quot tepidum flante Favonio
    Ver suffundit humo rosas,
  Tot sint ora mihi...

Was it strange that the youth who could say this felt himself a
poet?--or who, together with his friend, could sing of spring in a
Meliboean song of fifty distichs? Pedantic work, if you like, laboured
literary exercises, and yet full of the freshness and the vigour which
spring from the Latin itself.

Out of these moods was to come the first comprehensive work that Erasmus
was to undertake, the manuscript of which he was afterwards to lose, to
recover in part, and to publish only after many years--the
_Antibarbari_, which he commenced at Steyn, according to Dr. Allen. In
the version in which eventually the first book of the _Antibarbari_
appeared, it reflects, it is true, a somewhat later phase of Erasmus's
life, that which began after he had left the monastery; neither is the
comfortable tone of his witty defence of profane literature any longer
that of the poet at Steyn. But the ideal of a free and noble life of
friendly intercourse and the uninterrupted study of the Ancients had
already occurred to him within the convent walls.

In the course of years those walls probably hemmed him in more and more
closely. Neither learned and poetic correspondence nor the art of
painting with which he occupied himself,[1] together with one Sasboud,
could sweeten the oppression of monastic life and a narrow-minded,
unfriendly environment. Of the later period of his life in the
monastery, no letters at all have been preserved, according to Dr.
Allen's carefully considered dating. Had he dropped his correspondence
out of spleen, or had his superiors forbidden him to keep it up, or are
we merely left in the dark because of accidental loss? We know nothing
about the circumstances and the frame of mind in which Erasmus was
ordained on 25 April 1492, by the Bishop of Utrecht, David of Burgundy.
Perhaps his taking holy orders was connected with his design to leave
the monastery. He himself afterwards declared that he had but rarely
read mass. He got his chance to leave the monastery when offered the
post of secretary to the Bishop of Cambray, Henry of Bergen. Erasmus
owed this preferment to his fame as a Latinist and a man of letters; for
it was with a view to a journey to Rome, where the bishop hoped to
obtain a cardinal's hat, that Erasmus entered his service. The
authorization of the Bishop of Utrecht had been obtained, and also that
of the prior and the general of the order. Of course, there was no
question yet of taking leave for good, since, as the bishop's servant,
Erasmus continued to wear his canon's dress. He had prepared for his
departure in the deepest secrecy. There is something touching in the
glimpse we get of his friend and fellow-poet, William Hermans, waiting
in vain outside of Gouda to see his friend just for a moment, when on
his way south he would pass the town. It seems there had been
consultations between them as to leaving Steyn together, and Erasmus, on
his part, had left him ignorant of his plans. William had to console
himself with the literature that might be had at Steyn.

       *       *       *       *       *

Erasmus, then twenty-five years old--for in all probability the year
when he left the monastery was 1493--now set foot on the path of a
career that was very common and much coveted at that time: that of an
intellectual in the shadow of the great. His patron belonged to one of
the numerous Belgian noble families, which had risen in the service of
the Burgundians and were interestedly devoted to the prosperity of that
house. The Glimes were lords of the important town of Bergen-op-Zoom,
which, situated between the River Scheldt and the Meuse delta, was one
of the links between the northern and the southern Netherlands. Henry,
the Bishop of Cambray, had just been appointed chancellor of the Order
of the Golden Fleece, the most distinguished spiritual dignity at court,
which although now Habsburg in fact, was still named after Burgundy. The
service of such an important personage promised almost unbounded honour
and profit. Many a man would under the circumstances, at the cost of
some patience, some humiliation, and a certain laxity of principle, have
risen even to be a bishop. But Erasmus was never a man to make the most
of his situation.

Serving the bishop proved to be rather a disappointment. Erasmus had to
accompany him on his frequent migrations from one residence to another
in Bergen, Brussels, or Mechlin. He was very busy, but the exact nature
of his duties is unknown. The journey to Rome, the acme of things
desirable to every divine or student, did not come off. The bishop,
although taking a cordial interest in him for some months, was less
accommodating than he had expected. And so we shortly find Erasmus once
more in anything but a cheerful frame of mind. 'The hardest fate,' he
calls his own, which robs him of all his old sprightliness.
Opportunities to study he has none. He now envies his friend William,
who at Steyn in the little cell can write beautiful poetry, favoured by
his 'lucky stars'. It befits him, Erasmus, only to weep and sigh; it has
already so dulled his mind and withered his heart that his former
studies no longer appeal to him. There is rhetorical exaggeration in
this and we shall not take his pining for the monastery too seriously,
but still it is clear that deep dejection had mastered him. Contact with
the world of politics and ambition had probably unsettled Erasmus. He
never had any aptitude for it. The hard realities of life frightened and
distressed him. When forced to occupy himself with them he saw nothing
but bitterness and confusion about him. 'Where is gladness or repose?
Wherever I turn my eyes I only see disaster and harshness. And in such a
bustle and clamour about me you wish me to find leisure for the work of
the Muses?'

Real leisure Erasmus was never to find during his life. All his reading,
all his writing, he did hastily, _tumultuarie_, as he calls it
repeatedly. Yet he must nevertheless have worked with intensest
concentration and an incredible power of assimilation. Whilst staying
with the bishop he visited the monastery of Groenendael near Brussels,
where in former times Ruysbroeck wrote. Possibly Erasmus did not hear
the inmates speak of Ruysbroeck and he would certainly have taken little
pleasure in the writings of the great mystic. But in the library he
found the works of St. Augustine and these he devoured. The monks of
Groenendael were surprised at his diligence. He took the volumes with
him even to his bedroom.

He occasionally found time to compose at this period. At Halsteren, near
Bergen-op-Zoom, where the bishop had a country house, he revised the
_Antibarbari_, begun at Steyn, and elaborated it in the form of a
dialogue. It would seem as if he sought compensation for the agitation
of his existence in an atmosphere of idyllic repose and cultured
conversation. He conveys us to the scene (he will afterwards use it
repeatedly) which ever remained the ideal pleasure of life to him: a
garden or a garden house outside the town, where in the gladness of a
fine day a small number of friends meet to talk during a simple meal or
a quiet walk, in Platonic serenity, about things of the mind. The
personages whom he introduces, besides himself, are his best friends.
They are the valued and faithful friend whom he got to know at Bergen,
James Batt, schoolmaster and afterwards also clerk of that town, and his
old friend William Hermans of Steyn, whose literary future he continued
somewhat to promote. William, arriving unexpectedly from Holland, meets
the others, who are later joined by the Burgomaster of Bergen and the
town physician. In a lightly jesting, placid tone they engage in a
discussion about the appreciation of poetry and literature--Latin
literature. These are not incompatible with true devotion, as barbarous
dullness wants us to believe. A cloud of witnesses is there to prove it,
among them and above all St. Augustine, whom Erasmus had studied
recently, and St. Jerome, with whom Erasmus had been longer acquainted
and whose mind was, indeed, more congenial to him. Solemnly, in ancient
Roman guise, war is declared on the enemies of classic culture. O ye
Goths, by what right do you occupy, not only the Latin provinces (the
_disciplinae liberales_ are meant) but the capital, that is Latinity
itself?

It was Batt who, when his prospects with the Bishop of Cambray ended in
disappointment, helped to find a way out for Erasmus. He himself had
studied at Paris, and thither Erasmus also hoped to go, now that Rome
was denied him. The bishop's consent and the promise of a stipend were
obtained and Erasmus departed for the most famous of all universities,
that of Paris, probably in the late summer of 1495. Batt's influence and
efforts had procured him this lucky chance.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Allen No. 16.12 cf. IV p. xx, and _vide_ LB. IV 756, where surveying
the years of his youth he also writes 'Pingere dum meditor tenueis sine
corpore formas'.




CHAPTER III

THE UNIVERSITY OF PARIS

1495-9

    The University of Paris--Traditions and schools of Philosophy
    and Theology--The College of Montaigu--Erasmus's dislike of
    scholasticism--Relations with the humanist, Robert Gaguin,
    1495--How to earn a living--First drafts of several of his
    educational works--Travelling to Holland and back--Batt and the
    Lady of Veere--To England with Lord Mountjoy: 1499


The University of Paris was, more than any other place in Christendom,
the scene of the collision and struggle of opinions and parties.
University life in the Middle Ages was in general tumultuous and
agitated. The forms of scientific intercourse themselves entailed an
element of irritability: never-ending disputations, frequent elections
and rowdyism of the students. To those were added old and new quarrels
of all sorts of orders, schools and groups. The different colleges
contended among themselves, the secular clergy were at variance with the
regular. The Thomists and the Scotists, together called the Ancients,
had been disputing at Paris for half a century with the Terminists, or
Moderns, the followers of Ockam and Buridan. In 1482 some sort of peace
was concluded between those two groups. Both schools were on their last
legs, stuck fast in sterile technical disputes, in systematizing and
subdividing, a method of terms and words by which science and philosophy
benefited no longer. The theological colleges of the Dominicans and
Franciscans at Paris were declining; theological teaching was taken over
by the secular colleges of Navarre and Sorbonne, but in the old style.

The general traditionalism had not prevented humanism from penetrating
Paris also during the last quarter of the fifteenth century. Refinement
of Latin style and the taste for classic poetry here, too, had their
fervent champions, just as revived Platonism, which had sprung up in
Italy. The Parisian humanists were partly Italians as Girolamo Balbi and
Fausto Andrelini, but at that time a Frenchman was considered to be
their leader, Robert Gaguin, general of the order of the Mathurins or
Trinitarians, diplomatist, French poet and humanist. Side by side with
the new Platonism a clearer understanding of Aristotle penetrated, which
had also come from Italy. Shortly before Erasmus's arrival Jacques
Lefevre d'Etaples had returned from Italy, where he had visited the
Platonists, such as Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, and Ermolao
Barbaro, the reviver of Aristotle. Though theoretical theology and
philosophy generally were conservative at Paris, yet here as well as
elsewhere movements to reform the Church were not wanting. The authority
of Jean Gerson, the University's great chancellor (about 1400), had not
yet been forgotten. But reform by no means meant inclination to depart
from the doctrine of the Church; it aimed, in the first place, at
restoration and purification of the monastic orders and afterwards at
the extermination of abuses which the Church acknowledged and lamented
as existing within its fold. In that spirit of reformation of spiritual
life the Dutch movement of the _devotio moderna_ had recently begun to
make itself felt, also, at Paris. The chief of its promoters was John
Standonck of Mechlin, educated by the brethren of the Common Life at
Gouda and imbued with their spirit in its most rigorous form. He was an
ascetic more austere than the spirit of the Windesheimians, strict
indeed but yet moderate, required; far beyond ecclesiastical circles his
name was proverbial on account of his abstinence--he had definitely
denied himself the use of meat. As provisor of the college of Montaigu
he had instituted the most stringent rules there, enforced by
chastisement for the slightest faults. To the college he had annexed a
home for poor scholars, where they lived in a semi-monastic community.

To this man Erasmus had been recommended by the Bishop of Cambray.
Though he did not join the community of poor students--he was nearly
thirty years old--he came to know all the privations of the system. They
embittered the earlier part of his stay at Paris and instilled in him a
deep, permanent aversion to abstinence and austerity. Had he come to
Paris for this--to experience the dismal and depressing influences of
his youth anew in a more stringent form?

The purpose for which Erasmus went to Paris was chiefly to obtain the
degree of doctor of theology. This was not too difficult for him: as a
regular he was exempt from previous study in the faculty of arts, and
his learning and astonishing intelligence and energy enabled him to
prepare in a short time for the examinations and disputations required.
Yet he did not attain this object at Paris. His stay, which with
interruptions lasted, first till 1499, to be continued later, became to
him a period of difficulties and exasperations, of struggle to make his
way by all the humiliating means which at the time were indispensable to
that end; of dawning success, too, which, however, failed to gratify
him.

The first cause of his reverses was a physical one; he could not endure
the hard life in the college of Montaigu. The addled eggs and squalid
bedrooms stuck in his memory all his life; there he thinks he contracted
the beginnings of his later infirmity. In the _Colloquia_ he has
commemorated with abhorrence Standonck's system of abstinence, privation
and chastisement. For the rest his stay there lasted only until the
spring of 1496.

Meanwhile he had begun his theological studies. He attended lectures on
the Bible and on the Book of the Sentences, the medieval handbook of
theology and still the one most frequently used. He was even allowed to
give some lessons in the college on Holy Scripture. He preached a few
sermons in honour of the Saints, probably in the neighbouring abbey of
St. Genevieve. But his heart was not in all this. The subtleties of the
schools could not please him. That aversion to all scholasticism, which
he rejected in one sweeping condemnation, struck root in his mind,
which, however broad, always judged unjustly that for which it had no
room. 'Those studies can make a man opinionated and contentious; can
they make him wise? They exhaust the mind by a certain jejune and barren
subtlety, without fertilizing or inspiring it. By their stammering and
by the stains of their impure style they disfigure theology which had
been enriched and adorned by the eloquence of the ancients. They involve
everything whilst trying to resolve everything.' 'Scotist', with
Erasmus, became a handy epithet for all schoolmen, nay, for everything
superannuated and antiquated. He would rather lose the whole of Scotus
than Cicero's or Plutarch's works. These he feels the better for
reading, whereas he rises from the study of scholasticism frigidly
disposed towards true virtue, but irritated into a disputatious mood.

It would, no doubt, have been difficult for Erasmus to find in the arid
traditionalism which prevailed in the University of Paris the heyday of
scholastic philosophy and theology. From the disputations which he heard
in the Sorbonne he brought back nothing but the habit of scoffing at
doctors of theology, or as he always ironically calls them by their
title of honour: _Magistri nostri_. Yawning, he sat among 'those holy
Scotists' with their wrinkled brows, staring eyes, and puzzled faces,
and on his return home he writes a disrespectful fantasy to his young
friend Thomas Grey, telling him how he sleeps the sleep of Epimenides
with the divines of the Sorbonne. Epimenides awoke after his forty-seven
years of slumber, but the majority of our present theologians will never
wake up. What may Epimenides have dreamt? What but subtleties of the
Scotists: quiddities, formalities, etc.! Epimenides himself was reborn
in Scotus, or rather, Epimenides was Scotus's prototype. For did not he,
too, write theological books, in which he tied such syllogistic knots as
he would never have been able to loosen? The Sorbonne preserves
Epimenides's skin written over with mysterious letters, as an oracle
which men may only see after having borne the title of _Magister noster_
for fifteen years.

It is not a far cry from caricatures like these to the _Sorbonistres_
and the _Barbouillamenta Scoti_ of Rabelais. 'It is said', thus Erasmus
concludes his _boutade_, 'that no one can understand the mysteries of
this science who has had the least intercourse with the Muses or the
Graces. All that you have learned in the way of _bonae literae_ has to
be unlearned first; if you have drunk of Helicon you must first vomit
the draught. I do my utmost to say nothing according to the Latin taste,
and nothing graceful or witty; and I am already making progress, and
there is hope that one day they will acknowledge Erasmus.'

It was not only the dryness of the method and the barrenness of the
system which revolted Erasmus. It was also the qualities of his own
mind, which, in spite of all its breadth and acuteness, did not tend to
penetrate deeply into philosophical or dogmatic speculations. For it was
not only scholasticism that repelled him; the youthful Platonism and the
rejuvenated Aristotelianism taught by Lefevre d'Etaples also failed to
attract him. For the present he remained a humanist of aesthetic bias,
with the substratum of a biblical and moral disposition, resting mainly
on the study of his favourite Jerome. For a long time to come Erasmus
considered himself, and also introduced himself, as a poet and an
orator, by which latter term he meant what we call a man of letters.

Immediately on arriving at Paris he must have sought contact with the
headquarters of literary humanism. The obscure Dutch regular introduced
himself in a long letter (not preserved) full of eulogy, accompanied by
a much-laboured poem, to the general, not only of the Trinitarians but,
at the same time, of Parisian humanists, Robert Gaguin. The great man
answered very obligingly: 'From your lyrical specimen I conclude that
you are a scholar; my friendship is at your disposal; do not be so
profuse in your praise, that looks like flattery'. The correspondence
had hardly begun when Erasmus found a splendid opportunity to render
this illustrious personage a service and, at the same time, in the
shadow of his name, make himself known to the reading public. The matter
is also of importance because it affords us an opportunity, for the
first time, to notice the connection that is always found between
Erasmus's career as a man of letters and a scholar and the technical
conditions of the youthful art of printing.

Gaguin was an all-round man and his Latin text-book of the history of
France, _De origine et gestis Francorum Compendium_, was just being
printed. It was the first specimen of humanistic historiography in
France. The printer had finished his work on 30 September 1495, but of
the 136 leaves, two remained blank. This was not permissible according
to the notions of that time. Gaguin was ill and could not help matters.
By judicious spacing the compositor managed to fill up folio 135 with a
poem by Gaguin, the colophon and two panegyrics by Faustus Andrelinus
and another humanist. Even then there was need of matter, and Erasmus
dashed into the breach and furnished a long commendatory letter,
completely filling the superfluous blank space of folio 136.[2] In this
way his name and style suddenly became known to the numerous public
which was interested in Gaguin's historical work, and at the same time
he acquired another title to Gaguin's protection, on whom the
exceptional qualities of Erasmus's diction had evidently not been lost.
That his history would remain known chiefly because it had been a
stepping stone to Erasmus, Gaguin could hardly have anticipated.

Although Erasmus had now, as a follower of Gaguin, been introduced into
the world of Parisian humanists, the road to fame, which had latterly
begun to lead through the printing press, was not yet easy for him. He
showed the _Antibarbari_ to Gaguin, who praised them, but no suggestion
of publication resulted. A slender volume of Latin poems by Erasmus was
published in Paris in 1496, dedicated to Hector Boys, a Scotchman, with
whom he had become acquainted at Montaigu. But the more important
writings at which he worked during his stay in Paris all appeared in
print much later.

While intercourse with men like Robert Gaguin and Faustus Andrelinus
might be honourable, it was not directly profitable. The support of the
Bishop of Cambray was scantier than he wished. In the spring of 1496 he
fell ill and left Paris. Going first to Bergen, he had a kind welcome
from his patron, the bishop; and then, having recovered his health, he
went on to Holland to his friends. It was his intention to stay there,
he says. The friends themselves, however, urged him to return to Paris,
which he did in the autumn of 1496. He carried poetry by William Hermans
and a letter from this poet to Gaguin. A printer was found for the poems
and Erasmus also brought his friend and fellow-poet into contact with
Faustus Andrelinus.

The position of a man who wished to live by intellectual labour was far
from easy at that time and not always dignified. He had either to live
on church prebends or on distinguished patrons, or on both. But such a
prebend was difficult to get and patrons were uncertain and often
disappointing. The publishers paid considerable copy-fees only to famous
authors. As a rule the writer received a number of copies of his work
and that was all. His chief advantage came from a dedication to some
distinguished personage, who could compliment him for it with a handsome
gift. There were authors who made it a practice to dedicate the same
work repeatedly to different persons. Erasmus has afterwards defended
himself explicitly from that suspicion and carefully noted how many of
those whom he honoured with a dedication gave nothing or very little.

The first need, therefore, to a man in Erasmus's circumstances was to
find a Maecenas. Maecenas with the humanists was almost synonymous with
paymaster. Under the adage _Ne bos quidem pereat_ Erasmus has given a
description of the decent way of obtaining a Maecenas. Consequently,
when his conduct in these years appears to us to be actuated, more than
once, by an undignified pushing spirit, we should not gauge it by our
present standards. These were his years of weakness.

On his return to Paris he did not again lodge in Montaigu. He tried to
make a living by giving lessons to young men of fortune. A merchant's
sons of Luebeck, Christian and Henry Northoff, who lodged with one
Augustine Vincent, were his pupils. He composed beautiful letters for
them, witty, fluent and a trifle scented. At the same time he taught two
young Englishmen, Thomas Grey and Robert Fisher, and conceived such a
doting affection for Grey as to lead to trouble with the youth's
guardian, a Scotchman, by whom Erasmus was excessively vexed.

Paris did not fail to exercise its refining influence on Erasmus. It
made his style affectedly refined and sparkling--he pretends to disdain
the rustic products of his youth in Holland. In the meantime, the works
through which afterwards his influence was to spread over the whole
world began to grow, but only to the benefit of a few readers. They
remained unprinted as yet. For the Northoffs was composed the little
compendium of polite conversation (in Latin), _Familiarium colloquiorum
formulae_, the nucleus of the world-famous _Colloquia_. For Robert
Fisher he wrote the first draft of _De conscribendis epistolis_, the
great dissertation on the art of letter-writing (Latin letters),
probably also the paraphrase of Valla's _Elegantiae_, a treatise on pure
Latin, which had been a beacon-light of culture to Erasmus in his youth.
_De copia verborum ac rerum_ was also such a help for beginners, to
provide them with a vocabulary and abundance of turns and expressions;
and also the germs of a larger work: _De ratione studii_, a manual for
arranging courses of study, lay in the same line.

It was a life of uncertainty and unrest. The bishop gave but little
support. Erasmus was not in good health and felt continually depressed.
He made plans for a journey to Italy, but did not see much chance of
effecting them. In the summer of 1498 he again travelled to Holland and
to the bishop. In Holland his friends were little pleased with his
studies. It was feared that he was contracting debts at Paris. Current
reports about him were not favourable. He found the bishop, in the
commotion of his departure for England on a mission, irritable and full
of complaints. It became more and more evident that he would have to
look out for another patron. Perhaps he might turn to the Lady of Veere,
Anna of Borselen, with whom his faithful and helpful friend Batt had now
taken service, as a tutor to her son, in the castle of Tournehem,
between Calais and Saint Omer.

Upon his return to Paris, Erasmus resumed his old life, but it was
hateful slavery to him. Batt had an invitation for him to come to
Tournehem, but he could not yet bear to leave Paris. Here he had now as
a pupil the young Lord Mountjoy, William Blount. That meant two strings
to his bow. Batt is incited to prepare the ground for him with Anna of
Veere; William Hermans is charged with writing letters to Mountjoy, in
which he is to praise the latter's love of literature. 'You should
display an erudite integrity, commend me, and proffer your services
kindly. Believe me, William, your reputation, too, will benefit by it.
He is a young man of great authority with his own folk; you will have
some one to distribute your writings in England. I pray you again and
again, if you love me, take this to heart.'

The visit to Tournehem took place at the beginning of 1499, followed by
another journey to Holland. Henceforward Anna of Veere passed for his
patroness. In Holland he saw his friend William Hermans and told him
that he thought of leaving for Bologna after Easter. The Dutch journey
was one of unrest and bustle; he was in a hurry to return to Paris, not
to miss any opportunity which Mountjoy's affection might offer him. He
worked hard at the various writings on which he was engaged, as hard as
his health permitted after the difficult journey in winter. He was
busily occupied in collecting the money for travelling to Italy, now
postponed until August. But evidently Batt could not obtain as much for
him as he had hoped, and, in May, Erasmus suddenly gave up the Italian
plan, and left for England with Mountjoy at the latter's request.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] Allen No. 43, p. 145, where the particulars of the case are
expounded with peculiar acuteness and conclusions drawn with regard to
the chronology of Erasmus's stay at Paris.




CHAPTER IV

FIRST STAY IN ENGLAND

1499-1500

    First stay in England: 1499-1500--Oxford: John Colet--Erasmus's
    aspirations directed towards divinity--He is as yet mainly a
    literate--Fisher and More--Mishap at Dover when leaving England:
    1500--Back in France he composes the _Adagia_--Years of trouble
    and penury


Erasmus's first stay in England, which lasted from the early summer of
1499 till the beginning of 1500, was to become for him a period of
inward ripening. He came there as an erudite poet, the protege of a
nobleman of rank, on the road to closer contact with the great world
which knew how to appreciate and reward literary merit. He left the
country with the fervent desire in future to employ his gifts, in so far
as circumstances would permit, in more serious tasks. This change was
brought about by two new friends whom he found in England, whose
personalities were far above those who had hitherto crossed his path:
John Colet and Thomas More.

During all the time of his sojourn in England Erasmus is in high
spirits, for him. At first it is still the man of the world who speaks,
the refined man of letters, who must needs show his brilliant genius.
Aristocratic life, of which he evidently had seen but little at the
Bishop of Cambray's and the Lady of Veere's at Tournehem, pleased him
fairly well, it seems. 'Here in England', he writes in a light vein to
Faustus Andrelinus, 'we have, indeed, progressed somewhat. The Erasmus
whom you know is almost a good hunter already, not too bad a horseman, a
not unpractised courtier. He salutes a little more courteously, he
smiles more kindly. If you are wise, you also will alight here.' And he
teases the volatile poet by telling him about the charming girls and the
laudable custom, which he found in England, of accompanying all
compliments by kisses.[3]

It even fell to his lot to make the acquaintance of royalty. From
Mountjoy's estate at Greenwich, More, in the course of a walk, took him
to Eltham Palace, where the royal children were educated. There he saw,
surrounded by the whole royal household, the youthful Henry, who was to
be Henry VIII, a boy of nine years, together with two little sisters and
a young prince, who was still an infant in arms. Erasmus was ashamed
that he had nothing to offer and, on returning home, he composed (not
without exertion, for he had not written poetry at all for some time) a
panegyric on England, which he presented to the prince with a graceful
dedication.

In October Erasmus was at Oxford which, at first, did not please him,
but whither Mountjoy was to follow him. He had been recommended to John
Colet, who declared that he required no recommendations: he already knew
Erasmus from the letter to Gaguin in the latter's historical work and
thought very highly of his learning. There followed during the remainder
of Erasmus's stay at Oxford a lively intercourse, in conversation and in
correspondence, which definitely decided the bent of Erasmus's
many-sided mind.

[Illustration: III. JOHN COLET, DEAN OF ST. PAUL'S]

John Colet, who did not differ much from Erasmus in point of age, had
found his intellectual path earlier and more easily. Born of well-to-do
parents (his father was a London magistrate and twice lord mayor), he
had been able leisurely to prosecute his studies. Not seduced by quite
such a brilliant genius as Erasmus possessed into literary digressions,
he had from the beginning fixed his attention on theology. He knew Plato
and Plotinus, though not in Greek, was very well read in the older
Fathers and also respectably acquainted with scholasticism, not to
mention his knowledge of mathematics, law, history and the English
poets. In 1496 he had established himself at Oxford. Without possessing
a degree in divinity, he expounded St. Paul's epistles. Although, owing
to his ignorance of Greek, he was restricted to the Vulgate, he tried to
penetrate to the original meaning of the sacred texts, discarding the
later commentaries.

Colet had a deeply serious nature, always warring against the tendencies
of his vigorous being, and he kept within bounds his pride and the love
of pleasure. He had a keen sense of humour, which, without doubt,
endeared him to Erasmus. He was an enthusiast. When defending a point in
theology his ardour changed the sound of his voice, the look in his
eyes, and a lofty spirit permeated his whole person.

[Illustration: IV. SIR THOMAS MORE, 1527]

Out of his intercourse with Colet came the first of Erasmus's
theological writings. At the end of a discussion regarding Christ's
agony in the garden of Gethsemane, in which Erasmus had defended the
usual view that Christ's fear of suffering proceeded from his human
nature, Colet had exhorted him to think further about the matter. They
exchanged letters about it and finally Erasmus committed both their
opinions to paper in the form of a 'Little disputation concerning the
anguish, fear and sadness of Jesus', _Disputatiuncula de tedio, pavore,
tristicia Jesu_, etc., being an elaboration of these letters.

While the tone of this pamphlet is earnest and pious, it is not truly
fervent. The man of letters is not at once and completely superseded.
'See, Colet,' thus Erasmus ends his first letter, referring half
ironically to himself, 'how I can observe the rules of propriety in
concluding such a theologic disputation with poetic fables (he had made
use of a few mythologic metaphors). But as Horace says, _Naturam
expellas furca, tamen usque recurret_.'

This ambiguous position which Erasmus still occupied, also in things of
the mind, appears still more clearly from the report which he sent to
his new friend, the Frisian John Sixtin, a Latin poet like himself, of
another disputation with Colet, at a repast, probably in the hall of
Magdalen College, where Wolsey, too, was perhaps present. To his
fellow-poet, Erasmus writes as a poet, loosely and with some
affectation. It was a meal such as he liked, and afterwards frequently
pictured in his _Colloquies_: cultured company, good food, moderate
drinking, noble conversation. Colet presided. On his right hand sat the
prior Charnock of St. Mary's College, where Erasmus resided (he had also
been present at the disputation about Christ's agony). On his left was a
divine whose name is not mentioned, an advocate of scholasticism; next
to him came Erasmus, 'that the poet should not be wanting at the
banquet'. The discussion was about Cain's guilt by which he displeased
the Lord. Colet defended the opinion that Cain had injured God by
doubting the Creator's goodness, and, in reliance on his own industry,
tilling the earth, whereas Abel tended the sheep and was content with
what grew of itself. The divine contended with syllogisms, Erasmus with
arguments of 'rhetoric'. But Colet kindled, and got the better of both.
After a while, when the dispute had lasted long enough and had become
more serious than was suitable for table-talk--'then I said, in order to
play my part, the part of the poet that is--to abate the contention and
at the same time cheer the meal with a pleasant tale: "it is a very old
story, it has to be unearthed from the very oldest authors. I will tell
you what I found about it in literature, if you will promise me first
that you will not look upon it as a fable."'

And now he relates a witty story of some very ancient codex in which he
had read how Cain, who had often heard his parents speak of the glorious
vegetation of Paradise, where the ears of corn were as high as the
alders with us, had prevailed upon the angel who guarded it, to give him
some Paradisal grains. God would not mind it, if only he left the apples
alone. The speech by which the angel is incited to disobey the Almighty
is a masterpiece of Erasmian wit. 'Do you find it pleasant to stand
there by the gate with a big sword? We have just begun to use dogs for
that sort of work. It is not so bad on earth and it will be better
still; we shall learn, no doubt, to cure diseases. What that forbidden
knowledge matters I do not see very clearly. Though, in that matter,
too, unwearied industry surmounts all obstacles.' In this way the
guardian is seduced. But when God beholds the miraculous effect of
Cain's agricultural management, punishment does not fail to ensue. A
more delicate way of combining Genesis and the Prometheus myth no
humanist had yet invented.

But still, though Erasmus went on conducting himself as a man of letters
among his fellow-poets, his heart was no longer in those literary
exercises. It is one of the peculiarities of Erasmus's mental growth
that it records no violent crises. We never find him engaged in those
bitter inward struggles which are in the experience of so many great
minds. His transition from interest in literary matters to interest in
religious matters is not in the nature of a process of conversion. There
is no Tarsus in Erasmus's life. The transition takes place gradually and
is never complete. For many years to come Erasmus can, without suspicion
of hypocrisy, at pleasure, as his interests or his moods require, play
the man of letters or the theologian. He is a man with whom the deeper
currents of the soul gradually rise to the surface; who raises himself
to the height of his ethical consciousness under the stress of
circumstances, rather than at the spur of some irresistible impulse.

The desire to turn only to matters of faith he shows early. 'I have
resolved', he writes in his monastic period to Cornelius of Gouda, 'to
write no more poems in the future, except such as savour of praise of
the saints, or of sanctity itself.' But that was the youthful pious
resolve of a moment. During all the years previous to the first voyage
to England, Erasmus's writings, and especially his letters, betray a
worldly disposition. It only leaves him in moments of illness and
weariness. Then the world displeases him and he despises his own
ambition; he desires to live in holy quiet, musing on Scripture and
shedding tears over his old errors. But these are utterances inspired by
the occasion, which one should not take too seriously.

It was Colet's word and example which first changed Erasmus's desultory
occupation with theological studies into a firm and lasting resolve to
make their pursuit the object of his life. Colet urged him to expound
the Pentateuch or the prophet Isaiah at Oxford, just as he himself
treated of Paul's epistles. Erasmus declined; he could not do it. This
bespoke insight and self-knowledge, by which he surpassed Colet. The
latter's intuitive Scripture interpretation without knowledge of the
original language failed to satisfy Erasmus. 'You are acting
imprudently, my dear Colet, in trying to obtain water from a
pumice-stone (in the words of Plautus). How shall I be so impudent as to
teach that which I have not learned myself? How shall I warm others
while shivering and trembling with cold?... You complain that you find
yourself deceived in your expectations regarding me. But I have never
promised you such a thing; you have deceived yourself by refusing to
believe me when I was telling you the truth regarding myself. Neither
did I come here to teach poetics or rhetoric (Colet had hinted at that);
these have ceased to be sweet to me, since they ceased to be necessary
to me. I decline the one task because it does not come up to my aim in
life; the other because it is beyond my strength ... But when, one day,
I shall be conscious that the necessary power is in me, I, too, shall
choose your part and devote to the assertion of divinity, if no
excellent, yet sincere labour.'

The inference which Erasmus drew first of all was that he should know
Greek better than he had thus far been able to learn it.

Meanwhile his stay in England was rapidly drawing to a close; he had to
return to Paris. Towards the end of his sojourn he wrote to his former
pupil, Robert Fisher, who was in Italy, in a high-pitched tone about the
satisfaction which he experienced in England. A most pleasant and
wholesome climate (he was most sensitive to it); so much humanity and
erudition--not of the worn-out and trivial sort, but of the recondite,
genuine, ancient, Latin and Greek stamp--that he need hardly any more
long to go to Italy. In Colet he thought he heard Plato himself. Grocyn,
the Grecian scholar; Linacre, the learned physician, who would not
admire them! And whose spirit was ever softer, sweeter or happier than
that of Thomas More!

A disagreeable incident occurred as Erasmus was leaving English soil in
January 1500. Unfortunately it not only obscured his pleasant memories
of the happy island, but also placed another obstacle in the path of his
career, and left in his supersensitive soul a sting which vexed him for
years afterwards.

The livelihood which he had been gaining at Paris of late years was
precarious. The support from the bishop had probably been withdrawn;
that of Anna of Veere had trickled but languidly; he could not too
firmly rely on Mountjoy. Under these circumstances a modest fund, some
provision against a rainy day, was of the highest consequence. Such
savings he brought from England, twenty pounds. An act of Edward III,
re-enacted by Henry VII not long before, prohibited the export of gold
and silver, but More and Mountjoy had assured Erasmus that he could
safely take his money with him, if only it was not in English coin. At
Dover he learned that the custom-house officers were of a different
opinion. He might only keep six 'angels'--the rest was left behind in
the hands of the officials and was evidently confiscated.

The shock which this incident gave him perhaps contributed to his
fancying himself threatened by robbers and murderers on the road from
Calais to Paris. The loss of his money plunged him afresh into
perplexity as to his support from day to day. It forced him to resume
the profession of a _bel esprit_, which he already began to loathe, and
to take all the humiliating steps to get what was due to it from
patrons. And, above all, it affected his mental balance and his dignity.
Yet this mishap had its great advantage for the world, and for Erasmus,
too, after all. To it the world owes the _Adagia_; and he the fame,
which began with this work.

The feelings with which his misfortune at Dover inspired Erasmus were
bitter anger and thirst for revenge. A few months later he writes to
Batt: 'Things with me are as they are wont to be in such cases: the
wound received in England begins to smart only now that it has become
inveterate, and that the more as I cannot have my revenge in any way'.
And six months later, 'I shall swallow it. An occasion may offer itself,
no doubt, to be even with them.' Yet meanwhile true insight told this
man, whose strength did not always attain to his ideals, that the
English, whom he had just seen in such a favourable light, let alone his
special friends among them, were not accessories to the misfortune. He
never reproached More and Mountjoy, whose inaccurate information, he
tells us, had done the harm. At the same time his interest, which he
always saw in the garb of virtue, told him that now especially it would
be essential not to break off his relations with England, and that this
gave him a splendid chance of strengthening them. Afterwards he
explained this with a naivete which often causes his writings,
especially where he tries to suppress or cloak matters, to read like
confessions.

'Returning to Paris a poor man, I understood that many would expect I
should take revenge with my pen for this mishap, after the fashion of
men of letters, by writing something venomous against the king or
against England. At the same time I was afraid that William Mountjoy,
having indirectly caused my loss of money, would be apprehensive of
losing my affection. In order, therefore, both to put the expectations
of those people to shame, and to make known that I was not so unfair as
to blame the country for a private wrong, or so inconsiderate as,
because of a small loss, to risk making the king displeased with myself
or with my friends in England, and at the same time to give my friend
Mountjoy a proof that I was no less kindly disposed towards him than
before, I resolved to publish something as quickly as possible. As I had
nothing ready, I hastily brought together, by a few days' reading, a
collection of Adagia, in the supposition that such a booklet, however it
might turn out, by its mere usefulness would get into the hands of
students. In this way I demonstrated that my friendship had not cooled
off at all. Next, in a poem I subjoined, I protested that I was not
angry with the king or with the country at being deprived of my money.
And my scheme was not ill received. That moderation and candour procured
me a good many friends in England at the time--erudite, upright and
influential men.'

This is a characteristic specimen of semi-ethical conduct. In this way
Erasmus succeeded in dealing with his indignation, so that later on he
could declare, when the recollection came up occasionally, 'At one blow
I had lost all my fortune, but I was so unconcerned that I returned to
my books all the more cheerfully and ardently'. But his friends knew how
deep the wound had been. 'Now (on hearing that Henry VIII had ascended
the throne) surely all bitterness must have suddenly left your soul,'
Mountjoy writes to him in 1509, possibly through the pen of Ammonius.

The years after his return to France were difficult ones. He was in
great need of money and was forced to do what he could, as a man of
letters, with his talents and knowledge. He had again to be the _homo
poeticus_ or _rhetoricus_. He writes polished letters full of mythology
and modest mendicity. As a poet he had a reputation; as a poet he could
expect support. Meanwhile the elevating picture of his theological
activities remained present before his mind's eye. It nerves him to
energy and perseverance. 'It is incredible', he writes to Batt, 'how my
soul yearns to finish all my works, at the same time becoming somewhat
proficient in Greek, and afterwards to devote myself entirely to the
sacred learning after which my soul has been hankering for a long time.
I am in fairly good health, so I shall have to strain every nerve this
year (1501) to get the work we gave the printer published, and by
dealing with theological problems, to expose our cavillers, who are very
numerous, as they deserve. If three more years of life are granted me, I
shall be beyond the reach of envy.'

Here we see him in a frame of mind to accomplish great things, though
not merely under the impulse of true devotion. Already he sees the
restoration of genuine divinity as his task; unfortunately the effusion
is contained in a letter in which he instructs the faithful Batt as to
how he should handle the Lady of Veere in order to wheedle money out of
her.

For years to come the efforts to make a living were to cause him almost
constant tribulations and petty cares. He had had more than enough of
France and desired nothing better than to leave it. Part of the year
1500 he spent at Orleans. Adversity made him narrow. There is the story
of his relations with Augustine Vincent Caminade, a humanist of lesser
rank (he ended as syndic of Middelburg), who took young men as lodgers.
It is too long to detail here, but remarkable enough as revealing
Erasmus's psychology, for it shows how deeply he mistrusted his friends.
There are also his relations with Jacobus Voecht, in whose house he
evidently lived gratuitously and for whom he managed to procure a rich
lodger in the person of an illegitimate brother of the Bishop of
Cambray. At this time, Erasmus asserts, the bishop (Antimaecenas he now
calls him) set Standonck to dog him in Paris.

Much bitterness there is in the letters of this period. Erasmus is
suspicious, irritable, exacting, sometimes rude in writing to his
friends. He cannot bear William Hermans any longer because of his
epicureanism and his lack of energy, to which he, Erasmus, certainly was
a stranger. But what grieves us most is the way he speaks to honest
Batt. He is highly praised, certainly. Erasmus promises to make him
immortal, too. But how offended he is, when Batt cannot at once comply
with his imperious demands. How almost shameless are his instructions as
to what Batt is to tell the Lady of Veere, in order to solicit her
favour for Erasmus. And how meagre the expressions of his sorrow, when
the faithful Batt is taken from him by death in the first half of 1502.

It is as if Erasmus had revenged himself on Batt for having been obliged
to reveal himself to his true friend in need more completely than he
cared to appear to anyone; or for having disavowed to Anna of Borselen
his fundamental convictions, his most refined taste, for the sake of a
meagre gratuity. He has paid homage to her in that ponderous Burgundian
style with which dynasties in the Netherlands were familiar, and which
must have been hateful to him. He has flattered her formal piety. 'I
send you a few prayers, by means of which you could, as by incantations,
call down, even against her will, from Heaven, so to say, not the moon,
but her who gave birth to the sun of justice.'

Did you smile your delicate smile, O author of the _Colloquies_, while
writing this? So much the worse for you.

FOOTNOTES:

[3] Allen No. 103.17. Cf. _Chr. Matrim. inst._ LB. V. 678 and _Cent
nouvelles_ 2.63, 'ung baiser, dont les dames et demoiselles du dit pays
d'Angleterre sont assez liberales de l'accorder'.




CHAPTER V

ERASMUS AS A HUMANIST

    Significance of the _Adagia_ and similar works of later
    years--Erasmus as a divulger of classical culture--
    Latin--Estrangement from Holland--Erasmus as a
    Netherlander


Meanwhile renown came to Erasmus as the fruit of those literary studies
which, as he said, had ceased to be dear to him. In 1500 that work
appeared which Erasmus had written after his misfortune at Dover, and
had dedicated to Mountjoy, the _Adagiorum Collectanea_. It was a
collection of about eight hundred proverbial sayings drawn from the
Latin authors of antiquity and elucidated for the use of those who
aspired to write an elegant Latin style. In the dedication Erasmus
pointed out the profit an author may derive, both in ornamenting his
style and in strengthening his argumentation, from having at his
disposal a good supply of sentences hallowed by their antiquity. He
proposes to offer such a help to his readers. What he actually gave was
much more. He familiarized a much wider circle than the earlier
humanists had reached with the spirit of antiquity.

Until this time the humanists had, to some extent, monopolized the
treasures of classic culture, in order to parade their knowledge of
which the multitude remained destitute, and so to become strange
prodigies of learning and elegance. With his irresistible need of
teaching and his sincere love for humanity and its general culture,
Erasmus introduced the classic spirit, in so far as it could be
reflected in the soul of a sixteenth-century Christian, among the
people. Not he alone; but none more extensively and more effectively.
Not among all the people, it is true, for by writing in Latin he limited
his direct influence to the educated classes, which in those days were
the upper classes.

Erasmus made current the classic spirit. Humanism ceased to be the
exclusive privilege of a few. According to Beatus Rhenanus he had been
reproached by some humanists, when about to publish the _Adagia_, for
divulging the mysteries of their craft. But he desired that the book of
antiquity should be open to all.

The literary and educational works of Erasmus, the chief of which were
begun in his Parisian period, though most of them appeared much later,
have, in truth, brought about a transmutation of the general modes of
expression and of argumentation. It should be repeated over and over
again that this was not achieved by him single-handed; countless others
at that time were similarly engaged. But we have only to cast an eye on
the broad current of editions of the _Adagia_, of the _Colloquia_, etc.,
to realize of how much greater consequence he was in this respect than
all the others. 'Erasmus' is the only name in all the host of humanists
which has remained a household word all over the globe.

Here we will anticipate the course of Erasmus's life for a moment, to
enumerate the principal works of this sort. Some years later the
_Adagia_ increased from hundreds to thousands, through which not only
Latin, but also Greek, wisdom spoke. In 1514 he published in the same
manner a collection of similitudes, _Parabolae_. It was a partial
realization of what he had conceived to supplement the _Adagia_--
metaphors, saws, allusions, poetical and scriptural allegories, all to
be dealt with in a similar way. Towards the end of his life he published
a similar thesaurus of the witty anecdotes and the striking words or
deeds of wisdom of antiquity, the _Apophthegmata_. In addition to these
collections, we find manuals of a more grammatical nature, also piled up
treasury-like: 'On the stock of expressions', _De copia verborum et
rerum_, 'On letter-writing', _De conscribendis epistolis_, not to
mention works of less importance. By a number of Latin translations of
Greek authors Erasmus had rendered a point of prospect accessible to
those who did not wish to climb the whole mountain. And, finally, as
inimitable models of the manner in which to apply all that knowledge,
there were the _Colloquia_ and that almost countless multitude of
letters which have flowed from Erasmus's pen.

All this collectively made up antiquity (in such quantity and quality as
it was obtainable in the sixteenth century) exhibited in an emporium
where it might be had at retail. Each student could get what was to his
taste; everything was to be had there in a great variety of designs.
'You may read my _Adagia_ in such a manner', says Erasmus (of the later
augmented edition), 'that as soon as you have finished one, you may
imagine you have finished the whole book.' He himself made indices to
facilitate its use.

In the world of scholasticism he alone had up to now been considered an
authority who had mastered the technicalities of its system of thought
and its mode of expression in all its details and was versed in biblical
knowledge, logic and philosophy. Between scholastic parlance and the
spontaneously written popular languages, there yawned a wide gulf.
Humanism since Petrarch had substituted for the rigidly syllogistic
structure of an argument the loose style of the antique, free,
suggestive phrase. In this way the language of the learned approached
the natural manner of expression of daily life and raised the popular
languages, even where it continued to use Latin, to its own level.

The wealth of subject-matter was found with no one in greater abundance
than with Erasmus. What knowledge of life, what ethics, all supported by
the indisputable authority of the Ancients, all expressed in that fine,
airy form for which he was admired. And such knowledge of antiquities in
addition to all this! Illimitable was the craving for and illimitable
the power to absorb what is extraordinary in real life. This was one of
the principal characteristics of the spirit of the Renaissance. These
minds never had their desired share of striking incidents, curious
details, rarities and anomalies. There was, as yet, no symptom of that
mental dyspepsia of later periods, which can no longer digest reality
and relishes it no more. Men revelled in plenty.

And yet, were not Erasmus and his fellow-workers as leaders of
civilization on a wrong track? Was it true reality they were aiming at?
Was their proud Latinity not a fatal error? There is one of the crucial
points of history.

A present-day reader who should take up the _Adagia_ or the
_Apophthegmata_ with a view to enriching his own life (for they were
meant for this purpose and it is what gave them value), would soon ask
himself: 'What matter to us, apart from strictly philological or
historical considerations, those endless details concerning obscure
personages of antique society, of Phrygians, of Thessalians? They are
nothing to me.' And--he will continue--they really mattered nothing to
Erasmus's contemporaries either. The stupendous history of the sixteenth
century was not enacted in classic phrases or turns; it was not based on
classic interests or views of life. There were no Phrygians and
Thessalians, no Agesilauses or Dionysiuses. The humanists created out of
all this a mental realm, emancipated from the limitations of time.

And did their own times pass without being influenced by them? That is
the question, and we shall not attempt to answer it: to what extent did
humanism influence the course of events?

In any case Erasmus and his coadjutors greatly heightened the
international character of civilization which had existed throughout the
Middle Ages because of Latin and of the Church. If they thought they
were really making Latin a vehicle for daily international use, they
overrated their power. It was, no doubt, an amusing fancy and a witty
exercise to plan, in such an international _milieu_ as the Parisian
student world, such models of sports and games in Latin as the
_Colloquiorum formulae_ offered. But can Erasmus have seriously thought
that the next generation would play at marbles in Latin?

Still, intellectual intercourse undoubtedly became very easy in so wide
a circle as had not been within reach in Europe since the fall of the
Roman Empire. Henceforth it was no longer the clergy alone, and an
occasional literate, but a numerous multitude of sons of burghers and
nobles, qualifying for some magisterial office, who passed through a
grammar-school and found Erasmus in their path.

Erasmus could not have attained to his world-wide celebrity if it had
not been for Latin. To make his native tongue a universal language was
beyond him. It may well puzzle a fellow-countryman of Erasmus to guess
what a talent like his, with his power of observation, his delicacy of
expression, his gusto and wealth, might have meant to Dutch literature.
Just imagine the _Colloquia_ written in the racy Dutch of the sixteenth
century! What could he not have produced if, instead of gleaning and
commenting upon classic Adagia, he had, for his themes, availed himself
of the proverbs of the vernacular? To us such a proverb is perhaps even
more sapid than the sometimes slightly finical turns praised by Erasmus.

This, however, is to reason unhistorically; this was not what the times
required and what Erasmus could give. It is quite clear why Erasmus
could only write in Latin. Moreover, in the vernacular everything would
have appeared too direct, too personal, too real, for his taste. He
could not do without that thin veil of vagueness, of remoteness, in
which everything is wrapped when expressed in Latin. His fastidious mind
would have shrunk from the pithy coarseness of a Rabelais, or the rustic
violence of Luther's German.

Estrangement from his native tongue had begun for Erasmus as early as
the days when he learned reading and writing. Estrangement from the land
of his birth set in when he left the monastery of Steyn. It was
furthered not a little by the ease with which he handled Latin. Erasmus,
who could express himself as well in Latin as in his mother tongue, and
even better, consequently lacked the experience of, after all, feeling
thoroughly at home and of being able to express himself fully, only
among his compatriots. There was, however, another psychological
influence which acted to alienate him from Holland. After he had seen at
Paris the perspectives of his own capacities, he became confirmed in the
conviction that Holland failed to appreciate him, that it distrusted and
slandered him. Perhaps there was indeed some ground for this conviction.
But, partly, it was also a reaction of injured self-love. In Holland
people knew too much about him. They had seen him in his smallnesses and
feebleness. There he had been obliged to obey others--he who, above all
things, wanted to be free. Distaste of the narrow-mindedness, the
coarseness and intemperance which he knew to prevail there, were summed
up, within him, in a general condemnatory judgement of the Dutch
character.

Henceforth he spoke as a rule about Holland with a sort of apologetic
contempt. 'I see that you are content with Dutch fame,' he writes to his
old friend William Hermans, who like Cornelius Aurelius had begun to
devote his best forces to the history of his native country. 'In Holland
the air is good for me,' he writes elsewhere, 'but the extravagant
carousals annoy me; add to this the vulgar uncultured character of the
people, the violent contempt of study, no fruit of learning, the most
egregious envy.' And excusing the imperfection of his juvenilia, he
says: 'At that time I wrote not for Italians, but for Hollanders, that
is to say, for the dullest ears'. And, in another place, 'eloquence is
demanded from a Dutchman, that is, from a more hopeless person than a
B[oe]otian'. And again, 'If the story is not very witty, remember it is
a Dutch story'. No doubt, false modesty had its share in such sayings.

After 1496 he visited Holland only on hasty journeys. There is no
evidence that after 1501 he ever set foot on Dutch soil. He dissuaded
his own compatriots abroad from returning to Holland.

Still, now and again, a cordial feeling of sympathy for his native
country stirred within him. Just where he would have had an opportunity,
in explaining Martial's _Auris Batava_ in the _Adagia_, for venting his
spleen, he availed himself of the chance of writing an eloquent
panegyric on what was dearest to him in Holland, 'a country that I am
always bound to honour and revere, as that which gave me birth. Would I
might be a credit to it, just as, on the other hand, I need not be
ashamed of it.' Their reputed boorishness rather redounds to their
honour. 'If a "Batavian ear" means a horror of Martial's obscene jokes,
I could wish that all Christians might have Dutch ears. When we consider
their morals, no nation is more inclined to humanity and benevolence,
less savage or cruel. Their mind is upright and void of cunning and all
humbug. If they are somewhat sensual and excessive at meals, it results
partly from their plentiful supply: nowhere is import so easy and
fertility so great. What an extent of lush meadows, how many navigable
rivers! Nowhere are so many towns crowded together within so small an
area; not large towns, indeed, but excellently governed. Their
cleanliness is praised by everybody. Nowhere are such large numbers of
moderately learned persons found, though extraordinary and exquisite
erudition is rather rare.'

They were Erasmus's own most cherished ideals which he here ascribes to
his compatriots--gentleness, sincerity, simplicity, purity. He sounds
that note of love for Holland on other occasions. When speaking of lazy
women, he adds: 'In France there are large numbers of them, but in
Holland we find countless wives who by their industry support their
idling and revelling husbands'. And in the colloquy entitled 'The
Shipwreck', the people who charitably take in the castaways are
Hollanders. 'There is no more humane people than this, though surrounded
by violent nations.'

In addressing English readers it is perhaps not superfluous to point out
once again that Erasmus when speaking of Holland, or using the epithet
'Batavian', refers to the county of Holland, which at present forms the
provinces of North and South Holland of the kingdom of the Netherlands,
and stretches from the Wadden islands to the estuaries of the Meuse.
Even the nearest neighbours, such as Zealanders and Frisians, are not
included in this appellation.

But it is a different matter when Erasmus speaks of _patria_, the
fatherland, or of _nostras_, a compatriot. In those days a national
consciousness was just budding all over the Netherlands. A man still
felt himself a Hollander, a Frisian, a Fleming, a Brabantine in the
first place; but the community of language and customs, and still more
the strong political influence which for nearly a century had been
exercised by the Burgundian dynasty, which had united most of these low
countries under its sway, had cemented a feeling of solidarity which did
not even halt at the linguistic frontier in Belgium. It was still rather
a strong Burgundian patriotism (even after Habsburg had _de facto_
occupied the place of Burgundy) than a strictly Netherlandish feeling of
nationality. People liked, by using a heraldic symbol, to designate the
Netherlander as 'the Lions'. Erasmus, too, employs the term. In his
works we gradually see the narrower Hollandish patriotism gliding into
the Burgundian Netherlandish. In the beginning, _patria_ with him still
means Holland proper, but soon it meant the Netherlands. It is curious
to trace how by degrees his feelings regarding Holland, made up of
disgust and attachment, are transferred to the Low Countries in general.
'In my youth', he says in 1535, repeating himself, 'I did not write for
Italians but for Hollanders, the people of Brabant and Flemings.' So
they now all share the reputation of bluntness. To Louvain is applied
what formerly was said of Holland: there are too many compotations;
nothing can be done without a drinking bout. Nowhere, he repeatedly
complains, is there so little sense of the _bonae literae_, nowhere is
study so despised as in the Netherlands, and nowhere are there more
cavillers and slanderers. But also his affection has expanded. When
Longolius of Brabant plays the Frenchman, Erasmus is vexed: 'I devoted
nearly three days to Longolius; he was uncommonly pleasing, except only
that he is too French, whereas it is well known that he is one of
us'.[4] When Charles V has obtained the crown of Spain, Erasmus notes:
'a singular stroke of luck, but I pray that it may also prove a blessing
to the fatherland, and not only to the prince'. When his strength was
beginning to fail he began to think more and more of returning to his
native country. 'King Ferdinand invites me, with large promises, to come
to Vienna,' he writes from Basle, 1 October 1528, 'but nowhere would it
please me better to rest than in Brabant.'

[Illustration: V. Doodles by Erasmus in the margin of one of his
manuscripts.]

[Illustration: VI. A manuscript page of Erasmus]

FOOTNOTES:

[4] Allen No. 1026.4, cf. 914, intr. p. 473. Later Erasmus was made to
believe that Longolius was a Hollander, cf. LBE. 1507 A.




CHAPTER VI

THEOLOGICAL ASPIRATIONS

1501

    At Tournehem: 1501--The restoration of theology now the aim of
    his life--He learns Greek--John Vitrier--_Enchiridion Militis
    Christiani_


The lean years continued with Erasmus. His livelihood remained
uncertain, and he had no fixed abode. It is remarkable that, in spite of
his precarious means of support, his movements were ever guided rather
by the care for his health than for his sustenance, and his studies
rather by his burning desire to penetrate to the purest sources of
knowledge than by his advantage. Repeatedly the fear of the plague
drives him on: in 1500 from Paris to Orleans, where he first lodges with
Augustine Caminade; but when one of the latter's boarders falls ill,
Erasmus moves. Perhaps it was the impressions dating from his youth at
Deventer that made him so excessively afraid of the plague, which in
those days raged practically without intermission. Faustus Andrelinus
sent a servant to upbraid him in his name with cowardice: 'That would be
an intolerable insult', Erasmus answers, 'if I were a Swiss soldier, but
a poet's soul, loving peace and shady places, is proof against it'. In
the spring of 1501 he leaves Paris once more for fear of the plague:
'the frequent burials frighten me', he writes to Augustine.

He travelled first to Holland, where, at Steyn, he obtained leave to
spend another year outside the monastery, for the sake of study; his
friends would be ashamed if he returned, after so many years of study,
without having acquired some authority. At Haarlem he visited his friend
William Hermans, then turned to the south, once again to pay his
respects to the Bishop of Cambray, probably at Brussels. Thence he went
to Veere, but found no opportunity to talk to his patroness. In July
1501, he subsided into quietness at the castle of Tournehem with his
faithful friend Batt.

In all his comings and goings he does not for a moment lose sight of his
ideals of study. Since his return from England he is mastered by two
desires: to edit Jerome, the great Father of the Church, and,
especially, to learn Greek thoroughly. 'You understand how much all this
matters to my fame, nay, to my preservation,' he writes (from Orleans
towards the end of 1500) to Batt. But, indeed, had Erasmus been an
ordinary fame and success hunter he might have had recourse to plenty of
other expedients. It was the ardent desire to penetrate to the source
and to make others understand that impelled him, even when he availed
himself of these projects of study to raise a little money. 'Listen,' he
writes to Batt, 'to what more I desire from you. You must wrest a gift
from the abbot (of Saint Bertin). You know the man's disposition; invent
some modest and plausible reason for begging. Tell him that I purpose
something grand, viz., to restore the whole of Jerome, however
comprehensive he may be, and spoiled, mutilated, entangled by the
ignorance of divines; and to re-insert the Greek passages. I venture to
say, I shall be able to lay open the antiquities and the style of
Jerome, understood by no one as yet. Tell him that I shall want not a
few books for the purpose, and moreover the help of Greeks, and that
therefore I require support. In saying this, Battus, you will be telling
no lies. For I really mean to do all this.'

He was, indeed, in a serious mood on this point, as he was soon to prove
to the world. His conquest of Greek was a veritable feat of heroism. He
had learned the simplest rudiments at Deventer, but these evidently
amounted to very little. In March, 1500, he writes to Batt: 'Greek is
nearly killing me, but I have no time and I have no money to buy books
or to take a master'. When Augustine Caminade wants his Homer back which
he had lent to him, Erasmus complains: 'You deprive me of my sole
consolation in my tedium. For I so burn with love for this author,
though I cannot understand him, that I feast my eyes and re-create my
mind by looking at him.' Was Erasmus aware that in saying this he almost
literally reproduced feelings which Petrarch had expressed a hundred and
fifty years before? But he had already begun to study. Whether he had a
master is not quite clear, but it is probable. He finds the language
difficult at first. Then gradually he ventures to call himself 'a
candidate in this language', and he begins with more confidence to
scatter Greek quotations through his letters. It occupies him night and
day and he urges all his friends to procure Greek books for him. In the
autumn of 1502 he declares that he can properly write all he wants in
Greek, and that extempore. He was not deceived in his expectation that
Greek would open his eyes to the right understanding of Holy Scripture.
Three years of nearly uninterrupted study amply rewarded him for his
trouble. Hebrew, which he had also taken up, he abandoned. At that time
(1504) he made translations from the Greek, he employed it critically in
his theological studies, he taught it, amongst others, to William Cop,
the French physician-humanist. A few years later he was to find little
in Italy to improve his proficiency in Greek; he was afterwards inclined
to believe that he carried more of the two ancient languages to that
country than he brought back.

Nothing testifies more to the enthusiasm with which Erasmus applied
himself to Greek than his zeal to make his best friends share in its
blessings. Batt, he decided, should learn Greek. But Batt had no time,
and Latin appealed more to him. When Erasmus goes to Haarlem to visit
William Hermans, it is to make him a Greek scholar too; he has brought a
handbag full of books. But he had only his trouble for his pains.
William did not take at all kindly to this study and Erasmus was so
disappointed that he not only considered his money and trouble thrown
away, but also thought he had lost a friend.

Meanwhile he was still undecided where he should go in the near future.
To England, to Italy, or back to Paris? In the end he made a fairly long
stay as a guest, from the autumn of 1501 till the following summer,
first at Saint Omer, with the prior of Saint Bertin, and afterwards at
the castle of Courtebourne, not far off.

At Saint Omer, Erasmus became acquainted with a man whose image he was
afterwards to place beside that of Colet as that of a true divine, and
of a good monk at the same time: Jean Vitrier, the warden of the
Franciscan monastery at Saint Omer. Erasmus must have felt attracted to
a man who was burdened with a condemnation pronounced by the Sorbonne on
account of his too frank expressions regarding the abuses of monastic
life. Vitrier had not given up the life on that account, but he devoted
himself to reforming monasteries and convents. Having progressed from
scholasticism to Saint Paul, he had formed a very liberal conception of
Christian life, strongly opposed to practices and ceremonies. This man,
without doubt, considerably influenced the origin of one of Erasmus's
most celebrated and influential works, the _Enchiridion militis
Christiani_.

Erasmus himself afterwards confessed that the _Enchiridion_ was born by
chance. He did not reflect that some outward circumstance is often made
to serve an inward impulse. The outward circumstance was that the castle
of Tournehem was frequented by a soldier, a friend of Batt, a man of
very dissolute conduct, who behaved very badly towards his pious wife,
and who was, moreover, an uncultured and violent hater of priests.[5]
For the rest he was of a kindly disposition and excepted Erasmus from
his hatred of divines. The wife used her influence with Batt to get
Erasmus to write something which might bring her husband to take an
interest in religion. Erasmus complied with the request and Jean Vitrier
concurred so cordially with the views expressed in these notes that
Erasmus afterwards elaborated them at Louvain; in 1504 they were
published at Antwerp by Dirck Maertensz.

This is the outward genesis of the _Enchiridion_. But the inward cause
was that sooner or later Erasmus was bound to formulate his attitude
towards the religious conduct of the life of his day and towards
ceremonial and soulless conceptions of Christian duty, which were an
eyesore to him.

In point of form the _Enchiridion_ is a manual for an illiterate soldier
to attain to an attitude of mind worthy of Christ; as with a finger he
will point out to him the shortest path to Christ. He assumes the friend
to be weary of life at court--a common theme of contemporary literature.
Only for a few days does Erasmus interrupt the work of his life, the
purification of theology, to comply with his friend's request for
instruction. To keep up a soldierly style he chooses the title,
_Enchiridion_, the Greek word that even in antiquity meant both a
poniard and a manual:[6] 'The poniard of the militant Christian'.[7] He
reminds him of the duty of watchfulness and enumerates the weapons of
Christ's militia. Self-knowledge is the beginning of wisdom. The general
rules of the Christian conduct of life are followed by a number of
remedies for particular sins and faults.

Such is the outward frame. But within this scope Erasmus finds an
opportunity, for the first time, to develop his theological programme.
This programme calls upon us to return to Scripture. It should be the
endeavour of every Christian to understand Scripture in its purity and
original meaning. To that end he should prepare himself by the study of
the Ancients, orators, poets, philosophers; Plato especially. Also the
great Fathers of the Church, Jerome, Ambrose, Augustine will be found
useful, but not the large crowd of subsequent exegetists. The argument
chiefly aims at subverting the conception of religion as a continual
observance of ceremonies. This is Judaic ritualism and of no value. It
is better to understand a single verse of the psalms well, by this means
to deepen one's understanding of God and of oneself, and to draw a moral
and line of conduct from it, than to read the whole psalter without
attention. If the ceremonies do not renew the soul they are valueless
and hurtful. 'Many are wont to count how many masses they have heard
every day, and referring to them as to something very important, as
though they owed Christ nothing else, they return to their former habits
after leaving church.' 'Perhaps you sacrifice every day and yet you live
for yourself. You worship the saints, you like to touch their relics; do
you want to earn Peter and Paul? Then copy the faith of the one and the
charity of the other and you will have done more than if you had walked
to Rome ten times.' He does not reject formulae and practices; he does
not want to shake the faith of the humble but he cannot suffer that
Christ is offered a cult made up of practices only. And why is it the
monks, above all, who contribute to the deterioration of faith? 'I am
ashamed to tell how superstitiously most of them observe certain petty
ceremonies, invented by puny human minds (and not even for this
purpose), how hatefully they want to force others to conform to them,
how implicitly they trust them, how boldly they condemn others.'

Let Paul teach them true Christianity. 'Stand fast therefore in the
liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again
with the yoke of bondage.' This word to the Galatians contains the
doctrine of Christian liberty, which soon at the Reformation was to
resound so loudly. Erasmus did not apply it here in a sense derogatory
to the dogmatics of the Catholic Church; but still it is a fact that the
_Enchiridion_ prepared many minds to give up much that he still wanted
to keep.

The note of the _Enchiridion_ is already what was to remain the note of
Erasmus's life-work: how revolting it is that in this world the
substance and the shadow differ so and that the world reverences those
whom it should not reverence; that a hedge of infatuation, routine and
thoughtlessness prevents mankind from seeing things in their true
proportions. He expresses it later in the _Praise of Folly_ and in the
_Colloquies_. It is not merely religious feeling, it is equally social
feeling that inspired him. Under the heading: Opinions worthy of a
Christian, he laments the extremes of pride of class, national
hostility, professional envy, and rivalry between religious orders,
which keep men apart. Let everybody sincerely concern himself about his
brother. 'Throwing dice cost you a thousand gold pieces in one night,
and meanwhile some wretched girl, compelled by poverty, sold her
modesty; and a soul is lost for which Christ gave his own. You say, what
is that to me? I mind my own business, according to my lights. And yet
you, holding such opinions, consider yourself a Christian, who are not
even a man!'

In the _Enchiridion_ of the militant Christian, Erasmus had for the
first time said the things which he had most at heart, with fervour and
indignation, with sincerity and courage. And yet one would hardly say
that this booklet was born of an irresistible impulse of ardent piety.
Erasmus treats it, as we have seen, as a trifle, composed at the request
of a friend in a couple of days stolen from his studies (though,
strictly speaking, this only holds good of the first draft, which he
elaborated afterwards). The chief object of his studies he had already
conceived to be the restoration of theology. One day he will expound
Paul, 'that the slanderers who consider it the height of piety to know
nothing of _bonae literae_, may understand that we in our youth embraced
the cultured literature of the Ancients, and that we acquired a correct
knowledge of the two languages, Greek and Latin--not without many
vigils--not for the purpose of vainglory or childish satisfaction, but
because, long before, we premeditated adorning the temple of the Lord
(which some have too much desecrated by their ignorance and barbarism)
according to our strength, with help from foreign parts, so that also in
noble minds the love of Holy Scripture may be kindled'. Is it not still
the Humanist who speaks?

We hear, moreover, the note of personal justification. It is sounded
also in a letter to Colet written towards the close of 1504,
accompanying the edition of the _Lucubrationes_ in which the
_Enchiridion_ was first published. 'I did not write the _Enchiridion_ to
parade my invention or eloquence, but only that I might correct the
error of those whose religion is usually composed of more than Judaic
ceremonies and observances of a material sort, and who neglect the
things that conduce to piety.' He adds, and this is typically
humanistic, 'I have tried to give the reader a sort of art of piety, as
others have written the theory of certain sciences'.

The art of piety! Erasmus might have been surprised had he known that
another treatise, written more than sixty years before, by another canon
of the Low Countries would continue to appeal much longer and much more
urgently to the world than his manual: the _Imitatio Christi_ by Thomas
a Kempis.

The _Enchiridion_, collected with some other pieces into a volume of
_Lucubrationes_, did not meet with such a great and speedy success as
had been bestowed upon the _Adagia_. That Erasmus's speculations on true
piety were considered too bold was certainly not the cause. They
contained nothing antagonistic to the teachings of the Church, so that
even at the time of the Counter-Reformation, when the Church had become
highly suspicious of everything that Erasmus had written, the divines
who drew up the _index expurgatorius_ of his work found only a few
passages in the _Enchiridion_ to expunge. Moreover, Erasmus had inserted
in the volume some writings of unsuspected Catholic tenor. For a long
time it was in great repute, especially with theologians and monks. A
famous preacher at Antwerp used to say that a sermon might be found in
every page of the _Enchiridion_. But the book only obtained its great
influence in wide cultured circles when, upheld by Erasmus's world-wide
reputation, it was available in a number of translations, English,
Czech, German, Dutch, Spanish, and French. But then it began to fall
under suspicion, for that was the time when Luther had unchained the
great struggle. 'Now they have begun to nibble at the _Enchiridion_
also, that used to be so popular with divines,' Erasmus writes in 1526.
For the rest it was only two passages to which the orthodox critics
objected.

FOOTNOTES:

[5] That this man should have been John of Trazegnies as Allen thinks
possible and Renaudet accepts, is still all too uncertain; A. 164 t. I.
p. 373; Renaudet, Prereforme 428.

[6] In 1500 (A. 123.21) Erasmus speaks of the _Enchiridion_ of the
Father Augustine, cf. 135, 138; in 1501, A. 152.33, he calls the
_Officia_ of Cicero a 'pugiunculus'--a dagger. So the appellation had
been in his mind for some time.

[7] _Miles_ with Erasmus has no longer the meaning of 'knight' which it
had in medieval Latin.




CHAPTER VII

YEARS OF TROUBLE--LOUVAIN, PARIS, ENGLAND

1502-6

    Death of Batt: 1502--First stay at Louvain: 1502-4--Translations
    from the Greek--At Paris again--Valla's _Annotationes_ on the
    New Testament--Second stay in England: 1505-6--More patrons and
    friends--Departure for Italy: 1506--_Carmen Alpestre_


Circumstances continued to remain unfavourable for Erasmus. 'This year
fortune has truly been raging violently against me,' he writes in the
autumn of 1502. In the spring his good friend Batt had died. It is a
pity that no letters written by Erasmus directly after his bereavement
have come down to us. We should be glad to have for that faithful helper
a monument in addition to that which Erasmus erected to his memory in
the _Antibarbari_. Anna of Veere had remarried and, as a patroness,
might henceforth be left out of account. In October 1502, Henry of
Bergen passed away. 'I have commemorated the Bishop of Cambray in three
Latin epitaphs and a Greek one; they sent me but six guilders, that also
in death he should remain true to himself.' In Francis of Busleiden,
Archbishop of Besancon, he lost at about the same time a prospective new
patron. He still felt shut out from Paris, Cologne and England by the
danger of the plague.

In the late summer of 1502 he went to Louvain, 'flung thither by the
plague,' he says. The university of Louvain, established in 1425 to wean
the Netherlands in spiritual matters from Paris, was, at the beginning
of the sixteenth century, one of the strongholds of theological
tradition, which, however, did not prevent the progress of classical
studies. How else should Adrian of Utrecht, later pope but at that time
Dean of Saint Peter's and professor of theology, have forthwith
undertaken to get him a professorship? Erasmus declined the offer,
however, 'for certain reasons,' he says. Considering his great distress,
the reasons must have been cogent indeed. One of them which he mentioned
is not very clear to us: 'I am here so near to Dutch tongues which know
how to hurt much, it is true, but have not learned to profit any one'.
His spirit of liberty and his ardent love of the studies to which he
wanted to devote himself entirely, were, no doubt, his chief reasons for
declining.

But he had to make a living. Life at Louvain was expensive and he had no
regular earnings. He wrote some prefaces and dedicated to the Bishop of
Arras, Chancellor of the University, the first translation from the
Greek: some _Declamationes_ by Libanius. When in the autumn of 1503
Philip le Beau was expected back in the Netherlands from his journey to
Spain Erasmus wrote, with sighs of distaste, a panegyric to celebrate
the safe return of the prince. It cost him much trouble. 'It occupies me
day and night,' says the man who composed with such incredible facility,
when his heart was in the work. 'What is harder than to write with
aversion; what is more useless than to write something by which we
unlearn good writing?' It must be acknowledged that he really flattered
as sparingly as possible; the practice was so repulsive to him that in
his preface he roundly owned that, to tell the truth, this whole class
of composition was not to his taste.

At the end of 1504 Erasmus was back at Paris, at last. Probably he had
always meant to return and looked upon his stay at Louvain as a
temporary exile. The circumstances under which he left Louvain are
unknown to us, because of the almost total lack of letters of the year
1504. In any case, he hoped that at Paris he would sooner be able to
attain his great end of devoting himself entirely to the study of
theology. 'I cannot tell you, dear Colet,' he writes towards the end of
1504, 'how I hurry on, with all sails set, to holy literature; how I
dislike everything that keeps me back, or retards me. But the disfavour
of Fortune, who always looks at me with the same face, has been the
reason why I have not been able to get clear of those vexations. So I
returned to France with the purpose, if I cannot solve them, at any rate
of ridding myself of them in one way or another. After that I shall
devote myself, with all my heart, to the _divinae literae_, to give up
the remainder of my life to them.' If only he can find the means to work
for some months entirely for himself and disentangle himself from
profane literature. Can Colet not find out for him how matters stand
with regard to the proceeds of the hundred copies of the _Adagia_ which,
at one time, he sent to England at his own expense? The liberty of a few
months may be bought for little money.

There is something heroic in Erasmus scorning to make money out of his
facile talents and enviable knowledge of the humanities, daring
indigence so as to be able to realize his shining ideal of restoring
theology.

It is remarkable that the same Italian humanist who in his youth had
been his guide and example on the road to pure Latinity and classic
antiquity, Lorenzo Valla, by chance became his leader and an outpost in
the field of critical theology. In the summer of 1504, hunting in the
old library of the Premonstratensian monastery of Parc, near Louvain
('in no preserves is hunting a greater delight'), he found a manuscript
of Valla's _Annotationes_ on the New Testament. It was a collection of
critical notes on the text of the Gospels, the Epistles and Revelation.
That the text of the Vulgate was not stainless had been acknowledged by
Rome itself as early as the thirteenth century. Monastic orders and
individual divines had set themselves to correct it, but that
purification had not amounted to much, in spite of Nicholas of Lyra's
work in the fourteenth century.

It was probably the falling in with Valla's _Annotationes_ which led
Erasmus, who was formerly more inspired with the resolution to edit
Jerome and to comment upon Paul (he was to do both at a later date), to
turn to the task of taking up the New Testament as a whole, in order to
restore it in its purity. In March 1505 already Josse Badius at Paris
printed Valla's _Annotationes_ for Erasmus, as a sort of advertisement
of what he himself one day hoped to achieve. It was a feat of courage.
Erasmus did not conceal from himself that Valla, the humanist, had an
ill name with divines, and that there would be an outcry about 'the
intolerable temerity of the _homo grammaticus_, who after having
harassed all the _disciplinae_, did not scruple to assail holy
literature with his petulant pen'. It was another programme much more
explicit and defiant than the _Enchiridion_ had been.

Once more it is not clear why and how Erasmus left Paris again for
England in the autumn of 1505. He speaks of serious reasons and the
advice of sensible people. He mentions one reason: lack of money. The
reprint of the _Adagia_, published by John Philippi at Paris in 1505,
had probably helped him through, for the time being; the edition cannot
have been to his taste, for he had been dissatisfied with his work and
wanted to extend it by weaving his new Greek knowledge into it. From
Holland a warning voice had sounded, the voice of his superior and
friend Servatius, demanding an account of his departure from Paris.
Evidently his Dutch friends had still no confidence in Erasmus, his
work, and his future.

In many respects that future appeared more favourable to him in England
than it had seemed anywhere, thus far. There he found the old friends,
men of consideration and importance: Mountjoy, with whom, on his
arrival, he stayed some months, Colet, and More. There he found some
excellent Greek scholars, whose conversation promised to be profitable
and amusing; not Colet, who knew little Greek, but More, Linacre,
Grocyn, Latimer, and Tunstall. He soon came in contact with some high
ecclesiastics who were to be his friends and patrons: Richard Foxe,
Bishop of Winchester, John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester and William
Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury. Soon he would also find a friend whose
congenial spirit and interests, to some extent, made up for the loss of
Batt: the Italian Andrew Ammonius, of Lucca. And lastly, the king
promised him an ecclesiastical benefice. It was not long before Erasmus
was armed with a dispensation from Pope Julius II, dated 4 January 1506,
cancelling the obstacles in the way of accepting an English benefice.

Translations from Greek into Latin were for him an easy and speedy means
to obtain favour and support: a dialogue by Lucian, followed by others,
for Foxe; the _Hecuba_ and the _Iphigenia_ of Euripides for Warham. He
now also thought of publishing his letters.

Clearly his relations with Holland were not yet satisfactory. Servatius
did not reply to his letters. Erasmus ever felt hanging over him a
menace to his career and his liberty embodied in the figure of that
friend, to whom he was linked by so many silken ties, yonder in the
monastery of Steyn, where his return was looked forward to, sooner or
later, as a beacon-light of Christendom. Did the prior know of the papal
dispensation exempting Erasmus from the 'statutes and customs of the
monastery of Steyn in Holland, of the order of Saint Augustine?'
Probably he did. On 1 April 1506, Erasmus writes to him: 'Here in London
I am, it seems, greatly esteemed by the most eminent and erudite men of
all England. The king has promised me a curacy: the visit of the prince
necessitated a postponement of this business.'[8]

He immediately adds: 'I am deliberating again how best to devote the
remainder of my life (how much that will be, I do not know) entirely to
piety, to Christ. I see life, even when it is long, as evanescent and
dwindling; I know that I am of a delicate constitution and that my
strength has been encroached upon, not a little, by study and also,
somewhat, by misfortune. I see that no deliverance can be hoped from
study, and that it seems as if we had to begin over again, day after
day. Therefore I have resolved, content with my mediocrity (especially
now that I have learned as much Greek as suffices me), to apply myself
to meditation about death and the training of my soul. I should have
done so before and have husbanded the precious years when they were at
their best. But though it is a tardy husbandry that people practise when
only little remains at the bottom, we should be the more economical
accordingly as the quantity and quality of what is left diminishes.'

Was it a fit of melancholy which made Erasmus write those words of
repentance and renunciation? Was he surprised in the middle of the
pursuit of his life's aim by the consciousness of the vanity of his
endeavours, the consciousness, too, of a great fatigue? Is this the
deepest foundation of Erasmus's being, which he reveals for a moment to
his old and intimate friend? It may be doubted. The passage tallies very
ill with the first sentences of the letter, which are altogether
concerned with success and prospects. In a letter he wrote the next day,
also to Gouda and to a trusted friend, there is no trace of the mood: he
is again thinking of his future. We do not notice that the tremendous
zeal with which he continues his studies is relaxed for a moment. And
there are other indications that towards Servatius, who knew him better
than he could wish, and who, moreover, as prior of Steyn, had a
threatening power over him, he purposely demeaned himself as though he
despised the world.

Meanwhile nothing came of the English prebend. But suddenly the occasion
offered to which Erasmus had so often looked forward: the journey to
Italy. The court-physician of Henry VII, Giovanni Battista Boerio, of
Genoa, was looking for a master to accompany his sons in their journey
to the universities of Italy. Erasmus accepted the post, which charged
him neither with the duties of tuition nor with attending to the young
fellows, but only with supervising and guiding their studies. In the
beginning of June 1506, he found himself on French soil once more. For
two summer months the party of travellers stayed at Paris and Erasmus
availed himself of the opportunity to have several of his works, which
he had brought from England, printed at Paris. He was by now a
well-known and favourite author, gladly welcomed by the old friends (he
had been reputed dead) and made much of. Josse Badius printed all
Erasmus offered him: the translations of Euripides and Lucian, a
collection of _Epigrammata_, a new but still unaltered edition of the
_Adagia_.

In August the journey was continued. As he rode on horseback along the
Alpine roads the most important poem Erasmus has written, the echo of an
abandoned pursuit, originated. He had been vexed about his travelling
company, had abstained from conversing with them, and sought consolation
in composing poetry. The result was the ode which he called _Carmen
equestre vel potius alpestre_, about the inconveniences of old age,
dedicated to his friend William Cop.

Erasmus was one of those who early feel old. He was not forty and yet
fancied himself across the threshold of old age. How quickly it had
come! He looks back on the course of his life: he sees himself playing
with nuts as a child, as a boy eager for study, as a youth engrossed in
poetry and scholasticism, also in painting. He surveys his enormous
erudition, his study of Greek, his aspiration to scholarly fame. In the
midst of all this, old age has suddenly come. What remains to him? And
again we hear the note of renunciation of the world and of devotion to
Christ. Farewell jests and trifles, farewell philosophy and poetry, a
pure heart full of Christ is all he desires henceforward.

Here, in the stillness of the Alpine landscape, there arose something
more of Erasmus's deepest aspirations than in the lament to Servatius.
But in this case, too, it is a stray element of his soul, not the strong
impulse that gave direction and fullness to his life and with
irresistible pressure urged him on to ever new studies.

FOOTNOTES:

[8] A. 189, Philip le Beau, who had unexpectedly come to England because
of a storm, which obliged Mountjoy to do court-service.




CHAPTER VIII

IN ITALY

1506-9

    Erasmus in Italy: 1506-9--He takes his degree at Turin--Bologna
    and Pope Julius II--Erasmus in Venice with Aldus: 1507-8--The
    art of printing--Alexander Stewart--To Rome: 1509--News of Henry
    VIII's accession--Erasmus leaves Italy


At Turin Erasmus received, directly upon his arrival, on 4 September
1506, the degree of doctor of theology. That he did not attach much
value to the degree is easy to understand. He regarded it, however, as
an official warrant of his competence as a writer on theological
subjects, which would strengthen his position when assailed by the
suspicion of his critics. He writes disdainfully about the title, even
to his Dutch friends who in former days had helped him on in his studies
for the express purpose of obtaining the doctor's degree. As early as
1501, to Anna of Borselen he writes, 'Go to Italy and obtain the
doctor's degree? Foolish projects, both of them. But one should conform
to the customs of the times.' Again to Servatius and Johannes Obrecht,
half apologetically, he says: 'I have obtained the doctor's degree in
theology, and that quite contrary to my intention, only because I was
overcome by the prayers of friends.'

Bologna was now the destination of his journey. But when Erasmus arrived
there, a war was in progress which forced him to retire to Florence for
a time. Pope Julius II, allied with the French, at the head of an army,
marched on Bologna to conquer it from the Bentivogli. This purpose was
soon attained, and Bologna was a safe place to return to. On 11 November
1506, Erasmus witnessed the triumphal entry of the martial pope.

Of these days nothing but short, hasty letters of his have come down to
us. They speak of unrest and rumours of war. There is nothing to show
that he was impressed by the beauty of the Italy of the Renaissance. The
scanty correspondence dating from his stay in Italy mentions neither
architecture, nor sculpture, nor pictures. When much later he happened
to remember his visit to the Chartreuse of Pavia, it is only to give an
instance of useless waste and magnificence. Books alone seemed to occupy
and attract Erasmus in Italy.

At Bologna, Erasmus served as a mentor to the young Boerios to the end
of the year for which he had bound himself. It seemed a very long time
to him. He could not stand any encroachment upon his liberty. He felt
caught in the contract as in a net. The boys, it seems, were intelligent
enough, if not so brilliant as Erasmus had seen them in his first joy;
but with their private tutor Clyfton, whom he at first extolled to the
sky, he was soon at loggerheads. At Bologna he experienced many
vexations for which his new relations with Paul Bombasius could only in
part indemnify him. He worked there at an enlarged edition of his
_Adagia_, which now, by the addition of the Greek ones, increased from
eight hundred to some thousands of items.

[Illustration: VII. Title-page of the _Adagia_, printed by Aldus
Manutius in 1508]

[Illustration: VIII. VIEW OF VENICE, 1493]

[Illustration: IX. PORTRAIT MEDAL OF ALDUS MANUTIUS. On the reverse the
Aldine emblem]

[Illustration: X. A page from the _Praise of Folly_ with a drawing by
Holbein of Erasmus at his desk.]

From Bologna, in October 1507, Erasmus addressed a letter to the famous
Venetian printer, Aldus Manutius, in which he requested him to publish,
anew, the two translated dramas of Euripides, as the edition of Badius
was out of print and too defective for his taste. What made Aldus
attractive in his eyes was, no doubt, besides the fame of the business,
though it was languishing at the time, the printer's beautiful
type--'those most magnificent letters, especially those very small
ones'. Erasmus was one of those true book-lovers who pledge their heart
to a type or a size of a book, not because of any artistic preference,
but because of readableness and handiness, which to them are of the very
greatest importance. What he asked of Aldus was a small book at a low
price. Towards the end of the year their relations had gone so far that
Erasmus gave up his projected journey to Rome, for the time, to remove
to Venice, there personally to superintend the publication of his works.
Now there was no longer merely the question of a little book of
translations, but Aldus had declared himself willing to print the
enormously increased collection of the _Adagia_.

Beatus Rhenanus tells a story which, no doubt, he had heard from Erasmus
himself: how Erasmus on his arrival at Venice had gone straight to the
printing-office and was kept waiting there for a long time. Aldus was
correcting proofs and thought his visitor was one of those inquisitive
people by whom he used to be pestered. When he turned out to be Erasmus,
he welcomed him cordially and procured him board and lodging in the
house of his father-in-law, Andrea Asolani. Fully eight months did
Erasmus live there, in the environment which, in future, was to be his
true element: the printing-office. He was in a fever of hurried work,
about which he would often sigh, but which, after all, was congenial to
him. The augmented collection of the _Adagia_ had not yet been made
ready for the press at Bologna. 'With great temerity on my part,'
Erasmus himself testifies, 'we began to work at the same time, I to
write, Aldus to print.' Meanwhile the literary friends of the New
Academy whom he got to know at Venice, Johannes Lascaris, Baptista
Egnatius, Marcus Musurus and the young Jerome Aleander, with whom, at
Asolani's, he shared room and bed, brought him new Greek authors,
unprinted as yet, furnishing fresh material for augmenting the _Adagia_.
These were no inconsiderable additions: Plato in the original,
Plutarch's _Lives_ and _Moralia_, Pindar, Pausanias, and others. Even
people whom he did not know and who took an interest in his work,
brought new material to him. Amid the noise of the press-room, Erasmus,
to the surprise of his publisher, sat and wrote, usually from memory, so
busily occupied that, as he picturesquely expressed it, he had no time
to scratch his ears. He was lord and master of the printing-office. A
special corrector had been assigned to him; he made his textual changes
in the last impression. Aldus also read the proofs. 'Why?' asked
Erasmus. 'Because I am studying at the same time,' was the reply.
Meanwhile Erasmus suffered from the first attack of his tormenting
nephrolithic malady; he ascribed it to the food he got at Asolani's and
later took revenge by painting that boarding-house and its landlord in
very spiteful colours in the _Colloquies_.

When in September 1508, the edition of the _Adagia_ was ready, Aldus
wanted Erasmus to remain in order to write more for him. Till December
he continued to work at Venice on editions of Plautus, Terence, and
Seneca's tragedies. Visions of joint labour to publish all that classic
antiquity still held in the way of hidden treasures, together with
Hebrew and Chaldean stores, floated before his mind.

Erasmus belonged to the generation which had grown up together with the
youthful art of printing. To the world of those days it was still like a
newly acquired organ; people felt rich, powerful, happy in the
possession of this 'almost divine implement'. The figure of Erasmus and
his _[oe]uvre_ were only rendered possible by the art of printing. He
was its glorious triumph and, equally, in a sense, its victim. What
would Erasmus have been without the printing-press? To broadcast the
ancient documents, to purify and restore them was his life's passion.
The certainty that the printed book places exactly the same text in the
hands of thousands of readers, was to him a consolation that former
generations had lacked.

Erasmus is one of the first who, after his name as an author was
established, worked directly and continually for the press. It was his
strength, but also his weakness. It enabled him to exercise an immediate
influence on the reading public of Europe such as had emanated from none
before him; to become a focus of culture in the full sense of the word,
an intellectual central station, a touchstone of the spirit of the time.
Imagine for a moment what it would have meant if a still greater mind
than his, say Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, that universal spirit who had
helped in nursing the art of printing in its earliest infancy, could
have availed himself of the art as it was placed at the disposal of
Erasmus!

The dangerous aspect of this situation was that printing enabled
Erasmus, having once become a centre and an authority, to address the
world at large immediately about all that occurred to him. Much of his
later mental labour is, after all, really but repetition, ruminating
digression, unnecessary vindication from assaults to which his greatness
alone would have been a sufficient answer, futilities which he might
have better left alone. Much of this work written directly for the press
is journalism at bottom, and we do Erasmus an injustice by applying to
it the tests of lasting excellence. The consciousness that we can reach
the whole world at once with our writings is a stimulant which
unwittingly influences our mode of expression, a luxury that only the
highest spirits can bear with impunity.

The link between Erasmus and book-printing was Latin. Without his
incomparable Latinity his position as an author would have been
impossible. The art of printing undoubtedly furthered the use of Latin.
It was the Latin publications which in those days promised success and a
large sale for a publisher, and established his reputation, for they
were broadcast all over the world. The leading publishers were
themselves scholars filled with enthusiasm for humanism. Cultured and
well-to-do people acted as proof-readers to printers; such as Peter
Gilles, the friend of Erasmus and More, the town clerk of Antwerp, who
corrected proof-sheets for Dirck Maertensz. The great printing-offices
were, in a local sense, too, the foci of intellectual intercourse. The
fact that England had lagged behind, thus far, in the evolution of the
art of printing, contributed not a little, no doubt, to prevent Erasmus
from settling there, where so many ties held and so many advantages
allured him.

To find a permanent place of residence was, indeed, and apart from this
fact, very hard for him. Towards the end of 1508 he accepted the post of
tutor in rhetorics to the young Alexander Stewart, a natural son of
James IV of Scotland, and already, in spite of his youth, Archbishop of
Saint Andrews, now a student at Padua. The danger of war soon drove them
from upper Italy to Siena. Here Erasmus obtained leave to visit Rome. He
arrived there early in 1509, no longer an unknown canon from the
northern regions but a celebrated and honoured author. All the charms of
the Eternal City lay open to him and he must have felt keenly gratified
by the consideration and courtesy with which cardinals and prelates,
such as Giovanni de' Medici, afterwards Leo X, Domenico Grimani, Riario
and others, treated him. It seems that he was even offered some post in
the curia. But he had to return to his youthful archbishop with whom he
thereupon visited Rome again, incognito, and afterwards travelled in the
neighbourhood of Naples. He inspected the cave of the Sibylla of Cumae,
but what it meant to him we do not know. This entire period following
his departure from Padua and all that follows till the spring of
1511--in certain respects the most important part of his life--remains
unrecorded in a single letter that has come down to us. Here and there
he has occasionally, and at a much later date, touched upon some
impressions of Rome,[9] but the whole remains vague and dim. It is the
incubation period of the _Praise of Folly_ that is thus obscured from
view.

On 21 April 1509, King Henry VII of England died. His successor was the
young prince whom Erasmus had saluted at Eltham in 1499, to whom he had
dedicated his poem in praise of Great Britain, and who, during his stay
at Bologna, had distinguished him by a Latin letter as creditable to
Erasmus as to the fifteen-year-old royal latinist.[10] If ever the
chance of obtaining a patron seemed favourable, it was now, when this
promising lover of letters ascended the throne as Henry VIII. Lord
Mountjoy, Erasmus's most faithful Maecenas, thought so, too, and pointed
out the fact to him in a letter of 27 May 1509. It was a pleasure to
see, he wrote, how vigorous, how upright and just, how zealous in the
cause of literature and men of letters was the conduct of the youthful
prince. Mountjoy--or Ammonius, who probably drew up the flowery document
for him--was exultant. A laughing sky and tears of joy are the themes of
the letter. Evidently, however, Erasmus himself had, on his side,
already sounded Mountjoy as to his chances, as soon as the tidings of
Henry VII's death became known at Rome; not without lamentations about
cares and weakened health. 'The Archbishop of Canterbury', Mountjoy was
able to apprise Erasmus, 'is not only continually engrossed in your
_Adagia_ and praises you to the skies, but he also promises you a
benefice on your return and sends you five pounds for travelling
expenses,' which sum was doubled by Mountjoy.

We do not know whether Erasmus really hesitated before he reached his
decision. Cardinal Grimani, he asserts, tried to hold him back, but in
vain, for in July, 1509, he left Rome and Italy, never to return.

As he crossed the Alps for the second time, not on the French side now,
but across the Spluegen, through Switzerland, his genius touched him
again, as had happened in those high regions three years before on the
road to Italy. But this time it was not in the guise of the Latin Muse,
who then drew from him such artful and pathetic poetical meditations
about his past life and pious vows for the future;--it was something
much more subtle and grand: the _Praise of Folly_.

FOOTNOTES:

[9] LBE. No. 1175 _c._ 1375, visit to Grimani.

[10] A. 206, where from Allen's introduction one can form an opinion
about the prince's share in the composition.




CHAPTER IX

THE PRAISE OF FOLLY

    _Moriae Encomium, The Praise of Folly_: 1509, as a work of
    art--Folly, the motor of all life: Indispensable, salutary,
    cause and support of states and of heroism--Folly keeps the
    world going--Vital energy incorporated with folly--Lack of folly
    makes unfit for life--Need of self-complacency--Humbug beats
    truth--Knowledge a plague--Satire of all secular and
    ecclesiastical vocations--Two themes throughout the work--The
    highest folly: Ecstasy--The _Moria_ to be taken as a gay
    jest--Confusion of fools and lunatics--Erasmus treats his
    _Moria_ slightingly--Its value


While he rode over the mountain passes,[11] Erasmus's restless spirit,
now unfettered for some days by set tasks, occupied itself with
everything he had studied and read in the last few years, and with
everything he had seen. What ambition, what self-deception, what pride
and conceit filled the world! He thought of Thomas More, whom he was now
to see again--that most witty and wise of all his friends, with that
curious name _Moros_, the Greek word for a fool, which so ill became his
personality. Anticipating the gay jests which More's conversation
promised, there grew in his mind that masterpiece of humour and wise
irony, _Moriae Encomium_, the _Praise of Folly_. The world as the scene
of universal folly; folly as the indispensable element making life and
society possible and all this put into the mouth of Stultitia--Folly--
itself (true antitype of Minerva), who in a panegyric on her own power
and usefulness, praises herself. As to form it is a _Declamatio_, such
as he had translated from the Greek of Libanius. As to the spirit, a
revival of Lucian, whose _Gallus_, translated by him three years before,
may have suggested the theme. It must have been in the incomparably
lucid moments of that brilliant intellect. All the particulars of
classic reading which the year before he worked up in the new edition of
the _Adagia_ were still at his immediate disposal in that retentive and
capacious memory. Reflecting at his ease on all that wisdom of the
ancients, he secreted the juices required for his expostulation.

He arrived in London, took up his abode in More's house in Bucklersbury,
and there, tortured by nephritic pains, he wrote down in a few days,
without having his books with him, the perfect work of art that must
have been ready in his mind. Stultitia was truly born in the manner of
her serious sister Pallas.

As to form and imagery the _Moria_ is faultless, the product of the
inspired moments of creative impulse. The figure of an orator
confronting her public is sustained to the last in a masterly way. We
see the faces of the auditors light up with glee when Folly appears in
the pulpit; we hear the applause interrupting her words. There is a
wealth of fancy, coupled with so much soberness of line and colour, such
reserve, that the whole presents a perfect instance of that harmony
which is the essence of Renaissance expression. There is no exuberance,
in spite of the multiplicity of matter and thought, but a temperateness,
a smoothness, an airiness and clearness which are as gladdening as they
are relaxing. In order perfectly to realize the artistic perfection of
Erasmus's book we should compare it with Rabelais.

'Without me', says Folly, 'the world cannot exist for a moment. For is
not all that is done at all among mortals, full of folly; is it not
performed by fools and for fools?' 'No society, no cohabitation can be
pleasant or lasting without folly; so much so, that a people could not
stand its prince, nor the master his man, nor the maid her mistress, nor
the tutor his pupil, nor the friend his friend, nor the wife her husband
for a moment longer, if they did not now and then err together, now
flatter each other; now sensibly conniving at things, now smearing
themselves with some honey of folly.' In that sentence the summary of
the _Laus_ is contained. Folly here is worldly wisdom, resignation and
lenient judgement.

He who pulls off the masks in the comedy of life is ejected. What is the
whole life of mortals but a sort of play in which each actor appears on
the boards in his specific mask and acts his part till the stage-manager
calls him off? He acts wrongly who does not adapt himself to existing
conditions, and demands that the game shall be a game no longer. It is
the part of the truly sensible to mix with all people, either conniving
readily at their folly, or affably erring like themselves.

And the necessary driving power of all human action is 'Philautia',
Folly's own sister: self-love. He who does not please himself effects
little. Take away that condiment of life and the word of the orator
cools, the poet is laughed at, the artist perishes with his art.

Folly in the garb of pride, of vanity, of vainglory, is the hidden
spring of all that is considered high and great in this world. The state
with its posts of honour, patriotism and national pride; the stateliness
of ceremonies, the delusion of caste and nobility--what is it but folly?
War, the most foolish thing of all, is the origin of all heroism. What
prompted the Deciuses, what Curtius, to sacrifice themselves? Vainglory.
It is this folly which produces states; through her, empires, religion,
law-courts, exist.

This is bolder and more chilling than Machiavelli, more detached than
Montaigne. But Erasmus will not have it credited to him: it is Folly who
speaks. He purposely makes us tread the round of the _circulus
vitiosus_, as in the old saw: A Cretan said, all Cretans are liars.

Wisdom is to folly as reason is to passion. And there is much more
passion than reason in the world. That which keeps the world going, the
fount of life, is folly. For what else is love? Why do people marry, if
not out of folly, which sees no objections? All enjoyment and amusement
is only a condiment of folly. When a wise man wishes to become a father,
he has first to play the fool. For what is more foolish than the game of
procreation?

Unperceived the orator has incorporated here with folly all that is
vitality and the courage of life. Folly is spontaneous energy that no
one can do without. He who is perfectly sensible and serious cannot
live. The more people get away from me, Stultitia, the less they live.
Why do we kiss and cuddle little children, if not because they are still
so delightfully foolish. And what else makes youth so elegant?

Now look at the truly serious and sensible. They are awkward at
everything, at meal-time, at a dance, in playing, in social intercourse.
If they have to buy, or to contract, things are sure to go wrong.
Quintilian says that stage fright bespeaks the intelligent orator, who
knows his faults. Right! But does not, then, Quintilian confess openly
that wisdom is an impediment to good execution? And has not Stultitia
the right to claim prudence for herself, if the wise, out of shame, out
of bashfulness, undertake nothing in circumstances where fools pluckily
set to work?

Here Erasmus goes to the root of the matter in a psychological sense.
Indeed the consciousness of falling short in achievement is the brake
clogging action, is the great inertia retarding the progress of the
world. Did he know himself for one who is awkward when not bending over
his books, but confronting men and affairs?

Folly is gaiety and lightheartedness, indispensable to happiness. The
man of mere reason without passion is a stone image, blunt and without
any human feeling, a spectre or monster, from whom all fly, deaf to all
natural emotions, susceptible neither to love nor compassion. Nothing
escapes him, in nothing he errs; he sees through everything, he weighs
everything accurately, he forgives nothing, he is only satisfied with
himself; he alone is healthy; he alone is king, he alone is free. It is
the hideous figure of the doctrinaire which Erasmus is thinking of.
Which state, he exclaims, would desire such an absolutely wise man for a
magistrate?

He who devotes himself to tasting all the bitterness of life with wise
insight would forthwith deprive himself of life. Only folly is a remedy:
to err, to be mistaken, to be ignorant is to be human. How much better
it is in marriage to be blind to a wife's shortcomings than to make away
with oneself out of jealousy and to fill the world with tragedy!
Adulation is virtue. There is no cordial devotion without a little
adulation. It is the soul of eloquence, of medicine and poetry; it is
the honey and the sweetness of all human customs.

Again a series of valuable social qualities is slyly incorporated with
folly: benevolence, kindness, inclination to approve and to admire.

But especially to approve of oneself. There is no pleasing others
without beginning by flattering ourselves a little and approving of
ourselves. What would the world be if everyone was not proud of his
standing, his calling, so that no person would change places with
another in point of good appearance, of fancy, of good family, of landed
property?

Humbug is the right thing. Why should any one desire true erudition? The
more incompetent a man, the pleasanter his life is and the more he is
admired. Look at professors, poets, orators. Man's mind is so made that
he is more impressed by lies than by the truth. Go to church: if the
priest deals with serious subjects the whole congregation is dozing,
yawning, feeling bored. But when he begins to tell some cock-and-bull
story, they awake, sit up, and hang on his lips.

To be deceived, philosophers say, is a misfortune, but not to be
deceived is a superlative misfortune. If it is human to err, why should
a man be called unhappy because he errs, since he was so born and made,
and it is the fate of all? Do we pity a man because he cannot fly or
does not walk on four legs? We might as well call the horse unhappy
because it does not learn grammar or eat cakes. No creature is unhappy,
if it lives according to its nature. The sciences were invented to our
utmost destruction; far from conducing to our happiness, they are even
in its way, though for its sake they are supposed to have been invented.
By the agency of evil demons they have stolen into human life with the
other pests. For did not the simple-minded people of the Golden Age live
happily, unprovided with any science, only led by nature and instinct?
What did they want grammar for, when all spoke the same language? Why
have dialectics, when there were no quarrels and no differences of
opinion? Why jurisprudence, when there were no bad morals from which
good laws sprang? They were too religious to investigate with impious
curiosity the secrets of nature, the size, motions, influence of the
stars, the hidden cause of things.

It is the old idea, which germinated in antiquity, here lightly touched
upon by Erasmus, afterwards proclaimed by Rousseau in bitter earnest:
civilization is a plague.

Wisdom is misfortune, but self-conceit is happiness. Grammarians, who
wield the sceptre of wisdom--schoolmasters, that is--would be the most
wretched of all people if I, Folly, did not mitigate the discomforts of
their miserable calling by a sort of sweet frenzy. But what holds good
of schoolmasters, also holds good of poets, orators, authors. For them,
too, all happiness merely consists in vanity and delusion. The lawyers
are no better off and after them come the philosophers. Next there is a
numerous procession of clergy: divines, monks, bishops, cardinals,
popes, only interrupted by princes and courtiers.

In the chapters[12] which review these offices and callings, satire has
shifted its ground a little. Throughout the work two themes are
intertwined: that of salutary folly, which is true wisdom, and that of
deluded wisdom, which is pure folly. As they are both put into the mouth
of Folly, we should have to invert them both to get truth, if Folly ...
were not wisdom. Now it is clear that the first is the principal theme.
Erasmus starts from it; and he returns to it. Only in the middle, as he
reviews human accomplishments and dignities in their universal
foolishness, the second theme predominates and the book becomes an
ordinary satire on human folly, of which there are many though few are
so delicate. But in the other parts it is something far deeper.

Occasionally the satire runs somewhat off the line, when Stultitia
directly censures what Erasmus wishes to censure; for instance,
indulgences, silly belief in wonders, selfish worship of the saints; or
gamblers whom she, Folly, ought to praise; or the spirit of
systematizing and levelling, and the jealousy of the monks.

For contemporary readers the importance of the _Laus Stultitiae_ was, to
a great extent, in the direct satire. Its lasting value is in those
passages where we truly grant that folly is wisdom and the reverse.
Erasmus knows the aloofness of the ground of all things: all consistent
thinking out of the dogmas of faith leads to absurdity. Only look at the
theological quiddities of effete scholasticism. The apostles would not
have understood them: in the eyes of latter-day divines they would have
been fools. Holy Scripture itself sides with folly. 'The foolishness of
God is wiser than men,' says Saint Paul. 'But God hath chosen the
foolish things of the world.' 'It pleased God by the foolishness (of
preaching) to save them that believe.' Christ loved the simple-minded
and the ignorant: children, women, poor fishermen, nay, even such
animals as are farthest removed from vulpine cunning: the ass which he
wished to ride, the dove, the lamb, the sheep.

Here there is a great deal behind the seemingly light jest: 'Christian
religion seems in general to have some affinity with a certain sort of
folly'. Was it not thought the apostles were full of new wine? And did
not the judge say: 'Paul, thou art beside thyself'? When are we beside
ourselves? When the spirit breaks its fetters and tries to escape from
its prison and aspires to liberty. That is madness, but it is also
other-worldliness and the highest wisdom. True happiness is in
selflessness, in the furore of lovers, whom Plato calls happiest of all.
The more absolute love is, the greater and more rapturous is the frenzy.
Heavenly bliss itself is the greatest insanity; truly pious people enjoy
its shadow on earth already in their meditations.

Here Stultitia breaks off her discourse, apologizing in a few words in
case she may have been too petulant or talkative, and leaves the pulpit.
'So farewell, applaud, live happily, and drink, Moria's illustrious
initiates.'

It was an unrivalled feat of art even in these last chapters neither to
lose the light comical touch, nor to lapse into undisguised profanation.
It was only feasible by veritable dancing on the tight-rope of
sophistry. In the _Moria_ Erasmus is all the time hovering on the brink
of profound truths. But what a boon it was--still granted to those
times--to be able to treat of all this in a vein of pleasantry. For this
should be impressed upon our minds: that the _Moriae Encomium_ is a
true, gay jest. The laugh is more delicate, but no less hearty than
Rabelais's. 'Valete, plaudite, vivite, bibite.' 'All common people
abound to such a degree, and everywhere, in so many forms of folly that
a thousand Democrituses would be insufficient to laugh at them all (and
they would require another Democritus to laugh at them).'

How could one take the _Moria_ too seriously, when even More's _Utopia_,
which is a true companion-piece to it and makes such a grave impression
on us, is treated by its author and Erasmus as a mere jest? There is a
place where the _Laus_ seems to touch both More and Rabelais; the place
where Stultitia speaks of her father, Plutus, the god of wealth, at
whose beck all things are turned topsy-turvy, according to whose will
all human affairs are regulated--war and peace, government and counsel,
justice and treaties. He has begotten her on the nymph Youth, not a
senile, purblind Plutus, but a fresh god, warm with youth and nectar,
like another Gargantua.

The figure of Folly, of gigantic size, looms large in the period of the
Renaissance. She wears a fool's cap and bells. People laughed loudly and
with unconcern at all that was foolish, without discriminating between
species of folly. It is remarkable that even in the _Laus_, delicate as
it is, the author does not distinguish between the unwise or the silly,
between fools and lunatics. Holbein, illustrating Erasmus, knows but of
one representation of a fool: with a staff and ass's ears. Erasmus
speaks without clear transition, now of foolish persons and now of real
lunatics. They are happiest of all, he makes Stultitia say: they are not
frightened by spectres and apparitions; they are not tortured by the
fear of impending calamities; everywhere they bring mirth, jests, frolic
and laughter. Evidently he here means harmless imbeciles, who, indeed,
were often used as jesters. This identification of denseness and
insanity is kept up, however, like the confusion of the comic and the
simply ridiculous, and all this is well calculated to make us feel how
wide the gap has already become that separates us from Erasmus.

       *       *       *       *       *

In later years he always spoke slightingly of his _Moria_. He considered
it so unimportant, he says, as to be unworthy of publication, yet no
work of his had been received with such applause. It was a trifle and
not at all in keeping with his character. More had made him write it, as
if a camel were made to dance. But these disparaging utterances were not
without a secondary purpose. The _Moria_ had not brought him only
success and pleasure. The exceedingly susceptible age in which he lived
had taken the satire in very bad part, where it seemed to glance at
offices and orders, although in his preface he had tried to safeguard
himself from the reproach of irreverence. His airy play with the texts
of Holy Scripture had been too venturesome for many. His friend Martin
van Dorp upbraided him with having made a mock of eternal life. Erasmus
did what he could to convince evil-thinkers that the purpose of the
_Moria_ was no other than to exhort people to be virtuous. In affirming
this he did his work injustice: it was much more than that. But in 1515
he was no longer what he had been in 1509. Repeatedly he had been
obliged to defend his most witty work. Had he known that it would
offend, he might have kept it back, he writes in 1517 to an acquaintance
at Louvain. Even towards the end of his life, he warded off the
insinuations of Alberto Pio of Carpi in a lengthy expostulation.

Erasmus made no further ventures in the genre of the _Praise of Folly_.
One might consider the treatise _Lingua_, which he published in 1525, as
an attempt to make a companion-piece to the _Moria_. The book is called
_Of the Use and Abuse of the Tongue_. In the opening pages there is
something that reminds us of the style of the _Laus_, but it lacks all
the charm both of form and of thought.

Should one pity Erasmus because, of all his publications, collected in
ten folio volumes, only the _Praise of Folly_ has remained a really
popular book? It is, apart from the _Colloquies_, perhaps the only one
of his works that is still read for its own sake. The rest is now only
studied from a historical point of view, for the sake of becoming
acquainted with his person or his times. It seems to me that perfect
justice has been done in this case. The _Praise of Folly_ is his best
work. He wrote other books, more erudite, some more pious--some perhaps
of equal or greater influence on his time. But each has had its day.
_Moriae Encomium_ alone was to be immortal. For only when humour
illuminated that mind did it become truly profound. In the _Praise of
Folly_ Erasmus gave something that no one else could have given to the
world.

[Illustration: XI. The last page of the _Praise of Folly_, with
Holbein's drawing of Folly descending from the pulpit]

[Illustration: XII. THE PRINTING PRESS OF JOSSE BADIUS]

FOOTNOTES:

[11] That he conceived the work in the Alps follows from the fact that
he tells us explicitly that it happened while riding, whereas, after
passing through Switzerland, he travelled by boat. A. 1, IV 216.62.

[12] Erasmus did not divide the book into chapters. It was done by an
editor as late as 1765.




CHAPTER X

THIRD STAY IN ENGLAND

1509-14

    Third stay in England: 1509-14--No information about two years
    of Erasmus's life: 1509 summer, till 1511 spring--Poverty--
    Erasmus at Cambridge--Relations with Badius, the Paris
    publisher--A mistake profitable to Johannes Froben at Basle--
    Erasmus leaves England: 1514--_Julius Exclusus_--Epistle
    against war


From the moment when Erasmus, back from Italy in the early summer of
1509, is hidden from view in the house of More, to write the _Praise of
Folly_, until nearly two years later when he comes to view again on the
road to Paris to have the book printed by Gilles Gourmont, every trace
of his life has been obliterated. Of the letters which during that
period he wrote and received, not a single one has been preserved.
Perhaps it was the happiest time of his life, for it was partly spent
with his tried patron, Mountjoy, and also in the house of More in that
noble and witty circle which to Erasmus appeared ideal. That house was
also frequented by the friend whom Erasmus had made during his former
sojourn in England, and whose mind was perhaps more congenial to him
than any other, Andrew Ammonius. It is not improbable that during these
months he was able to work without interruption at the studies to which
he was irresistibly attracted, without cares as to the immediate future,
and not yet burdened by excessive renown, which afterwards was to cause
him as much trouble and loss as joy.

That future was still uncertain. As soon as he no longer enjoys More's
hospitality, the difficulties and complaints recommence. Continual
poverty, uncertainty and dependence were extraordinarily galling to a
mind requiring above all things liberty. At Paris he charged Badius with
a new, revised edition of the _Adagia_, though the Aldine might still be
had there at a moderate price. The _Laus_, which had just appeared at
Gourmont's, was reprinted at Strassburg as early as 1511, with a
courteous letter by Jacob Wimpfeling to Erasmus, but evidently without
his being consulted in the matter. By that time he was back in England,
had been laid up in London with a bad attack of the sweating sickness,
and thence had gone to Queens' College, Cambridge, where he had resided
before. From Cambridge he writes to Colet, 24 August 1511, in a vein of
comical despair. The journey from London had been disastrous: a lame
horse, no victuals for the road, rain and thunder. 'But I am almost
pleased at this, I see the track of Christian poverty.' A chance to make
some money he does not see; he will be obliged to spend everything he
can wrest from his Maecenases--he, born under a wrathful Mercury.

This may sound somewhat gloomier than it was meant, but a few weeks
later he writes again: 'Oh, this begging; you laugh at me, I know. But I
hate myself for it and am fully determined, either to obtain some
fortune, which will relieve me from cringing, or to imitate Diogenes
altogether.' This refers to a dedication of a translation of Basilius's
Commentaries on Isaiah to John Fisher, the Bishop of Rochester.

Colet, who had never known pecuniary cares himself, did not well
understand these sallies of Erasmus. He replies to them with delicate
irony and covert rebuke, which Erasmus, in his turn, pretends not to
understand. He was now 'in want in the midst of plenty', _simul et in
media copia et in summa inopia_. That is to say, he was engaged in
preparing for Badius's press the _De copia verborum ac rerum_, formerly
begun at Paris; it was dedicated to Colet. 'I ask you, who can be more
impudent or abject than I, who for such a long time already have been
openly begging in England?'

Writing to Ammonius he bitterly regrets having left Rome and Italy; how
prosperity had smiled upon him there! In the same way he would
afterwards lament that he had not permanently established himself in
England. If he had only embraced the opportunity! he thinks. Was not
Erasmus rather one of those people whom good fortune cannot help? He
remained in trouble and his tone grows more bitter. 'I am preparing some
bait against the 1st of January, though it is pretty sure to be in
vain,' he writes to Ammonius, referring to new translations of Lucian
and Plutarch.

At Cambridge Erasmus lectured on divinity and Greek, but it brought him
little success and still less profit. The long-wished-for prebend,
indeed, had at last been given him, in the form of the rectory of
Aldington, in Kent, to which Archbishop William Warham, his patron,
appointed him in 1512. Instead of residing he was allowed to draw a
pension of twenty pounds a year. The archbishop affirms explicitly that,
contrary to his custom, he had granted this favour to Erasmus, because
he, 'a light of learning in Latin and Greek literature, had, out of love
for England, disdained to live in Italy, France, or Germany, in order to
pass the rest of his life here, with his friends'. We see how nations
already begin to vie with each other for the honour of sheltering
Erasmus.

Relief from all cares the post did not bring. Intercourse and
correspondence with Colet was a little soured under the light veil of
jests and kindness by his constant need of money. Seeking new resources
by undertaking new labours, or preparing new editions of his old books,
remained a hard necessity for Erasmus. The great works upon which he had
set his heart, and to which he had given all his energies at Cambridge,
held out no promise of immediate profit. His serious theological labours
ranked above all others; and in these hard years, he devoted his best
strength to preparation for the great edition of Jerome's works and
emendation of the text of the New Testament, a task inspired, encouraged
and promoted by Colet.

For his living other books had to serve. He had a sufficient number now,
and the printers were eager enough about them, though the profit which
the author made by them was not large. After leaving Aldus at Venice,
Erasmus had returned to the publisher who had printed for him as early
as 1505--Josse Badius, of Brabant, who, at Paris, had established the
Ascensian Press (called after his native place, Assche) and who, a
scholar himself, rivalled Aldus in point of the accuracy of his editions
of the classics. At the time when Erasmus took the _Moria_ to Gourmont,
at Paris, he had charged Badius with a new edition, still to be revised,
of the _Adagia_. Why the _Moria_ was published by another, we cannot
tell; perhaps Badius did not like it at first. From the _Adagia_ he
promised himself the more profit, but that was a long work, the
alterations and preface of which he was still waiting for Erasmus to
send. He felt very sure of his ground, for everyone knew that he,
Badius, was preparing the new edition. Yet a rumour reached him that in
Germany the Aldine edition was being reprinted. So there was some hurry
to finish it, he wrote to Erasmus in May 1512.

Badius, meanwhile, had much more work of Erasmus in hand, or on
approval: the _Copia_, which, shortly afterwards, was published by him;
the _Moria_, of which, at the same time, a new edition, the fifth,
already had appeared; the dialogues by Lucian; the Euripides and Seneca
translations, which were to follow. He hoped to add Jerome's letters to
these. For the _Adagia_ they had agreed upon a copy-fee of fifteen
guilders; for Jerome's letters Badius was willing to give the same sum
and as much again for the rest of the consignment. 'Ah, you will say,
what a very small sum! I own that by no remuneration could your genius,
industry, knowledge and labour be requited, but the gods will requite
you and your own virtue will be the finest reward. You have already
deserved exceedingly well of Greek and Roman literature; you will in
this same way deserve well of sacred and divine, and you will help your
little Badius, who has a numerous family and no earnings besides his
daily trade.'

Erasmus must have smiled ruefully on receiving Badius's letter. But he
accepted the proposal readily. He promised to prepare everything for the
press and, on 5 January 1513, he finished, in London, the preface to the
revised _Adagia_, for which Badius was waiting. But then something
happened. An agent who acted as a mediator with authors for several
publishers in Germany and France, one Francis Berckman, of Cologne, took
the revised copy of the _Adagia_ with the preface entrusted to him by
Erasmus to hand over to Badius, not to Paris, but to Basle, to Johannes
Froben, who had just, without Erasmus's leave, reprinted the Venetian
edition! Erasmus pretended to be indignant at this mistake or perfidy,
but it is only too clear that he did not regret it. Six months later he
betook himself with bag and baggage to Basle, to enter with that same
Froben into those most cordial relations by which their names are
united. Beatus Rhenanus, afterwards, made no secret of the fact that a
connection with the house of Froben, then still called Amerbach and
Froben, had seemed attractive to Erasmus ever since he had heard of the
_Adagia_ being reprinted.

Without conclusive proofs of his complicity, we do not like to accuse
Erasmus of perfidy towards Badius, though his attitude is curious, to
say the least. But we do want to commemorate the dignified tone in which
Badius, who held strict notions, as those times went, about copyright,
replied, when Berckman afterwards had come to offer him a sort of
explanation of the case. He declares himself satisfied, though Erasmus
had, since that time, caused him losses in more ways, amongst others by
printing a new edition of the _Copia_ at Strassburg. 'If, however, it is
agreeable to your interests and honour, I shall suffer it, and that with
equanimity.' Their relations were not broken off. In all this we should
not lose sight of the fact that publishing at that time was yet a quite
new commercial phenomenon and that new commercial forms and relations of
trade are wont to be characterized by uncertainty, confusion and lack of
established business morals.

The stay at Cambridge gradually became irksome to Erasmus. 'For some
months already', he writes to Ammonius in November 1513, 'we have been
leading a true snail's life, staying at home and plodding. It is very
lonely here; most people have gone for fear of the plague, but even when
they are all here, it is lonely.' The cost of sustenance is unbearable
and he makes no money at all. If he does not succeed, that winter, in
making a nest for himself, he is resolved to fly away, he does not know
where. 'If to no other end, to die elsewhere.'

Added to the stress of circumstances, the plague, reappearing again and
again, and attacks of his kidney-trouble, there came the state of war,
which depressed and alarmed Erasmus. In the spring of 1513 the English
raid on France, long prepared, took place. In co-operation with
Maximilian's army the English had beaten the French near Guinegate and
compelled Therouanne to surrender, and afterwards Tournay. Meanwhile the
Scotch invaded England, to be decisively beaten near Flodden. Their
king, James IV, perished together with his natural son, Erasmus's pupil
and travelling companion in Italy, Alexander, Archbishop of Saint
Andrews.

Crowned with martial fame, Henry VIII returned in November to meet his
parliament. Erasmus did not share the universal joy and enthusiastic
admiration. 'We are circumscribed here by the plague, threatened by
robbers; we drink wine of the worst (because there is no import from
France), but, _io triumphe!_ we are the conquerors of the world!'

His deep aversion to the clamour of war, and all it represented,
stimulated Erasmus's satirical faculties. It is true that he flattered
the English national pride by an epigram on the rout of the French near
Guinegate, but soon he went deeper. He remembered how war had impeded
his movements in Italy; how the entry of the pope-conqueror, Julius II,
into Bologna had outraged his feelings. 'The high priest Julius wages
war, conquers, triumphs and truly plays the part of Julius (Caesar)' he
had written then. Pope Julius, he thought, had been the cause of all the
wars spreading more and more over Europe. Now the Pope had died in the
beginning of the year 1513.

And in the deepest secrecy, between his work on the New Testament and
Jerome, Erasmus took revenge on the martial Pope, for the misery of the
times, by writing the masterly satire, entitled _Julius exclusus_, in
which the Pope appears in all his glory before the gate of the Heavenly
Paradise to plead his cause and find himself excluded. The theme was not
new to him; for had he not made something similar in the witty Cain
fable, by which, at one time, he had cheered a dinner-party at Oxford?
But that was an innocent jest to which his pious fellow-guests had
listened with pleasure. To the satire about the defunct Pope many would,
no doubt, also gladly listen, but Erasmus had to be careful about it.
The folly of all the world might be ridiculed, but not the worldly
propensities of the recently deceased Pope. Therefore, though he helped
in circulating copies of the manuscript, Erasmus did his utmost, for the
rest of his life, to preserve its anonymity, and when it was universally
known and had appeared in print, and he was presumed to be the author,
he always cautiously denied the fact; although he was careful to use
such terms as to avoid a formal denial. The first edition of the
_Julius_ was published at Basle, not by Froben, Erasmus's ordinary
publisher, but by Cratander, probably in the year 1518.

Erasmus's need of protesting against warfare had not been satisfied by
writing the _Julius_. In March 1514, no longer at Cambridge, but in
London, he wrote a letter to his former patron, the Abbot of Saint
Bertin, Anthony of Bergen, in which he enlarges upon the folly of waging
war. Would that a Christian peace were concluded between Christian
princes! Perhaps the abbot might contribute to that consummation through
his influence with the youthful Charles V and especially with his
grandfather Maximilian. Erasmus states quite frankly that the war has
suddenly changed the spirit of England. He would like to return to his
native country if the prince would procure him the means to live there
in peace. It is a remarkable fact and of true Erasmian naivete that he
cannot help mixing up his personal interests with his sincere
indignation at the atrocities disgracing a man and a Christian. 'The war
has suddenly altered the spirit of this island. The cost of living rises
every day and generosity decreases. Through lack of wine I nearly
perished by gravel, contracted by taking bad stuff. We are confined in
this island, more than ever, so that even letters are not carried
abroad.'

This was the first of Erasmus's anti-war writings. He expanded it into
the adage _Dulce bellum inexpertis_, which was inserted into the
_Adagia_ edition of 1515, published by Froben and afterwards also
printed separately. Hereafter we shall follow up this line of Erasmus's
ideas as a whole.

Though the summer of 1514 was to bring peace between England and France,
Erasmus had now definitely made up his mind to leave England. He sent
his trunks to Antwerp, to his friend Peter Gilles and prepared to go to
the Netherlands, after a short visit to Mountjoy at the castle of Hammes
near Calais. Shortly before his departure from London he had a curious
interview with a papal diplomat, working in the cause of peace, Count
Canossa, at Ammonius's house on the Thames. Ammonius passed him off on
Erasmus as a merchant. After the meal the Italian sounded him as to a
possible return to Rome, where he might be the first in place instead of
living alone among a barbarous nation. Erasmus replied that he lived in
a land that contained the greatest number of excellent scholars, among
whom he would be content with the humblest place. This compliment was
his farewell to England, which had favoured him so. Some days later, in
the first half of July 1514, he was on the other side of the Channel. On
three more occasions he paid short visits to England, but he lived there
no more.

[Illustration: XIII. JOHANNES FROBEN, 1522-3

Reproduced by gracious permission of H.M. The Queen]

[Illustration: XIV. THE PRINTER'S EMBLEM OF JOHANNES FROBEN]




CHAPTER XI

A LIGHT OF THEOLOGY

1514-16

    On the way to success and satisfaction--His Prior calls him back
    to Steyn--He refuses to comply--First journey to Basle:
    1514-16--Cordial welcome in Germany--Johannes Froben--Editions
    of Jerome and the New Testament--A Councillor to Prince Charles:
    _Institutio Principis Christiani_, 1515--Definitive dispensation
    from Monastic Vows: 1517--Fame--Erasmus as a spiritual
    centre--His correspondence--Letter-writing as an art--Its
    dangers--A glorious age at hand


Erasmus had, as was usual with him, enveloped his departure from England
with mystery. It was given out that he was going to Rome to redeem a
pledge. Probably he had already determined to try his fortune in the
Netherlands; not in Holland, but in the neighbourhood of the princely
court in Brabant. The chief object of his journey, however, was to visit
Froben's printing-office at Basle, personally to supervise the
publication of the numerous works, old and new, which he brought with
him, among them the material for his chosen task, the New Testament and
Jerome, by which he hoped to effect the restoration of theology, which
he had long felt to be his life-work. It is easy thus to imagine his
anxiety when during the crossing he discovered that his hand-bag,
containing the manuscripts, was found to have been taken on board
another ship. He felt bereft, having lost the labour of so many years; a
sorrow so great, he writes, as only parents can feel at the loss of
their children.

To his joy, however, he found his manuscripts safe on the other side. At
the castle of Hammes near Calais, he stayed for some days, the guest of
Mountjoy. There, on 7 July, a letter found him, written on 18 April by
his superior, the prior of Steyn, his old friend Servatius Rogerus,
recalling him to the monastery after so many years of absence. The
letter had already been in the hands of more than one prying person,
before it reached him by mere chance.

It was a terrific blow, which struck him in the midst of his course to
his highest aspirations. Erasmus took counsel for a day and then sent a
refusal. To his old friend, in addressing whom he always found the most
serious accents of his being, he wrote a letter which he meant to be a
justification and which was self-contemplation, much deeper and more
sincere than the one which, at a momentous turning-point of his life,
had drawn from him his _Carmen Alpestre_.

He calls upon God to be his witness that he would follow the purest
inspiration of his life. But to return to the monastery! He reminds
Servatius of the circumstances under which he entered it, as they lived
in his memory: the pressure of his relations, his false modesty. He
points out to him how ill monastic life had suited his constitution, how
it outraged his love of freedom, how detrimental it would be to his
delicate health, if now resumed. Had he, then, lived a worse life in the
world? Literature had kept him from many vices. His restless life could
not redound to his dishonour, though only with diffidence did he dare to
appeal to the examples of Solon, Pythagoras, St. Paul and his favourite
Jerome. Had he not everywhere won recognition from friends and patrons?
He enumerates them: cardinals, archbishops, bishops, Mountjoy, the
Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and, lastly, John Colet. Was
there, then, any objection to his works: the _Enchiridion_, the
_Adagia_? (He did not mention the _Moria_.) The best was still to
follow: Jerome and the New Testament. The fact that, since his stay in
Italy, he had laid aside the habit of his order and wore a common
clerical dress, he could excuse on a number of grounds.

The conclusion was: I shall not return to Holland. 'I know that I shall
not be able to stand the air and the food there; all eyes will be
directed to me. I shall return to the country, an old and grey man, who
left it as a youth; I shall return a valetudinarian; I shall be exposed
to the contempt even of the lowest, I, who am accustomed to be honoured
even by the greatest.' 'It is not possible', he concludes, 'to speak out
frankly in a letter. I am now going to Basle and thence to Rome,
perhaps, but on my return I shall try to visit you ... I have heard of
the deaths of William, Francis and Andrew (his old Dutch friends).
Remember me to Master Henry and the others who live with you; I am
disposed towards them as befits me. For those old tragedies I ascribe to
my errors, or if you like to my fate. Do not omit to commend me to
Christ in your prayers. If I knew for sure that it would be pleasing to
Him that I should return to live with you, I should prepare for the
journey this very day. Farewell, my former sweetest companion, now my
venerable father.'

Underlying the immediate motives of his high theological aspirations,
this refusal was doubtless actuated by his ancient, inveterate,
psychological incentives of disgust and shame.[13]

       *       *       *       *       *

Through the southern Netherlands, where he visited several friends and
patrons and renewed his acquaintance with the University of Louvain,
Erasmus turned to the Rhine and reached Basle in the second half of
August 1514. There such pleasures of fame awaited him as he had never
yet tasted. The German humanists hailed him as the light of the
world--in letters, receptions and banquets. They were more solemn and
enthusiastic than Erasmus had found the scholars of France, England and
Italy, to say nothing of his compatriots; and they applauded him
emphatically as being a German himself and an ornament of Germany. At
his first meeting with Froben, Erasmus permitted himself the pleasure of
a jocular deception: he pretended to be a friend and agent of himself,
to enjoy to the full the joy of being recognized. The German environment
was rather to his mind: '_My_ Germany, which to my regret and shame I
got to know so late'.

Soon the work for which he had come was in full swing. He was in his
element once more, as he had been at Venice six years before: working
hard in a large printing-office, surrounded by scholars, who heaped upon
him homage and kindness in those rare moments of leisure which he
permitted himself. 'I move in a most agreeable Museon: so many men of
learning, and of such exceptional learning!'

Some translations of the lesser works of Plutarch were published by
Froben in August. The _Adagia_ was passing through the press again with
corrections and additions, and the preface which was originally destined
for Badius. At the same time Dirck Maertensz, at Louvain, was also at
work for Erasmus, who had, on passing through the town, entrusted him
with a collection of easy Latin texts; also M. Schuerer at Strassburg,
who prepared the _Parabolae sive similia_ for him. For Froben, too,
Erasmus was engaged on a Seneca, which appeared in 1515, together with a
work on Latin construction. But Jerome and the New Testament remained
his chief occupation.

Jerome's works had been Erasmus's love in early youth, especially his
letters. The plan of preparing a correct edition of the great Father of
the Church was conceived in 1500, if not earlier, and he had worked at
it ever since, at intervals. In 1513 he writes to Ammonius: 'My
enthusiasm for emending and annotating Jerome is such that I feel as
though inspired by some god. I have almost completely emended him
already by collating many old manuscripts. And this I do at incredibly
great expense.' In 1512 he negotiated with Badius about an edition of
the letters. Froben's partner, Johannes Amerbach, who died before
Erasmus's arrival, had been engaged for years on an edition of Jerome.
Several scholars, Reuchlin among others, had assisted in the undertaking
when Erasmus offered himself and all his material. He became the actual
editor. Of the nine volumes, in which Froben published the work in 1516,
the first four contained Erasmus's edition of Jerome's letters; the
others had been corrected by him and provided with forewords.

His work upon the New Testament was, if possible, still nearer his
heart. By its growth it had gradually changed its nature. Since the time
when Valla's _Annotationes_ had directed his attention to textual
criticism of the Vulgate, Erasmus had, probably during his second stay
in England from 1505 to 1506, at the instance of Colet, made a new
translation of the New Testament from the Greek original, which
translation differed greatly from the Vulgate. Besides Colet, few had
seen it. Later, Erasmus understood it was necessary to publish also a
new edition of the Greek text, with his notes. As to this he had made a
provisional arrangement with Froben, shortly after his arrival at Basle.
Afterwards he considered that it would be better to have it printed in
Italy, and was on the point of going there when, possibly persuaded by
new offers from Froben, he suddenly changed his plan of travel and in
the spring of 1515 made a short trip to England--probably, among other
reasons, for the purpose of securing a copy of his translation of the
New Testament, which he had left behind there. In the summer he was back
at Basle and resumed the work in Froben's printing-office. In the
beginning of 1516 the _Novum Instrumentum_ appeared, containing the
purified Greek text with notes, together with a Latin translation in
which Erasmus had altered too great deviations from the Vulgate.

From the moment of the appearance of two such important and, as regards
the second, such daring theological works by Erasmus as Jerome and the
New Testament, we may say that he had made himself the centre of the
scientific study of divinity, as he was at the same time the centre and
touchstone of classic erudition and literary taste. His authority
constantly increased in all countries, his correspondence was
prodigiously augmented.

But while his mental growth was accomplished, his financial position was
not assured. The years 1515 to 1517 are among the most restless of his
life; he is still looking out for every chance which presents itself, a
canonry at Tournay, a prebend in England, a bishopric in Sicily, always
half jocularly regretting the good chances he missed in former times,
jesting about his pursuit of fortune, lamenting about his 'spouse,
execrable poverty, which even yet I have not succeeded in shaking off my
shoulders'. And, after all, ever more the victim of his own restlessness
than of the disfavour of fate. He is now fifty years old and still he
is, as he says, 'sowing without knowing what I shall reap'. This,
however, only refers to his career, not to his life-work.

In the course of 1515 a new and promising patron, John le Sauvage,
Chancellor of Brabant, had succeeded in procuring for him the title of
councillor of the prince, the youthful Charles V. In the beginning of
1516 he was nominated: it was a mere title of honour, promising a yearly
pension of 200 florins, which, however, was paid but irregularly. To
habilitate himself as a councillor of the prince, Erasmus wrote the
_Institutio Principis Christiani_, a treatise about the education of a
prince, which in accordance with Erasmus's nature and inclination deals
rather with moral than with political matters, and is in striking
contrast with that other work, written some years earlier, _il Principe_
by Machiavelli.

When his work at Basle ceased for the time being, in the spring of 1516,
Erasmus journeyed to the Netherlands. At Brussels he met the chancellor,
who, in addition to the prince's pension, procured him a prebend at
Courtray, which, like the English benefice mentioned above, was
compounded for by money payments. At Antwerp lived one of the great
friends who helped in his support all his life: Peter Gilles, the young
town clerk, in whose house he stayed as often as he came to Antwerp.
Peter Gilles is the man who figures in More's _Utopia_ as the person in
whose garden the sailor tells his experiences; it was in these days that
Gilles helped Dirck Maertensz, at Louvain, to pass the first edition of
the _Utopia_ through the press. Later Quentin Metsys was to paint him
and Erasmus, joined in a diptych; a present for Thomas More and for us a
vivid memorial of one of the best things Erasmus ever knew: this triple
friendship.

In the summer of 1516 Erasmus made another short trip to England. He
stayed with More, saw Colet again, also Warham, Fisher, and the other
friends. But it was not to visit old friends that he went there. A
pressing and delicate matter impelled him. Now that prebends and church
dignities began to be presented to him, it was more urgent than ever
that the impediments in the way of a free ecclesiastical career should
be permanently obviated. He was provided with a dispensation of Pope
Julius II, authorizing him to accept English prebends, and another
exempting him from the obligation of wearing the habit of his order. But
both were of limited scope, and insufficient. The fervent impatience
with which he conducted this matter of his definite discharge from the
order makes it probable that, as Dr. Allen presumes, the threat

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