After dinner Erasmus, Augustine, and myself took a stroll in the very place among the vineyards where, as Erasmus told us, he had more than once sauntered with you, drunk with sweet words, while he recalled you by his eloquent exhortations from sordid cares and ravished your whole soul with love of letters. Do you recognize the spot? There Erasmus fed us with lettered speech, more delicate fare than the supper we had eaten. . . . It seems to me that now by the blessing of the saints, the supreme good has fallen to me, for what could I pray for more than a learned and friendly teacher, and now I have the most learned and kindest of all; I mean Erasmus whom I so long sought in vain. Now I have him and possess him all to myself and delight in him day and night. What do you say? I hold Helicon itself within my chamber walls. What is it to live among the choir of Muses if this is not to do so? When writers, scholars, and artists were dependent on a patron for their living, there was danger that they would be tempted to flatter this individual; just as, now that they are dependent on the reading public, it is probable that they are induced to flatter the prejudices of that patron. Neither form of writing for a living is more objectionable than the other; if flattery is used it is disgraceful not from the object on which it is spent, but from the prostitution that it implies of noble talents to a base end. As it was the general custom four hundred years ago for literary men to receive pensions from the great, the fact that Erasmus received, and even solicited, such favors, calls for no apology. It must be confessed, however, that he occasionally, though rarely, carried his importunity beyond the bounds of decency. This is most notable in his relations with Anne of Veere, a daughter of one of the greatest nobles in Holland and widow of Philip the Bastard of Burgundy.1 She had engaged one of Erasmus's friends to tutor her son Adolph and, doubtless at his invitation, Erasmus visited her at her castle of Tournehem, between Calais and St. Omer. Here he got to know Adolph, and probably 1 On Anne of Veere, see M. P. Roosenboom: The Scottish Staple in the Netherlands, 1910, pp. 32 and xliii. put in his Colloquy, "The Shipwreck," a record of some personal experience of the young man. The kindness and courtesy of the great lady aroused hopes of securing from her money for a projected journey to Italy. For the next few years the young Dutchman addressed to her and to his friend Batt, the tutor of her son, appeals of the most pressing nature. For example, December 12, 1500, he wrote to the latter:2 Point out to my lady how much more credit I shall do her by my learning than the other divines whom she maintains. They preach ordinary sermons; I write what will live forever; they, with their silly rubbish, are heard in one or two churches; my books will be read by all who know Latin and Greek in every country in the world; such unlearned divines abound everywhere, men like me are scarcely found in many centuries. Repeat all this to her unless you are too superstitious to tell a few fibs for a friend. Undiscouraged by the cool reception of this promise of immortality, Erasmus wrote and dedicated to the young Prince Adolph an Exhortation to Embrace Virtue, where, under the pretext of placing before his eyes images of perfection, the author heaped upon the little lord, upon his mother, and upon his tutor, the most fulsome flattery. Failing to realize from this also, in proportion to his hopes, the irrepressible suitor made a supreme effort and addressed his hoped-for patroness directly in an epistle comparing her with two other Annas, the mother of Samuel and the sister of Dido, and predicting for her also a like eternity of glory. He capped the climax of this ungracious proceeding by writing at the same time to Batt that he had never penned anything with so much repugnance as this parasitic flattery, and by heartily abusing Anne of Veere behind her back.3 CHAPTER II THE REVIVAL OF ANTIQUITY: THE CLASSICS AND THE THERE GOSPEL HERE was nothing precocious about the genius of Erasmus. When he was thirty he had produced hardly anything. Had he died at the age of forty he would scarce be remembered now. The prodigious success of his Folly, of his New Testament, of his Paraphrases, of his Colloquies, of his Epistles, not only raised his fame among his contemporaries and posterity, but cast a reflex luster on his earlier works. In these, however, his deepest interest, the restoration of antiquity both classic and Christian, had already found expression. And even these early works met with a hearty reception from contemporaries to whom these interests were vital. For it was just because Erasmus so perfectly expressed the spirit of his time that he gradually won the international reputation that all but made him arbiter of the great questions which arose with the Reformation and cried for authoritative judgment. Erasmus came at the acme of the Renaissance, when humanism had gathered its full force and reached its maturity, but before it had begun to wither in the fierce heats of confessional controversy and the drought of too academic, too remote, too fastidiously exclusive an interest. In his last years he was to see and to attack the absurdities of a classicism become a mania, an obsession for the antique, a haughty assertion of superiority to the rest of the world. But in his prime he saw and shared the glow of enthusiasm for the full revival of Greek and Latin letters. He also had the genius to combine into one stream the two contending currents of pagan and of Christian antiquity. For him the Gospel was the "philosophy of Christ," and the philosophy of the Greeks a natural gospel. When he read Cicero he reflected: "A heathen wrote this to heathen, and yet his moral principles have justice, sanctity, sincerity, truth, fidelity to nature; nothing false or careless is in them." "When I read certain passages of these great men," he confessed again, "I can hardly refrain from saying, 'St. Socrates, pray for me."" Erasmus's great success in Christianizing the Renaissance was due partly to the narrowness of his > interests. There were sides of life cultivated by his generation with enthusiasm and consummate ability, which hardly came into his purview at all. The most glorious artists of the whole world-Leonardo and Titian, Michelangelo and Raphael, San Gallo and Bramante-were his contemporaries, and he had opportunity to see their works, but not once, I believe, does he mention any of them in his pages. With Matsys, Dürer, and Holbein he came into personal contact, but hardly noticed their art. Again, a new world was discovered during his lifetime. In his youth Columbus found America and Vasco da Gama broke the path around the Cape of Good Hope to India; in his manhood Cortez and Pizarro and Balboa and De Soto enacted romances of discovery and conquest that would be thought too wonderful for fiction, and Magellan put a girdle around the earth. These triumphs fired the imagination of contemporaries, of More and Camoens, of Ariosto and Rabelais; the tales of Amerigo Vespucci were sought and eagerly read by Beatus Rhenanus3 and Eck and Vadian; but Erasmus, though he met 1 Preface to Cicero's De Officiis, September 10, 1519. Allen, ep. 1013. There is extant a copy of Waldseemüller's Cosmography with the name of Beatus Rhenanus written in. See the facsimile by Wieser, 1907. Allen: Age of Erasmus, p. 92. And see Eck's edition of Aristotle in the Cornell library. the son of Columbus in 1520, hardly let an allusion to the New World pass his pen. Then, again, he had no interest in science. While Leonardo was experimenting in anatomy and physics and accumulating facts about geology and astronomy, while Copernicus1 was working out the most momentous discovery that has ever dawned upon the human mind, while Vives, who was well known to Erasmus, was stating that men should no longer rely on authority but should look at nature for themselves, the attitude of Erasmus was intensely conservative. Like Socrates, he not only did not care for natural science, he actively disliked it as leading men's thoughts away from the more important problems of moral philosophy." Nor did he have attention to spare for beautiful scenery, nor for the common life of men as seen in their cities and country homes. He visited many parts of England, of France, of Italy, of Germany, of Switzerland, and of the Netherlands, but in all his works there are but one or two notable descriptions of town or country. How much he might have told us of Paris and London, of Venice and Rome and Naples, of the Swiss passes, and of the Rhine! But, after all, to point out these limitations is only to say that Erasmus was Erasmus and not somebody else. The very concentration of his mental life was doubtless one cause of the consummate mastery he displayed in his chosen field. As a scholar, as a stylist, as a thoughtful and popular writer on religion and education, he has had few equals. His work centers around a few ideas, the principal ones expressed in phrases that recur over and over again in all his writings, 1 Copernicus was in Italy just before Erasmus was there, and he knew one of Erasmus's friends, Celio Calcagnini, who, under his influence, wrote, about 1520, a treatise Quod cælum stet, terra moveatur. Copernicus did not publish his own great work until 1543, but he had arrived at his conclusions long before, and they were talked of in the learned world. On Calcagnini, Allen, iii, p. 26. A. Bonilla y San Martin: Luis Vives y la filosofia del renacimiento, 1903. Erasmus to Carondilet, January 5, 1522, LB. ep. 613. |