Part 2

It is interesting to think of him--now a man of forty-four, but prematurely old in appearance--moving about the narrow streets or quiet courts of that medieval Cambridge which was just about to become the modern--a transformation due, in no small measure, to the influence of his own labours. Eleven of our Colleges existed. Peterhouse was in the third century of its life; others also were of a venerable age. Erasmus would have heard the rumour that a house of his own order, the Hospital of the Brethren of St John, was about to be merged in a new and more splendid foundation, the College of St John the Evangelist. Where Trinity College now stands, he would have seen the separate institutions which, after another generation, were to be united by Henry VIII.; he would have seen a hostel of the Benedictines where Magdalene College was soon to arise; the Franciscans on the site of Sidney Sussex, and the Dominicans on the site of Emmanuel. North of Queens' College, he would have found the convent of the Carmelites; and then, rising in lonely majesty--with no other College buildings as yet on its south side--the chapel of King's, completed as to the walls, but not yet roofed.

When Erasmus began his Greek lectures in his rooms at Queens', his text-book was the elementary grammar of Manuel Chrysoloras, entitled the 'Questions',--which had been the standard book all through the fifteenth century. He next took up the larger and more advanced grammar of Theodorus Gaza, published in 1495,--which he afterwards translated into Latin. We have a specimen of his own Greek composition at this period. In 1511 he went from Cambridge to visit the celebrated shrine of the Virgin at Walsingham in Norfolk--the same where, two years later, Queen Catherine gave thanks after the battle of Flodden. As a votive offering, he hung up on the wall a short set of Greek iambics, which are extant: they are to the effect that, while others bring rich gifts and crave worldly blessings, he asks only for a pure heart. There are some faults of metre, but the diction is classical and idiomatic: probably no one in Europe at that time, unless it were Budaeus, could have written better. When Erasmus revisited Walsingham a little later, he found that these verses had sorely puzzled the monks and their friends; there had been much wiping of eye-glasses; and opinions differed as to whether the characters were Arabic, or purely arbitrary. Erasmus did not get many hearers for his Greek lectures, and was rather disappointed; but some, at least, of his pupils were ardent; thus he describes Henry Bullock of Queens'--the 'Bovillus' of his letters--as 'working hard at Greek.' And the impulse which he gave can be judged from the rapid progress of the new learning at Cambridge. Writing to him in 1516--three years after he had left--Bullock says, 'people here are devoting themselves eagerly to Greek literature.' In a letter to Everard, the Stadtholder of Holland, in 1520, Erasmus says:--'Theology is flourishing at Paris and at Cambridge as nowhere else: and why? Because they are adapting themselves to the tendencies of the age; because the new studies, which are ready, if need be, to storm an entrance, are not repelled by them as foes, but received as welcome guests.' In another letter he remarks that, while Greek studies have been instituted in both the English Universities, at Cambridge they are pursued peacefully (_tranquille_),--owing, he says, to Fisher's influence. He is alluding to those struggles at Oxford between the adherents of the schoolmen and the new learning which came to a head in the 'Trojan' and 'Grecian' riots of 1519, and led to Wolsey's founding the readership of Greek. Oxford had been, in England, the great theological University of the middle ages, and the scholastic system died hardest there.

Erasmus taught Greek without any formal appointment, so far as we know, from the University; though Fisher, the Chancellor, may have arranged that he should receive a stipend. The first man formally appointed Greek reader was Richard Croke in 1519; who speaks, indeed, of Erasmus as having been 'professor of Greek,' but probably means simply lecturer. The official status of Erasmus was that of Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity. The election to the Chair was then biennial. At the end of his term--_i.e._, in the summer of 1513--Erasmus was re-elected. This is a noteworthy fact. The electing body comprised the whole Faculty of Theology, regulars as well as seculars. The 'Praise of Folly' must by that time have been well-known here. If Erasmus was not universally acceptable to the schoolmen or to the monks of Cambridge, at any rate the general respect for his character and attainments carried the day.

When we try to imagine him in his rooms at Queens', we are not to picture him as a popular teacher, with the youth of the university crowding to learn from him; his life here was that of a recluse student, in weak health, whose surroundings were in some respects uncongenial to him, but who had a group of devoted pupils, and some chosen older friends. From 1508 to the end of his life he suffered from a painful organic disease, which obliged him to be careful of his diet. When he dined in the old College hall at Queens', above the west cloister--now part of the President's Lodge--the ghosts of the College benefactors, whose heads are carved on the oak wainscoting, would have been grieved if they could have known what he thought of Cambridge beverages; he writes to his Italian friend Ammonius--afterwards Latin Secretary to Henry VIII.--begging for a cask of Greek wine. His favourite exercise was riding; and he made frequent excursions. Meanwhile he accomplished a surprising amount of work. He was busy with the text of Seneca, with translations from Basil, with Latin manuals for St Paul's School, just founded by his friend Colet--and with much else. It was here that he began revising the text of Jerome's works. 'My mind is in such a glow over Jerome,' he writes, 'that I could fancy myself actually inspired.' But there is one labour above all that entitles those rooms in the old tower at Queens' to be reckoned among the sacred places of literature. It was there in 1512 that the Lady Margaret Professor completed a collation of the Greek Text of the New Testament. Four years later, his edition--the first ever published--appeared at Basle.

In 1513 Cambridge was visited by the plague, and nearly every one fled from it. During some months of the autumn, Erasmus had scarcely heard a foot-fall in the cloister beneath his rooms. At the end of the year, he finally left the University. Some of his reasons for going can be conjectured from his letters. They express disappointment with England; and they speak of poverty. It is well to observe the sense in which these complaints are to be understood. After 1510 Erasmus was never actually indigent. Archbishop Warham had offered him the Rectory of Aldington in Kent; Erasmus declined it, because he could not speak English--he never learned any modern language, and besides his own vernacular, spoke Latin only: then Warham gave him a pension from the benefice. Fisher and Mountjoy were also liberal. At Cambridge, with these resources, and the stipend of his Chair, it has been computed that his income must have been equivalent to about £700 at the present day. But his mode of living, though not profuse, was not frugal. Thus he himself enumerates the following heads of his expenditure;--servants ('_famulorum_')--the aid of amanuenses--the cost of keeping a horse, or horses (ιπποτροφἱá)--frequent journeys--and social or charitable obligations: he disliked, he says, to be penurious ('_hic animus abhorrens a sordibus_'). The fact seems to be that he had formed exaggerated hopes of what Henry VIII. would do for him. His immediate motive for departure, however, was probably the desire to supervise the printing of the Greek Testament. There was then no English press where such a work could be done so well as abroad. He had heard that Froben, the famous printer at Basle, was about to publish the works of Jerome; and to Basle he went. Another circumstance helped to decide him. Prince Charles,--afterwards the Emperor Charles V.,--had offered him the post of honorary privy-councillor, with a pension,--and this without binding him to live in the Netherlands. At this time Erasmus would have been welcomed in any country of Europe; Cardinal Canossa, the Papal legate, was anxious to secure him for Rome. At a later period, when his fame stood yet higher, Henry VIII. would have been glad to lure him back; but it was then too late.

So, in 1514, Erasmus left England--not to return, except for a few months in the following year. He was now forty-seven. Twenty-two years of life remained to him. The history of these years is essentially that of his untiring and astonishing literary activity. In his external life there is little to record beyond changes of residence,--from Basle to the University of Louvain in Brabant,--from Louvain back to Basle,--from Basle to Freiburg,--and once more to Basle, where, in 1536, he died. The clue to this later period is given by two threads, which are indeed but strands of a single cord,--his influence on the revival of learning, and his attitude towards the Reformation.

In the younger days of Erasmus the Italian cultivation of classical literature had attained its highest point, and was already verging towards decline. More than a century had passed since Petrarch had kindled the first enthusiasm. It requires some effort of the imagination for us to realise what that movement meant. The men of the fourteenth century lived under a Church which claimed the surrender of the reason, not only in matters of faith, but in all knowledge: philosophy and science could speak only by the doctors whom she sanctioned. When the fourteenth century began to study the classics, the first feeling was one of joy in the newly revealed dignity of the human mind; it was a strange and delightful thing, as they gradually came to know the great writers of ancient Greece and Rome, to see the reason moving freely, exploring, speculating, discussing, without restraint. And then those children of the middle age were surprised and charmed by the forms of classical expression,--so different from anything that had been familiar to them. Borrowing an old Latin word, they called this new learning _humanity_; for them, however, the phrase had a depth of meaning undreamt of by Cicero. Now, for the first time, they felt that they had entered into full possession of themselves; nothing is more characteristic of the Italian renaissance than the self-asserting individuality of the chief actors; each strives to throw the work of his own spirit into relief; the common life falls into the background; the history of that age is the history of men rather than of communities.

In the progress of this Italian humanism three chief phases may be roughly distinguished. The first closes with the end of the fourteenth century,--the time of Petrarch and his immediate followers,--the morning-time of discovery. Then, in the first half of the fifteenth century, the discovered materials were classified, and organised in great libraries; Greek manuscripts, too, were translated into Latin,--not that the versions might be taken as substitutes for the original, but to aid the study of Greek itself. The men of this second period were gathered around Cosmo de' Medici at Florence, or Nicholas V. at Rome. The third stage was that in which criticism, both of form and of matter, was carried to a higher level, chiefly by the joint efforts of scholars grouped in select societies or academies, such as the Platonic academy at Florence, of which Ficino was the centre. The greatest man of this time,--the greatest genius of the literary renaissance in Italy,--was Angelo Poliziano; he died in 1494, when Erasmus was twenty-seven.

With Erasmus a new period opens. Two things broadly distinguish him, as a scholar, from the men before and after him. First, he was not only a refined humanist, writing for the fastidious few, and prizing no judgment but theirs; he took the most profitable authors of antiquity,--profitable in a moral as well as a literary sense,--chose out the best things in them,--and sought to make these things widely known,--applying their wisdom or wit to the circumstances of his own day. Secondly, in all his work he had an educational aim,--and this of the largest kind. The evils of his age,--in Church, in State, in the daily lives of men,--seemed to him to have their roots in ignorance,--ignorance of what Christianity meant,--ignorance of what the Bible taught,--ignorance of what the noblest and most gifted minds of the past, whether Christian or pagan, had contributed to the instruction of the human race. Let true knowledge only spread, and under its enlightening and humanising influence a purer religion and a better morality will gradually prevail. Erasmus was a man of the world; but with his keen intellect, so quickly susceptible to all impressions, he made the mistake, not uncommon for such temperaments, of overrating the rapidity with which intellectual influences permeate the masses of mankind. However, no one was ever more persistently or brilliantly true to an idea than Erasmus was to his; and it is wonderful how much he achieved.

His services to the new learning took various forms. He wrote school-books, bringing out his view that boys were kept too long over grammar, and ought to begin reading some good author as soon as possible. His own _Colloquies_ were meant partly as models of colloquial Latin; the book was long a standard one in education. These lively dialogues are prose idylls with an ethical purpose,--the dramatic expression of the writer's views on the life of the day. Thus the dialogue between the Learned Lady and the Abbot depicts monastic illiteracy; that between the Soldier and the Carthusian brings out the seamy side of the military calling. Lucian has influenced the form; but the dramatic skill which blends earnestness with humour is the author's own; there are touches here and there which might fairly be called Shakspearian. Then he made collections of striking thoughts and fine passages in the classics. His chief book of this kind was the _Adagia_. Many of the classical proverbs are made texts for little essays on the affairs of the day. Thus he takes up a Latin proverb, 'The beetle pursues the eagle'--based on the fable of the beetle avenging itself for an insult by destroying the eagle's eggs--the moral being that the most exalted wrong-doer is never safe from the vengeance of the humblest victim. This suggests to him an ingenious satire on the misdeeds of great princes--typified by the eagle--and their results. Later in life, he brought out the _Apophthegms_--a collection of good sayings, chiefly from Plutarch. His editions of classical authors were numerous: the best was that of Terence,--his favourite poet; the next best was that of Seneca. His principal editions of Greek authors belong to the last five years of his life, and were less important. Speaking of these editions generally, we may say that they were valuable in two ways,--by making the authors themselves more accessible, and by furnishing improved texts. Then he made many Latin translations from Greek poetry and prose. Mention is due also to his dialogue on the pronunciation of Greek and Latin,--published in 1528. It was especially a protest against the confusion of the vowels in the modern Greek pronunciation, and against the modern disregard of quantity in favour of the stress accent. His views ultimately fixed the continental pronunciation of Greek, which is still known in Greece by his name (ἡ 'Ερáσμου προφορá). At Cambridge it was introduced a little later by Thomas Smith and John Cheke. Along with this dialogue appeared another,--the amusing _Ciceronian_. It is an appeal to common-sense against an absurd affectation which marked the dotage of Italian humanism. Bembo and his disciples would not use a single word or phrase which did not occur in Cicero. Their purism moreover rejected all modern terms: a Cardinal became an 'augur,' a nun a 'vestal,' the Papal tiara was 'the fillet of Romulus.' Most ludicrous of all, because Cicero was a statesman, the modern Ciceronian, writing to his friends from the profound seclusion of his study, deemed it a stylistic duty to imply that he lived in a vortex of politics. The gist of what Erasmus says is merely that other ancients besides Cicero wrote good Latin, and that a true Ciceronianism would adjust itself to its surroundings. No one, it should be added, had a more intelligent admiration for Cicero than Erasmus himself.

We see, then, the peculiar place which he holds in the history of the new learning. It may be allowed that, if the study of classical antiquity be viewed as a progressive science, he did much less to advance it than was done by some other great scholars of a later period. He did not enlarge the boundaries of knowledge in that field as they were afterwards enlarged by the special labours of Joseph Scaliger, of Isaac Casaubon, or of Richard Bentley. But the work which Erasmus did was one which, at that time, was of the first necessity for the northern nations. In his genial, popular way he made them feel the value and charm of the classics as literature; he himself was, in fact, a learned man of letters rather than a critical specialist. Let us remember what the state of northern Europe, as regards literature, was in his boyhood. It was sunk,--to use his own words,--in utter barbarism. To know Greek was the next thing to heresy. 'I did my best,' he says, 'to deliver the rising generation from this slough of ignorance, and to inspire them with a taste for better studies. I wrote, not for Italy, but for Germany and the Netherlands.'

The circulation of his more popular writings, all over Europe, was so enormous that one can compare it only to that of some widely-read modern journal, or of some extraordinarily popular novel. For instance, a Paris bookseller once heard, or invented, a rumour that the Sorbonne was going to condemn the _Colloquies_ of Erasmus as heretical; and, being a shrewd man, he instantly printed a new edition of 24,000 copies. A moral treatise by Erasmus, called the _Enchiridion_ ('the Christian Soldier's Dagger'), which was a favourite alike with Catholics and with Protestants, was translated into every language of Europe. A Spanish ecclesiastic, writing in 1527, declares that a version of it was in the hands of all classes throughout Spain,--even the smallest country inn could usually show a copy. It may be doubted whether any author's works were ever so frequently reprinted within his life-time as were those of Erasmus. And wherever his books went, they carried with them the influence of his spirit,--his love of good literature, his loyalty to reason, his quiet common-sense, his hatred of war, his versatile wit, nourished by varied observation of life,--wit which could play gracefully around the slightest theme, or strike with a keen edge at falsehood and wrong,--his desire to make it felt that a good life is not an affair of formal observance, but must begin in the heart.

The works which entitle Erasmus to be called the parent of Biblical criticism are connected with his secular studies by a closer tie than might appear at first sight. His principal concern was always with literature as such; he was, moreover, a practical moralist, anxious to aid in correcting the evils of his time: but he was not distinctively a theologian; and towards dogmatic theology, in particular, he had little inclination. Now, in pursuing his paramount aim--to make the world better by the humanising influences of literature--the enemy with which he had to do battle was the scholastic philosophy. Hear his words when he is asking how Christians are to convert Turks:--'Shall we put into their hands an Occam, a Durandus, a Scotus, a Gabriel, or an Alvarus? What will they think of us, when they hear of our perplexed subtleties about Instants, Formalities, Quiddities, and Relations?' This was the dreary wilderness of pedantry that had hitherto passed for knowledge. And the scholastic philosophy was securely entrenched behind the scholastic theology. The weapons of that theology were Biblical texts, isolated from their context, and artificially interpreted: the one way to disarm it was to make men know what the Bible really said and meant. Therefore Erasmus felt that his first duty, both as a moralist and as a man of letters, was to promote a knowledge of the Bible. He was not a Hebrew scholar, and could do nothing at first hand with the Old Testament; that province was left to Reuchlin. But in 1516 he published the Greek Testament,--the first edition which had appeared; for the Complutensian edition, though printed two years earlier, was not issued till 1522. He also wrote a new Latin version of the New Testament, endeavouring to make it more exact than the Vulgate; and added notes. Further, he wrote a series of Latin Paraphrases on all the books of the New Testament except Revelation. These were intended to exhibit the substance and thought of the several books in a more modern form, and so to bring them home more directly to the ordinary reader's mind. The paraphrases were presently translated into English, and every Parish Church in England was furnished with a copy. In the remarkable 'Exhortation' prefixed to his Greek Testament, Erasmus observes that, while the disciples of every other philosophy derive it from the fountain-head, the Christian doctrine alone is not studied at its source. He would like to see the Scriptures translated into every language, and put into the hands of all. 'I long,' he says, 'that the husbandman should sing them to himself as he follows the plough, that the weaver should hum them to the tune of his shuttle, that the traveller should beguile with them the weariness of his journey.' Then, as to interpretation,--from the medieval expositors, the schoolmen, he appealed to the primitive interpreters, the Fathers of the early Church, who stood nearer to those documents alike in time and in spirit. And first of all to Jerome; for Jerome had essayed, in the fourth century, a work analogous to that which Erasmus was attempting in the sixteenth. Thus it was fitting that his edition of Jerome should appear almost simultaneously with his Greek Testament. He afterwards edited other Latin Fathers; and it was through his translations from the Greek Fathers, especially Chrysostom and Athanasius, that their writings first became better known in the West.

So far, all that Erasmus had said and done was in accord with that general movement of thought which led up to the Reformation. When Luther came forward, it was expected by many that Erasmus would place himself at his side. But Erasmus never departed an inch from his allegiance to Rome; and in the year before his death Paul III., in appointing him Provost of Deventer, formally acknowledged the services which he had rendered in combating the new opinions. It is important to see as clearly as possible what his position was.