Erasmus was born in Fourteen Hundred Sixty-six, and died in Fifteen
Hundred Thirty-six. No thinker of his time influenced the world more. He
stood at a pivotal point, and some say he himself was the intellectual
pivot of the Renaissance.
The critics of the times were unanimous in denouncing him--which fact
recommends him to us.
Several Churchmen, high in power, live in letters for no other reason
than because they coupled their names with that of Erasmus by reviling
him. Let the critics take courage--they may outwit oblivion yet, even
though they do nothing but carp. Only let them be wise, and carp, croak,
cough, cat-call and sneeze at some one who is hitching his wagon to a
star. This way immortality lies. Erasmus was a monk who flocked by
himself, and found diversion in ridiculing monkery. Also, he was the
wisest man of his day. Wisdom is the distilled essence of intuition,
corroborated by experience. Learning is something else. Usually, the
learned man is he who has delved deep and soared high. But few there be
who dive, that fish the murex up. Among those who soar, the ones who
come back and tell us of what they have seen, are few. Like Lazarus,
they say nothing.
Erasmus had a sense of humor. Humor is a life-preserver and saves you
from drowning when you jump off into a sea of sermons. A theologian who
can not laugh is apt to explode--he is very dangerous. Erasmus, Luther,
Beecher, Theodore Parker, Roger Williams, Joseph Parker--all could
laugh. Calvin, Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards never gurgled in glee,
nor chortled softly at their own witticisms--or those of others.
Erasmus smiled. He has been called the Voltaire of his day. What
Rousseau was to Voltaire, Luther was to Erasmus. Well did Diderot say
that Erasmus laid the egg which Luther hatched. Erasmus wrote for the
educated, the refined, the learned--Luther made his appeal to the plain
and common mind.
Luther split the power of the Pope. Erasmus thought it a calamity to do
so, because he believed that strife of sects tended to make men lose
sight of the one essential in religion--harmony--and cause them simply
to struggle for victory. Erasmus wanted to trim the wings of the papal
office and file its claws--Luther would have destroyed it. Erasmus
considered the Church a very useful and needful organization--for social
reasons. It tended to regulate life and conduct and made men
"decentable." It should be a school of ethics, and take a leading part
in every human betterment. Man being a gregarious animal, the
congregation is in the line of natural desire. The excuse for gathering
together is religion--let them gather. The Catholic Church is not two
thousand years old--it is ten thousand years old and goes back to Egypt.
The birth of Jesus formed merely a psychosis in the Church's existence.
Here he parted company with Luther, who was a dogmatist and wanted to
debate his ninety-five theses. Erasmus laughed at all religious
disputations and called them mazes that led to cloudland. Very
naturally, people said he was not sincere, since the mediocre mind never
knows that only the paradox is true. Hence Erasmus was hated by
Catholics and denounced by Protestants.
The marvel is that the men with fetters and fagots did not follow him
with a purpose. Fifty years later he would have been snuffed out. But at
that time Rome was so astonished to think that any one should criticize
her that she lost breath. Besides, it was an age of laughter, of revolt,
of contests of wit, of love-bouts and love-scrapes, and the monks who
lapsed were too many to discipline. Everybody was busy with his own
affairs. Happy time!
Erasmus was part and parcel of the Italian Renaissance. Over his head
blazes, in letters that burn, the unforgetable date, Fourteen Hundred
Ninety-two. He was a part of the great unrest, and he helped cause the
great unrest. Every great awakening, every renaissance, is an age of
doubt. An age of conservatism is an age of moss, of lichen, of rest,
rust and ruin. We grow only as we question. As long as we are sure that
the present order is perfect, we button our collars behind, a thing
which Columbus, Luther, Melanchthon, Erasmus, Michelangelo, Leonardo and
Gutenberg, who all lived at this one time, never did. The year of
Fourteen Hundred Ninety-two, like the year Seventeen Hundred
Seventy-six, was essentially "infidelic," just as the present age is
constructively iconoclastic. We are tearing down our barns to build
greater. The railroadman who said, "I throw an engine on the scrap-heap
every morning before breakfast," expressed a great truth. We are
discarding bad things for good ones, and good things for better ones.
* * * * *
Rotterdam has the honor of being the birthplace of Erasmus. A storm of
calumny was directed at him during his life concerning the irregularity
of his birth. "He had no business to be born at all," said a proud
prelate, as he gathered his robes close around his prebendal form. But
souls knock at the gates of life for admittance, and the fact that a man
exists is proof of his right to live. The word "illegitimate" is not in
the vocabulary of God. If you do not know that, you have not read His
instructive and amusing works.
The critics variously declared the mother of Erasmus was a royal lady, a
physician's only daughter, a kitchen-wench, a Mother Superior--all
according to the prejudices preconceived. In one sense she was surely a
Mother Superior--let the lies neutralize one another.
The fact is, we do not know who the mother of Erasmus was. All we know
is that she was the mother of Erasmus. Here history halts. Her son once
told Sir Thomas More that she was married to a luckless nobody a few
months after the birth of her first baby, and amid the cares of raising
a goodly brood of nobodies on a scant allowance of love and rye-bread,
she was glad to forget her early indiscretions. Not so the father. The
debated question of whether a man really has any parental love is
answered here.
The father of Erasmus was Gerhard von Praet, and the child was called
Gerhard Gerhards--or the son of Gerhard. The father was a man of
property and held office under the State. At the time of the birth of
the illustrious baby, Gerhard von Praet was not married, and it is
reasonable to suppose that the reason he did not wed the mother of his
child was because she belonged to a different social station. In any
event the baby was given the father's name, and every care and attention
was paid the tiny voyager. This father was as foolish as most fond
mothers, for he dreamed out a great career for the motherless one, and
made sundry prophecies.
At six years of age the child was studying Latin, when he should have
been digging in a sand-pile. At eight he spoke Dutch and French, and
argued with his nurse in Greek as to the value of buttermilk.
In the meantime the father had married and settled down in honorable
obscurity as a respectable squire. Another account has it that he became
a priest. Anyway, the little maverick was now making head alone in a
private school.
When the lad was thirteen the father died, leaving a will in which he
provided well for the child. The amount of property which by this will
would have belonged to our hero when he became of age would have
approximated forty thousand dollars.
Happily, the trustees of the fund were law-wolves. They managed to break
the will, and then they showed the court that the child was a waif, and
absolutely devoid of legal rights of any and every kind. He was then
committed to an orphan asylum to be given "a right religious education."
It's a queer old world, Terese, and what would have become of Gerhard
Gerhards had he fallen heir to his father's titles and estate, no man
can say. He might have accumulated girth and become an honored
burgomaster. As it was he became powder-monkey to a monk, and scrubbed
stone floors and rushed the growler for cowled and pious prelates.
Then he did copying for the Abbe, and proved himself a boy from Missouri
Valley.
He was small, blue-eyed, fair-haired, slender, slight, with a long nose
and sharp features. "With this nose," said Albrecht Durer, many years
later, "he successfully hunted down everything but heresy."
At eighteen he became a monk and proudly had his flaxen poll tonsured.
His superior was fond of him, and prophesied that he would become a
bishop or something.
Children do not suffer much, nor long. God is good to them. They slide
into an environment and accept it. This child learned to dodge the big
bare feet of the monks--got his lessons, played a little, worked his wit
against their stupidity, and actually won their admiration--or as much
of it as men who are alternately ascetics and libertines can give.
It was about this time that the lad was taunted with having no name.
"Then I'll make one for myself," was his proud answer.
Having entered now upon his novitiate, he was allowed to take a new
name, and being dead to the world, the old one was forgotten.
They called him Brother Desiderius, or the Desired One. He then amended
this Latin name with its Greek equivalent, Erasmus, which means
literally the Well-Beloved. As to his pedigree, or lack of it, he was
needlessly proud. It set him apart as different. He had half-brothers
and half-sisters, and these he looked upon as strangers. When they came
to see him, he said, "There is no relationship between souls save that
of the spirit."
His sense of wit came in when he writes to a friend: "Two parents are
the rule; no parents the exception; a mother but no father is not
uncommon; but I had a father and never had a mother. I was nursed by a
man, and educated by monks, all of which shows that women are more or
less of a superfluity in creation. God Himself is a man. He had one son,
but no daughters. The cherubim are boys. All of the angels are
masculine, and so far as Holy Writ informs us, there are no women in
heaven."
That it was a woman, however, to whom Erasmus wrote this, lets him out
on the severity of the argument. He was a joker. And while women did not
absorb much of his time, we find that on his travels he often turned
aside to visit with intellectual women--no other kind interested him, at
all.
* * * * *
To belong to a religious order is to be owned by it. You trade freedom
for protection. The soul of Erasmus revolted at life in a monastery. He
hated the typical monks--their food, their ways of life, their
sophistry, their stupidity. To turn glutton and welcome folly as a
relief from religion, he said, was the most natural thing in the world,
when men had once started in to lead an unnatural life. Good food,
daintily served, only goes with a co-ed mental regimen. Men eat with
their hands, out of a pot, unless women are present to enforce the
decencies. Women alone are a little more to be pitied than men alone, if
't were possible.
Through emulation does the race grow. Sex puts men and women on their
good behavior.
Man's desire for power has caused him to enslave himself. Writes
Erasmus, "In a monastery, no one is on his good behavior, except when
there are visitors, but I am told that this is so in families."
The greasy, coarse cooking brought on a nice case of dyspepsia for poor
Erasmus--a complaint from which he was never free as long as he lived.
His system was too fine for any monastic general trough, but he found a
compensation in having his say at odd times and sundry. At one time we
hear of his printing on a card this legend, "If I owned hell and a
monastery, I would sell the monastery and reside in hell." Thereby did
Erasmus supply General Tecumseh Sherman the germ of a famous orphic.
Sherman was a professor in a college at Baton Rouge before the War, and
evidently had moused in the Latin classics to a purpose.
Connected with the monastery where Erasmus lived was a printing-outfit.
Our versatile young monk learned the case, worked the ink-balls,
manipulated the lever, and evidently dispelled, in degree, the monotony
of the place by his ready pen and eloquent tongue. When he wrote, he
wrote for his ear. All was tested by reading the matter aloud. At that
time great authors were not so wise or so clever as printers, and it
fell to the lot of Erasmus to improve upon the text of much of the copy
that was presented.
Erasmus learned to write by writing; and among modern prose-writers he
is the very first who had a distinct literary style. His language is
easy, fluid, suggestive. His paragraphs throw a shadow, and are pregnant
with meaning beyond what the lexicon supplies. This is genius--to be
bigger than your words.
If Erasmus had been possessed of a bit more patience and a jigger of
diplomacy, he would have been in line for a bishopric. That thing which
he praised so lavishly, Folly, was his cause of failure and also his
friend.
At twenty-six he was the best teacher and the most clever scholar in the
place. Also, he was regarded as a thorn in the side of the monkery,
since he refused to take it seriously. He protested that no man ever
became a monk of his own accord--he was either thrust into a religious
order by unkind kinsmen or kicked into it by Fate.
And then comes the Bishop of Cambray, with an attack of literary
scabies, looking for a young religieux who could correct his manuscript.
The Bishop was going to Paris after important historical facts, and must
have a competent secretary. Only a proficient Latin and Greek scholar
would do. The head of the monastery recommended Erasmus, very much as
Artemus Ward volunteered all of his wife's relatives for purposes of
war.
Andrew Carnegie once, when about to start for Europe, said to his
ironmaster, Bill Jones, "I am never so happy or care-free, Bill, as when
on board ship, headed for Europe, and the shores of Sandy Hook fade from
sight."
And Bill solemnly replied, "Mr. Carnegie, I can truthfully say for
myself and fellow-workers, that we are never so happy and care-free as
when you are on board ship, headed for Europe."
Very properly Mr. Carnegie at once raised Bill's salary five thousand a
year.
The Carthusian Brothers parted with Erasmus in pretended tears, but the
fact was they were more relieved than bereaved.
And then began the travels of Erasmus.
The Bishop was of middle age, with a dash of the cavalier in his blood,
which made him prefer a saddle to the cushions of a carriage. And so
they started away on horseback, the Bishop ahead, followed at a
discreet distance by Erasmus, his secretary; and ten paces behind with
well-loaded panniers, rode a servant as rearguard.
To be free and face the world and on a horse! Erasmus lifted up his
heart in a prayer of gratitude. He said that it was the first feeling of
thankfulness he had ever experienced, and it was the first thing which
had ever come to him worth gratitude.
And so they started for Paris.
Erasmus looked back and saw the monastery, where he had spent ten
arduous years, fade from view.
It was the happiest moment he had ever known. The world lay beyond.
* * * * *
The Bishop of Cambray introduced Erasmus to a mode of life for which he
was eminently fitted. It consisted in traveling, receiving honors,
hospitality and all good things in a material way, and giving his
gracious society in return. Doors flew open on the approach of the good
Bishop. Everywhere he went a greeting was assured. He was a
Churchman--that was enough. Erasmus shared in the welcomes, for he was
handsome in face and figure, had a ready tongue, and could hold his own
with the best.
Europe was then dotted with monasteries, nunneries and other church
institutions. Their remains are seen there yet--one is really never out
of sight of a steeple. But the exclusive power of the Church is gone,
and in many places there are only ruins where once were cloisters,
corridors, chapels, halls and gardens teeming with life and industry.
The "missions" of California were founded on the general plan of the
monasteries of Europe. They afforded a lodging for the night--a
resting-place for travelers--and were a radiatory center of
education--at least all of the education that then existed.
In California these "missions" were forty miles apart--one day's
journey. In France, Italy and Germany they were, say, ten miles apart.
Between them, trudged or rode on horseback or in carriages, a
picturesque array of pilgrims, young and old, male and female. To go
anywhere and be at home everywhere, this was the happy lot of a church
dignitary.
The parts in church institutions were interchangeable; and by a system
of migration, life was made agreeable, and reasonable honesty was
assured. I have noticed that certain Continental banking institutions,
with branches in various cities, keep their cashiers rotating. The idea
was gotten from Rome. Rome was very wise--her policies were the
crystallizations of the world-wisdom of centuries. The church-militant
battle-cry, "The world for Christ," simply means man's lust for
ownership, with Christ as an excuse. If ever there was a man-made
institution, it is the Church. To control mankind has been her desire,
and the miracle is that, with a promise of heaven, a threat of hell, and
a firm grip on temporal power--social and military--she was ever induced
partially to loosen her grip. To such men as Savonarola, Luther and
Erasmus, do we owe our freedom. These men cared more for truth than for
power, and their influence was to disintegrate the ankylosis of custom
and make men think. And a thought is mental dynamite. No wonder the
Church has always feared and hated a thinker!
The Bishop of Cambray was not a thinker. Fenelon, who was later to
occupy his office, was to make the bishopric of Cambray immortal.
Conformists die, but heretics live on forever. They are men who have
redeemed the cross and rendered the gallows glorious.
* * * * *
And so the Bishop of Cambray and his little light-haired secretary fared
forth to fame and fortune--the Bishop to be remembered because he had a
secretary, and the secretary to be remembered because he grew into a
great teacher.
At each stopping-place the Bishop said mass--the workers, students and
novitiates quitting their tasks to hear the words of encouragement from
the lips of the great man. Occasionally Erasmus was pushed forward to
say a few words, by the Bishop, who had to look after his own personal
devotions. The assembled friends liked the young man--he was so bright
and witty and free from cant. They even laughed out loud, and so, often
two smiles were made to grow where there were no smiles before.
Leisurely they rode--stopping at times for several days at places where
the food and drink were at their best, and the society sulphide. At
nunneries and monasteries were always guest-chambers for the great, and
they were usually occupied.
Thus it was that every church-house was a sort of university, depending
of course on the soul-size of the Superior or Abbe. These constant
journeyings and pilgrimages served in lieu of the daily paper, the
Western Union Telegraph, and the telephone. Things have slipped back, I
fear me, for now Mercury merely calls up his party on the long-distance,
instead of making a personal visit--the Angel Gabriel as well. We save
time, but we miss the personal contact.
The monastic impulse was founded on a human need. Like most good things,
it has been sadly perverted; but the idea of a sanctuary for stricken
souls--a place of refuge, where simplicity, service and useful endeavor
rule--will never die from out the human heart. The hospice stands for
hospitality, but we have now only a hotel and a hospital.
The latter stands for iodoform, carbolic acid and formaldehyde; the
former often means gold, glitter, gluttony and concrete selfishness,
with gout on one end, paresis at the other and Bright's Disease between.
The hospice was a part of the monastery. It was a home for the homeless.
There met men of learning--men of wit--men of brains and brawn. You
entered and were at home. There was no charge--you merely left something
for the poor.
Any man who has the courage, and sufficient faith in humanity to install
the hospice system in America will reap a rich reward. If he has the
same faith in his guests that Judge Lindsey has in his bad boys, he will
succeed; but if he hesitates, defers, doubts, and begins to plot and
plan, the Referee in Bankruptcy will beckon.
The early universities grew out of the monastic impulse. Students came
and went, and the teachers were a part of a great itinerancy. Man is a
migratory animal. His evolution has come about through change of
environment. Transplantation changes weeds into roses, and the
forebears of all the products of our greenhouses and gardens once grew
in hedgerows or open fields, choked by unkind competition or trampled
beneath the feet of the heedless.
The advantage of university life is in the transplantation. Get the boy
out of his home environment; sever the cord that holds him to his
"folks"; let him meet new faces, see new sights, hear new sermons, meet
new teachers, and his efforts at adjustment will work for growth.
Alexander Humboldt was right--one year at college is safer than four.
One year inspires you--four may get you pot-bound with pedant prejudice.
The university of the future will be industrial--all may come and go.
All men will be university men, and thus the pride in an imaginary
proficiency will be diluted to a healthful attenuation. To work and to
be useful--not merely to memorize and recite--will be the only
initiation.
The professors will be interchangeable, and the rotation of intellectual
crops will work for health, harmony and effectiveness.
The group, or college, will be the unit, not the family. The college was
once a collection of men and women grouped for a mutual intellectual,
religious or economic good.
To this group or college idea will we return.
Man is a gregarious animal, and the Christ-thought of giving all, and
receiving all, some day in the near future will be found practical. The
desire for exclusive ownership must be sloughed.
Universities devoted to useful work--art in its highest sense: head,
hand and heart--will yet dot the civilized world. The hospice will
return higher up the scale, and the present use of the word
"hospitality" will be drowned in its pink tea, choked with
cheese-wafers, rescued from the nervous clutch of the managing mama, and
the machinations of the chaperone. A society built on the sands of
silliness must give way to the universal university, and the strong,
healthful, helpful, honest companionship and comradeship of men and
women prevail.
* * * * *
The objective point of the Bishop was the University of Paris.
Here in due time, after their lingering ride from Holland, the Bishop
and his secretary arrived. They settled down to literary work; and in
odd hours the beauty and wonder of Paris became familiar to Erasmus. The
immediate task completed, the Bishop proposed going home, and thought,
of course, his secretary was a fixture and would go with him. But
Erasmus had evolved ideas concerning his own worth. He had already
collected quite a little circle of pupils about him, and these he held
by his glowing personality. At this time the vow of poverty was looked
upon lightly. And anyway, poverty is a comparative term. There were
monks who always trudged afoot with staff and bag, but not so our
Erasmus. He was Bishop of the Exterior.
The Bishop of Cambray, on parting with Erasmus, thought so much of him
that he presented him with the horse he rode.
Erasmus used to take short excursions about Paris, taking with him a
student and often two, as servants or attendants. Teaching then was
mostly on an independent basis, each pupil picking his tutors and paying
them direct.
Among other pupils whom Erasmus had at Paris was a young Englishman by
the name of Lord Mountjoy. A great affection arose between these two,
and when Lord Mountjoy returned to England he was accompanied by
Erasmus.
At London, Erasmus met on absolute equality many of the learned men of
England. We hear of his dining at the house of the Lord Mayor of London,
and there meeting Sir Thomas More and crossing swords with that worthy
in wordy debate.
Erasmus seems to have carried the "New Humanism" into England. It has
been said that the world was discovered in Fourteen Hundred Ninety-two,
but Man was not discovered until Seventeen Hundred Seventy-six. This is
hardly literal truth, since in Fourteen Hundred Ninety-two, there was a
theologico-scientific party of young men in all of the European
Universities who were reviving the Greek culture, and with it arose the
idea of the dignity and worth of Man. To this movement Erasmus brought
the enthusiasm of his nature. Perhaps he did as much as any other to fan
the embers which grew into a flame called "The Reformation."
He constantly ridiculed the austerities, pedantry, priggishness and
sciolism of the old-time Churchmen, and when a new question came up, he
asked, "What good is there in it?"
Everything was tested by him in the light of commonsense. What end does
it serve and how is humanity to be served or benefited by it?
Thus the good of humanity, not the glory of God, was the shibboleth of
this rising party.
Erasmus gave lectures and taught at Cambridge, Oxford and London.
Italy had been the objective point of his travels, but England had, for
a time, turned him aside. In the year Fifteen Hundred, Erasmus landed at
Calais, saddled his horse, and started southward, visiting, writing,
teaching, lecturing, as he went. The stimulus of meeting new people and
seeing new scenes, all tended toward intellectual growth.
The genius monk made mendicancy a fine art, and Erasmus was heir to most
of the instincts of the order. His associations with the laity were
mostly with the nobility or those with money. He was not slow in asking
for what he wanted, whether it was a fur-lined cloak, a saddle, top
riding-boots, a horse, or a prayer-book. He made no apologies--but took
as his divine right all that he needed. And he justified himself in
taking what he needed by the thought that he gave all he had. He
supplied Sir Thomas More the germ of "Utopia," for Erasmus pictured
again and again an ideal society where all would have enough, and none
suffer from either want or surfeit--a society in which all would be at
home wherever they went.
Had Erasmus seen fit to make England his home, his head, too, would have
paid the forfeit, as did the head that wrote "Utopia." What an absurd
use to make of a head--to separate it from the man's body!
Italy received Erasmus with the same royal welcome that England had
supplied. Scholars who knew the Greek and Roman classics were none too
common. Most monks stopped with the writings of the saints, as South
Americans balk at long division.
Erasmus could illumine an initial, bind a book, give advice to printers,
lecture to teachers, give lessons on rhetoric and oratory, or entertain
the ladies with recitations from the Iliad and the Odyssey.
So he went riding back and forth, stopping at cities and towns,
nunneries and monasteries, until his name became a familiar one to every
scholar of England, Germany and Italy. Scholarly, always a learner,
always a teacher, gracious, direct, witty, men began to divide on an
Erasmus basis. There were two parties: those for Erasmus and those
against him.
In Fifteen Hundred Seventeen, came Luther with his bombshells of
defiance. This fighting attitude was far from Erasmus--his weapons were
words. Between bouts with prelates, Luther sent a few thunderbolts at
Erasmus, accusing him of vacillation and cowardice. Erasmus replied with
dignity, and entered into a lengthy dispute with Melanchthon, Luther's
friend, on the New Humanism which was finding form in revolution.
Erasmus prophesied that by an easy process of evolution, through
education, the monasteries would all become schools and workshops. He
would not destroy them, but convert them into something different. He
fell into disfavor with the Catholics, and was invited by Henry the
Eighth to come to England and join the new religious regime. But this
English Catholicism was not to the liking of Erasmus. What he desired
was to reform the Church, not to destroy it or divide it.
His affairs were becoming critical: monasteries where he had once been
welcomed now feared to have him come near, lest they should be
contaminated and entangled. It was rumored that warrants of arrest were
out. He was invited to go to Rome and explain his position.
Erasmus knew better than to acknowledge receipt of the letter. He headed
his horse for Switzerland, the land of liberty. At Basel he stopped at
the house of Froben, the great printer and publisher. He put his horse
in the barn, unsaddled him, and said, "Froben, I've come to stay."
* * * * *
I was mousing around the other day in a book that is somewhat disjointed
and disconnected, and yet interesting--"The Standard Dictionary"--when I
came across the word "scamp." It is a handy word to fling, and I am not
sure but that it has been gently tossed once or twice in my direction.
Condemnation is usually a sort of subtle flattery, so I'm not sad. To
scamp means to cut short, to be superficial, slipshod, careless,
indifferent--to say, "Let 'er go, who cares--this is good enough!" If
anybody ever was a stickler for honest work, I am that bucolic party. I
often make things so fine that only one man out of ten thousand can buy
them, and I have to keep 'em myself.
You know that, when you get an idea in your head, how everything you
read contains allusions to the same thing. Knowledge is mucilaginous.
Well, next day after I was looking up that pleasant word "scamp," I was
reading in the Amusing Works of Erasmus, when I ran across the word
again, but spelled in Dutch, thus, "schamp." Now Erasmus was a
successful author, and he was also the best authority on paper, inks,
bindings, and general bookmaking in Italy, Holland or Germany. Being a
lover of learning, and listening to the lure of words, he never wallowed
in wealth. But in his hunt for ideas he had a lot of fun. Kipling says,
"There is no hunt equal to a man hunt." But Kip is wrong--to chase a
thought is twice the sport. Erasmus chased ideas, and very naturally
the preachers chased Erasmus--out of England, through France, down to
Italy and then he found refuge at Basel with Froben, the great Printer
and Publisher.
Up in Frankfort was a writer-printer, who, not being able to answer the
arguments of Erasmus, called him bad names. But this gentle pen-pusher
in Frankfort, who passed his vocabulary at Froben's proofreader, Erasmus
in time calls a "schamp," because he used cheap paper, cheap ink and
close margins. Soon after, the word was carried to England and spelled
"scamp"--a man who cheats in quality, weight, size and count. But the
first use merely meant a printer who scamps his margins and so cheats on
paper. I am sorry to see that Erasmus imitated his enemies and at
times was ambidextrous in the use of the literary stinkpot. His
vocabulary was equal to that of Muldoon. Erasmus refers to one of
his critics as a "scenophylax-stikken," and another he calls a "schnide
enchologion-schistosomus." And perhaps they may have been--I really do
not know.
But as an authority on books Erasmus can still be read. He it was who
fixed the classic page margin--twice as wide at the top as on the
inside; twice as wide at the outside as the top; twice as wide at the
bottom as at the side. And any printer who varies from this displays his
ignorance of proportion. Erasmus says, "To use poor paper marks the
decline of taste, both in printer and in patron." After the death of
Erasmus, Froben's firm failed because they got to making things cheap.
"Compete in quality, not in price," was the working motto of Erasmus.
All of the great bookmaking centers languished when they began to scamp.
That worthy wordissimus at Frankfort who called Erasmus names gave up
business and then the ghost, and Erasmus wrote his epitaph, and thus
supplied Benjamin Franklin an idea--"Here lies an old book, its cover
gone, its leaves torn, the worms at work on its vitals."
The wisdom of doing good work still applies, just as it did in the days
of Erasmus.
Erasmus proved a very valuable acquisition to Froben. He became general
editor and literary adviser of this great publishing-house, which was
then the most important in the world.
Besides his work as editor, Erasmus also stood sponsor for numerous
volumes which we now know were written by literary nobodies, his name
being placed on the title-page for commercial reasons.
At that time and for two hundred years later, the matter of attributing
a book to this man or that was considered a trivial affair. Piracies
were prevalent. All printers revised the work of classic authors if they
saw fit, and often they were specially rewarded for it by the Church. It
was about this time that some one slipped that paragraph into the works
of Josephus about Jesus. The "Annals" of Tacitus were similarly
doctored, if in fact they were not written entire, during the Sixteenth
Century. It will be remembered that the only two references in
contemporary literature to Jesus are those in Josephus and Tacitus, and
these the Church proudly points to yet.
During the last few years of his life Erasmus accumulated considerable
property. By his will he devised that this money should go to educate
certain young men and women, grandchildren and nephews and nieces of his
old friend, Johann Froben. He left no money for masses, after the usual
custom of Churchmen, and during his last illness was not attended by a
priest. For several years before his death he made no confessions and
very seldom attended church service. He said, "I am much more proud of
being a printer than a priest."
A statue of Erasmus in bronze adorns one of the public squares in
Rotterdam, and Basel and Freiburg have honored themselves, and him also,
in like manner.
As a sample of the subtle and keen literary style of Erasmus, I append
the following from "In Praise of Folly:"
The happiest times of life are youth and old age, and this for no
reason but that they are the times most completely under the rule
of folly, and least controlled by wisdom. It is the child's freedom
from wisdom that makes it so charming to us; we hate a precocious
child. So women owe their charm, and hence their power, to their
"folley," that is, to their obedience to the impulse. But if,
perchance, a woman wants to be thought wise, she only succeeds in
being doubly a fool, as if one should train a cow for the
prize-ring, a thing wholly against Nature. A woman will be a woman,
no matter what mask she wear, and she ought to be proud of her
folly and make the most of it.
Is not Cupid, that first father of all religion, is not he stark
blind, that he can not himself distinguish of colors, so he would
make us as mope-eyed in judging falsely of all love concerns, and
wheedle us into a thinking that we are always in the right? Thus
every Jack sticks to his own Jill; every tinker esteems his own
trull; and the hobnailed suitor prefers Joan the milkmaid before
any of milady's daughters. These things are true, and are
ordinarily laughed at, and yet, however ridiculous they seem, it is
hence only that all societies receive their cement and
consolidation.
Fortune we still find favoring the blunt, and flushing the forward;
strokes smooth up fools, crowning all their undertakings with
success; but wisdom makes her followers bashful, sneaking and
timorous, and therefore you commonly see that they are reduced to
hard shifts; must grapple with poverty, cold and hunger; must lie
recluse, despised, and unregarded; while fools roll in money, are
advanced to dignities and offices, and in a word have the whole
world at command. If any one thinks it happy to be a favorite at
court, and to manage the disposal of places and preferments, alas,
this happiness is so far from being attainable by wisdom, that the
very suspicion of it would put a stop to advancement. Has any man a
mind to raise himself a good estate? Alas, what dealer in the world
would ever get a farthing, if he be so wise as to scruple at
perjury, blush at a lie, or stick at a fraud and overreaching?
It is the public charter of all divines, to mold and bend the
sacred oracles till they comply with their own fancy, spreading
them (as Heaven by its Creator) like a curtain, closing together,
or drawing them back, as they please. Thus, indeed, Saint Paul
himself minces and mangles some citations he makes use of, and
seems to wrest them to a different sense from what they were first
intended for, as is confessed by the great linguist, Saint Hieron.
Thus when that apostle saw at Athens the inscription of the altar,
he draws from it an argument for the proof of the Christian
religion; but leaving out great parts of the sentence, which
perhaps if fully recited might have prejudiced his cause, he
mentions only the last two words, namely, "To the Unknown God"; and
this, too, not without alteration, for the whole inscription runs
thus: "To the Gods of Asia, Europe, and Africa, to all Foreign and
Unknown Gods."
'T is an imitation of the same pattern, I will warrant you, that
our young divines, by leaving out four or five words in a place and
putting a false construction on the rest, can make any passage
serviceable to their own purpose; though from the coherence of what
went before, or follows after, the genuine meaning appears to be
either wide enough, or perhaps quite contradictory to what they
would thrust and impose upon it. In which knack the divines are
grown now so expert that the lawyers themselves begin to be jealous
of an encroachment on what was formerly their sole privilege and
practise. And indeed what can they despair of proving, since the
forementioned commentator did upon a text of Saint Luke put an
interpretation no more agreeable to the meaning or the place than
one contrary quality is to another.
But because it seemed expedient that man, who was born for the
transaction of business, should have so much wisdom as should fit
and capacitate him for the discharge of his duty herein, and yet
lest such a measure as is requisite for this purpose might prove
too dangerous and fatal, I was advised with for an antidote, and
prescribed this infallible receipt of taking a wife, a creature so
harmless and silly, and yet so useful and convenient, as might
mollify and make pliable the stiffness and morose humor of man. Now
that which made Plato doubt under what genus to rank woman, whether
among brutes or rational creatures, was only meant to denote the
extreme stupidness and Folly of that sex, a sex so unalterably
simple that for any one of them to thrust forward and reach at the
name of wise, is but to make themselves the more remarkable fools,
such an endeavor being but a swimming against the stream, nay, the
turning the course of Nature, the bare attempting whereof is as
extravagant as the effecting of it is impossible: for as it is a
trite proverb, that an ape will be an ape, though clad in purple,
so a woman will be a woman, that is, a fool, whatever disguise she
takes up. And yet there is no reason women should take it amiss to
be thus charged, for if they do but rightly consider, they will
find to Folly they are beholden for those endowments wherein they
so far surpass and excel Man; as first for their unparalleled
beauty, by the charm whereof they tyrannize over the greatest of
tyrants; for what is it but too great a smatch of wisdom that makes
men so tawny and thick-skinned, so rough and prickly-bearded, like
an emblem of winter or old age, while women have such dainty,
smooth cheeks, such a low, gentle voice, and so pure a complexion,
as if Nature had drawn them for a standing pattern of all symmetry
and comeliness? Besides, what greater or juster aim and ambition
have they than to please their husbands? In order whereunto they
garnish themselves with paint, washes, curls, perfumes, and all
other mysteries of ornament; yet, after all, they become acceptable
to them only for their Folly. Wives are always allowed their humor,
yet it is only in exchange for titillation and pleasure, which
indeed are but other names for Folly; as none can deny, who
consider how a man must dandle, and kittle, and play a hundred
little tricks for his helpmate.
But now some blood-chilled old men, that are more for wine than
wenching, will pretend that in their opinion the greatest happiness
consists in feasting and drinking. Grant it be so; yet certainly in
the most luxurious entertainments it is Folly must give the sauce
and relish to the daintiest delicacies; so that if there be no one
of the guests naturally fool enough to be played upon by the rest,
they must procure some comical buffoon, that by his jokes and
flouts and blunders shall make the whole company split themselves
with laughing; for to what purpose were it to be stuffed and
crammed with so many dainty bits, savory dishes, and toothsome
rarities, if after all this epicurism, the eyes, the ears, and the
whole mind of man, were not so well foisted and relieved with
laughing, jesting, and such like divertisements, which, like second
courses, serve for the promoting of digestion? And as to all those
shoeing-horns of drunkenness, the keeping every one his man, the
throwing high jinks, the filling of bumpers, the drinking two in a
hand, the beginning of mistresses' healths; and then the roaring
out of drunken catches, the calling in a fiddler, the leading out
every one his lady to dance, and such like riotous pastimes--these
were not taught or dictated by any of the wise men of Greece, but
of Gotham rather, being my invention, and by me prescribed as the
best preservative of health: each of which, the more ridiculous it
is, the more welcome it finds. And indeed, to jog sleepingly
through the world, in a dumpish, melancholy posture, can not
properly be said to live.
[Illustration: BOOKER T. WASHINGTON]