The Stultifera Navis, or Ship of Fools, composed in verse by Sebastian
Brandt, a learned German civilian, is a general satire on society. It
has been translated into verse, or turned into prose, in almost every
European language; and no work of such dimensions has been made so
familiar to general readers.
There are works whose design displays the most striking originality;
but, alas! there are so many infelicitous modes of execution! To freight
a ship with fools, collected from all the classes and professions of
society, would have been a creative idea in the brain of Lucian, or
another pilgrimage for the personages of Chaucer; and natural or
grotesque incidents would have started from the invention of Rabelais.
These men of genius would have sportively navigated their "Ship," and
not have driven aboard fool after fool, an undistinguishable shoal, by
the mere brutal force of the pen, only to sermonise with a tedious
homily or a critical declamation. Erasmus playfully threw out a small
sparkling volume on folly, which we still open; Brandt furnishes a
massive tome, with fools huddled together; and while we lose our own, we
are astonished at his patience.
The severity of this decision, we own, is that of a critic of the
nineteenth century on an author of the sixteenth.
It is amusing to observe the perplexities of an eminent French critic,
Monsieur Guizot, in his endeavour to decide on the "Stultifera Navis." A
critic of his school could not rightly comprehend how it happened that
so dull a book had been a popular one, multiplied by editions in all the
languages of Europe. "It is," says M. Guizot, "a collection of
extravagant or of gross _plaisanteries_--which may have been poignant at
their time, but which at this day have no other merit than that of
having had great success three hundred years ago." The salt of
plaisanteries cannot be damped by three centuries, provided they were
such; but our author is by no means facetious: he is much too downright;
the tone is invariably condemnatory or exhortative; and the Proverbs,
the Psalms, and Jeremiah, are more frequently appealed to than Cicero,
Horace, and Ovid, who occasionally show their heads in his margin.
We must look somewhat deeper would we learn why a book which now tries
our patience was not undeserving of those multiplied editions which have
ascertained its popularity.
At the period when this volume appeared, we in the north were far
removed from the urbanity and the elevated ethics of lettered Italy.
Brandt took this general view of society at the time when the
illustrious Castiglione was an ambassador to our Henry the Seventh, and
was meditating to model the manners of his countrymen by his _Libro
dell' Cortigiano_; and La Casa, by his _Galateo_, was founding a code of
minute politeness. But neither France, nor Germany, nor England, had yet
greatly advanced in the civil intercourse of life, and could not
appreciate such exility of elegance, and such sublimated refinement.
With us, the staple of our moral philosophy was of a homespun but firm
texture, and had in it more of yarn than of silk. Men had little to
read; they were not weary of that eternal iteration of admonition on
whatever was most painful or most despicable in their conduct; their
ideas were uncertain, and their minds remained to be developed; nothing
was trite or trivial. In his wide survey of human life, the author
addressed the mundane fools of his age in the manner level to their
comprehension; the ethical character of the volume was such, that the
Abbot Trithemus designated it as a divine book; and in this volume,
which read like a homily, while every man beheld the reflection of his
own habits and thoughts, he chuckled over the sayings and doings of his
neighbours. If any one quipped the profession of another, the sufferer
had only to turn the leaf to find ample revenge; and these were the
causes of the uninterrupted popularity of this ethical work.
"The Ship of Fools" is, indeed, cumbrous, rude, and inartificial, and
was not constructed on the principles which regulate our fast-sailing
vessels; yet it may be prized for something more than its curiosity. It
is an ancient satire, of that age of simplicity which must precede an
age of refinement.
If man in society changes his manners, he cannot vary his species; man
remains nothing but man; for, however disguised by new modes of acting,
the same principles of our actions are always at work. The same follies
and the same vices in their result actuate the human being in all ages;
and he who turns over the volume of the learned civilian of Germany will
find detailed those great moral effects in life which, if the modern
moralist may invest with more dignity, he could not have discovered with
more truth. We have outgrown his counsels, but we never shall elude the
vexatious consequences of his experience; and many a chapter in the
"Ship of Fools" will point many an argument _ad hominum_, and awaken in
the secret hours of our reminiscences the pang of contrite sorrows, or
tingle our cheek with a blush for our weaknesses. The truths of human
nature are ever echoing in our breasts.
"The Ship of Fools," by Alexander Barclay--a volume of renown among
literary antiquaries, and of rarity and price--is at once a translation
and an original. In octave stanza, flowing in the ballad measure,
Barclay has a natural construction of style still retaining a vernacular
vigour. He is noticed by Warton for having contributed his share in the
improvement of English phraseology; and, indeed, we are often surprised
to discover many felicities of our native idiom; and the work, though it
should be repulsive to some for its black-letter, is perfectly
intelligible to a modern reader. The verse being prosaic, preserves its
colloquial ease, though with more gravity than suits sportive subjects;
we sometimes feel the tediousness of the good sense of the Priest of St.
Mary Ottery.
The edition of 1570 of the "Ship of Fooles"[1] contains other
productions of Barclay. In his "Eclogues,"[2] our good priest, who did
not write, as he says, "for the laud of man," indulged his ethical and
theological vein in pastoral poetry; and the interlocutors are citizens
disputing with men of the country, and poets with their patrons. To have
converted shepherds into scholastic disputants or town-satirists was an
unnatural change; but this whimsical taste had been introduced by
Petrarch and Mantuan; and the first eclogues in the English language,
which Warton tells us are those of Barclay, took this strange form--an
incongruity our Spenser had not the skill to avoid, and for which Milton
has been censured. The less fortunate anomalies of genius are often
perpetuated by the inconsiderate imitation of those who should be most
sensible of their deformity.
In the eclogues of Barclay, the country is ever represented in an
impoverished, depressed state; and the splendour of the city, and the
luxurious indulgence of the citizen and the courtier, offer a singular
contrast to the extreme misery of the agriculturist. We may infer that
the country had been deplorably ravaged or neglected in the civil wars,
which, half a century afterwards, was to be covered by the fat beeves of
the graziers of Elizabeth.