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.