The Age of Erasmus

The Age of Erasmus.

by P. S. Allen.

I

THE ADWERT ACADEMY

The importance of biography for the study of history can hardly be overrated. In a sense it is true that history should be like the law and "care not about very small things"; concerning itself not so much with individual personality as with fundamental causes affecting the rise and fall of nations or the development of mental outlook from one age to another. But even if this be conceded, we still must not forget that the course of history is worked out by individuals, who, in spite of the accidental condensation that the needs of human life thrust upon them, are isolated at the last and alone--for no man may deliver his brother. In consequence, it is only in periods when the stream of personal record flows wide and deep that history begins to live, and that we have a chance to view it through the eyes of the actors instead of projecting upon it our own fancies and conceptions.

One of the features that makes the study of the Renaissance so fascinating is that in that age the stream of personal record, which had been driven underground, its course choked and hidden beneath the fallen masonry of the Roman Empire, emerges again unimpeded and flows in ever-increasing volume. For reconstruction of the past we are no longer limited to charters and inst.i.tutions, or the mighty works of men"s hands. In place of a mental output, rigidly confined within unbending modes of thought and expression, we have a literature that reflects the varied phases of human life, that can discard romance and look upon the commonplace; and instead of dry and meagre chronicles, rarely producing evidence at first hand, we have rich store of memoirs and private letters, by means of which we can form real pictures of individuals--approaching almost to personal acquaintance and intimacy--and regard the same events from many points of view, to perception of the circ.u.mstances that "alter cases".

The period of the Transalpine Renaissance corresponds roughly with the life of Erasmus (1466-1536); from the days when Northern scholars began to win fame for themselves in reborn Italy, until the width of the humanistic outlook was narrowed and the progress of the reawakened studies overwhelmed by the tornado of the Reformation. The aim of these lectures is not so much to draw the outlines of the Renaissance in the North as to present sketches of the world through which Erasmus pa.s.sed, and to view it as it appeared to him and to some of his contemporaries, famous or obscure. And firstly of the generation that preceded him in the wide but undefined region known then as Germany.

The Cistercian Abbey of Adwert near Groningen, under the enlightened governance of Henry of Rees (1449-85), was a centre to which were attracted most of the scholars whose names are famous in the history of Northern humanism in the second half of the fifteenth century: Wessel, Agricola, Hegius, Langen, Vrye, and others. They came on return from visits to Italy or the universities; men of affairs after discharge of their missions; schoolmasters to rest on their holidays; parish priests in quest of change: all found a welcome from the hospitable Abbot, and their talk ranged far and wide, over the pursuit of learning, till Adwert merited the name of an "Academy".

Earliest of these is John Wessel (d. 1489), and perhaps also the most notable; certainly the others looked up to him with a veneration which seems to transcend the natural pre-eminence of seniority.

Unfortunately the details of his life have not been fully established.

Thirty years after his death, when it was too late for him to define his own views, the Reformers claimed him for their own; and in consequence his body has been wrangled over with the heat which seeks not truth but victory. His father, Hermann Wessel, was a baker from the Westphalian village of Gansfort or Goesevort, who settled in Groningen. After some years in the town school, the boy was about to be apprenticed to a trade, as his parents were too poor to help him further; but the good Oda Jargis, hearing how well he had done at his books, sent him to the school at Zwolle, in which the Brethren of the Common Life took part. There, as at Groningen, he rose to the top, and in his last years, as a first-form boy, also did some teaching in the third form, according to the custom of the school. He came into contact with Thomas a Kempis, who was then at the monastery of Mount St. Agnes, half an hour outside Zwolle, and was profoundly influenced by him. The course at Zwolle lasted eight years, and there is reason to suppose that he completed it in full. He was lodged in the Parua Domus, a hostel for fifty boys, and we are told that he and his next neighbour made a hole through the wall which divided their rooms--probably only a wooden part.i.tion--and taught one another: Wessel imparting earthly wisdom, and receiving in exchange the fear and love of the Lord. In the autumn of 1449 he matriculated at Cologne, entering the Bursa Laurentiana; in December 1450 he was B.A., and in February 1452, M.A.

By 1455 he had arrived at Paris and entered upon his studies for the theological degree. Within a year he conceived a profound distaste for the philosophy dominant in the schools; and though he persevered for some time, his frequent dissension from his teachers earned for him the t.i.tle of "Magister contradictionis". After this his movements cannot be traced until 1470, when he was at Rome in the train of Cardinal Francesco della Rovere. In the interval he studied medicine, and, if report be true, travelled far; venturing into the East, just when the fall of Constantinople had turned the tide of h.e.l.lenism westward. In Greece he read Aristotle in the original, and learnt to prefer Plato; in Egypt he sought in vain for the books of Solomon and a mythical library of Hebrew treasures.

In 1471 his Cardinal-patron was elected Pope as Sixtus IV. The magnificence which characterized the poor peasant"s son in his dealings with Italy, in his embellishment of Rome and the Vatican, was not lacking in his treatment of Wessel. "Ask what you please as a parting gift", he said to the scholar, who was preparing to set out for Friesland. "Give me books from your library, Greek and Hebrew", was the request. "What? No benefice, no grant of office or fees? Why not?" "Because I don"t want them", came the quiet reply. The books were forthcoming--one, a Greek Gospels, was perhaps the parent of a copy which reached Erasmus for the second edition of his New Testament.

After his return to the North, Wessel was invited to Heidelberg, to aid the Elector Palatine, Philip, in restoring the University, _c._ 1477. He was without the degree in theology which would have enabled him to teach in that faculty, and was not even in orders: indeed a proposal that he should qualify by entering the lowest grade and receiving the tonsure, he contemptuously rejected. So the Theological Faculty would not hear him, but to the students in Arts he lectured on Greek and Hebrew and philosophy. For some years, too, he was physician to David of Burgundy, Bishop of Utrecht, whom he cured of gout by making him take baths of warm milk. The Bishop rewarded him by shielding him from the attacks of the Dominicans, who were incensed by his bold criticisms of Aquinas; and when age brought the desire for rest, the Bishop set him over a house of nuns at Groningen, and bought him the right to visit Mount St. Agnes whenever he liked, by paying for the board and lodging of this welcome guest.

Wessel"s last years were happily spent. He was the acknowledged leader of his society, and he divided his time between Mount St. Agnes and the sisters at Groningen, with occasional visits to Adwert. There he set about reviving the Abbey schools, one elementary, within its walls, the other more advanced, in a village near by; and Abbot Rees warmly supported him. Would-be pupils besought him to teach them Greek and Hebrew. Admiring friends came to hear him talk, and brought their sons to see this glory of their country--Lux mundi, as he was called.

Some fragments of his conversation have been preserved, the unquestioned judgements which his hearers loyally received. Of the Schoolmen he was contemptuous, with their honorific t.i.tles: "doctor angelic, doctor seraphic, doctor subtle, doctor irrefragable." "Was Thomas (Aquinas) a doctor? So am I. Thomas scarcely knew Latin, and that was his only tongue: I have a fair knowledge of the three languages. Thomas saw Aristotle only as a phantom: I have read him in Greece in his own words." To Ostendorp, then a young man, but afterwards to become head master of Deventer school, he gave the counsel: "Read the ancients, sacred and profane: modern doctors, with their robes and distinctions, will soon be drummed out of town." At Mount St. Agnes once he was asked why he never used rosary nor book of hours. "I try", he replied, "to pray always. I say the Lord"s Prayer once every day. Said once a year in the right spirit it would have more weight than all these vain repet.i.tions."

He loved to read aloud to the brethren on Sunday evenings; his favourite pa.s.sage being John xiii-xviii, the discourse at the Last Supper. As he grew older, he sometimes stumbled over his words. He was not an imposing figure, with his eyes somewhat a-squint and his slight limp; and sometimes the younger monks fell into a t.i.tter, irreverent souls, to hear him so eager in his reading and so unconscious. It was not his eyesight that was at fault: to the end he could read the smallest hand without any gla.s.ses, like his great namesake, John Wesley, whom a German traveller noticed on the packet-boat between Flushing and London reading the fine print of the Elzevir Virgil, with his eyes unaided, though at an advanced age.

On his death-bed Wessel was a.s.sailed with scepticism, and began to doubt about the truth of the Christian religion. But the cloud was of short duration. That supreme moment of revelation, which comes to every man once, is no time for fear. Patient hope cast out questioning, and he pa.s.sed through the deep waters with his eyes on the Cross which had been his guide through the life that was ending.

Of Rudolph Agricola we know more than of the others; his striking personality, it seems, moved many of his friends to put on record their impressions of him. One of the best of these sketches is by Goswin of Halen (d. 1530), who had been Wessel"s servant at Groningen, and had frequently met Agricola. Rudolph"s father, Henry Huusman, was the parish priest of Baflo, a village four hours to the north of Groningen; his mother being a young woman of the place, who subsequently married a local carrier. On 17 Feb. 1444 the priest was elected to be warden of a college of nuns at Siloe, close to Groningen, and in the same hour a messenger came running to him from Baflo, claiming the reward of good news and announcing the birth of a son. "Good," said the new warden; "this is an auspicious day, for it has twice made me father."

From the moment he could walk, the boy was pa.s.sionately fond of music; the sound of church bells would bring him toddling out into the street, or the thrummings of the blind beggars as they went from house to house playing for alms; and he would follow strolling pipers out of the gates into the country, and only be driven back by a show of violence. When he was taken to church, all through the ma.s.s his eyes were riveted upon the organ and its bellows; and as he grew older he made himself a syrinx with eight or nine pipes out of willow-bark. He was taught to ride on horseback, and early became adept in pole-jumping whilst in the saddle, an art which the Frieslanders of that age had evolved to help their horses across the broad rhines of their country. In 1456, when he was just 12, he matriculated at Erfurt, and in May 1462 at Cologne. But the course of his education is not clear, and though it is known that he reached the M.A. at Louvain, the date of this degree is not certain. He is also said to have been at the University of Paris.

Of his life at Louvain some details are given by Geldenhauer (d. 1542) in a sketch written about fifty years after Agricola"s death. The University had been founded in 1426 to meet the needs of Belgian students, who for higher education had been obliged to go to Cologne or Paris, or more distant universities. Agricola entered Kettle College, which afterwards became the college of the Falcon, and soon distinguished himself among his fellow-students. They admired the ease with which he learnt French--not the rough dialect of Hainault, but the polite language of the court. With many his musical tastes were a bond of sympathy, in a way which recalls the evenings that Henry Bradshaw used to spend among the musical societies of Bruges and Lille when he was working in Belgian libraries; and on all sides men frankly acknowledged his intellectual pre-eminence as they marked his quiet readiness in debate and heard him pose the lecturers with acute questions. By nature he was silent and absorbed, and often in company he would sit deaf to all questions, his elbows on the table and biting his nails. But when roused he was at once captivating; and this unintended rudeness never lost him a friend. There was a small band of true humanists, who, as Geldenhauer puts it, "had begun to love purity of Latin style"; to them he was insensibly attracted, and spent with them over Cicero and Quintilian hours filched from the study of Aristotle. Later in life he openly regretted having spent as much as seven years over the scholastic philosophy, which he had learnt to regard as profitless.

From 1468 to 1479 he was for the most part in Italy, except for occasional visits to the North, when we see him staying with his father at Siloe, and, in 1474, teaching Greek to Hegius at Emmerich.

Many positions were offered to him already; gifts such as his have not to stand waiting in the marketplace. But his wits were not homely, and the world called him. Before he could settle he must see many men and many cities, and learn what Italy had to teach him.

For the first part of his time there, until 1473, he was at Pavia studying law and rhetoric; but on his return from home in 1474 he went to Ferrara in order to enjoy the better opportunities for learning Greek afforded by the court of Duke Hercules of Este and its circle of learned men. His description of the place is interesting: "The town is beautiful, and so are the women. The University has not so many faculties as Pavia, nor are they so well attended; but _literae humaniores_ seem to be in the very air. Indeed, Ferrara is the home of the Muses--and of Venus." One special delight to him was that the Duke had a fine organ, and he was able to indulge what he describes as his "old weakness for the organs". In October 1476, at the opening of the winter term of the University, the customary oration before the Duke was delivered by Rodolphus Agricola Phrysius. His eloquence surprised the Italians, coming from so outlandish a person: "a Phrygian, I believe", said one to another, with a contemptuous shrug of the shoulders. But Agricola, with his chestnut-brown hair and blue eyes, was no Oriental; only a Frieslander from the North, whose cold climate to the superb Italians seemed as benumbing to the intellect as we consider that of the Esquimaux.

During this period Agricola translated Isocrates _ad Demonic.u.m_ and the _Axiochus de contemnenda morte_, a dialogue wrongly attributed to Plato, which was a favourite in Renaissance days. Also he completed the chief composition of his lifetime, the _De inuentione dialectica_, a considerable treatise on rhetoric. His favourite books, Geldenhauer tells us, were Pliny"s Natural History, the younger Pliny"s Letters, Quintilian"s _Inst.i.tutio Oratoria_, and selections from Cicero and Plato. These were his travelling library, carried with him wherever he went; two of them, Pliny"s Letters and Quintilian, he had copied out with his own hand. Other books, as he acquired them, he planted out in friends" houses as pledges of return.

In 1479 he left Italy and went home. On his way he stayed for some months with the Bishop of Augsburg at Dillingen, on the Danube, and there translated Lucian"s _De non facile credendis delationibus_. A ma.n.u.script of Homer sorely tempted him to stay on through the winter.

He felt that without Homer his knowledge of Greek was incomplete; and he proposed to copy it out from beginning to end, or at any rate the Iliad. But home called him, and he went on. At Spires, in quest of ma.n.u.scripts, he went with a friend to the cathedral library. He describes it as not bad for Germany, though it contained nothing in Greek, and only a few Latin ma.n.u.scripts of any interest--a Livy and a Pliny, very old, but much injured and the texts corrupt--and nothing at all that could be called eloquence, that is to say, pure literature.

When he had been a little while in Groningen, the town council bethought them to turn his talents and learning to some account. He was a fine figure of a man, who would make a creditable show in conducting their business; and for composing the elegant Latin epistles, which every respectable corporation felt bound to rise to on occasions, no one was better equipped than he. He was retained as town secretary, and in the four years of his service went on frequent emba.s.sies. During the first year we hear of him visiting his father at Siloe, and contracting a friendship with one of the nuns[1]; to whom he afterwards sent a work of Eucherius, bishop of Lyons, which he had found in a ma.n.u.script at Roermond. Twice he visited Brussels on emba.s.sy to Maximilian; and in the next year he followed the Archduke"s court for several months, visiting Antwerp, and making the acquaintance of Barbiriau, the famous musician. Maximilian offered him the post of tutor to his children and Latin secretary to himself; the town of Antwerp invited him to become head of their school. He might easily have accepted. He was not altogether happy at Groningen. His countrymen had done him honour, but they had no real appreciation for learning, and some of them were boorish and cross-grained. It was the old story of Pegasus in harness; the practical men of business and the scholar impatient of restraint. His parents, too, were now both dead--in 1480, within a few months of each other--and such homes as he had had, with his father amongst the nuns at Siloe and with his mother in the house of her husband the tranter, were therefore closed to him.

And yet neither invitation attracted him. Friesland was his native land; and for all his wanderings the love of it was in his blood.

Adwert, too, was near, and Wessel. He refused, and stayed on in his irksome service.

[1] In view of Geldenhauer"s testimony to Agricola"s high character in this respect, we need not question, as does Goswin of Halen, the nature of this intimacy.

But in 1482 came an offer he could not resist. An old friend of Pavia days, John of Dalberg, for whom he had written the oration customary on his installation as Rector in 1474, had just been appointed Bishop of Worms. He invited Agricola for a visit, and urged him to come and join him; living partly as a friend in the Bishop"s household, partly lecturing at the neighbouring University of Heidelberg. The opening was just such as Agricola wished, and he eagerly accepted; but circ.u.mstances at Groningen prevented him from redeeming his promise until the spring of 1484. For little more than a year he rejoiced in the new position, which gave full scope for his abilities. Then he set out to Rome with Dalberg, their business being to deliver the usual oration of congratulation to Innocent VIII on his election. On the way back he fell ill of a fever at Trent, and the Bishop had to leave him behind. He recovered enough to struggle back to Heidelberg, but only to die in Dalberg"s arms on 27 Oct. 1485, at the age of 41.

Few men of letters have made more impression on their contemporaries; and yet his published writings are scanty. The generation that followed sought for his ma.n.u.scripts as though they were of the cla.s.sics; but thirty years elapsed before the _De inuentione dialectica_ was printed, and more than fifty before there was a collected edition. Besides his letters the only thing which has permanent value is a short educational treatise, _De formando studio_, which he wrote in 1484, and addressed to Barbiriau--some compensation to the men of Antwerp for his refusal to come to them. His work was to learn and to teach rather than to write. To learn Greek when few others were learning it, and when the apparatus of grammar and dictionary had to be made by the student for himself, was a task to consume even abundant energies; and still more so, if Hebrew, too, was to be acquired. But though he left little, the fire of his enthusiasm did not perish with him; pa.s.sing on by tradition, it kindled in others whom he had not known, the flame of interest in the wisdom of the ancients.

Another member of the Adwert gatherings was Alexander of Heck in Westphalia, hence called Hegius (1433-98). He was an older man than Agricola, but was not ashamed to learn of him when an opportunity offered to acquire Greek. His enthusiasm was for teaching; and to that he gave his life, first at Wesel, then at Emmerich, and finally for fifteen years at Deventer, where he had many eminent humanists under his care--Erasmus, William Herman, Mutia.n.u.s Rufus, Hermann Busch, John Faber, John Murmell, Gerard Geldenhauer. Butzbach, who was the last pupil he admitted, and who saw him buried in St. Lebuin"s church on a winter"s evening at sunset, describes him at great length; and besides his learning and simplicity, praises the liberality with which he gave all that he had to help the needy: living in the house of another (probably Richard Paffraet, the printer) and sharing expenses, and leaving at his death no possessions but his books and a few clothes.

And yet he was master of a school which had over 2000 boys.

Rudolph Langen of Munster (1438-1519) was another who was known at Adwert. He matriculated at Erfurt in the same year as Agricola, and was M.A. there in 1460. A canonry at Munster gave him maintenance for his life, and he devoted his energies to learning. Twice he visited Italy, in 1465 and 1486; and in 1498 he succeeded in establishing a school at Munster on humanistic lines, and wished Hegius to become head master, but in vain. Nevertheless it rapidly rivalled the fame of Deventer.

Finally, Antony Vrye (Liber) of Soest deserves record, since he has contributed somewhat to our knowledge of Adwert. He also was a schoolmaster, and taught at various times at Emmerich, Campen, Amsterdam, and Alcmar. In 1477 he published a volume ent.i.tled _Familiarium Epistolarum Compendium_, the composition of which ill.u.s.trates the catholic tastes of the humanists; for it contains selections from the letters of Cicero, Jerome, Symmachus, and the writers of the Italian Renaissance. But he chiefly merits our grat.i.tude for including in the book a number of letters which pa.s.sed between the visitors to Adwert and their friends, together with some of his own. The pleasant relations existing in this little society may be ill.u.s.trated by the fact that when Vrye"s son John had reached student age, the Adwert friends subscribed to pay his expenses at a university; and thus secured him an education which enabled him to become Syndic of Campen.

A few extracts from their letters will serve to show some of the characteristics of the age, its wide interest in the past, theological as well as cla.s.sical; its eager search for ma.n.u.scripts, and the freedom with which its libraries were opened; its concern for education, and its att.i.tude towards the old learning; and the extent of its actual achievements. The earliest of these letters that survive are a series written by Langen from Adwert in the spring of 1469 to Vrye at Soest. Despite the grave interest in serious study that the letters show, there are human touches about them. One begins: "You promised faithfully to return, and yet you have not come. But I cannot blame you; for the road is deep in mud, and I myself too am so feeble a walker that I can imagine the weariness of others" feet." Another ends in haste, not with the departure of the post, but "The servants are waiting to conduct me to bed". Here is a longer sample:

I. LANGEN TO VRYE: from Adwert, 27 Feb. <1469>.

"Why do you delay so long to gratify the wishes of our devout friend Wolter? With my own hand I have transcribed the little book of _Elegantiae_, as far as the section about the reckoning of the Kalends. I greatly desire to have this precious work complete; so do send me the portion we lack as soon as you can.

The little book will be my constant companion: I know nothing that has such value in so narrow a span. How brilliant Valla is! he has raised up Latin to glory from the bondage of the barbarians. May the earth lie lightly on him and the spring shine ever round his urn! Even if the book is not by Valla himself, it must come from his school.

"I write in haste and with people talking all round me, from whom politeness will not let me sit altogether aloof. But read carefully and you will understand me. At least I hope this letter won"t be quite so barbarous as the monstrosities which the usher from Osnabruck sends you every day: they sound like the spells of witches to bring up their familiar spirits, or the enchantments "Fecana kageti", &c., which open locks whoever knocks. Poor Latin! it is worse handled than was Regulus by the Carthaginians. Forgive this scrawl: I am writing by candlelight."

We shall have other occasions to notice the admiration of the Northern humanists for Lorenzo Valla (d. 1457), the master of Latin style, and the audacious Canon of the Lateran, who could apply the spirit of criticism not only to the New Testament but even to the Donation of Constantine.

2. VRYE TO ARNOLD OF HILDESHEIM (Schoolmaster at Emmerich):

Cologne, _c._ 1477>.

"I have still a great many things to do, but I shall not begin upon them till the printed books from Cologne arrive at Deventer. My plan was to go to Heidelberg, Freiburg, Basle and some of the universities in the East and then return to Deventer through Saxony and Westphalia. But at Coblenz I met four men from Strasburg who declared that Upper Germany was almost all overrun by soldiers. This unexpected alarm has compelled me to dispose of the 1500 copies of _The Revival of Latin_ amongst the schools.[2] After visiting Deventer and Zwolle I shall go to Louvain, and then, if it is safe, to Paris. I thought you ought to know of this change in my plans; that you might not be taken by surprise at finding me gone westwards instead of into Upper Germany.

"Please take great pains over the correction of the ma.n.u.scripts."

[2] particularibus studiis.

3. AGRICOLA TO HEGIUS

"I was very sorry to learn from your letter that you had been here just when I was away. There are so few opportunities of meeting any one who cares for learning that you would have been most welcome. My position becomes increasingly distasteful to me: since I left Italy, I forget everything--the cla.s.sics, history, even how to write with any style. In prose I can get neither ideas nor language. Such as come only serve to fill the page with awkward, disjointed sentences. Verse I hardly ever attempt, and when I do, there is no flow about it; sometimes the lines almost refuse to scan. The fact is that I can find no one here who is interested in these things. If only we were together!

"My youngest brother Henry has been fired with the desire to study. I have advised him against it, but as he persists, I do not like to do more. For the last six months he has been with Frederic Mormann at Munster, and has made some progress: but now Mormann has been sent as Rector to a house

[3] victui necessaria, vt solent nostrates. Victus is commonly used in the technical sense of "board"; but here the meaning probably is "the usual outfit for a schoolboy". Gebwiler, in 1530, required a boy coming to his school at Hagenau to be provided with "a bed, sheets, pillow, and other necessaries".

[4] diuersorium.

[5] capitiati.