Then comes in the stove again.
Hutten was, as well he might be, rather more angered than appeased by this missive, and soon printed his Expostulatio cum Erasmo.[146]
Erasmus had had to hear a good many bitter words in the years just past, but never such stinging reproaches as these. Doubtless the personal element played its part in adding a final goad to Hutten's indignation; but the Expostulatio is far from being a mere personal reply to real or fancied wrongs. It is a scathing review of the whole attitude of Erasmus towards the reform. The chief note of the charge is cowardice, deceit, and time-serving. The underlying assumption throughout is that Erasmus was really in sympathy with the whole attack upon the church order from Reuchlin onwards. This assumption is proved out of his own mouth. At every new stage of the reform he was shown to have expressed approval, only to change approval into condemnation as soon as there was a prospect that anything would be done. So, on the other hand, Hutten shows Erasmus attacking all the enemies of reform, the pope, Aleander, Hoogstraaten, and the rest, and then changing his tone to a weak, snivelling flattery as soon as he saw any danger in prospect. A few specimens will illustrate the vigour and openness of Hutten's method. After the twistings and turnings of Erasmus' style, his reads like a model of strength and directness.
"Because of my health, or for some other reason, I could not be away from my stove long enough to speak with you once or twice in the whole fifty days I spent at Basel, though I would often stand talking with friends in the midst of the market-place for three hours at a time! Well, that is quite like your sincerity, to take a perfectly simple thing and give it a false colouring and to cover up the truth with an empty show.
"As I thought the matter over attentively several reasons occurred to me why, perhaps, you might thus have fallen away from yourself. First, your insatiable ambition for fame, your greed for glory, which makes it impossible for you to bear the growing powers of anyone else; and then the lack of steadiness in your mind, which has always displeased me in you as unworthy of your greatness and led me to believe that you were terror-stricken by the threats of these men.... Finally I explain it to myself by the pettiness of your mind, which makes you afraid of everything and easily thrown into despair; for you had so little faith in the progress of our cause, especially when you saw that some of the chief princes of Germany were conspiring against us, that straightway you thought you must not only desert us, but must also seek their good-will by every possible means."
Referring to Erasmus' charge that the Lutherans had set on foot a rumour that Hoogstraaten had burned his books, in order to make him write against the Church, Hutten says:
"Now, supposing it was our purpose to draw you into our party, how could we hope to do it easily in this way, since it was perfectly certain that you would never dare to do anything against him or anybody else until you saw exactly how the land lay—unless, indeed, Switzerland be so far from Brabant that we could hope you would hear nothing from there for a whole year! Away with this simple-heartedness of yours to some other world! Our Germany knows no such morals as these.
"When the Epistolæ obscurorum came out, you approved and applauded more than anyone else; you gave the author a regular triumph; you said there had never been discovered a more complete way of attacking those people; that barbarians ought to be ridiculed in barbarous language; and you congratulated us on our cleverness. Before our fooleries were printed, you copied some of them with your own hand, saying: 'I must send these to my friends in England and France.' But soon after, when you saw that the whole muck of the theologers were much disturbed and that the hornets were stirred up in all directions and were threatening ruin, you began to tremble, and lest suspicion might fall upon you that you were the author or that you approved the plan, you wrote a letter with that same candour of yours to Cologne, trying to get ahead of the rumours and making a great pretence of sympathy with them and regret at the affair and saying many things against the whole business and abusing the authors."
If Erasmus is such a man of peace, why, asks Hutten, does he now so bitterly attack the reformers? Some people had long since accused him of treachery, but at that time no one would believe them and Erasmus was satisfied to put it all upon the Fates:
"a fine notion and, as we now see, truly Erasmian! You say that, being the man you are, you must deal with Germans after their own fashion. Well, this is not the way of Germans, but of men whose fickleness and inconstancy are altogether foreign to Germans, men who can be tossed about hither and thither by every change of wind, with whom nothing is fixed, but everything slippery and shifting with the changes of fortune. Get you to Italy with such doings, to those cardinals whom you are now taking under your wing, where everyone may live according to his own morals and his own character! Or else get back to your own French-Dutchmen, if, perhaps, this is a national vice and one common to you and them!"