Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam

by Ephraim Emerton

"But not satisfied with raging against me with such fury when I was present, he pursued me when I had fled from him and, out of hatred to me, rages against you, the dearest part of my soul—rages, I say, with that most terrible of human weapons, with slander. O poison of snakes, worse than any aconite, than any froth from the fangs of Cerberus! That a monster like this should gaze upon the fair light of the sun, should breathe,—nay! poison the vital air! That our common earth should bear such a disgrace! The imagination of the Poets was never able to conjure up a mischief so horrible, so pestilent, so accursed that this monster would not easily surpass it. For what Cerberus, what Sphinx, what Chimæra, what Tisiphone, what hobgoblin can rightly be compared with this evil thing which Gothia [?] has lately spewed out upon us? What scorpion, what viper, what basilisk has its poison handier? Venomous things seldom give forth their poison except when irritated. Lions repay kindness with kindness; dragons grow gentle under kind treatment; but this old man is made mad by good-will. There is a poisoned soul for you!

"Now that you may see how solid is my proof; if one marks carefully his savage face, the whole habit of his body, does not one seem to see as it were the very image of all vices? And herein is the wisdom of Nature to be praised, that she has pent this soul of deformity in a fitting body. Beneath the bristling forest of his eyebrows lurk his retreating eyes with their savage gaze. A brow of stone, that in his evil doing no blush of shame may ever be seen. His nostrils, filled with a grove of bristles, puff out a polypus. His cheeks are drooping, his lips livid, his voice belched out rather than breathed out—such is the man's impotence—you would think him barking rather than speaking. His twisted neck, his crooked legs—nothing that Nature has not branded with some stigma. So we brand criminals and malefactors; so we hang a bell upon a biting dog; so we mark a vicious ox by the hay bound about his horns.

"To share my learning with this base monster! for his sake to waste so much time, talent and energy! If this had gone for naught, I should be less wretched, for now I see that I have sown the dragon's teeth and they are springing up to my destruction."

This is about one half of the letter. It is evident that Erasmus was in good training for the choicest specimens of personal abuse which he was later to produce. The remainder of the letter is filled with flattery of young Grey laid on with as liberal a hand as was the abuse of the unfortunate "old man." The burden of this part of the letter is to console Grey for being still under the power of his tormentor, and to urge him to new effort and to self-reliance in his studies. Out of the confusion of vague references and later surmises as to who this unpleasant being was, one can get a certain unity and form such conjecture as one will. It seems probable that he was some Englishman of mature years and of good family who had been sent over to Paris as a guardian for the two young noblemen, Mountjoy and Grey; that he had engaged Erasmus as tutor, to live at their lodgings and to include himself in his instruction; that some cause, perhaps some looseness of morals on Erasmus' part, had brought them to a quarrel, in consequence of which Erasmus was forced to throw up his engagement. On the other hand, it is clear that no father would have intrusted his son to such a monster of physical and moral deformity as is here described. Just what Erasmus means by saying that "Gothia" was responsible for him I cannot make out. The whole episode is interesting only as throwing light on the development of our scholar in his style and his character.

That Erasmus, eager and diligent student as he surely was, did not entirely escape the allurements of the Latin Quarter is plain from later references of his own. Probably he is referring to some such experiences in a letter[31] written about this time to the friend whom Mr. Froude jauntily calls William Gauden, and who is the same William Hermann of Gouda to whom we have already alluded. This William had evidently written him a reproachful letter, but we do not learn clearly the grounds of his reproof. Erasmus ascribes his irritation to the tattling of some enemy and beseeches him at great length to trust rather his own personal knowledge and his memory of their lifelong friendship than any such calumny. He represents himself as plunged in the depths of misery. He would rather die than endure longer the burden of such a life. It is not life at all; it is mere existence. Doubtless this is mostly rhetoric, but the true state of the writer's mind seems to come out in a passage in which he refers to certain definite persons well known to the receiver, though obscure to us. The upshot of his gloomy reflections is:

"This is the kind of a moral atmosphere (moribus) we have to live in; and so we have to follow that saying of Chilo: 'So love as if thou wert one day to hate, and so hate as if thou wert one day to love.'"

This letter illustrates well traits of Erasmus which were to become very marked in his future work. He was already showing that joy in the idea of being persecuted which later seems to have reacted on his memory of his earliest years. It flattered his vanity to think that men cared enough about him to abuse him, and such abuse gave him an added claim upon the devotion of his friends. His nature demanded affection and admiration, and he was ready to repay them in kind, so long as he thereby incurred no lasting or burdensome obligation.

These singular contradictions of Erasmus' nature are most clearly brought out in his early correspondence with his friend Battus, a young man whom he met at Cambrai, and who became tutor to the son of the Marchioness of Veere. In connection with Battus, also, we learn to know Erasmus for the first time as a suitor for patronage. The Battus letters, some score in number, cover the period just before and just after his first trip to England, that is, about the year 1500. We are to think of him at this time as firmly fixed in his determination to be a scholar and, to this end, to get to Italy as soon as ever it might be possible. He wanted to take his doctor's degree there, and thought of Italy as a scholar's paradise. But to gain this great privilege he was not prepared for every sacrifice. One is apt to think of Erasmus as a wanderer, and with good reason, but after all he had little of the typical Bohemian in him. He was, it is true, a poor youth, but his poverty was always a comfortable poverty. There was nothing, apparently, to prevent him from taking his staff in his hand and making his way on foot, if need were, as many another poor scholar had done, to the goal of his desires. That was Luther's method of seeing Italy, under a very different impulse. Probably nothing would have done so much to chase away the megrims that were always pestering him. He would have had less reason to complain of his digestion and his bad sleeping—but if he could not have complained he would, perhaps, have been unhappier still. Meanwhile, he had to have books, he must eat only just such food as seemed to suit him, he kept a horse, and could not think of a journey without at least one servant and two horses. Italy seemed indefinitely far away. Private tutoring was a slippery source of revenue; frequent visitations of the plague scattered his pupils and he had to cast about him for ways and means. There were two resources: a place with an income and, presumably, with duties attached to it, or a patron. For obvious reasons, he preferred the latter.