Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam

by Ephraim Emerton

"Even to-day," said the orator, "there are not wanting those who croak into the ears of kings such stuff as this:—'Why should you hesitate? Have you forgotten that you are a prince? Is not your pleasure the law? It is the part of kings to live not by rule but by the lust of their own hearts. Whatever any of your subjects has, that belongs to you. It is yours to give life and to take it away; yours to make or to ruin the fortunes of whom you will. Others are praised or blamed, but to you everything is honourable, everything praiseworthy. Will you listen to those philosophers and scholastics?... Seal your ears with wax, most noble Duke, against the fatal song of these Sirens; like Homer's Ulysses, or rather, like Virgil's Æneas, steer your course so far from their coast that the poison of their seductive voices may not touch the soundness of your mind."

"By what names we call you, it matters little to you, for you do not think yourself to be other than what Homer calls the 'shepherd of the people' or Plato its 'guardian.' You have discovered a new way to increase the revenues of your nobles and of yourself: by diminishing expense instead of increasing taxes. Oh! wonderful soul! you deprive yourself that your subjects may abound; you deny yourself that there may be the more for the multitude. You keep watch, that we may sleep in safety. You are wearied with continual anxieties, that your own may have peace. You wear your princedom, not for yourself, but for your land."

"The Astrologers declare that in certain years there appear long-tailed stars which bring mighty convulsions into human affairs, touching both the minds and the bodies of men with fatal force and terribly affecting rivers, seas, earth, and air. But no comet can arise so fatal to the earth as a bad prince, nor any planet so healthful as a blameless ruler."

The most striking part of the panegyric, however, is that which compares the virtues of peace with those of war. Here Erasmus makes his first great declaration of principles as to the absolute wickedness and folly of war and henceforth, during his whole life, he never failed to repeat and to emphasise them. We cannot account for this consistent attitude on any theory of personal timidity or even on the ground that the scholar's work demanded peace for its full development. This latter argument we do find in Erasmus, but it might equally well be turned in favour of war as furnishing those stirring episodes and kindling that enthusiasm for heroic deeds which have always been inspiring to literary genius. Erasmus was sincerely and profoundly impressed with the enormous waste of energy which war seemed to imply and believed with all his heart that the motives leading to it were almost invariably bad. In a day when the peoples of Europe were continually involved in wars and rumours of wars, it was an act of no little courage for this solitary scholar to stand before a great assembly of princes and plead the sacred cause of peace.

Considerable ingenuity is shown in his clever reply to the argument that peace is enervating to the ruler. Bravery, Erasmus says, is far easier in war, for we see that a very poor kind of man may show it there; but to govern the spirit, to control desire, to put a bridle upon greed, to restrain the temper,—that kind of courage is peculiar to the wise and good. Of all these peaceful virtues he declares Philip to be the model, and it is of little account to us whether this praise be well or ill applied. Our interest is in the growth of Erasmus' own ideas and the part they had in fitting him for the work he was to do. His description of the miseries of war is a really noble piece of eloquence and reason.

We shall have occasion again to refer to Erasmus' peace propaganda. Enough here that he had the courage to speak his mind under circumstances which might well have led a less manly orator to dwell upon the glory and profit of a warlike policy. His listener, involved as he was at that moment in as tangled a web of negotiations as ever European diplomacy had yet woven, must have smiled in his sleeve at this harmless pedantry of the worthy scholar. Certainly no action of his life up to that time or in the short years left to him can indicate any preference for peace for its own sake.

More grateful, doubtless, to the princely ears were Erasmus' prognostications of his future. He had no faith in astrology, but he seemed to see in the evident trend of European affairs an accumulation of powers in the hand of duke Philip, which was to be realised in the person of his son Charles. The orator lets himself go in laudation of Maximilian, Ferdinand, Joanna, and Philip himself, with confident prediction of a magnificent future. In fact Maximilian's career was a series of brilliant failures. Ferdinand was in continual dread of Philip and often in open hostility with him. Joanna was already showing traces of that hopeless insanity, aggravated it was said by the cruel frivolities of Philip, which was to taint the house of Habsburg to this day. Finally Philip was to die of disease within two years, without realising any of the schemes of aggrandisement to which his life was devoted.

But if Erasmus' prophecy was bad, his scheme of princely morals, as here laid down, was good, and it indicates clearly the bent of his serious thought. A man with his sense of humour—in other words, with his common sense—could not fail to see the discrepancy between the actual Philip and the being whom he had here depicted. When he came to publish his panegyric he found it necessary to defend himself against the charge of falsehood. In a letter[66] to his friend Paludanus, professor of rhetoric at Louvain, he goes at considerable length into the obligation of a writer of such things to tell the truth. He supports his own action by reference to classic panegyrists and lays down the general principle, that one can do more to help a prince by praising him for virtues he has not, than by blaming him for the faults he has.

"Just," he says, "as the best of physicians declares to his patient that he likes his colour and the expression of his face, not because these things are so, but that he may make them so. Augustine, so they say, confesses that he told many a lie in praise of emperors. Paul the apostle himself not infrequently employs the device of pious adulation, praising in order that he may reform."