Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam

by Ephraim Emerton

This friendly beginning with Aldus had its immediate consequence for Erasmus. He gave up his intention—if he had ever had it—of going to Rome at Christmas, 1507, and we next find him in the early part of 1508 at Venice. He had thrown up the care of the young Boerios, for reasons, perhaps, connected with his dislike of their attendant, but certainly without any break with the lads themselves.

The specific purpose of Erasmus in going to Venice was to prepare a new edition of his Adages, the first edition of which we noted as made at Paris in 1500. Eight years of continuous occupation with classic literature, and especially the progress he had meanwhile made in the study of Greek, had given him an immensely increased acquaintance with the kind of material he wished to use for this collection. How far he had prepared the way by correspondence we do not know; but it would seem that he went at the work at once and kept on with it very steadily for about nine months. The peculiar nature of the Adages, a mere collection of disconnected paragraphs without any natural order or arrangement of any sort, made it possible for Erasmus to work in a fashion very different from his usual one. It was simply a question of getting the thing along bit by bit, and so we find him sending in a daily instalment of "copy" and taking away a daily batch of proof. The first typographical corrections were made by a paid proof-reader, then the author corrected, and finally Aldus himself read the proof, not so much, as he once said in reply to a question of Erasmus, to ensure correctness as for his own instruction.

We gain from many scattered indications a picture, on the whole very attractive, of this new activity.[76] It was Erasmus' first experience as a fellow-worker with anyone, and it had its uncomfortable aspects of course, or he would not have been Erasmus. His critics, notably Scaliger, would have it afterward, on the authority of Aldus himself, that Erasmus was little more than a paid assistant in the printing-office, and one is at a loss to know why so honourable an occupation should have seemed an occasion for reviling him or worth his own while to deny. The obvious refutation lies in the great amount of work required by the Adages themselves. He must have been busy enough to refute other charges of Scaliger as to his laziness. Whatever else he may have been, he was not lazy then nor at any other time of his life. As to still another accusation we may perhaps have our doubts. Scaliger says: "While you were doing the work of half a man, reading [proof?] in Aldus' office, you were a three-bodied Geryon for drinking."

The view of Erasmus at Venice which is reflected in Scaliger's tirade may have come from the undoubted familiarity of Erasmus' relation with Aldus and his family. Probably the most vivid conception of such an early printing-office may be gained to-day by a visit to the great house of Plantin at Antwerp, now happily preserved by the piety of the municipality and kept as nearly as possible in the condition it was in at the time of its great activity but little later than that of the house of Aldus. It is an ample burgher residence, with spacious living-rooms and every indication of a generous family life; but under the same roof and in close connection with the living apartments are also the rooms devoted to business. The working force was in an intimate sense the "family" of the publisher, and from the earliest moment of his arrival Erasmus seems to have formed one in the Aldine corps. The principal account of this Venetian life is, unfortunately to be found in the colloquy, "The Rich Miser," one of the most scurrilous of all Erasmus' writings. The person here exposed to the biting sting of his humour is Andreas d'Asola, the father-in-law of Aldus Manutius. He seems to have been the economic head of the Aldine household and, in some form, a partner in the business, as were also his two sons, Federigo and Francesco. Erasmus was received into this family on the same terms, apparently, as other workers. The household consisted of thirty-three persons. Beatus represents this arrangement as a kindness to Erasmus, to save him from going to a hotel and, at all events, he remained a fellow-member of this clan as long as he stayed in Venice. There was certainly no compulsion upon him to do so unless he pleased, and common courtesy ought to have prevented him from holding up to the ridicule of the world a family and a people to whom, as he elsewhere freely acknowledges, he owed every kind of assistance in his work and every personal attention. The principal speaker in the Opulentia sordida is one Gilbertus, who presents himself to his friend Jacobus in such lean and pitiful guise that the friend inquires whether he has been serving a term in the galleys. "No," he replies, "I have been at Synodium, boarding with Antronius." The weather had been for three months continually cold, so that he was nearly frozen to death; for the only firewood they had had was green stumps which Antronius rooted up by night out of the common land. In summer it was worse on account of vermin, but Antronius never minded that, he was brought up to it; and besides he was always off trading in everything that would bring him in a penny of profit. Even on the funerals that went out of his house he made his gain, and these were two or three at least in the most healthful year; for he played such tricks with his wine that some were always dying of the stone. Yet he weakened his wine by throwing in a bucketful of water every day, and adulterated the meal of which his bread was made by mixing chalk with it. The son-in-law Orthrogonus, who stands for Aldus himself, comes in for his share of abuse for aiding and abetting in this villany. Frequently Antronius would come home pretending to be very ill and without appetite, and then the whole family would have to starve on grey peas with a little oil on them. Finally, however, dinner would be served, but such a dinner! First a soup of water with lumps of old cheese soaked in it, then a piece of fortnight-old tripe covered up with a batter of eggs to cheat the eye, but not enough to deceive the sense of smell, and, to close, some of the same stale cheese. The luckless boarder saved his life by having a quarter of a boiled chicken served up with each meal, but even this was a poor wretched fowl and he was stinted in his meagre ration. Even his own private fresh eggs were stolen by the women and rotten ones given him instead, and his own cask of good wine was broached by the same thieves and drunk up without remonstrance from the host.

The worst of it was that when they found out that the poor Northerner was trying to keep soul and body together by buying extra things, they set a doctor upon him to persuade him not to be such a glutton. The doctor was a very good-natured fellow and finally compromised on a supper of an egg and a glass of wine, admitting that he allowed himself this indulgence, and, as Erasmus testifies, kept himself fat and hearty on such a diet. The dialogue concludes with good Erasmian hedging; for the grumbler confesses that if the food had been of good quality he would have got on very well with the quantity, and, after all, eating was largely a matter of habit and he, being used to a different method, simply could not do with this. The final fling at poor Andreas is to say that his sons, for whom he was doing all this scraping and pinching, would make up for their scanty fare at home by throwing their money away in riotous living outside.

Make what allowance we may for the humorous exaggeration of this tirade, it cannot give us any but the lowest notion of its author's fineness of feeling. The bit of truth contained in it was probably that to Erasmus the usual manner of living of the well-to-do Italians seemed meanly insufficient, while to the Italians his natural demands seemed those of a glutton and a wine-bibber. Very likely his friends, in the kindness of their hearts, called in a physician to persuade him to consider his health by living more as they did. It is simply the ever-repeated struggle of the Northerner, accustomed to much animal food and to strong drink, to understand the frugal ways of the South. Our interest in the whole incident is to notice that here Erasmus contracted the disease which to his great bodily distress, but also, it must be admitted, often to his great moral comfort, he was to carry about with him to his death. He writes from Basel in 1523 to Francesco d'Asola, one of the youths to whom he gives such a villainous character in his Opulentia sordida: "I have not forgotten our former intimacy, nor would my gravel let me do so if I would, for I first got it there and every time it comes it reminds me of Venice." His own explanation of this attack is the badness of his fare, especially the wine, which, he says, caused two or three deaths from stone every year in the Aldine family; but we may be permitted a doubt whether it was not rather due to his own imprudence and his refusal to adapt himself to the simple manners of the country.[77]

The Aldine printing establishment was a kind of literary club-house for the finer spirits of the Republic, and Erasmus was here introduced to them all. All were interested in his work and helped him with manuscripts and suggestions; to such a degree, indeed, that this was one of the counts in Scaliger's indictment against him. Such aid may, however, easily be explained by the peculiar nature of the Adages. Every available source, written, printed, or oral, was properly laid under contribution for a work which was essentially a compilation.

Of these men, none was of the first rank as a scholar; they were the fair representatives of that humanistic generation which had come into the great inheritance of culture prepared for it by two previous generations. The early original impulse with its extravagant individualism had settled down into a calmer, wider, and more polished method of thought and work. Culture had made its way into all departments of life and proved its right to exist by useful service. Of the Venetian scholars we need mention but few. Two Greeks, Marcus Musurus and Johannes Lascaris, were famous, the one as a Greek teacher, the other as the literary purveyor of Lorenzo the Magnificent and, at the time of Erasmus, as ambassador of King Louis of France to the Republic. Girolamo Aleander, then a man of twenty-eight, was preparing himself to teach Greek at Paris and, in fact, went thither in 1508 with letters of introduction from Erasmus. The two were to meet on another field when Aleander as legate of Leo X. at the court of Charles V. was to be the chief agent in the papal policy against Luther and was to reproach Erasmus in bitter terms for his half-way policy towards the Reformation. Erasmus believed that he was the author of the attacks of Scaliger, of whom he knew nothing, and says in this connection that they were co-frequenters at Aldus's and that he knew him as well as he knew himself.

Everything goes to show that the nine months of the Venetian visit were months of eager work, relieved by intercourse with men of genuine culture and of unbroken friendliness. That Erasmus should have dwelt more upon the petty inconveniences of his life than upon these weightier things is quite in character. The real monument of his Venetian days is the great second edition of the Adages, in substantially their final form.

From Venice Erasmus moved in the early autumn to Padua, the university city of the Venetian territory. His immediate business there was to take charge of a pupil, the young illegitimate son of King James IV. of Scotland. This amiable youth, Alexander by name, was already, at eighteen, burdened with the title of Archbishop of Saint Andrews. He had come to Italy to study, and was commended to Erasmus by his father to receive instruction in rhetoric. Erasmus once uses him as an illustration of near-sightedness: "he could see nothing without touching his nose to the book." Yet he was a most clever fellow with his hand. Writing in 1528 to his Nuremberg friend Pirkheimer about certain alleged manuscript forgeries, Erasmus tells a pretty tale of Alexander, which shows a very pleasant relation between them: