That Erasmus, with his usual shrewdness, hits the great blot of the time—the merely literal and “Capernaite” interpretation of the classics—is perhaps less surprising than that he should hit such much later crazes as the Flaubertian devotion of a night to a clause, and the still prevalent reluctance of many really literary persons to allow a reasonable analogy and extension from the actual practice of authority. It was inevitable that he should offend the pedants (from Scaliger downwards), and be attacked by them with the usual scurrility; and it is not quite certain that any but very few of his readers thoroughly sympathised with him. In this as in other matters he was not so much before his time (for the time of the wise is a nunc stans), as outside of the time of his contemporaries. But even here we see that he was still of that time as well. He has no real sympathy with the vernaculars, nor any comprehension of the fact that they are on equal literary terms with the classical tongues; and even in regard to this—even when he is vindicating the freedom of the letter—his thoughts are fixed on the letter mainly.
That it was better so, there can be no doubt. Literary criticism proper could wait: correction of the mediæval habit of indiscriminate acceptance of texts could not. And still, as it is, we have from Erasmus not a little agreeable material of that kind which we have sedulously gathered in the preceding volume; which, from men like him, we shall not neglect in this; but for which there will be decreasingly little and less room, both here and still more in the “not impossible” third.
Considering the very wide range in subject of the Colloquies,[[12]] it is not quite insignificant that literary matters have but a small place in them; there is perhaps more significance still in the nature of the treatment where it does occur. The Colloquies. The chief locus is inevitably the Convivium Poeticum, where, except the account of the feast itself, and the excellent by-play with the termagant gouvernante Margaret, the whole piece is literary, and in a manner critical. But the manner is wholly verbal; or else concerned with the very mint and anise of form. A various reading in Terence from a codex of Linacre’s; the possibility of eliding or slurring the consonantal v; whether Exilis in the Palinode to Canidia is a noun or a verb; whether the Ambrosian rhymes are to be scanned on strict metrical principles; the mistakes made by Latin translators of Aristotle,—this is the farrago libelluli. I must particularly beg to be understood as not in the least slighting these discussions. They had to be done; it is our great debt on this side to the Renaissance that it got over the doing of them for us in so many cases; they are the necessary preliminary to all criticism—nay, they are an important part of criticism itself. But they are only the rudiments.
The Concio, sive Merdardus, after an explanation of the offensive sub-title (which has less of good-humoured superiority, and more of the snappish Humanist temper, than is usual with Erasmus), declines into similar matters of reading and rendering—here in reference not to profane but to sacred literature. And the curious Conflictus Thaliæ et Barbariei, which is more dramatically arranged than most of the Colloquies, and may even have taken a hint from the French Morality of Science et Asnerye,[[13]] loses, as it may seem to us, an opportunity of being critical in the best and real kind. The antagonists exchange a good deal of abuse, which on Thalia’s part extends to some mediæval writers cited by Barbaries (among whom our poor old friend John of Garlandia rather unfairly figures), and the piece, which is short, ends with a contest in actual citation of verse—Leonine and scholastic enough on the part of Barbaries, gracefully enough pastiched from the classics on the part of Thalia. But Erasmus either deliberately declines, or simply does not perceive, the opening given for a critical indication of the charms of purity and the deformities of barbarism.
To thread the mighty maze of the Letters[[14]] completely, for the critical utterances to be picked up there, were more tempting than strictly incumbent on the present adventurer, who has, however, not neglected a reasonable essay at the adventure. The adroit and good-humoured attempt to soothe the poetic discontent of Eobanus Hessus, who thought Erasmus had not paid him proper attention,[[15]] contains, for instance, a little matter of the kind, and several references to contemporary Latin poets. The most important thing, perhaps, is the opinion—sensible as usual with the writer—that, as the knowledge of Greek becomes more and more extended, translation of it into Latin is more and more lost labour. But Erasmus, as we should expect, evidently has more at heart the questions of “reading and rendering” which fill his correspondence with Budæus and others. To take the matter in order, a curious glimpse of the literary manners, as well as the literary judgments, of the time is afforded by an enclosure in a letter to John Watson of Cambridge. Watson wanted to know what Erasmus had been doing, and Erasmus, answering indirectly, sends him a letter on the subject by one Adrian Barland of Louvain to his brother. The Letters. Some incidental expressions here about Euripides as nobilissimus poeta, and Apuleius as producing pestilentissimas facetias, are more valuable to us than the copious laudations of Barland on Erasmus’ own work, which pass without any “Spare my blushes!” from the recipient and transmitter. We note that the moral point of view is still uppermost, though the observations are taken from a different angle. Aristophanes would have regarded Euripides as much more “pestilent,” morally speaking, than Apuleius. The long and necessarily complimentary letter (ii. 1) to Leo the Tenth contains some praise of Politian and much of Jerome, on whom Erasmus was then engaged; and while the language of this correspondence naturally abounds in Ciceronian hyperbole, it is not insignificant that Erasmus describes the Father with the Lion as omni in genere litterarum absolutissimus, which, assuming any real meaning in it, is not quite critical, though Jerome was certainly no small man of letters. The letter to Henry Bovill (ii. 10), which contains the famous story of “mumpsimus” and “sumpsimus,” as well as the almost equally famous account of the studies of the University of Cambridge in the ninth decade of the fifteenth century, contains also a notable division of his own critics of the unfavourable kind. They are aut adeo morosi ut nihil omnino probent nisi quod ipsi faciunt; aut adeo stolidi ut nihil sentiant; aut adeo stupidi ut nec legant quod carpunt; aut adeo indocti ut nihil judicent; aut adeo gloriæ jejuni avidique ut carpendis aliorum laboribus sibi laudem parent. And their children are alive with us unto this day.
There is a very curious, half modest and severe, half confident criticism of his own verses in ii. 22. He admits that there is nothing “tumultuous” in them, “no torrent overflowing its banks,” no deinosis: but claims elegance and Atticism. It would be perhaps unfair to attach the character of deliberate critical utterance to his effusive laudation of the style of Colet in an early letter (v. 4, dated 1498, but Mr Seebohm has thrown doubt on these dates, and Mr Nichols appears to be completely redistributing them), as placidus sedatus inaffectatus, fontis limpidissimi in morem ditissimo e pectore scatens, æqualis, sui undique similis, apertus, simplex, modestiæ plenus, nihil usquam habens scabri contorti conturbati. But it is interesting, and significant of his own performances, as is the comparison (v. 19) of Jerome and Cicero as masters of rhetoric. The somewhat intemperate and promiscuous contempt of mediæval writing which appears in the Conflictus (vide supra) reappears, with the very same names mentioned, in an epistle (vii. 3), Cornelio Suo, of 1490, which, if it be rightly dated, must be long anterior to the Colloquy. But a much more important expression of critical opinion than any of these appears in v. 20 to Ammonius, where Erasmus gives his views on poetry at large. They are much what we should suspect or expect beforehand. Some folk, he says, think that a poem is not a poem unless you poke in all the gods from heaven, and from earth, and from under the earth. He has always liked poetry which is at no great distance from prose—but the best prose.[[16]] He likes rhetorical poetry and poetical rhetoric. He does not care for far-fetched thoughts; let the poet stick to his subject, but give fair attention to smoothness of versification. “Prose and sense,” in short: with a little rhetoric and versification added.
But on such matters he always touches lightly, and with little elaboration; and to see where his real interest lay we have but to turn to the above-quoted verbal discussions with Budæus on the one hand, to the minute and well-known account of More’s life and conversation given to Hutten in x. 30 on the other. Nor do I think that it is worth while to extend to the remaining two-thirds of the letters the more exact examination which has here been given to the first third or thereabouts.[[17]]
Once more, far be it from any reasonable person to blame Erasmus, or any of his immediate contemporaries, for not doing what it was not their chief business to do. That chief business, in the direction of criticism, was to shake off the critical promiscuousness of the Middle Ages, to insist on the importance of accurate texts and exact renderings, to stigmatise the actual barbarism, the mere mumpsimus, which had no doubt too often taken the place not only of pure classical Latinity, not only of the fine if not classical Latin of Tertullian and Augustine and Jerome, but of that exquisite “sport” the Latin of the early Middle Age hymns, to hammer Greek into men’s heads (or elsewhere), to clear up the confusion of dates and times and values, which had put the false Callisthenes on a level with Arrian, and exalted Dares above Homer. Even the literary beauty of the classics themselves was not their main affair;—they had to inculcate school-work rather than University work, University work rather than the maturer study of literature. Of the vernaculars it was best that they should say nothing: for except Italian none was in a very good state, and Humanists were much more likely to speak unadvisedly with their lips if they did speak on the subject. They worked their work: well were it for all if others did the same.
For the reasons given, then, Erasmus and those whom he represents[[18]] could do little for criticism proper; and for the Distribution of the Book. same (or yet others closely connected) the northern nations, of whom Erasmus is the most distinguished literary representative, could for a long time do as little: while some of them for a much longer did nothing at all. Of the others, the criticism of Spain, the criticism of France, and the criticism of England were all borrowed directly from that of Italy. The Spaniards did not begin till so late that their results, like those of Opitz and other Germans, cannot be properly treated till the next Book. France was stirred about the middle of the century, and England a very little later. These two countries, therefore, will properly have each its chapter in the present book. But two of much more importance must first be given to those Italian developments, in our Art or Study, on which both French and English criticism are based. The first will deal with those who write, roundly speaking, before Scaliger; the second with the work of that redoubted Aristarch, with the equally—perhaps the more—important name of Castelvetro, with the weary wrangle over the Gerusalemme Liberata (which, weary as it is, is the first great critical debate over a contemporary vernacular work of importance, and therefore within measure not to be missed by us), and with certain of the later Italian critical theorists, of the sixteenth and earliest seventeenth century, who are valuable, some as continuing, some as more or less ineffectually fighting against, the neo-classic domination.