THE SHIP OF FOOLS.
The Stultifera Navis, or Ship of Fools, composed in verse by Sebastian Brandt, a learned German civilian, is a general satire on society. It has been translated into verse, or turned into prose, in almost every European language; and no work of such dimensions has been made so familiar to general readers.
There are works whose design displays the most striking originality; but, alas! there are so many infelicitous modes of execution! To freight a ship with fools, collected from all the classes and professions of society, would have been a creative idea in the brain of Lucian, or another pilgrimage for the personages of Chaucer; and natural or grotesque incidents would have started from the invention of Rabelais. These men of genius would have sportively navigated their “Ship,” and not have driven aboard fool after fool, an undistinguishable shoal, by the mere brutal force of the pen, only to sermonise with a tedious homily or a critical declamation. Erasmus playfully threw out a small sparkling volume on folly, which we still open; Brandt furnishes a massive tome, with fools huddled together; and while we lose our own, we are astonished at his patience.
The severity of this decision, we own, is that of a critic of the nineteenth century on an author of the sixteenth.
It is amusing to observe the perplexities of an eminent French critic, Monsieur Guizot, in his endeavour to decide on the “Stultifera Navis.” A critic of his school could not rightly comprehend how it happened that so dull a book had been a popular one, multiplied by editions in all the languages of Europe. “It is,” says M. Guizot, “a collection of extravagant or of gross plaisanteries—which may have been poignant at their time, but which at this day have no other merit than that of having had great success three hundred years ago.” The salt of plaisanteries cannot be damped by three centuries, provided they were such; but our author is by no means facetious: he is much too downright; the tone is invariably condemnatory or exhortative; and the Proverbs, the Psalms, and Jeremiah, are more frequently appealed to than Cicero, Horace, and Ovid, who occasionally show their heads in his margin.
We must look somewhat deeper would we learn why a book which now tries our patience was not undeserving of those multiplied editions which have ascertained its popularity.
At the period when this volume appeared, we in the north were far removed from the urbanity and the elevated ethics of lettered Italy. Brandt took this general view of society at the time when the illustrious Castiglione was an ambassador to our Henry the Seventh, and was meditating to model the manners of his countrymen by his Libro dell’ Cortigiano; and La Casa, by his Galateo, was founding a code of minute politeness. But neither France, nor Germany, nor England, had yet greatly advanced in the civil intercourse of life, and could not appreciate such exility of elegance, and such sublimated refinement. With us, the staple of our moral philosophy was of a homespun but firm texture, and had in it more of yarn than of silk. Men had little to read; they were not weary of that eternal iteration of admonition on whatever was most painful or most despicable in their conduct; their ideas were uncertain, and their minds remained to be developed; nothing was trite or trivial. In his wide survey of human life, the author addressed the mundane fools of his age in the manner level to their comprehension; the ethical character of the volume was such, that the Abbot Trithemus designated it as a divine book; and in this volume, which read like a homily, while every man beheld the reflection of his own habits and thoughts, he chuckled over the sayings and doings of his neighbours. If any one quipped the profession of another, the sufferer had only to turn the leaf to find ample revenge; and these were the causes of the uninterrupted popularity of this ethical work.
“The Ship of Fools” is, indeed, cumbrous, rude, and inartificial, and was not constructed on the principles which regulate our fast-sailing vessels; yet it may be prized for something more than its curiosity. It is an ancient satire, of that age of simplicity which must precede an age of refinement.
If man in society changes his manners, he cannot vary his species; man remains nothing but man; for, however disguised by new modes of acting, the same principles of our actions are always at work. The same follies and the same vices in their result actuate the human being in all ages; and he who turns over the volume of the learned civilian of Germany will find detailed those great moral effects in life which, if the modern moralist may invest with more dignity, he could not have discovered with more truth. We have outgrown his counsels, but we never shall elude the vexatious consequences of his experience; and many a chapter in the “Ship of Fools” will point many an argument ad hominum, and awaken in the secret hours of our reminiscences the pang of contrite sorrows, or tingle our cheek with a blush for our weaknesses. The truths of human nature are ever echoing in our breasts.