In later years he always spoke slightingly of his Moria. He considered it so unimportant, he says, as to be unworthy of publication, yet no work of his had been received with such applause. It was a trifle and not at all in keeping with his character. More had made him write it, as if a camel were made to dance. But these disparaging utterances were not without a secondary purpose. The Moria had not brought him only success and pleasure. The exceedingly susceptible age in which he lived had taken the satire in very bad part, where it seemed to glance at offices and orders, although in his preface he had tried to safeguard himself from the reproach of irreverence. His airy play with the texts of Holy Scripture had been too venturesome for many. His friend Martin van Dorp upbraided him with having made a mock of eternal life. Erasmus did what he could to convince evil-thinkers that the purpose of the Moria was no other than to exhort people to be virtuous. In affirming this he did his work injustice: it was much more than that. But in 1515 he was no longer what he had been in 1509. Repeatedly he had been obliged to defend his most witty work. Had he known that it would offend, he might have kept it back, he writes in 1517 to an acquaintance at Louvain. Even towards the end of his life, he warded off the insinuations of Alberto Pio of Carpi in a lengthy expostulation.
Erasmus made no further ventures in the genre of the Praise of Folly. One might consider the treatise Lingua, which he published in 1525, as an attempt to make a companion-piece to the Moria. The book is called Of the Use and Abuse of the Tongue. In the opening pages there is something that reminds us of the style of the Laus, but it lacks all the charm both of form and of thought.
Should one pity Erasmus because, of all his publications, collected in ten folio volumes, only the Praise of Folly has remained a really popular book? It is, apart from the Colloquies, perhaps the only one of his works that is still read for its own sake. The rest is now only studied from a historical point of view, for the sake of becoming acquainted with his person or his times. It seems to me that perfect justice has been done in this case. The Praise of Folly is his best work. He wrote other books, more erudite, some more pious—some perhaps of equal or greater influence on his time. But each has had its day. Moriae Encomium alone was to be immortal. For only when humour illuminated that mind did it become truly profound. In the Praise of Folly Erasmus gave something that no one else could have given to the world.
Plate XI. The last page of the Praise of Folly, with Holbein's drawing of Folly descending from the pulpit
Plate XII. THE PRINTING PRESS OF JOSSE BADIUS
FOOTNOTES:
[11] That he conceived the work in the Alps follows from the fact that he tells us explicitly that it happened while riding, whereas, after passing through Switzerland, he travelled by boat. A. 1, IV 216.62.
[12] Erasmus did not divide the book into chapters. It was done by an editor as late as 1765.