A Topic of Standing Interest

The Oxford University Press has just issued a beautiful little edition of Erasmus’s Praise of Folly, with a good reproduction of Quentin Matsys’ portrait of Erasmus as a frontispiece. The last edition of the Encomium Moriæ with which I am familiar is that issued in 1887 by the firm of Hamilton, Adams. It had a binding which did not please, but contained Holbein’s interesting illustrations. Whether any considerable sale of the book is likely nowadays I very much doubt. Erasmus’s humour was an improvement on mediæval humour, which, except in a few cases, cannot make a modern man laugh save sometimes through the brazenness of its indecency. Erasmus was a child of the Renaissance, a wit, a scholar, a questioner of all things, a man of the world, a revolutionary conformist. But there are long dull passages in his most famous book, and many remarks that seemed most daring to the men of his own time are to us platitudinous; whilst he often labours some obvious joke in the worst mediæval way.

At the same time, any one who cares to go through the book will find occasional amusement. Erasmus had a mild theory of the satirist’s rights. “Wits,” said he, “have always been allowed this privilege, that they might be smart upon any transactions of life, if so be their liberty did not extend to railing”; and he disclaimed a desire to imitate Juvenal by “raking into the sink of vices to procure a laughter.” With these qualifications, he let out all around him with some vigour. The personification of Folly is rather feebly sustained, though the character is pleasantly introduced with the sentence: “I was born neither in the floating Delos nor on the frothy sea, nor in any of the privacies where too forward mothers are wont to retire for undiscovered delivery.” But the obiter dicta on various classes of men who have often been the butts of satirists since his day are still entertaining and must in his own time have been shocking. He refers to priests as “wisely foreseeing that the people, like cows, which never give down their milk so well as when they are gently stroked, would part with less if they knew more, their bounty proceeding only from a mistake of charity.” He speaks of “The Carthusians, which order alone keeps honesty and piety among them, but really keeps them so close that nobody ever yet could see them,” and he is especially down on the scholastic theologians. Sterne, it will be remembered, described a dispute “as to whether God could make a nose as big as the steeple of Strasburg.” This is scarcely a caricature of the kind of discussion ridiculed by Erasmus:

“Whether this proposition is possible to be true; that the first person of the Trinity hated the second?

“Whether God, who took our nature upon him in the form of a man, could as well have become a woman, a devil, a beast, an herb, or a stone. And were it possible that the Godhead had appeared in the shape of an inanimate substance, how he then should have preached his gospel? Or how have been nailed to the cross? Whether if St. Peter had celebrated the eucharist at the same time our Saviour was hanging on the cross, the consecrated bread would have been transubstantiated into the same body that remained on the tree?”

Word-spinning he detested, and he refers the Nominalists, the Realists, the Thomists, the Albertists, the Scotists, etc., to the primitive disciples who were “well acquainted with the Virgin Mary, yet none of them undertook to prove that she was preserved immaculate from original sin.”

“The disciples baptized all nations, and yet never taught what was the formal, material, efficient, and final cause of baptism, and certainly never dreamt of distinguishing between a delible and an indelible character in this sacrament.”

Chaucer, with his observations about relics and “pigges bones,” and the novelists who never hesitated to put friars in the most ignominious positions (e. g. in chimneys and under tables) had made sport of the clergy, but Erasmus’s particular method of battering current theology had not been so devastatingly employed since Lucian. He showed, like Rabelais, that it is possible to reconcile the profession of Christianity with something of what a recent writer calls “the old Voltairean love of humanity.”

Erasmus made the familiar sport of lawyers and pedantic critics. He would have agreed with Sterne: “Of all the cants which are canted in this canting world—though the cant of hypocrites may be the worst—the cant of criticism is the most tormenting.” “When any of them,” he says,

“has found out who was the mother of Anchises, or has lighted upon some old unusual word, such as bubsequa, bovinator, manticulator, or other like obsolete cramp terms, or can, after a great deal of poring, spell out the inscription of some battered monument: Lord! what joy, what triumph, what congratulating their success, as if they had conquered Africa, or taken Babylon the Great!”

It was for such people’s benefit that he must have made his irritating final remark: “I hate a hearer that will carry anything away with him.”

Erasmus was the mildest of the famous satirists, but he has his place in the great succession, though his works cannot now compete for readableness with those of Lucian, Rabelais, Swift, Sterne, and Voltaire. Satirists have usually been considerable plagiarists, and The Praise of Folly has an important historical place in the development of this kind of literature. Richard Burton cribbed a good deal from it, in spite of his own drastic remark about persons who “lard their lean bookes with fat of others’ workes” and his question: “If that severe doom of Synesius be true it is a greater offence to steal dead men’s labours than their cloaths, what shall become of most writers?” But Burton has an account on the other side, for Sterne later on reprinted chunks of his work almost literally without any acknowledgement whatever.

The new Oxford edition gives a modernized reprint of the Caroline Version by John Wilson. In the introduction Mrs. P. S. Allen gives some interesting bibliographical particulars. Over forty editions of the Encomium Moriæ were published in the author’s lifetime; within forty years of its first Latin issue French, Italian, and English translations had been published; and later versions have appeared in (amongst other languages) Swedish, Czech, Polish, and Modern Greek.