Erasmus and the Age of Reformation | Page 8

was likely
to become somewhat excessive in his affections.
He was obliged to moderate them. Servatius would have none of so
jealous and exacting a friendship and, probably at the cost of more
humiliation and shame than appears in his letters, young Erasmus
resigns himself, to be more guarded in expressing his feelings in the
future. The sentimental Erasmus disappears for good and presently
makes room for the witty latinist, who surpasses his older friends, and
chats with them about poetry and literature, advises them about their
Latin style, and lectures them if necessary.
The opportunities for acquiring the new taste for classic antiquity
cannot have been so scanty at Deventer, and in the monastery itself, as
Erasmus afterwards would have us believe, considering the authors he
already knew at this time. We may conjecture, also, that the books left
by his father, possibly brought by him from Italy, contributed to
Erasmus's culture, though it would be strange that, prone as he was to
disparage his schools and his monastery, he should not have mentioned
the fact. Moreover, we know that the humanistic knowledge of his
youth was not exclusively his own, in spite of all he afterwards said
about Dutch ignorance and obscurantism. Cornelius Aurelius and
William Hermans likewise possessed it.
In a letter to Cornelius he mentions the following authors as his poetic
models--Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Juvenal, Statius, Martial, Claudian,
Persius, Lucan, Tibullus, Propertius. In prose he imitates Cicero,
Quintilian, Sallust, and Terence, whose metrical character had not yet
been recognized. Among Italian humanists he was especially

acquainted with Lorenzo Valla, who on account of his Elegantiae
passed with him for the pioneer of bonae literae; but Filelfo, Aeneas
Sylvius, Guarino, Poggio, and others, were also not unknown to him. In
ecclesiastical literature he was particularly well read in Jerome. It
remains remarkable that the education which Erasmus received in the
schools of the devotio moderna with their ultra-puritanical object, their
rigid discipline intent on breaking the personality, could produce such a
mind as he manifests in his monastic period--the mind of an
accomplished humanist. He is only interested in writing Latin verses
and in the purity of his Latin style. We look almost in vain for piety in
the correspondence with Cornelius of Gouda and William Hermans.
They manipulate with ease the most difficult Latin metres and the
rarest terms of mythology. Their subject-matter is bucolic or amatory,
and, if devotional, their classicism deprives it of the accent of piety.
The prior of the neighbouring monastery of Hem, at whose request
Erasmus sang the Archangel Michael, did not dare to paste up his
Sapphic ode: it was so 'poetic', he thought, as to seem almost Greek. In
those days poetic meant classic. Erasmus himself thought he had made
it so bald that it was nearly prose--'the times were so barren, then', he
afterwards sighed.
These young poets felt themselves the guardians of a new light amidst
the dullness and barbarism which oppressed them. They readily
believed each other's productions to be immortal, as every band of
youthful poets does, and dreamt of a future of poetic glory for Steyn by
which it would vie with Mantua. Their environment of clownish,
narrow-minded conventional divines--for as such they saw
them--neither acknowledged nor encouraged them. Erasmus's strong
propensity to fancy himself menaced and injured tinged this position
with the martyrdom of oppressed talent. To Cornelius he complains in
fine Horatian measure of the contempt in which poetry was held; his
fellow-monk orders him to let his pen, accustomed to writing poetry,
rest. Consuming envy forces him to give up making verses. A horrid
barbarism prevails, the country laughs at the laurel-bringing art of
high-seated Apollo; the coarse peasant orders the learned poet to write
verses. 'Though I had mouths as many as the stars that twinkle in the
silent firmament on quiet nights, or as many as the roses that the mild

gale of spring strews on the ground, I could not complain of all the
evils by which the sacred art of poetry is oppressed in these days. I am
tired of writing poetry.' Of this effusion Cornelius made a dialogue
which highly pleased Erasmus.
Though in this art nine-tenths may be rhetorical fiction and sedulous
imitation, we ought not, on that account, to undervalue the enthusiasm
inspiring the young poets. Let us, who have mostly grown blunt to the
charms of Latin, not think too lightly of the elation felt by one who,
after learning this language out of the most absurd primers and
according to the most ridiculous methods, nevertheless discovered it in
its purity, and afterwards came to handle it in the charming rhythm of
some artful metre, in the glorious precision of its structure and in all the
melodiousness of its sound.
[Illustration: I. ERASMUS AT THE