In a letter[16] written by Erasmus, in 1520, to Peter Manius occurs a passage so characteristic of the writer that one can hardly have a better introduction to the study of his life. Manius had urged him to declare frankly that he was not a Frenchman but a German, in order that Germany might not be defrauded of so great a glory. Erasmus replies:

Erasmus cared not where he was born and certainly was in no way identified with Rotterdam, his native place. He often speaks of "us" and "our people," referring to Low Germans generally, but he preferred to be called a citizen of the world, and his whole life is the illustration of this indifference. Though born a Dutchman, it has been doubted whether he could speak with readiness his native tongue, and it seems certain that no other modern language came as readily to his lips as did the speech of ancient Rome.[17] During a long life he was continually in motion, never resting more than a few years in any one place, always seeking more favourable conditions for the work he had in hand.

Holland, Belgium, England, France, Switzerland, were equally his homes, "ubi bene, ibi patria." If he had a preference of sentiment for any country it was possibly for England, but the demands of his work and the pressure of untoward circumstances carried him hither and yon, so that his visits to England seem rather like busy vacations in his arduous life. Patriotism, citizenship, loyalty to a place, seemed to him like so many limitations upon that dominant individuality which was the key-note of his character.

As he was indifferent to the place, so was he also to the time of his birth. It is even probable that he did not know precisely when he was born. At all events he nowhere tells us, excepting that the day was the 27-28th of October. As to the year we are left to later conjecture, and 1467, the date placed by the citizens of Rotterdam upon their monument to his memory, is as likely to be correct as any other.[18]

In regard to his family and the circumstances of his birth, Erasmus was also reticent to the point of obscurity. That he was born out of wedlock is clear. His enemies made what little they could out of the fact, and he never took the trouble to deny it. We may safely conclude that he cared as little to what family he belonged as to what land he owed his affection. Our actual knowledge on the subject is limited to the pathetic little opening paragraph of the very brief Compendium VitÆ, which he sent, under the impression of approaching death, to his intimate friend, Conrad Goclenius, Latin professor at the University of Louvain. "Nothing," he says in the letter accompanying it, "was ever more unfortunate than my birth, but perchance there will be those who will add fictions to the facts." "My father Gerard," he writes, "had secretly an affair with Margaret, daughter of a physician of Zevenberge, in the hope of marriage, and some say that they had plighted their troth (intercessisse verba)."

The marriage was delayed by the desire of Gerard's parents that one of their family of ten sons should be devoted to the Church and by the jealousy of the brothers lest their property be diminished. Meanwhile Gerard, "as desperate men are wont to do," took himself out of the way and wandered to Rome. Our Erasmus was born after his departure. The relatives, learning Gerard's whereabouts, sent him word that Margaret was dead, and the poor fellow, who had been earning his living as a copyist and decorator of manuscripts, sought refuge in ordination as a priest. On his return to Holland he discovered the fraud, but lived the short remnant of his days faithful to his priestly vows.

One or two obscure references in later writings give some reason to think that Erasmus had an older brother, who figures also in the letter to Grunnius mentioned in the Introduction. This brother can interest us only as affecting the question of the relation between the father and mother of Erasmus. His appearance in the letter to Grunnius reminds one so strongly of the characters introduced by Erasmus in his Colloquies to serve as foils for the principal speakers, that one can hardly help suspecting a similar device here. At all events the brother is too shadowy a personage to warrant us in drawing from his previous existence any instructive conclusion as to the origin of Erasmus.

In spite of so unfavourable a start in life, the early years of the lad seem to have been as well sheltered and cared for as could be desired. The little Gerard, as tradition would have him called during his childhood, was early sent to school in Gouda (Tergouw), his father's native place, to an uncle, Peter Winckel by name, and served for some time before he was nine years old as choir-boy at the Cathedral of Utrecht.[19]

He says of himself at this tender age, that he "made but little progress in those unattractive studies for which he was not made by Nature," but we are hardly warranted in drawing from this phrase the conclusion that he was ever a backward scholar.

At nine he was sent to the famous school at Deventer. His mother accompanied him and cared for him as before. Of the Deventer school Erasmus says that it was "as yet a barbarous place," by which he means that it had not yet been reformed in the direction of the New Learning. The boys had to learn their "pater meus,"[20] (?) to conjugate their verbs, and to master their Latin grammar in the text-books of Everard and John Garland. It was a dreary method and Erasmus' recollection doubtless made it seem worse than it really was. The error of it to his maturer mind was that it was rather practical than scientific, especially that it did not introduce the pupil from the outset to the models of Latin style, which the great classic authors alone could furnish. He looked back upon these, as indeed upon all his years of pupilage, as to a time of struggle and hardship. Yet the fact is that he was making rapid progress, and at the close of his four years at Deventer he found himself the equal in learning of many older lads.

The head-master of Deventer at the time was a German, Alexander Hegius, from whom and from John Sintheim, one of the teachers, Erasmus says the school was beginning to get a glimmer of the great light, which, spreading from Italy, was enlightening the world. Erasmus' younger friend and biographer, Beatus Rhenanus, speaks of this Hegius as a man of very moderate learning, who knew no Greek at all, but says that he was open to the merits of the learning he did not share and gladly accepted the instruction of the younger German scholar, Rudolf Agricola, who had just returned from Italy fresh with the eager enthusiasm of that land of all promise. Erasmus fancied that the most he got out of his Deventer days was a "certain odor of better learning" which came to him from his older mates, who enjoyed the direct teaching of Sintheim, and from the occasional hearing of Hegius, who on feast days lectured to the whole school. There can be no doubt, however, that he had got on famously in Latin and made at least a beginning in Greek.[21] Beatus tells a very pretty story of Sintheim,—that having heard Erasmus recite, he kissed him and said, "Go on, Erasmus, you will some day reach the very summit of learning."

After four years at Deventer an outbreak of the plague carried off the faithful mother and within a few weeks the father also, both just over forty years of age. Gerard, so Erasmus says, left a modest fortune, sufficient, if it had been properly husbanded, to provide for his own education at a university. The guardians, however, to whom he had intrusted his little property, the uncle Peter Winckel especially, were determined not to give the boy an academic training, but instead to turn him into the monastic life. Beatus speaks of Deventer as "a most prolific nursery of monks of every kind," and Erasmus employs this phrase, with every shade of anger and contempt, for the next institution in which his lot was to be cast.

This was a house of the so-called "Brethren of the Common Life" at 's Hertogenbosch (Bois-le-Duc). This widespread organisation had for more than a century played a large part in the religious life of the Low Countries. Founded by one Gerard Groot of Deventer, about 1380, it had come into existence as above all else a protest against the dominant monasticism of the Middle Ages. It was not an "order" in the stricter sense; the brethren were not bound by irrevocable vows; they were not regularly chartered by the authority of the Church. It was a free association of men who simply came to live together, giving up their private property, in order that they might the more effectively, as they believed, live the life of the Spirit.

Their chief occupation was the copying of sacred writings, but they professed to support themselves by manual labour. Without calling into question any of the teachings of the Church, their greater lights, Gerard himself, Thomas À Kempis, John Wessel, had given to them a deeper spiritual meaning. They had sought to emphasise rather the inner life of the individual than the outward, visible institutions of the Church. Naturally they had from the first been suspected by all those elements of the Church organisation which saw their future thus threatened; the regular orders, the Inquisition, the secularised priesthood, had each in its turn sought to check this growing protest against their peculiar interests. On the other hand, the communities in which the brethren had established themselves had come to value them as examples of piety and types of a virtue which did not tend to separate men too widely from the life of the world.

Now all this would seem to point precisely in the direction towards which all the thought of Erasmus naturally turned. Of the two early instructors who chiefly impressed him, Hegius and Sintheim, the latter was certainly of the Brethren. The school of Deventer, while probably not directly under their control, was profoundly influenced by them. Yet we find in his writings repeated reflections upon their houses as training-schools for the monasteries and upon themselves as enemies of sound learning and practical virtue.

At 's Hertogenbosch he spent—or, as he himself says, wasted—about three years. Yet he admits that at the end of that time he had made good progress, had acquired a ready style, and in some good authors was "satis paratus." We may be quite sure that he would not have exaggerated any attainments he might have made under such circumstances. His residence at 's Hertogenbosch was cut short by an illness, a quartan fever, as he describes it, to which he seems to have been subject. He was thrown back upon his guardians and, if we may believe his own later testimony, he found the whole world in a conspiracy to force him into the monastic life. The uncle Peter, whom he describes as a man of good outward reputation, but selfish, ignorant, and bigoted, was especially determined on this point. Erasmus makes what he can out of the ruin of his little fortune as a motive for getting rid of him, but rather spoils the force of his argument by representing Peter as upon principle devoted to getting his pupils into monasteries. "He used to brag about how many youths he had captured every year for Francis or Dominic or Benedict or Augustine or Bridget."

That the effort of the guardians was to persuade Erasmus to become a member of the Brethren of the Common Life is made probable by his use of the term "Fratres Collationarii." This was one of the popular names for the Brethren, derived from their peculiar practice of giving moral instruction by means of conferences (collationes). Erasmus includes them all in his sweeping denunciations of all schools and monasteries as "man-stealers." "Formerly," he says, "they were not monks at all; now they are a half-way kind of people, monks in what suits them, non-monks in what they don't like." "They have nested themselves in everywhere and make a regular business of hunting up boys to be trained." A clever lad of quick parts was an especial prize. "They ply him with torments, break him with threats, reproofs, and many other arts, and call this 'training.' Thus they mould him for the monastic life. If this is not 'man-stealing,' what is?"

One might have supposed that the more stupid the boy, the greater the reason for urging him to a life whose essence is described as stupidness; but Erasmus declares the opposite and makes himself the illustration. All these devices were tried upon him. Violence worked as badly with him then as ever afterward, and so one of the teachers, for whom he shows some real affection, was set to try the method of persuasion. Erasmus, however, declared that he was too young, that he knew neither the world nor himself, and that it seemed much wiser for him to pass some years yet in the study of good literature before making so important a decision. These were not bad people; they were simply ignorant men, shut up in a corner, always comparing themselves one with the other, but never with men of the world—what could be expected of them but narrowness and bigotry? In the reflected light of later years the great scholar saw himself already at fourteen the champion of pure learning as against the benumbing influence of the schools.

A final assault was made by one of the guardians. Erasmus and his elder brother—we are following the Grunnius letter—had prepared themselves by an agreement to stand by each other. The younger was to be spokesman and was very doubtful of the elder's firmness of purpose. The guardian came in all kindness to congratulate the boys on their good fortune in having, through his good offices, obtained a place among the canons. Erasmus thanked him kindly, but said, as he had said to his teacher, that they had decided not to venture upon this unknown way of life until they should have gained in years and knowledge. The guardian, instead of being pleased with the manliness of the answer, "flared up as if someone had struck him, could hardly keep his hands off them, and began to call names,"—"you recognise the voice of the monks," Erasmus adds slyly to the papal secretary. The end of it was that the guardian threw up his trust, declared that the boys' estate was all spent and they might see to it how they got on in the world. "Very well," Erasmus heard himself saying through his tears, "we accept your resignation and release you from all care of us."

Then the guardian sent his brother, a man famous for his gentle ways. He invited the lads into the garden, offered them wine, and with all gentleness entertained them with the marvellous charms of the monastic life. "Many a lie he told them of the wondrous happiness of that institution." At this the elder gave way, and this gives Erasmus a pretext for an assault upon the good name of his dead brother—supposing this brother to be a real person. He was a dull fellow, eager only for gain, sly, crafty, a wine-bibber and worse—"in short, so different from the younger that one might think him a changeling; for he had nothing in common with him but his evil genius."

Hereupon follows Erasmus' famous description of the pressure which finally drove him into the monastery. It is plainly a work of literary art, with little of the directness of simple truth; but we have no reason to doubt that it fairly represents one side of the impressions under which a youth of Erasmus' tastes and condition would naturally be brought. He describes it as a conspiracy deliberately set in motion by a hostile guardian, but one hardly needs this explanation to account for the fact that a lad in the year of grace 1483 should hear every manner of description of the monastic life. These things were in the air. To be a scholar had, up to that time, been almost the same thing as to be a monk, and if Erasmus desired to be a scholar, here was, apparently, the line of least resistance.

The youth was at that crisis which comes to every young man, when for the first time he is called upon to decide for himself, with such help as he can get from others, what course of life he ought to follow. He describes himself as just entering upon his sixteenth year, without experience of the world and by nature disinclined to everything but study; of frail body, though strong enough for mental occupation. He had passed all his life in schools and believed that the low fever, from which he had suffered more than a year, was the consequence of this narrow and dreary training. Deserted on every side, with no one to turn to,—was not this enough to break a tender youth like him?

Still he held out, and then began a new series of persecutions. "Monks and semi-monks, relatives, both male and female, young and old, known and unknown," were set upon him.

Another gave an overdrawn picture of the evils of this world—as if monks were not of this world! Indeed they do represent themselves as safe on board ship while all the rest of the world is struggling in the waves and must surely perish unless they cast out a spar or a rope. Another spread before his eyes the frightful torments of hell—as if there were no open road from the monasteries into hell!

Others sought to alarm him with "old wives' tales" of prodigies and monstrous visions. They praised the monkish communion in good works, "as if they had a superfluity of these, when really they need the mercy of God more than laymen." In short, there was no engine of any sort that was not set at work on the poor lad, and they spent upon him as much energy as would go to the taking of an opulent city. So he hung "between the victim and the knife," waiting for some god to show him a hope of safety, when by chance he met an old friend who had been from his earliest years an inmate of the monastery at Steyn, near Gouda. This Cantelius, or Cornelius, whom Erasmus describes as driven into the monastery partly by the love of ease and good living, partly as a last resort, because he had failed to make his fortune in Italy, conceived a mighty affection for the boy and joined in the chorus of exhortation. Especially, knowing his taste, he dwelt upon the abundance of books and the leisure for study until "to hear him one would suppose that this was not so much a monastery as a garden of the Muses." Erasmus returned this affection, "ignorant as yet of human nature and judging others by himself." Cornelius left no stone unturned, but still Erasmus resisted, until finally some "yet more powerful battering-rams" were applied. What these were he does not precisely say, but only enumerates again the loss of property and the pressure of his friends. At last, "rather tormented than persuaded," he goes back to Cornelius, "tantum fabulandi gratia,"—whatever he may wish to imply by that,—and consents to try the experiment, without, however, committing himself to remain permanently. His only condition was that he would not go to "the filthy, unwholesome place, unfit for oxen, which his guardian had recommended."

Still Erasmus cannot help fancying himself abused. He was charmingly treated; no duties were pressed upon him; everybody flattered him and coddled him to his heart's content. He had a capital chance to read all the "good literature" he wished, for Cornelius soon came to regard him as a kind of private tutor and kept him at it whole nights long, much to the injury, he says, of his poor little body. "After all," thought Erasmus, "this was what the selfish fellow wanted me here for." In a few months the friends had thus read through the principal Latin authors; so that this novitiate must have been for Erasmus a time of great profit along the very line for which he professed unlimited enthusiasm.

As the time drew near for putting off the secular and donning the "religious" garb, the same conflict is repeated. Erasmus, looking back upon his youth, says that his only ambition was for scholarship, pure and simple, and that, therefore, his natural wish was to go to a university. His experience in the monastery had made it clear to him that this was not the life he wished to lead, but precisely why, he does not satisfactorily explain. Reasons, indeed, he gives in plenty: his health was not good; he needed plenty of good food and at regular intervals; he could not bear to be broken of his sleep, and so forth. His delicate constitution was plainly a source of pride to him as evidence of a finer spirit than those about him possessed.

Especially against fish, Erasmus says, he had such a loathing that the very smell of it gave him a headache and fever.

These objections are highly trivial. They agree, for one thing, very ill with Erasmus' charges against monks, for of all things he accuses them most often of easy and luxurious living. There were ways enough, as he found out afterward for his own convenience, of getting around the burdensome requirements of the cloister and, on the other hand, out of these very restrictions there had gone forth many a vigorous leader of human thought and action. The fact is, probably, that Erasmus felt already stirring within him that restless impulse towards the free, unfettered development of his own individuality which was to be the guide and motive of his life. He accepted the monastery because under the circumstances there was nothing else to do; but it could not satisfy him.

Such, at all events, is the impression he desired to produce when writing this account. He says:

Here indeed we may see what was really troubling Erasmus. It was not any special hostility to the monastery. It was a dread of anything and anybody that could make any lasting claims upon him. The monastery simply came in for a larger share of his abuse because its claim upon him was more burdensome and more evident. It was not true that a man bred a monk could not rise to almost any distinction in almost any field. The times just before Erasmus were filled with examples of men who, through their own talent and energy, had made their monastic connection the ladder by which they had mounted to far-reaching usefulness. Even Luther, fiery spirit as he was, worked his way to liberty along the path of monastic conformity.

For Erasmus a thorough-going conformity to anything was an impossibility. Making all allowance for the effect of later experience upon his record of youthful feeling, we may well believe that he really felt at the moment of his struggle something of what he puts into his defence:

Above all, he says, they worked upon his acute sense of shame. If he should turn back now he would be disgraced in the sight of God and man. His friends and guardians again joined in the cry and finally

It has seemed worth while to follow rather closely this account of his early years, as given chiefly by Erasmus himself, partly because it is almost our only source of information and partly because it gives at the outset so good an illustration of his way of dressing up every subject he touched to suit the occasion.[23] His biographers have generally done little more than copy out the Grunnius letter as an authentic record of his early experience, and its contents have become the common property of our books of reference. It must, however, be carefully studied in view of the circumstances under which it was written and by comparison with the little we can learn from other sources. Especially must all Erasmus' later criticism of the monastic life be referred to one of his earliest literary performances, the treatise, On the Contempt of the World (de contemptu mundi), written, probably, while he was still at Steyn, and when he was about twenty years old. This is an essay on the charms of the monastery as compared to "the world." It purports to be written by a monk to a nephew who was considering how his life should be spent. Excepting in the concluding paragraph there is hardly an indication of even a question as to the superiority of the solitary life over the life of society. The tone throughout is serious to the point of dulness. There is hardly a trace of the sparkle and liveliness which marked most of Erasmus' later writing. He begins with the same laboured comparison between human life and a troubled sea which he later ridicules:—the sea with its storms, its hidden rocks, its violent alternations, its siren voices luring the sailor to destruction. There is danger on the land, but one is far nearer to it on the sea. Life offers many joys, but none to compare with safety. Earthly joys are so hedged about with miseries that they lose their proper charm.

Marriage is all very well for those who cannot live otherwise, but it is a necessary evil. Earthly honours are vain and fleeting. If the great king Alexander himself could look upon the present world he would unquestionably warn us that even his unparalleled powers and dignities were as nothing compared with the victory of the man who knows how to govern himself. Death makes an end of all and does not wait for all to come to maturity, but cuts down many in the flower of their youth.

Then the argument turns to the positive attractions of the monastery and these are chiefly three: liberty, tranquillity, and happiness. As to the last two the line of defence is tolerably obvious; but to represent the monastery as the abode of liberty required no little ingenuity. Erasmus solved the difficulty by showing that all the relations of human life were but so many restraints on personal freedom, while the life in the monastery, imposing limits only upon the body, allows the soul to enjoy the highest kind of freedom.

Now which of these documents, the de contemptu mundi, written at the time, or the Grunnius letter written perhaps thirty years afterward, represents the true Erasmus as he was at the age of twenty? If one tries to form an opinion from facts rather than from words, one must feel that there is at least room for the question. Erasmus speaks in the letter as if his intellectual life had been utterly crushed by the discipline of the monastery, but on the other hand there is every indication that he had all the opportunity for study that he could desire. Even if we think of the de contemptu mundi as a mere piece of sophomoric composition, it shows a very great acquisition, both of knowledge and of power, in a lad of twenty. It cannot have been written to please any teacher, for he was at this time under no regular instruction.

He was no longer at school, but was simply educating himself by the only pedagogical method which ever yet produced any results anywhere,—namely, by the method of his own tireless energy in continuous study and practice. This essay shows a command of classic literature in quotation and allusion quite inconceivable except as a result of persistent study. Almost as much may be said of the style. If it lacks much of the vivacity and personality of the later Erasmus, it has already gained a very considerable degree of correctness and force. The conclusion is irresistible that the description of the charm of the monastery as a place of refuge from the distractions of the world, and as affording leisure for the higher life, is a fair reflection of Erasmus' own experience up to that time. The monastery had served his purpose and now he was ready for something wider and freer, but he could not justify his quitting the monastic life without piling charges upon charges against the institution that had tided over for him, as gently as its conditions permitted, these years of helplessness.

Nor had his life been by any means a solitary one. He had formed an intimate friendship with a certain William Hermann of Gouda and with him "he spent," says Beatus, "days and nights over his books. There was not a volume of the Latin authors which he had not thoroughly studied. The time which their companions basely spent in games, in sleep, in guzzling, these two spent in turning over books and in improving their style."

Another friendship dating from this period was that with Servatius, a fellow-monk and afterward prior of Steyn. No one of Erasmus' correspondents seems to have stood nearer to his heart. The group of letters addressed to him, probably just before and just after the writer had left the monastery, show a warmth of affection and a real desire for affection in return which bear every mark of sincerity. Even long after their ways had parted for ever Erasmus writes to Servatius with a respect which has no tinge of bitterness in it. If his hatred of monasticism had been as furious as he would often have men believe, hardly anyone would have been a more natural victim for him than this prior of the house where he is popularly believed to have suffered such a grievous experience.

So far as the two things which he always described as the requisites of a happy life, books and friendship, could go, the life of Erasmus at Steyn ought to have been a happy one.

Let us add one more contribution to the problem,—a letter[24] written at the age of sixty to a certain monk who had grown restless during the stirring time of the Reformation: