From Bologna, in October 1507, Erasmus addressed a letter to the famous Venetian printer, Aldus Manutius, in which he requested him to publish, anew, the two translated dramas of Euripides, as the edition of Badius was out of print and too defective for his taste. What made Aldus attractive in his eyes was, no doubt, besides the fame of the business, though it was languishing at the time, the printer's beautiful type—'those most magnificent letters, especially those very small ones'. Erasmus was one of those true book-lovers who pledge their heart to a type or a size of a book, not because of any artistic preference, but because of readableness and handiness, which to them are of the very greatest importance. What he asked of Aldus was a small book at a low price. Towards the end of the year their relations had gone so far that Erasmus gave up his projected journey to Rome, for the time, to remove to Venice, there personally to superintend the publication of his works. Now there was no longer merely the question of a little book of translations, but Aldus had declared himself willing to print the enormously increased collection of the Adagia.

Beatus Rhenanus tells a story which, no doubt, he had heard from Erasmus himself: how Erasmus on his arrival at Venice had gone straight to the printing-office and was kept waiting there for a long time. Aldus was correcting proofs and thought his visitor was one of those inquisitive people by whom he used to be pestered. When he turned out to be Erasmus, he welcomed him cordially and procured him board and lodging in the house of his father-in-law, Andrea Asolani. Fully eight months did Erasmus live there, in the environment which, in future, was to be his true element: the printing-office. He was in a fever of hurried work, about which he would often sigh, but which, after all, was congenial to him. The augmented collection of the Adagia had not yet been made ready for the press at Bologna. 'With great temerity on my part,' Erasmus himself testifies, 'we began to work at the same time, I to write, Aldus to print.' Meanwhile the literary friends of the New Academy whom he got to know at Venice, Johannes Lascaris, Baptista Egnatius, Marcus Musurus and the young Jerome Aleander, with whom, at Asolani's, he shared room and bed, brought him new Greek authors, unprinted as yet, furnishing fresh material for augmenting the Adagia. These were no inconsiderable additions: Plato in the original, Plutarch's Lives and Moralia, Pindar, Pausanias, and others. Even people whom he did not know and who took an interest in his work, brought new material to him. Amid the noise of the press-room, Erasmus, to the surprise of his publisher, sat and wrote, usually from memory, so busily occupied that, as he picturesquely expressed it, he had no time to scratch his ears. He was lord and master of the printing-office. A special corrector had been assigned to him; he made his textual changes in the last impression. Aldus also read the proofs. 'Why?' asked Erasmus. 'Because I am studying at the same time,' was the reply. Meanwhile Erasmus suffered from the first attack of his tormenting nephrolithic malady; he ascribed it to the food he got at Asolani's and later took revenge by painting that boarding-house and its landlord in very spiteful colours in the Colloquies.

When in September 1508, the edition of the Adagia was ready, Aldus wanted Erasmus to remain in order to write more for him. Till December he continued to work at Venice on editions of Plautus, Terence, and Seneca's tragedies. Visions of joint labour to publish all that classic antiquity still held in the way of hidden treasures, together with Hebrew and Chaldean stores, floated before his mind.

Erasmus belonged to the generation which had grown up together with the youthful art of printing. To the world of those days it was still like a newly acquired organ; people felt rich, powerful, happy in the possession of this 'almost divine implement'. The figure of Erasmus and his [oe]uvre were only rendered possible by the art of printing. He was its glorious triumph and, equally, in a sense, its victim. What would Erasmus have been without the printing-press? To broadcast the ancient documents, to purify and restore them was his life's passion. The certainty that the printed book places exactly the same text in the hands of thousands of readers, was to him a consolation that former generations had lacked.

Erasmus is one of the first who, after his name as an author was established, worked directly and continually for the press. It was his strength, but also his weakness. It enabled him to exercise an immediate influence on the reading public of Europe such as had emanated from none before him; to become a focus of culture in the full sense of the word, an intellectual central station, a touchstone of the spirit of the time. Imagine for a moment what it would have meant if a still greater mind than his, say Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, that universal spirit who had helped in nursing the art of printing in its earliest infancy, could have availed himself of the art as it was placed at the disposal of Erasmus!

The dangerous aspect of this situation was that printing enabled Erasmus, having once become a centre and an authority, to address the world at large immediately about all that occurred to him. Much of his later mental labour is, after all, really but repetition, ruminating digression, unnecessary vindication from assaults to which his greatness alone would have been a sufficient answer, futilities which he might have better left alone. Much of this work written directly for the press is journalism at bottom, and we do Erasmus an injustice by applying to it the tests of lasting excellence. The consciousness that we can reach the whole world at once with our writings is a stimulant which unwittingly influences our mode of expression, a luxury that only the highest spirits can bear with impunity.

The link between Erasmus and book-printing was Latin. Without his incomparable Latinity his position as an author would have been impossible. The art of printing undoubtedly furthered the use of Latin. It was the Latin publications which in those days promised success and a large sale for a publisher, and established his reputation, for they were broadcast all over the world. The leading publishers were themselves scholars filled with enthusiasm for humanism. Cultured and well-to-do people acted as proof-readers to printers; such as Peter Gilles, the friend of Erasmus and More, the town clerk of Antwerp, who corrected proof-sheets for Dirck Maertensz. The great printing-offices were, in a local sense, too, the foci of intellectual intercourse. The fact that England had lagged behind, thus far, in the evolution of the art of printing, contributed not a little, no doubt, to prevent Erasmus from settling there, where so many ties held and so many advantages allured him.

To find a permanent place of residence was, indeed, and apart from this fact, very hard for him. Towards the end of 1508 he accepted the post of tutor in rhetorics to the young Alexander Stewart, a natural son of James IV of Scotland, and already, in spite of his youth, Archbishop of Saint Andrews, now a student at Padua. The danger of war soon drove them from upper Italy to Siena. Here Erasmus obtained leave to visit Rome. He arrived there early in 1509, no longer an unknown canon from the northern regions but a celebrated and honoured author. All the charms of the Eternal City lay open to him and he must have felt keenly gratified by the consideration and courtesy with which cardinals and prelates, such as Giovanni de' Medici, afterwards Leo X, Domenico Grimani, Riario and others, treated him. It seems that he was even offered some post in the curia. But he had to return to his youthful archbishop with whom he thereupon visited Rome again, incognito, and afterwards travelled in the neighbourhood of Naples. He inspected the cave of the Sibylla of Cumae, but what it meant to him we do not know. This entire period following his departure from Padua and all that follows till the spring of 1511—in certain respects the most important part of his life—remains unrecorded in a single letter that has come down to us. Here and there he has occasionally, and at a much later date, touched upon some impressions of Rome,[9] but the whole remains vague and dim. It is the incubation period of the Praise of Folly that is thus obscured from view.

On 21 April 1509, King Henry VII of England died. His successor was the young prince whom Erasmus had saluted at Eltham in 1499, to whom he had dedicated his poem in praise of Great Britain, and who, during his stay at Bologna, had distinguished him by a Latin letter as creditable to Erasmus as to the fifteen-year-old royal latinist.[10] If ever the chance of obtaining a patron seemed favourable, it was now, when this promising lover of letters ascended the throne as Henry VIII. Lord Mountjoy, Erasmus's most faithful Maecenas, thought so, too, and pointed out the fact to him in a letter of 27 May 1509. It was a pleasure to see, he wrote, how vigorous, how upright and just, how zealous in the cause of literature and men of letters was the conduct of the youthful prince. Mountjoy—or Ammonius, who probably drew up the flowery document for him—was exultant. A laughing sky and tears of joy are the themes of the letter. Evidently, however, Erasmus himself had, on his side, already sounded Mountjoy as to his chances, as soon as the tidings of Henry VII's death became known at Rome; not without lamentations about cares and weakened health. 'The Archbishop of Canterbury', Mountjoy was able to apprise Erasmus, 'is not only continually engrossed in your Adagia and praises you to the skies, but he also promises you a benefice on your return and sends you five pounds for travelling expenses,' which sum was doubled by Mountjoy.

We do not know whether Erasmus really hesitated before he reached his decision. Cardinal Grimani, he asserts, tried to hold him back, but in vain, for in July, 1509, he left Rome and Italy, never to return.

As he crossed the Alps for the second time, not on the French side now, but across the SplÜgen, through Switzerland, his genius touched him again, as had happened in those high regions three years before on the road to Italy. But this time it was not in the guise of the Latin Muse, who then drew from him such artful and pathetic poetical meditations about his past life and pious vows for the future;—it was something much more subtle and grand: the Praise of Folly.

FOOTNOTES:

[9] LBE. No. 1175 c. 1375, visit to Grimani.