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De Gulden Passer. Jaargang 47 (1969)

De Gulden Passer. Jaargang 47

(1969)– [tijdschrift] Gulden Passer, De–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

Vorige Volgende

Erasmus as a poet in the context of northern humanism
by D.F.S. Thomson

The early poems of Erasmus can be, broadly speaking, divided into two major categories, one of which can be further subdivided. In the first category are poems on religious topics, the nature of which I hope to indicate presently; in the second, complimentary poems either directed towards his fellow-humanists at Paris, which formed a labour of love, or again to his patron Henry of Bergen, Bishop of Cambrai, and the Bishop's kinsmen, where the element of expected reward is not lacking. On later occasions, Erasmus was to maintain that his early poetry had been used as a step-ladder to recognition, and more especially for financial gain, and could now be discarded1. It was still as a poet that he was invited to polite dinner-parties in England; but inwardly he had discarded that role.

However, the other class of ‘occasional poetry’, chiefly consisting in complimentary epigrams, was to form a more permanent, indeed a life-long, part of Erasmus's literary activity, and deserves attention for this reason and also as illustrating the circles in which he moved. Such a circle formed itself about the person of Robert Gaguin, professor of rhetoric, writer on Latin metrical practice, encourager of printing, and patriotic historian of France, an old man already when Erasmus first met him2. It was a French circle

in essence, owing much to Guillaume Tardif as well as to Fichet in its origins, easily attracting men like Budé, but also - and here we must not forget Gaguin's upbringing in Flanders - a great and growing number of men from the Low Countries, and from Italy the redoubtable Balbo (Balbus) and others. Some had been the pupils of Pomponio Leto, and thus brought the influence of Poliziano at second hand; also of Filelfo. It will not do to stress too much the indirect effect of Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola; there is, I rather think, little evidence that many people understood them3.

Rhetoric is another matter. The link between the arts of persuasion and poetry in Erasmus' mind (under the influence of Gaguin, no doubt) can be happily illustrated from the Carmen Alpestre; ‘Blandae Pegasides animosque trahentia Pithus Pigmenta flosculique’. For this is the Peitho of Plato's Gorgias, whose demiurge Rhetoric is said to be4. In the same passage Erasmus renounces, for the sake of Christ, the whole science of Aristotle's logic; and in the thumb-nail sketch of his intellectual biography which the same poem furnishes, Erasmus links rhetoric and logic as the two presiding deities, as it were, of his education at this stage of his life.

The ‘rhetorical-grammatical-poetical’ nexus at Paris is perhaps best illustrated by the relations of Hieronymus Balbus, first with Guillaume Tardif, and later with the poets Cornelio Vitelli and Fausto Andrelini - relations in which connoisseurs of invective will find plenty of entertainment. In a delightful article published in 1902, P.S. Allen remarks that ‘An indication of Balbus's reputation at this period is to be found in some letters that passed between Erasmus, then a canon regular at Steyn, near Gouda, and his friend Cornelius Girardus, of Gouda, who was probably at Hieronymiana Vallis, a monastery near Leyden. Cornelius describes Balbus as having spent twenty-five years in studying poetry in Italy and at Paris, praises him as the only modern poet to follow in the steps of the ancients, and compares him to Ovid for tuneful song and lax morals. The poetry of northern

Europe was indeed at a low ebb if Balbus's verses could find their way, probably in manuscript, to obscure Dutch monasteries as the best of their time5’.

Balbus wrote, and published, epigrams addressed to Tardif, Gaguin and Petrus Aegidius; also to Charles Fernard, who addressed to Balbus, in turn, three of the epistolae elegantes, a notable essay in the modern (rhetorical) kind of letter. So ‘elegant’ were these letters that Gaguin found them impenetrably obscure6, and advised the youthful Erasmus to pursue simplicity, even at some cost; a lesson Erasmus took to heart, for he speaks of it more than once as his own special aim in poetry, his reason for avoiding the loftier flights. Even so, his innate love of ambiguous, and of devious, utterance does not fail to make itself felt; sometimes with the effect of weakening his poems, especially the epigrams - a fault of which he was well aware, and which emerges emphatically from a direct comparison with the work of Thomas More.

The art of rhetoric, as the Humanists understood it, appears to have been introduced at Paris by Guillaume Fichet; Reuchlin, as we know, heard Gaguin lecture on the subject some twenty-two years before Erasmus arrived there. While it is clear that the young Erasmus preserved and transmitted Gaguin's interest in the use of the printing-press, his devotion to rhetoric, here also in the tradition of Gaguin, has been less attended to, yet is clear. Indeed the first treatment Erasmus received at Gaguin's hands was censure for the rhetorical vice of flattery; this lesson learned, he turned to Gaguin and to his circle for the acquisition of rhetorical virtues7. And some things in Erasmus' poetry bear the imprint of Gaguin's example. One poem of which Erasmus thought rather highly was Gaguin's meditation on the Immaculate Conception, a burning question of the Parisian schools. The exemplum at its end - the curing of Gaguin by a vision in a dream - was available ultimately as prototype to Erasmus for the remarkable carmen votivum to

St. Geneviève, uncharacteristic of his outlook perhaps, but justified as we have seen by literary precedent. (It may be remarked that Professor R.H. Bainton's recent book8 appears to be in error in describing this as a work of Erasmus's youth; lines 110f. (Ne mihi sit fraudi quod tanto tempore votum Solvere distulerim), and the arguments advanced by Dr. Reedijk9 about the age of William Cop and other matters, surely disprove this view). To Erasmus, all Gaguin's criticisms were worth heeding. When (as he tells Budé) Erasmus was once again reproved by Gaguin because his first, or 1500, collection of Adagia seemed ‘ieiunus’, he set about to enlarge and improve it, to the great benefit (and joy) of posterity. It is not surprising to find that Erasmus reacted warmly to this latter-day Petrarch, with his large and sane general ideas. Louis Thuasne lists his principles as those of nature, observation and classical reading, adding that ‘His distinction consists in having had faith, in the midst of scholastic barbarism, in the power of art and of eloquence10’. Here, surely, the Erasmian formulae are foreshadowed.

But Erasmus, absorbed as he was in the circle of Paris, was still intensely loyal to his friends from the Low Countries - Badius and his former teachers above all - Sinthem, for example, whom Erasmus could more easily forgive for editing again the Doctrinale of Alexander de Villa Dei, than if he had been another man. And for all his devotion to Gaguin, it was not in the end Gaguin - though he apparently inspired the notion of the work - that Erasmus dedicated his poem De casa natalicia Jesu, which again centres on the Immaculate Conception, nor again to his patron the Bishop of Cambrai as might have been expected, but to a far northern visitor to Paris, namely Hector Boece of Aberdeen.

It has puzzled scholars that Erasmus should have entertained thoughts of going to Aberdeen - the very ultima Thule of Latinity - at the instigation of Hector Boece. Yet perhaps for a moment I may be permitted to plead the words of my title - ‘The Northern Renaissance’ - to extend our range of sight in that direction. My

excuse lies in the thick web of threefold connexion between the Low Countries, Paris and Scotland. It was, after all, a Scot who recommended Alexander Stewart for Erasmus's instruction at the court of James IV of the Stewart line of Scottish kings. This enterprising man, Patrick Panter, a cleric and a statesman, ‘praised’ we are told, ‘not so much for learning as for sagacity’ - was to be the Latin secretary of James IV and James V, a member of James IV's Privy Council and Principal Secretary also to that king; afterwards an abbot, and himself tutor to the same Alexander Stewart, Archbishop of St. Andrews. At Paris, he was a class-fellow of Hector Boece. Latin verses to him exist, written by the equally eminent James Foulis, the author of the first book ever printed in Scotland, a long elegy on the accession of James V11. Foulis, a Latin poet of considerable versatility, celebrated with more Latin verses his inauguration as Procurator of the Scottish ‘Nation’ at Orleans in 1512: two years earlier he had published his carmina at Paris, with an elaborate tribute to Panter and a page of verse dedicated to Remacle d'Ardennes. His prose preface, too, is dedicated to Erasmus's friend and pupil Alexander Stewart. Boece published verses of his own at the press of Badius, who responded in kind, attaching his poems to Boece's Scottish History. Then, in the same Parisian context, we find Gilbert Crab, ‘magister, vir disertissimus, artium professor’ as a friend recalls in Crab's Tractatus notitiarum of 1505; another logical work by him, published in 1524, contains Latin verses also. Crab was a friend of Petrus Aegidius, who also was closely related in friendship to another Scot, David Cranston, the author of several moral and philosophical works published about 1510, and to Robert Caubraith or Galbraith, the traditional scholastic philosopher, whose Quadrupertitum appeared in 1509 with verses in the minor asclepiad by that same James Foulis of whom we have spoken. But perhaps the most conservative, the most traditional of all scholastics was the Scot Johannes Maior or Mair - solo cognomine Maior, as the Humanist poet-historian George Buchanan remarked in bitter scorn; Maior's Quartus

Sententiarum appeared in 1509 and was dedicated, with Latin verses, once again to Alexander Stewart, who, (as we know from Erasmus) gave as a parting present to the Dutch humanist the famous gold ring, preserved in the Basle Historical Museum. The existence of a Scottish circle at Paris will be of some importance presently. It is time to return to Erasmus's own corpus of poetry.

The poems which Erasmus addressed to a fellow-monk, Servatius Rogerus, present a special problem of interpretation, aptly summed up in the title given to the fifth poem in Reedijk's edition: ‘Sentimental Friendship’. This, and the three succeeding poems, are frequently linked with these letters, also addressed to Servatius, which stand fourth to ninth in the first volume of Allen's edition of the Epistles. Generally, it has been thought that these poems and letters represent a period in the adolescent life of Erasmus when he incurred feelings of dangerous intensity for a member of his own sex, which, although quite speedily overcome, have left their mark on the correspondence and on the carmina.

However, this judgment should not, I think, rest wholly unquestioned. The character of the poems themselves points clearly to literary imitation as a motivating force: for example, apart from the metre itself, the end of Poem 5 contrives to recall most powerfully the end of Horace's 15th Epode, while the whole poem suggests an effort on the part of Erasmus to recapture the spirit, tone and language of the Horatian epode in general. The same is true, mutatis mutandis, of numbers 6 to 8, which, whether Horatian or Ovidian in metre, are manifestly infused with the language, spirit and influence of Horace and Ovid. Other and slightly later poems reflect the same two authors in particular, with the especial addition of that Christian poet who was Erasmus's favourite, namely Prudentius. Thus the object of these poems may be pronounced to be, at least in part, literary.

But there is another and better reason for supposing that Erasmus may here be following a convention. Recently in England there was published the Letter-Book of Robert Joseph12, a monk of

Evesham shortly before the Dissolution of the Monasteries, of whose correspondence there remain about 170 examples; a series of letters from a cultivated humanist, which forms an invaluable guide to the writer's outlook and character. Born about 1500, Joseph attended Oxford for several years; the letters, dated from 1530 to 1533, were written during a period of return to the monastery, where Joseph's task was to instruct novices, not in the usual clerical subjects but in Latin literature, for which he practically had a passion. He was much interested in metrics and in the composition of Latin verse, and experimented with sapphics, asclepiadic verses, the hexameter and the elegiac couplet; his use of the asclepiad may fairly perhaps be taken to represent the new Humanistic vogue. Variations upon a theme in different metres had, in Joseph's youth, been encouraged by his uncle; and what Joseph called his ‘halfpenny verses’ reflected the extent of avuncular munificence which had attended each variation. Besides poetry, Joseph had rhetorical interests and was, we are told, an ‘enthusiastic devotee’ of the art of letter-writing, both in theory and in practice. He expressed the somewhat Petrarchan view that ‘It is wrong to bury literary talent in the earth’, and clearly reflects the new outlook revealed in Erasmus's writings on the subject. In his seventh letter, for example, we find these words: ‘Satietate, praesertim in literis, nihil perniciosius inquit Erasmus’.

Accordingly we are not surprised to find the theme of monastic friendship, as well as the tensions of monastic life, treated by him in his letters in a way that quite suggests that he is handling a stock subject of rhetorical letter-composition. It has been suggested by his editors that Joseph was ‘probably quite unaware of the mediaeval precedents - Anselm, for example, or the monk Ailred, who wrote a treatise on “spiritual friendship”:’ but the editors go on to remark how easily this kind of monastic friendship ‘puts on a humanistic dress’, and how its reverse side, the anxieties about possible slander and detraction and about enmity within the community, could in certain circumstances not only lend themselves to rhetorical treatment, but engender, through faction and jealousy, a positive danger to social harmony and mental health, which is one good reason why heads of religious houses, as well as writers of

works of spiritual exhortation, frowned upon these special friendships. I shall presently suggest that the institutional frown that greeted Erasmus' correspondent Servatius was a frown of this kind. But let us for a moment briefly examine the conventional phraseology used in the correspondence of Joseph, who appears to have been a monk of a blameless nature and of high intelligence. In spite of this exemplary character, there are traces of pettishness here and there: ‘You have never sent me a letter or a present as a greeting.. I would swear I fully deserve your love.. Please.. tell me if I have offended you’; again, ‘Why does your love to me grow so cold?’ Or again, ‘I wondered exceedingly at the dwindling of your love towards me (lanquescentem in me tuum amorem oppido miratus); accordingly I wrote a letter of expostulation, to tell you how my wine has turned to bitter gall under my distress...’. And, writing to another about his best friend, he will say: ‘He is the lamp of my abode, sheer honey, more than the half of my soul (dimidium animae); him I will accompany with love's accustomed richness (solita amoris ubertate)’; and writing to the friend, ‘If you visit me or send me a letter you will heal my wounded heart’, or again ‘How fortunate I am, to have a friend so sugar-sweet (saccaraceum) and so constant; yet not at all fortunate, in so far as I do not see, living daily with me, him for the love of whom my heart pines (cuius amore elanguescat animus).... I should rather be at Oxford in your company than posses the richest gift... And in the language of love's rhetoric, this time let us quote in Latin for the rhythm and the savour of the words: ‘summopere cuperem omnem exterminio affici causam quae amoris fructui debitam corraderet felicitatem... Omni deleto fuco et figmento, quae circa te mei cordis adyta tuis reserarim oculis. Tu igitur econtra videris, ut pari cura sentire tuum mihi aperias. Si hoc egeris, non facile dixero quam me bearis, qui iam non sine scrupo tui subinde meminisse queo. Quis enim thesaurum suum sine dolore amittere possit? Vale, et valeant qui inter nos dissidium volunt13’. The note of jealousy, touched lightly here, is much more prominent elsewhere, and could be easily illustrated.

Much of this language is repeated in certain letters written in fact by Patrick Panter (see above, p. 191), but included in the still unpublished Letter Book of James IV of Scotland; cf. for example the following instances (References are to the numbers of the Letters as calendared by R.K. Hannay, in English, in ‘The Letters of James IV, 1505-1513’, Scottish Hist. Socy. Series 3, No. 45, edited by R.L. Mackie): Letter 145, dimidium animae (and also lacrimae); Letter 160, spes unica (and the implication that sleepless nights had been the writer's lot through a suspicion of betraying his correspondent's affection); Letter 228, mi Alexander, animo meo carissime (and the claim to have refrained from writing deliberately in order to try the patience and test the fidelity, in affection, of his correspondent). All these are taken from letters of Panter, in his own name, to Alexander Stewart, Archbishop of St Andrews (and pupil of Erasmus). It is interesting to note that ‘the King's’ style of Latinity has been compared to that of Erasmus, without any knowledge that the royal letters were written by Panter, who as we have seen belonged to the same Parisian circle as Erasmus. Others speak of the ‘Corinthian glitter’ of Panter's Latin style (op. cit., intr., p. xxxiii). Nothing of this comes through in Hannay's English summaries. It is unfortunate that the Latin has not been published; to do so would illuminate the literary practices of the time. Enough has been said to show that this kind of language must be taken as the common coin of monastic (or quasi-monastic) rhetoric in the period about 1500. (The reason why I have diverged in order to mention Scottish connexions among the Erasmian circle will now be plain).

It is just such expressions, in the letters and poems of Erasmus, that have given rise to doubts and suspicions. Indeed at many points the very words of the Latin, as well as the concepts invoked, are identical with those that appear in the letter-book of Joseph. Thus Erasmus writes to Servatius: ‘Fortasse.. meum in the amorem elanguisse suspicaris’; again, after the word amantes, ‘Si corporum praesentia (quod quidem erat quam iucundissimus) una esse nequimus, quid erit cur non literarum vicissitudine.. una simus.. o animae dimidium meae’ (this Horatian quotation, as we saw, was also used by the monk Joseph)... ‘Num interdum animo

tuo amantissimi tui subit imago? Ut suspiciosi sunt omnes qui amant’, and so forth. ‘Ego tui assidue torqueo desiderio’. Again the frequent use of the adjectives dulcis, suavis - often in the superlative - reminds us of Joseph and of Panter, as does the phrase anima carior, and the frequent references to tears (lacrimae) and the conceit ‘te absente dulce mihi est nihil; te praesente, amarum nihil’; also the notion of hardness or deafness to appeals, and the frequent use of classical quotations to illustrate all these concepts. The tears and the hardness as of rocks, and the recurrent o spes, o animae dimidium meae, appear in the poems of Erasmus to Servatius also. With proper caution, Dr. Reedijk introduces his Poem No. 5 by saying, ‘If the Epistles 4-9 (in Allen) must be regarded as veritable documents and not as literary exercises, they provide exhaustive information on an emotional crisis..’. Allen himself remarks, ‘It is not clear whether these letters are to be regarded as genuine documents or whether they are merely epistolary exercises on simple themes.. for the sake of practice in Latin composition’. I think, however, that we have now seen some reason to believe that the cri de coeur, expressed so conventionally and punctuated at every turn by quotations from Horace and Virgil, may not be quite so much of a cri de coeur after all; that the expression of affection, which may have alarmed the young men's superior at Steyn, draws from roots as much rhetorical as psychological; and that the censure applied to Servatius had regard to the social and perhaps intellectual, rather than moral, effects of such expressions as we find in the poems and letters addressed to him.

It is true that in a passage of the Compendium Vitae Erasmus does use the phrase ‘non, si quid olim iuveniliter sensi, id partim aetas, partim rerum correxit usus’; and Allen, in the third Appendix to his first volume of letters, draws attention to one particular use of the adverb iuveniliter, by which he would explain its meaning here, when of his father Erasmus says ‘Vixit iuveniliter. Mox applicuit animum ad honesta studia’. For Allen, then, iuveniliter implies the sins of the flesh. But in the Carmen Alpestre (line 159), for example, the word iuveniliter cannot possibly hold this implication, but only that of ‘gaily, brightly, freshly’. In both of the passages quoted by Allen I myself would take iuveniliter to

imply frivolity, not sensuality - and, in the second, the contrasting mox applicuit animum ad honesta studia fits this admirably. It is typical of Erasmus to feel the same pangs of conscience about an intellectual lapse, and about waste of time, as about the darker passions which might have visited him; and to express himself accordingly. Here, then we may leave the question. The conclusion can hardly be final - Erasmian ambiguity again! - but we have seen that it need not be in any way inimical to Erasmus's moral reputation14.

In the rest of the earlier poems of Erasmus we may observe the formation of his intellect, the strengthening (by stages) of his Latinity, and that command of metrical variety, and metrical refinement, for which he soon became well known, even in England. Poetry for him, nevertheless15, was on the whole a department of rhetoric, as we have said, though one possessing a special charm; and since Erasmus's mind and interests were essentially prosaic, it suited him so to regard it. It is not, of course, to be expected that we should find much of interest in those schoolboy products which have survived almost in despite of their author's wish; and if we pass over the fashionable bucolic which he attempted only once in extreme youth, it is clear that the moralistic elegies on love and joy and sorrow were the merest exercises of a prentice hand for the sake of technique. Erasmus himself tell us: ‘When I was not yet 18 I began to write rhetorical studies (declamare) against the vices, lust, avarice and ambition’; and indeed he repeatedly uses these words, declamare and declamatiunculae (as in Letter 1193), in describing the works of his earlier life, a fact that agrees with the statement he makes when criticizing the poems of Ammonius (Ep. 283, 92 ff): ‘I have always liked the kind of poetry which does not get too far away from prose - but good prose.... I take

great delight in a rhetorical poem, and in a poetic rhetorician; I like to recognise the presence of poetry in prose, and of rhetorical expressiveness (phrasis) in a poem. Other men favour more far-fetched, imaginative things: but what I especially approve of in you is, that you get the substance of your theme from the facts, and are more concerned with expressing those facts than with displaying your talent16’. Thus Erasmus attempts to keep Fancy at arm's length and even the Imagination under severe control. In spite of this, he manages, as we shall presently see, to touch the vein of genuine poetry himself in more than one instance, most memorably in the Carmen Alpestre.

In fact, of course, Erasmus was at first considerably prompted by that ostentatio ingenii which he is relieved not to find in Ammonius. ‘Dulcis parare amicos / Dum studeo, atque viris iuvat innotescere doctis’ - these are the youthful desires he records of himself in the Carmen Alpestre (108-9), and if rhetoric was the means to mastery, poetic production it was by which reputations were made in the world. Reedijk has counted the number of times the principal poems were re-issued, and the last of editions is astonishingly lengthy. The principal demand was for religious poetry; and, although Erasmus was not by temperament a writer of devotional poems, he conformed to the fashion (helped in doing so by certain friends, like Cornelius of Gouda, whose piety was sincere), and such verses attracted attention. He soon became known as an expert and versatile metrist, thanks to his deep and instinctive attraction to Horace; and, as Dr. Reedijk has remarked, the lesson of the Dialogus de Pronunciatione is that although ‘the Book of Psalms may be holier than Horace's Odes, it cannot be denied that from the latter a better Latinity can be acquired’. (Indeed a whole Humanist literature of Psalm-versions arose from painful awareness of this fact, and a desire to correct it). The very fact that poetria was a term of abuse when employed by the more reactionary among the clerics indicates the popularity and power of the poetic art17. If Erasmus himself found it proper to compose 246 exquisitely-written and carefully revised Latin verses on the general theme

of Not Wasting Time (as he did in the De Senectutis Incommodis, or Carmen Alpestre), it is reasonable to infer from this that he did not think this activity itself to be a waste of time.

The fourth poem in Reedijk's collection forms a link between the Carmen Alpestre, whose theme it foreshadows, and those moralistic elegiacs which, as we saw, are nothing but exercises in a genre. The words cura dolorque seem to echo the latter group, in one of which, they function as a kind of refrain; but the brooding apprehension of life's decay, unheralded by signs as yet, announces the De Senectutis Incommodis. Of the poems to Servatius we have already spoken; suffice it to say that the seventh poem, Elegia de mutabilitate temporum, shows an improved command of the elegiac couplet, and enough independence, despite some borrowed phrases, to serve as model for a later poem by Jacob Micyllus. The anti-barbarian side of Erasmus erupts in a couple of poems, but is soon suppressed, temporarily at least, in favour of monastic disquisitions in verse, though not before the ideal of pietas docta has, as Reedijk notes, been for the first time formulated in the poem Libellus Loquitur which later was to accompany the Enchiridion. From this period of dullness Erasmus emerges somewhat, in his rhythmus iambicus to St. Anne, though this too was a hopeful expression of the desire to find patronage. But by way of self-criticism, perhaps (and here the Erasmian irony peeps out, even at the early age of 20) we have in No. 26 a delightful ‘themation’, as Erasmus called it, in Phalaecian or hendecasyllabic metre, on the virtues of money: ‘If’, says Erasmus, ‘you have a bulging purse, you don't need a patron, and Cicero's eloquence in your support would be wasted compared with that great protector. With it you can become whatever you like; kind, lovable, eloquent, handsome, wise and invincible. You can be a consul, a commander, a saint if you wish. But let the money fly away, and back you are where you started, and not very popular with your friends, who like a good table. So, when the hand of generosity falters, friendship is over; cease to give money, and you cease to be loved’. If it were not for bibliographic reasons18, we should suppose this to be a much

later poem, so clear and elegant is it, and so mature in its satire.

Such clarity as this does not always permeate the Carmen de casa natalicia Jesu, written some five years later, at the request of Gaguin it may be, and certainly concerned to defend Gaguin's views - indeed Gaguin is likely to have inspired two or three theological emendations, as we may call them, incorporated in later versions, though two at least of the changes in the poem were made on literary grounds by Erasmus himself. In the preface Erasmus tells Boece how he had left all his previous poems behind him when he set out for Paris, ‘for I did not dare to import into this most famous school of Paris my Muses which were redolent of barbarity and foreignness’ - an implied expression of the ideal of gloria, of personal credit won by poetry, which was to attune him so readily to the circle of Italianate young humanists and to counter, in him, the residual sobriety of Steyn and of Deventer.

The poems of the next period show an increasing degree of inward affinity with Horace's Odes, always a favourite, indeed the favourite model of Erasmus. The complimentary verses to Gaguin and Andrelini did him no harm professionally, and are pleasing in themselves and again distinguished for their clarity - a quality at which, under the stimulus of Gaguin, Erasmus always aimed, though not always with success. There is some metrical awkwardness in Poem 40, a complaint (in low spirits, after a fever) addressed to Gaguin: the lengthened final syllable of the vocative in o fatis genite prosperioribus come off badly, and the whole poem is perhaps over-dosed with Horatian allusion. The complimentary epigrams, and the prosopopoeia Britanniae, which follow, represent another poor patch, when low creativity is maked only by the clever use of Horace's Odes in style and vocabulary. But, under the influence it may be of John Colet, Erasmus discovered a temporary revival of interest in the writing of religious poetry, out of which came what amounts to the first draft of the Expostulatio Jesu cum homine. This is far nearer to devotional poetry than the theological drafts of the De Casa Natalicia, and may reflect discussions in Oxford and London. At about the same period begins a reviving ability to write satirical epigram, and this time it is possible to detect the

guiding finger, perhaps, of More. Even so, Erasmus's group of three elegiac epigrams In aulicum quendam clero infestum, is rather feeble compared to those of More, and the poems fall away from his own level of clarity - even Reedijk is hard put to it to explain, for example, a devious pun in Poem 57, though he thinks it may be Dutch. There is also a sharp attack on the meanness with which Anthony of Bergen had paid for some verses on his brother, Erasmus' patron, - a not unparalleled hit at those who failed to pay properly for the poet's services - and a slightly distasteful lampoon on a blind critic, probably Bernard André (who had attacked Gaguin); but, apart from these, most of the next group of occasional poems are thoroughly conventional. This period of Erasmus' life, when his creative fire was wholly absorbed by other pursuits, was broken by the short interval of travel and distraction which gave rise to the Carmen Alpestre, which in a moment I hope to discuss in detail. It is true that Erasmus took a good deal of trouble over his minor epigrams (‘in later years.. the only poetical medium in which he expressed himself more or less regularly’, says Reedijk), and there is evidence of this in the verbal changes that were made in the course of re-issuing them. Changes are indeed from time to time invited by Erasmus (‘Si quid censebis mutandum... communica’). But only one poem, in all the subsequent period, reaches the point of genuine interest or individuality. This is the Carmen Votivum to St. Geneviève on recovery long since from a fever. It has the old personal touch, and the prase of William Cop, that remind us of the Carmen Alpestre. It is, as Reedijk says, a charming piece, containing one of Erasmus's very rare descriptions of scenery, comparable with the view of Lake Constance in his letters; it is polished, urbane, extremely elegant. However, despite its subject it is not, in spirit, religious. The use of the hexameter gives opportunity for the use of the narrative instead of the lyric style, for once; also for the recounting of anecdote. It is still Horatian, but to my mind we have here the Horace of the Satires, not of the Odes; in character it seems to me to be Erasmus' great essay in the imitation of Horatian satire, a most difficult feat, performed with remarkable success. The religious pretext, rather than theme, has tended to make the reader look in the wrong direction

for its inspiration, though Reedijk is not unaware that it reveals ‘a liberal, if essentially pious mind, deferring to a venerable tradition, rather than an ardent believer's strong convictions’.19

Thus we find Erasmus, at this stage of his life, still much pre-occupied with the challenge of imitative versification. Even on his death-bed, as we know, he reprimanded other aspiring Latin poets for faults in metrical accuracy. A brief comparison with Thomas More, indeed, may here be instructive. It is worth beginning with the technical aspect, always first in the minds of poets themselves. If Erasmus in the Carmen Alpestre uses, as we have seen, a combination unknown in the classical world, of hexameter and iambic dimeter catalectic, More is much less bold. In their table of metres, Bradner and Lynch20 give only 34 poems as written by him in metres other than the elegiac couplet, and discounting the hexameter, only seven varieties are listed. When More translated from the Greek in the Epigrammata he used the metre of his original except in 3 cases. When he writes on his own subject-matter, he uses either hexameters or an iambic strophe, with the exception of an experiment in the qualis uxor deligenda21 and the special case of the ipse loquor Morus lines in Metsys' double painting of Aegidius and More (ably discussed by Professor Gerlo)22. By contrast, Dr. Reedijk lists twenty different metres employed by Erasmus. More has this in common with at least the earlier Erasmus, that he uses the metres, as well as the tone, which suggest, and are redolent of, the Epodes of Horace.

But if More is technically more timorous, he is bolder in subject and in treatment as well as lacking some of Erasmus's delicacy and even prudery; and it is with some justice that his editors say: ‘When we turn from the poems of Pontanus or Erasmus to those of More, we feel that we are leaving the study of a scholar or a cleric and entering the world of merchants and lawyers and courtiers’. Erasmus somewhat evades this issue of essential originality, even

perhaps essential creative genius, when in the Catalogus Lucubrationum he ascribes to the lack of practice and to his habit of extemporary composition the relative inadequacy of his own effusions in epigram when compared to those of More, whose superiority he recognizes with good grace: ‘quoque magis rideretur, adiunxerunt Thomae Mori epigrammatis, in hoc genere felicissimi’. More, again, readily puts himself into his poems throughout his entire life; while apart from the Carmen votivum, which recalls a moment of youth, I find little of the truly individual and inimitable Erasmus in the later poems, which seem to me to withdraw to a distance, as it were. There are also two preoccupations which meant much to More, and which, infused into his poetic compositions, lent them urgency: one is the political concern, the interest in kingship, tyranny and government, as in the poem Quis optimus rei publicae status23; with which goes the concern for reform in the Church, equally felt by Erasmus but rather sparsely affecting his verses. The other is that peculiar kind of brooding on death which is absent from Erasmus. It may be said that whereas Erasmus had a serious side, if we like, More had a sombre side, and this emerges very clearly in the poems with titles such as Ad contemptum huius vitae, Vita ipsa cursus ad mortem and so forth, each of which is much more than the conventionally pious memento mori which it might have become in the hands of Erasmus. Some even of More's choices among Greek epigrams reflect this brooding spirit, as in Mortem finis malorum, Mortis aequalitas and others. In ‘court poetry’, More exhibits a more independent tone of voice than Erasmus; yet even Erasmus' hastily-composed Prosopopoeia Britanniae is rhetorically more effective, and more brilliant in style, than More's Carmen Gratulatorium for Henry VIII; compare e.g. the last four lines of each.

More's metre is less surely free of error than Erasmus', and he was duly attacked for this: some indeed, of the versions in the Progymnasmata which he shared with Lilly exhibit this imperfection24. At the same time, his epigrams are (as what I have said thus

far may serve to show) less obviously derivative than Erasmus's poetry, for all his care to follow Greek exemplars. Both Erasmus and More enjoyed a good story, containing a slice, so to speak, of life; but Erasmus is better able to narrate these things in prose, while for poetry he reserves an allusive, evasive and delicate irony, the same habit of indirection by which he had incurred Robert Gaguin's censure. To illustrate these weaknesses, I would simply refer to the lines on the Two Roses theme, popular in English Tudor court literature at the marriage of Henry VII and Elizabeth, whereby the red rose united with the white. We may compare the lines of Skelton, the Poet Laureate, beginning: ‘The Rose both White and Red / In one Rose now doth grow25’. Now, it is claimed by Erasmus that he wrote the Prosopopoeia Britanniae, where his version of the theme appears, in three days, as a duty; yet the excuse is hardly valid since, for Erasmus, to write rapidly, tumultuarie, was always the rule, not the exception; and the ‘somewhat complicated allegory’ of the Tudor Rose (lines 73-100) has a great deal less of point and force about it than the clear, well-poised epigram that More wrote on the same Two Roses theme26.

But we may appropriately turn from Erasmus's failures to his successes, which are infinitely greater. I propose now to discuss the Carmen de Senectutis Incommodis, to which I shall refer by its briefer title, Carmen Alpestre.

This, the most moving of all Erasmus' poetic compositions, was written, as he tells us, virtually in the saddle, while travelling in the Alps. It has that combination of universal significance and the individual touch of concrete expressiveness which is characteristic of great poetry. It is philosophical yet personal, as Karl August Meissinger has with justice remarked27. As such, it transcends all the rest of Erasmus's early verses. The style is considerably more stately than theirs, and for all its subjectivity it exhibits unusually few colloquialisms, though Erasmus does (once) venture quo in

place of final ut, a characteristic blemish of his prose Latinity. Despite the physical nature of some of the descriptive passages the use of diminutive terminations is severely limited, and the five or so he does use - at the rate of one every fifty lines - are, with one exception (miselle as an adverb), entirely classical.

The metre is one that (like several of those that Erasmus employs) nowhere occurs in classical literature - a mixture of the dactylic (or epic) hexameter and the ‘iambic dimeter catalectic’. Horace, whose spirit is very much present to Erasmus in the composition of this poem, uses hexameters in alternation with the acatalectic iambic dimeter; and Prudentius, another favourite, shows the iambic dimeter catalectic without admixture of hexameters. Why Erasmus should have mixed the two with such careful artistry is a question to which I shall presently suggest an answer.

Erasmus begins by praising the medical skill of William Cop, to whom the poem is dedicated. In the middle of the sixth line, he passes smoothly and artistically from the statement that every kind of disease yields under Cop's knowledge, to the unyielding force of Death, seen as the mightiest of diseases and worst of all afflictions - repeating the word morbus; and here we think of the sombre motto attached to the seal of Terminus: ‘cedo nulli’. For old age is incurable, and in its gradual onset drains away all strength from body and all vigour from the mind; not to speak of the myriad ills that accompany it and themselves, bit by bit, destroy life's joys, ‘plucking them forth and wearing them away’, in the graphic Erasmian expression. Then, by a charge of rhetorical colour, we are given a picture of the commoda vitae, the good things that growth and maturity have brought to a man and that are now reft away - looks, stature, fresh complexion, good memory, intelligence, eyesight and sound sleep; strength and alertness, the fire and moisture that go with life; finally the breath of life itself, and the blood-stream, and the body that contains it, and - as a culminating point - risus, iocos, lepores, ‘laughter, jesting and the delights of wit’. To sum up, old age - by stages - takes everything away, leaving in the end only a name and an empty titulus or list of honours, like those funerary inscriptions graven upon marble tombs which we see all about us.

Thereupon, with a rhetorical gesture, Erasmus asks abruptly: ‘Is this old age or not, rather a “slow death”, mors lenta?’ - borrowing the phrase, not here alone in the poem, from Statius, that greatly successful inventor of callidae iuncturae. Then comes an exclamatory outburst upon the malignity of Fate, who is shown as quickening the evil threads of a man's life and (to change the metaphor) gliding inward on swift wings - a picture, the awe and gloom of which are enhanced by the archaic form allabier, while the spacing of metrical pauses is exquisitely studied; - and so, to resume, before one is well aware of life's joys they are gone; or (for the idea is now expressed in another way) sooner than we are quite fully aware that we are alive, suddenly, broken in health, we cease to live.

Presently Erasmus turns to an illustration from his vast reading, taken from Aristotle's biological works: ‘Yet (he says) the deer and the crow live and preserve their vigour through many human generations’ (and, unusually in this poem at any rate, Erasmus gives epitheta ornantia - cervi volucres; comix garrula - which are easily recognisable by their authors, Statius (with Silius) and Horace, so that we recognise the rhetorical use of learned embroidery): ‘Man alone, then, is oppressed by the toils of old age and its bodily wear (a phrase of Ovid's, this) when barely past his five-and-thirtieth year’. Erasmus elaborates on this thought by looking forward to the still more decrepit age of 49 and the assault to be made, in that time of life, upon the very soul itself, not to say the intellect, ‘if (as he drily says) Aristotle, a recognized authority, is to be trusted’, (Erasmus here in the Latin adopts a genuinely poetical, albeit somewhat ironic, mode of expression). But at once he adds, ‘Why need I appeal to so great an authority, when I can attest the symptoms in my own person?’ And, since Erasmus has learned, perhaps from Ovid, to manage his transitions very skilfully, we now pass imperceptibly to a picture of the author himself, still under forty years of age (as he tantalizingly says), and born on the fifth day before the Calends of November; so he will not deny us exact information about the month of his birth, at least. The introduction of his name in the third person, nine lines before, has prepared us for the first-person Erasmus whom we meet in line 65;

Nunc mihi iam raris sparguntur tempora canis, etc. - then, with a thoroughly familiar Horatian reference, ‘Eheu fugacis’ is linked to the word aevi that follows - thus not plagiarizing Horace but adapting him - and with a rising emotional tone the poet drops his self-banter and enters (just as he does in the Praise of Folly) upon a finale that is essentially serious; addressing the years that have fled, with a magnificent double simile of rapid rivers and chasing storm-clouds, Erasmus proceeds to a climax with a well-known quotation in the words cava nubila which Virgil had used several times in the Aeneid. Then comes a turn to another and a sterner image: of the dreams that haunt us at the flitting-away of sleep, leaving nothing of themselves but ‘a yearning, and foolish love-longings’ (curae, which may also mean ‘cares’ - for even in his subconscious mind Erasmus is profoundly ambiguous). But these dreams fade - it is one of the few glimpses we have of Erasmus's suppressed sensuous consciousness - like the dropping of the once-red rose in the breath of the south wind; - rosa.. tenui senescit Austro; and with the verb (senescit) in this lovely simile we are brought back, very deftly, to the notion of aging.

Now another change of direction, for which the introduction of the poet's name, and the alteration to the first person, have helped to prepare us; Erasmus recounts his own, essential, inward life-story from the brief playtime of childhood, through his youthful all-devouring passion for letters, to Paris and the battlefields of Scholastic disputation; and thence to rhetoric, its rules and colores, and his continued love for poetry -

Blandaque mellifluae deamo figmenta Poesis -; then to his serious study of Logic, with perhaps a reference the art of to painting also:

Pingere dum meditor tenueis sine corpore formas - then his literary pursuits, with deep, wide and omnivorous reading, and his attempts to complete his education - and here, significantly, he refers to Horace's ‘Matine bee’, showing that for him all this is still viewed as the formation of a poet; - his passion for all that he did to improve his mind, dum nil placet relinqui, and his trying (significantly) to join profana sacris (but this is borrowed from Horace, not from a Christian source) and to unite Greek things to

Latin; longing also to cross the Alps, to acquire friends, to be known, (Where, indeed, are Erasmus' motivating forces more clearly or more concisely depicted than in these lines?). But, in the eager acquisition of an education for these ends, he has suddenly, surprisingly, grown old - ‘Surely there was not time for this’, he says in consternation - and with this idea, and the cunning mention of the Alps at just the right place, we are back where we started. Life, ideals, experience - all these have been described - in intimate, almost revelatory, terms.

Nevertheless all this turns out to have been only preliminary, like (perhaps) the introductory scene in some Platonic dialogue. Erasmus now abandons self-examination and, for a time, turns outward to the moral needs of mankind; here, what has been called the conscience of his poetry, which is always latent somewhere, leaps to the foreground. What he has now to teach is a simple lesson, often paralleled in his educational and hortatory writings. Why he asks, do we save jewels and gold, and waste life and time, which are far more precious than these, and the loss of which can never be made good? And then at once we find a welter of mythological illustrations, from which in the preceding part of the poem our rhetorically minded author has rigorously abstained: Crassus, Croesus, Codrus, Irus; Clotho and her fatal thread; Circe; Mercury's wand and Medea's spells; nectar and ambrosia, together with a learned reference to Homer - not Aristotle this time! - as authority, which is so full of the Erasmian fun: -

‘Namque his ali iuventam,

Arceri senium, scripsit nugator Homerus’. Here it becomes evident why, twice before in the poem. Erasmus has laboured the point of reliance on authority. Again continuing the ‘non, si’ device familiar to poetic rhetoric, we have Tithonus and Phaon, and Chiron as the wise pharmacist, and the Magi (with a doubtful and twice-repeated ferunt), and two adynata to follow. But, whatever magic may or may not do, life cannot go back, even though the sun and moon should be halted in their courses. And while the wheel of nature revolves so that the sun and moon wane and yet wax young again - observe the clever re-introduction of the words sensim senescit, that run like a thread through the poem - still, if

the reviving moon ‘vegeta arridet tenero iuveniliter ore’, man's life and man's youth experience no returning. Like Phrygians, we learn late, and we regret and repent too late (‘Ploramus miseri’; - the use of the first person surely recalls the ‘me miserum!’ of line 89, while the adjective miseri also reminds us of the earlier miselle). Again at line 184 there is a return to the first person, followed by an urgent self-address: ‘Nunc tempus est, Erasme, Nunc expergisci et tota resipiscere mente’. And the exhortations that follow gradually re-introduce the notion of white hairs, whimsically (for Erasmus' fun is never far away) described as adhuc numerabilis.. until the word senectam returns to close, like a doom-stroke, line 203 of the poem. The images of autumn and winter that follow are inspired once more by Horace; but the corollary, age, iam meliora sequamur, is borrowed outright from Virgil.

The closing passage, or coda, is more restrained and quieter, and it, first, brings in a specifically Christian note; for, as we saw, the antithesis sacrum-profanum, made early in the poem is, on the face of it, only good old pagan Horace. But there is no mistaking the message here:

 
Quidquid mihi deinceps
 
Fata aevi superesse volent, id protinus omne
 
Christo dicetur uni....

And in lines 222 ff. Erasmus firmly says farewell to his intellectual trifling, however ‘serious’ hitherto - thus recalling by such a device the account of his Bildung given before - ‘valete nugae’ of course reminds us of valete formosi, Virgil's presumed adieu to his earlier studies in the Catalepton: but is reversed, for Erasmus moves away from Philosophy, unlike Virgil: Farewell (he says) to the delights of Theology, of syllogisms, the Muses, and Rhetoric with all its quaint colours and devices - ‘animosque trahentia Pithus Pigmenta flosculique’. For - ‘certum est vacare Christo’. (We may find the same sentiment, often, in Erasmus's correspondence), ‘This shall be in place of my Muses, of honour and place and pleasure; it will be all-in-all, and for everything else I shall care no more than - Hippocleides’. The incongruous old Herodotean story of Hippocleides (who, inverted upon a table, danced away his marriage) lends an unexpected air of Erasmian fun and exuberance even to the serious

climax of the poem, where it may seem out of place; and yet, it serves to indicate that however seriously Erasmus took his ideals - and the poem itself testifies to this - he never could view himself altogether gravely. At the very end there is a properly Christian sentiment: ‘Even if my earthly body should dissolve, may my mind endure in purity, until the last day restores me to everlasting life’ -; these thoughts prepare the way for the final two distichs, which enshrine a prayer to the Saviour to grant fulfilment to the wish thus devoutly expressed. If ever Erasmus expressed the whole of himself in a short composition, surely he did so here.

If we may now return to the initial question concerning the metre of the Carmen Alpestre, why did Erasmus invent, rather than adapt it for this particular purpose? In answer I would point to his two partial models, in metre as in subject, who are, as I have indicated, Horace and Prudentius. In its personal feeling and its largely autobiographical intention, the poem approaches closely to the tone of Horace's early work, especially his Epodes, and the beat of the alternating long and short lines serves to emphasize this fact. Yet it is not quite Horace, and again this is attested by the metre. If the universal, critical and philosophic content which, as we have seen, Erasmus can so skilfully interweave together with his intellectual and sentimental life-story, recall not so much the Epodes as the Satires of Horace, both must in the end give way to the lucid and serene faith of a Prudentius. It was not inappropriate, therefore, even if it was bold and unexampled, for Erasmus to blend the two metres - the pagan and the Christian - together.


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