The Renaissance European
Erasmus : Lectures and Wayfaring Sketches. By P. s. Allen. (Clarendon Press. 12s. ed.)
Erasmus. By Stefan Zweig. Translated by Eden and cedar Paul. (Cassell. 10s. 6c1.)
THESE two books provide an elegant and stimulating contrast to each other : one is a work of pure scholarship withOut any arriere-pensee, the other is one which thinks of ErasMus in
terms of the contemporary phase of the struggle between
reason and unreason, and ends with-an eloquent plea for that tradition of toleration and. reasonableness of which Erasmus was the foremost European exponent.
Dr. Allen's posthumous book of sketches is a fit companion for his previous volume, The Age 'of Erasmus. As the last
book from the greatest authority on Erasmus, it is a book well worth having, even if put together from occasional papers. What is more, it makes very pleasant reading ; it is in some sort fragments of that Life of Erasmus which he would have written after bringing his life's work on the Letters to an end, and is some consolation for our lacking that. It portrays, with sympathy and instinctive understanding, various facets of that busy, brilliant life : his relations with the great printers, Aldus, Froben, Christopher Plantin and others, whose presses he kept busy with his ceaseless industry and his facile, hurrying pen ; it is curious, for instance, to reflect that the works by which Erasmus is remembered, In Praise of Folly (the Moriae Encomium with its characteristic play on the name of Thomas More), the Enchiridion :Militis Christiani and the Colloquia, were mostly thrown off in a few days or weeks in the intervals of his untiring labours on the New Testament and the early Fathers. We are given sketches of his friends, disciples and servant-pupils, who drew around him from all over Europe ; there was the young Pole of noble birth, who was proud to inscribe upon his tomb, years after in far-away Cracow, where he died as Bishop : magni illius Erasmi discipulus et auditor" ; or there was our own Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, who wrote to remind the great scholar of the house in Paris, in the Rix St. Jean, where as a boy he had prepared Erasmus's salads with butter and vinegar, " and you used to say that you never had therri so niceanywhere else."
Erasmus knew everybody of importance in Europe ; it was a brilliant circle, in which was brought together all that was most hopeful and promising in the Northern RenaissanCe.
Ulrich von Hutten had written that it was a joy to be alive in those years--one remembers a similar phrase at another such spring-time in history, written by an Englishman, after what disappointments of what hOpes ! But the hopes of these civilized men, the Humanists, were destined to be blasted-by a wind blowing out of the barbaric forests of interior Germany.
Stefan Zweig's book is concerned with the conflict between these hopes of a new advance in civilization, cultured, kindly, pacific and the reaction to an elemental faith, passionate, sincere, thinking with the bowels. He brings out, movingly and justly, the dramatic contrast between Erasmus and Luther, the two protagonists. " As the Germanic hordes of old swept down upon the world of classical Rome," he says, " so Luther, the fanatical man of action, backed by the irresistible force of a mass movement, sallied forth to Swamp and to destroy this supranational dream." The contemporary
parallel is .obvioui.. But in his portraits of the one and the other, Stefan Zweig is just and accurate, and pierces to the
heart of his subject : the strength and weakness of Erasmus, the candid faith in reason as the only guide in humanaffairs, the tolerance, the penetrating keenness, the intellectualism without strong enough roots to face the blast from the East,
Similarly, in reading his account of the filthy Luther (" Kill, . slay, stab, burn," he exhorted the Princes dUring the Peasants' if- they needed any encouragement !), Yie still have no doubt of the man's demonic genius, his .brutal force rooted in alt the strength of tgesoiL '-'t:'..The•HOIY:GliOst is not a sceptic," he cried out against Erasmus, delivering a shat- tering blow where the latter was at his weakest tactically. For the latter could hardly reply, " No : it is a strong delu- sion ; in that age he had to make the gesture of belief. But it was Erasmus who, though less effective, was right ; whose whole life had pointed to the only tolerable way to the future, the rule of intelligence and reason.
A. L. ROWSE.
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