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A Study in Fool Literature.

THE "SHIP OF FOOLS."

Of all the literary products of man's scorn for man, the most finished and classical is the Fool. The rest betray the 'prentice hand; he is a masterpiece. The figures of the "dolt" or the "blockhead," for instance, are formless shadows, without distinct colour or characteristic bearing; that of the "dunce" has one feature clearly drawn-his pointed capand the rest vague; the Fool alone is completely imagined, vividly drawn, and charged at every point with ridiculous expression. The cap and ass-ears trimmed with bells, the short coat, the leather club, the bagpipe which he prefers to harp or lyre, the dull eye, the wide smirking mouth, the retreating chin-all these features make up a vivid and unique figure, which none of us ever saw, but which, if we met him, we should all involuntarily greet as an old friend.

It might be supposed that a figure so distinct would have a rigorously limited application. On the contrary, however, his very piquancy made him a favourite instrument with satirists who lashed vice with an eye to literary effect; and he was used with indiscriminate partiality to label a host of errors with which he was only remotely concerned, just as children defy nature by painting a whole landscape in their favourite red or blue. Or, again, the same thing would happen in quite a different way. When a man with a quick eye fixes his attention on some mental trait, and sets himself to observe every shade and form in which it exists, he is pretty sure to hit upon analogies which the crude psychology of popular language has missed. Thackeray pursued the notion of "snobbishness so far, that the detection of an almost impalpable grain of the quality sufficed to write a man down a snob. And the "Dulness," which Pope celebrates in the Dunciad, becomes in the last book so abnormally expanded that it can include even a Bentley and a Bolingbroke. Partly through over-close observation of this kind, partly through the loose usage of excited controversy, the term Fool obtained in the sixteenth century an extraordinary currency; and a whole group of writers is extant who used it (in logical language) with the utmost degree both of extension and of comprehension. Nearly all men, we find, are "fools," and nearly the whole gamut of faults and vices are implied in "folly." This literature of Fools is one of the most curious chapters of literary history, and, we can assure the reader, by no means without its amusing side. He must follow us, however, into scenery very unlike that of modern satire. He must leave

the elegant frivolities of Pope's "Twit'nam," and the refined fopperies of La Bruyère's Paris, the aristocracy of wit and the aristocracy of birth, and jostle the stout burghers of a medieval German town, in their narrow, crooked streets, gloomy with the shadow of jutting gables and oriels.

The vogue was first established by the epoch-making Narrenschiff (1494) of Sebastian Brandt; and writers of all classes and opinions followed his lead. The impressive preacher, Geiler of Keisersberg, made each of Brandt's Fools the theme of a sermon; the impatient Bohemian Murner surpassed Brandt on his own ground, and produced in his Narrenbeschwörung (1512) and Der grosse lutherische Narr (1522), among the most inventive works of Fool literature; Pamphilus Gengenbach answered the attack on Luther with the equally effective Novella, in which Murner is swallowed by the "Great Lutheran Fool," whom he had vainly tried to exorcise. In the camp of Humanism, meantime, the Ship of Fools helped to evoke the most famous book of the time, Erasmus's Praise of Folly (1509); and another scarcely less famous, the Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum (1515-17), though not precisely a part of Fool literature, belongs to it in tendency, and shows its influence in details. And finally, to pass over minor efforts, honest Hans Sachs devoted a good many of those Sabbath leisure hours of his to further working the same fruitful mine; and under his patient, genial touch, Fool literature, which had been steeped in all the venom of theological controversy, returned to the calmer region of social satire.

The Ship of Fools and the Praise of Folly stand at the two poles of Fool literature. The one is its most naïve, the other its most artificial, product. Erasmus's book is incomparably superior in learning, wit, and intellectual resource; but it is less sincere, consistent, and fervent than Brandt's sober rhymes. The Praise of Folly is the most brilliant work of German Humanism, a collection of the best things which had ever been said about Folly, woven into a continuous tissue, with the utmost rhetorical skill and the finest sense of congruity; the Ship of Fools is rather a growth than a creation-the outcome of mediæval wisdom flung, at the last moment of the middle ages, upon the dawning consciousness of modern times; and its materials, artlessly assembled like the items in a catalogue, betray an utter indifference to effective grouping. Brandt's work is like a bed of wild flowers, with their homely smell and sober colours; Erasmus's like a wreath woven of the most dainty and piquant exotics. And while the less pretending has at least the harmony of monotony, the more brilliant is marred by occasional lapses in its essential irony, attacking in earnest where it should defend in sport, and becoming at different times a jeu d'esprit, a diatribe, and a sermon. But both men, after all, are Teutons; and we shall seize the final note of Brandt's life and work better if we bring his shy and modest learning face to face with the blatant Humanism of Italy. Sandro Botticelli has a fascinating portrait* of one who, as

* In the Berlin Museum.

Pope, showed no love of Humanism, but who came of a great Humanist stock-Giuliano de' Medici, son of Lorenzo, and brother of Leo X.; and one sees his ancestry in the fastidious nostril, the haughty lip, the imperious but not indomitable chin, the ingenious rather than meditative forehead: an embodiment of enterprise, audacity, and defiance. Of Sebastian Brandt, too, we have a portrait. He is taken in his doctor's robes. Under the sober baretus, which covers the whole head from brow to neck, gleams a face somewhat pale and worn, yet not oppressively so, and bent a little downward, yet without any suggestion of abstraction. The eye is staid, melancholy, observant; the mouth refined, cautious, and not without a shade of pain; the nose sharp and sinuous; the forehead firm and strong. It is the face of a man whose strength and weakness lie in quiet moderation.

I.

The son of an innkeeper in Strassburg, Sebastian Brandt was born there in 1458. His father died while he was still young, and, it would seem, left his mother poor. For, instead of being sent to the great public school in the neighbouring Alsatian town of Schlettstadt, which attracted scholars from far and near-among them nearly all the other Strassburg Humanists-Brandt attended certain "elementary schools kept by private teachers." Here he learned to write Latin verses with more facility than elegance; and here he learned to love his life-long favourite, the pious and gentle magician Vergil. It was an epoch in his life when from this provincial air, from the widowed household and the obscure teachers, young Sebastian entered, at seventeen, what was at this moment the focus of the intellectual vigour of Germany, the arena of its fiercest conflicts, and the nurse of most that was to be brilliant in the next generation—the university of Basel. Here Reuchlin was preparing to be, with Erasmus, one of the "two eyes" of Germany. Here was the genial and highborn Johann von Dalberg, afterwards, as Bishop of Worms, to adorn the choice Humanist circle which Philip of the Pfalz gathered round him in Heidelberg castle; Rudolph Agricola, too, another ornament of the same court, of whom Erasmus said that he might have been the first man in Italy if he had not loved Germany better, and who might have been, still more unequivocally than he was, the first of German Humanists if his fine accomplishments had not been accompanied by a fastidious distaste for the trouble of communicating them. A little apart from this Humanist group was a little band of Alsatians distinguished rather by fervour than by lucidity, in whom the genius of Humanism half accepted or irresolutely repelled the embrace of its deadly scholastic enemy. Chief among these are two life-long friends of Brandt-Jacob Wimpheling, the most audacious of literary patriots, and the fiery coryphæus of the Strassburg Humanists, who dealt the first heavy blow at the medieval barbarism of the schools, and then, when

age had revived the old Adam in him, soiled his laurels by a passionate assault upon the pagan poets; and Johann Geiler of Keisersberg, the last great preacher before the Reformation, who attracted multitudes with sermons as homely and vivid as Bunyan in spite of all the scholastic elaboration of their plan, and made the Strassburg minster classic ground before Goethe. There, too, was Tritheim, the laborious historian of Germany, who was to cultivate Humanism in the place of all others least accessible to it-an abbot's chair-making his abbey of Sforzheim a hostelry for scholars; until at length the Obscure powers, incensed at such an anomaly, drove him out to seek a calmer resting-place at Würzburg.

To be without speculative curiosity is no doubt to avoid one great source of mental revolutions, and men who begin with no more abstract faith than that the world is full of evil commonly carry it consistently to their graves. The life of Brandt, at any rate, who held this faith if ever man did, has a continuity rarely found in celebrated lives. His way is of an even tenor, without turning points, almost without turnings. He is changed neither by obscurity nor by fame; he can be poor without bitterness, prosperous without pride. He keeps his simple creed unaltered by controversy or by persuasion. Half a century of momentous national life leaves him nearly where it found him; the youth who came to Basel in 1477 is something more than a father to the man who died at Strassburg in 1521: if one listens, one hears only a repetition-the same solemn wielding of the same moral lash, the same homely verses and the same false quantities. At the beginning one would think of him, but for his Mariolatry, as an early reformer; and when the Reformation comes he preserves his middle station, neither joining it, nor like Erasmus, Reuchlin, and so many others, receding the more the further it advanced. This is not the spurious consistency of one too proud to change his course, for no man was more inveterately modest than our Sebastian. But his very modesty heightened his natural inaccessibility to strange influences. Without either speculative intellect or restless ambition, he never struggled to escape from the charmed circle of his thoughts, the master principle of which was not understanding, nor imagination, but a hungry and imperious moral fervour, which reduced both to its service. Ingenious subtleties of the schools and airy fancies of the poets alike asked vainly for lodging within a mind which required of all its inmates the passport of ethical emotion.

It was natural, therefore, that Brandt, who had entered in the philosophic faculty, did not remain there; and that he chose instead one of the two professions congenial to a man of his earnest and didactic disposition-theology and law. He passed into the latter faculty during his third year, became licentiate in the canon law in 1484, and then taking up the civil law became in 1489 graduate in both-doctor utriusque legis. He lectured, published legal treatises, and served repeatedly as dean of the faculty. He might even be called a successful lawyer; though the phrase is somewhat inadequate to describe a man so

unworldly, so devoid of mere bustling activity, so impatient of the moral neutrality which may lurk behind the indignant phrases of the courts, so impervious to the suspicion that laws were perhaps invented for the sake of lawyers. Law, too, was only a part of his activity. He was an energetic Humanist; and in those early days of the printing-press, a Humanist had no more important function than to multiply the classics by its means. The famous press of Aldus, at Venice, was emulated by that scarcely less famous-established here by Bergmann von Olpe, which did for the Basel of Brandt what that of Froben, a generation later, did for the Basel of Erasmus. Brandt was the editor-in-chief; and under his supervision, classics and theologians, poets and jurists, heathen fabulists and fathers of the Church were impressed with that motto of Bergmann-Nil sine causa, which symbolises the self-reliance of the Humanists, as Aldus's Festina lente their methodic industry. Original poems too, Latin as well as German, issued from Brandt's busy pen; though his muse, if he had one, was certainly no classic damsel, but some pious, true-hearted Teutonic maiden. There are devout addresses to the Virgin, which read as if they came rather from a monk at his shrine than from a lawyer at his desk; and glowing odes to Kaiser Max, the favourite of his unruly subjects, the genial type of a chivalry which was dying, and which all his boyish devotion, his tournaments, and his romances could not revive.

The German poems have less elaboration of style; they are less literary; they are even less ambitious. And they have a distinct sphere. Brandt's mind, which hardly admitted of low tones of feeling, was divided somewhat sharply into the two regions of his scorns and his admirations -his attitude towards the man of men, who were "fools," and towards the exceptional,"wise." Speaking roughly, his Latin poems are odes, epistles, descriptions referring to the latter-to Geiler, A Lapide, Max, the saints and the Virgin; while the German poems are a mass of stern precepts designed to lead the host of infatuated wanderers into the right way. They are culled partly from ancients such as Solomon and Dionysius Cato; partly from the voluminous German moralists who had already gathered in the same field, from Vrîdanc, Albrecht v. Eyt, Hugo v. Trimberg. In dignity and generality they range from the Commandments down to minute injunctions not to stuff the mouth or gaze on the food. With few additions of his own, Brandt rearranges these useful directions in the dialect of his own day and his own district. There is no attempt at ingenious style, no frippery of many metres. His unvaried measure is a homely octosyllabic couplet, the degenerate offspring of the beautiful measures of Wolfram and Walther; a measure without subtle movement or airy grace, offending alternately by hard regularity and by harsh licence, but serviceable enough as a medium for thoughts which, in a metre of any lyric suggestiveness, would have seemed as incongruous as words by Poor Richard set to music by Schubert. Moreover, his didactic aim made elegance of metre superfluous. What he needed was a line VOL. XLVII.-NO. 280. 22.