ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE

(A Relief in the National Museum at Naples)

S. GRISWOLD MORLEY

There in the clear-cut Parian marble stand
The classic lovers: he the earth-sent guide,
And she the spirit, in a brief flash of pride
United in the shadowy Stygian land.
He turns to gaze ere they have left the strand,
And she moves toward him gladly, as a bride.
But gentle Hermes, silent at her side,
Irrevocably takes her by the hand.

No sobbing grief is here! This passion seems
Calm, like a silvery, moonlit tide. Their eyes,
Thwarted of love, and big with shattered dreams,
Are pure and steadfast: for the gods are wise,
And these true Greeks, with fearless brows, obey
The mighty laws they can not know, nor stay.

TO THREE OLD FRIENDS

In memory of unforgotten days

When we four youngsters first explored the soil
Of aging Europe, this belated spoil

I send you, to recall the high-walled ways,
Bavarian showers and Lutetian blaze,

Through which we tramped, when hardship was a foil
To rush of spirits. What delight in toil!

What fresh sensation, and wide-roving gaze!
But Time, devourer of dear things, has kept
The ancient word, and plundered from our store
Laughter and health. Soberer joys have crept
Into their places, but our graver eyes,

Grateful that we, though scattered, still are four,
Grow warm, sometimes, with smouldering memories.

TURNING FROM CAXTON TO ERASMUS

GEORGE WILLIAMSON

Caxton's Mirror of the World' may be a holding of the mirror up to nature, but the reflection is chiefly of God. This medieval encyclopedia is made with the architecture of a Divine Syllogism: all things derive from God and return to Him. Recognizing the claim of this work as one of the earliest encyclopedias in English and as the first work printed in England with illustrations, we are still more impressed with its claim as a representative page in the medieval story of man's mind when the center of his thinking was in God.

The otherworldly reference in this mass of miscellaneous knowledge is a constant reminder of the logical character of its composition. Given God as a major premise, all else may be derived. It is in this fashion that the whole work is constructed. The first chapter gives us the major premise: "All things come from Him and return to Him." The application of this proposition to the world then falls into

three parts, which may be roughly summarized as the powers

of God and man, the geography of the world, and man's place in nature. Scattered over some such logical framework is the weirdest miscellany of superstition and knowledge, ranging from Virgil's brazen Ay to mermaids and bananas, rising from the contempt of wealth to the praise of the seven liberal arts, and yet not forgetting that all things come from God and return to Him.

1

Caxton, Mirror of the World, Early English Text Society.

If we look a little more closely at this collection of knowledge we shall see some of the fundamental concepts, attitudes, and characteristics which marked the medieval mind. Most striking of all perhaps is the divine reference of medieval thought. Medieval folk thought of themselves in relation to God. And so this encyclopedia, to have any meaning, must begin with God and His power and proceed to a cataloguing of man in that relation. To make man's relation to God significant, man is given free will. Chapter four has it that "God gave man the power to do good or evil." Thus man acquires a moral meaning.

Knowledge, too, acquires its significance from God. Of those who sought knowledge chapter five says, "They endeavored to acquire the sciences which would give them the knowledge of God." He was the end of all their being. If knowledge seems at times to lose its way in geographical curiosity, it is never long till we are recalled by some such statement as "By means of their science, certain philosophers, and among them Virgil, were able to foretell the coming of Christ."

This passage is suggestive of what happened to classical learning when seen under this otherworldly light. Aristotle and Plato became props of theological projections: both of them are called upon to bear witness to more things in heaven than they had dreamed of. And among them Virgil plays his twin rôle of prophet and magician, tasting the privileges of a saint of the Church and awaiting the virtuoso's wreath of the Renaissance. In the medieval mind he was now foretelling the coming of Christ and now creating brazen flies beside which no other flies could live.

Medieval learning itself here appears in its common form of Trivium and Quadrivium, the seven liberal sciences or arts-liberal because they pertain to the soul; or as the Mirror has it, "and therefore ben the sciences liberall, for they make the soul all free." Medicine, since it pertains to the body, cannot be liberal. humanistic sense, though it may at first seem so, for it involves a certain distrust of knowledge in and for itself,

This is not liberal in the

which appears in the idea that even astronomy-most highly praised by our encyclopedist-can be an instrument of evil. This possibility became a reality when the Pope found it necessary to issue a bull against the Copernican theory.

For all that the seven arts "make the soule liberall and deliver it from all evil," their aim is not free reason, but a reason that departs from or returns to the divine premise. Some idea of what reason means in the Mirror of the World may be got from a statement, following some speculation. about God's works, which runs thus, "Else he had made something for nought and without reason." The stress. should go on "for nought," which gives the proper nuance to "without reason," making it really mean without a reason. The Middle Ages were truly the Age of "There's a reason," with the accent on a reason rather than on reason. In the medieval way of thinking God could not make something for nought, and man could not use his reason unmindful of its destination.

In yet another way the Mirror of the World is representative of the medieval mind. That is in its lack of personality, self-consciousness, or subjectivity. To be sure, one should not expect this in an encylopedia, but the Mirror of the World is not sternly objective but rather speculative and open to self-awareness. This lack is closely related to reason with a string to it, for such reason is certain to be more conscious of what it is fastened to than of itself. The medieval mind, thinking of itself only in relation to God, does not give us the sense of personality that comes with the Renaissance; and the Mirror of the World is no exception.

When we turn to such a book as Erasmus' Praise of Folly, we deepen by contrast the lines we have already sketched for the medieval mind. This Renaissance product strikes the defects of the medieval qualities much more clearly into our mind.

What a pleasant contrast is the new sense of personality which comes to us! Of course we are told that it is Folly speaking, but we know that it is a new self-conscious human

2

Erasmus, The Praise of Folly (London, Hamilton, Adams and Co., 1887).

ego, capable of playfully quoting itself in the Max Beerbohm manner, delighting in its whims and style, and knowing what it thinks. In one leap man has jumped to the place where it will be possible for an Anatole France to view his frailties with affection. And the only way they could become dear to him is by becoming of less concern to God.

This involves a shift in point of view that Erasmus puts thus, "For all interpreters by Moon understand mankind, and by Sun that fountain of all light, the Almighty." Erasmus as Folly, we must recall, was an interpreter by Moon, and spent less time in outstaring the sun and more in understanding mankind. Erasmus had what the author and the translator of the Mirror of the World could not find in their Zeitgeist-moonlight in his brains. The ability to sport with man, learning, and Scripture betrays an entirely new egocentric point of view.

The praise of folly is the ironical way of praising reason, and reason of a different sort from that of the Mirror of the World. It is reason that understands "plain sense better than any artificial pomp of reasoning." It proposes the life of reason as Aristotle knew it rather than the artificial pomp of reasoning which the Schoolmen devoted to their God. Erasmus heaps a good deal of scorn on those who "support the Catholic Church with the props and pillars of propositions and syllogisms" and, in the spirit of the Mirror, fear to find that God "had made something for nought and without reason."

Along with this different view of reason goes a different view of classical learning. Aristotle and Plato no longer serve as props and pillars of the Church, but become founts of humane learning which may be visited in the praise of folly. Familiarity with classical authors is much more extensive and profound in The Praise of Folly than in the Mirror of the World. Sophocles, Lucretius, and Horace appear; and the wider and deeper understanding of Plato which characterized the Renaissance is as strikingly present as the misinterpretation of Virgil is absent. Familiarity with