Page:The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).djvu/41

Rh Stoic, for the world. A passage extracted from a letter written by Erasmus in 1518, may serve better than Hutten's exclamation to show the average valuation put upon life by a humanist. "I am not so greatly attached to life; having entered upon my fifty-first year, I judge I have lived long enough; and on the other hand, I see in this life nothing so excellent or agreeable that a man might wish for it, on whom the Christian creed has conferred the hope of a much happier life, in store for those who have attached themselves closely to piety. Nevertheless, at present, I could almost wish to be rejuvenated for a few years, for this only reason that I believe I see a golden age dawning in the near future." He then describes the concord reigning among the princes of Christendom and their inclination to peace—which was so dear to him personally—then he continues: "Everything confirms my hope that not only good morals and Christian piety will be reborn and flourish, but also pure and true literature and good learning." Thanks to the protection of princes, be it understood. "It is to their pious feelings that we are indebted for seeing everywhere, as at a given signal, illustrious spirits awakening and conspiring to restore good learning."

In short, the appreciation of the joys of life, which Erasmus manifests, is fairly cool; moreover, he soon changed his mood of hopeful expectation, never to find it again. However, compared with current feeling in the preceding century, except in Italy, Erasmus's appreciation might rather be called warm. The men of letters at the court of Charles VII, or at that of Philip the Good, never tire of inveighing against life and the age. The note of despair and profound dejection is predominantly sounded not by ascetic monks, but by the court poets and the chroniclers—laymen, living in aristocratic circles and amid aristocratic ideas. Possessing only a slight intellectual and moral culture, being for the most part strangers to study and learning, and of only a feebly religious temper, they were incapable of finding consolation or hope in the spectacle of universal misery and decay, and could only bewail the decline of the world and despair of justice and of peace.

No one has been so lavish of complaints of this nature as Eustache Deschamps: