John Rothwell Slater

“ Many important works have not been printed, and the copies of these must be prepared by scribes. The scribe who ceases his work because of the invention of the printing-press can be no true lover of books, in that, regarding only the present, he gives no due thought to the intellectual cultivation of his successors. The printer has no care for the beauty and the artistic form of books, while with the scribe this is a labor of love. ”

“ There are two types of great men [22] equally worthy of admiration: those of unmixed and lifelong devotion to a single aim springing from a single source, such as Aldus Manutius, and those in whom that balance of diverse and almost contradictory elements of character which commonly leads to weakness makes instead for strength and for richness, for duty and delight. Such was Robert Estienne.
[23]
The third printer whom I have selected as typical of the Renaissance is Johann Froben, of Basel. ”

“ Printing had been introduced into France in 1469 by the ecclesiastics of the Sorbonne. Like that abbot of Subiaco who set up the first press in Italy five years before, these professors of scholastic philosophy and theology at Paris did not realize that the new art had in it the possibilities of anti-clerical and heretical use. For the first generation the French printers enjoyed a considerable freedom from censorship and burdensome restrictions. They published, like the Venetians, both the Greek and Latin classics and the works of contemporary writers. ”

“ Conceive how great would be our loss if to archaeology alone we could turn for the reconstruction of the civilization, the art, the philosophy, the public and private life of Greece and Rome. If the Church had done no more than this for civilization, it would still [3] have earned some measure of tolerance from its most anti-clerical opponents. It is of course to the Eastern rather than to the Roman Church that we owe the preservation of classical Greek literature, copied during the dark ages in Greek monasteries and introduced into Italy after the fall of Constantinople. ”

“ There were universities centuries before Gutenberg where the few instructed the many in the learning treasured up in books, and where both scholars and professional scribes multiplied copies of books both old and new. At the outset of any examination of the influence of printing on the Renaissance it is necessary to remind ourselves that the intellectual life of the ancient and the mediaeval world was built upon the written word. ”

“ All that romance of the imagination which touches with a golden glamour the recovered treasures of pagan antiquity he loved as intensely as if it were not alien and hostile, as the many thought, to that glow of spiritual piety, that zeal of martyrdom, that white, consuming splendor which for the mystical imagination surrounds the holy cross. ”

“ Such a fear was not unfounded, for the poorer scholars of Germany and the Netherlands did actually find that they could stay at home and get for a few francs the ripest results of Italian and Greek scholarship. This gave Aldus no concern; if he could render international services to learning, if he could help to set up among the humbler scholars of other lands such a fine rivalry of competitive coöperation as already existed among such leaders as Erasmus and Sir Thomas More, he should be well content to live laborious days and to die poor. ”

“ A great many other examples of such disinterested carefulness are to be found in the history of those busy fifteen years at Westminster. In view of the fact that he was not only editor, printer, and publisher, but also translated twenty-three books totaling more than forty-five hundred printed pages, this scholarly desire for accuracy deserves the highest praise. Unlike Aldus and Froben, who were likewise editors as well as publishers, he was not surrounded by a capable corps of expert scholars, but worked almost alone. ”

“ The middle of the sixteenth century in France is thus marked by a curious blend of those two distinct movements in human history which we call the Renaissance and the Reformation, and the blend is nowhere more picturesque than in the life of Robert Estienne. ”

“ Later, with an equally sagacious and generous spirit, perceiving that the young artist was too great a man to spend his days in a printing office, he procured for him through Sir Thomas More an introduction to the court of Henry VIII, where he won fame and fortune as a portrait painter. I narrate the incident because it illustrates a very attractive and amiable aspect of some of these men of the Renaissance, an uncalculating and generous desire to help gifted men to find their true place in the world where they might do their largest work. ”

“ Every city in Europe is shown in a front elevation in which the perspective reminds one of Japanese art, and the castle-towers and bridges and river-boats all bear a strong family resemblance. The book is full of curious material, quite apart from the quaint illustrations. In the midst of grave affairs of state we run across a plague of locusts, an eclipse of the sun, or a pair of lovers who died for love. ”

“ There is evidence of similar methods in France and Germany during the earlier decades of the Renaissance.
This preliminary sketch of the book-publishing business before printing is intended to correct a rather common misapprehension. Manuscript books were indeed relatively costly, but they were not scarce. Any scholar who had not been through a university not only had access to public libraries of hundreds of volumes, but might also possess, at prices not beyond the reach of a moderate purse, his own five-foot shelf of the classics. ”

“ And in this relation of Froben to Erasmus there was not the mere commercial attitude of a shrewd publisher toward a successful author whose works became highly lucrative, but the support by one enlightened scholar who happened to be in a profitable business of another who happened to be out of it. The earlier life of Erasmus exhibits a rather depressing illustration of the humiliations to which professional scholars were exposed in trying to get a living from the pensions and benefactions of the idle rich. ”

“ Again, Caxton was conscientious. He set great store by accuracy, not only typographical accuracy in matters of detail, but also the general accuracy of the texts or sources from which his own translations and his editions of other works were made. For example, in the second edition of the Canterbury Tales he explains how the first edition was printed from the best manuscript that he could find in 1478, but how after the appearance of that there came to him a scholar who complained of many errors, and spoke of another and more [33] authentic manuscript in his father's possession. ”

“ Then they loaf in and sit and chatter to no purpose. Even these people with no business are not so bad as those who have a poem to offer or something in prose (usually very prosy indeed) which they wish to see printed with the name of Aldus. These interruptions are now becoming too serious for me, and I must take steps to lessen them. Many letters I simply leave unanswered, while to others I send very brief replies; and as I do this not from pride or from discourtesy, but simply in order to be able to go on with my task of printing good books, it must not be taken hardly. ”

“ There grew up in each university city an organized system of supplying the students with textbooks. The authorized book-dealers of a mediaeval university were called stationarii, or stationers, a term apparently derived from the fixed post or station assigned in or near the university buildings to each scribe permitted to supply books to the students and professors. A stationer in England has always meant primarily a book-dealer or publisher, as for example in the term Stationers' Hall, the guild or corporation which until 1842 still exercised in London the functions of a copyright bureau. ”

“ The mechanical advance in the art of writing brought about by printing was at first regarded as consisting in the greater rapidity and lower cost at which printed books could be produced.
But the new invention was at first looked upon by some famous scholars and patrons of learning as a detriment rather than a help. The great Trithemius, abbot of Sponheim, wrote as late as 1494 in the following terms:
"A work written on parchment could be preserved for a thousand years, while it is probable that no volume printed on paper will last for more than two centuries. ”

“ If printing had never been invented, it is easy to conceive that the enormous learning and intellectual power of a few men in each generation might have gone on increasing so that the world might to-day possess most of the knowledge that we now enjoy ”

“ Nuremberg nodded peacefully on while a new world loomed up beyond the seas, and studied Michael Wolgemut's picture of Noah building the ark while Columbus was fitting out the Santa Maria for a second voyage. Such is mankind, blind and deaf to the greatest things. We know not the great hour when it strikes. We are indeed most enthralled by the echoing chimes of the romantic past when the future sounds its faint far-off reveille upon our unheeding ears. The multitude understands noon and night; only the wise man understands the morning.
[30]
And now finally, what of William Caxton? ”

“ The books of the Aldine press, all with the well-known sign of the anchor and dolphin, are familiar to most students of the classics. Aldus was born in 1450, the very year of Gutenberg's invention. For the first forty years of his life he was a scholar, devoting himself to the Latin classics and to the mastery of the newly revived Greek language and literature. ”

“ It is to the mediaeval Church, her conservatism in the true sense of the word, her industry, her patience, her disinterested guardianship alike of sacred and of pagan letters, that the world owes most of our knowledge of antiquity. ”

“ Anti-Semitism runs rampant through its pages. Various detailed accounts are given of the torture and murder of Christian boys by Jews, followed by the capture and burning alive of the conspirators. Superstition and intolerance stand side by side with a naive mystical piety and engaging stories of the saints and martyrs. Of all the vast transformation in human thought that was then taking form in Italy, of all the forward-looking signs of the times, there is little trace. ”

“ This popularizing of literature and of classical learning did not meet with universal favor amongst his countrymen. We read of one Italian who warned Aldus that if he kept on spreading Italian scholarship beyond the Alps at nominal prices the outer barbarians would no longer come to Italy to study Greek, but would stay at home and read their Aldine editions without adding a penny to the income of Italian cities. ”

“ Loeb commands the latest and most complete resources of the modern art of printing; Aldus helped to make that art. Mr. Loeb's editors may employ when they choose the style of type known as italic; Aldus invented it. Mr. Loeb's publishers have at their command all the advertising and selling machinery of a great modern business [14] concern, and yet they do not, and probably can not, make the classics pay for themselves, but must meet the deficits out of an endowment. ”

“ In the second place, his publishing business was far better organized, far more extensive in its selling and distributing machinery, than that of any other printer in Europe. We learn that he had agents not only in every German city, but in the very headquarters of his greatest competitors at Paris, Venice, and Rome, and in such more distant places as Vienna, Buda-Pesth, and Warsaw. The twenty-four presses in his own Nuremberg establishment were not sufficient for his enormous business, and he let out printing jobs on contract or commission to printers at Strasburg, Basel, and elsewhere. ”

“ The invention of printing was not the work of any one man. Not only were printed pages of text with accompanying pictures produced from woodcut blocks in Holland a quarter of a century before Gutenberg began his work at Mainz, but it is pretty well established that movable types were employed by Laurence Koster, of [7] Haarlem, as early as 1430. But Koster, who died about 1440, did not carry his invention beyond the experimental stages, and produced no really fine printing. ”

“ Loeb is a retired millionaire who employs scholars to do all the work and merely foots the bill, while Aldus was a poor man dependent upon such capital as he could borrow from his patrons, and had at the same time to perform for himself a large part of the editorial labors on his books. ”

“ Herein may be seen noble chivalry, courtesy, humanity, friendliness, hardiness, love, friendship, cowardice, murder, hate virtue and sin. Do after the good and leave the evil, and it shall bring you to good fame and renommee. ”

“ The original regulation which forbade the stationers to sell books was intended to prevent students of a profiteering turn of mind from buying books for resale to their fellow-students at a higher price, thus cornering the market and holding up the work of an entire class. ”

“ But all of its publications belonged in general to the movement known as humanism, the field of ancient [17] and contemporary poetry, drama, philosophy, history, and art. Aldus left to others, especially to the great ecclesiastical printers of Venice and of Rome, the printing of the scriptures, the works of the church fathers, and the innumerable volumes of theological controversy with which the age abounded. ”

“ The small letters were adapted from the rounded vertical style of writing used in many Italian texts, altogether different in form from the angular gothic alphabet used in ecclesiastical manuscripts. Jenson's roman letters were clear, sharp and easy to read, and constituted the greatest single addition to the art of printing since its beginning. [11] Germany clung obstinately to the black-letter in its Latin books, as it has adhered down to very recent times to a similar heavy type for the printing of German text ”