Part 56 (2/2)

[Sidenote: Roger Bacon and Columbus.]

[Sidenote: Pierre d'Ailly's _Imago Mundi_.]

The man who becomes the conspicuous developer of any great world-movement is usually the embodiment of the ripened aspirations of his time. Such was Columbus. It is the forerunner, the man who has little countenance in his age, who points the way for some hazardous after-soul to pursue. Such was Roger Bacon, the English Franciscan. It was Bacon's lot to direct into proper channels the new surging of the experimental sciences which was induced by the revived study of Aristotle, and was carrying dismay into the strongholds of Platonism.

Standing out from the background of Arab regenerating learning, the name of Roger Bacon, linked often with that of Albertus Magnus, stood for the best knowledge and insight of the thirteenth century. Bacon it was who gave that tendency to thought which, seized by Cardinal Pierre d'Ailly, and incorporated by him in his _Imago Mundi_ (1410), became the link between Bacon and Columbus. Humboldt has indeed expressed his belief that this encyclopaedic Survey of the World exercised a more important influence upon the discovery of America than even the prompting which Columbus got from his correspondence with Toscanelli. How well Columbus pored over the pages of the _Imago Mundi_ we know from the annotations of his own copy, which is still preserved in the Biblioteca Colombina.

It seems likely that Columbus got directly from this book most that he knew of those pa.s.sages in Aristotle, Strabo, and Seneca which speak of the Asiatic sh.o.r.es as lying opposite to Hispania. There is some evidence that this book was his companion even on his voyages, and Humboldt points out how he translates a pa.s.sage from it, word for word, when in 1498 he embodied it in a letter which he wrote to his sovereigns from Espanola.

[Sidenote: His acquaintance with the elder writers.]

If we take the pains, as Humboldt did, to examine the writings of Columbus, to ascertain the sources which he cited, we find what appears to be a broad acquaintance with books. It is to be remembered, however, that the Admiral quoted usually at second hand, and that he got his acquaintance with cla.s.sic authors, at least, mainly through this _Imago Mundi_ of Pierre d'Ailly. Humboldt, in making his list of Columbus's authors, omits the references to the Scriptures and to the Church fathers, ”in whom,” as he says, ”Columbus was singularly versed,” and then gives the following catalogue:--

Aristotle; Julius Caesar; Strabo; Seneca; Pliny; Ptolemy; Solinus; Julius Capitolinus; Alfrazano; Avenruyz; Rabbi Samuel de Israel; Isidore, Bishop of Seville; the Venerable Bede; Strabus, Abbe of Reichenau; Duns Scotus; Francois Mayronis; Abbe Joachim de Calabre; Sacrobosco, being in fact the English mathematician Holywood; Nicholas de Lyra, the Norman Franciscan; King Alfonso the Wise, and his Moorish scribes; Cardinal Pierre d'Ailly; Gerson, Chancellor of the University of Paris; Pope Pius II., otherwise known as aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini; Regiomonta.n.u.s, as the Latinized name of Johann Muller of Konigsberg is given, though Columbus does not really name him; Paolo Toscanelli, the Florentine physician; and Nicolas de Conti, of whom he had heard through Toscanelli, perhaps.

Humboldt can find no evidence that Columbus had read the travels of Marco Polo, and does not discover why Navarrete holds that he had, though Polo's stories must have permeated much that Columbus read; nor does he understand why Irving says that Columbus took Marco Polo's book on his first voyage.

[Sidenote: Columbus and Toscanelli.]

We see often in the world's history a simultaneousness in the regeneration of thought. Here and there a seer works on in ignorance of some obscure brother elsewhere. Rumor and circulating ma.n.u.scripts bring them into sympathy. They grow by the correlation. It is just this correspondence that confronts us in Columbus and Toscanelli, and it is not quite, but almost, perceptible that this wise Florentine doctor was the first, despite Humboldt's theory, to plant in the mind of Columbus his aspirations for the truths of geography. It is meet that Columbus should not be mentioned without the accompanying name of Toscanelli. It was the Genoese's different fortune that he could attempt as a seaman a practical demonstration of his fellow Italian's views.

Many a twin movement of the world's groping spirit thus seeks the light.

Progress naturally pushes on parallel lines. Commerce thrusts her intercourse to remotest regions, while the Church yearns for new souls to convert, and peers longingly into the dim s.p.a.ces that skirt the world's geography. Navigators improve their methods, and learned men in the arts supply them with exacter instruments. The widespread manifestations of all this new life at last crystallize, and Gama and Columbus appear, the reflex of every development.

[Sidenote: Opportuneness of his discoveries.]

Thus the discovery of Columbus came in the ripeness of time. No one of the anterior accidents, suggesting a western land, granting that there was some measure of fact in all of them, had come to a world prepared to think on their developments. Vinland was practically forgotten, wherever it may have been. The tales of Fousang had never a listener in Europe.

Madoc was as unknown as Elidacthon. While the new Indies were not in their turn to be forgotten, their discoverer was to bury himself in a world of conjecture. The superlatives of Columbus soon spent their influence. The pioneer was lost sight of in the new currents of thought which he had started. Not of least interest among them was the cognizance of new races of men, and new revelations in the animal and physical kingdoms, while the question of their origins pressed very soon on the theological and scientific sense of the age.

[Sidenote: Not above his age.]

[Sidenote: Claims for palliation.]

No man craves more than Columbus to be judged with all the palliations demanded of a difference of his own age and ours. No child of any age ever did less to improve his contemporaries, and few ever did more to prepare the way for such improvements. The age created him and the age left him. There is no more conspicuous example in history of a man showing the path and losing it.

It is by no means sure, with all our boast of benevolent progress, that atrocities not much short of those which we ascribe to Columbus and his compeers may not at any time disgrace the coming as they have blackened the past years of the nineteenth century. This fact gives us the right to judge the infirmities of man in any age from the high vantage-ground of the best emotions of all the centuries. In the application of such perennial justice Columbus must inevitably suffer. The degradation of the times ceases to be an excuse when the man to be judged stands on the pinnacle of the ages. The biographer cannot forget, indeed, that Columbus is a portrait set in the surroundings of his times; but it is equally his duty at the same time to judge the paths which he trod by the scale of an eternal n.o.bleness.

[Sidenote: Test of his character.]

[Sidenote: Not a creator of ideas.]

The very domination of this man in the history of two hemispheres warrants us in estimating him by an austere sense of occasions lost and of opportunities embraced. The really great man is superior to his age, and antic.i.p.ates its future; not as a sudden apparition, but as the embodiment of a long growth of ideas of which he is the inheritor and the capable exemplar. Humboldt makes this personal domination of two kinds. The one comes from the direct influence of character; the other from the creation of an idea, which, freed from personality, works its controlling mission by changing the face of things. It is of this last description that Humboldt makes the domination of Columbus. It is extremely doubtful if any instance can be found of a great idea changing the world's history, which has been created by any single man. None such was created by Columbus. There are always forerunners whose agency is postponed because the times are not propitious. A masterful thought has often a long pedigree, starting from a remote antiquity, but it will be dormant till it is environed by the circ.u.mstances suited to fructify it.

This was just the destiny of the intuition which began with Aristotle and came down to Columbus. To make his first voyage partook of foolhardiness, as many a looker-on reasonably declared. It was none the less foolhardy when it was done. If he had reached the opulent and powerful kings of the Orient, his little c.o.c.kboats and their brave souls might have fared hard for their intrusion. His blunder in geography very likely saved him from annihilation.

[Sidenote: His character differently drawn.]

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