Renaissance in Italy Volume II Part 27

[Footnote 516: 'Perfect nose, imperial nose, divine nose, nose to be blessed among all noses; and blessed be the b.r.e.a.s.t.s that made you with a nose so lordly, and blessed be all those things you put your nose to!' The above is quoted from Cantu's _Storia della Letteratura Italiana_. I have not seen the actual address.]

If the most marked feature of humanistic literature was the creation of a Latin style, the supreme dictators were Cicero in prose and Virgil in verse. That Cicero should have fascinated the Italians in an age when art was dominant, when richness of decoration, rhetorical fluency, and pomp of phrase appealed to the liveliest instincts of a splendour-loving, sensitive, declamatory race, is natural. The Renaissance found exactly what it wanted in the manner of the most obviously eloquent of Latin authors, himself a rhetorician among philosophers, an orator among statesmen, the weakness of whose character was akin to that which lay at the root of fifteenth-century society. To be the 'apes of Cicero,' in all the branches of literature he had cultivated, was regarded by the humanists as a religious duty.[517] Though they had no place in the senate, the pulpit, or the law court, they were fain to imitate his oratory. Therefore public addresses to amba.s.sadors, to magistrates on a.s.suming office, and to Popes on their election; epithalamial and funeral discourses; panegyrics and congratulations--sounded far and wide through Italy.

The fifteenth century was the golden age of speechification. A man was measured by the amount of fluent Latinity he could pour forth; copiousness of quotations secured applause; and readiness to answer on the spur of the moment in smooth Ciceronian phrases, was reckoned among the qualities that led to posts of trust in Church and State.

On the other hand, a failure of words on any ceremonial occasion pa.s.sed for one of the great calamities of life. The common name for an envoy, _oratore_, sufficiently indicates the public importance attached to rhetoric. It formed a necessary part of the parade which the Renaissance loved, and, more than that, a part of its diplomatic machinery. To compose orations that could never be recited was a fashionable exercise; and since the 'Verrines' and the 'Philippics'

existed, no occasion was lost for reproducing something of their spirit in the invectives whereof so much has been already said. The emptiness of all this oratory, separated from the solid concerns of life, and void of actual value, tended to increase the sophistic character of literature. Eloquence, which ought to owe its force to pa.s.sionate emotion or to gravity of meaning, degenerated into a mere play of words; and to such an extent was verbal cleverness over-estimated, that a scholar could ascribe the fame of Julius Caesar to his 'Commentaries' rather than his victories.[518] It does not seem to have occurred to him that Pompey would have been glad if Caesar had always wielded his pen, and that Brutus would hardly have stabbed a friendly man of letters. When we read a genuine humanistic speech, we find that it is princ.i.p.ally composed of trite tales and citations. To play upon the texts of antiquity, as a pianist upon the keys of his instrument, was no small part of eloquence; and the music sounded pleasant in ears greedy of the very t.i.tles of old writings. Vespasiano mentions that Carlo Aretino owed his early fame at Florence to one lecture, introducing references to all the cla.s.sic authors.

[Footnote 517: The phrase is eulogistically used by F. Villani in his _Life of Coluccio Salutato_.]

[Footnote 518: See Muratori, vol. xx. 442, 453.]

The style affected for moral dissertation was in like manner Ciceronian. The dialogue in particular became fashionable; and since it was dangerous to introduce matter unsuited to Tully's phrases, these disquisitions are usually devoid of local colouring and contemporary interest. Few have such value as attaches to the opening of Poggio's essay on Fortune, to Valeriano's treatise on the misfortunes of the learned, or to Gyraldi's attack upon the humanists.

Another important branch of literature, modelled upon Ciceronian masterpieces, was letter-writing. The epistolography of the humanists might form a separate branch of study, if we cared to trace its history through several stages, and to sift the stores at our disposal. Petrarch, after discovering the familiar letters of the Roman orator, first gave an impulse to this kind of composition. In his old age he tells how he was laughed at in his youth for a.s.suming the Latin style of _thou_ together with the Roman form of superscription.[519] I have already touched upon the currency it gained through the practice of Coluccio Salutato and the teaching of Gasparino da Barzizza.[520] In course of time books of formulae and polite letter-writers were compiled, enabling novices to adopt the Ciceronian mannerism with safety.[521] The Papal Curia sanctioned a set of precedents for the guidance of its secretaries, while the epistles of eminent chancellors served as models for the despatches of republican governments.

[Footnote 519: _Epist. Rer. Senil._ xv. 1. 'Styli hujus per Italiam non auctor quidem, sed instaurator ipse mihi videor, quo c.u.m uti inciperem, adolescens a coaetaneis irridebar, qui in hoc ipso certatim me postea sunt secuti.']

[Footnote 520: See above, pp. 76-78.]

[Footnote 521: Gian Maria Filelfo, son of the celebrated professor, published an _Epistolarium_ of this kind.]

The private letters of scholars were useful in keeping up communication between the several centres of culture in Italy. From these sources too we now derive much interesting information respecting the social life of the humanists. They seem to have avoided political, theological, and practical topics, cultivating a style of urbane compliment, exchanging opinions about books, asking small favours, acknowledging obligations, recommending friends to favourable notice, occasionally describing their mode of life, discussing the qualities of their patrons with cautious reserve, but seeking above all things to display grace of diction and elegant humour rather than erudition. The fact that these Latin epistles were invariably intended for circulation and ultimate publication, renders it useless to seek for insight from them into strictly private matters.[522] For the historian the most valuable collections of Renaissance letters are composed in Italian, and are not usually the work of scholars, but of agents, spies, and envoys. Compared with the reports of the Venetian amba.s.sadors, the correspondence of the humanists is unimportant. In addition to familiar letters, it not unfrequently happened, however, that epistles upon topics of public interest were indited by students. Intended by their diffusion to affect opinion, and addressed to influential friends or patrons, these compositions a.s.sumed the form of pamphlets. Of this kind were the letters on the Eastern question sent by Filelfo to Charles VII. of France, to the Emperor, to Matthias Corvinus, to the Dukes of Burgundy and Urbino, and to the Doge of Venice. The immortality expected by the humanists from their epistles, has hardly fallen to their lot; though much of Poliziano's, Pico's, Antiquari's, and Piccolomini's correspondence is still delightful and instructive reading. The ma.s.ses extant in MS. exceed what has been printed; while the printed volumes, with some rare exceptions, among which may be mentioned Poliziano's letter to Antiquari on the death of Lorenzo, are only used by students.[523]

[Footnote 522: Francesco Filelfo, quoted in Rosmini's Life, vol. ii.

pp. 304, 282, 448, writes, 'Le cose che non voglio sieno copiate, le scrivo sempre alla grossolana.' 'Hoc autem scribendi more utimur iis in rebus quarum memoriam nolumus transferre ad posteros. Et ethrusca quidem lingua vix toti Italiae nota est, at latina oratio longe ac late per universum orbem est diffusa.' ('Matters I do not wish to have copied I always write off in the vulgar. This style I use for such things as I do not care to transmit to posterity. Tuscan, to be sure, is hardly known to all Italians, while Latin is spread far and wide through the whole world.')]

[Footnote 523: See Voigt, pp. 421, 422, for an account of Filelfo's, Traversari's, Barbaro's, and Bruni's letters.]

Since Cicero had left no specimen of history, the humanists were driven to follow other masters in this branch of literature. Livy was the author of their predilection. Caesar supplied them with a model for the composition of commentaries, and Sall.u.s.t for concise monographs.

Suetonius was followed in such minute studies of character as Decembrio's 'Life of Filippo Maria Visconti.' I do not find that Tacitus had any thoroughgoing imitators; the magniloquence of rhetoric, rather than the pungency of sarcasm, suited the taste of the age. The faults of the humanistic histories have been already pointed out.[524]

[Footnote 524: See Vol. I., _Age of the Despots_, pp. 216, 217, and above, p. 377.]

The services of the humanists, as commentators, translators, critics of texts, compilers of grammars and dictionaries of all kinds, collectors of miscellaneous information, and writers on antiquities, still remain to be remembered. Their industry in this field was quite different from the labour they devoted to the perfecting of style.

Whatever we may think of them as men of letters, we are bound to give their erudition almost unqualified praise. Not, indeed, that their learning any more than their literature was final. It too has been superseded; but it formed the basis of a sounder method, and rendered the attainment of more certain knowledge possible. It is not too much to say that modern culture, so far as it is derived from antiquity, owes everything to the indefatigable energy of the humanists. Before the age of printing, scholars had to store their memories with encyclopaedic information, while the very want of a critical method, by preventing them from exactly discerning the good and the bad, enabled them to take a broader and more comprehensive view of cla.s.sical literature than is now at any rate common. Antiquity as a whole--not the authors merely of the Attic age or the Augustan--claimed their admiration; and though they devoted special study to Cicero and Virgil for the purposes of style, they eagerly accepted every Greek or Latin composition from the earliest to the latest. To this omnivorous appet.i.te of the elder scholars we are perhaps indebted for the preservation of many fragments which a more delicate taste would have rejected. Certainly we owe to them the conception of the cla.s.sics in their totality, as forming the proper source of culture for the human race. The purism of Vida and Bembo, though it sprang from more refined perceptions, was in some respects a retrogression from the wide and liberal erudition of their predecessors. Discipleship under Virgil may make a versifier; but he who would fain comprehend the Latin genius must know the poets of Rome from Ennius to Claudian.

Finally we have to render the tribute due to the humanists for their diffusion of a liberal spirit. Sustained by the enthusiasm of antiquity, they first ventured to take a standpoint outside catholicity; and though they made but bad use of this spiritual freedom, inclining to levity and G.o.dlessness instead of fighting the battle of the reason, yet their large and human survey of the world was in itself invigorating. Poggio at the Council of Constance regarded Jerome of Prague not as a heretic, not as a fanatic, but as a Stoic. In other words, he was capable of divesting his mind of temporary a.s.sociations and conventional prejudices, and of discerning the true character of the man who suffered heroically for his opinions. This instance ill.u.s.trates the general tone and temper of the humanists. Their study of antiquity freed them from the scholastic pedantries of theologians, and from the professional conceits of jurists and physicians. There is nothing great and n.o.ble in human nature that might not, we fancy, have grown and thriven under their direction, if the circ.u.mstances of Italy had been more favourable to high aspirations. As it was, the light was early quenched and clouded by base vapours of a sensual, enslaved, and priest-corrupted society.

The vital force of the Revival pa.s.sed into the Reformation; the humanists, degraded and demoralised, were superseded. Still it was they who created the new atmosphere of culture, wherein whatever is luminous in art, literature, science, criticism, and religion has since flourished. Though we may perceive that they obeyed a false authority--that of the cla.s.sics, and worshipped a false idol--style, yet modern liberty must render them the meed of thanks for this. When we consider that before the sixteenth century had closed, they had imbued the whole Italian nation with their views, forming a new literature, directing every kind of mental activity, and producing a new social tone, and furthermore that Italy in the sixteenth century impressed her spirit on the rest of Europe, we have a right to hail the humanists as the schoolmasters of modern civilisation.

As schoolmasters in a stricter sense of the term, it is not easy to exaggerate the influence exercised by Italian students. They first conceived and framed the education that has now prevailed through Europe for four centuries, moulding the youth of divers nations by one common discipline, and establishing an intellectual concord for all peoples. In spite of changes in government and creed, in spite of differences caused by race and language, we have maintained an uniformity of culture through the simultaneous prosecution of cla.s.sic studies on the lines laid down for teachers by the scholars of the fifteenth century. The system of our universities and public schools is in truth no other than that devised by Vittorino and Guarino. Thus humanism in modern Europe has continued the work performed during the Middle Ages by the Church, uniting in one confederation of spiritual activity nations widely separated by all that tends to keep the human families apart.

Until quite recently in England, the _litterae humaniores_ were accepted as the soundest training for careers in Church and State, for the learned professions, and for the private duties of gentlemen. If the old ideal is yielding at last to theories of a wider education based on science and on modern languages, that is due partly to the extension of useful knowledge, and partly to the absorption of cla.s.sic literature into the modern consciousness. The sum of what a cultivated man should know, in order to maintain a place among the pioneers of progress, is so vast, that learners, distracted by a variety of subjects, resent the expenditure of precious time on Greek and Latin.

Teachers, on the other hand, through long familiarity with humane studies, have fallen into the languor of routine. Besides, as knowledge in each new department increases, the necessity of specialising with a view to adopting a professional career, makes itself continually felt with greater urgency. It may therefore be plausibly argued that we have outgrown the conditions of humanism, and that a new stage in the history of education has been reached. Have not the ancients done as much for us as they can do? Are not our minds permeated with their thoughts? Do not the masterpieces of modern literature hold in solution the best that can be got from them for future uses?

These questions can perhaps be met by the counter-question whether the arts and letters of the Greeks and Romans will not always hold their own, not only in the formation of pure taste, but also in the discipline of character and the training of the intelligence. Just as well might we cease to study the sacred books of the Jews, because we have incorporated their ethics into our conscience, and possess their religion in our liturgy. No transmission of a spirit at second or third hand can be the same as its immediate contact; nor can we afford, however full our mental life may be, to lose the vivid sense of what men were and what they wrought in ages far removed from us, especially when those men were our superiors in certain spheres.

Again, it may be doubted whether we should understand the masterpieces of modern literature, when we came to be separated from the sources of their inspiration. If Olympus connoted less than Asgard, or Hercules were no more familiar to our minds than Rustem, or the horses of the Sun stood at the same distance from us as the cows of Indra--if, in fact, we abandoned Greek as much as we have abandoned Scandinavian, Persian, and Sanskrit mythology, would not some of the most brilliant images of our own poets fade into leaden greyness, like clouds that have lost the flush of living light upon them?

It is therefore not improbable that for many years to come the higher culture of the race will still be grounded upon humanism: true though it be that the first enthusiasm for antiquity shall never be restored, nor the cla.s.sics yield that vital nourishment they offered in the spring-time of the modern era. For average students, who have no special vocation for literature and no aeesthetic tastes, it may well happen that new methods of teaching the cla.s.sics will have to be invented. Why should they not be read in English versions, and the time expended upon Greek and Latin grammar be thus saved? The practice of Greek and Latin versification has been virtually doomed already; nor is there any reason why Latin prose should form a necessary part of education in an age that has ceased to publish its thoughts in a now completely dead language. Our actual relation to the ancients, again, justifies some change. We know far more about them now than in the period of the Renaissance; but they are no longer all in all for civilised humanity, eager to reconst.i.tute the realm of thought, and find its n.o.bler self anew in the image of a glorious past, reconquered and inalienable. The very culture created by the study of antiquity through the last four centuries stands between them and our apprehension, so that they seem at the same moment more distinct from us and more a part of our familiar selves.

When we seek the causes which produced the decay of learning in Italy about the middle of the sixteenth century, we are first led to observe that the type of scholarship inaugurated by Petrarch had been fully developed. Nothing new remained to be worked out upon the lines laid down by him. Meanwhile the forces of the nation, both creative and receptive, were exhausted in the old fields of humanism. The reading public had been glutted with epistles, invectives, poems, orations, histories of antiquities, and disquisitions of all kinds. The matter of the ancient literatures had been absorbed, if superficially, at least entirely, and their forms had been reproduced with wearisome reiteration. The Paganism that had so long ruled as a fashion, was now pa.s.sing out of vogue, because of its inadequacy to meet the deeper wants and satisfy the aspirations of the modern world. The humanists, moreover, as a cla.s.s, had fallen into disrepute through faults and vices whereof enough has been already said. Nothing short of the new impulse which a new genius, equal at least in power to Petrarch, might have communicated, could have given a fresh direction to the declining enthusiasm for antiquity. But for this display of energy the Italians were not prepared. As in the ascent of some high peak, the traveller, after surmounting pine woods and Alpine pastures, comes upon bare gra.s.sy slopes that form an intermediate region between the bas.e.m.e.nts of the mountain and the snowfields overhead, so the humanists had accomplished the first stage of learning. But it requires a fresh start and the employment of other faculties to scale the final heights; and for this the force was wanting. Erasmus, at the opening of the century, had, indeed, initiated a second age of scholarship.

The more exact methods of criticism and comparison were already about to be inst.i.tuted by the French, the Germans, and the Dutch. It was too much, however, to expect that the Italians, who had expended their vigour in recovering the cla.s.sics and reviving a pa.s.sion for knowledge, should compete upon the ground of modern erudition with these fresh and untried races.

What they might have done, if circ.u.mstances had been less unfavourable, and if the way of progress had been free before them, cannot be conjectured. As it was, all things contributed to the decline of intellectual energy in Italy. The distracting wars of half a century told more heavily upon the literati, who depended for their very existence upon the liberality of patrons, than on any other section of the people. What miseries they endured in Lombardy may be gathered from the prefaces and epistles of Aldus Manutius; while the blow inflicted on them by the sack of Rome is vividly described by Valeriano.[525] When comparative peace was restored, liberty had been extinguished. Florence, the stronghold of liberal learning, was enslaved. Scholarship no less than art suffered from the loss of political independence. Rome, terror-stricken by the Reformation, turned with rage against the very studies she had helped to stimulate.

The engines of the Inquisition, wielded with all the mercilessness of panic by men who had the sombre cruelty of Spain to back them up, destroyed the germs of life in science and philosophy.

[Footnote 525: See above, p. 321.]

To some extent, again, the Italian scholars had prepared their own suicide by tending more and more to subtleties of taste and affectations of refinement. The purism of the sixteenth century was itself a sort of etiolation, and the puerilities of the academies distracted even able men from serious studies. It was one of the inevitable drawbacks of humanism that the new culture separated men of letters from the nation. Dante and the wool-carders of the fourteenth century understood each other; there was then no thick veil of erudition between the teacher and the taught. But neither Bembo nor Pomponazzi had anything to say that could be comprehended by the common folk. Therefore scholarship was left in mournful isolation; suspected, when it pa.s.sed from trifles to grave speculations, by the Church; viewed with indifference by the people; unsustained by any sympathy, and, what was worse, without a programme or a watchword. The thinkers, whose biography belongs to the history of the Counter-Reformation in Italy, were all solitary men, voices crying in the wilderness with none to listen, bound together by no common bond, unnoticed by the nation, extinguished singly on the scaffold by an ever-watchful league of tyrants spiritual and political.

Before the end of the sixteenth century Greek had almost ceased to be studied in Italy. This was the sign of intellectual death. All that was virile in humanism fled beyond the Alps. This transference of intellectual supremacy from Italy to Germany was speedily accomplished. 'When I was a boy,' said Erasmus,[526] 'sound letters had begun to revive among the Italians; but by reason of the printer's art being as yet undiscovered or known to few, no books had reached us, and in the deep tranquillity of dulness there reigned a set of men who taught in all our towns the most illiterate learning. Rodolph Agricola was the first to bring to us from Italy some breath of a superior culture.' Again, he says of Italy, 'In that land, where even the very walls are both more learned and more eloquent than men with us; so that what here seems beautifully said, and elegant and full of charm, cannot be held for aught but clumsy, stupid, and uncultivated there.' Less than half a century after Erasmus had gained the right to hold the balance thus between the nations of the North and South--that is, in 1540 or thereabouts--Paolo Giovio, at the close of his 'Elogia Literaria,' while speaking of the Germans, felt obliged to confess that 'not only Latin letters, to our disgrace, but Greek and Hebrew also have pa.s.sed into their territory by a fatal simultaneous migration.'

[Footnote 526: See the pa.s.sages quoted by Tiraboschi, vol. vi. lib.

iii. cap. v. 71.]

Thus Italy, after receiving the lamp of learning from the dying hands of h.e.l.las, in the days of her own freedom, now, in the time of her adversity and ruin, gave it to the nations of the North. Her work was ended. Three centuries of increasing decrepitude, within our recent memory at length most happily surmounted, were before her. Can history, we wonder, furnish a spectacle more pathetic than that of the protagonist of spiritual liberty falling uneasily asleep beneath the footstool of the Spaniard and the churchman, while the races who had trampled her to death went on rejoicing in the light and culture she had won by centuries of toil? This is the tragic aspect of the subject which has occupied us through the present volume. At the conclusion of the whole matter it is, however, more profitable to remember, not the intellectual death of Italy, but what she wrought in that bright period of her vigour. She was the divinely appointed birthplace of the modern spirit, the workshop of knowledge for all Europe, our mistress in the arts and sciences, the Alma Mater of our student years, the well-spring of mental freedom and activity after ages of stagnation.

If greater philosophers have since been produced by Germany and France and England, greater scholars, greater men of science, greater poets even, and greater pioneers of progress in the lands divined by Christopher Columbus beyond the seas--this must not blind us to the truth that at the very outset of the era in which we live and play our parts, Italy embraced all philosophy, all scholarship, all science, all art, all discovery, alone. Such is the Lampadephoria, or torch-race, of the nations. Greece stretches forth her hand to Italy; Italy consigns the sacred fire to Northern Europe; the people of the North pa.s.s on the flame to America, to India, and the Australasian isles.