What was finally accomplished for sound scholarship by Ficino, lay in

the direction, not of metaphysics or of history, but of translation.

The enduring value of Pico's work is due, not to his Quixotic quest of

an accord between Pagan, Hebrew and Christian traditions, but to the

noble spirit of confidence and humane sympathy with all great

movements of the mind, which penetrates it. If we cannot rate the

positive achievements of the Florentines in philosophy at a high

value, still the discussion of Platonic and Aristotelian doctrines

which their investigations originated, caused the text of the Greek

philosophers to be accurately examined for the first time in Western

Europe. Their theories, though devoid of originality and clogged at

every point with slavish reverence for classical authority, marked a

momentous deviation from the traditional methods of medieval

speculation.

Thus a vast and tolerably accurate acquaintance with the chief

thinkers of antiquity, re-enforced by the translation of their

principal works, was the main outcome of the Platonic revival at

Florence. Uncritically, and with many a blundering divergence into the

uncongenial provinces of Oriental thought, the Italian intellect

appropriated Greek philosophy. A groundwork was laid down for the

discussion of fundamental problems in the forms under which they had

presented themselves to the ancient world. But while the Platonists

were wrangling with the Aristotelians about the superiority of their

respective masters; while the scholars were translating from the

original languages; while the mystics were building castles in the

air, composed of fragments from Neo-platonic and Neo-pythagorean

systems, cementing them with the mortar of Christianity and adding

quaint outbuildings of Cabbalistic and astrological delusions; the

writers of ethical treatises pursued another line of inquiry, which

was no less characteristic of the age and no less fruitful of results.

During the middle ages thought of every kind had been concentrated on

the world beyond this life. The question of how to live here was

answered with reference to eternal interests solely. Human existence

had no meaning except as the prelude to heaven or hell. But contact

with antiquity introduced a new class of problems. Men began once more

to ask themselves how they ought to live in this world, not with the

view of avoiding misery and securing happiness in the next, but with

the aim of making their terrestrial home most comfortable and their

sojourn in it most effective for themselves and their companions. The

discussion of the fundamental question how to live to best advantage,

without regard for the next world and unbiased by the belief in a

rigid scheme of salvation, occupies an important place in the

philosophical essays of the time. Landino, for example, in his

Camaldolese Disputations, raises the question whether the

contemplative or the practical life offers superior attractions to a

man desirous of perfecting self-culture. Alberti touches the same

topic in his minor dialogues, while he subjects the organism of the

Family in all its relations to a searching analysis in his most

important essay.

Valla, in the famous dialogue _De Voluptate_, attacks the problem of

conduct from another point of view.[554] Contrasting the Stoical with

the Epicurean ideals, asceticism with hedonism, he asks which of the

two fulfills the true end of human life. His treatise on Pleasure is,

indeed, a disputation between renascent paganism, naturalism, and

humanism on the one side, and the medieval scheme of ethics on the

other. Man according to nature contends with man according to grace;

the soul, obeying the desires of the flesh, defends her cause against

the spirit, whose life is hid with a crucified Christ in God. Thus the

two points of view between which the Renaissance wavered, are placed

in powerful contrast; and nowhere has their antagonism been more ably

stated. For the champion of hedonism Valla appropriately chose the

poet Beccadelli, while he committed the defense of asceticism to

Niccolo Niccoli. Though at the close of the argument he awarded the

palm of victory to the latter,[555] it is clear that his sympathies

lay with the former, and all the strength of his reasoning faculty is

employed in the statement and support of Beccadelli's thesis. The

first and far the longest part of the dialogue, where we detect a true

note of sincerity, is a remorseless onslaught upon monasticism under

the name of Stoicism, resulting in a no less uncompromising defense of

physical appetite. Some of the utterances upon sexual morality are

penetrated with the rancor of rebellion.[556] It is the revolt of the

will against unnatural restrictions, the reassertion of natural

liberty, emboldened by the study of classical literature, imbittered

by long centuries of ecclesiastical oppression. Underlying the

extravagances of an argument which owes its crudity and coarseness to

the contradictions of the century, we find one central thought of

permanent importance. Nature can do nothing wrong: and that must be

wrong which violates nature.[557] It is man's duty, by interrogation

of nature, to discover the laws of his own being and to obey those. In

other words, Valla, though in no sense a man of science, proclaims

the fundamental principle of science, and inaugurates a new criterion

of ethics.

[Footnote 554: _Laurentius Valla: Opera omnia_, Basileae, 1465. The "De

Voluptate" begins at p. 896 of this edition.]

[Footnote 555: "Uterque pro se de laudibus Voluptatis suavissime

quidem quasi cantare visus est; sed Antonius hirundini, Nicolaus

philomelae (quam lusciniam nominant) magis comparandus" (_ib._ lib.

iii. p. 697).]

[Footnote 556: "Mea quidem sententia odiosus est si quis in moechos,

si rerum naturam intueri volumus, invehat" (_ib._ lib. i. cap. 38).

"Quisquis virgines sanctimoniales primus invenit, abominandum atque in

ultimas terras exterminandum morem in civitatem induxisse.... Melius

merentur scorta et postribula quam sanctimoniales virgines ac

continentes" (_ib._ lib. i. cap. 43).]

[Footnote 557: "Quod natura finxit atque formavit id nisi sanctum

laudabileque esse non posse" (_ib._ lib. i. cap. 9).]

Three main points may be discriminated in the intellectual movement

briefly surveyed in the preceding paragraphs. The first is an abrupt

breach with scholasticism. The whole method of philosophy has been

changed, and the canon of authority has altered. The second is the

acquisition of classical thought, and the endeavor, especially at

Florence, among the Platonists to appropriate it and adapt it to

Christianity. The third is the introduction of a new problem into

philosophical discussion. How to make the best of human life, is

substituted for the question how to insure salvation in the world

beyond the grave. It will be observed that each of these three points

implies departure from the prescribed ground of medieval speculation,

which always moved within the limits of theology. Theology, except in

the mysticism of the Platonists, except in occasional and perfunctory

allusions of the rhetoricians, has no place in this medley of

scholarship, citation, superstition, and frank handling of practical

ideals.

While the Florentine Platonists were evolving an eclectic mysticism

from the materials furnished by their Greek and Oriental studies;

while the Ciceronian humanists were discussing the fundamental

principles which underlie the various forms of human life; the

universities of Lombardy continued their exposition of Aristotle upon

the lines laid down by Thomistic and Averroistic schoolmen. Padua and

Bologna extended the methods of the middle ages into the Renaissance.

Their professors adhered to the formal definitions and distinctions of

an earlier epoch, accumulating comment upon comment, and darkening

the text of their originals with glosses. Yet the light shed by the

Revival penetrated even to the lecture-rooms of men like Achillini.

Humanism had established the principle of basing erudition on the

study of authentic documents. The text of Aristotle in the Greek or in

first-hand translations, had become the common property of theologians

and philosophers. It was from these universities that the first dim

light of veritable science was to issue. And here the part played by

one man in the preparation of a new epoch for modern thought is so

important that I may be allowed to introduce him with some prolixity

of biographical details.[558]

[Footnote 558: For the following sketch of Pomponazzi's life, and for

help in the study of his philosophy, I am indebted to Francesco

Fiorentino's _Pietro Pomponazzi_, Firenze, Lemonnier, 1868, 1 vol. I

may here take occasion to mention a work by the same author,

_Bernardino Telesio_, _ibid._ 1872, 2 vols. Together, these two books

form an important contribution to the history of Italian philosophy.]

Pietro Pomponazzi was born of noble lineage at Mantua in 1462. He

completed his studies at Padua, where he graduated in 1487 as laureate

of medicine. It may be remarked incidentally that teachers of

philosophy at this era held the degree of physicians. This point is

not unimportant, since it fixes our attention on the fact that

philosophy, as distinguished from theology, had not yet won a

recognized position. Logic formed a separate part of the educational

curriculum. Rhetoric was classed with humanistic literature.

Philosophy counted as a branch of Physics. At Florence, in the schools

of the Platonists, metaphysical inquiries assumed a certain hue of

mysticism. At Padua and Bologna, in the schools of the physicians,

they assimilated something of materialism. During the middle ages

they had always flourished in connection with theology. But that

association had been broken; and as yet a proper place had not been

assigned to the science of the human mind. A new department of

knowledge was in process of formation, distinct from theology,

distinct from physics, distinct from literature. But at the epoch of

which we are now treating, it had not been correctly marked off from

either of these provinces, and in the schools of Lombardy it was

confounded with physical science.

In 1488 Pomponazzi, soon after taking his degree as a physician, was

appointed Professor Extraordinary of Philosophy at Padua. He taught in

concurrence with the veteran Achillini, who was celebrated for his

old-world erudition and his leaning toward the doctrines of Averroes.

Pomponazzi signalized his _debut_ in the professorial career, by

adopting a new method of instruction. Less distinguished for learning

than acuteness, he confined himself to brilliant elucidations of his

author's text. For glosses, citations and hair-splitting distinctions,

he substituted lucid and precise analysis. It is probable that he was

a poor Greek scholar. Paolo Giovio goes so far, indeed, as to assert

that, of the two classical languages, he only knew Latin; nor is there

anything in his own writings to demonstrate that he had studied Greek

philosophy in the original. But he proved himself a child of the new

era by his style of exposition, no less than by a strict adherence to

Alexander of Aphrodisias, the Greek commentator of Aristotle. What

that divergence from the system of his rival, Achillini, who still

adhered to the commentaries of Averroes, implied, I shall endeavor to

make clear in the sequel. For the present, we must follow his career

as a professor. Before the year 1495 he had been appointed to the

ordinary chair of Natural Philosophy at Padua; and there he resided

until 1509, when the schools of Padua were closed. He spent this

period chiefly in lecturing on Aristotle's Physics, for the sake

presumably of the medical students who crowded that university. Forced

by circumstances to leave Padua, Pomponazzi found a home in Ferrara,

where he began to expound Aristotle's treatise _De Anima_. Unlike

Padua, the University of Ferrara had a literary bias; and we may

therefore conclude that Pomponazzi availed himself of this first

favorable opportunity to pursue the studies in Aristotelian psychology

for which he had a decided personal preference. In 1512 he was invited

to Bologna, where he remained until his death, in the capacity of

Professor of Natural and Moral Philosophy. His stipend, increased

gradually through a series of engagements, varied from a little over

200 to 600 golden ducats. Bologna, like Ferrara, was not distinguished

for its school of medicine. Consequently, we find that from the date

of his first settlement in that city, Pomponazzi devoted himself to

psychological and ethical investigations. All the books on which his

fame are founded were written at Bologna. In the autumn of 1516 he

published his treatise _De Immortalitate Animae_. It was dedicated to

Marcantonio Flavio Contarini; and, finding its way to Venice, it was

immediately burned in public because of its heretical opinions. A long

and fierce controversy followed this first publication. Contarini,

Agostino Nifo, Ambrogio Fiandino, and Bartolommeo di Spina issued

treatises, in which they strove to combat the Aristotelian materialism

of Pomponazzi with arguments based on Thomistic theology or

Averroistic mysticism. He replied with an _Apologia_ and a

_Defensorium_, avowing his submission to the Church in all matters of

faith, but stubbornly upholding a philosophical disagreement with the

doctrine of the immortality of the human soul. During this discussion

Pomponazzi ran some risk of being held accountable for his opinions.

The friars and preachers of all colors were loud in their

denunciations; and it is said that Bembo's intercession with Pope Leo

in behalf of his old master was needed to secure Pomponazzi from

ecclesiastical procedure. During the last years of his life the

professor of Bologna completed two important treatises, _De

Incantationibus_ and _De Fato_. They were finished in 1520 but not

published until after his death, when they appeared in the Basle

edition of his collected works. He died in 1525, and was buried at

Mantua. Pomponazzi had been thrice married. He left behind him an

unsullied reputation for virtuous conduct and sweet temper. He was,

physically, a little man, and owed to this circumstance the

_sobriquet_ of _Peretto_. We gain a glimpse of him in one of

Bandello's novels. But, with this exception, the man is undiscernible

through the mists of three intervening centuries. With the author the

case is different. In his books Pomponazzi presents a powerful and

unmistakable personality. What remains to be said about him and his

influence over Italian thought must be derived from an examination of

the three treatises already mentioned.

In order to make Pomponazzi's position intelligible, it will be

needful to review the main outlines of Aristotelian thought, as it was

transmitted through the middle ages to the men of the Renaissance.

Pomponazzi claimed to be no more than an expositor of Aristotle's

system. If he diverged from the paths of orthodox philosophy, it was

because he recognized a discrepancy upon vital points between Thomas

of Aquino and the Peripatetic writings. If he rejected some

fashionable theories of the freethinkers who preceded him, it was

because he saw that Averroes had misinterpreted their common master.

He aimed at stating once again the precise doctrine of the Greek

philosopher. He believed that if he could but grasp Aristotle's real

opinion, he should by that mental act arrive at truth. The authority

of the Stagirite in all matters of human knowledge lay for him beyond

the possibility of question; or, what amounted to nearly the same

thing, his interest in speculative questions was confined to making

Aristotle's view intelligible. Thus, under the humble garb of a

commentator, one of the boldest and in some respects the most original

thinkers of his age stepped forth to wage war with superstition and

ecclesiastical despotism. The Church, since the date of Thomas

Aquinas, had so committed herself to Aristotle that proving a

discrepancy between her dogma and the Aristotelian text upon any vital

point, was much the same as attacking the dogma itself. This must be

kept steadily in mind if we wish to appreciate Pomponazzi.[559] His

attitude cannot easily be understood at the present day, when science

has discarded authority, and the _ipse dixit_ of a dead man carries no

weight outside religious or quasi-religious circles. This renders the

prefatory remarks I have to make necessary.

[Footnote 559: It will be remembered that in the controversy between

Galileo and the Inquisition, the latter condemned Copernicus on the

score that he contradicted Aristotle and S. Thomas of Aquino.]

In the Platonic system it was impossible to explain the connection

between ideas, conceived as sole realities, and phenomena, regarded as

distinct from that ideal world to which they owed their qualities of

relative substantiality and cognizability. Aristotle attempted to

solve Plato's problem by his theory of form and matter, activity and

passivity, energy and potentiality, inseparable in the reality of the

individual. He represented the intelligible world as a scale of

existences, beginning with form and matter coherent in the simplest

object, and ending in God. God was the form of forms, the thought of

thoughts, independent of matter, immovable and unchangeable, although

the cause of movement and variety. The forms resumed in God, as

species are included in the Summum Genus, were disseminated through

the universe in a hierarchy of substances, from the most complex

immediately below God, to the most simple immediately above the

groundwork given by incognizable matter. In this hierarchy matter was

conceived as the mere base; necessary, indeed, to every individual but

God; an essential element of reality; but beyond the reach of

knowledge. The form or universal alone was intelligible. It may

already be perceived that in this system, if the individual, composed

of form and matter, alone is substantial and concrete, while the

universal alone is cognizable, Aristotle admitted a division between

reality and truth. The former attribute belongs to the individual,

the latter to the universal. The place of God, too, in the system is

doubtful. Is He meant to be immanent in the universe, or separated

from it? Aristotle uses language which supports each of these views.

Again, God is immaterial, universal, the highest form; and yet at the

same time He is an individual substance; whereas, by the fundamental

conception of the whole scheme, the coherence of form and matter in

the individual is necessary to reality. It might seem possible to

escape from these difficulties by regarding Aristotle's Deity as the

Idea of the Universe, and each inferior form in the ascending series

of existences as the material of its immediate superior, until the

final and inclusive form is reached in God. But what, then, becomes of

matter in itself, which, though recognized as unintelligible, is

postulated as the necessary base of individual substances?

In Aristotle's theory of life there is a similar ascending scale. The

soul ([Greek: psyche]) is defined as the form of the body. Its

vegetative, motive, sensitive, appetitive faculties ([Greek: psyche

threptike, kinetike, aisthetike, orektike]), are subordinated to the

active intellect ([Greek: nous pathetikos]), which receives their

reports; and this in its turn is subordinated to the active intellect

([Greek: nous poietikos]), which possesses the content of the passive

intellect as thought. The intellect ([Greek: nous]) is man's peculiar

property: and Aristotle in plain words asserts that it is separate

from the soul ([Greek: psyche]). But he has not explained whether it

is separate as the highest series of an evolution may be called

distinct from the lower, or as something alien and communicated from

without is separate. The passive intellect, being a receptacle for

images and phantasms furnished by the senses, perishes with the soul,

which, upon the dissolution of the body, whereof it is the form,

ceases to exist. But the active intellect is immortal and eternal,

being pure thought, and identifiable in the last resort with God. So

much Aristotle seems to have laid down about the immortality of the

intellect. It is tempting to infer that he maintained a theory of

man's participation in the divine Idea--that is to say, in the complex

of the categories which render the universe intelligible and

distinguish it as a cosmos. But, just as Aristotle failed to explain

the connection of God with the world, so he failed to render his

opinion regarding the relation of God to the human intellect, and of

the immortal to the perishable part of the soul, manifest. It can,

however, be safely asserted that he laid himself open to a denial of

the immortality of each individual person. This, at any rate, would

follow from the assumption that he believed us to be persons by reason

of physical existence, of the soul's faculties, and of that blending

of the reason with the orectic soul which we call will. As the

universe culminates in God, so man culminates in thought, which is the

definition of God; and this thought is eternal, the same for all and

for ever. It does not, however, follow that each man who has shared

the divine thought, should survive the dissolution of his body. The

person is a complex, and this complex perishes. The active intellect

is imperishable, but it is impersonal. In like manner the whole

hierarchy of substances between the ground of matter and the form of

forms is in perpetual process of combination and dissolution. But the

supreme Idea endures, in isolation from that flux and reflux of the

individuals it causes. Whether we regard the ontological or the

psychological series, only the world of pure thought, the Idea, is

indissoluble, subject to no process of becoming, and superior to all

change. The supreme place assigned to Thought in either hierarchy is

clear enough. But the nexus between (i) God and the Universe (ii) God

and the active intellect (iii) the active intellect, or pure thought,

and the inferior faculties of the soul, which supply it with material

for thought, is unexplained.

Three distinct but interpenetrating problems were presented by the

Aristotelian system. One concerns the theory of the Universal. Are

universals or particulars prior? Do we collect the former from the

latter; or do the latter owe their value as approximate realities to

the former? The second concerns the theory of the Individual. Assuming

that the Individual is a complex of form and matter, are we to regard

the matter or the form as its essential substratum? The third concerns

the theory of the human Soul. Is it perishable with the body, or

immortal? If it is immortal, does the incorruptible quality perpetuate

the person who has lived upon this globe; or is it the common property

of all persons, surviving their decease, but not insuring the

prolongation of each several consciousness? The first of these

problems formed the battlefield of Nominalists, Realists and

Conceptualists in the first period of medieval thought. It was waged

upon the data supplied by Porphyry's abstract of the Aristotelian

doctrine of the predicaments. The second problem occupied the

encyclopaedic thinkers of the second period, Albertus Magnus, Duns

Scotus and Thomas of Aquino. Their contest was fought out over the

Metaphysics of Aristotle. The third problem arrested the attention of

speculators in the age of the Renaissance. The text which they

disputed was Aristotle's essay _De Anima_. This movement of medieval

thought from point to point was not unnatural nor unnecessitated. In

the first period Aristotle was unknown; but the creeds of Christianity

supplied a very definite body of conceptions to be dealt with. About

the personality of God, the immortality of the soul, and the concrete

reality of the human individual, there was then no doubt. Theology was

paramount; and the contention of the schoolmen at this epoch regarded

the right interpretation of the Universal. Was it a simple conception

of the mind, or an external and substantial reality? Was it a name or

an entity? The Nominalists, who adopted the former of these two

alternatives, fell necessarily beneath the ban of ecclesiastical

censure and suspicion; not because their philosophical conclusions

were unwarranted, but because these ran counter to the prevailing

spirit of the Christian belief. Their definitions sapped the basis of

that transcendentalism on which the whole fabric of medieval thought

reposed. Nevertheless, at the end of the battle, the Nominalists

virtually gained the day. Abelard's Conceptualism was an attempt to

harmonize antagonistic points of view by emphasizing the abstractive

faculty of the human subject. In the course of this warfare the

problem of the Individual had been neglected. The reciprocity of form

and matter had not been expressly made a topic of dispute. Meanwhile

a flood of new light was being cast upon philosophical questions by

the introduction into Europe of Latin texts translated by Jewish

scholars from the Arabic versions of Aristotle, as well as by the

commentaries of Averroes. This rediscovery of Aristotle forced the

schoolmen of the second period to consider the fundamental relation of

matter to form. The master had postulated the conjunction of these two

constituents in the individual. Thomas of Aquino and Duns Scotus

advanced opposing theories to explain the ground and process of

individualization. With regard to the elder problem of the Universal,

S. Thomas declared himself for modified Conceptualism. With regard to

the second problem, he pronounced matter to be the substratum of

individuals--matter stamped as with a seal by the form impressed upon

it. Thus he adhered as closely as was possible for a theologian to the

Peripatetic doctrines. For a student of philosophy to advance opinions

without reckoning with Aristotle was now impossible. The great

Dominican Doctor achieved the task of bringing Aristotle into

satisfactory accord with Christian dogma. Nor was this so difficult as

it appears. Aristotle, as we have seen, did not define his views about

the soul and God. Moreover, he had written no treatise on theology

proper. Whether he ascribed personality or conscious thought to God

was more than doubtful. His God stood at the apex of the world's

pyramid, inert, abstract, empty, and devoid of life. Christendom,

meanwhile, was provided with a robust set of theological opinions,

based on revelation and held as matters of faith. To transfer these

to the account of the Aristotelian Deity, to fill out the vacuous and

formal outline, and to theosophize the whole system was the work of S.

Thomas. To the fixed dogmas of the Latin Church he adjusted the more

favorable of Aristotle's various definitions, and interpreted his

dubious utterances by the light of ecclesiastical orthodoxy.

Up to this point the doctrine of personal immortality had been

accepted by all Christians as requiring no investigation. Human life

was only studied in relation to the world beyond the grave, where each

man and woman was destined to endure for all eternity. To traverse

this fundamental postulate, was to proclaim the grossest heresy; and

though Epicureans, as Dante calls them, of that type were found, they

had not formulated their opinions regarding the soul's corruptibility

in any scientific theory, nor based them on the authority of

Aristotle. S. Thomas viewed the soul as the essential form of the

human body; he further affirmed its separate existence in each person,

and its separate immortality. The soul, he thought, although defined

as the form of a physical body, acquired a habit of existence in the

body, which sufficed for its independent and perpetual survival. These

determinations were clearly in accordance with the Christian faith.

But the time was approaching when the problem of the soul itself

should be narrowly considered. Averroes had interpreted Aristotle to

mean that the active intellect alone, which he regarded as common to

all human beings, was immortal. This was tantamount to denying the

immortality of the individual. Men live and die, but the species is

eternal. The active intellect arrives continually at human

consciousness in persons, who participate in it and perish. Knowledge

is indestructible for the race, transitory for each separate soul. At

one end of the universal hierarchy is matter; at the other end is God.

Between God and man in the descending scale are the intelligences of

the several spheres. From the lowest or lunar sphere humanity derives

the active intellect. This active intellect is a substantial entity,

separate no less from God than from the human soul on which it rains

the knowledge of a lifetime. It is not necessary to point out how much

of mystical and Oriental material Averroes ingrafted on Aristotle's

system. His doctrine, though vehemently repudiated by orthodox

schoolmen, found wide acceptance; and there were other heretics who

asserted the perishable nature of the human soul, without distinction

of its faculties. These heterodoxies gained ground so rapidly through

the first two centuries of the Italian revival (1300-1500), that in

December, 1513, it was judged needful to condemn them, and to reassert

the Thomistic doctrine by a Council of the Lateran over which Leo X.

presided.[560]

[Footnote 560: These are the words: "Hoc sacro approbante Concilio

damnamus et reprobamus omnes asserentes _animam intellectivam mortalem

esse_, aut _unicam in cunctis hominibus_, et haec in dubium vertentes,

cum illa non solum vere per se et essentialiter humani corporis forma

existat ... verum et immortalis, et pro corporum quibus infunditur

multitudine, singulariter multiplicabilis et multiplicata et

multiplicanda sit."]

If we consider the intellectual conditions of the Renaissance, it

becomes clear why the problem of Immortality acquired this importance,

and why heretical opinions spread so widely as to necessitate a

confirmation of the orthodox dogma. Medieval speculation had a

perpetual tendency to transcend the sphere of this earth. The other

world gave reality and meaning to human life. All eyes were fixed on

the Beyond, at first with an immediate expectation of the Judgment,

afterwards with a continued looking forward to Paradise or Punishment.

This attitude toward eternity was an absorbing preoccupation. But with

the dawn of the new age our life on earth acquired a deeper

significance; and the question was not unnaturally posed--this soul,

whose immortality has been postulated, on whose ultimate destiny so

many anticipations of weal and woe have been based, what is it? Are we

justified in assuming its existence as an incorruptible and

everlasting self? What did Aristotle really think about it? The age

inclined with overmastering bias toward a practical materialism. Men

were eager to enjoy their lives and to indulge their appetites. They

tired of the restrictions imposed upon their nature by the prospect of

futurity. They found in their cherished classics, whose authority had

triumphed over Church and Council, but vague and visionary hints of

immortality. Even in the highest ecclesiastical quarters it was

fashionable to speak lightly of the fundamental dogmas of the

Christian creed. Leo X., who presided over the Lateran Council of

1513, did not disguise his doubts concerning the very doctrine it had

re-enforced. The time had come for a reconsideration _ab initio_ of a

theory which the middle ages had accepted as an axiom. The battle was

fought out on the ground of Aristotle's treatise on the soul.

Independent research had not yet asserted its claims against

authority; and the problem which now presented itself to the

professors and students of Italy, was not: Is the soul immortal? but:

Did Aristotle maintain the immortality of the soul? The philosopher of

Stagira, having been treated on his first appearance as a foe of the

faith and then accepted as its bulwark, was now to be used as an

efficient battering-ram against the castles of orthodox opinion.

There were two ways of regarding Aristotle's doctrine of the active

intellect. The one was to view the Nous as a development from the

soul, which in its turn should be conceived as a development from the

senses. The other was to recognize it as separate from the soul and

imported from without. Each claimed substantial support in various

dicta of the master. The latter found able exposition at the hands of

his Arabic commentator Averroes. The former was maintained by the

fullest and latest of the Greek peripatetics, Alexander of

Aphrodisias. In the later middle ages free thought, combating the

Thomistic system, inclined to Averroism. Pomponazzi, the chief

Aristotelian of the Renaissance, declared for Alexander. His great

work, _De Immortalitate Animae_, is little more than an attempt to

reconstruct the doctrine of Aristotle by the help of Alexander.

Pomponazzi starts by laying down the double nature of the human soul.

It is both sensitive and intelligent. On this point philosophers are

agreed; the questions at issue relate to the mode of connection

between the two portions, and the prospect of immortality for both or

either. He next proceeds to state the opinions of Averroes, the

Platonists, and Thomas of Aquino, meeting their several arguments, and

showing how and where they diverge from Aristotle, and endeavoring to

prove the superiority of his master's doctrine. Pomponazzi agrees with

S. Thomas as to the division of the soul and its relation to the body.

He differs with him on the point of immortality, declaring with

sufficient clearness that no portion of the human soul can be other

than perishable. If we admit that the soul in general is the act or

form of the body, the intelligent portion of the soul is included in

this definition. It cannot dispense with the body, at least as the

object of its intelligent activity. But if it be thus intimately bound

up with the body, it must suffer corruption with the body; or even

should we suppose it to survive, it will have no images or phantasms

furnished by the senses, which are the necessary pabulum of its

thinking faculty.[561] The order of nature admits of no interruption.

It will not do to say that the soul thinks in one way during life on

earth, and in another way after death. This contradicts the first

principle of continuity. Man occupies a middle place between

imperishable and perishable things.[562] He has a certain odor of

immateriality, a mere shadow of intellect, because he stands upon the

confine between these regions.[563] But his very conduct shows how

vain and unsubstantial is his claim to pure reason. If we see a few

men elevate themselves toward God, there are thousands who descend

toward the brutes; and of those who spend their lives in clarifying

their intelligence, none can boast of more than an obscure and cloudy

vision.[564] In the hierarchy of souls we can broadly distinguish

three grades; the pure intelligences of the astral spheres, who have

no need of physical organs; the souls of brutes, immersed in matter,

and no better than a mode of it; the souls of men, which occupy a

middle place, requiring matter as the object of their thought, but

rising by speculation above it. Even so within the mind of man we may

discern a triple series--the factive, practical, and speculative

intellects. The first subserves utility; man shares it with the

brutes. The third enables him to lift himself toward God. The second

is essentially human; he uses it in moral action, and performs his

duty by obeying it. Both the sensitive soul and the intellect are

material in the full sense of extension.[565] To conceive of them

otherwise is contradictory to reason and to Aristotle. It is therefore

impossible to hold that either soul or intellect, although the latter

has certain affinities to imperishable intelligence, should survive

the body. The senses supply the object of thought; the phantasms

dealt with by the intellect depend upon the physical organs: abstract

these, and where is the cogitative faculty? Having thus attempted to

demonstrate the mortality of the human soul, Pomponazzi feels bound to

attack the problem of the final end of human beings. Hitherto,

throughout the ages of Christianity, men had lived on this world with

eternity in view. That was their aim and goal. He has removed this

object; and he anticipates hostile argument by affirming that virtue

itself is the proper end of man on earth. The practical intellect is

the attribute of humanity as distinguished both from the brutes and

from the separate intelligences of the spheres. To act in accordance

with the nature of this specific quality--in other words, to follow

virtue--is the end of man. Virtue is her own reward, as vice is its

own punishment.[566] The question whether the soul be mortal or

immortal, whether we have a right to expect future judgment or not,

has really nothing to do with the matter.[567] With this ethical

conclusion Pomponazzi terminates his argument. He is careful, however,

to note that though he disbelieves in the immortality of the soul as a

philosopher, he accepts it in the fullest sense as a Christian.[568]

It has been suggested that the orthodox doctrine of the resurrection

of the body might have supplied Pomponazzi with a link between science

and faith.[569] However, he did not avail himself of it; and his

philosophy stands in abrupt and open conflict with his creed.

[Footnote 561: Cap. viii. "Cum et Aristoteles dicat, necesse esse

intelligentem phantasma aliquod speculari." Again, _ibid._: "Ergo in

omni suo intelligere indiget phantasia, sed si sic est, ipsa est

materialis; ergo anima intellectiva est materialis." Again, _ibid._:

"Humanus intellectus corpus habet caducum, quare vel corrupto corpore

ipse non esset, quod positioni repugnat, vel si esset, sine opere

esset, cum sine phantasmate per positionem intelligere non posset et

sic otiaretur."]

[Footnote 562: Cap. ix. "Et sic medio modo humanus intellectus inter

materialia et immaterialia est actus corporis organici." Again,

_ibid._: "Ipse igitur intellectus sic medius existens inter materialia

et immaterialia." Again, _ibid._: "Homo est medius inter Deos et

bestias, quare sicut pallidum comparatum nigro dicitur album, sic

homo, comparatus bestiis, dici potest Deus et immortalis, sed non vere

et simpliciter."]

[Footnote 563: Cap. viii. "Vixque sit umbra intellectus." Again, cap.

ix.: "Cum ipsa sit materialium nobilissima, in confinioque

immaterialium, aliquid immaterialitatis odorat, sed non simpliciter."]

[Footnote 564: See (cap. viii.) the passage which begins "Secundo quia

cum in ista essentia."]

[Footnote 565: See the passages quoted above; and compare _De

Nutritione_, lib. i. cap. 11, which contains Pomponazzi's most mature

opinion on the material extension of the soul, which he calls, in all

its faculties, _realiter extensa_.]

[Footnote 566: _De Immortalitate_, cap. xiv. After demonstrating that

the _intellectus practicus_, as distinguished from the _speculativus_

and the _factivus_, is the special property of man, and that

consequently in Ethics we have the true science of humanity, he lays

down and tries to demonstrate the two positions that (1) "praemium

essentiale virtutis est ipsamet virtus quae hominem felicem facit;" (2)

"poena vitiosi est ipsum vitium, quo nihil miserius, nihil

infelicius esse potest."]

[Footnote 567: For this argument he refers to Plato in cap. xiv.:

"Sive animus mortalis sit, sive immortalis, nihilominus contemnenda

est mors, neque alio pacto declinandum est a virtute quicquid accidat

post mortem."]

[Footnote 568: See especially the exordium to cap. viii.]

[Footnote 569: Ritter, _Geschichte der Christlichen Philosophie_, part

v. p. 426, quoted by Fiorentino, _op. cit._]

The treatise _De Incantatione_ presents the same antithesis between

Peripatetic science and Christian faith. Pomponazzi composed it at the

instance of a physician, his friend, who begged him to offer an

explanation of some apparently supernatural phenomena. It is, in fact,

an essay upon demons and miracles. As a philosopher, Pomponazzi

stoutly rejects both. The order of nature cannot be interrupted.

Angels and devils only exist in the popular imagination. Miracles are

but imperfectly comprehended manifestations of natural forces, which

the vulgar ascribe to the intervention of God or spirits.[570] Each

religion has its own miracles and its own saints, to whom the common

folk attribute supernatural power.[571] But Moses, Mahomet and Christ

stand upon the same level; the thaumaturgists of every creed are

equally unable to alter the universal order.[572] Credulity and

ignorance ascribe to all of them faculties they cannot possess.

Having, as a philosopher, expressed these revolutionary ideas, as a

Christian, he briefly and summarily states his belief in all that he

has just denied.[573]

[Footnote 570: _De Incant._ cap. 3.]

[Footnote 571: _Ibid._ cap. 4.]

[Footnote 572: _Ibid._ cap. 12.]

[Footnote 573: Peroration of _De Incant._]

Basing his argument upon the ground of reason, which, for him, was no

other than the Aristotelian doctrine of the Cosmos, Pomponazzi

recognizes no agency that interrupts the sequence of cause and effect

in nature. But the astral intelligences are realities, and their

operation has been as clearly ascertained as that of any other natural

force. Therefore Pomponazzi refers to the planets many extraordinary

exhibitions of apparently abnormal power, conceding upon this point as

much as could have been desired by the most superstitious of his

contemporaries. Not only are the lives of men subject to planetary

influence; but all human institutions rise, flourish and decay in

obedience to the same superior laws. Even religions have their day of

inevitable decline, and Christianity is no exception to the general

rule. At the present moment, says Pomponazzi, we may discern signs of

approaching dissolution in the fabric of our creed.[574] He is careful

to add, as usual, that he holds this doctrine as a philosopher; but

that, as a Christian, he believes in the permanence of revealed

religion. Faith and reason could not be brought into more glaring

antagonism, nor is it possible to affirm contradictory propositions

with less attempt at reconciliation. Pomponazzi seems determined to

act out by anticipation Pascal's axiom, _Il faut etre Pyrrhonniste

accompli et Chretien soumis_. What the real state of his mind was, and

whether the antithesis which seems to us so untenable, did not present

itself to him as an anomaly, hardly admits of explanation. A similar

unresolved discord may be traced in nearly all the thinkers of this

epoch.

[Footnote 574: _De Incant._ cap. 12.]

It remains to mention one more treatise of Pomponazzi, the Book on

Fate. Here he raises the question of human freedom face to face with

God and the unbroken order of the Universe. The conclusions at which

he arrives are vacillating and unsatisfactory; nor is there much in

his method of handling this ancient problem to arrest attention. The

essay, however, contains one sentence which deserves to be recorded.

"A very Prometheus," he says, "is the philosopher. Seeking to

penetrate the secret things of God, he is consumed with ceaseless

cares and cogitations; he forgets to thirst, to hunger, to eat, to

sleep, to spit; he is derided of all men, and held for a fool and

sacrilegious person; he is persecuted by inquisitors; he becomes a

gazing-stock to the common folk. These, then, are the gains of the

philosophers; these are their guerdons."[575] Not only were these

words spoken from the man's own heart, smarting under the attacks to

which his treatise on the soul had exposed him; but they were in a

profound sense prophetic. While reading them, we think of Campanella's

lifelong imprisonment and sevenfold tortures; of Bruno's death by

fire, and Vanini's tongue torn out before his execution; of Galileo's

recantation and disgrace; of Carnesecchi, Paleario and Montalcino

burned or strangled. A whole procession of Italian martyrs to free

thought and bold avowal of opinion passes before our eyes.

[Footnote 575: _De Fato_, lib. iii. cap. 7.]

Reviewing Pomponazzi's work, we find that, though he occupied for the

most part the modest place of a commentator and expositor, he

valiantly asserted the rights of reason face to face with

ecclesiastical authority. Under the aegis of the formula _salva fide_,

he attacked the popular belief, disputed the fiats of Church

Councils, denied miracles, rejected supernatural causes, and

proclaimed that science must be based upon the axiom of an unalterable

permanence in the order of the universe. The controversy which his

treatise on immortality inflamed in Italy, popularized the two

conceptions of God's immanence in nature and of the evolution of the

human soul from corporeal organs. In other words it struck a powerful

blow at transcendental, extra-mundane speculation, and prepared the

way for sounder physical investigations. The positive spirit appeared

in Pomponazzi, never thenceforward to be set at rest until the cycle

of modern scientific illumination shall be accomplished.

The deep impression produced by this controversy on the mind of the

Italians, may be illustrated by a little story. Pomponazzi's disciple,

Simone Porzio, when invited to lecture at Pisa, opened Aristotle's

meteorological treatises at the commencement of his course. The

assembly, composed of students and people of the town, who had

assembled, as was then the custom, to gaze upon the new professor and

to judge his manner,[576] cried in a loud voice: "_Quid de anima?_

Speak to us about the soul!" He had to close his book, and take up the

_De Anima_. This Porzio frankly professed his belief that the human

soul differed in no essential point from the soul of a lion or a

plant, and that those who thought otherwise, were prompted by a

generous pity for our mean estate.[577] Materialism of the purest

water became fashionable and expressed itself in pithy sentences,

which, though devoid of historical accuracy, sufficiently paint the

temper of the folk who gave them currency. Of this type is the

apocryphal epitaph of Cesare Cremonini, one of the latest of the

Italian peripateticians. He died in 1631, and on his grave was said to

have been written at his own request _Hic jacet Cremoninus totus_. To

the same Cremonini is ascribed the Jesuitical motto _Foris ut moris,

intus ut libet_, which may be regarded as a cynical version of

Pomponazzi's oft-repeated protestation of belief in dogmas he had

demonstrated contrary to reason.[578] Had it been possible for the

Church to continue her tolerance of Leo's age, or had the

Counter-Reformation taken a direction less inimical to free inquiry,

the studied hypocrisy of this epigram, so painfully characteristic of

the age that gave it birth, might have been avoided. The men who

uttered it and acted by it, were the same of whom Milton spoke in

_Areopagitica_: "I have sat among their learned men (for that honor I

had), and been counted happy to be born in such a place of philosophic

freedom as they supposed England was, while themselves did nothing but

bemoan the servile condition into which learning amongst them was

brought; that this was it which had damped the glory of Italian wits;

that nothing had been written now these many years but flattery and

fustian."

[Footnote 576: An interesting description of a humanist opening his

course at Padua, and of the excitement in the town about it, is

furnished by the anonymous Maccaronic poet who sang the burlesque

praises of _Vigonca_. See Delepierre, _Macaroneana Andra_, London,

1862. Above, p. 331.]

[Footnote 577: He makes these assertions in a treatise _De Mente

Humana_.]

[Footnote 578: In the peroration of his treatise on Incantation,

Pomponazzi says: "Habes itaque, compater charissime, quae, ut mea fert

opinio, Peripatetici ad ea quae quaesivisti, dicere verisimiliter

haberent. Habes et quae veritati et Christianae religioni consona

sunt."]

Central and Northern Italy performed the first two stages of

Renaissance thought. Florence, true to the destiny which made her

artful and form-giving, attempted to restore Platonic philosophy in

accordance with the conditions determined by the middle ages. Bologna,

gifted with a personality no less substantial, adhered to scholastic

traditions, but accommodated their rigid subject-matter to the spirit

breathed upon them by more liberal scholarship. It remained for the

South of Italy to complete the work, and to supply the fulcrum needed

for the first true effort of modern science. Hitherto, whether at

Florence or Bologna, philosophy had recognized authority. Discarding

the yoke of the Church, both Platonists and Aristotelians recognized

masters, whose words they were contented to interpret. Reason dared

not declare herself, except beneath the mask of some great

teacher--Plato or Plotinus, Aristotle or Alexander or Averroes. The

school of Cosenza cut itself adrift from authority, ecclesiastical or

classical. This is the import of the first sonnet in Campanella's

series, preserved for us by the fortunate mediation of his disciple,

the German with the Italianized patronymic, Tobia Adami:[579]

Born of God's Wisdom and Philosophy,

Keen lover of true beauty and true good,

I call the vain self-traitorous multitude

Back to my mother's milk; for it is she,

Faithful to God her spouse, who nourished me,

Making me quick and active to intrude

Within the inmost veil, where I have viewed

And handled all things in eternity.

If the whole world's our home where we may run,

Up, friends, forsake those secondary schools

Which give grains, units, inches for the whole!

If facts surpass mere words, melt pride of soul,

And pain, and ignorance that hardens fools,

Here in the fire I've stolen from the Sun!

[Footnote 579: From my _Sonnets of Michael Angelo and Campanella_, p.

119.]

Campanella calls the students of truth back to Nature from the

"secondary schools" of the philosophers, Plato, Aristotle, Thomas of

Aquino, or Averroes; who imposed upon their reason by the word

"authority." In his fifth sonnet he enforces the same theme:[580]

The world's the book where the eternal sense

Wrote his own thoughts; the living temple where,

Painting his very self, with figures fair

He filled the whole immense circumference.

Here then should each man read, and gazing find

Both how to live and govern, and beware

Of godlessness; and, seeing God all-where,

Be bold to grasp the universal mind.

But we tied down to books and temples dead,

Copied with countless errors from the life,--

These nobler than that school sublime we call.

O may our senseless souls at length be led,

To truth by pain, grief, anguish, trouble, strife!

Turn we to read the one original!

[Footnote 580: _Ibid._ p. 123.]

Tyrants, hypocrites and sophists--that is to say, the triple band of

State and Church oppressors, of interested ecclesiastics, and of

subtle logicians--have drawn their threefold veil between the human

intelligence and the universe, from which alone, as their proper home

and _milieu_, men must derive the knowledge that belongs to them.

Campanella, with the sincerity of one to whom the truth is dearer than

his own reputation, yields the _spolia opima_ of this latest victory

over the strongholds of authority to his master--the master whom he

never knew in life, but over whose bier he wept and prayed in secret,

hiding the fire of modern freedom and modern science beneath the black

cowl of a Dominican friar:[581]

Telesius, the arrow from thy bow

Midmost his band of sophists slays that high

Tyrant of souls that think; he cannot fly:

While Truth soars free, loosed by the self-same blow.

Proud lyres with thine immortal praises glow,

Smitten by bards elate with victory:

Lo, thine own Cavalcante, stormfully

Lightning, still strikes the fortress of the foe!

Good Gaieta bedecks our saint serene

With robes translucent, light-irradiate,

Restoring her to all her natural sheen;

The while my tocsin at the temple-gate

Of the wide universe proclaims her queen,

Pythia of first and last ordained by fate.

[Footnote 581: _Ibid._ p. 174.]

In these verses, the saint and queen proclaimed by Campanella is

Nature. During the middle ages truth had seemed to descend as by a

sort of inspiration upon man from an extra-mundane God. During the

first and second periods of the Renaissance the human intellect

repudiated this transcendentalism, but yielded itself, a willing

victim, to the authority of books, Plato or Aristotle, and their

commentators. Now the mind of man stands face to face with nature, and

knows that there, and there alone, is inspiration. The great Baconian

secret, the Interrogation of Nature, has been revealed. It is now

acknowledged on all sides that not what Telesio or Campanella, or

their famous disciple, Bacon, achieved in actual discovery, was

noteworthy. But the spirit communicated from Telesio and Campanella to

Bacon, is the spirit of modern science. Meanwhile, another native of

South Italy, Giordano Bruno, proclaimed the immanence of God in the

world, the identification of the universe with God in thought, the

impossibility of escaping from God in nature, because nature,

realizing God for the human soul, is divine. The central conception of

the third age of Italian thought, underlying the apparently divergent

systems of Campanella and Bruno--the conception, namely, of a real and

indestructible correlation between the human spirit and the actual

universe, and the consequent reliance of the human consciousness upon

its own testimony in the search for truth--contained the germ of all

that has, in very various regions, been subsequently achieved by

French, Dutch, English, and German speculators. Telesio and

Campanella, long before Bacon, founded empirical science. Campanella

and Bruno, long before Descartes, established the principle of

idealistic philosophy in the self-conscious thinking faculty of man.

The sensualism of Telesio, the spiritualism of Bruno, and Campanella's

dualism, foreshadow all possible sects of empiricists, rationalists

and eclectics, which have since divided the field of modern

speculation. It is easy enough now to look down either from the height

of full-blown transcendental metaphysics or from the more modest

eminence of solid physical science upon the intellectual abortions

generated by this potent conception in its earliest fusion with

medieval theology. Yet it is impossible to neglect the negative

importance of the work effected by men who declared their independence

of ecclesiastical and classical authority in an age when the Church

and antiquity contended for the empire of the human reason. Still less

possible is it to deny the place of Galileo, Descartes, Bacon,

Spinoza, among the offspring begotten of the movement which

Pomponazzi, Telesio, Campanella and Bruno inaugurated and developed.

Thus, therefore, by the substitution of human for revealed authority;

by the suggestion of new and real topics of inquiry, and finally by

the repudiation of all authority except that of nature's ascertained

laws; by the rending of all veils between the human reason and the

universe, the Italian philosophers of the Renaissance effected for

Europe the transition from the middle ages to the modern era.

What is the link of connection between Machiavelli and Pomponazzi, the

two leaders of Italian thought at the height of the Renaissance? It

may be expressed in one formula--a vivid sense of man and the world as

they are; or, in other words, positivism. Machiavelli dispenses with

Providence, smiles incredulously at Fortune, explains all social and

historical problems by reference to the will and thought of men in

action. He studies human nature as he finds it, not as it ought to be

according to some ideal standard. Pomponazzi shatters transcendentalism

at a blow. He proves that there is no convincing argument for

immortality. He demonstrates that the end of man is to be found in

conduct. He treats religions without exception as transitory

institutions, subject to the universal laws of birth and corruption,

useful to society in their day of vigor, but destined to succeed each

other with the waxing and the waning of the influences that control

our globe and all that it contains. On this point Machiavelli and

Pomponazzi are in complete accord. Both of them interpret the spirit

of their century.

As Machiavellism existed in Italian politics before Machiavelli

theorized it, so materialism leavened society before Pomponazzi gave

it the consistency of demonstration. The middle ages with their

political and theological idealism were at an end. Machiavelli and

Pomponazzi contemporaneously philosophized the realism on which

science was destined to be founded. They were the deicides of elder

faiths; the hierophants of a new revelation, as yet but dimly

apprehended; the Columbus and Vespucci of an intellectual hemisphere

which it remained for their posterity to colonize. The conditions of

public and private life in the Italian cities--the decline of

religious feeling, the corruption of morality, the paganizing

tendencies of humanism, the extinction of political activity, the

decay of freedom, the survival of the Church and Commune when their

work was ended--rendered any such movement as that of the German

Reformation wholly impossible. The people lacked the spiritual stuff

for it. We have seen that it was chiefly men like Berni and Folengo

who gave open utterance to Lutheran opinions; and from sources like

those no pure or vivifying waters could be drawn. Italy's work lay in

another direction. Those very conditions which unfitted her for a

religious revival, enabled her to perform her true mission. It was no

slight achievement to have set up the pillars of Hercules for

transcendentalism, and at the same time to have discovered the

continent of positive science. For the fruits and recognition of her

labors she has had to wait. Her history since the date of

Machiavelli's death has been obscure until the middle of this century,

and in the race of the nations she has been left behind.[582] But the

perturbation of the intellectual current caused by the Reformation is

now nearly over, and the spirit of modern science still finds itself

in harmony with that of the Italian thinkers who gave it earliest

expression.

[Footnote 582: It may be worth reminding the reader that Pomponazzi

died in 1525, and Machiavelli in 1527--the year of Rome's disaster.

Their births also were nearly synchronous. Pomponazzi was born in

1462, Machiavelli in 1469.]

CHAPTER XVII.

CONCLUSION.

Retrospect--Meaning of the Renaissance--Modern Science and

Democracy--The Preparation of an Intellectual Medium for

Europe--The Precocity of Italy--Servitude and

Corruption--Antiquity and Art--The Italian

Provinces--Florence--Lombardy and Venice--The March of

Ancona, Urbino, Umbria--Perugia--Rome--Sicily and

Naples--Italian Ethnology--Italian Independence on the

Empire and the Church--Persistence of the Old Italic

Stocks--The New Nation--Its Relation to the Old--The Revival

of Learning was a National Movement--Its Effect on Art--On

Literature--Resumption of the Latin Language--Affinities

between the Latin and Italian Genius--Renascence of Italian

Literature combined with Humanism--Greek Studies

comparatively Uninfluential--The Modern Italians inherited

Roman Qualities--Roman Defects--Elimination of Roman

Satire--Decay of Roman Vigor--Italian

Realism--Positivism--Sensuousness--Want of Mystery,

Suggestion, Romance--The Intellectual Atmosphere--A

Literature of Form and Diversion--Absence of Commanding

Genius--Lack of Earnestness--Lack of Piety--Materialism and

Negation--Idyllic Beauty--The Men of the Golden Age--The

Cult of Form--Italy's Gifts to Europe--The Renaissance is

not to be Imitated--Its Importance in Human

Development--Feudalism, Renaissance, Reformation,

Revolution.

At the end of a long journey it is natural to review the stages of the

way that has been traversed. We resume the impressions made upon our

mind, and extract that element of generality from recollection, which

the rapid succession of scenes, incidents and interests denied to the

experience of travel. In like manner, those who have been engaged in

some historical inquiry, after examining each province of the subject

separately, seek a vantage-ground of contemplation, whence the

conclusions they have reached can be surveyed in their relation to

each other.

What we call, for want of a better name, the Renaissance, was a period

of transition from the middle ages to the first phase of modern life.

It was a step which had to be made, at unequal distances of time and

under varying influences, by all the peoples of the European

community. Its accomplishment brought the several members of that

community into international relationship, and formed a confederation

of reciprocally balanced powers out of the Occidental races who shared

the inheritance of imperial Rome. At the commencement of this period,

the modern nations acquired consistency and fixity of type. Mutually

repelled by the principle of nationality, which made of each a

separate organism, obeying its own laws of growth according to

peculiarities of climate, blood and social institutions, they were at

the same time drawn and knit together by a common bond of intellectual

activities and interests. The creation of this international

consciousness or spirit, which, after the lapse of four centuries,

justifies us in regarding the past history of Europe as the history of

a single family, and encourages us to expect from the future a still

closer interaction of the Western nations, can be ascribed in a great

measure to the Renaissance. One distinctive feature of that epoch was,

reaction against the main forces of the middle ages. And since

reaction implies a vivid principle of vitality, we find, in the

further progress of this movement, the new ideas of democracy and

science counterposed to feudalism and the Church. So vast a revolution

as the reconstruction of society upon new bases, could not be

effected by any simple or continuously progressive process. The

nations educated by the Church and disciplined by feudalism, could not

pass into a new phase of being without checks, hesitations,

retrogressions, hindrances innumerable. Nor was it to be expected that

the advance of each member in the European community should proceed

upon an exactly similar method, or with equally felicitous results. It

was inevitable that both feudalism and the Church should long remain

in liquidation, resisting the impact of skepticism inherent in the

Reformation; opposing stubborn resistance to republican energy

liberated by the Revolution; crystallizing the counter-movement of the

modern spirit at one point in monarchical absolutism, at another in

Protestant establishments; receding from this rebellious province to

fortify and garrison that loyal stronghold; tolerating no compromise

here, and there achieving a temporary triumph by transaction with the

steadily-advancing forces ranged against them. The battle even now is

being waged with varying success over the wide field of Europe; and

whatever may be our conviction as to the ultimate issue of the

struggle, it is impossible to foresee a definite end, or to assign

even probable limits to the extent and the duration of the conflict.

Although we may hold the opinion that science and democracy constitute

the fundamental points in modern as distinguished from medieval

history, it would be paradoxical to assert that they emerged into

prominence during the initial stage of the Renaissance. A common

intellectual atmosphere had first to be prepared for Europe. The sense

of human freedom had to be acquired by studies and discoveries which

made man master of himself and of the world around him. His attention

had to be diverted from the life beyond the grave to his life upon

this planet. The culture, which formed the great achievement of the

Italian Renaissance and which was diffused through Europe, uniting men

of all races and all creeds in speculative and literary activity,

evoking sympathies and stimulating antagonisms upon vital questions of

universal import, was necessary for the evolution of the modern world

as we now know it. In many senses we have already transcended the

original conditions of that culture. But we owe to it our spiritual

solidarity, our feeling of intellectual identity, our habit of pouring

convergent contributions from divers quarters into the stock of

indestructible experience.

Quickened to livelier consciousness by contact with the masterpieces

of antiquity, in the dawn of that new age, the reason rapidly engaged

in exploratory expeditions. Both human nature and the material

universe presented themselves with altered aspect to thought and

senses, which had lain dormant during centuries of incubation. At

first, like the blind man of the miracle, the awakening intelligence

saw confusedly. It is easy with our clearer vision to despise the

hybrid fancies of a time when things old and new were so romantically

blent--"the men as trees, walking," of that inexperienced intuition,

the childish science and the scarce-fledged criticism of discoverers,

who, while they reached forth to the future, still retained the hold

of custom and long reverence on the past. A note of imperfection,

vacillation, tentative endeavor, can be traced in all the productions

of the Renaissance--everywhere, in fact, but in the fine arts, where a

simpler insight and more unimpeded faculties were exercised at that

period than the last three centuries have boasted. In another

important department the men of that age proved themselves more than

merely precocious and immature. The humanistic system of mental

training has survived with little alteration to the present day, and

still forms the basis of what is called a liberal education.

This transition from the middle ages to the modern era, which we

designate by the metaphor of Renascence or new birth, made itself

first powerfully felt in Italy. Of all the European nations, the

Italians alone can boast of a great and uninterrupted history,

extending over the twenty-five centuries which are known to us by

tolerably trustworthy records. They first gave the civilization of

republican and imperial Rome to the Western world. They formed the

Latin Church, and extended the organization of ecclesiastical Rome to

European Christendom. This was their double work in what we call the

ancient and medieval periods. At the close of the latter, they

inaugurated the age of culture, science and associated intellectual

endeavor, in which we are now living. In Italy the people preserved

unbroken memories of their classical past; and, as we have seen

throughout these volumes, the point of departure for modern

reconstruction was a renewed and vital interest in antiquity. Here,

too, the characteristic institutions of feudalism had taken but slight

hold, while the secularization of the Papacy had undermined the

spiritual prestige of the Church. Thus the forces to be overcome were

feebler in Italy than elsewhere, while the current of fresh energy

was stronger.

The conditions under which the Italians performed their task in the

Renaissance were such as seem at first sight unfavorable to any great

achievement. Yet it is probable that, the end in view being the

stimulation of mental activity, no better circumstances than they

enjoyed could have been provided. Owing to a series of adverse

accidents, and owing also to their own instinctive preference for

local institutions, they failed to attain the coherence and the

centralized organization which are necessary to a nation as we

understand that word. Their dismemberment among rival communities

proved a fatal source of political and military weakness, but it

developed all their intellectual energies by competition to the

utmost.

At the middle of the fifteenth century their communes had lost

political liberty, and were ruled by despots. Martial spirit declined.

Wars were carried on by mercenaries; and the people found itself in a

state of practical disarmament, when the neighboring nations quarreled

for the prize of those rich provinces. At the same time society

underwent a rapid moral deterioration. When Machiavelli called Italy

"the corruption of the world," he did not speak rhetorically. An

impure and worldly clergy; an irreligious, though superstitious,

laity; a self-indulgent and materialistic middle class; an idle

aristocracy, excluded from politics and unused to arms; a public given

up to pleasure and money-getting; a multitude of scholars, devoted to

trifles, and vitiated by studies which clashed with the ideals of

Christianity--from such elements in the nation proceeded a

widely-spread and ever-increasing degeneracy. Public energy, exhausted

by the civil wars and debilitated by the arts of the tyrants, sank

deep and deeper into the lassitude of acquiescent lethargy. Religion

expired in laughter, irony and license. Domestic simplicity yielded to

vice, whereof the records are precise and unmistakable. The virile

virtues disappeared. What survived of courage assumed the forms of

ruffianism, ferocity and treasonable daring. Still, simultaneously

with this decline in all the moral qualities which constitute a

powerful people, the Italians brought their arts and some departments

of their literature to a perfection that can only be paralleled by

ancient Greece. The anomaly implied in this statement is striking; but

it is revealed to us by evidence too overwhelming to be rejected. We

must be careful not to insist on any causal link of connection between

the moral and intellectual conditions of Italian society at this

epoch. Still we are forced to admit that servitude and corruption are

the commanding features of the age in which Italy for the third time

in her history won and held the hegemony of the world. In politics, in

religion, in ethics, she seemed to have been left devoid of guiding

principles; and tragic interest is added to the climax of her

greatness by the long series of disasters, culminating in Spanish

enslavement and ecclesiastical tyranny, which proved her internal

rottenness and put an end to her unrivaled intellectual triumphs.

It has been my object in this work to review the part played by the

Italians at the beginning of modern history, subjecting each

department of their activity to separate examination. In the first of

the five volumes I described the social and political conditions under

which the renascence of the race took place. In the second I treated

of that retrogressive movement toward antiquity, which constitutes the

most important factor in the problem offered by that age. The third

volume was devoted to the Fine Arts, wherein the main originality of

modern Italy emerged. It was through art that the creative instincts

of the people found their true and adequate channel of expression.

Paramount over all other manifestations of the epoch, fundamental

beneath all, penetrative to the core of all, is the artistic impulse.

The slowly self-consolidating life of a great kingdom, concentrating

all elements of national existence by the centripetal force of organic

unity, was wanting. Commonwealths and despotisms, representing a more

imperfect stage of political growth, achieved completion and decayed.

But art survived this disintegration of the medieval fabric; and in

art the Italians found the cohesion denied them as a nation. While

speaking thus of art, it is necessary to give a wide extension to that

word. It must be understood to include literature. Nor, in the case of

Italy, does this imply an undue strain upon its meaning. The last two

volumes of my work have been devoted to the stages whereby vernacular

literature absorbed into itself the elements of scholarship, and gave

form to the predominating thoughts and feelings of the people. This

process of form-giving was controlled, more or less consciously

throughout, by the artistic instincts of which I have been speaking.

Thus we are justified in regarding the literary masterpieces of the

sixteenth century as the fullest and most representative expression

of the Italian temperament at the climax of its growth. The literature

of the golden age implies humanism, implies painting. It will be seen

that the logic of the whole subject necessitated the reservation of

this department for final treatment, and justified a more minute

investigation than had been accorded to the rest.

It is not only possible but right to speak of Italy collectively when

we review her work in the Renaissance. Yet it should not be forgotten

that Italy at this time was a federation, presenting upon a miniature

scale the same diversities in her component parts as the nations of

Europe do now. If for this reason alone, we may profitably survey the

different shares claimed by her several communities in the general

achievement.

At the beginning of such a review, we cannot fail to be struck with

the predominance of Florence. The superiority of the Tuscans was

threefold. In the first place, they determined the development of art

in all its branches. In the second place, they gave a language to

Italy, which, without obliterating the local dialects, superseded them

in literature when the right moment for intellectual community

arrived. That moment, in the third place, was rendered possible by the

humanistic movement, which began at Florence. The humanists prepared

the needful literary medium by introducing classical studies into

every town of the peninsula. Without this discipline, Tuscan could not

so speedily have produced Italian, or have been so readily accepted by

North and South. It may, indeed, be affirmed without exaggeration

that, prior to the close of the fifteenth century, what we call the

Italian genius was, in truth, the genius of Florence.

What the Lombards and Venetians produced in fine art and literature

was of a later birth.[583] Yet the novelists of Lombardy, the Latin

lyrists of Garda, the school of romantic and dramatic poets at

Ferrara, the group of sculptors and painters assembled in Milan by the

Sforza dynasty, the maccaronic Muse of Mantua, the unrivaled

magnificence of painting at Venice, the transient splendor of the

Parmese masters, the wit of Modena, the learning of the princes of

Mirandola and Carpi, must be catalogued among the most brilliant and

characteristic manifestations of Italian genius. In pure literature

Venice contributed but little, though she sent forth a dictator,

Pietro Bembo, to rule the republic of letters at the moment when the

scepter was about to pass from Florence. Her place, as the home of

Aldo's Greek press, and as the refuge for adventurers like Aretino and

Folengo, when the rest of Italy was yielding to reactionary despotism,

has to be commemorated. Of the northern universities, Padua preserved

the tradition of physical studies, and Bologna that of legal

erudition, onward from the middle ages. Both became headquarters of

materialistic philosophy in the sixteenth century. The school of

Vicenza had flourished in humane letters at the commencement of the

epoch. But it declined early; while that of Ferrara, on the contrary,

succeeded to the honors of Florence and Pisa. Genoa was almost

excluded from the current of Italian culture. Her sumptuous palaces

and churches, her sensual unsympathetic painting, belong to the last

days of Italian energy. Her few great scholars owed their fame to

correspondence and connection with the students of more favored

districts.

[Footnote 583: I need hardly guard this paragraph by saying that I

speak within the limits of the Renaissance.]

From Romagna, the Marches of Ancona, and the Umbrian cities, more

captains of adventure than men of letters or artists swelled the

muster-roll of Italian worthies. We must not, however, forget the

unique place which Urbino, with its refined society, pure Court, and

concourse of accomplished men and women, occupies in the history of

Italian civilization. The position of Perugia, again, is not a little

singular. Situated upon the borders of Tuscany and Umbria, sharing

something of the spirit of both districts, overshadowed by Papal Rome,

yet harboring such broods of _bravi_ as the Baglioni, conferring a

tyranny on Braccio and the honor of her name on Pietro Vannucci, this

city offers a succession of picturesque and perplexing contradictions.

Perugia was the center of the most religious school of painting which

flourished in the fifteenth century, and also the cradle of the

religious drama. For the student of Italian psychology, very much of

serious moment is contained in this statement.

Rome continued to be rather cosmopolitan than Italian. The power,

wealth, and prestige of the Popes made their court a center; and men

who settled in the Eternal City, caught something of its greatness.

There is, however, no reason to recapitulate the benefits conferred by

ecclesiastical patronage at various times on fine arts, scholarship,

and literature. Rather must it be borne in mind that the Romans who

advanced Italian culture, were singularly few. The work of Rome was

done almost exclusively by aliens, drawn for the most part from

Tuscany and Lombardy.

After Frederick II.'s brilliant reign, the Sicilians shared but little

in the intellectual activity of the nation. That this was not due to

want of capacity in the people, seems proved by their aptitude for

poetry first shown at Frederick's Court, and next by the unrivaled

richness of their dialectical literature, both popular and cultivated.

Whether the semi-feudalism which oppressed the Southern provinces,

checked the free expansion of mental faculty, admits of question. But

it is certainly remarkable that, during the Renaissance, the wide

districts of the Regno produced so little. Antonio Beccadelli was,

indeed, a native of Palermo; but Pontano owned Cerreto for his

birthplace. Valla claimed to be a Roman, and Sannazzaro traced his

ancestry through Piacenza into Spain. These are the four greatest

names of the period when Naples formed a literary center under the

Aragonese dynasty. We have already seen that Naples, though not

prolific of native genius, gave specific tone of warmth and liberty to

literature. This may be ascribed partly to the free manners, bordering

on license, of the South, and partly to the permanent jealousy

subsisting between the Kingdom and the Papacy. The _Novella_ produced

humorous pictures of society at Florence, facetiae in Rome, but bitter

satires on the clergy at Naples. The scandals of the Church provoked

the frigid animosity of Florentines like Machiavelli and

Guicciardini; in Naples they led to Valla's ponderous critique and

Sannazzaro's envenomed epigrams. The sensuousness of Poliziano assumed

voluptuous fervor in Pontano's lyrics. Lastly, the Platonic mysticism

of Florence, and the Peripatetic materialism of Bologna ended in the

new philosophy of the Calabrian school. This crowning contribution of

the south to Italy, this special glory of the sixteenth century, came

less from Naples than from minor cities of Calabria. Telesio of

Cosenza, Bruno of Nola, Campanella of Stilo, showed that something of

the old Greek speculative genius--the spirit of Parmenides and

Pythagoras--still lingered round the shores of Magna Graecia. Just as

the Hellenic colonists at Elea and Tarentum anticipated the dawn of

Attic philosophy, so did those robust and innovating thinkers shoot

the arrows of their speculation forward at the mark of modern science.

It is tempting to pass from this review of the Italian provinces to

meditations on a further problem. How far may the qualities of each

district have endured from remote antiquity? To what extent may they

have determined the specific character of Italian production in the

modern age? Did the population of Calabria, we ponder, really inherit

philosophical capacity from their Greek ancestors? Dare we connect the

Tuscan aptitude for art with that mysterious race who built their

cities on Etrurian hill-tops? Can the primitive ethnology of the

Ligurian and Iapygian stocks be used to explain the silence of the

Genoese Riviera and the Apulian champaign? Is a Teutonic strain

discernible in the gross humor of the Mantuan Muse, or in the ballads

of Montferrat? It would be easy to multiply these questions. But the

whole subject of national development is still too obscure to admit of

satisfactory answers.[584] All we can affirm without liability to

error, amounts to this; that Rome never completely fused the divers

races of the Italian peninsula, nor obliterated their characteristic

differences. After the dissolution of her empire, we find the Italian

provinces presenting local types in language, manners, sentiments, and

intellectual proclivities. It is not unreasonable, therefore, to

conjecture that certain of these differences sprang from the

persistence of ethnological qualities, and others from the infusion of

fresh blood from without.

[Footnote 584: Those who are curious in such matters, may be referred

to the following works by Giustiniano Nicolucci: _La Stirpe Ligure in

Italia_, Napoli, 1864; _Sulla Stirpe Iapigica_, Napoli, 1866;

_Sull'Antropologia delta Grecia_, Napoli, 1867; _Antropologia

dell'Etruria_, Napoli, 1869; _Antropologia del Lazio_, Napoli, 1873.

Also to Luigi Calori's _Del Tipo Brachicefalo negli Italiani odierni_,

Bologna, 1868, and a learned article upon this work by J. Barnard

Davis in the _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, Jan. July,

1871. Nicolucci's and Calori's researches lead to opposite results

regarding the distribution of brachycephalic skulls in Italy.

Nicolucci adopts in its entirety the theory of an Aryan immigration

from the North; Barnard Davis rejects it. It seems to me impossible in

our present state of knowledge to draw conclusions from the extremely

varied and interesting observations recorded in the treatises cited

above.]

The decisive fact of Italian history in all its branches at this epoch

is the resurgence of the Latin, or shall we rather say, of the Italic

spirit? The national consciousness survived, though dimly, through the

middle ages; nor had the people suffered shipwreck in the break-up of

the Roman power. This was due in no small measure to the fact that the

Empire was the creation of this people, and that consequently they

were in a sense superior to its fall. Roman civilization, Roman

organization, Roman institutions, Roman law, were the products of the

Italian genius; and when the Roman State declined, the home province

suffered a less thorough-going transformation than, to take an

instance, either Gaul or Spain. It would be paradoxical to maintain

that the imperial despotism exercised a more controlling authority

over the outlying provinces than over Italy proper. Yet something of

this kind might be advanced, when we reflect upon the self-indulgent

majesty of Rome herself; upon the sovereign privileges accorded to the

chief Italian cities; upon the prosperity and vastness of Mediolanum,

Aquileia and Ravenna. Local ties and local institutions kept a lasting

hold upon the ancient no less than the medieval Italian; and long

after Rome became the _colluvies omnium gentium_ so bitterly described

by Juvenal, the country towns, especially in the valley of the Po,

retained a vigorous personality. In this respect the relation in which

men of state and letters, like the Plinies, stood on one side to the

capital and on the other to their birthplace, is both interesting and

instructive. The citizens of the provincial _municipia_ gloried in the

might of Rome. Rome was for them the fulcrum of a lever which set the

habitable globe in movement at their touch. Still the Empire existed

for the world, while each Italian city claimed the duty and affection

of its own inhabitants. When Rome failed, the cosmopolitan authority

of the Empire was extended to the Church, or, rather, fell into

abeyance between the Church and the resuscitated Empire. Just as the

_municipia_ flourished beneath the shadow of old Rome, so now the

Communes grew beneath the Church and the new Empire. These two

creations of the earlier middle ages, though formulated and legalized

in Italy, weighed less heavily there than on some other parts of

Europe. The Italians resisted imperial authority, and preserved their

own local independence. The Northern Emperors were never really strong

below the Alps except on sufferance and by the aid of faction. In like

manner the Italian burghers tolerated ecclesiastical despotism only in

so far as they found it convenient to do so. In spite of Gothic,

Lombard, Frankish and German attempts at solidification, the cities

succeeded in asserting their autonomy. The Italic stock absorbed the

several foreign elements that mingled with it. Vernacular Latin,

surviving the decay of literature, repelling the influence of alien

dialects, prevailed and was the language of the people.

Notwithstanding this persistence of the antique type, the Italian

nation, between the ages of Constantine and Frederick Barbarossa, was

intellectually and actually remade. It was not a new nation like the

English, French or Germans; for its life had continued without

cessation on the same soil from a period antecedent to the birth of

Rome. It had no fund of myth and legend, embodying its memories in

popular epical poetry. Instead of Siegfried, Arthur or Roland, it

looked back to the Virgilian AEneas.[585] Still it underwent, together

with the rest of Europe, the transformation from Paganism to

Christianity. It felt the influences of feudalism, while repelling

them with obstinate and finally victorious jealousy. It owed

something to chivalry, though the instincts of the race were rather

practical and positive than romantic. It suffered the eclipse of

antique culture, and borrowed from its conquerors a tincture of their

style in art and literature. When these new Italians found a voice,

they spoke in tones which lacked the ring of Roman eloquence. The

massy fabric of the Roman syntax was dismembered. And yet their speech

had more affinity to Roman style than that of any Northern people. The

greatest jurists, ecclesiastics and statesmen of the middle ages, the

interpreters of Roman law, the fabricators of solid theological

edifices, the founders of the Catholic Church, the champions of the

Imperial idea, were Italians, proving by their grasp of practical

affairs and by the positive turn they gave to speculative inquiries, a

participation in the ancient Latin Spirit.[586] Even when it is least

classical, the medieval work of the Italian genius betrays this

ancestry--in Lombard no less than in Tuscan architecture, in the

monumental structure of the Divine Comedy, in the comprehensive digest

of the _Summa_, in the rejection of sentimentalism from the tradition

of Provencal poetry, in Petrarch's conception of scholarship, in the

sensuous realism of Boccaccio.

[Footnote 585: That the _AEneid_ was still the Italian Epos is proved

by the many local legends which connected the foundation of cities

with the Trojan wars.]

[Footnote 586: It is enough to mention a few names--Gregory the Great,

Lanfranc, S. Anselm, Peter the Lombard, Hildebrand, S. Thomas Aquinas,

Accursius, Bartolus--to prove how strong in construction, as opposed

to criticism, were the Italian thinkers of the middle ages.]

The Revival of Learning was the acquisition of complete

self-consciousness by this new race, which still retained so much of

its old temperament. Ill at ease among the customs and ideals of

Teutonic tribes; stubbornly refusing to merge their local

independence in a kingdom; struggling against feudalism; accepting

Chivalry and Gothic architecture as exotics; without national legends;

without crusading enthusiasms; the Italians were scarcely themselves

until they regained the right use of their energies by contact with

the classics. This makes the Revival of Learning a national, a

patriotic, a dramatic movement. This gives life and passion to a

process which in any other country, upon any other soil, might have

possessed but little more than antiquarian interest. This, and this

alone, explains the extraordinary fervor with which the Italians threw

themselves into the search, abandoning the new-gained laurels of their

modern tongue, absorbing the intellectual faculties of at least three

generations in the labor of erudition, and emerging from the libraries

of the humanists with a fresh sense of national unity. At the same

moment, and by the same series of discoveries, they found themselves

and found for Europe the civilization of the modern world.

It is only by remembering that the Italic races, clogged by the ruins

of the Roman Empire, and tardily receptive of Teutonic influences,

resumed their natural activity and recognized their vocation in the

Revival of Learning, that we can comprehend the radical revolution

effected in all departments of thought by this event. In Architecture,

the Gothic style, which had been adopted as it were with repugnance

and imperfectly assimilated, was at once abandoned. Brunelleschi,

Alberti, Bramante, San Gallo, Michelangelo, Palladio, strove, one and

all, to effect a right adjustment of the antique style to modern

requirements. Foreign elsewhere, the so-called Palladian manner is at

home and national in Italy. Sculpture, even earlier than architecture,

took and followed the same hint. What chiefly distinguishes the work

of the Pisan school from contemporary work of French or German

craftsmen is, that here the manner of Graeco-Roman art has been felt

and partly comprehended. Painting, though more closely connected with

Christianity, more perfectly related to conditions of contemporary

life, owed strength and vigor in great measure to the same conditions.

During the fifteenth century classical influences continued

increasingly to modify the practice of the strongest masters. In

literature, the effect of the Revival was so decisive as to demand a

somewhat closer investigation.

The awakened consciousness of the Italic people showed itself first in

the creation of a learned literature, imitating as closely as possible

in a dead language the models recovered from ancient Rome. It was not

enough to appropriate the matter of the Latin authors. Their form had

to be assimilated and reproduced. These pioneers in scholarship

believed that the vulgar tongue, with its divergent dialects, had ever

been and still remained incapable of higher culture. The refined

diction of Cicero and Virgil was for them a separate and superior

speech, consecrated by infallible precedent, and no less serviceable

for modern than it formerly had been for antique usage. Recovering the

style of the Augustan age, they thought they should possess an

instrument of utterance adapted to their present needs, and correlated

to the living language of the people as it had been in the age of

Roman greatness. They attacked the easier branches of composition

first. Epistolography and rhetoric assumed the Roman habit. Then the

meters of Horace, Ovid, and Virgil were analyzed and copied. In the

inevitable compromise between classical modes of expression and modern

necessities of thought, concessions were always made to the advantage

of the former. The Persons of the Trinity, the saints and Martyrs of

the Church, pranked themselves in phrases borrowed from an obsolete

mythology. Christ figured as a hero. The councils of each petty

Commune arrogated the style of Senate and People. _Condottieri_

masqueraded as Scipio, Hannibal, and Fabius Cunctator. Cecco and

Tonino assumed the graceful garb of Lycidas and Thyrsis. So fervid was

the sense of national resurgence that these literary conventions

imposed on men who ruled the politics of Italy--on statesmen with

subtle insight into practical affairs; on generals with egotistic

schemes to be developed from the play and counter-play of living

interests. When Poliziano ruled the republic of letters, this

acclimatization of the Latin classics was complete. Innumerable poems,

reproducing the epic, elegiac and lyric measures of the Romans, poured

from the press. Moralists draped themselves in the Hortensian toga.

Orators fulminated copious floods of Ciceronian rhetoric. Critics aped

Quintilian. Historians stuffed their chapters with speeches and

descriptions modeled upon Livy. Pastoral and didactic poets made

centos from Virgil. The drama flourished under the auspices of

Plautus, Terence, and Seneca. Preachers were more scrupulous to turn

their sentences in florid style than to clinch a theological argument.

Upon the lips of Popes the God of Sinai or Calvary was Jupiter

Optimus Maximus. Even envoys and embassadors won causes for their

States by paragraphs, citations, perorations in the manner of the

ancients.

This humanistic ardor at first effected a division between the

lettered and unlettered classes. The people clung to their dialects.

Educated folk despised all forms of speech but Latin. It seemed as

though the national literature might henceforth follow two separate

and divergent courses. But with the cessation of the first enthusiasm

for antique culture, the claims of vernacular Italian came to be

recognized. No other modern nation had produced masterpieces equal to

Dante's, Petrarch's and Boccaccio's. The self-esteem of the Italians

could not suffer the exclusion of the Divine Comedy, the _Canzoniere_

and the Decameron from the rank of classics. Men of delicate

perception, like Alberti and Lorenzo de' Medici, felt that the honors

of posterity would fall to the share of those who cultivated and

improved their mother tongue. Thus the earlier position of the

humanists was recognized as false. Could not their recent acquisitions

be carried over to the account and profit of the vernacular? A common

Italian language, based upon the Tuscan, but modified for general

usage, was now practiced in accordance with the rules and objects of

the scholars. Upon the briar of the popular literature were grafted

the highly-cultivated roses of the classic gardens. It was thus that

the masterpieces of _cinque cento_ literature came into being--the

_Orlando_ and the comedies of Ariosto, Machiavelli's histories and

Sannazzaro's _Arcadia_--Tasso's _Gerusalemme_, and Guarini's _Pastor

Fido_, together with the multitudinous and multifarious work of lesser

craftsmen in prose and verse.

Steeped in classical allusion and reminiscence, the form of this new

literature was modern; but its spirit was in a true sense Latin. The

Italic people had found their proper mode of self-expression, and

proclaimed their hereditary affinities to the makers of Roman art. In

the history of the Italian Renaissance Greek studies form but an

episode. The Platonic school of Florence, the Venetian labors of

Aldus, exercised a partial and imperfect influence over Italian

culture. They proved more important for Europe at large than for the

peninsula, more valuable in their remote than their immediate

consequences. With the whole of classic literature to choose from,

this instinctive preference of Latin illustrates the point I am

engaged in demonstrating--namely, that in Italy the Revival of

Learning was a resurgence of the Italic genius modified and formed by

Roman influence. True to their ancestry, the Italians assimilated

Roman types, and left the Greek aside.

If we pause to consider the qualities of the Roman spirit in art and

literature, we shall see in how real a sense the modern people

reproduced them and remained within their limits. Compared with the

Hellenic and Teutonic races, the Romans were not myth-making, nor in

the sincerest sense poetical. In like manner the Italians are

deficient on the side of legend and romance. This defect has been

insisted on in the preceding volumes, where the practical and positive

quality of Italian poetry, its leaning to realism and abstinence from

visionary flights of the imagination, have more than once been pointed

out. Roman literature was composite and cultured, rather than simple

or spontaneous. The Roman epic was literary; based on antecedent

models, and confined within the sphere of polished imitation. The

Roman Comedy and Tragedy were copies of the Greek. In these highest

departments of art the Roman poets gave new form to foreign matter,

and infused their national spirit into works that might be almost

ranked with free translations. The same is true of their lyrics. Even

the meters in all these species are appropriated. The Italians in like

manner invented but little. They borrowed from every source--from the

Arthurian and Carolingian romances, from Provencal love-poetry, and

lastly in copious quantities from Roman literature. But they stamped

their own genius on the materials adopted, retouched the form, and

modified the sentiment, converting all they took to their own genuine

uses. In this respect the Italians, though apparently so uncreative,

may be called more original than the Romans. Their metrical systems,

to begin with--the sonnet, the octave stanza, and _terza rima_--are

their own. Their touch upon Teutonic legend is more characteristic

than the Roman touch on Greek mythology. Dante and Petrarch deal more

freely with Provencal poetry than Horace or Catullus with the lyrics

of their predecessors. In the matter of dramatic composition, the

Italians stand in much the same relation to the Romans as the Romans

to the Greeks; and this may be repeated with reference to elegiac and

pastoral poetry, and some minor species. The Italic race, in its

later as in its earlier development, seems here, also, satisfied with

form-giving and delicacy of execution.

If we turn to the indigenous and characteristic qualities of Roman

literary genius, we find these reappearing with the force of

spontaneity among the Italians. First of all may be reckoned the

strong love of country-life which lends undying freshness to Catullus,

Horace, and the poetical episodes of Lucretius. This is a no less

marked feature of Italian literature. The very best poetry of the

humanists is that which deals with villa-life among the Tuscan hills,

beside the bay of Naples, or on the shores of Garda. The purest

passages in the _Novelle_, the least intolerable descriptions in the

treatises of the essayists, are those which celebrate the joys of

field and wood and garden. The most original products of the Italian

stage are the _Aminta_ and the _Pastor Fido_, penetrated through and

through with a real love of the country--not with any feeling for

Nature in her sublimer and wilder aspects, but with the old Saturnian

pathos and fresh clinging loveliness of nature made the friend of man

and humanized by labor. The tears shed by Alberti over the rich fields

of autumn, as he gazed upon them from some Tuscan summit, seem to have

fallen like a dew of real emotion upon the driest places of a pastoral

literature which is too often conventional.

Resuming the main thread of the argument, it may be said that the

Italians also shared the Roman partiality for didactic poetry. The

Latin poems of Poliziano, Vida, and Fracastoro, together with the

Italian work of Alamanni, Rucellai, and other authors, sufficiently

prove this. Nor does it seem to me that we need suppose these essays

in a style of inevitable weariness to have been merely formal

imitations of the ancients. The delight with which they were first

received and even now sometimes are read in Italy, and the high

reputation they have won for their authors, show that there is

something in the Italian genius sympathetic to their spirit. One

department of their Roman heritage was left uncultivated by the

Italians. They produced no really great satire; but, on the other

hand, that indigenous satiric humor, inclining to caricature and

obscenity, which found vent in the fescennine songs of Roman festivals

and triumphs, endured without material change through all

modifications of the national life. The earliest monuments of the

vernacular literature afford instances of its popularity throughout

the middle ages. It gave a special quality to the Florentine Carnival;

it assumed high literary form in Lorenzo's _Canti_ and Berni's

burlesque _Capitoli_; it flourished on the quays of Naples, and

sheltered at Rome under the protection of Pasquino.

Leaving pure literature aside, we may trace the Latin ancestry of the

Italians in their strong forensic bias. Just as the Forum was the

center of Roman, so was the Piazza the center of Italian life. The

declamatory emphasis that spoils much Latin prose and verse for

Northern ears, sounds throughout Italian literature. Their writers too

easily assume a rhetorical tone, and substitute sonorousness of

verbiage for solid matter or sound feeling. The recitations of the

Romans find an analogue in the Italian Academies. The colloquial taint

of Roman philosophical discussion is repeated in the moral diatribes

of the humanists. But with equal justice we might urge that the

practical and legal qualities of the Latin race, and its powerful

organizing faculty, survived, and found expression in the modern

nation. The Italians, as we have already said, were the greatest

Churchmen, Statesmen, and Jurists of medieval Europe. They created the

Papacy. They formulated the conception of the Empire. They preserved,

explained, and taught Roman law. But this element was already worked

out and exhausted at the close of the medieval period. We find it in

abeyance during the Renaissance. The political vigor, the martial

energy, the cohesive force, the indomitable will of the Romans, have

clearly deserted their Italian inheritors. There is a massive

architecture, as of masonry, in Roman writing, which Italian almost

always misses.

If it were permissible to venture here upon a somewhat bold

hypothesis, we might ask whether the Italic races now displayed

themselves as they might have been without the centralizing and

controlling genius of Rome? In the history of the Italian peninsula

can we regard the ascendancy of Rome as a gigantic episode? Rome bound

the various tribes together in a common system, formed one language,

and used Italy as the throne of world-wide empire. But Rome's empire

passed, and the tribes remained--indelibly stamped, it is true, with

her mark, and subsequently modified by a succession of intrusive

incidents--yet yielding to the world in a new form a second crop of

flowers and fruitage similar to that which they had borne for Rome. It

will not do to press these speculations. They suggest themselves when

we observe that, what the Italians lacked in the Renaissance was

precisely what Rome, or the Latin confederacy, gave to Italy in the

ancient days of her supremacy. It is as though the great Saturnian

mother, exhausted by the production of Rome and all that Rome implied

through Empire and through Papacy for Europe, had little force left

but for amenities and subtleties in modern literature. To the masonry

of Rome succeeds the filigree work of the _cinque cento_.

There is no mistaking the positive, materialistic, quality possessed

by the Italians in common with their Latin ancestors. This, after all

is said, constitutes the true note of their art and literature.

Realism, preferring the tangible and concrete to the visionary and

abstract, the defined to the indefinite, the sensuous to the ideal,

determines the character of their genius in all its manifestations. We

find it even in the Divine Comedy. Dante's pictures appeal to our

eyes; his songs of angels and cries of damned souls reach our ears; he

makes us shrink with physical loathing from the abominations of

Malebolge, and feel upon our foreheads the cool morning wind of

Purgatory. His imaginary world can be mapped out; his journey through

it has been traced and measured, inch by inch, and hour by hour. The

same realism determined the speculation of the Italians, deflecting it

from metaphysics to problems of practical life. Again it leavened

their religion. We find it in S. Catherine's visions, in the stigmata

of S. Francis, in the miracle of Bolsena. Under its influence the

dogmas of the Church assumed a kind of palpability. It was against

Italian sensuousness that the finer spiritual perceptions of the

Teutonic races rose in revolt; and the Italians, who had transmitted

their own religious forms to Europe, could not understand the point at

issue. Feeble or insufficient as we may judge this realism in the

regions of pure thought or pious feeling, it was supremely powerful in

art. It enabled the Italians so to apprehend the mysteries of the

faith, and so to assimilate the classic myths, as to find for both a

form of beauty in sculpture and in painting. Had they inclined more to

the abstract or to the visionary, Christian art would have remained

impossible. Had they been less simply sensuous, they might perhaps

have shrunk from pagan legends, or have failed to touch them with the

right sincerity. How ill these legends fared at the hands of

contemporary Teutonic artists, is notorious. In the realm of

literature the same quality gave to Petrarch's treatment of chivalrous

love a new substantiality. It animated Boccaccio, and through his

influence created a literature of fiction, indescribably rich in

objective realism and spontaneous passion. Ariosto owed to it the

incomparable brilliance of his pictures. And, since such sensuousness

has perforce its evil side, we find it, in the last resort, no longer

clothing unsubstantial thoughts with forms of beauty, lending reality

to the poet's visions, or humanizing the austerities of faith, but

frankly and simply subordinating its powers to a debased imagination.

The Italian sensuousness too often degenerates into mere sensuality in

the period of our inquiry. Nor is this the only defect of the quality.

When we complain that the Italians are deficient in the highest tragic

imagination, that their feeling for nature lacks romance, or that none

but their rarest works of art attain sublimity, we are but insisting

on the realistic bias which inclined them to things tangible,

palpable, experienced, compassable by the senses. How much of tragedy

is due to horror the soul alone can gauge; how much of romance depends

upon a sense of mystery and unexplored capacities in natural things;

how much of the sublime consists of incorporeal vagueness, need not

here be insisted on. The sensuousness of the Italians, simpler and

less finely tempered with spiritual substance than that of the Greeks,

while it gave them so much of serene beauty and intelligible form,

denied them those high and rare touches which the less evenly balanced

genius of the Northern races can command at will. The poverty of

imaginative suggestion in their lyrical and dramatic poetry has been

already indicated. We feel this even in their music. The most adorable

melodies, poured forth like nightingale songs in the great schools of

the eighteenth century, owe their perfection to purity of outline;

their magic depends on a direct appeal to sensibility. There is not in

them "more than the ear discovers." They are not, to quote Sir Thomas

Browne again, "a hieroglyphical and shadowed lesson of the whole world

and creatures of God." Palestrina and Stradella, Pergolese and

Salvator Rosa, move in a region less mystical and pregnant with

accumulated meaning than that which belongs to Bach and Beethoven.

The intellectual medium formed in Italy upon the dissolution of the

middle ages was irreligious and indifferent; highly refined and highly

cultivated; instinctively aesthetic and superbly gifted, but devoid of

moral earnestness or patriotic enthusiasm, of spiritual passion or

political energy. Society, enslaved, disfranchised, and unwarlike, was

composed of peasants and artisans, sleek citizens, effeminated nobles,

courtiers and scholars of a hundred types, monks and clergy of

manifold variety and almost incalculable multitude, despots more or

less successful in their arts of imposition and seduction, and the

countless dependents on the wants and whims and vices of this motley

population. Among the last may be reckoned artists of all but the

first rank, men of letters, parasites and captains of adventure,

courtesans and Abbes, pamphleteers and _bravi_, orators and

secretaries. Outside the universities, the factories and the

marketplace, there were few callings that could be reckoned honorable

or honest, independent or respectable. Over the rest hung the shadow

of servitude and corruption, of ecclesiastical depravity and private

debauchery, of political stagnation and haughty patronage. Still the

qualities of intellectual sagacity, determined volition, and a certain

aesthetical good taste, were all but universal. We find them in such

works as Cellini's biography, Lorenzino de' Medici's apology, and the

memoirs of his murderer--to mention only documents where the

last-named quality might well have been absent. Even the lowest

instruments of public or private profligacy maintained an independence

face to face with art, and recognized a higher law than their

employer's in the duties imposed upon them by the ideal after which

they strove as men of letters, painters or the like. We trace this

loyal service and artistic freedom even in Pietro Aretino.

A literature, corresponding to this medium, of necessity arose. It was

a literature of form and style, of pleasure and diversion, without

intensity of passion, earnestness of purpose, or profundity of

thought. It could boast no Shakspere, no Pindar, no Dante, no

Descartes. The prevailing types which it developed, were idyllic,

descriptive, melodramatic, narrative, elegiac, sentimental, burlesque,

and licentious. Poliziano, Sannazzaro, Lorenzo de' Medici, Pulci, the

writers of Sonnets and _Capitoli_, the novelists and the satirists,

are each and all of them related by no superficial tie to Boccaccio.

He is the morning star of this multifarious and brilliant band of

artist-authors, until the moment when Ariosto rises above the horizon,

and the _cinque cento_ finds adequate expression in the _Orlando

Furioso_. In that poem the qualities by which the age is

characterized, are concentrated, and the advance in artistic faculty

and feeling since the period of the Decameron is manifested. Amid the

many writers of the century we seek in vain a true philosopher. We

have, instead, to content ourselves with the ethical dissertations of

the humanists; with sketches like the _Cortegiano_, the _Galateo_, the

_Governo della Famiglia_; with erudite fancies like the speculations

of Ficino, or the scholastic triflings of Pico della Mirandola. Yet

out of the very indifferentism of the age philosophy will spring.

Pomponazzi formulates the current materialism. It remains for Telesio,

Campanella, Bruno, Galileo to found the modern scientific method.

Meanwhile, the political agitations of despotisms and republics alike,

and the diplomatic relations of so many petty States, have stimulated

observation and developed the powers of analysis. Therefore the most

vigorous and virile product of this literature is such work as the

_Principe_ and _Discorsi_ of Machiavelli, the _Ricordi_ of

Guicciardini, together with the histories and reflective treatises on

statecraft published by the statists of their school.

The absence of seriousness in the literature of the golden age is

striking to a Northern student. It seems to have been produced for and

by men who had lost their ethical and political conscience, and had

enthroned an aesthetical conscience in its room. Their religious

indifference is deadlier than atheism. Their levity is worse than

sarcasm. They fulfill the epigram of Tacitus, who wrote: _corrumpere

et corrumpi saeculum vocant_. Yet no one has the vigor to be angry. It

is difficult to detect the true note of satire in their criticism of

society. Ariosto is playful, Aretino scurrilous, Alamanni peevish,

Folengo atrabilious. The purely religious compositions of the period

lack simplicity and sincerity. The _Sacre Rappresentazioni_ are

sentimental and romantic. The Christian epics of the Latin poets are

indescribably frigid. The _Laudi_ are either literary like Lorenzo's,

or hysterical like Benivieni's praise of Christian madness. The

impertinent biographies of Aretino pass muster for genuinely pious

work with Vittoria Colonna. It is only in some heartfelt utterance of

the aged Michelangelo, in the holy life of a S. Antonino, or the

charity of Luca della Robbia's mission to young Boscoli, or the fervor

of Savonarola's sermons, that here and there the chord of real

religious feeling vibrates. Philosophy entrenches herself, where she

is strongest, in negation--in Valla's negation of any ethical

standard superior to sensuous hedonism, in Pomponazzi's negation of

immortality, in Machiavelli's negation of Providence. So complete an

antithesis to the medieval ground of thought was necessary; and its

results for the future of science are incontestable. But at the moment

it meant a withdrawal from spiritual interests, an insistance on the

material side of human life, which was correlated to religious

indifference and social dissolution.

The drama abounds in comedies and masks, of wonderful variety and

great artistic beauty. But there is no tragedy worthy of the name. And

the tragic element, as distinguished from romance and pathos, is

conspicuous by its absence in the novels of the period. Lyrical poets

prefer the conscious shams of Petrarchism to any genuine utterance of

emotion. The gravity of La Casa's sonnets, wrenched from an uneasy and

unwilling conscience, the sublimity of Michelangelo's Platonic

mysticism, the patriotic indignation of Guidiccioni's laments for

Italy enslaved and sunk in sensual sloth, must rank as luminous

exceptions. In the romantic epic, chivalry, the ideal of an earlier

age, is turned to gentle ridicule. Honor is sneered at or

misunderstood. The absurd, the marvelous, the licentious are mingled

in a form of incomparable artistic suavity. Tasso's graver epic

belongs to another epoch. Trissino's heroic poem is unreadable. Like

the tragedies of the scholars, it lacks life and stands in no relation

to the spirit of the age.

Over the whole art and literature of the epoch is shed an agreeable

light of quietude and acquiescence, a glow of contentment and

well-being, which contrasts strangely with the tragic circumstances of

a nation crumbling into an abyss of ruin. It is not precisely the

_bourgeois_ felicity of Boccaccio, but a tranquillity that finds

choicest expression in the painted idyls of Giorgione and the written

idyls of Sannazzaro. Its ultimate ideal is the Golden Age, when no

restraints were placed on natural inclination, and no ambition ruffled

the spirit rocked in halcyon ease. This prevailing mood of artists and

writers was capable of sensuous depth, as in the _Baiae_ of Pontano. It

was capable of refined irony, as in the smile of Ariosto. It was

capable of broad laughter, as in the farce of Bibbiena. It was capable

of tenderness, as in the _Ballate_ of Poliziano. It was capable of

cynical licentiousness, as in Aretino's _Ragionamenti_, and the

Florentine _Capitoli_. But it was incapable of tragic passion, lyrical

rapture, intensity, sublimity, heroism. What ears would there have

been in Italy for Marston's prologue to _Antonio and Mellida_ or for

Milton's definition of the poet's calling? The men who made this

literature and those with whom they lived, for whom they wrote, were

well-bred, satisfied with inactivity, open at all pores to pleasure,

delighting in the refinements of tact and taste, but at the same time

addicted to gross sensuality of word and deed. The world was over for

them. The arenas of energy were closed. About the future life they

entertained a suave and genial skepticism, a delicate _peut-etre_ of

blended affirmation and negation, lightly worn, which did not

interrupt the observance of ceremonial piety. They loved their villa,

like Flamminio, Ficino, Bembo, all the poets of Benacus. They spent

their leisure between a grove of laurels and a study. They met in

courtly circles for polite discourse and trifling dissertation, with

no influencing passion, no speculative enthusiasm, no insight into

mysteries deeper than the subtleties of poetry and art. Not one of

them, amid the crash and conflict of three nations on their soil,

exclaimed in darkness _Imus, imus praecipites!_ When the woes of Italy

touched them with a shade of melancholy, they sought relief in

pastimes or in study. Cinthio, prefacing his novels with the horrors

of the Sack of Rome, Bargagli using Siena's agony as introduction to

his love-romances, are parables of what was happening in the world of

fact and feeling. The portrait of Castiglione, clear-browed, sedate,

intelligent, humane, expresses the best men of the best moment in that

age. The _Aminta_ is their dream-world, modeled on reality. Vida's

apostrophe to _pulcherrima Roma_ utters their sentiment of

nationality.

There is a beautiful side to all this. It is the idyllic ideal of

life, revealed in Titian's picture of the _Three Ages of Man_, the

ideal which results in golden and consummate art, tranquilized to

euthanasia, purged of all purpose more earnest than may be found in

melodies played beside a fountain in the fields by boys to listening

girls, on flute or viol. For this ideal a great future was in store,

when the animating motive of idyllic melody expressed itself in the

opera music of the eighteenth century, and Italy gave the last of her

imperishable gifts, a new and perfect art of song, to Europe. But

there is also an ugly side to all this. The ultimate corruption of the

age--in its absence of energy, its avoidance of serious endeavor, its

courtly adulation, its ruffianism, servility, cynicism and

hypocrisy--is incarnated in Aretino. Here the vices of the Italian

Renaissance show their cloven hoofs. Through the orange and laurel

bowers, flooded with Tintoretto's golden sunlight, grins a bestial

all-devouring satyr, a satyr far less innocent or gentle than Greek

poets feigned, with a wolf's jaws as well as a goat's legs. And in

Aretino is already foreshadowed Baffo, the prurient and porcine

Caliban of verse, more barbarously bestial than Venetian Casanova.

Meanwhile amid apparent civility of manner, the violent crimes of a

corrupt and servile race were frequent. Poisoning and secret

assassination, acts of personal vengeance and the employment of hired

cut-throats, rendered life unsafe in that idyllic Italy.

The historian of this epoch, though he feels its splendor and would

fain bless, finds himself forced to insist upon the darker details of

the subject. The triumphal paean of his opening pages ends, too often

for his sympathy, in dissonance and wailing echoes. Yet it would be

unjust and unscientific to close on any note of lamentation, when the

achievements of the eldest-born of Europe's daughters stand arrayed

before him. It has often been said that the Renaissance presents an

insoluble problem. Twy-natured and indeterminate, the spirit of the

age has been likened to the Sphinx, whose riddle finds no Oedipus.

But this language is at best rhetorical. The anomalies and

contradictions of a period to which we owe so much of our spiritual

and intellectual force, are due to its transitional character. The

middle ages were closed. The modern world was scarcely formed. This

interval was chosen for the re-birth of the Italian spirit. On the

Italians fell the complicated and perplexing task of modulating from

the one phase to the other. And, as I have attempted to explain, the

Italians were a peculiar people. They had resisted the Teutonic impact

of the medieval past; but they had failed to prepare themselves for

the drama of violence and bloodshed which the feudal races played out

on the plains of Lombardy. When we say that it was their duty to have

formed themselves into a nation like the French, we are criticising

their conduct from a modern point of view. Experience proved that

their policy of municipal independence was a kind of suicide. But the

instincts of clanship, slowly transmuted through feudal institutions

into a monarchical system, had from time immemorial been absent in

Italy. Rome herself had never gathered the Italian cities into what we

call a nation. And when Rome, the world's head, fell, the

municipalities of Italy remained, and the Italian people sprang to

life again by contact with their irrecoverable past.[587] Then, though

the Church swayed Europe from Italian soil, she had nowhere less

devoted subjects than in Italy. Proud as the Italians had been of the

Empire, proud as they now were of the Church, still neither the Roman

Empire nor the Roman Church imposed on the Italian character.

Pondering on the unique circumstances of this new nation, unorganized

like her sisters, conscious of an immense past and a persistent

vitality, shrewdly apathetic to the religious enthusiasms of the

younger races, yet obliged to temporize and acquiesce and cloak

indifference with hypocrisy, we are brought to feel, though we may not

fully explain, the inevitableness of many distracting discords in what

was still an incomplete phase of national existence.

[Footnote 587: "Roma, caput mundi," is a significant phrase. It marks

the defect of Italian nationality as distinguished from cosmopolitan

empire.]

As a final consideration, after reviewing the anomalies of Italian

society upon the dissolution of the Middle Ages, we are fully

justified in maintaining that the race which had produced Machiavelli

and Columbus, Campanella and Galileo--that is to say, the firmest

pioneers and freest speculators of the dawning modern age--was

capable, left but alone, of solving its own moral contradictions by

some virile effort. Pioneering energy, speculative boldness, virility

of effort (however masked by pedantry and purism, by the urbanities

and amenities of polite culture, by the baseness of egotism and the

immorality of social decadence), were the deepest notes of the

bewildering age which forms our theme. But this freedom from

interference, this luck of being left alone, was just what the

Italians could never get. The catastrophes of several successive

invasions, followed by the petrifying stagnation of political and

ecclesiastical tyranny, checked their natural evolution and suspended

their intellectual life, before the fruit-time had succeeded to the

flower-time of the Renaissance. The magnificent audacity of their

impulse fell checked in mid-career. Their achievement might be likened

to an arch ascending bravely from two mighty piers, whereon the key

stone of completion was not set.

When all her deities were decayed or broken, Italy still worshiped

beauty in fine art and literary form. When all her energies seemed

paralyzed, she still pursued her intellectual development with

unremitting ardor. This is the true greatness of those fifty years of

glorious achievement and pitiful humiliation, during which the

Italians, like Archimedes in his Syracusan watch-tower, turned deaf

ears to combatant and conqueror, intent on problems that involved the

future destinies of man. The light of the classics had fallen on their

pathway at the close of the middle ages. The leading of that light

they still pursued, as though they had been consecrated to the service

of a god before unknown in modern Europe. Their first and foremost

gift to nations who had scourged and slain them, was a new and radiant

conception of humanity. This conception externalized itself in the

creation of a common mental atmosphere, in the expression of the

modern spirit by fine art and literature, in the diffusion of all that

is contained for us in culture. They wrought, thought, painted, carved

and built with the antique ideal as a guiding and illuminative

principle in view. This principle enabled them to elevate and

harmonize, to humanize and beautify the coarser elements existing in

the world around them. What they sought and clung to in the heritage

of the ancients, was the divinity of form--the form that gives grace,

loveliness, sublimity to common flesh and blood in art; style to

poetry and prose; urbanity to social manners; richness and elegance to

reflections upon history and statecraft and the problems of still

infantine science. Lastly, whatsoever is implied in the double

formula of the discovery of man and of the world--the resuscitation of

learning by scholars; the positive study of human motives and action

by historians; the new philosophy prepared by speculators of the

Southern school; the revival of mathematical and astronomical

researches after a sound method; the endeavor to base physical science

on experiment and observation; the exploration of the western

hemisphere by navigators--all this we owe to the Italians of the

fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

We may allow that their execution of a task so arduous and beneficial

was accomplished under conditions of social corruption and political

apathy, which somewhat dimmed the luster of their triumph. It may be

admitted that they failed, even in their own domains of art and

poetry, to realize the highest possible ideals; and we may ascribe

this failure partly to their moral feebleness, which contradicts our

sense of manhood. Still these are no reasons why we should not pay the

homage due to their achievement. The deepest interest in the Italian

Renaissance, the warmest recognition of its services to modern Europe,

are compatible with a just conviction that the tone of that epoch is

not to be imitated. Such imitation would, in point of fact, be not

merely anachronistic but impossible. To insist on anything so obvious

would be impertinent to common sense, were we not from time to time

admonished from the chair of criticism that a new Gospel, founded on

the principles of the Renaissance, has been or is being preached in

England. Criticism, however, is fallible; and in this matter its

mistake is due to the English incapacity for understanding that

scientific curiosity may be engaged, without didactic objects, on

moral and historical problems. We cannot extract from the Renaissance

a body of ethical teaching, an ideal of conduct, or a discipline of

manners, applicable to the altered conditions of the nineteenth

century. But we can exercise our ingenuity upon the complex questions

which it offers; we can satisfy the passion of inquiry, which prompts

men to examine, analyze, reflect upon, and reappropriate the past. We

can attempt to depict the period, as we recover a phase of our own

youth by recollection, extenuating nothing, setting nothing down in

malice, using the results of our researches for no purposes of

propaganda, but aiming, in so far as our capacity sustains us, at the

simple truth about it.

For a student animated with this passion of curiosity, the Italian

Renaissance, independently of any sympathies he may have formed for

the Italian people, or any fascination which an age and race so

picturesque may exercise, must be a subject worthy of most patient

contemplation. As we grow in knowledge, corroborating and confirming

those views about the world and man which originated with the new

direction given to inquiry in the fifteenth century, we learn with

ever stronger certainty, that as there is no interruption in the order

of nature, so the history of civilization is continuous and undivided.

In the sequence of events, in the growth of human character, no

arbitrary freaks, no flaws of chance, are recognizable. Age succeeds

to age; nations rise and perish; new elements are introduced at

intervals into the common stock; the drama is not played out with one

set of actors. But, in spite of all change, and though we cannot as

yet demonstrate the law of evolution in details, we are reasonably

convinced that the development of human energy and intellectual

consciousness has been carried on without cessation from the earliest

times until the present moment, and is destined to unbroken progress

through the centuries before us. History, under the influence of this

conception, is rapidly ceasing to be the record of external incidents,

of isolated moments, or of brilliant episodes in the epic of humanity.

We have learned to look upon it as the biography of man. To trace the

continuity of civilization through the labyrinths of chance and error

and suspended energy, apparent to a superficial glance or partial

knowledge, but on closer observation and a wider sweep of vision found

to disappear, is the highest aim of the historian. The germ of this

new notion of man's life upon our planet was contained in the cardinal

intuition of the Renaissance, when the ancient and the modern worlds

were recognized as one. It assumed the dignity of organized

speculation in the German philosophies of history, and in the positive

philosophy of Auguste Comte. It has received its most powerful

corroboration from recent physical discoveries, and has acquired

firmer consistency in the Darwinian speculation. Whether we approach

the problem from a theological, a positive, or a purely scientific

point of view, the force of the hypothesis remains unaltered. We are

obliged to think of civilized humanity as one.

In this unbroken sequence of events, a place of prime importance must

be assigned to the Renaissance; and the Italian race at that moment

must be regarded, for a short while at least, as the protagonist of

the universal drama. The first stage of civilization is by common

consent assigned to the Eastern empires of remote antiquity; the

second to the Hellenic system of civic liberty and intellectual

energy; the third to Roman organization. During the third period a new

spiritual force was evolved in Christianity, and new factors were

introduced into Europe by the immigration of the Northern races. The

fourth historical period is occupied by the Church and feudalism, the

first inheriting Roman organization, the second helping to constitute

the immigrant races into new nationalities. The fifth great epoch is

the emancipation of modern Europe from medieval influences. We may be

said to live in it; for though the work of liberation has in large

measure been accomplished, no new social principle or comprehensive

system has yet supervened. Three movements in the process can,

however, be discerned; and these are respectively known by the names

of Renaissance, Reformation, Revolution. It was in the first of these

three stages that Italy determined the course of civilization. To

neglect the work achieved by Italy, before the other nations of Europe

had emerged from feudalism, is tantamount to dropping a link

indispensable to the strength and cohesion of the whole chain.

Accustomed to regard the Church as a political member of their own

confederation, and withdrawn from the feudal system by the action of

their communes, the Italians were specially fitted to perform their

task. The conditions under which they lived as the inheritors of Rome,

obliged them to look backward instead of forward; and from this

necessity emerged the Revival of Learning, which not only restored the

interrupted consciousness of human unity, but supplied the needful

starting-point for a new period of intellectual growth. The connection

between the study of classical literature, scientific investigation,

and Biblical criticism, has been already insisted on in this work.

From the Renaissance sprang the Reformation, veiling the same spirit

in another form, before the Church bethought herself of quenching the

new light in Italy. Without the skeptical and critical industry of the

Italians; without their bold explorations in the fields of philosophy,

theology and political science; without their digging round the roots

of human knowledge; without their frank disavowal of past medieval

transcendentalism; neither the German Reformation nor the advance of

speculative thought in France, Holland and England, would have been

possible.

To pursue the subject further is not necessary. How the Revolution was

linked to the Reformation by the intermediate action of Holland,

England and America; and how the European peoples, educated after the

type designed by Italian humanists, formed their literatures, built up

philosophies, and based positive inquiry on solid foundations, are

matters too well known and have too often been already noted to need

illustration. It is enough for a student of the Renaissance to have

suggested that the peculiar circumstances and sympathies of the

Italians, at a certain moment of this modern evolution, forced and

enabled them to do what was imperatively demanded for its after

progress. That they led the van of liberation; that, like the Jews

and Greeks, their predecessors, they sacrificed their independence in

the very triumph of achievement; are claims upon our everlasting

gratitude. This lends the interest of romance or drama to the doleful

tale of depredation and enslavement which concludes the history of the

Italian Renaissance.

APPENDICES.

APPENDIX I.

(See above, chapter xi.)

_Italian Comic Prologues._

The current of opinion represented by the prologues to Italian

comedies deserves some further illustration.

Bibbiena, in the _Calandra_, starts with what is tantamount to an

apology for the modern style of his play. "Voi sarete oggi spettatori

d'una nuova commedia intitolata Calandra, in prosa non in versi,

moderna non antica, volgare non latina." He then explains why he has

chosen the language of his age and nation, taking great pains to

combat learned prejudices in favor of pure Latin. At the close he

defends himself from the charge of having robbed from Plautus,

confessing at the same time that he has done so, and thus restricting

his earlier boast of novelty to the bare point of diction.

In the prose _Cassaria_, which was contemporaneous with the

_Calandra_, Ariosto takes the same line:

Nuova commedia v'appresento, piena

Di vari giuochi; che ne mai latine

Ne greche lingue recitarno in scena.

Parmi vedere che la piu parte incline

A riprenderla, subito ch'ho detto

Nuova, senza ascoltarne mezzo o fine:

Che tale impresa non gli par suggetto

Delli moderni ingegni, e solo stima

Quel, che gli antiqui han detto, esser perfetto.

He then proceeds to defend his own audacity, which really consists in

no more than the attempt to remodel a Latin play. In the prologue to

the prose _Suppositi_ Ariosto follows a different course, apologizing

for his _contaminatio_ of Plautus and Terence by the argument that

they borrowed from Menander and Apollodorus.

Machiavelli in the prologue to the _Clizia_ says that history repeats

itself. What happened at Athens, happened yesterday at Florence. He

has, therefore, laid his scene at Florence: "perche Atene e rovinata,

le vie, le piazze, i luoghi non vi si riconoscono." He thus justifies

the modern _rifacimento_ of an ancient comedy conducted upon classical

principles.

Gelli in the _Sporta_ reproduces Ariosto's defense for the

_Suppositi_. If he has borrowed from Plautus and Terence, they

borrowed from Menander. Then follows an acute description of comedy as

it should be: "La commedia, per non essere elleno altro ch'uno

specchio di costumi della vita privata e civile sotto una imaginazione

di verita, non tratto da altro che di cose, che tutto 'l giorno

accaggiono al viver nostro, non ci vedrete riconoscimenti di giovani o

di fanciulle che oggidi non ne occorre."

Cecchi in the _Martello_ says he has followed the _Asinaria_:

Rimbustata a suo dosso, e su compostovi

(Aggiungendo e levando, come meglio

Gli e parso; e cio, non per corregger Plauto,

Ma per accomodarsi ai tempi e agli uomini

Che ci sono oggidi) questa sua favola.

In the _Moglie_ and the _Dissimili_ he makes similar statements,

preferring "la opinione di quelli maestri migliori" (probably Ariosto

and Machiavelli), and also:

perche il medesimo

Ved'egli che hanno fatto li piu nobili

Comici che vi sieno.

Lorenzino de' Medici in his prologue to the _Aridosio_ tells the

audience they must not be angry if they see the usual lover, miser,

and crafty servant, "e simil cose delle quali non puo uscire chi vuol

fare commedie."

These quotations may suffice. If we analyze them, it is clear that at

first the comic playwrights felt bound to apologize for writing in

Italian; next, that they had to defend themselves against the charge

of plagiarism; and in the third place that, when the public became

accustomed to Latinizing comedies in the vulgar tongue, they undertook

the more difficult task of justifying the usage which introduced so

many obsolete, monotonous, and anachronistic elements into dramatic

literature. At first they were afraid to innovate even to the slight

extent of adaptation. At last they were driven to vindicate their

artificial forms of art on the score of prescribed usage. But when

Cecchi and Lorenzino de' Medici advanced these pleas, which seem to

indicate a desire on the part of their public for a more original and

modern comedy, the form was too fixed to be altered. Aretino, boldly

breaking with tradition, had effected nothing. Il Lasca, laughing at

the learned unrealities of his contemporaries, was not strong enough

to burst their fetters. Nothing was left for the playwrights but to go

on cutting down the old clothes of Plautus and Terence to fit their

own backs--as Cecchi puts it.

APPENDIX II.

(See above, chapter xiv.)

_Passages translated from Folengo and Berni, which illustrate the

Lutheran opinions of the Burlesque Poets._

ORLANDINO VI. 41.

"To Thee, and not to any Saint I go;

How should their mediation here succeed?

The Canaanitish woman, well I know,

Prayed not to James or Peter in her need;

She had recourse to only Thee; and so,

Alone with Thee alone, I hope and plead.

Thou know'st my weal and woe; make plain the way

Thou, Lord, for to none other dare I pray.

"Nor will I wander with the common kind,

Who, clogged with falsehood and credulity,

Make vows to Gothard or to Roch, and mind

I know not what Saint Bovo more than Thee;

Because some friar, as cunning as they're blind,

Offering to Moloch, his dark deity,

Causes Thy Mother, up in heaven, a Queen,

To load with spoil his sacrifice obscene.

"Beneath the husk of piety these friars

Make a huge harvest for themselves to hold;

The alms on Mary's altar quench the fires

Of impious greed in priests who burn for gold:

Another of their odious laws requires

That year by year my faults should still be told

To a monk's ears:--I who am young and fair!--

He hears, and straightway flogs his shoulders bare:

"He flogs himself because he feels the sting

My words, impregnate with lasciviousness,

Send to his heart; so sharp are they, and wring

His lust so nearly, that, in sore distress,

With wiles and wheedling ways, he seeks to bring

Me in his secret will to acquiesce;

And here confessors oft are shown to be

More learned in pimping than divinity.

"Therefore, O Lord, that know'st the heart of man,

And seest Thy Church in these same friars' grasp,

To Thee with contrite soul, as sinners can,

Who hope their faults forgiven, my hands I clasp;

And if, my God, from this mad ocean

Thou'lt save me, now, as at my latest gasp,

I vow that never more will I trust any

Who grant indulgences for pound or penny."

Such prayers, chock-full of rankest heresy,

Prayed Berta; for she was a German wench:

In those days, you must know, theology

Had changed herself to Roman, Flemish, French;

But I've my doubts that in the end she'll be

Found squatting _a la_ Moor on some Turk's bench,

Because Christ's seamless coat has so been tattered

Its rags have long since to the winds been scattered.

ORLANDINO VIII. 22.

"I do not marvel much," Rainero cried,

"If the lambs suffer scandals and the fold

Be ruined by these wolves of lust and pride,

Foemen to God beneath God's flag enrolled:

But for the present need I'll soon provide--

Ho! to my presence drag yon Prior bold!"

Sharp were the words; the sheriff in a skurry,

He and his serjeants to the convent hurry,