RENAISSANCE
There is a learned cartoonist in our land who takes pleasure in asking
himself, what do billiard-balls and cross-word puzzles and bull-fiddles
and boiled shirts and door-mats think of this world?
But what I would like to know is the exact psychological reaction of the
men who are ordered to handle the big modern siege guns. During the war
a great many people performed a great many strange tasks, but was there
ever a more absurd job than firing dicke Berthas?
All other soldiers knew more or less what they were doing.
A flying man could judge by the rapidly spreading red glow whether he had
hit the gas factory or not.
The submarine commander could return after a couple of hours to judge by
the abundance of flotsam in how far he had been successful.
The poor devil in his dug-out had the satisfaction of realizing that
by his mere continued presence in a particular trench he was at least
holding his own.
Even the artillerist, working his field-piece upon an invisible object,
could take down the telephone and could ask his colleague, hidden in a
dead tree seven miles away, whether the doomed church tower was showing
signs of deterioration or whether he should try again at a different
angle.
But the brotherhood of the big guns lived in a strange and unreal world
of their own. Even with the assistance of a couple of full-fledged
professors of ballistics, they were unable to foretell what fate awaited
those projectiles which they shot so blithely into space. Their shells
might actually hit the object for which they were destined. They might
land in the midst of a powder factory or in the heart of a fortress. But
then again they might strike a church or an orphan asylum or they might
bury themselves peacefully in a river or in a gravel pit without doing
any harm whatsoever.
Authors, it seems to me, have much in common with the siege-gunners. They
too handle a sort of heavy artillery. Their literary missiles may start a
revolution or a conflagration in the most unlikely spots. But more often
they are just poor duds and lie harmless in a nearby field until they are
used for scrap iron or converted into an umbrella-stand or a flower pot.
Surely there never was a period in history when so much rag-pulp was
consumed within so short a space as the era commonly known as the
Renaissance.
Every Tomasso, Ricardo and Enrico of the Italian peninsula, every Doctor
Thomasius, Professor Ricardus and Dominus Heinrich of the great Teuton
plain rushed into print with at least a dozen duodecimos. Not to mention
the Tomassinos who wrote pretty little sonnets in imitation of the
Greeks, the Ricardinos who reeled off odes after the best pattern of
their Roman grandfathers, and the countless lovers of coins, statuary,
images, pictures, manuscripts and ancient armor who for almost three
centuries kept themselves busy classifying, ordering, tabulating,
listing, filing and codifying what they had just dug out of the ancestral
ruins and who then published their collections in countless folios
illuminated with the most beautiful of copper engravings and the most
ponderous of wood-cuts.
This great intellectual curiosity was very lucrative for the Frobens and
the Alduses and the Etiennes and the other new firms of printers who were
making a fortune out of the invention which had ruined Gutenberg, but
otherwise the literary output of the Renaissance did not very greatly
affect the state of that world in which the authors of the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries happened to find themselves. The distinction of
having contributed something new was restricted to only a very few heroes
of the quill and they were like our friends of the big guns. They rarely
discovered during their own lifetime in how far they had been successful
and how much damage their writings had actually done. But first and last
they managed to demolish a great many of the obstacles which stood in
the way of progress. And they deserve our everlasting gratitude for the
thoroughness with which they cleaned up a lot of rubbish which otherwise
would continue to clutter our intellectual front yard.
Strictly speaking, however, the Renaissance was not primarily a
forward-looking movement. It turned its back in disgust upon the recent
past, called the works of its immediate predecessors “barbaric” (or
“Gothic” in the language of the country where the Goths had enjoyed the
same reputation as the Huns), and concentrated its main interest upon
those arts which seem to be pervaded with that curious substance known as
the “classical spirit.”
If nevertheless the Renaissance struck a mighty blow for the liberty
of conscience and for tolerance and for a better world in general, it
was done in spite of the men who were considered the leaders of the new
movement.
Long before the days of which we are now speaking, there had been people
who had questioned the rights of a Roman bishop to dictate to Bohemian
peasants and to English yeomen in what language they should say their
prayers, in what spirit they should study the words of Jesus, how much
they should pay for an indulgence, what books they should read and how
they should bring up their children. And all of them had been crushed by
the strength of that super-state, the power of which they had undertaken
to defy. Even when they had acted as champions and representatives of a
national cause, they had failed.
The smoldering ashes of great John Huss, thrown ignominiously into the
river Rhine, were a warning to all the world that the Papal Monarchy
still ruled supreme.
The corpse of Wycliffe, burned by the public executioner, told the humble
peasants of Leicestershire that councils and Popes could reach beyond the
grave.
Frontal attacks, evidently, were impossible.
The mighty fortress of tradition, builded slowly and carefully during
fifteen centuries of unlimited power, could not be taken by assault.
The scandals which had taken place within these hallowed enclosures;
the wars between three rival Popes, each claiming to be the legitimate
and exclusive heir to the chair of Holy Peter; the utter corruption of
the courts of Rome and Avignon, where laws were made for the purpose
of being broken by those who were willing to pay for such favors; the
utter demoralization of monastic life; the venality of those who used
the recently increased horrors of purgatory as an excuse to blackmail
poor parents into paying large sums of money for the benefit of their
dead children; all these things, although widely known, never really
threatened the safety of the Church.
But the chance shots fired at random by certain men and women who were
not at all interested in ecclesiastical matters, who had no particular
grievance against either pope or bishop, these caused the damage which
finally made the old edifice collapse.
What the “thin, pale man” from Prague had failed to accomplish with his
high ideals of Christian virtue was brought about by a motley crowd
of private citizens who had no other ambition than to live and die
(preferably at a ripe old age) as loyal patrons of all the good things of
this world and faithful sons of the Mother Church.
They came from all the seven corners of Europe. They represented every
sort of profession and they would have been very angry, had an historian
told them what they were doing.
For instance, take the case of Marco Polo.
We know him as a mighty traveler, a man who had seen such wondrous sights
that his neighbors, accustomed to the smaller scale of their western
cities, called him “Million Dollar Marc” and laughed uproariously when he
told them of golden thrones as high as a tower and of granite walls that
would stretch all the way from the Baltic to the Black Sea.
All the same, the shriveled little fellow played a most important rôle
in the history of progress. He was not much of a writer. He shared the
prejudice of his class and his age against the literary profession. A
gentleman (even a Venetian gentleman who was supposed to be familiar
with double-entry bookkeeping) handled a sword and not a goose-quill.
Hence the unwillingness of Messire Marco to turn author. But the fortunes
of war carried him into a Genoese prison. And there, to while away the
tedious hours of his confinement, he told a poor scribbler, who happened
to share his cell, the strange story of his life. In this roundabout way
the people of Europe learned many things about this world which they had
never known before. For although Polo was a simple-minded fellow who
firmly believed that one of the mountains he had seen in Asia Minor had
been moved a couple of miles by a pious saint who wanted to show the
heathen “what true faith could do,” and who swallowed all the stories
about people without heads and chickens with three legs which were
so popular in his day, his report did more to upset the geographical
theories of the Church than anything that had appeared during the
previous twelve hundred years.
Polo, of course, lived and died a faithful son of the Church. He
would have been terribly upset if any one had compared him with his
near-contemporary, the famous Roger Bacon, who was an out and out
scientist and paid for his intellectual curiosity with ten years of
enforced literary idleness and fourteen years of prison.
And yet of the two he was by far the more dangerous.
For whereas only one person in a hundred thousand could follow Bacon when
he went chasing rainbows, and spun those fine evolutionary theories which
threatened to upset all the ideas held sacred in his own time, every
citizen who had been taught his ABCs could learn from Polo that the world
was full of a number of things the existence of which the authors of the
Old Testament had never even suspected.
I do not mean to imply that the publication of a single book caused that
rebellion against scriptural authority which was to occur before the
world could gain a modicum of freedom. Popular enlightenment is ever
the result of centuries of painstaking preparation. But the plain and
straightforward accounts of the explorers and the navigators and the
travelers, understandable to all the people, did a great deal to bring
about that spirit of scepticism which characterizes the latter half of
the Renaissance and which allowed people to say and write things which
only a few years before would have brought them into contact with the
agents of the Inquisition.
Take that strange story to which the friends of Boccaccio listened on
the first day of their agreeable exile from Florence. All religious
systems, so it told, were probably equally true and equally false. But
if this were true, and they were all equally true and false, then how
could people be condemned to the gallows for ideas which could neither be
proven nor contradicted?
Read the even stranger adventures of a famous scholar like Lorenzo Valla.
He died as a highly respectable member of the government of the Roman
Church. Yet in the pursuit of his Latin studies he had incontrovertibly
proven that the famous donation of “Rome and Italy and all the provinces
of the West,” which Constantine the Great was supposed to have made to
Pope Sylvester (and upon which the Popes had ever since based their
claims to be regarded as super-lords of all Europe), was nothing but
a clumsy fraud, perpetrated hundreds of years after the death of the
Emperor by an obscure official of the papal chancery.
Or to return to more practical questions, what were faithful Christians,
carefully reared in the ideas of Saint Augustine who had taught that
a belief in the presence of people on the other side of the earth was
both blasphemous and heretical, since such poor creatures would not be
able to see the second coming of Christ and therefore had no reason to
exist, what indeed were the good people of the year 1499 to think of this
doctrine when Vasco da Gama returned from his first voyage to the Indies
and described the populous kingdoms which he had found on the other side
of this planet?
What were these same simple folk, who had always been told that our world
was a flat dial and that Jerusalem was the center of the universe, what
were they to believe when the little “Vittoria” returned from her voyage
around the globe and when the geography of the Old Testament was shown to
contain some rather serious errors?
I repeat what I have said before. The Renaissance was not an era of
conscious scientific endeavor. In spiritual matters it often showed a
most regrettable lack of real interest. Everything during these three
hundred years was dominated by a desire for beauty and entertainment.
Even the Popes, who fulminated loudest against the iniquitous doctrines
of some of their subjects, were only too happy to invite those self-same
rebels for dinner if they happened to be good conversationalists and knew
something about printing or architecture. And eager zealots for virtue,
like Savonarola, ran quite as great a risk of losing their lives as the
bright young agnostics who in poetry and prose attacked the fundaments of
the Christian faith with a great deal more violence than good taste.
But throughout all these manifestations of a new interest in the business
of living, there undoubtedly ran a severe undercurrent of discontent
with the existing order of society and the restrictions put upon the
development of human reason by the claims of an all-powerful Church.
Between the days of Boccaccio and those of Erasmus, there is an interval
of almost two centuries. During these two centuries, the copyist and the
printer never enjoyed an idle moment. And outside of the books published
by the Church herself, it would be difficult to find an important piece
of work which did not contain some indirect reference to the sad plight
into which the world had fallen when the ancient civilizations of Greece
and Rome had been superseded by the anarchy of the barbarian invaders
and western society was placed under the tutelage of ignorant monks.
The contemporaries of Machiavelli and Lorenzo de’ Medici were not
particularly interested in ethics. They were practical men who made the
best of a practical world. Outwardly they remained at peace with the
Church because it was a powerful and far-reaching organization which was
capable of doing them great harm and they never consciously took part
in any of the several attempts at reform or questioned the institutions
under which they lived.
But their insatiable curiosity concerning old facts, their continual
search after new emotions, the very instability of their restless minds,
caused a world which had been brought up in the conviction “We know” to
ask the question “Do we really know?”
And that is a greater claim to the gratitude of all future generations
than the collected sonnets of Petrarch or the assembled works of Raffael.