CONCLUSION
General Survey -- The Part played in the Revival by the
Chief Cities -- Preoccupation with Scholarship in spite of
War and Conquest -- Place of the Humanists in Society --
Distributors of Praise and Blame -- Flattery and Libels --
Comparison with the Sophists -- The Form preferred to the
Matter of Literature -- Ideal of Culture as an end in itself
-- Suspicion of Zealous Churchmen -- Intrusion of Humanism
into the Church -- Irreligion of the Humanists -- Gyraldi's
'Progymnasma' -- Ariosto -- Bohemian Life -- Personal
Immorality -- Want of Fixed Principles -- Professional
Vanity -- Literary Pride -- Estimate of Humanistic
Literature -- Study of Style -- Influence of Cicero --
Valla's 'Elegantiæ' -- Stylistic Puerilities -- Value
attached to Rhetoric -- 'Oratore' -- Moral Essays --
Epistolography -- Historics -- Critical and Antiquarian
Studies -- Large Appreciation of Antiquity -- Liberal Spirit
-- Poggio and Jerome of Prague -- Humanistic Type of
Education -- Its Diffusion through Europe -- Future
Prospects -- Decay of Learning in Italy.
In tracing the history of the Revival, we have seen how the impulse,
first communicated by Petrarch, was continued by Boccaccio and his
immediate successors. We have watched the enthusiasm for antiquity
strike root in Florence, spread to Rome, and penetrate the Courts of
Italy. One city after another receives the light and hands it on,
until the whole cycle of study has been traversed and the vigour of
the nation is exhausted. Florence discovers manuscripts, founds
libraries, learns Greek, and leads the movement of the fifteenth
century. Naples criticises; Rome translates; Mantua and Ferrara form a
system of education; Venice commits the literature of the classics to
the press. By the combined and successive activity of the chief
Italian centres, not only is the culture of antiquity regained; it is
also appropriated in all its various branches, discussed and
illustrated, placed beyond the reach of accident, and delivered over
in its integrity to Europe. The work thus performed by the Italians
was begun in peace; but it had to be continued under the pressure of
wars and national disasters unparalleled in the history of any other
modern people. Not for a single moment did the students relax their
energy. In the midst of foreign armies, deafened by the roar of cannon
and the tumult of sacked towns, exiled from their homes, robbed of
their books, deprived of their subsistence, they advanced to their end
with the irresistible obstinacy of insects. The drums and tramplings of
successive conquests and invasions by four warlike nations--Frenchmen,
Spaniards, Germans, Swiss--could not disturb them. Drop by drop, Italy
was being drained of blood; from the first the only question was which
of her assailants should possess the beauty of her corpse. Yet the
student, intent upon his manuscripts, paid but little heed. So
non-existent was the sense of nationality in Italy that the Italians
did not know they were being slowly murdered. When the agony was over,
and the ruin was accomplished, they congratulated themselves on being
still the depositaries of polite literature. Nations that are nations,
seek to inspire fear, or at least respect. The Italians were contented
with admiration, and looked confidently to the world for gratitude.
The task of two toilsome, glorious centuries had been accomplished.
The chasm between Rome and the Renaissance was bridged over, and a
plain way was built for the progressive human spirit. Italy,
downtrodden in the mire of blood and ruins, should still lead the van
and teach the peoples. It was a sublime delusion, the last phase of an
impulse so powerful in its origin that to prophesy an ending was
impossible. Yet how delusive was the expectation is proved by the
immediate history of Italy, enslaved and decadent, outstripped by the
nations she had taught, and scorned by the world that owed her
veneration.
The humanists, who were the organ of this intellectual movement,
formed, as we have seen, a literary commonwealth, diffused through all
the Courts and cities of Italy. As the secretaries of Popes and
princes, as the chancellors of republics, as orators on all occasions
of public and private ceremony, they occupied important posts of
influence, and had the opportunity of leavening society with their
opinions. Furthermore, we have learned to know them in their capacity
of professors at the universities, of house-tutors in the service of
noblemen, and of authors. Closely connected among themselves by their
feuds no less than by their friendships, and working to one common end
of scholarship, it was inevitable that these men, after the enthusiasm
for antiquity had once become the fashion, should take the lead and
mould the genius of the nation. Their epistles, invectives, treatises,
and panegyrics, formed the study of an audience that embraced all
cultivated minds in Italy. Thus the current literature of humanism
played the same part in the fifteenth century as journalism in the
nineteenth, and the humanists had the same kind of coherence in
relation to the public as the _quatrième état_ of modern times. The
respect they inspired as the arbiters of praise and blame, was only
equalled by their vast pretensions. Eugenius IV., living at the period
of their highest influence, is reported to have said that they were as
much to be feared for their malice as to be loved for their learning.
While they claimed the power of conferring an immortality of honour or
dishonour, no one dared to call their credit with posterity in
question. Nothing seemed more dreadful than the fate reserved for Paul
II. in the pages of Platina; and even so robust a ruler as Francesco
Sforza sought to buy the praises of Filelfo. Flattery in all its
branches, fulsome and delicate, wholesale and allusive, was developed
by them as an art whereby to gain their living. The official history
of this period is rendered almost worthless by its sustained note of
panegyrical laudation. Our ears are deafened with the eulogies of
petty patrons transformed into Mæcenases, of carpet knights compared
to Leonidas, of tyrants equalled with Augustus, and of generals who
never looked on bloodshed tricked out as Hannibals or Scipios. As a
pendant to panegyric, the art of abuse reached its climax in the
invectives whereby the scholars sought to hand their comrades down to
all time 'immortally immerded,' or to vilify the public enemies of
their employers. As in the case of praise, so also in the case of
blame, it is impossible to attach importance to the writings of the
humanists. Their vaulting ambition to depreciate each other overleaped
itself. All their literature of defamation serves now only to throw
light on the general impurity of an age in which such monstrous
charges carried weight. Unluckily, this double vice of humanism struck
deep roots into Italian literature. Without the scholars of the
fifteenth century, it is hardly possible that such a brigand as Pietro
Aretino, who levied black mail from princes at the point of his
venomous quill, or such an unprincipled biographer as Paolo Giovio,
who boasted that he wrote with a golden or a silver pen, as pleased
him best, could have existed. Bullying and fawning tainted the very
source of history, and a false ideal of the writer's function was
established by the practice of men like Poggio.
It is obvious and easy to compare the humanists of the Renaissance
with the sophists of antiquity. Whether we think of the rivals of
Socrates at Athens, or of the Greek rhetoricians of the Roman
period,[508] the parallel is tolerably close. From certain points of
view the Italian scholars remind us of the former class; from others,
again, they recall the latter. The essence of sophism is the
substitution of semblance for reality, indifference to truth provided
a fair show be made, combined with verbal ingenuity and practice in
the art of exposition. The sophist feels no need of forming opinions
on a sound basis, or of adhering to principles. Regarding thought as
the subject-matter of literary treatment, he is chiefly concerned with
giving it a fair and plausible investiture in language. Instead of
recognising that he must live up to the standard he professes, he
takes delight in expressing with force the contrary of what he acts.
The discord between his philosophy and his conduct awakes no shame in
him, because it is the highest triumph of his art to persuade by
eloquence and to dazzle by rhetoric. Phrases and sentences supply the
place of feelings and convictions. Sonorous cadences and harmonies of
language are always ready to conceal the want of substance in his
matter or the flimsiness of his argument. At the same time the
sophist's enthusiasm for a certain form of culture, and his belief in
the sophistic method, may be genuine.
[Footnote 508: 'Græculi esurientes.' Lives written by Philostratus.]
The literature of the Revival is full of such sophism. Men who lived
loose lives, were never tired of repeating the commonplaces of the
Ciceronian ethics, praising simplicity and self-control with the pen
they used for reproducing the scandals of Martial, mingling impudent
demands for money and flatteries of debauched despots with panegyrics
of Pætus Thrasea and eulogies of Cincinnatus. Conversely, students of
eminent sobriety, like Guarino da Verona, thought it no harm to
welcome Beccadelli's 'Hermaphroditus' with admiration; while the
excellent Nicholas V. spent nine days in perusing the filthy satires
of Filelfo. It was enough that the form was elegant, according to
their standards of taste, the Latinity copious and sound:--the
subject-matter raised no scruples.
This vice of regarding only the exterior of literature produced a
fatal weakness in the dissertations of the age. If a humanist wanted
to moralise the mutability of fortune or the disadvantages of
matrimony, he did not take the trouble to think, or the pains to
borrow illustrations from his own experience. He strung together
quotations and classical instances, expending his labour on the polish
of the style, and fancying he had proved something by piquancy
displayed in handling old material. When he undertook history, the
same fault was apparent. Instead of seeking to set forth the real
conditions of his native city, to describe its political vicissitudes
and constitutional development, or to paint the characters of its
great men, he prepared imaginary speeches and avoided topics incapable
of expression in pure Latin. The result was that whole libraries of
ethical disquisitions and historical treatises, bequeathed with proud
confidence by their authors to the admiration of posterity, are now
reposing in unhonoured dust, ransacked at rare intervals by weary
students with restless fingers in search of such meagre scraps of
information as even a humanist could not succeed in excluding.
The humanists resembled the sophists again in their profession to
teach wisdom for pay. What philosophy was for the early Greeks,
classic culture was for Italy in the Renaissance; and this the
scholars sold. Antiquity lay before them like an open book. From their
seat among the learned they doled out the new lore of life to eager
pupils. And as the more sober-minded of the Athenians regarded the
educational practice of the sophists with suspicion, so the humanists
came to be dreaded as the corrupters of youth. The peculiar turn they
gave to mental training, by diverting attention from patriotic duties
to literary pleasures, by denationalising the interests of students,
and by distracting serious thought from affairs of the present to
interests of the past, tended to confirm the political debility of the
Italians; nor can it be doubted that the substitution of Pagan for
Christian ideals intensified the demoralisation of the age. Many
arguments used by Aristophanes and Xenophon might be repeated against
these sophists of the Renaissance.[509]
[Footnote 509: Aristoph., _Clouds_, Speeches of Dikaios Logos; Xen.,
_On Hunting_, chap. xiii.]
On this point it is worth observing that, though humanism took the
Papal Court by storm and installed itself in pomp and pride within the
Vatican, the lower clergy and the leaders of religious revivals, in no
mere spirit of blind prejudice, but with solid force of argument,
denounced it. S. Bernardino and Savonarola were only two among many
who preached against the humanists from the pulpit. And yet, while we
admit that the influences of the Revival injured morality, and gave a
cosmopolitan direction to energies that ought to have been
concentrated on the preservation of national existence, we are unable
to join with these ecclesiastical antagonists in their crusade.
Humanism was a necessary moment in the evolution of the modern world;
and whatever were its errors, however weakening it may have been to
Italy, this phase had to be passed through, this nation had to suffer
for the general good.
The intrusion of the humanists into the Papal Curia was a victory of
the purely secular spirit. It is remarkable how very few scholars took
orders except with a view of holding minor benefices. They remained
virtual laymen, drawing the emoluments of their cures at a distance.
If Filelfo, after the death of his second wife, proposed to enter the
Church, he did so because in his enormous vanity he hoped to gain the
scarlet hat, and thought this worth the sacrifice of independence. The
only great monastic _litteratus_ was Ambrogio, General of the
Camaldolese Order. Maffeo Vegio is the single instance I can remember
of a poet-philologer who assumed the cowl. These statements, it will
be understood, refer chiefly to the second or aggressive period of
the Revival. Classic erudition was so common in the fourth that to be
without a humanistic tincture was, even among churchmen, the exception
rather than the rule. In the age of Leo, moreover, the humanists as a
class had ceased to exist, merged in the general culture of the
nation. Their successors were for the most part cardinals and bishops,
elevated to high rank for literary merit. This change, however, really
indicated the complete triumph of an ideal that for a moment had
succeeded in paganising the Papacy, and substituting its own standard
of excellence for ecclesiastical tradition.
This external separation between the humanists and the Church
corresponded to their deep internal irreligiousness. If contemporary
testimony be needed to support this assertion, I may quote freely from
Lilius Gyraldus, Battista Mantovano, and Ariosto, not to mention the
invectives that record so vast a mass of almost incredible
licentiousness. A rhetorical treatise, addressed to Gian Francesco
Pico by Lilius Gyraldus, himself an eminent professor at Ferrara,
acquaints us with the opinion formed in Italy, after a century's
experience, of the vices and discordant lives of scholars.[510] 'I
call God and men to witness,' he writes, 'whether it be possible to
find men more affected by immoderate disturbances of soul, by such
emotions as the Greeks called [Greek: pathê], or by such desires as
they named [Greek: hormai], more easily influenced, driven about, and
drawn in all directions. No class of human beings are more subject to
anger, more puffed up with vanity, more arrogant, more insolent, more
proud, conceited, idle-minded, inconsequent, opinionated, changeable,
obstinate; some of them ready to believe the most incredible nonsense,
others sceptical about notorious truths, some full of doubt and
suspicion, others void of reasonable circumspection. None are of a
less free spirit, and that for the very reason I have touched before,
because they think themselves so far more powerful. They all of them,
indeed, pretend to omniscience, fancy themselves superior to
everything, and rate themselves as gods, while we unlearned little men
are made of clay and mud, as they maintain.' Having for some space
discoursed concerning their mad ways of life, Gyraldus proceeds to
arraign the humanists in detail for vicious passions, want of economy,
impiety, gluttony, intemperance, sloth, and incontinence.[511] This
invective reads like a paradoxical thesis supported for the sake of
novelty by a clever rhetorician; and, indeed, it might pass for such
were it not for the confirmation it receives in Ariosto's seventh
satire addressed to Pietro Bembo.[512] The poet, anxious to find a
tutor for his son, dares not commit the young man to the care of a
humanist. His picture of their personal immorality, impiety, pride,
and gluttony acquires weight from the well-known tolerance of the
satirist, and from his genial parsimony of expression. To cite further
testimony from the personal confessions of Pacificus Maximus would
hardly strengthen the argument, though students may be referred to his
poems for details.[513]
[Footnote 510: _Progymnasma adversus Literatos._ _Op. Omn._, Basle,
1582, vol. ii.]
[Footnote 511: 'Pudet me, Pice, pigetque id de literatis afferre quod
omnium tamen est in ore, nullos esse cum omnium vitiorum etiam
nefandissimorum genere inquinatos magis, tum iis præcipue, quæ præter
naturam dicuntur,' &c.--_Progymnasma adversus Literatos_, p. 431.]
[Footnote 512: Lines 22-129.]
[Footnote 513: _Quinque Illustrium Poetarum Lusus in Venerem_,
Parisiis, 1791, p. 107.]
The alternations of fortune to which the humanists were
exposed--living at one time in the lap of luxury, caressed and petted;
then cast forth to wander in almost total indigence, neglected and
derided--encouraged a Bohemian recklessness injurious to good manners.
Their frequent change of place told upon their character in the same
way, by exposing them to fresh temptations and withdrawing them from
censure. They had no country but the dreamland of antiquity, no laws
beyond the law of taste and inclination. They acknowledged no
authority superior to their own exalted judgment; they bowed to no
tribunal but that of posterity and the past. Thus they lived within
their own conceits, outside of custom and opinion; nor was the world,
at any rate before the period of their downfall, scrupulous to count
their errors or correct their vices.
Far more important, however, than these circumstances was their
passion for a Pagan ideal. The study of the classics and the effort to
assimilate the spirit of the ancients, undermined their Christianity
without substituting the religion or the ethics of the old world. They
ceased to fear God; but they did not acquire either the self-restraint
of the Greek or the patriotic virtues of the Roman. Thus exposed
without defence or safeguard, they adopted the perilous attitude of
men whose regulative principle was literary taste, who had left the
ground of faith and popular convention for the shoals and shallows of
an irrecoverable past. On this sea they wandered, with no guidance but
the promptings of undisciplined self. It is not, therefore, a marvel
that, while professing Stoicism, they wallowed in sensuality, openly
affected the worst habits of Pagan society, and devoted their
ingenuity to the explanation of foulness that might have been passed
by in silence. Licentiousness became a special branch of humanistic
literature. Under the thin mask of humane refinement leered the
untamed savage; and an age that boasted not unreasonably of its mental
progress, was at the same time notorious for the vices that disgrace
mankind. These disorders of the scholars, hidden for a time beneath a
learned language, ended by contaminating the genius of the nation. The
vernacular _Capitoli_ of Florence say plainly what Beccadelli, Poggio,
and Bembo piqued themselves on veiling.
Another notable defect of the humanists, equally inseparable from the
position they assumed in Italy, was their personal and professional
vanity. Battista Mantovano, writing on the calamities of the age in
which he lived, reckons them among the most eminent examples of pride
in his catalogue of the deadly sins. Regarding themselves as
resuscitators of a glorious past and founders of a new civility, they
were not satisfied with asserting their real merits in the sphere of
scholarship. They went further, and claimed to rank as sages,
political philosophers, writers of deathless histories, and singers of
immortal verse. The most miserable poetasters got crowned with
laurels. The most trivial thinkers passed verdict upon statecraft.
Mistaking mere cultivation for genius, they believed that, because
they had perused the authors of antiquity and could imitate Ovid at a
respectful distance, their fame would endure for all ages. On the
strength of this confidence they gave themselves inconceivable airs,
looking down from the height of their attainment on the profane crowd.
To understand that, after all, antiquity was a school wherein to train
the modern intellect for genuine production, was not given to this
epoch of discovery. Posterity has sadly belied their expectations. Of
all their treatises and commentaries, poems and translations, how few
are now remembered; how rarely are their names upon the lips of even
professed students! The debt of gratitude we owe them is indeed great,
and should be amply paid by our respectful memory of all they wrought
for us with labour in the field of learning. Yet Filelfo would turn
with passionate disappointment in his grave, if he could know that men
of wider scope and sounder erudition appreciate his writings solely as
shed leaves that fertilised the soil of literature.
Before turning, as is natural at this point, to form an estimate of
the humanists in their capacity of authors, it will be right briefly
to qualify the condemnation passed upon their characters. Taken as a
class, they deserve the hardest words that have been said of them.
Yet it must not be forgotten that they numbered in their ranks such
men as Ambrogio Traversari, Tommaso da Sarzana, Guarino, Jacopo
Antiquari, Vittorino da Feltre, Pomponius Lætus, Ficino, Pico, Fabio
Calvi, and Aldus Manutius. The bare enumeration of these names will
suffice for those who have read the preceding chapters. Piety,
sobriety of morals, self-devotion to public interests, the purest
literary enthusiasm, the most lofty aspirations, fairness of judgment,
and generosity of feeling distinguish these men, and some others who
might be mentioned, from the majority of their fellows. Nor, again, is
it fair to charge the humanists alone with vices common to their age.
The picture I ventured to draw of Papal and despotic manners in a
previous volume, shows that a too strict standard cannot be applied to
scholars, holding less responsible positions than their patrons, and
professing a far looser code of conduct. Much, too, of their
inordinate vanity may be ascribed to the infatuation of the people.
Such scenes as the reception of the supposed author of 'Hermaphroditus'
in Vicenza were enough to turn the heads of even stronger men.[514]
[Footnote 514: See above, p. 185, note 4.]
It is difficult to appraise humanistic literature at a just value,
seeing that by far the larger mass of it, after serving a purpose of
temporary utility, is now forgotten. Not itself, but its effect, is
what we have to estimate; and the ultimate product of the whole
movement was the creation of a new capacity for cultivation. To have
restored to Europe the knowledge of the classics, and to have
recovered the style of the ancients, so as to use Latin prose and
verse with freedom at a time when Latin formed an universal medium of
culture, is the first real merit of the humanists. Nothing can rob
them of this glory; however much we may be forced to feel that their
critical labours have been superseded, that their dissertations are
dull, that their poems at the worst fall far below the level of an
Oxford prize exercise, and at the best supply a decent appendix to the
'Corpus Poetarum.' Nor can we defraud them of the fame of having
striven to realise Petrarch's ideal.[515] That ideal, only partially
attained at any single point, developed in one direction by Milton, in
another by Goethe, still guides, and will long guide, the efforts of
the modern intellect.
[Footnote 515: See above, Chapter II.]
The most salient characteristic of this literature was study of style.
The beginners of the humanistic movement were conscious that what
separated them more than anything else from their Roman ancestors, was
want of elegance in diction. They used the same language; but they
used it clumsily. They could think the same thoughts, but they had
lost the art of expressing them with propriety. To restore style was
therefore a prime object. Exaggerating its importance, they neglected
the matter for the form, and ended by producing a literature of
imitation. The ideal they proposed in composition included limpidity
of language, simplicity in the structure of sentences however lengthy,
choiceness of phrase, and a copious vocabulary. To be intelligible was
the first requisite; to be attractive the second. Having mastered
elementary difficulties, they proceeded to fix the rules for
decorative writing. Cicero had said that nothing was so ugly or so
common but that rhetoric could lend it charm. This unfortunate dictum,
implying that style, as separate from matter, is valuable in and for
itself, led the Italians astray. To form commonplace books of phrases
culled from the 'Tusculans' and the 'Orations,' to choose some trivial
theme for treatment, and to make it the occasion for verbal display,
became their business. In the coteries of Rome and Florence scholars
measured one another by their ingenuity--in other words, by their
aptness for producing Ciceronian and Virgilian centos. Few indeed,
like Pico, raised their voices against such trifling, or protested
that what a man thought and felt was at least as important as his
power of clothing it in rhetoric.
The appearance of Valla's 'Elegantiæ' marked an epoch in the evolution
of this stylistic art. It reached its climax in the work of Bembo.
What the humanists intended, they achieved. Purity and perspicuity of
language were made conditions of all literature that claimed
attention; nor is it, perhaps, too much to say that Racine, Pascal,
and Voltaire owe something of their magic to the training of these
worn-out pedagogues. Yet the immediate effect in Italy, when
Machiavelli's vigour had passed out of the nation, and the stylistic
tradition survived, was deplorable. Nothing strikes a northern student
of the post-Renaissance authors more than the empty smoothness of
their writing, their faculty of saying nothing with a vast expenditure
of phrase, their dread of homely details, and the triviality of the
subjects they chose for illustration. When a man of wit like Annibale
Caro could rise to praise the nose of the president before a learned
academy in periods of this ineptitude--'Naso perfetto, naso
principale, naso divino, naso che benedetto sia fra tutti i nasi; e
benedetta sia quella mamma che vi fece così nasuto, e benedette tutte
quelle cose che voi annusate!'[516]--we trace no more than a burlesque
of humanistic seeking after style. It must, however, be admitted that
it is not easy for a less artistic nation to do the Italians justice
in this respect. They derived an æsthetic pleasure from refinements of
speech and subtle flavours of expression, while they remained no less
conscious than we are that the workmanship surpassed the matter. The
proper analogue to their rhetoric may be found in the exquisite but
too unmeaning arabesques in marble and in wood, which belong to Cinque
Cento architecture. Viewed as the playthings of skilled artists, these
are not without their value; and we are apt, perhaps, unduly to
depreciate them, because we lack the sense for their particular form
of beauty.
[Footnote 516: 'Perfect nose, imperial nose, divine nose, nose to be
blessed among all noses; and blessed be the breasts that made you with
a nose so lordly, and blessed be all those things you put your nose
to!' The above is quoted from Cantù's _Storia della Letteratura
Italiana_. I have not seen the actual address.]
If the most marked feature of humanistic literature was the creation
of a Latin style, the supreme dictators were Cicero in prose and
Virgil in verse. That Cicero should have fascinated the Italians in an
age when art was dominant, when richness of decoration, rhetorical
fluency, and pomp of phrase appealed to the liveliest instincts of a
splendour-loving, sensitive, declamatory race, is natural. The
Renaissance found exactly what it wanted in the manner of the most
obviously eloquent of Latin authors, himself a rhetorician among
philosophers, an orator among statesmen, the weakness of whose
character was akin to that which lay at the root of fifteenth-century
society. To be the 'apes of Cicero,' in all the branches of literature
he had cultivated, was regarded by the humanists as a religious
duty.[517] Though they had no place in the senate, the pulpit, or the
law court, they were fain to imitate his oratory. Therefore public
addresses to ambassadors, to magistrates on assuming office, and to
Popes on their election; epithalamial and funeral discourses;
panegyrics and congratulations--sounded far and wide through Italy.
The fifteenth century was the golden age of speechification. A man was
measured by the amount of fluent Latinity he could pour forth;
copiousness of quotations secured applause; and readiness to answer on
the spur of the moment in smooth Ciceronian phrases, was reckoned
among the qualities that led to posts of trust in Church and State.
On the other hand, a failure of words on any ceremonial occasion
passed for one of the great calamities of life. The common name for an
envoy, _oratore_, sufficiently indicates the public importance
attached to rhetoric. It formed a necessary part of the parade which
the Renaissance loved, and, more than that, a part of its diplomatic
machinery. To compose orations that could never be recited was a
fashionable exercise; and since the 'Verrines' and the 'Philippics'
existed, no occasion was lost for reproducing something of their
spirit in the invectives whereof so much has been already said. The
emptiness of all this oratory, separated from the solid concerns of
life, and void of actual value, tended to increase the sophistic
character of literature. Eloquence, which ought to owe its force to
passionate emotion or to gravity of meaning, degenerated into a mere
play of words; and to such an extent was verbal cleverness
over-estimated, that a scholar could ascribe the fame of Julius Cæsar
to his 'Commentaries' rather than his victories.[518] It does not seem
to have occurred to him that Pompey would have been glad if Cæsar had
always wielded his pen, and that Brutus would hardly have stabbed a
friendly man of letters. When we read a genuine humanistic speech, we
find that it is principally composed of trite tales and citations. To
play upon the texts of antiquity, as a pianist upon the keys of his
instrument, was no small part of eloquence; and the music sounded
pleasant in ears greedy of the very titles of old writings. Vespasiano
mentions that Carlo Aretino owed his early fame at Florence to one
lecture, introducing references to all the classic authors.
[Footnote 517: The phrase is eulogistically used by F. Villani in his
_Life of Coluccio Salutato_.]
[Footnote 518: See Muratori, vol. xx. 442, 453.]
The style affected for moral dissertation was in like manner
Ciceronian. The dialogue in particular became fashionable; and since
it was dangerous to introduce matter unsuited to Tully's phrases,
these disquisitions are usually devoid of local colouring and
contemporary interest. Few have such value as attaches to the opening
of Poggio's essay on Fortune, to Valeriano's treatise on the
misfortunes of the learned, or to Gyraldi's attack upon the humanists.
Another important branch of literature, modelled upon Ciceronian
masterpieces, was letter-writing. The epistolography of the humanists
might form a separate branch of study, if we cared to trace its
history through several stages, and to sift the stores at our
disposal. Petrarch, after discovering the familiar letters of the
Roman orator, first gave an impulse to this kind of composition. In
his old age he tells how he was laughed at in his youth for assuming
the Latin style of _thou_ together with the Roman form of
superscription.[519] I have already touched upon the currency it
gained through the practice of Coluccio Salutato and the teaching of
Gasparino da Barzizza.[520] In course of time books of formulæ and
polite letter-writers were compiled, enabling novices to adopt the
Ciceronian mannerism with safety.[521] The Papal Curia sanctioned a
set of precedents for the guidance of its secretaries, while the
epistles of eminent chancellors served as models for the despatches of
republican governments.
[Footnote 519: _Epist. Rer. Senil._ xv. 1. 'Styli hujus per Italiam
non auctor quidem, sed instaurator ipse mihi videor, quo cum uti
inciperem, adolescens a coætaneis irridebar, qui in hoc ipso certatim
me postea sunt secuti.']
[Footnote 520: See above, pp. 76-78.]
[Footnote 521: Gian Maria Filelfo, son of the celebrated professor,
published an _Epistolarium_ of this kind.]
The private letters of scholars were useful in keeping up
communication between the several centres of culture in Italy. From
these sources too we now derive much interesting information
respecting the social life of the humanists. They seem to have avoided
political, theological, and practical topics, cultivating a style of
urbane compliment, exchanging opinions about books, asking small
favours, acknowledging obligations, recommending friends to
favourable notice, occasionally describing their mode of life,
discussing the qualities of their patrons with cautious reserve, but
seeking above all things to display grace of diction and elegant
humour rather than erudition. The fact that these Latin epistles were
invariably intended for circulation and ultimate publication, renders
it useless to seek for insight from them into strictly private
matters.[522] For the historian the most valuable collections of
Renaissance letters are composed in Italian, and are not usually the
work of scholars, but of agents, spies, and envoys. Compared with the
reports of the Venetian ambassadors, the correspondence of the
humanists is unimportant. In addition to familiar letters, it not
unfrequently happened, however, that epistles upon topics of public
interest were indited by students. Intended by their diffusion to
affect opinion, and addressed to influential friends or patrons, these
compositions assumed the form of pamphlets. Of this kind were the
letters on the Eastern question sent by Filelfo to Charles VII. of
France, to the Emperor, to Matthias Corvinus, to the Dukes of Burgundy
and Urbino, and to the Doge of Venice. The immortality expected by the
humanists from their epistles, has hardly fallen to their lot; though
much of Poliziano's, Pico's, Antiquari's, and Piccolomini's
correspondence is still delightful and instructive reading. The masses
extant in MS. exceed what has been printed; while the printed volumes,
with some rare exceptions, among which may be mentioned Poliziano's
letter to Antiquari on the death of Lorenzo, are only used by
students.[523]
[Footnote 522: Francesco Filelfo, quoted in Rosmini's Life, vol. ii.
pp. 304, 282, 448, writes, 'Le cose che non voglio sieno copiate, le
scrivo sempre alla grossolana.' 'Hoc autem scribendi more utimur iis
in rebus quarum memoriam nolumus transferre ad posteros. Et ethrusca
quidem lingua vix toti Italiæ nota est, at latina oratio longe ac late
per universum orbem est diffusa.' ('Matters I do not wish to have
copied I always write off in the vulgar. This style I use for such
things as I do not care to transmit to posterity. Tuscan, to be sure,
is hardly known to all Italians, while Latin is spread far and wide
through the whole world.')]
[Footnote 523: See Voigt, pp. 421, 422, for an account of Filelfo's,
Traversari's, Barbaro's, and Bruni's letters.]
Since Cicero had left no specimen of history, the humanists were
driven to follow other masters in this branch of literature. Livy was
the author of their predilection. Cæsar supplied them with a model for
the composition of commentaries, and Sallust for concise monographs.
Suetonius was followed in such minute studies of character as
Decembrio's 'Life of Filippo Maria Visconti.' I do not find that
Tacitus had any thoroughgoing imitators; the magniloquence of
rhetoric, rather than the pungency of sarcasm, suited the taste of the
age. The faults of the humanistic histories have been already pointed
out.[524]
[Footnote 524: See Vol. I., _Age of the Despots_, pp. 216, 217, and
above, p. 377.]
The services of the humanists, as commentators, translators, critics
of texts, compilers of grammars and dictionaries of all kinds,
collectors of miscellaneous information, and writers on antiquities,
still remain to be remembered. Their industry in this field was quite
different from the labour they devoted to the perfecting of style.
Whatever we may think of them as men of letters, we are bound to give
their erudition almost unqualified praise. Not, indeed, that their
learning any more than their literature was final. It too has been
superseded; but it formed the basis of a sounder method, and rendered
the attainment of more certain knowledge possible. It is not too much
to say that modern culture, so far as it is derived from antiquity,
owes everything to the indefatigable energy of the humanists. Before
the age of printing, scholars had to store their memories with
encyclopædic information, while the very want of a critical method, by
preventing them from exactly discerning the good and the bad, enabled
them to take a broader and more comprehensive view of classical
literature than is now at any rate common. Antiquity as a whole--not
the authors merely of the Attic age or the Augustan--claimed their
admiration; and though they devoted special study to Cicero and Virgil
for the purposes of style, they eagerly accepted every Greek or Latin
composition from the earliest to the latest. To this omnivorous
appetite of the elder scholars we are perhaps indebted for the
preservation of many fragments which a more delicate taste would have
rejected. Certainly we owe to them the conception of the classics in
their totality, as forming the proper source of culture for the human
race. The purism of Vida and Bembo, though it sprang from more refined
perceptions, was in some respects a retrogression from the wide and
liberal erudition of their predecessors. Discipleship under Virgil may
make a versifier; but he who would fain comprehend the Latin genius
must know the poets of Rome from Ennius to Claudian.
Finally we have to render the tribute due to the humanists for their
diffusion of a liberal spirit. Sustained by the enthusiasm of
antiquity, they first ventured to take a standpoint outside
catholicity; and though they made but bad use of this spiritual
freedom, inclining to levity and godlessness instead of fighting the
battle of the reason, yet their large and human survey of the world
was in itself invigorating. Poggio at the Council of Constance
regarded Jerome of Prague not as a heretic, not as a fanatic, but as a
Stoic. In other words, he was capable of divesting his mind of
temporary associations and conventional prejudices, and of discerning
the true character of the man who suffered heroically for his
opinions. This instance illustrates the general tone and temper of the
humanists. Their study of antiquity freed them from the scholastic
pedantries of theologians, and from the professional conceits of
jurists and physicians. There is nothing great and noble in human
nature that might not, we fancy, have grown and thriven under their
direction, if the circumstances of Italy had been more favourable to
high aspirations. As it was, the light was early quenched and clouded
by base vapours of a sensual, enslaved, and priest-corrupted society.
The vital force of the Revival passed into the Reformation; the
humanists, degraded and demoralised, were superseded. Still it was
they who created the new atmosphere of culture, wherein whatever is
luminous in art, literature, science, criticism, and religion has
since flourished. Though we may perceive that they obeyed a false
authority--that of the classics, and worshipped a false idol--style,
yet modern liberty must render them the meed of thanks for this. When
we consider that before the sixteenth century had closed, they had
imbued the whole Italian nation with their views, forming a new
literature, directing every kind of mental activity, and producing a
new social tone, and furthermore that Italy in the sixteenth century
impressed her spirit on the rest of Europe, we have a right to hail
the humanists as the schoolmasters of modern civilisation.
As schoolmasters in a stricter sense of the term, it is not easy to
exaggerate the influence exercised by Italian students. They first
conceived and framed the education that has now prevailed through
Europe for four centuries, moulding the youth of divers nations by one
common discipline, and establishing an intellectual concord for all
peoples. In spite of changes in government and creed, in spite of
differences caused by race and language, we have maintained an
uniformity of culture through the simultaneous prosecution of classic
studies on the lines laid down for teachers by the scholars of the
fifteenth century. The system of our universities and public schools
is in truth no other than that devised by Vittorino and Guarino. Thus
humanism in modern Europe has continued the work performed during the
Middle Ages by the Church, uniting in one confederation of spiritual
activity nations widely separated by all that tends to keep the human
families apart.
Until quite recently in England, the _litteræ humaniores_ were
accepted as the soundest training for careers in Church and State, for
the learned professions, and for the private duties of gentlemen. If
the old ideal is yielding at last to theories of a wider education
based on science and on modern languages, that is due partly to the
extension of useful knowledge, and partly to the absorption of classic
literature into the modern consciousness. The sum of what a cultivated
man should know, in order to maintain a place among the pioneers of
progress, is so vast, that learners, distracted by a variety of
subjects, resent the expenditure of precious time on Greek and Latin.
Teachers, on the other hand, through long familiarity with humane
studies, have fallen into the languor of routine. Besides, as
knowledge in each new department increases, the necessity of
specialising with a view to adopting a professional career, makes
itself continually felt with greater urgency. It may therefore be
plausibly argued that we have outgrown the conditions of humanism, and
that a new stage in the history of education has been reached. Have
not the ancients done as much for us as they can do? Are not our minds
permeated with their thoughts? Do not the masterpieces of modern
literature hold in solution the best that can be got from them for
future uses?
These questions can perhaps be met by the counter-question whether the
arts and letters of the Greeks and Romans will not always hold their
own, not only in the formation of pure taste, but also in the
discipline of character and the training of the intelligence. Just as
well might we cease to study the sacred books of the Jews, because we
have incorporated their ethics into our conscience, and possess their
religion in our liturgy. No transmission of a spirit at second or
third hand can be the same as its immediate contact; nor can we
afford, however full our mental life may be, to lose the vivid sense
of what men were and what they wrought in ages far removed from us,
especially when those men were our superiors in certain spheres.
Again, it may be doubted whether we should understand the masterpieces
of modern literature, when we came to be separated from the sources of
their inspiration. If Olympus connoted less than Asgard, or Hercules
were no more familiar to our minds than Rustem, or the horses of the
Sun stood at the same distance from us as the cows of Indra--if, in
fact, we abandoned Greek as much as we have abandoned Scandinavian,
Persian, and Sanskrit mythology, would not some of the most brilliant
images of our own poets fade into leaden greyness, like clouds that
have lost the flush of living light upon them?
It is therefore not improbable that for many years to come the higher
culture of the race will still be grounded upon humanism: true though
it be that the first enthusiasm for antiquity shall never be restored,
nor the classics yield that vital nourishment they offered in the
spring-time of the modern era. For average students, who have no
special vocation for literature and no æesthetic tastes, it may well
happen that new methods of teaching the classics will have to be
invented. Why should they not be read in English versions, and the
time expended upon Greek and Latin grammar be thus saved? The practice
of Greek and Latin versification has been virtually doomed already;
nor is there any reason why Latin prose should form a necessary part
of education in an age that has ceased to publish its thoughts in a
now completely dead language. Our actual relation to the ancients,
again, justifies some change. We know far more about them now than in
the period of the Renaissance; but they are no longer all in all for
civilised humanity, eager to reconstitute the realm of thought, and
find its nobler self anew in the image of a glorious past,
reconquered and inalienable. The very culture created by the study of
antiquity through the last four centuries stands between them and our
apprehension, so that they seem at the same moment more distinct from
us and more a part of our familiar selves.
When we seek the causes which produced the decay of learning in Italy
about the middle of the sixteenth century, we are first led to observe
that the type of scholarship inaugurated by Petrarch had been fully
developed. Nothing new remained to be worked out upon the lines laid
down by him. Meanwhile the forces of the nation, both creative and
receptive, were exhausted in the old fields of humanism. The reading
public had been glutted with epistles, invectives, poems, orations,
histories of antiquities, and disquisitions of all kinds. The matter
of the ancient literatures had been absorbed, if superficially, at
least entirely, and their forms had been reproduced with wearisome
reiteration. The Paganism that had so long ruled as a fashion, was now
passing out of vogue, because of its inadequacy to meet the deeper
wants and satisfy the aspirations of the modern world. The humanists,
moreover, as a class, had fallen into disrepute through faults and
vices whereof enough has been already said. Nothing short of the new
impulse which a new genius, equal at least in power to Petrarch, might
have communicated, could have given a fresh direction to the declining
enthusiasm for antiquity. But for this display of energy the Italians
were not prepared. As in the ascent of some high peak, the traveller,
after surmounting pine woods and Alpine pastures, comes upon bare
grassy slopes that form an intermediate region between the basements
of the mountain and the snowfields overhead, so the humanists had
accomplished the first stage of learning. But it requires a fresh
start and the employment of other faculties to scale the final
heights; and for this the force was wanting. Erasmus, at the opening
of the century, had, indeed, initiated a second age of scholarship.
The more exact methods of criticism and comparison were already about
to be instituted by the French, the Germans, and the Dutch. It was too
much, however, to expect that the Italians, who had expended their
vigour in recovering the classics and reviving a passion for
knowledge, should compete upon the ground of modern erudition with
these fresh and untried races.
What they might have done, if circumstances had been less
unfavourable, and if the way of progress had been free before them,
cannot be conjectured. As it was, all things contributed to the
decline of intellectual energy in Italy. The distracting wars of half
a century told more heavily upon the literati, who depended for their
very existence upon the liberality of patrons, than on any other
section of the people. What miseries they endured in Lombardy may be
gathered from the prefaces and epistles of Aldus Manutius; while the
blow inflicted on them by the sack of Rome is vividly described by
Valeriano.[525] When comparative peace was restored, liberty had been
extinguished. Florence, the stronghold of liberal learning, was
enslaved. Scholarship no less than art suffered from the loss of
political independence. Rome, terror-stricken by the Reformation,
turned with rage against the very studies she had helped to stimulate.
The engines of the Inquisition, wielded with all the mercilessness of
panic by men who had the sombre cruelty of Spain to back them up,
destroyed the germs of life in science and philosophy.
[Footnote 525: See above, p. 321.]
To some extent, again, the Italian scholars had prepared their own
suicide by tending more and more to subtleties of taste and
affectations of refinement. The purism of the sixteenth century was
itself a sort of etiolation, and the puerilities of the academies
distracted even able men from serious studies. It was one of the
inevitable drawbacks of humanism that the new culture separated men of
letters from the nation. Dante and the wool-carders of the fourteenth
century understood each other; there was then no thick veil of
erudition between the teacher and the taught. But neither Bembo nor
Pomponazzi had anything to say that could be comprehended by the
common folk. Therefore scholarship was left in mournful isolation;
suspected, when it passed from trifles to grave speculations, by the
Church; viewed with indifference by the people; unsustained by any
sympathy, and, what was worse, without a programme or a watchword. The
thinkers, whose biography belongs to the history of the
Counter-Reformation in Italy, were all solitary men, voices crying in
the wilderness with none to listen, bound together by no common bond,
unnoticed by the nation, extinguished singly on the scaffold by an
ever-watchful league of tyrants spiritual and political.
Before the end of the sixteenth century Greek had almost ceased to be
studied in Italy. This was the sign of intellectual death. All that
was virile in humanism fled beyond the Alps. This transference of
intellectual supremacy from Italy to Germany was speedily
accomplished. 'When I was a boy,' said Erasmus,[526] 'sound letters
had begun to revive among the Italians; but by reason of the printer's
art being as yet undiscovered or known to few, no books had reached
us, and in the deep tranquillity of dulness there reigned a set of men
who taught in all our towns the most illiterate learning. Rodolph
Agricola was the first to bring to us from Italy some breath of a
superior culture.' Again, he says of Italy, 'In that land, where even
the very walls are both more learned and more eloquent than men with
us; so that what here seems beautifully said, and elegant and full of
charm, cannot be held for aught but clumsy, stupid, and uncultivated
there.' Less than half a century after Erasmus had gained the right to
hold the balance thus between the nations of the North and South--that
is, in 1540 or thereabouts--Paolo Giovio, at the close of his 'Elogia
Literaria,' while speaking of the Germans, felt obliged to confess
that 'not only Latin letters, to our disgrace, but Greek and Hebrew
also have passed into their territory by a fatal simultaneous
migration.'
[Footnote 526: See the passages quoted by Tiraboschi, vol. vi. lib.
iii. cap. v. 71.]
Thus Italy, after receiving the lamp of learning from the dying hands
of Hellas, in the days of her own freedom, now, in the time of her
adversity and ruin, gave it to the nations of the North. Her work was
ended. Three centuries of increasing decrepitude, within our recent
memory at length most happily surmounted, were before her. Can
history, we wonder, furnish a spectacle more pathetic than that of the
protagonist of spiritual liberty falling uneasily asleep beneath the
footstool of the Spaniard and the churchman, while the races who had
trampled her to death went on rejoicing in the light and culture she
had won by centuries of toil? This is the tragic aspect of the subject
which has occupied us through the present volume. At the conclusion of
the whole matter it is, however, more profitable to remember, not the
intellectual death of Italy, but what she wrought in that bright
period of her vigour. She was the divinely appointed birthplace of the
modern spirit, the workshop of knowledge for all Europe, our mistress
in the arts and sciences, the Alma Mater of our student years, the
well-spring of mental freedom and activity after ages of stagnation.
If greater philosophers have since been produced by Germany and France
and England, greater scholars, greater men of science, greater poets
even, and greater pioneers of progress in the lands divined by
Christopher Columbus beyond the seas--this must not blind us to the
truth that at the very outset of the era in which we live and play
our parts, Italy embraced all philosophy, all scholarship, all
science, all art, all discovery, alone. Such is the Lampadephoria, or
torch-race, of the nations. Greece stretches forth her hand to Italy;
Italy consigns the sacred fire to Northern Europe; the people of the
North pass on the flame to America, to India, and the Australasian
isles.