When on the one hand the two cities, the heavenly and the earthly, and

on the other the transcendency of the principle of explanation had

been conceived, the composition of dualism could not be sought for in

intelligence, but in myth, which put an end to the strife with the

triumph of one of the two adversaries: the myth of the fall, of the

redemption, of the expected reign of Christ, of the Last Judgment, and

of the final separation of the two cities, one ascending to Paradise

with the elect, the other driven back into hell with the wicked. This

mythology had its precedent in the Judaic expectations of a Messiah,

and also, from some points of view, in Orphism, and continued to

develop through gnosis, millenarism, and other heretical tentatives

and heresies, until it took a definite or almost a definite form in

St Augustine. It has been remarked that in this conception metaphysic

became identified with history, as an entirely new thought, altogether

opposed to Greek thought, and that it is a philosophical contribution

altogether novel and proper to Christianity. But we must add here that,

as mythology, it did not unite, but indeed confounded, metaphysic and

history, making the finite infinite, avoiding the fallacy of the circle

as perpetual return of things, but falling into the other fallacy of a

progress beginning and ending in time. History was therefore arranged

in spiritual epochs or phases, through which humanity was born, grew

up, and attained completion: there were six, seven, or eight epochs,

according to the various ways of dividing and calculating, which

sometimes corresponded to the ages of human life, sometimes to the days

of the creation, sometimes to both these schemes combined; or where

the hermeneutic of St Jerome upon the Book of Daniel was accepted,

the succession of events was distributed among the four _monarchies,_

of which the last was the Roman, not only in order of time, but also

in that of the idea, because after the Roman Empire (the Middle Ages,

as we know, long nourished the illusion that that empire persisted in

the form of the Holy Roman Empire) there would be nothing else, and

the reign of Christ or of the Church and then of Antichrist and the

universal judgment were expected to follow without any intermission.

The end which history had not yet reached chronologically, being also

intrinsic to the system, was ideally constructible, as the Apocalypses

had already ideally constructed it, pervading theological works and

even histories, which in their last section (see the works of Otto of

Frisia for all of them) described the coming of Antichrist and the end

of the world: hence the idea of a _history of things future,_ continued

by the paradoxical Francesco Patrizzi, who gave utterance to his theory

in the sixteenth century in his dialogues _Upon History_ (1560). This

general historical picture might be here and there varied in its

particulars, but never shattered and confuted; it varied in orthodoxy

up to the time of Augustine, and afterward among the dissentients and

the heretics: most noteworthy of these variations was the _Eternal

Evangel_ of the followers of Gioacchino di Flora, who divided history

into three epochs, corresponding to the three persons of the Trinity:

the first that of the Old Testament or of the Father, the second

that of the New Testament or of the Son, the third and last, that of

the Spirit. These are but artificial combinations and transactions,

by means of which life always seeks to find a passage between the

preconceived schemes which compress and threaten to suffocate it.

But such transactions did not avail to get the better of the discord

between reality and plan which everywhere revealed itself. Hence the

necessity of the _allegorical interpretation,_ so dear to the Middle

Ages. This consisted substantially in placing an imaginary figure

between the plan and the historical reality, a mixture of both, like a

bridge, but a bridge which could be crossed only in imagination. Thus

personages and events of sacred and profane history were allegorized,

and subtle numerical calculations made and continually reinforced with

new imaginary contributions, in order to discover correspondences

and parallelisms; and not only were the ages of life and the days of

creation placed on a parallel line with historical epochs, but so

also were the virtues and other conceptions. Such notions are still

to be found in books of devotion and in the preaching of the less

acute and less modernized of sacred orators. The 'reign of nature'

was also included in allegorical interpretation; and since history

and metaphysic had been set at variance with one another, so in like

manner was natural science set at variance with both of them, and all

appeared together in allegorical forms in the medieval encyclopædias,

the _Pantheons_ and _Mirrors of the World._

Notwithstanding these inevitable strayings, the new idea of history

as the spiritual drama of humanity, although it inclined toward myth,

yet acted with such energy as to weaken the ancient heteronomous

conception of history as directed toward the administration of abstract

instruction, useful in actual practice. History itself was now the

teaching, the knowledge of the life of the human race from its creation

upon the earth, through its struggles, up to its final state, which

was indicated in the near or remote horizon. History thus became the

work of God, teaching by His direct word and presence, which is to be

seen and heard in every part of it. Declarations are certainly not

wanting, indeed they abound, that the reading of histories is useful

as counselling, and particularly as inculcating, good behaviour and

abstention from evil. Sometimes it is a question of traditional and

conventional declarations, at others of particular designs: but

medieval historiography was not conceived, because it could not be

conceived, heteronomously.

If asceticism mortified minds, and if the miraculous clouded them, it

is not necessary to believe, on the other hand, that either had the

power to depress reality altogether and for a long period. Indeed,

precisely because asceticism was arbitrary, and mythology imaginary,

they remained more or less abstract, in the same way as allegorical

interpretation, which was impotent to suppress the real determinations

of fact. It was all very well to despise and condemn the earthly city

in words, but it forced itself upon the attention, and if it did not

speak to the intellect it spoke to the souls and to the passions of

men. In its period of youthful vigour, also, Christianity was obliged

to tolerate profane history, dictated by economic, political, and

military interests, side by side with sacred history. And as in the

course of the Middle Ages, in addition to the religious poetry of the

sacred hymns and poems, there also existed an epic of territorial

conquests, of the shock of peoples and of feudal strife, so there

continued to exist a worldly history, more or less mingled and tempered

with religious history. We find even fervent Christians and the most

pious of priests yielding to the desire of collecting and handing down

the memory of their race: thus Gregory of Tours told of the Franks,

Paulus Diaconus of the Lombards, Bede of the Angles, Widekind of the

Saxons. Their gentle hearts of political partisans do not cease to

beat. Not only do they lament the misery and wickedness of humanity

in general, but also give vent to their particular feelings, as we

observe, for instance, in the monk Erchempertus, who, _ex intimo corde

ducens alta suspiria,_ resumes the thread of Paul's history to narrate

the deeds of his glorious Lombards (now hunted back into the southern

part of Italy alone and assaulted and imbushed on every side), _non

regnum sed excidium, non felicitatem sed miseriam, non triumphum sed

perniciem._ And Liutprand of Cremona, although he makes the deity

intervene as ruler and punisher on every occasion, and even the saints

in person do battle, does not fail, for instance, to note that when

Berengarius proceeded to take possession of the kingdom after the

death of Guido, the followers of the latter called for King Lambert,

_quia semper Itali geminis uti dominis volunt, quatinus alterum

alterius terrore coherceant_: which is also the definition of feudal

society. They were most credulous in many things, far from profound

and abandoned to their imagination, but they were not credulous,

indeed they were clear-sighted, shrewd and diffident in what concerned

the possessions and privileges of the churches and monasteries, of

families, and of the feudal group and the order of citizenship to which

each belonged. It is to these interests that we owe the formation of

archives, registers, chronologies, and the exercise of criticism as to

the authenticity and genuineness of documents. The conception of the

new Christian virtue oppressed, but did not quench, admiration (though

held sinful by the most severe) for the great name of ancient Rome, and

the many works of pagan civilization, its eloquence, its poetry, its

civil wisdom. Nor did it forbid admiration for Arabic or Judaic-Arabic

wisdom, of which the works were well received, notwithstanding

religious strife. Hence we may say that in the same way as Græco-Roman

humanism did not altogether exclude the supernatural, so the Christian

supernatural did not prevent human consideration of worldly passions

and earthly transactions.

This becomes more and more evident as we pass from the early to the

late Middle Ages, when profane historiography progresses, as the result

of the struggles between Church and State, of the communal movement,

of the more frequent commercial communications between Europe and the

East, and the like. These are themselves the result of the development,

the maturing, and the modernization of thought, which grows with life

and makes life grow. Neither life nor thought remained attached to the

conceptions of the fathers of the Church, of Augustine, of Orosius,

to whom history offered nothing but the proof of the infinite evils

that afflict humanity, of the unceasing punishments of God, and of

the "deaths of the persecutors." In Otto of Frisia himself, who holds

more firmly than the others to the doctrines of Augustine, we find the

asperity of doctrine tempered by grace; and when he afterward proceeds

to narrate the struggle between the Church and the Empire, if it cannot

be said that he takes the side of the Empire, it also cannot be said

that he resolutely defends that of the Church, for the eschatological

visions that form so great a part of his work do not blind his

practical sense and political judgment. The party of the faith against

the faithless remained, however, always the 'great party,' the great

'struggle of classes' (elect and reprobate) and of 'states' (celestial

and earthly cities). But within this large framework we perceive other

figures more closely particularized, other parties and interests,

which gradually come to occupy the first, second, and third planes,

so that the struggle between God and the devil is forced ever more

and more into the background and becomes somewhat vague, something

always assumed to be present, but not felt to be active and urgent in

the soul, as something which is still talked of, but is not deeply

felt, or at least felt with the energy that the words would wish us

to believe, the words themselves often sounding like a refrain, as

pious as it is conventional. The miraculous gradually fills less and

less space and appears more rarely: God acts more willingly by means

of secondary causes, and respects natural laws; He rarely intervenes

directly in a revolutionary manner. The form of the chronicles, too,

becomes also less accidental and arid, the better among the chroniclers

here and there seeking a different 'order'--that is to say, really, a

better understanding--and we find (particularly from the thirteenth

century onward) the _ordo artificialis_ or internal opposed to the

_ordo naturalis_ or external chronological order. There are also

to be found those who distinguish between the _sub singulis annis

describere_ and the _sub stilo historico conglutinare_--that is to

say, the grouping together according to things described. The general

aspect of historiography changes not a little. Limiting ourselves

to Italian historiography alone, there are no longer little books

upon the miracles and the translations of the bodies of saints and

bishops, but chronicles of communes, all of them full of affection for

the feudal superiors or for the archbishop, for the imperial or the

anti-imperial side, for Milan or for Bergamo, or for Lodi. The sense

of tragedy, which weighed so heavily upon Erchempertus, returns with

new and stronger accents in the narrative of the deeds of Barbarossa

at Milan, entitled _Libellus tristititiæ et doloris, angustiæ et

tribulationis, passionum et tormentorum._ Love for one's city usurps

much of the space previously devoted to things celestial, and praises

of Milan, of Bergamo, of Venice, of Amalfi, of Naples, resound in the

pages of their chroniclers. Thus those vast chronicles are reached

which, although they begin with the Tower of Babel, yet lead to the

history of that city or of that event which makes the strongest appeal

to the feelings and best stimulates the industry of the writer, and

become mingled with the persons and things of the present or future

life. Giovanni Villani, a pilgrim to Rome to celebrate the papal

jubilee, is not inspired with the ascetic spirit or raised to heaven by

that solemn spectacle; but, on the contrary, "since he finds himself

in the holy city of Rome on that blessed pilgrimage, inspecting its

_great_ and _ancient possessions,_ and reading the _histories and the

great deeds_ of the Romans," he is inspired to compose the history of

his native Fiorenza, "daughter and creation of Rome" (of ancient Rome

prior to Christianity). His Fiorenza resembled Rome in its rise to

greatness and its following after great things, and was like Rome in

its fall. Thus the 'holy' and the 'blessed' do not lead him to holy

and blessed thoughts, but to thoughts of worldly greatness. To the

historiography of the communes answers the more seriously worldly, the

more formally and historically elaborated historiography of the Norman

and Suabian kingdom of Sicily. In the proem to its _Constitutiones_

sovereigns are declared to be instituted _ipsa rerum necessitate

cogente, nec minus divinæ provisionis instinctu_; with its Romualdo

Guarna, its Abbot Telesino, its Malaterra, its Hugo Falcando and Pietro

da Eboli, its Riccardo da San Germano, with the pseudo-Jamsilla, and

Saba Malaspina. All of these have their heroes, Roger and William the

Normans, Frederick and Manfred the Suabians, and what they praise in

them is the sound political basis which they knew how to establish

and to maintain with a firm hand. _Eo tempore,_ says Falcando of

Roger, _Regnum Sicilia, strenuis et præclaris viris abundans, cum

terra marique plurimum posset, vicinis circumquoque gentibus terrorem

incusserat, summaque pace ac tranquillitate maxima fruebatur._ And

the so-called Jamsilla, of Frederick II: _Vir fuit magni cordis,

sed magnanitatem suam multa, qua in eo fuit, sapientia superavit,

ut nequaquam impetus eum ad aliquid faciendum impelleret, sed ad

omnia cum rationis maturitate procederet;... utpote qui philosophisæ

studiosus erat quam et ipse in se coluit, et in regno suo propagare

ordinavit. Tunc quidem ipsius felici tempore in regno Siciliæ erant

litterati pauci vel nulli; ipse vero imperator liberalium artium et

omnis approbatæ scientia scholas in regno ipso constituit ... ut

omnis conditionis et fortuna homines nullius occasione indigentiæ

a philosophiæ studio retraherentur._ The state, profane culture,

'philosophy,' impersonated in the heresiarch Frederick, are thus set in

clear relief. And while on the one hand more and more laical theories

of the state become joined to these political and cultural currents

(from Dante, indeed from Thomas Aquinas, to Marsilio of Padua), and

the first outlines of literary history (lives of the poets and of men

famous for their knowledge, and the rise of vernacular literatures) and

histories of manners (as in certain passages in Ricobaldo of Ferrara),

on the other hand scholasticism found its way to such problems and

conceptions by means of the works of Aristotle, which represented as

it were a first brief summary of ancient knowledge. It is unnecessary

to say that Dante's poem is the chief monument of this condition of

spirit, where the ideas of the Middle Ages are maintained, but the

political, poetical, and philosophical affections, the love of fame and

of glory, prove their vigour, although subordinated to those ideas and

restrained, as far as possible, by them.

But those ideas are nevertheless maintained, even among the

imperialists and adversaries of the Church, and it is only in rare

spirits that we find a partly sceptical and partly mocking negation

of them. Transcendency, the prescience of God, Who ordains, directs,

and disposes of everything according to His will, bestows rewards

and punishments, and intervenes mysteriously, always maintains its

place in the distant background, in Dante as in Giovanni Villani,

as in all the historians and chroniclers. Toward the close of the

fifteenth century the theological conception makes a curious appearance

in the French historian Comines, arm in arm with the most alert and

unprejudiced policy of success at all costs. Worldliness, so rich,

so various, and so complex, was yet without an ideal standard of

comparison, and for this reason it was rather lived than thought,

showing itself rather in richness of detail than systematically. The

ancient elements of culture, which had passed from Aristotelianism

into scholasticism, failed to act powerfully, because that part of

Aristotelianism was particularly selected which was in harmony with

Christian thought already translated into Platonic terms and dogmatized

in a transcendental form by the fathers of the Church. Hence it has

even been possible to note a pause in historiographical interest,

where scholasticism has prevailed, a compendium of the type of that of

Martin Polonus being held sufficient to serve the end of quotations for

demonstration or for legal purposes. What was required upon entering

a new period of progress (there is always progress, but 'periods of

progress' are those in which the motion of the spirit seems to become

accelerated and the fruit that has been growing ripe for centuries is

rapidly plucked) was a direct conscious negation of transcendency and

of Christian miracle, of ascesis and of eschatology, both in life

and in thought a negation whose terms (heavenly and earthly life) had

certainly been noted by medieval historiography, but had been allowed

to endure and to progress, the one beside the other, without true and

proper contact and conflict arising between them.

IV

THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE RENAISSANCE

The negation of Christian transcendency was the work of the age of

the Renaissance, when, to employ the expression used by Fueter,

historiography became 'secularized.' In the histories of Leonardo Bruni

and of Bracciolini, who gave the first conspicuous examples of the

new attitude of historiographical thought, and in all others of the

same sort which followed them--among them those of Machiavelli and of

Guicciardini shine forth conspicuously--we find hardly any trace of

'miracles.' These are recorded solely with the intention of mocking at

them and of explaining them in an altogether human manner. An acute

analysis of individual characters and interests is substituted for the

intervention of divine providence and the actions of the popes, and

religious strifes themselves are apt to be interpreted according to

utilitarian passions and solely with an eye to their political bearing.

The scheme of the four monarchies with the advent of Antichrist

connected with it is allowed to disappear; histories are now narrated

_ab inclinatione imperii,_ and even universal histories, like the

_Enneads_ of Sabellicus, do not adhere to traditional ecclesiastical

tradition. Chronicles of the world, universal miraculous histories,

both theological and apocalyptic, become the literature of the people

and of those with little culture, or persist in countries of backward

culture, such as Germany at that time, or finally are limited to the

circle of Catholic or Protestant confessional historiography, both

of which retain so much of the Middle Ages, the Protestant perhaps

more than the Catholic (at least at a first glance), for the latter

contrived at least here and there to temporize and to accommodate

itself to the times. All this is shown very clearly and minutely by

Fueter, and I shall now proceed to take certain observations and some

information from his book, which I shall rearrange and complete with

some more of my own. In the political historiography of the late Middle

Ages, the theological conception had been, as we have said, thrown into

the background; but henceforward it is not to be found even there,

and if at times we hear its formulas, they are just like those of the

Crusade against the Turks, preaching the liberation of the tomb of

Christ. These were still repeated by preachers, writers of verse, and

rhetoricians (and continued to be repeated for three centuries), but

they found no response in political reality and in the conscience of

the people, because they were but empty sound. Nor was the negation

of theologism and the secularization of history accomplished only in

practice, unaccompanied with complete consciousness; for, although

many minds really did turn in the direction indicated by fate, or in

other words by the new mental necessity, and although the polemic

was not always open, but on the contrary often surrounded with many

precautions, evidence abounds of the agreement of the practice with

the theory of historiography. The criticism of so grave a theorist of

history as Bodin is opposed to the scheme of the four monarchies. He

makes it his object to combat the _inveteratum errorem de quattuor

imperiis,_ proving that the notion was capriciously taken from the

dream of Daniel, and that it in no way corresponded with the real

course of events. It would be superfluous to record here the celebrated

epigrams of Machiavelli and of Guicciardini, who satirized theology

and miracles. Guicciardini noted that all religions have boasted of

miracles, and therefore they are not proofs of any one of them, and

are perhaps nothing but "secrets of nature." He advised his readers

never to say that God had aided so-and-so because he was good and

had made so-and-so suffer because he was wicked, for we "often see

the opposite," and the counsels of divine providence are in fact

an abyss. Paolo Sarpi, although he admits that "it is a pious and

religious thought to attribute the disposition of every event to divine

providence," yet holds it "presumption" to determine "to what end

events are directed by that highest wisdom"; for men, being emotionally

attached to their opinions, "are persuaded that they are as much loved

and favoured by God as by themselves." Hence, for example, they argued

that God had caused Zwingli and Hecolampadius to die almost at the

same time, in order that he might punish and remove the ministers of

discord, whereas it is certain that "after the death of these two, the

evangelical cantons have made greater progress in the doctrine that

they received from both of them." Such a disposition of religious and

cautious spirits is yet more significant than that of the radical and

impetuous, openly irreverent, in the same way as the new importance

attributed to history is notable in the increase of historiographical

labour that is then everywhere noticeable, and in the formation of a

true and proper philological school, not only for antiquity, but for

the Middle Ages (Valla, Flavio Biondo, Calchi, Sigonio, Beato Renano,

etc.), which publishes and restores texts, criticizes the authenticity

and the value of sources, is occupied with the establishment of a

technical method of examining witnesses, and composes learned histories.

Nothing is more natural than that the new form of historiography

should seem to be a return to Græco-Roman antiquity, as Christianity

had seemed to be a return to the story of Eden (the interlude of

paganism having been brought to an end by the redemption), or that the

Middle Ages should still seem to some to-day to be a falling back into

barbarous pre-Hellenic times. The illusion of the return was expressed

in the cult of classical antiquity, and in all those manifestations,

literary, artistic, moral, and customary, familiar to those who know

the Renaissance. In the special field with which we are at present

occupied, we find a curious document in support of the difficulty that

philologists and critics experienced in persuading themselves that the

Greek and Roman writers had perhaps been able to deceive themselves, to

lie, to falsify, to be led astray by passions and blinded by ignorance,

in the same way as those of the Middle Ages. Thus the latter were

severely criticized while the former were reverenced and accepted, for

it needed much time and labour to attain to an equal mental freedom

regarding the ancients, and the criticism of texts and of sources was

developed in respect to medieval history long before it attained to

a like freedom in respect to ancient history. But the greatest proof

and monument of the illusion of the return was the formation of the

_humanistic_ type of historiography, opposed to the medieval. This

had been chiefly confined to the form of chronicle and humanistic

historiography, although it accepted the arrangement by years and

seasons according to the examples set by the Greeks and Romans,

cancelled as far as possible numerical indications, and exerted itself

to run on unbrokenly, without chronological cuts and cross-cuts.

Latin had become barbarous in the Middle Ages and had accepted the

vocabularies of vulgar tongues, or those which designated new things

in a new way, whereas the humanistic historiographers translated and

disguised every thought and every narrative in Ciceronian Latin, or

at least Latin of the Golden Age. We frequently find picturesque

anecdotes in the medieval chronicles, and humanism, while it restored

its dignity to history, deprived it of that picturesque element, or

attenuated and polished it as it had done the things and customs of the

barbaric centuries. This humanistic type of historiography, like the

new philological erudition and criticism and the whole movement of the

Renaissance, was Italian work, and in Italy histories in the vulgar

tongue were soon modelled upon it, which found in the latinized prose

of Boccaccio an instrument well suited to their ends. From Italy it was

diffused among other countries, and as always happens when an industry

is transplanted into virgin soil, and workmen and technical experts are

invited to come from the country of its origin, so the first humanistic

historians of the other parts of Europe were Italians. Paolo Emilio

the Veronese, who _Gallis condidit historias,_ gave the French the

humanistic history of France in his _De rebus gestis Francorum,_ and

Polydore Virgil did the like for England, Lucio Marineo for Spain, and

many others for other countries, until indigenous experts appeared and

the aid of Italians became unnecessary. Later on it became necessary to

throw off this cloak, which was too loose or too tight--indeed, was not

cut to the model of modern thought. What there was in it of artificial,

of swollen, of false, was blamed--these defects being indeed clearly

indicated in the constructive principle of this literary form, which

was that of imitation. But anyone with a feeling for the past will

enjoy that historical humanistic prose as the expression of love for

antiquity and of the desire to rise to its level. This love and this

desire were so keen that they had no hesitation in reproducing things

external and indifferent in addition to what was better and sometimes

in default of it. Giambattista Vico, sometimes so sublimely puerile, is

still found lamenting, three centuries after the creation of humanistic

historiography, that "no sovereign has been found into whose mind has

entered the thought of preserving for ever in the best Latin style

a record of the famous War of the Spanish Succession, than which a

greater has never happened in the world since the Second Carthaginian

War, that of Cæsar with Pompey, and of Alexander with Darius." But what

of this? Quite recently, during the war in Tripoli, came the proposal

from the depths of one of the meridional provinces of Italy, one of

those little countrysides where the shadow of a humanist still exists,

that a Latin commentary should be composed upon that war entitled

_De bello libico._ This proposal was received with much laughter and

made even me smile, yet the smile was accompanied with a sort of

tender emotion, when I recalled how long and devotedly our fathers and

forefathers had pursued the ideal of a beautiful antiquity and of a

decorous historiography.

Nevertheless, the belief in the effectivity or possibility of such a

return was, as we have said, an illusion; nothing of what has been

returns, nothing of what has been can be abolished; even when we

return to an old thought the new adversary makes the defence new and

the thought itself new. I read some time ago the work of a learned

French Catholic. While clearing the Middle Ages of certain absurd

accusations and confuting errors commonly circulated about them, he

maintained that the Middle Ages are the truly modern time, modern with

the eternal modernity of the true, and that therefore they should

not be called the Middle Ages, which term should be applied to the

period that has elapsed between the fifteenth century and our own

day, between the Reformation and positivism. As I read, I reflected

that such a theory is the worthy pendant to that other theory, which

places the Middle Ages beneath antiquity, and that both had some time

ago shown themselves false to historical thought, which knows nothing

of returns, but knows that the Middle Ages preserved antiquity deep

in its heart as the Renaissance preserved the Middle Ages. And what

is 'humanism' but a renewed formula of that 'humanity' of which the

ancient world knew little or nothing, and which Christianity and the

Middle Ages had so profoundly felt? What is the word 'renaissance'

or 'renewal' but a metaphor taken from the language of religion? And

setting aside the word, is not the conception of humanism perhaps the

affirmation of a spiritual and universal value, and in so far as it is

that, altogether foreign, as we know, to the mind of antiquity, and an

intrinsic continuation of the 'ecclesiastical' and 'spiritual' history

which appeared with Christianity? The conception of spiritual value

had without doubt become changed or enriched, for it contained within

itself more than a thousand years of mental experiences, thoughts, and

actions. But while it thus grew more rich, it preserved its original

character, and constituted the religion of the new times, with its

priests and martyrs, its polemic and its apologetic, its intolerance

(it destroyed or allowed to perish the monuments of the Middle Ages

and condemned its writers to oblivion), and sometimes even imitated the

forms of its worship (Navagaro used to burn a copy of Martial every

year as a holocaust to pure Latinity). And since humanity, philosophy,

science, literature, and especially art, politics, activity in all its

forms, now fill that conception of value which the Middle Ages had

placed in Christian religious faith alone, histories or outlines of

histories continue to appear as the outcome of these determinations,

which were certainly new in respect to medieval literature, but were

not less new in respect to Græco-Roman literature, where there was

nothing to compare to them, or only treatises composed in an empirical

and extrinsic manner. The new histories of values presented them selves

timidly, imitating in certain respects the few indent examples, but

they gave evidence of a fervour, an intelligence, an afflatus, which

led to a hope for that increase and development wanting to their

predecessors, which, instead of developing, had gradually become more

superficial and finally disappeared again into vagueness. Suffice it to

mention as representative of them all Vasari's _Lives of the Painters,_

which are connected with the meditations and the researches upon art

contained in so many treatises, dialogues, and letters of Italians, and

are here and there shot through with flashes such as never shone in

antiquity. The same may be said of treatises on poetry and rhetoric,

and of the judgments which they contain as to poetry and of the new

history of poetry, then being attempted with more or less successful

results. The 'state' too, which forms the object of the meditations

of Machiavelli, is not the simple state of antiquity, city or empire,

but is almost the national state felt as something divine, to which

even the salvation of the soul must be sacrificed--that is to say,

as the institution in which the true salvation of the soul is to be

found. Even the pagan virtue which he and others opposed to Christian

virtue is very different from the pure Græco-Roman disposition of mind.

At that time a start was also made in the direction of investigating

the theory of rights, of political forms, of myths and beliefs, of

philosophical systems, to-day in full flower. And since that same

consciousness which had produced humanism had also widened the

boundaries of the known world, and had sought for and found people of

whom the Bible preserved no record and of whom the Græco-Roman writers

knew nothing, there appeared at that time a literature relating to

savages and to the indigenous civilizations of America (and also of

distant Asia, which had been better explored), from which arose the

first notions as to the primitive forms of human life. Thus were

widened the spiritual boundaries of humanity at the same time as the

material.

We are not alone in perceiving the illusion of the 'return to

antiquity,' for the men of the Renaissance were not slow in doing this.

Not every one was content to suit himself to the humanistic literary

type. Some, like Machiavelli, threw away that cloak, too ample in its

folds and in its train, preferring to it the shorter modern dress.

Protests against pedantry and imitation are indeed frequently to be

heard during the course of the century. Philosophers rebelled against

Aristotle (first against the medieval and then against the ancient

Aristotle), and appeals were made to truth, which is superior both to

Plato and to Aristotle; men of letters advocated the new 'classes,'

and artists repeated that the great masters were 'nature' and the

'idea.' One feels in the air that the time is not far distant when the

question, "Who are the true ancients?"--that is to say, "Who are the

intellectually expert and mature?"--will be answered with, "We are";

the symbol of antiquity will be broken and there will be found within

it the reality which is human thought, ever new in its manifestations.

Such an answer may possibly be slow in becoming clear and certain as an

object of common conviction, though it will eventually become so, and

now suffices to explain the true quality of that return antiquity, by

preventing the taking of the symbol for the thing symbolized.

This symbolical covering, cause of prejudices and misunderstandings,

which enfolded the whole of humanism, was not the sole vice from

which the historiography of the Renaissance suffered. We do not,

of course, speak here of the bias with which all histories were

variously affected, according as they were written by men of letters

who were also courtiers and supported the interests of their masters,

or official historians of aristocratic and conservative states like

Venice, or men taking one or the other side in the conflicts within the

same state, such as the _ottimani_ (or aristocratic) and the popular

party of Florence, or upholders of opposed religious beliefs, such as

the group of reformed divines of Magdeburg and Baronio. We do not speak

here of the historians who became story-writers (they sometimes take to

history, like Bandello), or of those who collected information with a

view to exciting curiosity and creating scandal. These are things that

belong to all periods, and are not sufficient to qualify a particular

historiographical age. But if we examine only that which is or wished

to be historical thought, the historiography of the Renaissance

suffered from two other defects, each of which it had inherited from

one of its progenitors, antiquity and the Middle Ages. And above all

there came to it from antiquity the humanistic-abstract or pragmatical

conception, as it is called, which inclines to explain facts by the

individual in his singularity and in his atomism, or by means of

abstract political forms, and the like. For Machiavelli, the prince is

not only the ideal but the criterion that he adopts for the explanation

of events. He does not only appear in his treatises and political

opuscules, but in the Florentine Histories, where we meet with him at

the very beginning--after the terrible imaginative description of

the condition of Italy in the fifth century--in the great figure of

Theodoric, by whose 'virtue' and 'goodness' not only Rome and Italy,

but all the other parts of the Western empire, "arose free from the

continual scourgings which they had supported for so many years from so

many invasions, and became again happy and well-ordered communities."

The same figure reappears in many different forms in the course of

the centuries described in those histories. Finally, at the end of

the description of the social struggles of Florence, we read that

"this city had reached such a point that it could be easily adapted to

_any form of government_ by _a wise law-giver._" In like manner, the

_History of Italy_ by Guicciardini begins with the description of the

happiness of Italy at the end of the fifteenth century, "acquired at

various times and preserved for many reasons," not the least of which

was "the industry and genius of Lorenzo de' Medici," who "strove in

every way so to balance Italian affairs that they should not incline

more in one direction than another." He had allies in Ferdinand of

Aragon and Ludovic the Moor, "partly for the same and partly for other

reasons," and the Venetians were held in check by all three of them.

This perfect system of equilibrium was broken by the deaths of Lorenzo,

of Ferdinand, and of the Pope. All historians of this period express

themselves in the same way, and although a lively consciousness of the

spiritual values of humanity was in process of formation, as has been

seen, yet these were spoken of as though they depended upon the will

and the intelligence of individuals who were their masters, not the

contrary. In the history of painting, for example, the 'prince' for

Vasari is Giotto, "who, although born among inexpert artisans, alone

revived painting and reduced it to such a form as might be described as

good." Biographies are also constantly individualistic, for they never

succeed in perfectly uniting the individual with the work which he

creates and which in turn creates him.

The idea of chance or fortune persisted alongside the pragmatic

conception, its ancient companion. Machiavelli assigns the course of

events half to fortune and half to human prudence, and although the

accent falls here upon prudence, the acknowledgment of the one does

not abolish the force of the other, so mysterious and transcendent.

Guicciardini attacks those who, while attributing everything to

prudence and virtue, exclude "the power of fortune," because we

see that human affairs "receive at all times great impulsions from

fortuitous events, which it is not within the power of man either to

foresee or to escape, and although the care and understanding of man

may moderate many things, nevertheless that alone does not suffice,

but good fortune is also necessary." It is true that here and there

there seems to appear another conception in Machiavelli, that of the

strength and logic of things, but it is only a fleeting shadow. It is

also a shadow for Guicciardini, when he adds that even if we wish to

attribute everything to prudence and virtue, "must at least admit that

it is necessary to fall upon or be born in times when the virtues or

qualities for which you value yourself are esteemed." Guicciardini

remains perplexed as to one point only, as though he had caught a

glimpse of something that is neither caprice of the individual nor

contingency of fortune: "When I consider to what accidents and dangers

of illness, of chance, of violence, of infinite sorts, is exposed the

life of man, the concurrence of how many things is needful that the

harvest of the year should be good, nothing surprises me more than to

see an old man or a good harvest." But even here we do not get beyond

uncertainty, which in this case manifests itself as astonishment. With

the renewal of the idea of fortune, even to a partial extent, with

the restitution of the cult of this pagan divinity, not only does

the God of Christianity disappear, but also the idea of rationality,

of finality, of development, affirmed during the medieval period.

The ancient Oriental idea of the circle in human affairs returns;

it dominated all the historians of the Renaissance, and above all

Machiavelli. History is an alternation of lives and deaths, of goods

and ills, of happiness and misery, of splendour and decadence. Vasari

understands the history of painting in the same way as that of all

the arts, which, "like human bodies, have their birth, their growth,

their old age, and their death." He is solicitous of preserving in his

book the memory of the artistic capacity of his time, lest the art

of painting, "either owing to the neglect of men or to the malignity

of the ages or to decree of heaven (which does not appear to wish

to maintain things here below for long in the same state), should

encounter the same disorder and ruin" as befell it in the Middle

Ages. Bodin, while criticizing and rejecting the scheme of the four

monarchies, and demonstrating the fallaciousness of the assertion that

gold deteriorates into copper, or even into clay, and celebrating the

splendour of letters, of commerce, of the geographical discoveries of

his age, does not, however, conclude in favour of progress, but of

the circle, blaming those who find everything inferior in antiquity,

_cum, æterna quadam lege naturæ, conversiti omnium rerum velut in orbem

redire videatur, ut aqua vitia virtutibus, ignoratio scientiæ, turpe

honesto consequens sit, ac tenebræ luci._ The sad, bitter, pessimistic

tone which we observe among ancient historians, which sometimes

bursts forth into the tragic, is also often to be met with among the

historians of the Renaissance, for they saw perish many things that

were very dear to them, and were constrained to tremble for those which

they still enjoyed, or at least to fear for them by anticipation,

certain that sooner or later they would yield their place to their

contraries.

And since history thus conceived does not represent progress but a

circle, and is not directed by the historical law of development,

but by the natural law of the circle, which gives it regularity and

uniformity, it follows that the historiography of the Renaissance,

like the Græco-Roman, has its end outside itself, and affords nothing

but material suitable for exhortations toward the useful and the good,

for various forms of pleasure or as ornament for abstract truths.

Historians and theorists of history are all in agreement as to this,

with the exception of such eccentrics as Patrizzi, who expressed

doubts as to the utility of knowing what had happened and as to

the truth itself of narratives, but ended by contradicting himself

and also laying down an extrinsic end. "Each one of us can find,

both on his own account and on that of the public weal, many useful

documents in the knowledge of these so different and so important

examples," writes Guicciardini in the proem to his History of Italy.

"Hence will clearly appear, as the result of innumerable examples,

the instability of things human, how harmful they are often wont to

be to themselves, but ever to the people, the ill-conceived counsels

of those who rule, when, having only before their eyes either vain

errors or present cupidities, they are not mindful of the frequent

variations of fortune, and converting the power that has been granted

them for the common weal into an injury to others, they become the

authors of new perturbations, either as the result of lack of prudence

or of too much ambition." And Bodin holds that _non solum præsentia

commode explicantur, sed etiam futura colliguntur, certissimaque rerum

expetendarum ac fugiendarum præcepta constantur,_ from historical

narratives. Campanella thinks that history should be composed _ut sit

scientiarum fundamentum sufficiens_; Vossius formulates the definition

that was destined to appear for centuries in treatises: _cognitio

singularium, quorum memoriam conservari utile sit ad bene beateque

vivendum._ Historical knowledge therefore seemed at that time to be

the lowest and easiest form of knowledge (and this view has been held

down to our own days); to such an extent that Bodin, in addition

to the _utilitas_ and the _oblectatio,_ also recognized to history

_facilitas,_ so great a facility _ut, sine ullius artis adjumento, ipsa

per sese ab omnibus intelligatur._ When truth had been placed outside

historical narrative, all the historians of the Renaissance, like

their Greek and Roman predecessors, practised, and all the theorists

(from Pontanus in the _Actius_ to Vossius in the _Ars historica_)

defended, the use of more or less imaginary orations and exhortations,

not only as the result of bowing to ancient example, but through their

own convictions. Eventually M. de la Popelinière, in his _Histoire

des histoires, avec l'idée de l'histoire accomplie_ (1599), where

he inculcates in turn historical exactitude and sincerity with such

warm eloquence, suddenly turns round to defend imaginary _harangues

et concions,_ for this fine reason, that what is necessary is 'truth'

and not 'the words' in which it is expressed! The truth of history

was thus not history, but oratory and political science; and if the

historians of the Renaissance were hardly ever able to exercise oratory

(for which the political constitution of the time allowed little

scope), all or nearly all were authors of treatises upon political

science, differently inspired as compared with those of the Middle

Ages, which had ethical and religious thought behind them, resuming

and advancing the speculations of Aristotle and of ancient political

writers. In like manner, treatises on historical art, unknown to the

Middle Ages, but which rapidly multiplied in the Renaissance (see a

great number of them in the _Penus artis historicæ_ of 1579), resumed

and fertilized the researches of Græco-Roman theorists. It is to be

expected that the historiography of this period should represent some

of the defects of medieval historiography in another form, owing to

its character of reaction already mentioned and to the new divinity

that it had raised up upon the altars in place of the ancient divinity,

humanity. The Renaissance everywhere reveals its effort to oppose the

one term to the other, and since scholasticism had sought the things

of God and of the soul, it wished to restrict itself to the things

of nature. We find Guicciardini and a chorus of others describing the

investigations of philosophers and theologians and "of all those who

write things above nature or such as are not seen" as 'madnesses';

and because scholasticism had defined science in the Aristotelian

manner as _de universalibus,_ Campanella opposed to this definition

his _Scientia est de singularibus._ In like manner its men of letters,

prejudiced in favour of Latin, at first refused to recognize the new

languages that had been formed during the Middle Ages, as well as

medieval literature and poetry; its jurists rejected the feudal in

favour of the Roman legal code, its politicians representative forms

in favour of absolute lordship and monarchy. It was then that first

appeared the conception of the Middle Ages as a whole, opposed to

another whole, formed of the ancient and the ancient-modern, into

which the Middle Ages were inserted like an irksome and painful wedge.

The word 'medieval' was certainly late in appearing as an official

designation, employed in the divisions and titles of histories (toward

the end of the seventeenth century, as it would seem, in the manuals

of Cellario); previously it had only just occurred here and there; but

the thought contained in it had been in the air for some time--that is

to say, in the soul of everybody--eked out with other words, such as

'barbarous' or 'Gothic' ages, and Vasari expresses it by means of the

distinction between ancient and 'old,' calling those things ancient

which occurred before the existence of Constantine, of Corinth, of

Athens, of Rome, and of other very famous cities built up to the time

of Nero, of the Vespasians, of Trajan, Hadrian, and Antoninus, and

'old' those "which had their origin from St Silvester onward." In

any case, the distinction was clear: on the one hand most brilliant

light, on the other dense darkness. After Constantine, writes the

same Vasari, "every sort of virtue" was lost, "beautiful" souls and

"lofty" intellects became corrupted into "most ugly" and "basest,"

and the fervent zeal of the new religion did infinite damage to the

arts. This means neither more nor less than that _dualism,_ one of the

capital traits of the Middle Ages, was retained, although differently

determined, for now the god was (although not openly acknowledged)

antiquity, art, science, Greek and Roman life, and its adversary, the

reprobate and rebel, was the Middle Age, 'Gothic' temples, theology and

philosophy bristling with difficulties, the clumsy and cruel customs of

that age. But just because the respective functions of the two terms

were merely inverted, their opposition remained, and if Christianity

did not succeed in understanding Paganism and in recognizing its

father, so the Renaissance failed to recognize itself as the son of

the Middle Ages, and did not understand the positive and durable value

of the period that was closing. For this reason, both ages destroyed

or allowed to disappear the monuments of the previous age. This was

certainly far less the case with the Renaissance, which expressed

itself less violently and was deeply imbued with the thought of the

Middle Ages, and, owing to the idea of humanity, had an obscure feeling

of the importance of its predecessor. So much was this the case that

the school of learned men and philologists already mentioned was formed

at that time, with the new of investigating medieval antiquities. But

the learned are the learned--that is to say, they do not take an active

part in the struggles of their time, though busied with the collection

and arrangement of its chronicles and remains, which they often judge

in accordance with the vulgar opinion of their own time, so that it is

quite customary to find them despising the subject of their labours,

declaring that the poet whom they are studying has no value, or that

the period to which they are consecrating their entire life is ugly

and displeasing. It needed much to free the flame of intelligence from

the heaps of medieval antiquities accumulated for centuries by the

learned, and the Middle Ages were abhorred during the Renaissance,

even when they were investigated. The drama of love and hatred was not

dissimilar in its forms, nor less bitterly dualistic, although vastly

more interesting, than that which was then being played out between

Catholics and Protestants. The latter called the Pope Antichrist, and

the primacy of the Roman Church _mysterium iniquitatis,_ and compiled

a catalogue _testium veritatis_ of those who had opposed that iniquity

even while it prevailed. The Catholics returned the compliment with

remarks about Luther and the Reformation, and composed catalogues

of heretics, Satan's witnesses. But this strife was a relic of the

past, and would have ended by becoming gradually attenuated and

dispersed; whereas the other was an element of the future, and could

only be conquered by long effort and a new conception of the loftiest

character.

V

THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT

Meanwhile the historiography which immediately followed pushed the

double aporia of antiquity and of the Middle Ages to the extreme; and

it was owing to this radical unprejudiced procedure that it acquired

its definite physiognomy and the right of being considered a particular

historiographical period. The symbolical vesture, woven of memories of

the Græco-Roman world, with which the modern spirit had first clothed

itself, is now torn and thrown away. The thought that the ancients had

not been the oldest and wisest among the peoples, but the youngest

and the least expert, and that the true ancients, that is to say, the

most expert and mature in mind, are co be found in the men of the

modern world, had little by little made its way and become universally

accepted. Reason in its nudity, henceforth saluted by its proper

name, succeeds the example and the authority of the Græco-Romans,

which represented reason opposed to barbaric culture and customs.

Humanitarianism, the cult of humanity, also idolized by the name of

'nature,' that is to say, ingenuous general human nature, succeeds to

humanism, with its one-sided admirations for certain peoples and for

certain forms of life. Histories written in Latin become scarce or

are confined to the learned, and those written in national languages

are multiplied; criticism is exercised not only upon medieval

falsifications and fables, upon the writings of credulous and ignorant

monks in monasteries, but upon the pages of ancient historians, and the

first doubts appear as to the truth of the historical Roman tradition.

A feeling of sympathy, however, toward the ancients still persists,

whereas repugnance and abhorrence for the Middle Ages continue to

increase. All feel and say that they have emerged, not only from

darkness, but from the twilight before dawn, that the sun of reason

is high on the horizon, illuminating the intellect and irradiating

it with most vivid light. 'Light,' 'illumination,' and the like are

words pronounced on every occasion and with ever increasing conviction

and energy; hence the title 'age of light,' of 'enlightenment' or

of 'illumination,' given to the period extending from Descartes to

Kant. Another term began to circulate, at first used rarely and in

a restricted sense--'progress.' It gradually becomes more insistent

and familiar, and finally succeeds in supplying a criterion for the

judgment of facts, for the conduct of life, for the construction of

history, becomes the subject of special investigations, and of a new

kind of history, the history of the _progresses_ of the human spirit.

But here we observe the persistence and the potency of Christian and

theological thought. The progress so much discussed was, so to speak,

a progress without _development,_ manifesting itself chiefly in a sigh

of satisfaction and security, as of one, favoured by fortune, who has

successfully encountered many obstacles and now looks serenely upon

the present, secure as to the future, with mind averted from the past,

or returning to it now and then for a brief moment only, in order to

lament its ugliness, to despise and to smile at it. Take as an example

of all the most intelligent and at the same time the best of the

historical representatives of enlightenment M. de Voltaire, who wrote

his _Essai sur les mœurs_ in order to aid his friend the Marquise du

Châtelet to _surmonter le dégoût_ caused her by _l'histoire moderne

depuis la décadence de l'Empire romain,_ treating the subject in a

satirical vein. Or take Condorcet's work, _l'Esquisse d'un tableau

historique des progrès de l'esprit humain,_ which appears at its end

like a last will and testament (and also as the testament of the man

who wrote it), and where we find the whole century in compendium.

It is as happy in the present, even in the midst of the slaughters

of the Revolution, as rosy in its views as to the future, as it is

full of contempt and sarcasm for the past, which had generated that

present. The felicity of the period upon which they were entering

was clearly stated. Voltaire says that at this time _les hommes ont

acquis plus de lumières d'un bout de l'Europe à l'autre que dans

tous les âges précédents._ Man now brandishes the arm which none can

resist: _la seule arme contre le monstre, c'est la Raison: la seule

manière d'empêcher les hommes d'être absurdes et méchants, c'est de

les éclairer; pour rendre le fanatisme exécrable, il ne faut que le

peindre._ Certainly it was not denied that there had been something

of good and beautiful in the past. They must have existed, if they

suffered from superstition and oppression. _On voit dans l'histoire

les erreurs et les préjugés se succéder tour à tour, et chasser la

vérité et la raison: on voit les habiles et les heureux enchaîner

les imbéciles et écraser les infortunés; et encore ces habiles et

ces heureux sont eux-mêmes les jouets de la fortune, ainsi quelles

esclaves qu'ils gouvernent._ And not only had the good existed, though

oppressed, but it had also been efficient in a certain measure: _au

milieu de ces saccagements et de ces destructions nous voyons un amour

de l'ordre qui anime en secret le genre humain et qui a prévenu sa

ruine totale: c'est un des ressorts de la nature, qui reprend toujours

sa force...._ And then the 'great epochs' must not be forgotten, the

'centuries' in which the arts nourished as the result of the work

of wise men and monarchs, les quatre âges heureux of history. But

between this sporadic good, weak or acting covertly, or appearing

only for a time and then disappearing, and that of the new era, the

quantitative and energetic difference is such that it is turned into

a qualitative difference: a moment comes when men learn to think, to

rectify their ideas, and past history seems like a tempestuous sea

to one who has landed upon solid earth. Certainly everything is not

to be praised in the new times; indeed, there is much to blame: _les

abus servent de lois dans presque toute la terre; et si les plus sages

des hommes s'assemblaient pour faire des lois, où est l'État dont

la forme subsistât entière?_ The distance from the ideal of reason

was still great and the new century had still to consider itself as

a simple step toward complete rationality and felicity. We find the

fancy of a social form limit even in Kant, who dragged after him

so much old intellectualistic and scholastic philosophy. Sometimes

indeed its final form was not discovered, and its place was taken by a

vertiginous succession of more and more radiant social forms. But the

series of these radiant forms, the progress toward the final form and

the destruction of abuses, really began in the age of enlightenment,

after some episodic attempts in that direction during previous ages,

for this age alone had entered upon the just, the wide, the sure

path, the path illumined with the light of reason. It sometimes even

happened in the course of that period that a doctrine leading to

Rousseau's inverted the usual view and placed _reason,_ not in modern

times or in the near or distant future, but in the past, and not in

the medieval, Græco-Roman, or Oriental past, but in the prehistoric

past, in the 'state of nature,' from which history represented the

deviation. But this theory, though differing in its mode of expression,

was altogether identical in substance with that generally accepted,

because a prehistoric 'state of nature' never had any existence in the

reality, which is history, but expressed an ideal to be attained in a

near or distant future, which had first been perceived in modern times

and was therefore really capable of moving in that direction, whether

in the sense of realization or return. The religious character of all

this new conception of the world cannot be obscure to anyone, for it

repeats the Christian conceptions of God as truth and justice (the lay

God), of the earthly paradise, the redemption, the millennium, and so

on, in laical terms, and in like manner with! Christianity sets the

whole of previous history in opposition to itself, to condemn it, while

hardly admiring here and there some consoling ray of itself. What does

it matter that religion, and especially Christianity, was then the

target for fiercest blows and shame and mockery, that all reticence was

abandoned, and people were no longer satisfied with the discreet smile

that had once blossomed on the lips of the Italian humanists, but broke

out into open and fanatical warfare? Even lay fanaticism is the result

of dogmatism. What does it matter that pious folk were shocked and saw

the ancient Satan in the lay God, as the enlightened discovered the

capricious, domineering, cruel tribal deity in the old God represented

by the priest? The possibility of reciprocal accusations confirms the

_dualism,_ active in the new as in the old conception, and rendering

it unsuitable for the understanding of development and of history.

The historiographical _aporia_ of antiquity was also being increased

by abstract individualism or the 'pragmatic' conception. So true was

this that it was precisely at that time that the formula was resumed,

and pragmatism, as history of human ideas, sentiments, calculations,

and actions, as a narrative embellished with reflections, was opposed

to theological or medieval history and to the old ingenuous chronicles

or erudite collections of information and documents. Voltaire, who

combats and mocks at belief in divine designs and punishments and in

the leadership of a small barbarous population called upon to act as an

elect people and to be the axle of universal history (so that he may

substitute for it the lay theology which has been described), is the

same Voltaire who praises in Guicciardini and in Machiavelli the first

appearance of an _histoire bien faite._ The pragmatic mode of treatment

was extended even to the narrative of events relating to religion and

the Church and was applied by Mosheim and others in Germany. Owing to

this penetration of rationalism into ecclesiastical historiography and

into Protestant philosophy, it afterward seemed that the Reformation

had caused thought to progress, whereas, as regards this matter,

the Reformation simply received humanistic thought in the new form,

to which it had previously been opposed. If, in other respects, it

aided the advance of the historical conception in an original manner,

this was brought about, as we shall see, by means of another element

seething within it, mysticism. But meanwhile not even Catholicism

remained immune from the pragmatic, of which we find traces in the

_Discours_ of Bossuet, who represents the Augustinian conception, shorn

of its accessories, reduced and modernized, lacking the irreconcilable

dualism of the two cities and the Roman Empire as the ultimate and

everlasting empire, allowing natural causes preordained by God and

regulated by the laws to operate side by side with divine intervention,

and conceding a large share to the social and political conditions of

the various peoples. We do not speak of the last step taken by the same

author in his _Histoire des variations des églises_, when he conceived

the history of the Reformation objectively and in its internal motives,

presenting it as a rebellious movement directed against authority.

Even his adversary Voltaire recognized that Bossuet had not omitted

_d'autres causes_ in addition to the divine will favouring the elect

people, because he had several times taken count de l'esprit des

nations. Such was the strength of _l'esprit du siècle._ The pragmatic

conceptions of that time are still so well known and so near to us,

so persistent in so many of our narratives and historical manuals,

that it would be useless to describe them. When we direct our thoughts

to the historical works of the eighteenth century, there immediately

rises to the memory the general outline of a history in which priests

deceive, courtiers intrigue, wise monarchs conceive and realize good

institutions, combated and rendered almost vain through the malignity

of others and the ignorance of the people, though they remain

nevertheless a perpetual object of admiration for enlightened spirits.

The image of chance or caprice appears with the evocation of that

image, and mingling with the histories of these conflicts makes them

yet more complicated, their results yet stranger and more astonishing.

And what was the use, that is to say, the end, of historical narrative

in the view of those historians? Here also the reading of a few lines

of Voltaire affords the explanation: _Cet avantage consiste surtout

dans la comparaison qu'un homme d'état, un citoyen, peut faire des lois

et des mours étrangères avec celles de son pays: c'est ce qui excite

l'émulation des nations modernes dans les arts, dans l''agriculture,

dans le commerce. Les grandes fautes passées servent beaucoup à tout

genre. On ne saurait trop remettre devant les yeux les crimes et

les malheurs: on peut, quoi qu'on en dise, prévenir les uns et les

autres._ This thought is repeated with many verbal variations and is

to be found in nearly all the books of historiographie theory of the

time, continuing the Italian mode of the Renaissance in an easier

and more popular style. The words 'philosophy of history,' which had

later so much success, at first served to describe the assistance

obtainable from history in the shape of advice and useful precepts,

when investigated without prejudice--that is to say, with the one

'assumption' of reason.

The external end assigned to history led to the same results as in

antiquity, when history became oratorical and even historico-pedagogic

romances were composed, and as in the Renaissance, when 'declamatory

orations' were preserved, and history was treated as material more

or less well adapted to certain ends, whence arose a certain amount

of indifference toward its truth, so that Machiavelli, for instance,

deduced laws and precepts from the decades of Livy, not only assuming

them to be true, but accepting them in those parts which he must have

recognized to be demonstrably fabulous. Orations began to disappear,

but their disappearance was due to good literary taste rather than

to anything else, which recognized how out of harmony were those

expedients with the new popular, prosaic, polemical tone that narrative

assumed in the eighteenth century. In exchange they got something

worse: lack of esteem for history, which was considered to be an

inferior reality, unworthy of the philosopher, who seeks for laws, for

what is constant, for the uniform, the general, and can find it in

himself and in the direct observation of external and internal nature,

natural and human, without making that long, useless, and dangerous

tour of facts narrated in the histories. Descartes, Malebranche, and

the long list of their successors do not need especial mention here,

for it is well known how mathematics and naturalism dominated and

depressed history at this period. But was historical truth at least an

inferior truth? After fuller reflection, it did not seem possible to

grant even this. In history, said Voltaire, the word 'certain,' which

is used to designate such knowledge as that "two and two make four," "I

think," "I suffer," "I exist," should be used very rarely, and in the

sole sense of "very probable." Others held that even this was saying

too much, for they altogether denied the truth of history and declared

that it was a collection of fables, of inventions and equivocations, or

of undemonstrable affirmations. Hence the scepticism or Pyrrhonism of

the eighteenth century, which showed itself on several occasions and

has left us a series of curious little books as a document of itself.

Such is, indeed, the inevitable result when historical knowledge is

looked upon as a mass of individual testimonies, dictated or altered by

the passions, or misunderstood through ignorance, good at the best for

supplying edifying and terrible examples in confirmation of the eternal

truths of reason, which, for the rest, shine with their own light.

It would nevertheless be altogether erroneous to found upon the

exaggeration to which the theological and pragmatical views attained

in the historiography of the enlightenment, and see in it a decadence

or regression similar to that of the Renaissance and of other

predecessors. Not only were germs of error evolved at that time, not

only did the difficulties that had appeared in the previous period

become more acute, but there was also developed, and elevated to a

high degree of efficiency, that historiography of spiritual values

which Christian historiography had intensified and almost created, and

which the Renaissance had begun to transfer to the earth. Voltaire

as historiographer deserves to be defended (and this has recently

been done by several writers, admirably by Fueter), because he has

a lively perception of the need of bringing history back from the

treatment of the external to that of the internal and strives to

satisfy this need. For this reason, books that gave accounts of wars,

treaties, ceremonies, and solemnities seemed to him to be nothing but

'archives' or 'historical dictionaries,' useful for consultation on

certain occasions, but history, true history, he held to be something

altogether different. The duty of true history could not be to weight

the memory with external or material facts, or as he called them

events (événements), but to discover what was the society of men in

the past, _la société des hommes, comment on vivait dans l'intérieur

des familles, quels arts étaient cultivés,_ and to paint 'manners'

(_les mours_); not to lose itself in the multitude of insignificant

particulars (_petits faits_), but to collect only those that were of

importance (_considérables_) and to explain the spirit (_l'esprit_)

that had produced them. Owing to this preference that Voltaire accords

to manners over battles we find in him the conception (although it

remains without adequate treatment and gets lost in the ardour of

polemic) that it is not for history to trace the portrait of human

splendours and miseries (_les détails de la splendeur et de la misère

humaine_) but only of manners and of the arts, that is, of the

positive work; in his _Siècle de Louis XIV_ he says that he wishes to

illustrate the government of that monarch, not in so far as il a fait

du bien aux français, but in so far as il a fait du lien aux hommes.

What Voltaire undertook, and to no small extent achieved, forms the

principal object of all historians' labours at this period. Whoever

wishes to do so can see in Fueter's book how the great pictures

to be found in Voltaire's _Essai sur les mours_ and _Siècle_ were

imitated in the pages both of French writers and in those of other

European countries--for instance, in the celebrated introduction by

Robertson to his history of Charles V. It will also be noticed how the

special histories of this or that aspect of culture are multiplied

and perfected, as though several of the _desiderata_ mentioned by

Bacon in his classification of history had been thus supplied. The

history of philosophy abandons more and more the type of collections

of anecdotes and utterances of philosophers, to become the history

of systems, from Brucker to Buhle and to Tiedemann. The history of

art takes the shape of a special problem in Winckelmann's work and in

the works of his successors. In Voltaire's own books and in those of

his school it assumes that of literature; in those of Dubos and of

Montesquieu that of rights and of institutions; in Germany it leads to

the production of a work as original and realistic as the history of

Osnabrück by Möser. In the specialist work of Heeren, the history of

industry and commerce separates itself from the historical divisions

or digressions of economic treatises and takes a form of its own. The

history of social customs investigates (as in Sainte-Palaye's book

on _Ancienne chevalerie_) even the minutest aspects of social and

moral life. Had not Voltaire remarked about tournaments that _il se

fait des révolutions dans les plaisirs comme dans tout le reste?_ And

to limit ourselves to Italy, which at that time was also acting on

the initiative, though she soon afterward withdrew and received her

impulse from the other countries of Europe, it is well to remember

that in the eighteenth century Pietro Giannone, expressing the desires

and the attempts at their realization of a multitude of Neapolitan

compatriots and contemporaries, traced the civil history of the Kingdom

of Naples, giving much space to the relations between Church and State

and to the incidents of legislation. Many followed this example in

Italy and outside it (among the many were Montesquieu and Gibbon). In

Italy, too, Ludovico Antonio Muratori illustrated medieval life in

his _Antiquitates Italiæ,_ and Tiraboschi composed a great history of

Italian literature (understood as that of the whole culture of Italy),

notable not less for its erudition than for its clearness of design,

while other lesser writers, like Napoli Signorelli, in his _Vicende

della cultura delle due Sicilie_, particularized in certain regions,

sprinkling their history with the philosophy current at the time. The

Jesuit Bettinelli, too, imitated the historical books of Voltaire

for the history of letters, arts, and customs in Italy, Bonafede the

work of Brucker for the history of philosophy, and Lanzi, in a manner

far superior to those just mentioned, continued the path followed by

Winckelmann in his _History of Painting._

Not only did the historiography of the enlightenment render history

more 'interior' and develop it in its interiority, but it also

broadened it in space and time. Here too Voltaire represents in an

eminent degree the needs of his age, with his continual accusations of

narrowness and meanness levelled at the traditional image of universal

history, as composed of Hebrew or sacred history and Græco-Roman or

profane history, or, as he says, _histoires prétendues universelles,

fabriquées dans notre Occident._ A beginning was made with the use of

the material discovered, transported, and accumulated by explorers and

travellers from the Renaissance onward, of which a considerable part

had been contributed by the Jesuits and by missionaries. India and

China attracted attention, both on account of their antiquity and of

the high grade of civilization to which they had attained. Translations

of religious and literary Oriental texts were soon added to this,

and it became possible to discuss that civilization, not merely at

second-hand and according to the narratives of travellers. This

increase of knowledge relating to the East is paralleled by increase

of knowledge not only in relation to antiquity (these studies were

never dropped, but changed their centre, first from Italy to France

and Holland, then to England, and then to Germany), but also in regard

to the Middle Ages, in the works of the Benedictines, of Leibnitz,

Muratori, and very many others, who here also specialized both as

regards the objects of their researches and as to the regions or cities

in which they conducted them, as for instance De Meo in his _Annali

critici del Regno di Napoli._

With the increase of erudition, of the variety of documents and

information available, went hand in hand a more refined criticism as

to the authenticity of the one and of the value as evidence of the

other. Fueter does well to note the progress in method accomplished by

the Benedictines and by Leibnitz (who did not surpass those excellent

and learned monks in this respect, although he was a philosopher) up

to Muratori, who did not restrict himself to testing the genuineness

of tradition, but initiated criticism of the tendencies of individual

witnesses, of the interests and passions which colour and give

their shape to narratives. The en-lightened, with Voltaire at their

head, initiated another kind of criticism of a more intrinsic sort,

directed to things and to the knowledge of things (to literary, moral,

political, and military experience), recognizing the impossibility

that things should have happened in the way that they are said to have

happened by superficial, credulous, or prejudiced historians, and

attempting to reconstruct them in the only way that they could have

happened. We shall admire in Voltaire (especially in the _Siècle_) his

lack of confidence in the reports of courtiers and servants, accustomed

to forge calumnies and to interpret maliciously and anecdotically the

external actions of sovereigns and statesmen.

This happened because the historiography of the enlightenment, while

it preserved and even exaggerated pragmatism, yet on the other

hand refined and spiritualized it, as will have been observed in

the expressions preferred by Voltaire and even in the theologizing

Bossuet: _l'esprit des nations, l'esprit du temps._ What that _esprit_

was naturally remained vague, because the support of philosophy,

in which at that time those newly imported concepts introduced an

unexpected element of conflict, was lacking to refer it to the ideal

determinations of the spirit in its development and to conceive the

various epochs and the various nations as each playing its own part in

the spiritual drama. Thus it often happened that _esprit_ was perverted

into a fixed quality, such as _race_, if it were a question of nations,

and into a current or mode, if periods were spoken of, and was thus

naturalized and pragmatized. _Trois choses,_ wrote Voltaire, _influent

sans cesse sur l'esprit des hommes, le climat, le gouvernement, et

la religion: c'est la seule manière d'expliquer l'énigme du monde:_

where the 'spirit' is lowered to the position of a product of natural,

and social circumstances. The suggestive word had, however, been

pronounced, and a clear consciousness of the terms themselves of the

social, political, and cultural struggle that was being carried on

would have little by little emerged. For the time being, climate,

government, religion, genius of the peoples, genius of the time, were

all more or less happy attempts to go beyond pragmatism and to place

causality in a universal order. This effort, and at the same time its

limit--that is to say, the falling back into the abstract and pragmatic

form of explanation--is also shown in the doctrine of the 'single

event,' which was believed to determine at a stroke the new epoch of

barbarism or of civilization. Thus at this time it was customary to

assign enormous importance to the Crusades or to the Turkish occupation

of Constantinople, as Fueter records, with special reference to

Richardson's history. Another consequence of the same embarrassment

was the slight degree of fusion attained in the various histories of

culture, of customs, and of the arts that were composed it this time.

The various manifestations of life were set down one after the other

without any success, or even any attempt at developing them organically.

Doubtless the new and vigorous historiographical tendencies of the

enlightenment were then attacking other barriers opposed to them by

the already mentioned lay-theological dualism, in addition to those of

pragmatism and of naturalism. This lay-theology ended by negating the

principle of development itself, because the judgment of the past as

consisting of darkness and errors precluded any serious conception of

religion, poetry, philosophy, or of primitive and bygone institutions.

What did an institution of the great importance of 'divination' in

primitive civilizations amount to for Voltaire in the formative process

of observation and scientific deduction? The invention _du premier

fripon qui rencontra un imbécile._ Or oracles, also of such importance

in the life of antiquity? _Des fourberies._ To what amounted the

theological struggles between Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists

in connexion with the Eucharist? To the ridiculous spectacle of the

Papists _who mangeaient Dieu pour pain, les luthériens du pain et Dieu,

les calvinistes mangèrent le pain et ne mangèrent point Dieu._ What

was the only end that could be attained by the Jansenists? Boredom: a

sequence of tiresome _querelles théologiques_ and of petty querelles

de plume, so that nothing remains of the writers of that time who took

part in them but geometry, reasoned grammar, logic--that is to say,

only what _appartient à la raison; the querelles théologiques were

une maladie de plus dans l'esprit humain._ Nor does the philosophy

of earlier times receive better treatment. That of Plato was nothing

but _une mauvaise métaphysique,_ a tissue of arguments so bad that

it seems impossible they could have been admired and added to by

others yet more extravagant from century to century, until Locke was

reached: Locke, _qui seul a développé l'entendement humain dans un

livre où il n'y a que des vérités, et, ce qui rend l'ouvrage parfait,

toutes les vérités sont claires._ In poetry, modern work was placed

above ancient, the Gerusalemme above the Iliad, the Orlando above the

Odyssey, Dante seems obscure and awkward, Shakespeare a barbarian not

without talent. Medieval literature was beneath consideration: _On a

recueilli quelques malheureuses compositions de ce temps: c'est faire

un amas de cailloux tirés dantiques masures quand on est entouré de

palais._ Frederick of Prussia, who here showed himself a consistent

Voltairean, did not receive the new edition of the Nibelungenlied and

the other epic monuments of Germany graciously. In a word, the whole

of the past lost its value, or preserved only the negative value

of evil: _Que les citoyens d'une ville immense, où les arts, les

plaisirs, et la paix régnent aujourd'hui, où la raison même commence à

s'introduire, comparent les temps, et qu'ils se plaignent, s'ils osent.

C'est une réflexion qu'il faut faire presque à chaque page de cette

histoire._ The lack of the conception of development rendered sterile

the very acquisition of knowledge of distant things and people; and

although there was in certain respects merit in introducing India and

China into universal history, and although the criticism and satire

of the 'four monarchies' and of 'sacred' history was to a certain

extent justified, it is well to remember that in the notion mocked at

was satisfied the legitimate need for understanding history in its

relations with Christian and European civilized life; and that if it

had not been found possible (and it never was at that time) to form a

more complete chain, in which were Arabia, India and China, and the

American civilizations, and all the other newly discovered things,

these additional contributions to knowledge would have remained a mere

object for curiosity or imagination. India, China, and the East in

general were therefore of little more use in the eighteenth century

than to manifest an affection for tolerance, indeed for religious

indifferentism. Those distant countries, in which there was no

proselytizing frenzy, and which did not send missionaries to weary

Europe--though Europe did not spare them such visitations--were not

treated as historical realities, nor did they obtain their place in

the reality of spiritual development, but became longed-for ideals,

countries of dream. Those who in our day renew praises of Asiatic

toleration, contrasting it with European intolerance, and wax tender

over such wisdom and meekness, are not aware that in so doing they

are repeating uselessly and inopportunely what Voltaire has already

done; and if in this matter he did not aid the better understanding

of history, he at any rate fulfilled a practical and moral function

which was necessary for the conditions of his own time. The defective

conception of development, and not accidental circumstances, such as

the publicistic, journalistic, and literary tendencies of the original

among those historians, is also the profound reason for the failure of

contact and of union between the immense mass of erudition accumulated

by the sixteenth century philologists, and the historiography of the

enlightenment. How were those documents and collections to be employed

in the slow and laborious development of the spirit, if, according to

the new conception, instead of developing, the spirit was to leap, and

had indeed already made a great leap and left the past far behind? It

was sufficient to rummage from time to time among them and extract some

curious detail, which should fit in with the polemic of the moment.

_C'est un vaste magasin, où vous prendrez ce qui est à votre usage,_

said Voltaire. Thus the learned and the enlightened, both of them

children of their time, remained divided among themselves, the former

incapable of rising to the level of history owing to their slight

vivacity of spirit, the latter overrunning it owing to their too great

vivacity, and reducing it to a form of journalism.

All these limits, just because they are limits, assign its proper

sphere to the historiography of the enlightenment, but they must

not be taken as meaning that it had not made any progress. That

historiography, plunged in the work at the moment most urgent,

surrounded with the splendour of the truths that it was in the act

of revealing around it, failed to see those limits and its own

deficiencies, or saw them rarely and with difficulty. It was aware only

that it progressed and progressed rapidly, nor was it wrong in this

belief. Nor are those critics (among whom is Fueter) wrong who now

defend it from the bad reputation that has befallen it and celebrate

its many virtues, which we also have set in a clear light and have

added to, and whose connexion and unity we have proved. Yet we must

not leave that bad reputation unexplained, for it sounds far more

serious than the usual depreciation by every historical period of the

one that has preceded it, with the view of showing its inferiority

to the present. Here, on the contrary, we find a particular judgment

of depreciation, pronounced even by comparison with the periods

that preceded the enlightenment, so that this period, and not, for

example, the Renaissance, has especially received the epithet of

'anti-historical' ("the anti-historical eighteenth century"). We find

the explanation of this when we think of the dissipation then taking

place of all symbolical veils, received from _venerable antiquity,_ and

of the crude dualism and conflict which were being instigated at that

time between history and religion. The Renaissance was also itself an

affirmation of human reason, but at the moment of its breaking with

medieval tradition it was felt to be all the same tied to classical

tradition, which gave it an appearance of historical consciousness (an

appearance and not the reality). The philosophers of the Renaissance

often invoked and placed themselves under the protection of the

ancient philosophers, Plato against Aristotle, or the Greek Aristotle

against the Aristotle of the commentators. The lettered men of the

period sought to justify the new works of art and the new judgments

upon them by appealing to the precepts of antiquity, although they

sophisticated and subtilized what they found there. Philosophers,

artists, and critics turned their shoulders upon antiquity only when

and where no sort of conciliation was possible, and it was only the

boldest among them who ventured to do even this. The ancient republics

were taken as an example by the politicians, with Livy as their text,

as the Bible was by the Christians. Religion, which was exhausted or

had been extinguished in the souls of the cultured, was of necessity

preserved for the people as an instrument of government, a vulgar form

of philosophy: almost all are agreed as to this, from Machiavelli to

Bruno. The sage legislator or the 'prince' of Machiavelli and the

enlightened despot of Voltaire, who were both of them idealizations

of the absolute monarchies that had moulded Europe politically to

their will, have substantial affinities; but the sixteenth-century

politician, expert in human weaknesses and charged with all the

experience of the rich history of Greece and of Rome, studied finesse

and transactions, where the enlightened man of the eighteenth century,

encouraged by the ever renewed victories of the _Reason,_ raised

Reason's banner, and for her took his sword from the scabbard, without

feeling the smallest necessity for covering his face with a mask. King

Numa created a religion in order to deceive the people, and was praised

for it by Machiavelli; but Voltaire would have abused him for doing

so, as he abused all inventors of dogmas and promoters of fanaticism.

What more is to be said? The rationalism of the Renaissance was

especially the work of the Italian genius, so well balanced, so careful

to avoid excesses, so accommodating, so artistic; enlightenment, which

was especially the work of the French genius, was radical, consequent,

apt to run into extremes, logistical.

When the genius of the two countries and the two epochs is compared,

the enlightenment is bound to appear anti-historical with respect

to the Renaissance, which, owing to the comparison thus drawn and

instituted with such an object, becomes endowed with a historical

sense and with a sense of development which it did not possess, having

also been essentially rationalistic and anti-historical, and, in a

certain sense, more so than the enlightenment. I say more than the

enlightenment, not only because the latter, as I have shown, greatly,

increased historical knowledge and ideas, but also precisely because it

caused all the contradictions latent in the Renaissance to break out.

This was an apparent regression in historical knowledge, but in reality

it was an addition to life, and therefore to historical consciousness

itself, as we clearly see immediately afterward. The triumph and

the catastrophe of the enlightenment was the French Revolution; and

this was at the same time the triumph and the catastrophe of its

historiography.

VI

THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF ROMANTICISM