HUMANISM IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY.
Who now were those who acted as mediators between their own age and a
venerated antiquity, and made the latter a chief element in the culture
of the former?
They were a crowd of the most miscellaneous sort, wearing one face
to-day and another to-morrow; but they clearly felt themselves, and it
was fully recognised by their time, that they formed a wholly new
element in society. The ‘clerici vagantes’ of the twelfth century, whose
poetry we have already referred to (p. 174), may perhaps be taken as
their forerunner--the same unstable existence, the same free and more
than free views of life, and the germs at all events of the same pagan
tendencies in their poetry. But now, as competitor with the whole
culture of the Middle Ages, which was essentially clerical and was
fostered by the Church, there appeared a new civilisation, founding
itself on that which lay on the other side of the Middle Ages. Its
active representatives became influential[470] because they knew what
the ancients knew, because they tried to write as the ancients wrote,
because they began to think, and soon to feel, as the ancients thought
and felt. The tradition to which they devoted themselves passed at a
thousand points into genuine reproduction.
Some modern writers deplore the fact that the germs of a far more
independent and essentially national culture, such as appeared in
Florence about the year 1300, were afterwards so completely swamped by
the humanists.[471] There was then, we are told, nobody in Florence who
could not read; even the donkey-men sang the verses of Dante; the best
Italian manuscripts which we possess belonged originally to Florentine
artisans; the publication of a popular encyclopædia, like the ‘Tesoro’
of Brunette Latini, was then possible; and all this was founded on a
strength and soundness of character due to the universal participation
in public affairs, to commerce and travel, and to the systematic
reprobation of idleness. The Florentines, it is urged, were at that time
respected and influential throughout the whole world, and were called in
that year, not without reason, by Pope Boniface VIII., ‘the fifth
element.’ The rapid progress of humanism after the year 1400 paralysed
native impulses. Henceforth men looked to antiquity only for the
solution of every problem, and consequently allowed literature to sink
into mere quotation. Nay, the very fall of civil freedom is partly to be
ascribed to all this, since the new learning rested on obedience to
authority, sacrificed municipal rights to Roman law, and thereby both
sought and found the favour of the despots.
These charges will occupy us now and then at a later stage of our
inquiry, when we shall attempt to reduce them to their true value, and
to weigh the losses against the gains of this movement. For the present
we must confine ourselves to showing how the civilisation even of the
vigorous fourteenth century necessarily prepared the way for the
complete victory of humanism, and how precisely the greatest
representatives of the national Italian spirit were themselves the men
who opened wide the gate for the measureless devotion to antiquity in
the fifteenth century.
To begin with Dante. If a succession of men of equal genius had presided
over Italian culture, whatever elements their natures might have
absorbed from the antique, they still could not fail to retain a
characteristic and strongly-marked national stamp. But neither Italy nor
Western Europe produced another Dante, and he was and remained the man
who first thrust antiquity into the foreground of national culture. In
the ‘Divine Comedy’ he treats the ancient and the Christian worlds, not
indeed as of equal authority, but as parallel to one another. Just as,
at an earlier period of the Middle Ages types and antitypes were sought
in the history of the Old and New Testaments, so does Dante constantly
bring together a Christian and a pagan illustration of the same
fact.[472] It must be remembered that the Christian cycle of history and
legend was familiar, while the ancient was relatively unknown, was full
of promise and of interest, and must necessarily have gained the upper
hand in the competition for public sympathy when there was no longer a
Dante to hold the balance between the two.
Petrarch, who lives in the memory of most people nowadays chiefly as a
great Italian poet, owed his fame among his contemporaries far rather to
the fact that he was a kind of living representative of antiquity, that
he imitated all styles of Latin poetry, endeavoured by his voluminous
historical and philosophical writings not to supplant but to make known
the works of the ancients, and wrote letters that, as treatises on
matters of antiquarian interest, obtained a reputation which to us is
unintelligible, but which was natural enough in an age without
handbooks. Petrarch himself trusted and hoped that his Latin writings
would bring him fame with his contemporaries and with posterity, and
thought so little of his Italian poems that, as he often tell us, he
would gladly have destroyed them if he could have succeeded thereby in
blotting them out from the memory of men.
It was the same with Boccaccio. For two centuries, when but little was
known of the ‘Decameron’[473] north of the Alps, he was famous all over
Europe simply on account of his Latin compilations on mythology,
geography, and biography.[474] One of these, ‘De Genealogia Deorum,’
contains in the fourteenth and fifteenth books a remarkable appendix, in
which he discusses the position of the then youthful humanism with
regard to the age. We must not be misled by his exclusive references to
‘poesia,’ as closer observation shows that he means thereby the whole
mental activity of the poet-scholars.[475] This it is whose enemies he
so vigorously combats--the frivolous ignoramuses who have no soul for
anything but debauchery; the sophistical theologian, to whom Helicon,
the Castalian fountain, and the grove of Apollo were foolishness; the
greedy lawyers, to whom poetry was a superfluity, since no money was to
be made by it; finally the mendicant friars, described periphrastically,
but clearly enough, who made free with their charges of paganism and
immorality.[476] Then follows the defence of poetry, the proof that the
poetry of the ancients and of their modern followers contains nothing
mendacious, the praise of it, and especially of the deeper and
allegorical meanings which we must always attribute to it, and of that
calculated obscurity which is intended to repel the dull minds of the
ignorant.
And finally, with a clear reference to his own scholarly work,[477] the
writer justifies the new relation in which his age stood to paganism.
The case was wholly different, he pleads, when the Early Church had to
fight its way among the heathen. Now--praised be Jesus Christ!--true
religion was strengthened, paganism destroyed, and the victorious Church
in possession of the hostile camp. It was now possible to touch and
study paganism almost (_fere_) without danger. Boccaccio, however, did
not hold this liberal view consistently. The ground of his apostasy lay
partly in the mobility of his character, partly in the still powerful
and widespread prejudice that classical pursuits were unbecoming in a
theologian. To these reasons must be added the warning given him in the
name of the dead Pietro Petroni by the monk Gioacchino Ciani to give up
his pagan studies under pain of early death. He accordingly determined
to abandon them, and was only brought back from this cowardly resolve by
the earnest exhortations of Petrarch, and by the latter’s able
demonstration that humanism was reconcileable with religion.[478]
There was thus a new cause in the world and a new class of men to
maintain it. It is idle to ask if this cause ought not to have stopped
short in its career of victory, to have restrained itself deliberately,
and conceded the first place to purely national elements of culture. No
conviction was more firmly rooted in the popular mind, than that
antiquity was the highest title to glory which Italy possessed.
There was a symbolical ceremony familiar to this generation of
poet-scholars which lasted on into the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries, though losing the higher sentiment which inspired it--the
coronation of the poets with the laurel wreath. The origin of this
system in the Middle Ages is obscure, and the ritual of the ceremony
never became fixed. It was a public demonstration, an outward and
visible expression of literary enthusiasm,[479] and naturally its form
was variable. Dante, for instance, seems to have understood it in the
sense of a half-religious consecration; he desired to assume the wreath
in the baptistery of San Giovanni, where, like thousands of other
Florentine children, he had received baptism.[480] He could, says his
biographer, have anywhere received the crown in virtue of his fame, but
desired it nowhere but in his native city, and therefore died uncrowned.
From the same source we learn that the usage was till then uncommon, and
was held to be inherited by the ancient Romans from the Greeks. The
most recent source to which the practices could be referred is to be
found in the Capitoline contests of musicians, poets, and other artists,
founded by Domitian in imitation of the Greeks and celebrated every five
years, which may possibly have survived for a time the fall of the Roman
Empire; but as few other men would venture to crown themselves, as Dante
desired to do, the question arises, to whom did this office belong?
Albertino Mussato (p. 140) was crowned at Padua in 1310 by the bishop
and the rector of the University. The University of Paris, the rector of
which was then a Florentine (1341), and the municipal authorities of
Rome, competed for the honour of crowning Petrarch. His self-elected
examiner, King Robert of Anjou, would gladly have performed the ceremony
at Naples, but Petrarch preferred to be crowned on the Capitol by the
senator of Rome. This honour was long the highest object of ambition,
and so it seemed to Jacobus Pizinga, an illustrious Sicilian
magistrate.[481] Then came the Italian journey of Charles IV., whom it
amused to flatter the vanity of ambitious men, and impress the ignorant
multitude by means of gorgeous ceremonies. Starting from the fiction
that the coronation of poets was a prerogative of the old Roman
emperors, and consequently was no less his own, he crowned (May 15,
1355) the Florentine scholar, Zanobi della Strada, at Pisa, to the
annoyance of Petrarch, who complained that ‘the barbarian laurel had
dared adorn the man loved by the Ausonian Muses,’ and to the great
disgust of Boccaccio, who declined to recognise this ‘laurea Pisana’ as
legitimate.[482] Indeed it might be fairly asked with what right this
stranger, half Slavonic by birth, came to sit in judgment on the merits
of Italian poets. But from henceforth the emperors crowned poets
wherever they went on their travels; and in the fifteenth century the
popes and other princes assumed the same right, till at last no regard
whatever was paid to place or circumstances. In Rome, under Sixtus IV.,
the academy[483] of Pomponius Lætus gave the wreath on its own
authority. The Florentines had the good taste not to crown their famous
humanists till after death. Carlo Aretino and Lionardo Aretino were thus
crowned; the eulogy of the first was pronounced by Matteo Palmieri, of
the latter by Giannozzo Manetti, before the members of the council and
the whole people, the orator standing at the head of the bier, on which
the corpse lay clad in a silken robe.[484] Carlo Aretino was further
honoured by a tomb in Santa Croce, which is among the most beautiful in
the whole course of the Renaissance.