THE REVIVAL OF LEARNING IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY.
More than half a century before the taking of Constantinople by the
Turks, the learned men of that city, apprehensive of the approaching
fall of the empire, had begun to emigrate into Italy, where they opened
schools, and became the preceptors of princes and the guides of the
public taste, which they directed towards the study of the classic
writers of Greece especially, and even of Rome. But it was the fall
of Constantinople in 1453 which filled the Italian cities with these
learned strangers.
The Italians of that age needed only to receive this kind of direction,
and to be aided by these means of study; for they had for some time
been placed under those peculiar circumstances which have ever proved
the most favourable to the advancement of the human mind. Throughout
a number of independent states--crowded upon a narrow space, the same
language, yet diversified by dialects, was spoken. The energy, the
rivalry, the munificence that accompany an active commerce kept the
whole mass of society in movement; while the influence of a gorgeous
superstition, which sought to recommend itself by every embellishment
that the genius of man could devise or execute, overruled the tendency
of successful trade, and directed the ambition of princely merchants
towards objects more noble and intellectual than are those which wealth
usually selects as the means of distinction.
The formation of libraries, suggested or favoured by the abundant
importation of manuscripts from Constantinople, was the means not only
of making more widely known the works of those Greek authors which had
never fallen into oblivion, but of prompting researches which issued
in the recovery of the Latin writers also, many of whom had long been
forgotten. The appetite for books having thus been quickened, neither
cost nor labour was thenceforward spared in their accumulation; and
learned men were despatched, in all directions, throughout Europe,
western Asia, and Africa, expressly to collect manuscripts. In the
course of a few years, most of the authors that are now known to
us, were brought together in the libraries of Rome, Naples, Venice,
Florence, Milan, Vienna, and Paris, where they were laid open to those
who were best qualified to give them forth anew to the world.
Thus aided by the munificence and zeal of princes and popes, the
scholars of the fifteenth century sedulously applied themselves to
the discovery, the restoration, and the publication of the remains of
Greek and Roman literature; and so it was that in the course of sixty
or eighty years, most of the works now known had been committed to the
press. Since that time some few discoveries have been made; but the
principal improvements in classic literature, of later date, have
consisted in the emendation of the text of ancient authors by means
of a more extensive collation of manuscripts than the first editors
had any opportunity to institute. This restoration of the remains of
ancient works to their pristine integrity has not been effected, like
that of a dilapidated building, or a mutilated statue, by the addition
of new materials in an imagined conformity with the plan and taste of
the original work; but by the industrious collection and replacement of
the very particles of which it at first consisted.
The invention of printing, which virtually exempts books from the
operation of the law that subjects all things mundane to the decays of
time, has greatly promoted also the process of their renovation; for,
by giving to the issue of an edition of a standard work a degree of
importance, several hundred times greater than what belonged to the
transcription of a single copy, it has called for the employment of a
proportionably larger amount of learning, diligence, and caution in the
work of revision; and then, by enabling each successive editor to avail
himself of the labours of his predecessors, the advantages belonging to
the concentration of many minds upon the same subject have been secured.
It is a fact therefore, the significance of which should be clearly
understood, that, since the fifteenth century, the lapse of time,
instead of gradually impairing and corrupting the literary remains
of antiquity, has incessantly contributed to their renovation and
purification. Indeed it may be affirmed that, in relation to the
amount, the exactitude, and the certainty of our knowledge, we are
not receding from remote ages, but are constantly approaching towards
them. In a thousand instances what was unknown, or was doubtful, or
imperfect, or corrupted, at the commencement of the fifteenth century,
has been ascertained, restored, and completed in the nineteenth.
The history and the literature of Greece and Rome--long inhumed in
monasteries, were, at the period of their re-appearance, liable to
uncertainties and to suspicions which not all the learning and industry
of that vigorous age were able to dispel. But the learning and the
industry of the four centuries that have since elapsed, constantly
directed towards the same objects, and constantly accumulating a
various mass of evidence, have left exceedingly few questions of
literary antiquity open to controversy.
Thus then, by the mention of some leading facts, we have traced the
remains of ancient literature up to the time when they passed to the
press, and when their history can no longer be regarded as obscure or
questionable. Nor can it be thought that this body of literature is now
liable to the hazards of extinction from political changes, or from the
decline of learning in this or that country; for unless a universal
devastation should take its course, at once, over every region of the
civilized world, the literature now extant in books can neither perish,
nor suffer corruption. A temple, a statue, a picture, or a gem is but
_one_; and however durable may be the material of which it consists, it
continually decays, and it is always destructible. The touch of the
sculptor moulders from the chiselled surface; and the time will come
when every monument of his genius shall have crumbled into dust, and
when his fame--lost from the marble, shall live only in the works of
the poets and historians who were his contemporaries.
Thus it is that the _written_ records of distant ages, with the
knowledge of which the intellectual, moral, and political well-being of
mankind is inseparably connected, are secured from extinction by a mode
of conservation that is less liable to extensive hazards than any other
that can be imagined. If Man be cut off from the knowledge of the past,
he becomes indifferent to the future, and thenceforward sinks into the
rudeness and ferocity of the sensual life. The redundant amplitude,
therefore, of the means by which this knowledge is preserved, only
bears a due proportion to the importance of the consequences that
depend upon its perpetuation.