Ihr fuehrt ins Leben uns hinein;
Ihr laesst den armen schuldig werden;
Dann uebergiebt Ihr ihm der Pein,
Denn alle Schuld raecht sich auf Erden.
At the end of the fifteenth century, Italy was the centre of European
civilization: while the other nations were still plunged in a feudal
barbarism which seems almost as far removed from all our sympathies as
is the condition of some American or Polynesian savages, the Italians
appear to us as possessing habits of thought, a mode of life, political,
social, and literary institutions, not unlike those of to-day; as men
whom we can thoroughly understand, whose ideas and aims, whose general
views, resemble our own in that main, indefinable characteristic of
being modern. They had shaken off the morbid monastic ways of feeling,
they had thrown aside the crooked scholastic modes of thinking, they had
trampled under foot the feudal institutions of the Middle Ages; no
symbolical mists made them see things vague, strange, and distorted;
their intellectual atmosphere was as clear as our own, and, if they saw
less than we do, what they did see appeared to them in its true shape
and proportions. Almost for the first time since the ruin of antique
civilization, they could show well-organized, well-defined States;
artistically disciplined armies; rationally devised laws; scientifically
conducted agriculture; and widely extended, intelligently undertaken
commerce. For the first time, also, they showed regularly built,
healthy, and commodious towns; well-drained fields; and, more important
than all, hundreds of miles of country owned not by feudal lords, but by
citizens; cultivated not by serfs, but by free peasants. While in the
rest of Europe men were floundering among the stagnant ideas and
crumbling institutions of the effete Middle Ages, with but a vague
half-consciousness of their own nature, the Italians walked calmly
through a life as well arranged as their great towns, bold, inquisitive,
and sceptical: modern administrators, modern soldiers, modern
politicians, modern financiers, scholars, and thinkers. Towards the end
of the fifteenth century, Italy seemed to have obtained the philosophic,
literary, and artistic inheritance of Greece; the administrative, legal,
and military inheritance of Rome, increased threefold by her own strong,
original, essentially modern activities.
Yet, at that very time, and almost in proportion as all these advantages
developed, the moral vitality of the Italians was rapidly decreasing,
and a horrible moral gangrene beginning to spread: liberty was
extinguished; public good faith seemed to be dying out; even private
morality flickered ominously; every free State became subject to a
despot, always unscrupulous and often infamous; warfare became a mere
pretext for the rapine and extortions of mercenaries; diplomacy grew to
be a mere swindle; the humanists inoculated literature with the
filthiest refuse cast up by antiquity; nay, even civic and family ties
were loosened; assassinations and fratricides began to abound, and all
law, human and divine, to be set at defiance.
The nations who came into contact with the Italians opened their eyes
with astonishment, with mingled admiration and terror; and we, people of
the nineteenth century, are filled with the same feeling, only much
stronger and more defined, as we watch the strange ebullition of the
Renaissance, seething with good and evil, as we contemplate the
enigmatic picture drawn by the puzzled historian, the picture of a
people moving on towards civilization and towards chaos. Our first
feeling is perplexity; our second feeling, anger; we do not at first
know whether we ought to believe in such an anomaly; when once we do
believe in it, we are indignant at its existence. We accuse these
Italians of the Renaissance of having wilfully and shamefully perverted
their own powers, of having wantonly corrupted their own civilization,
of having cynically destroyed their own national existence, of having
boldly called down the vengeance of Heaven; we lament and we accuse,
naturally enough, but perhaps not justly.
Let us ask ourselves what the Renaissance really was, and what was its
use; how it was produced, and how it necessarily ended. Let us try to
understand its inherent nature, and the nature of what surrounded it,
which, taken together, constitute its inevitable fate; let us seek the
explanation of that strange, anomalous civilization, of that life in
death, and death in life. The Renaissance, inasmuch as it is something
which we can define, and not a mere vague name for a certain epoch, is
not a period, but a condition; and if we apply the word to any period in
particular, it is because in it that condition was peculiarly marked.
The Renaissance may be defined as being that phase in mediaeval history
in which the double influence, feudal and ecclesiastic, which had
gradually crushed the spontaneous life of the early mediaeval revival,
and reduced all to a dead, sterile mass, was neutralized by the
existence of democratic and secular communities; that phase in which,
while there existed not yet any large nations, or any definite national
feeling, there existed free towns and civic democracies. In this sense
the Renaissance began to exist with the earliest mediaeval revival, but
its peculiar mission could be carried out only when that general revival
had come to an end. In this sense, also, the Renaissance did not exist
all over Italy, and it existed outside Italy; but in Italy it was far
more universal than elsewhere: there it was the rule, elsewhere the
exception. There was no Renaissance in Savoy, nor in Naples, nor even in
Rome; but north of the Alps there was Renaissance only in individual
towns like Nuernberg, Augsburg, Bruges, Ghent, &c. In the North the
Renaissance is dotted about amidst the stagnant Middle Ages; in Italy
the Middle Ages intersect and interrupt the Renaissance here and there:
the consequence was that in the North the Renaissance was crushed by the
Middle Ages, whereas in Italy the Middle Ages were crushed by the
Renaissance. Wherever there was a free town, without direct dependence
on feudal or ecclesiastical institutions, governed by its own citizens,
subsisting by its own industry and commerce; wherever the burghers built
walls, slung chains across their streets, and raised their own
cathedral; wherever, be it in Germany, in Flanders, or in England, there
was a suspension of the deadly influences of the later Middle Ages;
there, to greater or less extent, was the Renaissance.
But in the North this rudimentary Renaissance was never suffered to
spread beyond the walls of single towns; it was hemmed in on all sides
by feudal and ecclesiastical institutions, which restrained it within
definite limits. The free towns of Germany were mostly dependent upon
their bishops or archbishops; the more politically important cities of
Flanders were under the suzerainty of a feudal family; they were subject
to constant vexations from their suzerains, and their very existence was
endangered by an attempt at independence; Liege was well-nigh destroyed
by the supporters of her bishop, and Ghent was ruined by the revenge of
the Duke of Burgundy. In these northern cities, therefore, the
commonwealth was restricted to a sort of mercantile
corporation--powerful within the town, but powerless without it; while
outside the town reigned feudalism, with its robber nobles, free
companies, and bands of outlawed peasants, from whom the merchant
princes of Bruges and Nuernberg could scarcely protect their wares. To
this political feebleness and narrowness corresponded an intellectual
weakness and pettiness: the burghers were mere self-ruling tradesfolk;
their interests did not extend far beyond their shops and their houses;
literature was cramped in guilds, and reflection and imagination were
confined within the narrow limits of town life. Everything was on a
small scale; the Renaissance was moderate and inefficient, running no
great dangers and achieving no great conquests. There was not enough
action to produce reaction; and, while the Italian free States were
ground down by foreign tyrannies, the German and Flemish cities
insensibly merged into the vast empire of the House of Austria. While
also the Italians of the sixteenth century rushed into moral and
religious confusion, which only Jesuitism could discipline, the Germans
of the same time quietly and comfortably adopted the Reformation.
The main cause of this difference, the main explanation of the fact that
while in the North the Renaissance was cramped and enfeebled, in Italy
it carried everything before it, lies in the circumstance that feudalism
never took deep root in Italy. The conquered Latin race was enfeebled,
it is true, but it was far more civilized than the conquering Teutonic
peoples; the Barbarians came down, not on to a previous layer of
Barbarians, but on to a deep layer of civilized men; the nomads of the
North found in Italy a people weakened and corrupt, but with a long and
inextinguishable habit of independence, of order, of industry. The
country had been cultivated for centuries, the Barbarians could not turn
it into a desert; the inhabitants had been organized as citizens for a
thousand years, the Barbarians could not reorganize them feudally. The
Barbarians who settled in Italy, especially the latest of them, the
Lombards, were not only in a minority, but at an immense disadvantage.
They founded kingdoms and dukedoms, where German was spoken and German
laws were enacted; but whenever they tried to communicate with their
Italian subjects, they found themselves forced to adopt the Latin
language, manners, and laws; their domination became real only in
proportion as it ceased to be Teutonic, and the Barbarian element was
swallowed up by what remained of Roman civilization. Little by little
these Lombard monarchies, without roots in the soil, and surrounded by
hostile influences, died out, and there remained of the invaders only a
certain number of nobles, those whose descendants were to bear the
originally German names of Gherardesca, Rolandinghi, Soffredinghi,
Lambertazzi, Guidi, and whose suzerains were the Bavarian and Swabian
dukes and marquises of Tuscan. Meanwhile the Latin element revived;
towns were rebuilt; a new Latin language was formed; and the burghers of
these young communities gradually wrested franchises and privileges from
the weak Teutonic rulers, who required Italian agriculture, industry,
and commerce, without which they and their feudal retainers would have
starved. Feudalism became speedily limited to the hilly country; the
plain became the property of the cities which it surrounded; the nobles
turned into mere robber chieftains, then into mercenary soldiers, and
finally, as the towns gained importance, they gradually descended into
the cities and begged admission into the guilds of artizans and
tradesfolk. Thus they grew into citizens and Italians; but for a long
time they kept hankering after feudalism, and looking towards the German
emperors who claimed the inheritance of the Lombard kings. The struggle
between Guelphs and Ghibellines, between the German feudal element and
the Latin civic one, ended in the complete annihilation of the former in
all the north and centre of Italy. The nobles sank definitely into
merchants, and those who persisted in keeping their castles were
speedily ousted by the commissaries of the free towns. Such is the
history of feudalism in Italy--the history of Barbarian minority
engulphed in Latin civilization; of Teutonic counts and dukes turned
into robber nobles, hunted into the hills by the townsfolk, and finally
seeking admission into the guilds of wool-spinners or money-changers;
and in it is the main explanation of the fact that the Italian
republics, instead of remaining restricted within their city walls like
those of the North, spread over whole provinces, and became real
politically organized States. And in such States having a free
political, military, and commercial life, uncramped by ecclesiastic or
feudal influence, in them alone could the great revival of human
intelligence and character thoroughly succeed. The commune was the only
species of free government possible during the Middle Ages, the only
form which could resist that utterly prostrating action of later
mediaevalism. Feudalism stamped out civilization; monasticism warped it;
in the open country it was burnt, trampled on, and uprooted; in the
cloister it withered and shrank and perished; only within the walls of a
city, protected from the storm without, and yet in the fresh atmosphere
of life, could it develope, flourish, and bear fruit.
But this system of the free town contained in itself, as does every
other institution, the seed of death--contained it in that expanding
element which developes, ripens, rots, and finally dissolves all living
organisms. A little town is formed in the midst of some feudal state, as
Pisa, Florence, Lucca, and Bologna were formed in the dominions of the
lords of Tuscany; the _elders_ govern it; it is protected from without;
it obtains privileges from its suzerain, always glad to oppose anything
to his vassals, and who, unlike them, is too far removed in the feudal
scale to injure the commune, which is under his supreme jurisdiction but
not in his land. The town can thus develope regularly, governing itself,
taxing itself, defending itself against encroaching neighbours; it
gradually extends beyond its own walls, liberates its peasantry, extends
its commerce, extinguishes feudalism, beats back its suzerain or buys
privileges from him; in short, lives the vigorous young life of the
early Italian commonwealths. But now the danger begins. The original
system of government, where every head of a family is a power in the
State, where every man helps to govern, without representation or
substitution, could exist only as long as the commune remained small
enough for the individual to be in proportion with it; as long as the
State remained small enough for all its citizens to assemble in the
market-place and vote, for every man to know every detail of the
administration, every inch of the land. When the limits were extended,
the burgher had to deal with towns and villages and men and things which
he did not know, and which he probably hated, as every small community
hated its neighbour; witness the horrible war, lasting centuries,
between the two little towns of Dinant and Bouvines on the Meuse. Still
more was this the case with an important city: the subjugated town was
hated all the more for being a rival centre; the burghers of Florence,
inspired only by their narrow town interest, treated Pisa according to
its dictates, that is, tried to stamp it out. Thence the victorious
communes came to be surrounded by conquered communes, which they dared
not trust with any degree of power; and which, instead of being so many
allies in case of invasion, were merely focuses of revolt, or at best
inert impediments. Similarly, when the communes enlarged, and found it
indispensable to delegate special men, who could attend to political
matters more thoroughly than the other citizens, they were constantly
falling under the tyranny of their _captains of the people_, of their
_gonfalonieri_, and of all other heads of the State; or else, as in
Florence, they were frightened by this continual danger into a system of
perpetual interference with the executive, which was thus rendered
well-nigh helpless. To this rule Venice forms the only exception, on
account of her exceptional position and history: the earliest burghers
turning into an intensely conservative and civic aristocracy, while
everywhere else the feudal nobles turned into petty burghers, entirely
subversive of communal interests. Venice had the yet greater safeguard
of being protected both from her victorious enemies and her own
victorious generals; who, however powerful on the mainland, could not
seriously endanger the city itself, which thus remained a centre of
reorganization in time of disaster. In this Venice was entirely unique,
as she was unique in the duration of her institutions and independence.
In the other towns of Italy, where there existed no naturally governing
family or class, where every citizen had an equal share in government,
and there existed no distinction save that of wealth and influence,
there was a constant tendency to the illegitimate preponderance of every
man or every family that rose above the average; and in a democratic,
mercantile State, not a day passed without some such elevation. In a
systematic, consolidated State, where the power is in the hands of a
hereditary sovereign or aristocracy, a rich merchant remains a rich
merchant, a victorious general remains a victorious general, an eloquent
orator remains an eloquent orator; but in a shapeless, flunctuating
democracy like those of Italy, the man who has influence over his
fellow-citizens, whether by his money, his soldiers, or his eloquence,
necessarily becomes the head of the State; everything is free and
unoccupied, only a little superior strength is required to push into it.
Cosimo de' Medici has many clients, many correspondents, many debtors;
he can bind people by pecuniary obligations: he becomes prince. Sforza
has a victorious army, whom he can either hound on to the city or
restrain into a protection of its interests: he becomes prince.
Savonarola has eloquence that makes the virtuous start up and the wicked
tremble: he becomes prince. The history of the Italian commonwealths
shows us but one thing: the people, the only legal possessors of
political power, giving it over to their bankers (Medici, Pepoli); to
their generals (Della Torre, Visconti, Scaligeri); to their monkish
reformers (Fra Bussolaro, Fra Giovanni da Vincenza, Savonarola). Here
then we have the occasional but inevitable usurpers, who either
momentarily or finally disorganize the State. But this is not all. In
such a State every family hate, every mercantile hostility, means a
corresponding political division. The guilds are sure to be rivals, the
larger wishing to exclude the smaller from government: the lower working
classes (the _ciompi_ of Florence) wish to upset the guilds completely;
the once feudal nobles wish to get back military power; the burghers
wish entirely to extirpate the feudal nobles; the older families wish to
limit the Government, the newer prefer democracy and Caesarism. Add to
this the complications of private interests, the personal jealousies and
aversions, the private warfare, inevitable in a town where legal justice
is not always to be had, while forcible retaliation is always within
reach; and the result is constant party spirit, insults, scuffles,
conspiracies: the feudal nobles build towers in the streets, the
burghers pull them down; the lower artizans set fire to the warehouses
of the guilds, the magistrates take part in the contest; blood is spilt,
magistrates are beheaded or thrown out of windows, a foreign State is
entreated to interfere, and a number of citizens are banished by the
victorious party. This latter result creates a new and terrible danger
for the State, in the persons of so many exiles, ready to do anything,
to join with any one, in order to return to the city and drive out their
enemies in their turn. The end of such constant upheavings is that the
whole population is disarmed, no party suffering its rival to have any
means of offence or defence. Moreover, as industry and commerce
develope, the citizens become unwilling to fight, while on the other
hand the invention of firearms, subverting the whole system of warfare,
renders special military training more and more necessary. In the days
of the Lombard League, of Campaldino and Montaperti, the citizens could
fight, hand to hand, round their _carroccio_ or banner, without much
discipline being required; but when it came to fortifying towns against
cannon, to drilling bodies of heavily armed cavalry, acting by the mere
dexterity of their movements; when war became a science and an art, then
the citizen had necessarily to be left out, and adventurers and poor
nobles had to form armies of mercenaries, making warfare their sole
profession. This system of mercenary troops, so bitterly inveighed
against by Machiavelli (who, of course, entirely overlooked its
inevitable origin and viewed it as a voluntarily incurred pest), added
yet another and, perhaps, the very worst danger to civil liberty. It
gave enormous, irresistible power to adventurers unscrupulous by nature
and lawless by education, the sole object of whose career it became to
obtain possession of States; by no means a difficult enterprise,
considering that they and their fellows were the sole possessors of
military force in the country. At the same time, this system of
mercenaries perfected the condition of utter defencelessness in which
the gradual subjection of rival cities, the violent party spirit, and
the general disarming of the burghers, had placed the great Italian
cities. For these troops, being wholly indifferent as to the cause for
which they were fighting, turned war into the merest game of
dodges--half-a-dozen men being killed at a great battle like that of
Anghiari--and they at the same time protracted campaigns beyond every
limit, without any decisive action taking place. The result of all these
inevitable causes of ruin, was that most of the commonwealths fell into
the hands of despots; while those that did not were paralyzed by
interior factions, by a number of rebellious subject towns, and by
generals who, even if they did not absolutely betray their employers,
never efficiently served them.
Such a condition of civic disorder lasted throughout the Middle Ages,
until the end of the fifteenth century, without any further evils
arising from it. The Italians made endless wars with each other,
conquered each other, changed their government without end, fell into
the power of tyrants; but throughout these changes their civilization
developed unimpeded; because, although one of the centres of national
life might be momentarily crushed, the others remained in activity, and
infused vitality even into the feeble one, which would otherwise have
perished. All these ups and downs seemed but to stir the life in the
country: and no vital danger appeared to threaten it; nor did any, so
long as the surrounding countries--France, Germany, and Spain--remained
mere vast feudal nebulae, formless, weightless, immovable. The Italians
feared nothing from them; they would call down the King of France or the
Emperor of Germany without a moment's hesitation, because they knew that
the king could not bring France, nor the emperor bring Germany, but only
a few miserable, hungry retainers with him; but Florence would watch the
growth of the petty State of the Scaligers, and Venice look with terror
at the Duke of Milan, because they knew that _there_ there was
concentrated life, and an organization which could be wielded as'
perfectly as a sword by the head of the State. In the last decade of the
fifteenth century the Italians called in the French to put down their
private enemies: Lodovico of Milan called down Charles VIII. to rid him
of his nephew and of the Venetians; the Venetians to rid them of
Lodovico: the Medici to establish them firmly in Florence; the party of
freedom to drive out the Medici. Each State intended to use the French
to serve their purpose, and then to send back Charles VIII. with a
little money and a great deal of derision, as they had done with kings
and emperors of earlier days. But Italian politicians suddenly
discovered that they had made a fatal mistake; that they had reckoned in
ignorance, and that instead of an army they had called down a nation:
for during the interval since their last appeal to foreign interference,
that great movement had taken place which had consolidated the
heterogeneous feudal nebulae into homogeneous and compact kingdoms.
Single small States, relying upon mercenary troops, could not for a
moment resist the shock of such an agglomeration of soldiery as that of
the French, and of their successors the Spaniards and Germans. Sismondi
asks indignantly, Why did the Italians not form a federation as soon as
the strangers appeared? He might as well ask, Why did the commonwealths
not turn into a modern monarchy? The habit of security from abroad and
of jealousy within; the essential nature of a number of rival trading
centres, made such a thing not only impossible of execution, but for a
while impossible of conception; confederacies had become possible only
when Burlamacchi was decapitated by the imperialists; popular resistance
had become a reality only when Feruccio was massacred by the Spaniards;
a change of national institutions was feasible only when all national
institutions had been destroyed; when the Italians, having recognized
the irresistible force of their adversaries, had ceased to form
independent States and larger and smaller guilds; when all the
characteristics of Italian civilization had been destroyed; when, in
short, it was too late to do anything save theorize with Machiavelli and
Guicciardini as to what ought to have been done. We must not hastily
accuse the volition of the Italians of the Renaissance; they may have
been egotistic and timid, but had they been (as some most certainly
were) heroic and self-sacrificing to the utmost degree, they could not
have averted the catastrophe. The nature of their civilization prevented
not only their averting the peril, but even their conceiving its
existence; the very nature of their political forms necessitated such a
dissolution of them. The commune grows from within; it is a little speck
which gradually extends its circumference, and the further this may be
from the original centre, the less do its parts coalesce. The modern
monarchy grows from external pressure, and towards the centre; it is a
huge mass consolidating into a hard, distinct shape. Thence it follows
that the more the commonwealth developes, the weaker it grows, because
its tendency is to spread and fall to pieces; whereas the more the
monarchy developes, the stronger it becomes, because it fills up towards
the centre, and becomes more vigorously knit together. The city ceases
to be a city when extended over hundreds of miles; the nation becomes
all the more a nation for being compressed towards a central point.
The entire political collapse of Italy in the sixteenth century was not
only inevitable, from the essential nature of the civilization of the
Renaissance, but it was also indispensable in order that this
civilization might fulfil its mission. Civilization cannot spread so
long as it is contained within a national mould, and only a vanquished
nation can civilize its victors. The Greece of Pericles could not
Hellenize Rome, but the Greece of the weak successors of Alexander
could; the Rome of Caesar did not Romanize the Teutonic races as did the
Rome of Theodosius; no amount of colonizing among the vanquished can
ever produce the effect of a victorious army, of a whole nation,
suddenly finding itself in the midst of the superior civilization of a
conquered people. Michelet may well call the campaign of Charles VIII.
the discovery of Italy. His imaginative mind seized at once the vast
importance of this descent of the French into Italy, which other
historians have been too prone to view in the same light as any other
invasion. It is from this moment that dates the _modernisation_, if we
may so express ourselves, of the North. The barbarous soldiers of Gaston
de Foix, of Frundsberg, and of Gonsalvo, were the unconscious bearers of
the seeds of the ages of Elizabeth, of Louis XIV., and of Goethe. These
stupid and rapacious ruffians, while they wantonly destroyed the works
of Italian civilization, rendered possible the existence of a Montaigne,
a Shakespeare, and a Cervantes.
Italy was as a vast store-house, sheltered from all the dangers of
mediaeval destruction; in which, while all other nations were blindly and
fiercely working out their national existence, the inheritance of
Antiquity and the produce of the earliest modern civilization had been
peaceably garnered up. When the store-house was full, its gates had to
be torn open and its riches plundered and disseminated by the
intellectual starvelings of the North; thus only could the rest of
mankind feed on these riches, regain and develope their mental life.
What were those intellectual riches of the Renaissance? What was that
strong intellectual food which revived the energies and enriched the
blood of the Barbarians of the sixteenth century? The Renaissance
possessed the germs of every modern thing, and much that was far more
than a mere germ: it possessed the habit of equality before the law, of
civic organization, of industry and commerce developed to immense and
superb proportions. It possessed science, literature, and art; above
all, that which at once produced and was produced by all these--thorough
perception of what exists, thorough consciousness of our own freedom and
powers: self-cognizance. In Italy there was intellectual light, enabling
men to see and judge all around them, enabling them to act wittingly and
deliberately. In this lies the immense greatness of the Renaissance; to
this are due all its achievements in literature and science, and, above
all, in art: that, for the first time since the dissolution of antique
civilization, men were free agents, both in thought and in deed; that
there was an end of that palsying slavery of the Middle Ages, slavery of
body and of mind, slavery to stultified ideas and effete forms, which
made men endure every degree of evil and believe every degree of
absurdity. For the first time since Antiquity, man walks free of all
political and intellectual trammels, erect, conscious of his own
thoughts, master of his own actions; ready to seek for truth across the
ocean like Columbus, or across the heavens like Copernicus; to seek it
in criticism and analysis like Machiavelli or Guicciardini, boldly to
reproduce it in its highest, widest sense like Michael Angelo and
Raphael.
The men of the Renaissance had to pay a heavy price for this
intellectual freedom and self-cognizance which they not only enjoyed
themselves, but transmitted to the rest of the world; the price was the
loss of all moral standard, of all fixed public feeling. They had thrown
aside all accepted rules and criteria, they had cast away all faith in
traditional institutions, they had destroyed, and could not yet rebuild.
In their instinctive and universal disbelief in all that had been taught
them, they lost all respect for opinion, for rule, for what had been
called right and wrong. Could it be otherwise? Had they not discovered
that what had been called right had often been unnatural, and what had
been called wrong often natural? Moral teachings, remonstrances, and
judgments belonged to that dogmatism from which they had broken loose;
to those schools and churches where the foolish and the unnatural had
been taught and worshipped; to those priests and monks who themselves
most shamefully violated their teachings. To profess morality was to be
a hypocrite; to reprobate others was to be narrow-minded. There was so
much error mixed up with truth that truth had to share the discredit of
error; so many innocent things had been denounced as sins that sinful
ones at length ceased to be reprobated; people had so often found
themselves sympathizing with supposed criminals, that they soon lost
their horror of real ones. Damnation came to be disassociated from moral
indignation: it was the retribution, not of the unnatural and immoral,
but of the unlawful; and unlawful with respect to a law made without
reference to reason and instinct. As reason and instinct were thus set
at defiance, but could not be silenced, the law was soon acquiesced in
without being morally supported; thus, little by little, moral feeling
became warped. This was already the case in Dante's day. Farinata is
condemned to the most horrible punishment, which to Dante seems just,
because in accordance with an accepted code; yet Dante cannot but admire
him and cannot really hate him, for there is nothing in him to hate; he
is a criminal and yet respected--fatal combination! Dante punishes
Francesca, Pier delle Vigne, and Brunetto Latini, but he shows no
personal horror of them; in the one case his moral instinct refrains
from censuring the comparatively innocent, in the other it has ceased to
revolt from the really infamous. Where Dante does feel real indignation,
is most often in cases unprovided for by the religious codes, as with
those low, grovelling, timid natures (the very same with whom
Machiavelli, the admirer of great villains, fairly loses patience),
those creatures whom Dante personally despises, whom he punishes with
filthy devices of his own, whom he passes by with words such as he never
addresses to Semiramis, Brutus, or Capaneus. This toleration of vice,
while acquiescing in its legal punishment, increased in proportion to
the development of individual judgment, and did not cease till all the
theories of the lawful and unlawful had been so completely demolished as
to permit of their being rebuilt on solid bases.
This work of demolition had not yet ceased in the beginning of the
sixteenth century; and the moral confusion due to it was increased by
various causes dependent on political and other circumstances. The
despots in whose hands it was the inevitable fate of the various
commonwealths to fall, were by their very position immoral in all their
dealings: violent, fraudulent, suspicious, and, from their life of
constant unnatural tension of the feelings, prone to every species of
depravity; while, on the other hand, in the feudal parts of Italy--which
had merely received a superficial Renaissance varnish imported from
other places with painters and humanists--in Naples, Rome, and the
greater part of Umbria and the Marches, the upper classes had got into
that monstrous condition which seems to have been the inevitable final
product of feudalism, and which, while it gave France her Armagnacs, her
Foix, and her Retz, gave Italy their counterparts in her hideously
depraved princelets, the Malatestas, Varanos, Vitelli, and Baglioni.
Both these classes of men, despots and feudal nobles, had a wide field
for their ambition among the necessarily dissolved civic institutions;
and their easy success contributed to confirm the general tendency of
the day to say with Commines, "Qui a le succes a l'honneur," and to
confound these two words and ideas. Nor was this yet all: the men of the
Renaissance discovered the antique world, and in their wild, blind
enthusiasm, in their ardent, insatiable thirst for its literature,
swallowed it eagerly, dregs and all, till they were drunk and poisoned.
These are the main causes of the immorality of the Renaissance: first,
the general disbelief in all accepted doctrines, due to the falseness
and unnaturalness of those hitherto prevalent; secondly, the success of
unscrupulous talent in a condition of political disorder; thirdly, the
wholesale and unjudging enthusiasm for all that remained of Antiquity,
good or bad. These three great causes, united in a general intellectual
ebullition, are the explanation of the worst feature of the Renaissance:
not the wickedness of numberless single individuals, but the universal
toleration of it by the people at large. Men like Sigismondo Malatesta,
Sixtus IV., Alexander VI., and Caesar Borgia might be passed over as
exceptions, as monstrous aberrations which cannot affect our judgment of
their time and nation; but the general indifference towards their vices
shown by their contemporaries and countrymen is a conclusive and
terrible proof of the moral chaos of the Renaissance. It is just the
presence of so much instinctive simplicity and virtue, of childlike
devotion to great objects, of patriarchal simplicity of manners, of all
that is loveable in the books of men like Vespasiano da Bisticci and
Leon Battista Albert; of so much that seems like the realization of the
idyllic home and merchant life of Schiller's "Song of the Bell," by the
side of all the hideous lawlessness and vice of the despots and
humanists; that makes the Renaissance so drearily painful a spectacle.
The presence of the good does not console us for that of the evil,
because it neither mitigates nor even shrinks from it; we merely lose
our pleasure in the good nature and simplicity of AEneas Sylvius when we
see his cool admiration for a man of fraud and violence like Sforza; we
begin to mistrust the purity and integrity of the upright Guarino da
Verona when we hear his lenient judgment of the infamous Beccadelli; we
require of the virtuous that they should not only be incapable of vice,
but abhorrent of it; and this is what even the best men of the
Renaissance rarely were.
Such a state of moral chaos there has constantly been when an old effete
mode of thought required to be destroyed. Such work is always attended,
in greater or less degree, by this subversion of all recognized
authority, this indifference to evil, this bold tasting of the
forbidden. In the eighteenth century France plays the same part that was
played in the fifteenth by Italy: again we meet the rebellion against
all that has been consecrated by time and belief, the toleration of
evil, the praise of the abominable, in the midst of the search for the
good. These two have been the great fever epochs of modern history;
fever necessary for a subsequent steady growth. Both gave back truth to
man, and man to nature, at the expense of temporary moral uncertainty
and ruthless destruction. The Renaissance reinstated the individual in
his human dignity, as a thinking, feeling, and acting being; the
Eighteenth Century reconstructed society as a homogeneous free
existence; both at the expense of individual degradation and social
disorder. Both were moments of ebullition in which horrible things rose
to the surface, but after which what remained was purer than it had ever
been before.
This is no plea for the immorality of the Renaissance: evil is none the
less evil for being inevitable and necessary; but it is nevertheless
well that we should understand its necessity. It certainly is a terrible
admission, but one which must be made, that evil is part of the
mechanism for producing good; and had the arrangement of the universe
been entrusted to us, benevolent and equitable people of an enlightened
age, there would doubtless have been invented some system of evolution
and progression differing from the one which includes such machinery as
hurricanes and pestilences, carnage and misery, superstition and
license, Renaissance and Eighteenth Century. But unfortunately Nature
was organized in a less charitable and intelligent fashion; and, among
other evils required for the final attainment of good, we find that of
whole generations of men being condemned to moral uncertainty and error
in order that other generations may enjoy knowledge peacefully and
guiltlessly. Let us remember this, and let us be more generous towards
the men who were wicked that we might be enlightened. Above all, let us
bear in mind, in judging the Renaissance, that the sacrifice which it
represents could be useful only in so far as it was complete and
irretrievable. Let us remember that the communal system of government,
on whose development the Renaissance mainly depended, inevitably
perished in proportion as it developed; that the absolute subjugation of
Italy by Barbarous nations was requisite to the dissemination of the
civilization thus obtained; that the Italians were politically
annihilated before they had time to recover a normal condition, and were
given up crushed and broken spirited, to be taught righteousness by
Spaniards and Jesuits. That, in short, while the morality of the
Italians was sacrificed to obtain the knowledge on which modern society
depends, the political existence of Italy was sacrificed to the
diffusion of that knowledge, and that the nation was not only doomed to
immorality, but doomed also to the inability to reform. Perhaps, if we
think of all this, and weigh the tremendous sacrifice to which we owe
our present intellectual advantages, we may still feel sad, but sad
rather with remorse than with indignation, in contemplating the
condition of Italy in the first years of the sixteenth century; in
looking down from our calm, safe, scientific position, on the murder of
the Italian Renaissance: great and noble at heart, cut off pitilessly at
its prime; denied even an hour to repent and amend; hurried off before
the tribunal of posterity, suddenly, unexpectedly, and still bearing its
weight of unexpiated, unrecognized guilt.