no mere pursuit of a special and recluse class. It was fashionable and it was passionate, pervading all society with the fervour of romance. For a generation nursed in decadent scholasticism and stereotyped theological formulae it was the fountain cf renascent youth, beauty and freedom, the shape in which the Helen of art and poetry appeared to the ravished eyes of medieval Faustus. It was the resurrection of the mightiest spirits of the past. “I go,” said Cyriac of Ancona, the indefatigable though uncritical explorer of antiquities, “I go to awake the dead!” This was the enthusiasm, this the vitalizing faith, which made the work of scholarship in the 15th century so highly strung and ardent. The men who followed it knew that they were restoring humanity to its birthright after the expatriation of ten centuries. They were instinctively aware that the effort was for liberty of action, thought and conscience in the future. This conviction made young men leave their loves and pleasures, grave men quit their counting-houses, churchmen desert their missals, to crowd the lecture-rooms of philologers and rhetoricians. When Greek had been acquired, MSS. accumulated, libraries and museums formed, came the age of printers and expositors. Aldus Manutius in Italy, Froben in Basel, the Étiennes in Paris, committed to the press what the investigators had recovered. Nor were there wanting men who dedicated their powers to Hebrew and Oriental erudition, laying, together with the Grecians, a basis for those Biblical studies which advanced the Reformation. Meanwhile the languages of Greece and Rome had been so thoroughly appropriated that a final race of scholars, headed by Politian, Pontano, Valla, handled once again in verse and prose both antique dialects, and thrilled the ears of Europe with new-made pagan melodies. The church itself at this epoch lent its influence to the prevalent enthusiasm. Nicholas V. and Leo VX., not to mention intervening popes who showed themselves tolerant of humanistic culture, were heroes of the classical revival. Scholarship became the surest path of advancement to ecclesiastical and political honours. Italy was one great school of the new learning at the moment when the German, French and Spanish nations were invited to her feast.
It will be well to describe briefly, but in detail, what this meeting of the modern with the ancient mind effected over the whole field of intellectual interests. In doing so, we must be careful to remember that the study of the classics did but give a special impulse to pent-up energies which were bound in one way or another toNature of Italian humanism. assert their independence. Without the Revival, of Learning the direction of those forces would have been different; but that novel intuition into the nature of the world and man which constitutes what we describe as Renaissance must have emerged. As the facts, however, stand before us, it is impossible to dissociate the rejection of the other world as the sole reality, the joyous acceptance of this world as a place to live and act in, the conviction that “the proper study of mankind is man,” from humanism. Humanism, as it actually appeared in Italy, was positive in its conception of the problems to be solved, pagan in its contempt for medieval mysticism, invigorated for sensuous enjoyment by contact with antiquity, yet holding in itself the germ of new religious aspirations, profounder science and sterner probings of the mysteries of life than had been attempted even by the ancients. The operation of this humanistic spirit has now to be traced.
It is obvious that Italian literature owed little, at the outset to
the Revival of Learning. The Divine Comedy, the Canzoniere
and the Decameron were works of monumental art,
deriving neither form nor inspiration immediately from
the classics, but applying the originality of Italian geniusRelation of Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio and Villani to the Revival
of Learning.
to matter drawn from previous medieval sources. Dante
showed both in his epic poem and in his lyrics that he
had not abandoned the sphere of contemporary thought.
Allegory and theology, the vision and the symbol, still
determine the form of masterpieces which for perfection
of workmanship and for emancipated force of intellect
rank among the highest products of the human mind. Yet they
are not medieval in the same sense as the song of Roland or the
Arthurian cycle. They proved that, though Italy came late into
the realm of literature, her action was destined to be decisive and
alterative by the introduction of a new spirit, a firmer and more
positive grasp on life and aft. These qualities she owed to her
material prosperity, to her freedom from feudalism, to her secularized
church, her commercial nobility, her political independence in
a federation of small States. Petrarch and Boccaccio, though they
both held the medieval doctrine that literature should teach some
abstruse truth beneath a veil of fiction, differed from Dante in this
that their poetry and prose in the vernacular abandoned both
allegory and symbol. In their practice they ignored their theory.
Petrarch’s lyrics continue the Provengal tradition as it had been
reformed in Tuscany, with a subtler and more modern analysis of
emotion, a purer and more chastened style, than his masters could
boast. Boccaccio’s tales, in like manner, continue the tradition
of the fabliaux, raising that literary species to the rank of finished
art, enriching it with humour and strengthening its substance
by keen insight into all varieties of character. The Canzoniere
and the Decameron distinguish themselves from medieval literature,
not by any return to classical precedents, but by free self-conscious
handling of human nature. So much had to be premised in order
to make it clear in what relation humanism stood to the Renaissance,
since the Italian work of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio
is sufficient to indicate the re-birth of the spirit after ages of apparent
deadness. Had the Revival of Learning not intervened it is
probable that the vigorous efforts of these writers alone would have
inaugurated a new age of European culture. Yet, while noting
this reservation of judgment, it must also be remarked that all three
felt themselves under some peculiar obligation to the classics.
Dante, medieval as his temper seems to us, chose Virgil for his guide,
and ascribed his mastery of style to the study of Virgilian poetry.
Petrarch and Boccaccio were, as we have seen, the pioneers of the
new learning. They held their writings in the vernacular cheap,
and initiated that contempt for the mother tongue which was a
note of the earlier Renaissance. Giovanni Villani, the first chronicler
who used Italian for the compilation of a methodical history,
tells us how he was impelled to write by musing on the ruins of Rome
and thinking of the vanished greatness of the Latin race. We
have therefore to recognize that the four greatest writers of the 14th
century, while the Revival of Learning was yet in its cradle, each
after his own fashion acknowledged the vivifying touch upon their
spirit of the antique genius. They seem to have been conscious
that they could not give the desired impulse to modern literature
and art without contact with the classics; and, in spite of the
splendour of their achievements in Italian, they found no immediate
followers upon that path.
The fascination of pure study was so powerful, the Italians at that epoch were so eager to recover the past, that during the 15th century we have before our eyes the spectacle of this great nation deviating from the course of development begun in poetry by Dante and Petrarch, in, prose by Boccaccio, and Villani, into the channels of scholarship and antiquarianRelation of humanism to scholarship and literature. research. The language of the Canzoniere and Decameron was abandoned for revived Latin and discovered Greek. Acquisition supplanted invention; imitation of classical authors suppressed originality of style. The energies of the Italian people were devoted to transcribing codices, settling texts, translating Greek books into Latin, compiling grammars, commentaries, encyclopedias, dictionaries, cpitomes and ephemerides. During this century the best histories—Bruno’s and Poggio’s annals of Florence, for example—were composed in Latin after the manner of Livy. The best dissertations, Landino’s Camaldunenses, Valla’s De Voluptate, were laboured imitations of Cicero's Tusculans. The best verses, Pontano’s elegies, Politian’s hexameters, were in like manner Latin; public orations upon ceremonial occasions were delivered in the Latin tongue; correspondence, official and familiar, was carried on in the same language; even the fabliaux received, in Poggio’s Facetiae. a dress of elegant Latinity. The noticeable barrenness of Italian literature at this period is referable to the fact that men of genius and talent devoted themselves to erudition and struggled to express their thoughts and feelings in a speech which was not natural. Yet they were engaged in a work of incalculable importance. At the close of the century the knowledge of Greece and Rome had been re appropriated and placed beyond the possibility of destruction; the chasm between the old and new world had been bridged; medieval modes of thinking and discussing had been superseded; the staple of education, the common culture which has brought all Europe into intellectual agreement, was already in existence. Humanism was now an actuality. Owing to the uncritical veneration for antiquity which then prevailed, it had received a strong tincture of pedantry. Its professors, in their revolt against the middle ages, made light of Christianity and paraded paganism. What was even worse from an artistic point of view, they had contracted puerilities of style, vanities of rhetoric, stupidities of wearisome citation. Still, at the opening of the 16th century, it became manifest what fruits of noble quality the Revival of Letters was about to bring forth for modern literature. Two great scholars,
Lorenzo de’ Medici and Politian, had already returned to the
