French literature was quick to respond to Renaissance influences.
De Comines, the historian of Charles VIII.’s expedition to Naples,
differs from the earlier French chroniclers in his way of
regarding the world of men and affairs. He has the
perspicuity and analytical penetration of a Venetian
ambassador. Villon, his contemporary, may rather be ranked,
French literature.
so far as artistic form and use of knowledge are concerned, with
poets of the middle ages, and in particular with the Goliardi. But
he is essentially modern in the vividness of his self-portraiture,
and in what we are wont to call realism. Both De Comines and
Villon indicate the entrance of a new quality into literature. The
Rhétoriqueurs, while protracting medieval traditions by their use
of allegory and complicated metrical systems, sought to improve
the French language by introducing Latinisms. Thus the Revival
of Learning began to affect the vernacular in the last years of the
15th century. Marot and his school reacted against this pedantry.
The Renaissance displayed itself in their effort to purify the form
and diction of poetry. But the decisive revolution was effected
by Ronsard and his comrades of the Pléiade. It was their professed
object to raise French to a level with the classics, and to acclimatize
Italian species of verse. The humanistic movement led these
learned writers to engraft the graces of the antique upon their
native literature, and to refine it by emulating the lucidity of
Petrarch. The result of their endeavour was immediately apparent
in the new force added to French rhythm, the new pomp, richness,
colouring and polish conferred upon poetic diction. French style
gradually attained to fixity, and the alexandrine came to be recognized
the standard line in poetry. D’Aubigné’s invective and
Regnier’s satire, at the close of the 16th century, are as modern as
Voltaire’s. Meanwhile the drama was emerging from the medieval
mysteries; and the classical type, made popular by Garnier’s
genius, was elaborated, as in Italy, upon the model of Seneca and
the canons-of the three unities. The tradition thus formed was
continued and fortified by the illustrious playwrights of the 17th
century. Translation from Greek and Latin into French progressed
rapidly at the commencement of this period. It was a marked
characteristic of the Renaissance in France to appropriate the
spoils of Greece and Rome for the profit of the mother tongue.
Amyot’s Plutarch and his Daphnis and Chloe rank among the
most exquisite examples of beautiful French prose. Prose ha now
the charm of simplicity combined with grace. To mention Brantôme
is to mention the most entertaining of gossips. To speak of
Montaigne is to speak of the best as well as the first of essayists.
In all the literary work which has been mentioned, the originality
and freshness of the French genius are no less conspicuous
than its saturation with the new learning and with Italian
studies. But the greatest name of the epoch, the name which
is synonymous with the Renaissance in France, has yet to be
uttered. That, of course, is Rabelais. His incommensurable
and indescribable masterpiece of mingled humour, wisdom,
satire, erudition, indecency, profundity, levity, imagination,
realism, reflects the whole age in its mirror of hyper-Aristophanic
farce. What Ariosto is for Italy, Cervantes for
Spain, Erasmus for Holland, Luther for Germany, Shakespeare
for England, that is Rabelais for France. The Renaissance cannot
be comprehended in its true character without familiarity
with these six representatives of its manifold and many-sided
inspiration.
The French Renaissance, so rich on the side of arts and letters, was hardly less rich on the side of classical studies. The revival of learning has a noble muster-roll of names in France: Turnebus, the patriarch of Hellenistic studies; the Étiennes of Paris, equalling in numbers, industry and learning their Venetian rivals; the two Scaligers; impassioned French scholarship. The Reformation in France. Dolet; eloquent Muret; learned Cujas; terrible Calvin; Ramus, the intrepid antagonist of Aristotle; De Thou and De Bèze; ponderous Casaubon; brilliant young Saumaise. The distinguishing characteristics of French humanism are vivid intelligence, critical audacity and polemical acumen, perspicuity of exposition, learning directed in its applications by logical sense rather than by artistic ideals of taste. Some of the names just mentioned remind us that in France, as in Germany and Holland, the Reformation was closely connected with the revival of learning. Humanism has never been in the narrow sense of that term Protestant; still less has it been strictly Catholic. In Italy it fostered a temper of mind decidedly averse to theological speculation and religious earnestness. In Holland and Germany, with Erasmus, Reuchlin and Melanchthon, it developed types of character, urbane, reflective, pointedly or gently critical, which, left to themselves, would not have plunged the north of Europe into the whirlpool of belligerent reform. Yet none the less was the new learning, through the open spirit of inquiry it nourished, its vindication of the private reason, its enthusiasm for republican antiquity, and its proud assertion of the rights of human independence, linked by a strong and subtle chain to that turbid revolt of the individual consciousness against spiritual despotism draped in fallacies and throned upon abuses. To this rebellion we give the name of Reformation. But, while the necessities of antagonism to papal Rome made it assume at first the form of narrow and sectarian opposition, it marked in fact a vital struggle of the intellect towards truth and freedom, involving future results of scepticism and rationalistic audacity from which its earlier champions would have shrunk. It marked, moreover, in the condition of armed resistance against established authority which was forced upon it by the Counter-Reformation, a firm resolve to assert political liberty, leading in the course of time to a revolution with which the rebellious spirit of the Revival was sympathetic. This being the relation of humanism in general to reform, French learning in particular displayed such innovating boldness as threw many of its most conspicuous professors into the camp at war with Rome. Calvin, a French student of Picard origin, created the type of Protestantism to which the majority of French Huguenots adhered. This too was a moment at which philosophical seclusion was hardly possible. In a nation so tumultuously agitated one side or the other had to be adopted. Those of the French humanists who did not proclaim Huguenot opinions found themselves obliged with Muretus to lend their talents to the Counter-Reformation, or to suffer persecution for heterodoxy, like Dolet. The church, terrified and infuriated by the progress of reform, suspected learning on its own account. To be an eminent scholar was to be accused of immorality, heresy and atheism in a single indictment; and the defence of weaker minds la in joining the Jesuits, as Heinsius was fain to do. France had already absorbed the earlier Renaissance in an Italianizing spirit before the Reformation made itself felt as a political actuality. This fact, together with the strong Italian bias of the Valois, serves to explain in some degree the reason why the Counter-Reformation entailed those fierce entangled civil wars, massacres of St Bartholomew, murders of the Guises, regicides, treasons and empoisonments that terminated with the compromise of Henry IV. It is no part of the present subject to analyse the political, religious and social interests of that struggle. The upshot was the triumph of the Counter-Reformation, and the establishment of its principle, absolutism, as the basis of French government. It was, a French king who, when the nation had been reduced to order, uttered the famous word of absolutism, “L’Etat, c’est moi.”
The Renaissance in the Low Countries, as elsewhere, had its brilliant age of arts and letters. During the middle ages the wealthy free towns of Flanders flourished under conditions not dissimilar to those of the Italian republics. They raised miracles of architectural beauty, which were modified in the 15th and 16th centuries by characteristic elements The Netherlands—Flemish and Dutch painting. of the new style. The Van Eycks, followed by Memling, Metsys, Mabuse, Lucas van Leyden, struck out a new path in the revival of painting and taught Europe the secret of oil-colouring. But it was reserved for the 17th century to witness the flower and fruit time of this powerful art in the work of Porbus, Rubens and Vandyck, in the Dutch schools of landscape and home-life, and in the unique masterpieces of Rembrandt. We have a right to connect this later period with the Renaissance, because the distracted state of the Netherlands during the 16th century suspended, while it could not extinguish, their aesthetic development. The various schools of the 17th century, moreover, are animated with the Renaissance spirit no less surely than the Florentine school of the 15th or the Venetian of the 16th. The animal vigour and carnal enjoyment of Rubens, the refined Italianizing beauty of Vandyck, the mystery of light and gloom on Rembrandt’s panels, the love of nature in Ruysdael, Cuyp and Van Hooghe, with their luminously misty skies, silvery daylight and broad expanse of landscape, the interest in common life displayed by Ter Borch, Van Steen, Douw, Ostade and Teniers, the instinct for the beauty of animals in Potter, the vast sea spaces of Vanderveldt, the grasp on reality, the acute intuition into character in portraits, the scientific study of the world and man, the robust sympathy with natural appetites, which distinguish the whole art of the Low Countries, are a direct emanation from the Renaissance.
The vernacular in the Netherlands profited at first but little by the impulse which raised Italian, Spanish, French and English to the ran of classic languages. But humanism, first of all in its protagonist Erasmus, afterwards in the long list of critical scholars and editors, Lipsius, Heinsius and Grotius, in the printers Elzevir and Plantin, developed Flemish and Dutch scholarship. itself from the centre of the Leiden university with massive energy, and proved that it was still a motive force of intellectual progress. In the fields of classical learning the students of the Low Countries broke new ground chiefly by methodical collection, classification and comprehensive criticism of previously accumulated stores. Their works were solid and substantial edifices, forming the substratum for future scholarship. In addition to this they brought philosophy and scientific thoroughness to bear on studies which had been pursued in a more literary spirit. It would, however, be uncritical to pursue this subject further; for the encyclopaedic labours of the Dutch philologers belong to a period when the Renaissance was overpast. For the same reason it is inadmissible to do more than mention the name of Spinoza here.
