Vixisti, genitor, bene ac beate, Nec pauper, neque dives, eruditus Satis, et satis eloquens, valente Semper corpore, mente sana, amicis Jucundus, pietate singulari.
Nunc l.u.s.tris bene s.e.xdecim peractis Ad divm proficisceris beatas Oras; i, genitor, tuumque natum Olympi cito siste tec.u.m in arce.[504]
[Footnote 504: "Well and happily hast thou lived, my father; neither poor nor rich; learned enough and eloquent enough; of vigorous body and of healthy mind; pleasant to thy friends, and in thy piety unrivalled. Now, after sixteen l.u.s.tres finished, thou goest to the regions of the blest. Go, father, and soon greet thy son, to stay with thee in heaven"s high seat."--"Ad Patrem morientem," _Poemata Selecta_, p. 157.]
At the risk of extending this notice of Flaminio"s poetry beyond due limits, I must quote from a copy of verses sent to Alessandro Farnese, together with a volume containing the Latin _prolusiones_ of the North Italian scholars:--
Hos tibi lepidissimos poetas Dono, tempora quos tulere nostra, Fortunata nimis, nimis beata Nostra tempora, quae suos Catullos, Tibullos, et Horatios, suosque Marones genuere. Quis puta.s.set, Post tot saecula tam tenebricosa, Et tot Ausoniae graves ruinas, Tanta lumina tempore uno in una Tam brevi regione Transpadana Oriri potuisse? quae vel ipsa Sola barbarie queant fugata Suum reddere litteris Latinis Splendorem, veteremque dignitatem.[505]
[Footnote 505: _Poemata Selecta_, p. 166. "These most graceful poets I give you, the offspring of our too, too happy times, which have produced their Catullus and their Horace, their Tibullus and their Maro. Who could have thought, after so many ages of such darkness, and all the ruin that has weighed on Italy, that so many lights could have arisen at one epoch in one little region of the land above the Po?
They alone are enough to put to flight the gloom of barbarism, and to restore its antique glory and own splendour to Latin literature."
After this he goes on to add that these poets will confer eternal l.u.s.tre on Italy. Not only the northern nations of Europe, but America also has begun to study Latin; and races in another hemisphere will take their culture from these pages. The Cardinal is finally reminded that immortality of fame awaits him in their praises.]
There is the whole of humanism in this pa.s.sage--the belief in the unity of Italian civilisation, the conviction that the Middle Ages were but an interruption of historic continuity, the confidence in the restoration of cla.s.sic literature, and the firm hope that Latin would never cease to be the language of culture. Flaminio says nothing, unless parenthetically, about the real woes of his country. The tyranny of the Spaniard and the violence of the German are reckoned with the old wrongs of the Goth and the Vandal in one phrase--"_tot graves ruinas_." He does not touch upon the dismemberment of Italy into mutually jealous and suspicious States: for him the Italian nation, even in a dream, has no existence. He is satisfied with a literary ideal. Too fortunate, too blessed, are these days of ours, in spite of Florence extinguished, Rome sacked, Milan devastated, Venice curbed, because, forsooth, Bembo and Fracastoro have made a pinchbeck age of poetry. Here lay the incurable weakness of the humanistic movement. The vanity of the scholar, determined to seek the present in the past, building the walls of Troy anew with borrowed music, and singing in falsetto while Rome was burning--this blindness to the actual situation of Italy was scarcely less pernicious, scarcely less a sign of incapacity for civil life than the selfishness of the Despots or the egotism of the Papacy. Italy was foredoomed to lose her place among the nations at the very moment when she was recovering culture for the modern world; and when that culture was recovered through her industry and genius, not she, but the races of the North, began to profit by the acquisition--not her imitations of the Latin Muse, but the new languages of Europe were destined to prevail and lead the age.
Another point for observation is that the centre of humanistic studies has shifted.[506] Florence, disillusioned, drained of strength, and sucked dry by the tyrants, holds her tongue. The schools of Naples and of Rome are silent. Lombardy is now the mother of poets, who draw their inspiration no longer from Valdarno or the myrtle groves of Posilippo, but from the blue waves of Garda.[507] The university where science still flourishes is Padua. The best professors of the cla.s.sics, Celio Calcagnini and Lilius Gyraldus, teach at Ferrara.
Bembo, the dictator of letters for his century, Navagero, the sweetest versifier, Contarini, the most sober student, are Venetians. Stefano Sauli, the author of a Ciceronian treatise on the Christian hero, is a patrician of Genoa. Sadoleto and Molsa are Modenese. Verona claims Fracastoro and the Torriani. Imola is the mother city of Flaminio.
Castiglione and Capilupo are natives of Mantua; Amalteo and Vida of Forli and Cremona; Bonfadio and Archio of Lake Garda. If we seek the causes of this change, we find them partly in the circ.u.mstance that Venice at this period was free, while Ferrara still retained her independence under native princes; partly also in the fact that Florence had already overtaxed her intellectual energies. Like a creeping paralysis, the extinction of liberty and spiritual force was gradually invading all the members of the Italian community. The Revival of Learning came to an end, as far as Italy was concerned, in these Transpadane poets.
[Footnote 506: "Tam brevi regione Transpadana."]
[Footnote 507: Cf. Bembo"s _Benacus_, Bonfadio"s _Gazani Vici Descriptio_, Fracastoro"s _Ad Francisc.u.m Turrianum Veronensem_, &c.]
To trace the history of philosophic thought, set in motion by the Renaissance and stamped out by the Counter-Reformation, and to describe the aftergrowth of art and literature encouraged by the Catholic reaction, must form the subject of a separate inquiry.
I hope, if I have time and strength, after the completion of my work on the Renaissance, to trace this sequel in a volume on "Italy and the Council of Trent." To this chapter of Italian history will also belong the philosophy of the sixteenth century, the poetry of Ta.s.so, the painting of the Bolognese masters, and the new music of Palestrina.
CHAPTER IX
CONCLUSION
General Survey -- The Part played in the Revival by the Chief Cities -- Preoccupation with Scholarship in spite of War and Conquest -- Place of the Humanists in Society -- Distributors of Praise and Blame -- Flattery and Libels -- Comparison with the Sophists -- The Form preferred to the Matter of Literature -- Ideal of Culture as an end in itself -- Suspicion of Zealous Churchmen -- Intrusion of Humanism into the Church -- Irreligion of the Humanists -- Gyraldi"s "Progymnasma" -- Ariosto -- Bohemian Life -- Personal Immorality -- Want of Fixed Principles -- Professional Vanity -- Literary Pride -- Estimate of Humanistic Literature -- Study of Style -- Influence of Cicero -- Valla"s "Elegantiae" -- Stylistic Puerilities -- Value attached to Rhetoric -- "Oratore" -- Moral Essays -- Epistolography -- Historics -- Critical and Antiquarian Studies -- Large Appreciation of Antiquity -- Liberal Spirit -- Poggio and Jerome of Prague -- Humanistic Type of Education -- Its Diffusion through Europe -- Future Prospects -- Decay of Learning in Italy.
In tracing the history of the Revival, we have seen how the impulse, first communicated by Petrarch, was continued by Boccaccio and his immediate successors. We have watched the enthusiasm for antiquity strike root in Florence, spread to Rome, and penetrate the Courts of Italy. One city after another receives the light and hands it on, until the whole cycle of study has been traversed and the vigour of the nation is exhausted. Florence discovers ma.n.u.scripts, founds libraries, learns Greek, and leads the movement of the fifteenth century. Naples criticises; Rome translates; Mantua and Ferrara form a system of education; Venice commits the literature of the cla.s.sics to the press. By the combined and successive activity of the chief Italian centres, not only is the culture of antiquity regained; it is also appropriated in all its various branches, discussed and ill.u.s.trated, placed beyond the reach of accident, and delivered over in its integrity to Europe. The work thus performed by the Italians was begun in peace; but it had to be continued under the pressure of wars and national disasters unparalleled in the history of any other modern people. Not for a single moment did the students relax their energy. In the midst of foreign armies, deafened by the roar of cannon and the tumult of sacked towns, exiled from their homes, robbed of their books, deprived of their subsistence, they advanced to their end with the irresistible obstinacy of insects. The drums and tramplings of successive conquests and invasions by four warlike nations--Frenchmen, Spaniards, Germans, Swiss--could not disturb them. Drop by drop, Italy was being drained of blood; from the first the only question was which of her a.s.sailants should possess the beauty of her corpse. Yet the student, intent upon his ma.n.u.scripts, paid but little heed. So non-existent was the sense of nationality in Italy that the Italians did not know they were being slowly murdered. When the agony was over, and the ruin was accomplished, they congratulated themselves on being still the depositaries of polite literature. Nations that are nations, seek to inspire fear, or at least respect. The Italians were contented with admiration, and looked confidently to the world for grat.i.tude.
The task of two toilsome, glorious centuries had been accomplished.
The chasm between Rome and the Renaissance was bridged over, and a plain way was built for the progressive human spirit. Italy, downtrodden in the mire of blood and ruins, should still lead the van and teach the peoples. It was a sublime delusion, the last phase of an impulse so powerful in its origin that to prophesy an ending was impossible. Yet how delusive was the expectation is proved by the immediate history of Italy, enslaved and decadent, outstripped by the nations she had taught, and scorned by the world that owed her veneration.
The humanists, who were the organ of this intellectual movement, formed, as we have seen, a literary commonwealth, diffused through all the Courts and cities of Italy. As the secretaries of Popes and princes, as the chancellors of republics, as orators on all occasions of public and private ceremony, they occupied important posts of influence, and had the opportunity of leavening society with their opinions. Furthermore, we have learned to know them in their capacity of professors at the universities, of house-tutors in the service of n.o.blemen, and of authors. Closely connected among themselves by their feuds no less than by their friendships, and working to one common end of scholarship, it was inevitable that these men, after the enthusiasm for antiquity had once become the fashion, should take the lead and mould the genius of the nation. Their epistles, invectives, treatises, and panegyrics, formed the study of an audience that embraced all cultivated minds in Italy. Thus the current literature of humanism played the same part in the fifteenth century as journalism in the nineteenth, and the humanists had the same kind of coherence in relation to the public as the _quatrieme etat_ of modern times. The respect they inspired as the arbiters of praise and blame, was only equalled by their vast pretensions. Eugenius IV., living at the period of their highest influence, is reported to have said that they were as much to be feared for their malice as to be loved for their learning.
While they claimed the power of conferring an immortality of honour or dishonour, no one dared to call their credit with posterity in question. Nothing seemed more dreadful than the fate reserved for Paul II. in the pages of Platina; and even so robust a ruler as Francesco Sforza sought to buy the praises of Filelfo. Flattery in all its branches, fulsome and delicate, wholesale and allusive, was developed by them as an art whereby to gain their living. The official history of this period is rendered almost worthless by its sustained note of panegyrical laudation. Our ears are deafened with the eulogies of petty patrons transformed into Maecenases, of carpet knights compared to Leonidas, of tyrants equalled with Augustus, and of generals who never looked on bloodshed tricked out as Hannibals or Scipios. As a pendant to panegyric, the art of abuse reached its climax in the invectives whereby the scholars sought to hand their comrades down to all time "immortally immerded," or to vilify the public enemies of their employers. As in the case of praise, so also in the case of blame, it is impossible to attach importance to the writings of the humanists. Their vaulting ambition to depreciate each other overleaped itself. All their literature of defamation serves now only to throw light on the general impurity of an age in which such monstrous charges carried weight. Unluckily, this double vice of humanism struck deep roots into Italian literature. Without the scholars of the fifteenth century, it is hardly possible that such a brigand as Pietro Aretino, who levied black mail from princes at the point of his venomous quill, or such an unprincipled biographer as Paolo Giovio, who boasted that he wrote with a golden or a silver pen, as pleased him best, could have existed. Bullying and fawning tainted the very source of history, and a false ideal of the writer"s function was established by the practice of men like Poggio.
It is obvious and easy to compare the humanists of the Renaissance with the sophists of antiquity. Whether we think of the rivals of Socrates at Athens, or of the Greek rhetoricians of the Roman period,[508] the parallel is tolerably close. From certain points of view the Italian scholars remind us of the former cla.s.s; from others, again, they recall the latter. The essence of sophism is the subst.i.tution of semblance for reality, indifference to truth provided a fair show be made, combined with verbal ingenuity and practice in the art of exposition. The sophist feels no need of forming opinions on a sound basis, or of adhering to principles. Regarding thought as the subject-matter of literary treatment, he is chiefly concerned with giving it a fair and plausible invest.i.ture in language. Instead of recognising that he must live up to the standard he professes, he takes delight in expressing with force the contrary of what he acts.
The discord between his philosophy and his conduct awakes no shame in him, because it is the highest triumph of his art to persuade by eloquence and to dazzle by rhetoric. Phrases and sentences supply the place of feelings and convictions. Sonorous cadences and harmonies of language are always ready to conceal the want of substance in his matter or the flimsiness of his argument. At the same time the sophist"s enthusiasm for a certain form of culture, and his belief in the sophistic method, may be genuine.
[Footnote 508: "Graeculi esurientes." Lives written by Philostratus.]
The literature of the Revival is full of such sophism. Men who lived loose lives, were never tired of repeating the commonplaces of the Ciceronian ethics, praising simplicity and self-control with the pen they used for reproducing the scandals of Martial, mingling impudent demands for money and flatteries of debauched despots with panegyrics of Paetus Thrasea and eulogies of Cincinnatus. Conversely, students of eminent sobriety, like Guarino da Verona, thought it no harm to welcome Beccadelli"s "Hermaphroditus" with admiration; while the excellent Nicholas V. spent nine days in perusing the filthy satires of Filelfo. It was enough that the form was elegant, according to their standards of taste, the Latinity copious and sound:--the subject-matter raised no scruples.
This vice of regarding only the exterior of literature produced a fatal weakness in the dissertations of the age. If a humanist wanted to moralise the mutability of fortune or the disadvantages of matrimony, he did not take the trouble to think, or the pains to borrow ill.u.s.trations from his own experience. He strung together quotations and cla.s.sical instances, expending his labour on the polish of the style, and fancying he had proved something by piquancy displayed in handling old material. When he undertook history, the same fault was apparent. Instead of seeking to set forth the real conditions of his native city, to describe its political vicissitudes and const.i.tutional development, or to paint the characters of its great men, he prepared imaginary speeches and avoided topics incapable of expression in pure Latin. The result was that whole libraries of ethical disquisitions and historical treatises, bequeathed with proud confidence by their authors to the admiration of posterity, are now reposing in unhonoured dust, ransacked at rare intervals by weary students with restless fingers in search of such meagre sc.r.a.ps of information as even a humanist could not succeed in excluding.
The humanists resembled the sophists again in their profession to teach wisdom for pay. What philosophy was for the early Greeks, cla.s.sic culture was for Italy in the Renaissance; and this the scholars sold. Antiquity lay before them like an open book. From their seat among the learned they doled out the new lore of life to eager pupils. And as the more sober-minded of the Athenians regarded the educational practice of the sophists with suspicion, so the humanists came to be dreaded as the corrupters of youth. The peculiar turn they gave to mental training, by diverting attention from patriotic duties to literary pleasures, by denationalising the interests of students, and by distracting serious thought from affairs of the present to interests of the past, tended to confirm the political debility of the Italians; nor can it be doubted that the subst.i.tution of Pagan for Christian ideals intensified the demoralisation of the age. Many arguments used by Aristophanes and Xenophon might be repeated against these sophists of the Renaissance.[509]
[Footnote 509: Aristoph., _Clouds_, Speeches of Dikaios Logos; Xen., _On Hunting_, chap. xiii.]
On this point it is worth observing that, though humanism took the Papal Court by storm and installed itself in pomp and pride within the Vatican, the lower clergy and the leaders of religious revivals, in no mere spirit of blind prejudice, but with solid force of argument, denounced it. S. Bernardino and Savonarola were only two among many who preached against the humanists from the pulpit. And yet, while we admit that the influences of the Revival injured morality, and gave a cosmopolitan direction to energies that ought to have been concentrated on the preservation of national existence, we are unable to join with these ecclesiastical antagonists in their crusade.
Humanism was a necessary moment in the evolution of the modern world; and whatever were its errors, however weakening it may have been to Italy, this phase had to be pa.s.sed through, this nation had to suffer for the general good.
The intrusion of the humanists into the Papal Curia was a victory of the purely secular spirit. It is remarkable how very few scholars took orders except with a view of holding minor benefices. They remained virtual laymen, drawing the emoluments of their cures at a distance.
If Filelfo, after the death of his second wife, proposed to enter the Church, he did so because in his enormous vanity he hoped to gain the scarlet hat, and thought this worth the sacrifice of independence. The only great monastic _litteratus_ was Ambrogio, General of the Camaldolese Order. Maffeo Vegio is the single instance I can remember of a poet-philologer who a.s.sumed the cowl. These statements, it will be understood, refer chiefly to the second or aggressive period of the Revival. Cla.s.sic erudition was so common in the fourth that to be without a humanistic tincture was, even among churchmen, the exception rather than the rule. In the age of Leo, moreover, the humanists as a cla.s.s had ceased to exist, merged in the general culture of the nation. Their successors were for the most part cardinals and bishops, elevated to high rank for literary merit. This change, however, really indicated the complete triumph of an ideal that for a moment had succeeded in paganising the Papacy, and subst.i.tuting its own standard of excellence for ecclesiastical tradition.
This external separation between the humanists and the Church corresponded to their deep internal irreligiousness. If contemporary testimony be needed to support this a.s.sertion, I may quote freely from Lilius Gyraldus, Battista Mantovano, and Ariosto, not to mention the invectives that record so vast a ma.s.s of almost incredible licentiousness. A rhetorical treatise, addressed to Gian Francesco Pico by Lilius Gyraldus, himself an eminent professor at Ferrara, acquaints us with the opinion formed in Italy, after a century"s experience, of the vices and discordant lives of scholars.[510] "I call G.o.d and men to witness," he writes, "whether it be possible to find men more affected by immoderate disturbances of soul, by such emotions as the Greeks called [Greek: pathe], or by such desires as they named [Greek: hormai], more easily influenced, driven about, and drawn in all directions. No cla.s.s of human beings are more subject to anger, more puffed up with vanity, more arrogant, more insolent, more proud, conceited, idle-minded, inconsequent, opinionated, changeable, obstinate; some of them ready to believe the most incredible nonsense, others sceptical about notorious truths, some full of doubt and suspicion, others void of reasonable circ.u.mspection. None are of a less free spirit, and that for the very reason I have touched before, because they think themselves so far more powerful. They all of them, indeed, pretend to omniscience, fancy themselves superior to everything, and rate themselves as G.o.ds, while we unlearned little men are made of clay and mud, as they maintain." Having for some s.p.a.ce discoursed concerning their mad ways of life, Gyraldus proceeds to arraign the humanists in detail for vicious pa.s.sions, want of economy, impiety, gluttony, intemperance, sloth, and incontinence.[511] This invective reads like a paradoxical thesis supported for the sake of novelty by a clever rhetorician; and, indeed, it might pa.s.s for such were it not for the confirmation it receives in Ariosto"s seventh satire addressed to Pietro Bembo.[512] The poet, anxious to find a tutor for his son, dares not commit the young man to the care of a humanist. His picture of their personal immorality, impiety, pride, and gluttony acquires weight from the well-known tolerance of the satirist, and from his genial parsimony of expression. To cite further testimony from the personal confessions of Pacificus Maximus would hardly strengthen the argument, though students may be referred to his poems for details.[513]
[Footnote 510: _Progymnasma adversus Literatos._ _Op. Omn._, Basle, 1582, vol. ii.]
[Footnote 511: "Pudet me, Pice, pigetque id de literatis afferre quod omnium tamen est in ore, nullos esse c.u.m omnium vitiorum etiam nefandissimorum genere inquinatos magis, tum iis praecipue, quae praeter naturam dic.u.n.tur," &c.--_Progymnasma adversus Literatos_, p. 431.]
[Footnote 512: Lines 22-129.]
[Footnote 513: _Quinque Ill.u.s.trium Poetarum Lusus in Venerem_, Parisiis, 1791, p. 107.]
The alternations of fortune to which the humanists were exposed--living at one time in the lap of luxury, caressed and petted; then cast forth to wander in almost total indigence, neglected and derided--encouraged a Bohemian recklessness injurious to good manners.
Their frequent change of place told upon their character in the same way, by exposing them to fresh temptations and withdrawing them from censure. They had no country but the dreamland of antiquity, no laws beyond the law of taste and inclination. They acknowledged no authority superior to their own exalted judgment; they bowed to no tribunal but that of posterity and the past. Thus they lived within their own conceits, outside of custom and opinion; nor was the world, at any rate before the period of their downfall, scrupulous to count their errors or correct their vices.
Far more important, however, than these circ.u.mstances was their pa.s.sion for a Pagan ideal. The study of the cla.s.sics and the effort to a.s.similate the spirit of the ancients, undermined their Christianity without subst.i.tuting the religion or the ethics of the old world. They ceased to fear G.o.d; but they did not acquire either the self-restraint of the Greek or the patriotic virtues of the Roman. Thus exposed without defence or safeguard, they adopted the perilous att.i.tude of men whose regulative principle was literary taste, who had left the ground of faith and popular convention for the shoals and shallows of an irrecoverable past. On this sea they wandered, with no guidance but the promptings of undisciplined self. It is not, therefore, a marvel that, while professing Stoicism, they wallowed in sensuality, openly affected the worst habits of Pagan society, and devoted their ingenuity to the explanation of foulness that might have been pa.s.sed by in silence. Licentiousness became a special branch of humanistic literature. Under the thin mask of humane refinement leered the untamed savage; and an age that boasted not unreasonably of its mental progress, was at the same time notorious for the vices that disgrace mankind. These disorders of the scholars, hidden for a time beneath a learned language, ended by contaminating the genius of the nation. The vernacular _Capitoli_ of Florence say plainly what Beccadelli, Poggio, and Bembo piqued themselves on veiling.
Another notable defect of the humanists, equally inseparable from the position they a.s.sumed in Italy, was their personal and professional vanity. Battista Mantovano, writing on the calamities of the age in which he lived, reckons them among the most eminent examples of pride in his catalogue of the deadly sins. Regarding themselves as resuscitators of a glorious past and founders of a new civility, they were not satisfied with a.s.serting their real merits in the sphere of scholarship. They went further, and claimed to rank as sages, political philosophers, writers of deathless histories, and singers of immortal verse. The most miserable poetasters got crowned with laurels. The most trivial thinkers pa.s.sed verdict upon statecraft.
Mistaking mere cultivation for genius, they believed that, because they had perused the authors of antiquity and could imitate Ovid at a respectful distance, their fame would endure for all ages. On the strength of this confidence they gave themselves inconceivable airs, looking down from the height of their attainment on the profane crowd.
To understand that, after all, antiquity was a school wherein to train the modern intellect for genuine production, was not given to this epoch of discovery. Posterity has sadly belied their expectations. Of all their treatises and commentaries, poems and translations, how few are now remembered; how rarely are their names upon the lips of even professed students! The debt of grat.i.tude we owe them is indeed great, and should be amply paid by our respectful memory of all they wrought for us with labour in the field of learning. Yet Filelfo would turn with pa.s.sionate disappointment in his grave, if he could know that men of wider scope and sounder erudition appreciate his writings solely as shed leaves that fertilised the soil of literature.
Before turning, as is natural at this point, to form an estimate of the humanists in their capacity of authors, it will be right briefly to qualify the condemnation pa.s.sed upon their characters. Taken as a cla.s.s, they deserve the hardest words that have been said of them.
Yet it must not be forgotten that they numbered in their ranks such men as Ambrogio Traversari, Tommaso da Sarzana, Guarino, Jacopo Antiquari, Vittorino da Feltre, Pomponius Laetus, Ficino, Pico, Fabio Calvi, and Aldus Manutius. The bare enumeration of these names will suffice for those who have read the preceding chapters. Piety, sobriety of morals, self-devotion to public interests, the purest literary enthusiasm, the most lofty aspirations, fairness of judgment, and generosity of feeling distinguish these men, and some others who might be mentioned, from the majority of their fellows. Nor, again, is it fair to charge the humanists alone with vices common to their age.
The picture I ventured to draw of Papal and despotic manners in a previous volume, shows that a too strict standard cannot be applied to scholars, holding less responsible positions than their patrons, and professing a far looser code of conduct. Much, too, of their inordinate vanity may be ascribed to the infatuation of the people.
Such scenes as the reception of the supposed author of "Hermaphroditus"
in Vicenza were enough to turn the heads of even stronger men.[514]
[Footnote 514: See above, p. 185, note 4.]
It is difficult to appraise humanistic literature at a just value, seeing that by far the larger ma.s.s of it, after serving a purpose of temporary utility, is now forgotten. Not itself, but its effect, is what we have to estimate; and the ultimate product of the whole movement was the creation of a new capacity for cultivation. To have restored to Europe the knowledge of the cla.s.sics, and to have recovered the style of the ancients, so as to use Latin prose and verse with freedom at a time when Latin formed an universal medium of culture, is the first real merit of the humanists. Nothing can rob them of this glory; however much we may be forced to feel that their critical labours have been superseded, that their dissertations are dull, that their poems at the worst fall far below the level of an Oxford prize exercise, and at the best supply a decent appendix to the "Corpus Poetarum." Nor can we defraud them of the fame of having striven to realise Petrarch"s ideal.[515] That ideal, only partially attained at any single point, developed in one direction by Milton, in another by Goethe, still guides, and will long guide, the efforts of the modern intellect.
[Footnote 515: See above, Chapter II.]
The most salient characteristic of this literature was study of style.
The beginners of the humanistic movement were conscious that what separated them more than anything else from their Roman ancestors, was want of elegance in diction. They used the same language; but they used it clumsily. They could think the same thoughts, but they had lost the art of expressing them with propriety. To restore style was therefore a prime object. Exaggerating its importance, they neglected the matter for the form, and ended by producing a literature of imitation. The ideal they proposed in composition included limpidity of language, simplicity in the structure of sentences however lengthy, choiceness of phrase, and a copious vocabulary. To be intelligible was the first requisite; to be attractive the second. Having mastered elementary difficulties, they proceeded to fix the rules for decorative writing. Cicero had said that nothing was so ugly or so common but that rhetoric could lend it charm. This unfortunate dictum, implying that style, as separate from matter, is valuable in and for itself, led the Italians astray. To form commonplace books of phrases culled from the "Tusculans" and the "Orations," to choose some trivial theme for treatment, and to make it the occasion for verbal display, became their business. In the coteries of Rome and Florence scholars measured one another by their ingenuity--in other words, by their aptness for producing Ciceronian and Virgilian centos. Few indeed, like Pico, raised their voices against such trifling, or protested that what a man thought and felt was at least as important as his power of clothing it in rhetoric.
The appearance of Valla"s "Elegantiae" marked an epoch in the evolution of this stylistic art. It reached its climax in the work of Bembo.
What the humanists intended, they achieved. Purity and perspicuity of language were made conditions of all literature that claimed attention; nor is it, perhaps, too much to say that Racine, Pascal, and Voltaire owe something of their magic to the training of these worn-out pedagogues. Yet the immediate effect in Italy, when Machiavelli"s vigour had pa.s.sed out of the nation, and the stylistic tradition survived, was deplorable. Nothing strikes a northern student of the post-Renaissance authors more than the empty smoothness of their writing, their faculty of saying nothing with a vast expenditure of phrase, their dread of homely details, and the triviality of the subjects they chose for ill.u.s.tration. When a man of wit like Annibale Caro could rise to praise the nose of the president before a learned academy in periods of this inept.i.tude--"Naso perfetto, naso princ.i.p.ale, naso divino, naso che benedetto sia fra tutti i nasi; e benedetta sia quella mamma che vi fece cos nasuto, e benedette tutte quelle cose che voi annusate!"[516]--we trace no more than a burlesque of humanistic seeking after style. It must, however, be admitted that it is not easy for a less artistic nation to do the Italians justice in this respect. They derived an aesthetic pleasure from refinements of speech and subtle flavours of expression, while they remained no less conscious than we are that the workmanship surpa.s.sed the matter. The proper a.n.a.logue to their rhetoric may be found in the exquisite but too unmeaning arabesques in marble and in wood, which belong to Cinque Cento architecture. Viewed as the playthings of skilled artists, these are not without their value; and we are apt, perhaps, unduly to depreciate them, because we lack the sense for their particular form of beauty.