At the middle of the fifteenth century their communes had lost political liberty, and were ruled by despots. Martial spirit declined.
Wars were carried on by mercenaries; and the people found itself in a state of practical disarmament, when the neighboring nations quarreled for the prize of those rich provinces. At the same time society underwent a rapid moral deterioration. When Machiavelli called Italy "the corruption of the world," he did not speak rhetorically. An impure and worldly clergy; an irreligious, though superst.i.tious, laity; a self-indulgent and materialistic middle cla.s.s; an idle aristocracy, excluded from politics and unused to arms; a public given up to pleasure and money-getting; a mult.i.tude of scholars, devoted to trifles, and vitiated by studies which clashed with the ideals of Christianity--from such elements in the nation proceeded a widely-spread and ever-increasing degeneracy. Public energy, exhausted by the civil wars and debilitated by the arts of the tyrants, sank deep and deeper into the la.s.situde of acquiescent lethargy. Religion expired in laughter, irony and license. Domestic simplicity yielded to vice, whereof the records are precise and unmistakable. The virile virtues disappeared. What survived of courage a.s.sumed the forms of ruffianism, ferocity and treasonable daring. Still, simultaneously with this decline in all the moral qualities which const.i.tute a powerful people, the Italians brought their arts and some departments of their literature to a perfection that can only be paralleled by ancient Greece. The anomaly implied in this statement is striking; but it is revealed to us by evidence too overwhelming to be rejected. We must be careful not to insist on any causal link of connection between the moral and intellectual conditions of Italian society at this epoch. Still we are forced to admit that servitude and corruption are the commanding features of the age in which Italy for the third time in her history won and held the hegemony of the world. In politics, in religion, in ethics, she seemed to have been left devoid of guiding principles; and tragic interest is added to the climax of her greatness by the long series of disasters, culminating in Spanish enslavement and ecclesiastical tyranny, which proved her internal rottenness and put an end to her unrivaled intellectual triumphs.
It has been my object in this work to review the part played by the Italians at the beginning of modern history, subjecting each department of their activity to separate examination. In the first of the five volumes I described the social and political conditions under which the renascence of the race took place. In the second I treated of that retrogressive movement toward antiquity, which const.i.tutes the most important factor in the problem offered by that age. The third volume was devoted to the Fine Arts, wherein the main originality of modern Italy emerged. It was through art that the creative instincts of the people found their true and adequate channel of expression.
Paramount over all other manifestations of the epoch, fundamental beneath all, penetrative to the core of all, is the artistic impulse.
The slowly self-consolidating life of a great kingdom, concentrating all elements of national existence by the centripetal force of organic unity, was wanting. Commonwealths and despotisms, representing a more imperfect stage of political growth, achieved completion and decayed.
But art survived this disintegration of the medieval fabric; and in art the Italians found the cohesion denied them as a nation. While speaking thus of art, it is necessary to give a wide extension to that word. It must be understood to include literature. Nor, in the case of Italy, does this imply an undue strain upon its meaning. The last two volumes of my work have been devoted to the stages whereby vernacular literature absorbed into itself the elements of scholarship, and gave form to the predominating thoughts and feelings of the people. This process of form-giving was controlled, more or less consciously throughout, by the artistic instincts of which I have been speaking.
Thus we are justified in regarding the literary masterpieces of the sixteenth century as the fullest and most representative expression of the Italian temperament at the climax of its growth. The literature of the golden age implies humanism, implies painting. It will be seen that the logic of the whole subject necessitated the reservation of this department for final treatment, and justified a more minute investigation than had been accorded to the rest.
It is not only possible but right to speak of Italy collectively when we review her work in the Renaissance. Yet it should not be forgotten that Italy at this time was a federation, presenting upon a miniature scale the same diversities in her component parts as the nations of Europe do now. If for this reason alone, we may profitably survey the different shares claimed by her several communities in the general achievement.
At the beginning of such a review, we cannot fail to be struck with the predominance of Florence. The superiority of the Tuscans was threefold. In the first place, they determined the development of art in all its branches. In the second place, they gave a language to Italy, which, without obliterating the local dialects, superseded them in literature when the right moment for intellectual community arrived. That moment, in the third place, was rendered possible by the humanistic movement, which began at Florence. The humanists prepared the needful literary medium by introducing cla.s.sical studies into every town of the peninsula. Without this discipline, Tuscan could not so speedily have produced Italian, or have been so readily accepted by North and South. It may, indeed, be affirmed without exaggeration that, prior to the close of the fifteenth century, what we call the Italian genius was, in truth, the genius of Florence.
What the Lombards and Venetians produced in fine art and literature was of a later birth.[583] Yet the novelists of Lombardy, the Latin lyrists of Garda, the school of romantic and dramatic poets at Ferrara, the group of sculptors and painters a.s.sembled in Milan by the Sforza dynasty, the maccaronic Muse of Mantua, the unrivaled magnificence of painting at Venice, the transient splendor of the Parmese masters, the wit of Modena, the learning of the princes of Mirandola and Carpi, must be catalogued among the most brilliant and characteristic manifestations of Italian genius. In pure literature Venice contributed but little, though she sent forth a dictator, Pietro Bembo, to rule the republic of letters at the moment when the scepter was about to pa.s.s from Florence. Her place, as the home of Aldo"s Greek press, and as the refuge for adventurers like Aretino and Folengo, when the rest of Italy was yielding to reactionary despotism, has to be commemorated. Of the northern universities, Padua preserved the tradition of physical studies, and Bologna that of legal erudition, onward from the middle ages. Both became headquarters of materialistic philosophy in the sixteenth century. The school of Vicenza had flourished in humane letters at the commencement of the epoch. But it declined early; while that of Ferrara, on the contrary, succeeded to the honors of Florence and Pisa. Genoa was almost excluded from the current of Italian culture. Her sumptuous palaces and churches, her sensual unsympathetic painting, belong to the last days of Italian energy. Her few great scholars owed their fame to correspondence and connection with the students of more favored districts.
[Footnote 583: I need hardly guard this paragraph by saying that I speak within the limits of the Renaissance.]
From Romagna, the Marches of Ancona, and the Umbrian cities, more captains of adventure than men of letters or artists swelled the muster-roll of Italian worthies. We must not, however, forget the unique place which Urbino, with its refined society, pure Court, and concourse of accomplished men and women, occupies in the history of Italian civilization. The position of Perugia, again, is not a little singular. Situated upon the borders of Tuscany and Umbria, sharing something of the spirit of both districts, overshadowed by Papal Rome, yet harboring such broods of _bravi_ as the Baglioni, conferring a tyranny on Braccio and the honor of her name on Pietro Vannucci, this city offers a succession of picturesque and perplexing contradictions.
Perugia was the center of the most religious school of painting which flourished in the fifteenth century, and also the cradle of the religious drama. For the student of Italian psychology, very much of serious moment is contained in this statement.
Rome continued to be rather cosmopolitan than Italian. The power, wealth, and prestige of the Popes made their court a center; and men who settled in the Eternal City, caught something of its greatness.
There is, however, no reason to recapitulate the benefits conferred by ecclesiastical patronage at various times on fine arts, scholarship, and literature. Rather must it be borne in mind that the Romans who advanced Italian culture, were singularly few. The work of Rome was done almost exclusively by aliens, drawn for the most part from Tuscany and Lombardy.
After Frederick II."s brilliant reign, the Sicilians shared but little in the intellectual activity of the nation. That this was not due to want of capacity in the people, seems proved by their apt.i.tude for poetry first shown at Frederick"s Court, and next by the unrivaled richness of their dialectical literature, both popular and cultivated.
Whether the semi-feudalism which oppressed the Southern provinces, checked the free expansion of mental faculty, admits of question. But it is certainly remarkable that, during the Renaissance, the wide districts of the Regno produced so little. Antonio Beccadelli was, indeed, a native of Palermo; but Pontano owned Cerreto for his birthplace. Valla claimed to be a Roman, and Sannazzaro traced his ancestry through Piacenza into Spain. These are the four greatest names of the period when Naples formed a literary center under the Aragonese dynasty. We have already seen that Naples, though not prolific of native genius, gave specific tone of warmth and liberty to literature. This may be ascribed partly to the free manners, bordering on license, of the South, and partly to the permanent jealousy subsisting between the Kingdom and the Papacy. The _Novella_ produced humorous pictures of society at Florence, facetiae in Rome, but bitter satires on the clergy at Naples. The scandals of the Church provoked the frigid animosity of Florentines like Machiavelli and Guicciardini; in Naples they led to Valla"s ponderous critique and Sannazzaro"s envenomed epigrams. The sensuousness of Poliziano a.s.sumed voluptuous fervor in Pontano"s lyrics. Lastly, the Platonic mysticism of Florence, and the Peripatetic materialism of Bologna ended in the new philosophy of the Calabrian school. This crowning contribution of the south to Italy, this special glory of the sixteenth century, came less from Naples than from minor cities of Calabria. Telesio of Cosenza, Bruno of Nola, Campanella of Stilo, showed that something of the old Greek speculative genius--the spirit of Parmenides and Pythagoras--still lingered round the sh.o.r.es of Magna Graecia. Just as the h.e.l.lenic colonists at Elea and Tarentum antic.i.p.ated the dawn of Attic philosophy, so did those robust and innovating thinkers shoot the arrows of their speculation forward at the mark of modern science.
It is tempting to pa.s.s from this review of the Italian provinces to meditations on a further problem. How far may the qualities of each district have endured from remote antiquity? To what extent may they have determined the specific character of Italian production in the modern age? Did the population of Calabria, we ponder, really inherit philosophical capacity from their Greek ancestors? Dare we connect the Tuscan apt.i.tude for art with that mysterious race who built their cities on Etrurian hill-tops? Can the primitive ethnology of the Ligurian and Iapygian stocks be used to explain the silence of the Genoese Riviera and the Apulian champaign? Is a Teutonic strain discernible in the gross humor of the Mantuan Muse, or in the ballads of Montferrat? It would be easy to multiply these questions. But the whole subject of national development is still too obscure to admit of satisfactory answers.[584] All we can affirm without liability to error, amounts to this; that Rome never completely fused the divers races of the Italian peninsula, nor obliterated their characteristic differences. After the dissolution of her empire, we find the Italian provinces presenting local types in language, manners, sentiments, and intellectual proclivities. It is not unreasonable, therefore, to conjecture that certain of these differences sprang from the persistence of ethnological qualities, and others from the infusion of fresh blood from without.
[Footnote 584: Those who are curious in such matters, may be referred to the following works by Giustiniano Nicolucci: _La Stirpe Ligure in Italia_, Napoli, 1864; _Sulla Stirpe Iapigica_, Napoli, 1866; _Sull"Antropologia delta Grecia_, Napoli, 1867; _Antropologia dell"Etruria_, Napoli, 1869; _Antropologia del Lazio_, Napoli, 1873.
Also to Luigi Calori"s _Del Tipo Brachicefalo negli Italiani odierni_, Bologna, 1868, and a learned article upon this work by J. Barnard Davis in the _Journal of the Anthropological Inst.i.tute_, Jan. July, 1871. Nicolucci"s and Calori"s researches lead to opposite results regarding the distribution of brachycephalic skulls in Italy.
Nicolucci adopts in its entirety the theory of an Aryan immigration from the North; Barnard Davis rejects it. It seems to me impossible in our present state of knowledge to draw conclusions from the extremely varied and interesting observations recorded in the treatises cited above.]
The decisive fact of Italian history in all its branches at this epoch is the resurgence of the Latin, or shall we rather say, of the Italic spirit? The national consciousness survived, though dimly, through the middle ages; nor had the people suffered shipwreck in the break-up of the Roman power. This was due in no small measure to the fact that the Empire was the creation of this people, and that consequently they were in a sense superior to its fall. Roman civilization, Roman organization, Roman inst.i.tutions, Roman law, were the products of the Italian genius; and when the Roman State declined, the home province suffered a less thorough-going transformation than, to take an instance, either Gaul or Spain. It would be paradoxical to maintain that the imperial despotism exercised a more controlling authority over the outlying provinces than over Italy proper. Yet something of this kind might be advanced, when we reflect upon the self-indulgent majesty of Rome herself; upon the sovereign privileges accorded to the chief Italian cities; upon the prosperity and vastness of Mediolanum, Aquileia and Ravenna. Local ties and local inst.i.tutions kept a lasting hold upon the ancient no less than the medieval Italian; and long after Rome became the _colluvies omnium gentium_ so bitterly described by Juvenal, the country towns, especially in the valley of the Po, retained a vigorous personality. In this respect the relation in which men of state and letters, like the Plinies, stood on one side to the capital and on the other to their birthplace, is both interesting and instructive. The citizens of the provincial _municipia_ gloried in the might of Rome. Rome was for them the fulcrum of a lever which set the habitable globe in movement at their touch. Still the Empire existed for the world, while each Italian city claimed the duty and affection of its own inhabitants. When Rome failed, the cosmopolitan authority of the Empire was extended to the Church, or, rather, fell into abeyance between the Church and the resuscitated Empire. Just as the _municipia_ flourished beneath the shadow of old Rome, so now the Communes grew beneath the Church and the new Empire. These two creations of the earlier middle ages, though formulated and legalized in Italy, weighed less heavily there than on some other parts of Europe. The Italians resisted imperial authority, and preserved their own local independence. The Northern Emperors were never really strong below the Alps except on sufferance and by the aid of faction. In like manner the Italian burghers tolerated ecclesiastical despotism only in so far as they found it convenient to do so. In spite of Gothic, Lombard, Frankish and German attempts at solidification, the cities succeeded in a.s.serting their autonomy. The Italic stock absorbed the several foreign elements that mingled with it. Vernacular Latin, surviving the decay of literature, repelling the influence of alien dialects, prevailed and was the language of the people.
Notwithstanding this persistence of the antique type, the Italian nation, between the ages of Constantine and Frederick Barbarossa, was intellectually and actually remade. It was not a new nation like the English, French or Germans; for its life had continued without cessation on the same soil from a period antecedent to the birth of Rome. It had no fund of myth and legend, embodying its memories in popular epical poetry. Instead of Siegfried, Arthur or Roland, it looked back to the Virgilian aeneas.[585] Still it underwent, together with the rest of Europe, the transformation from Paganism to Christianity. It felt the influences of feudalism, while repelling them with obstinate and finally victorious jealousy. It owed something to chivalry, though the instincts of the race were rather practical and positive than romantic. It suffered the eclipse of antique culture, and borrowed from its conquerors a tincture of their style in art and literature. When these new Italians found a voice, they spoke in tones which lacked the ring of Roman eloquence. The ma.s.sy fabric of the Roman syntax was dismembered. And yet their speech had more affinity to Roman style than that of any Northern people. The greatest jurists, ecclesiastics and statesmen of the middle ages, the interpreters of Roman law, the fabricators of solid theological edifices, the founders of the Catholic Church, the champions of the Imperial idea, were Italians, proving by their grasp of practical affairs and by the positive turn they gave to speculative inquiries, a partic.i.p.ation in the ancient Latin Spirit.[586] Even when it is least cla.s.sical, the medieval work of the Italian genius betrays this ancestry--in Lombard no less than in Tuscan architecture, in the monumental structure of the Divine Comedy, in the comprehensive digest of the _Summa_, in the rejection of sentimentalism from the tradition of Provencal poetry, in Petrarch"s conception of scholarship, in the sensuous realism of Boccaccio.
[Footnote 585: That the _aeneid_ was still the Italian Epos is proved by the many local legends which connected the foundation of cities with the Trojan wars.]
[Footnote 586: It is enough to mention a few names--Gregory the Great, Lanfranc, S. Anselm, Peter the Lombard, Hildebrand, S. Thomas Aquinas, Accursius, Bartolus--to prove how strong in construction, as opposed to criticism, were the Italian thinkers of the middle ages.]
The Revival of Learning was the acquisition of complete self-consciousness by this new race, which still retained so much of its old temperament. Ill at ease among the customs and ideals of Teutonic tribes; stubbornly refusing to merge their local independence in a kingdom; struggling against feudalism; accepting Chivalry and Gothic architecture as exotics; without national legends; without crusading enthusiasms; the Italians were scarcely themselves until they regained the right use of their energies by contact with the cla.s.sics. This makes the Revival of Learning a national, a patriotic, a dramatic movement. This gives life and pa.s.sion to a process which in any other country, upon any other soil, might have possessed but little more than antiquarian interest. This, and this alone, explains the extraordinary fervor with which the Italians threw themselves into the search, abandoning the new-gained laurels of their modern tongue, absorbing the intellectual faculties of at least three generations in the labor of erudition, and emerging from the libraries of the humanists with a fresh sense of national unity. At the same moment, and by the same series of discoveries, they found themselves and found for Europe the civilization of the modern world.
It is only by remembering that the Italic races, clogged by the ruins of the Roman Empire, and tardily receptive of Teutonic influences, resumed their natural activity and recognized their vocation in the Revival of Learning, that we can comprehend the radical revolution effected in all departments of thought by this event. In Architecture, the Gothic style, which had been adopted as it were with repugnance and imperfectly a.s.similated, was at once abandoned. Brunelleschi, Alberti, Bramante, San Gallo, Michelangelo, Palladio, strove, one and all, to effect a right adjustment of the antique style to modern requirements. Foreign elsewhere, the so-called Palladian manner is at home and national in Italy. Sculpture, even earlier than architecture, took and followed the same hint. What chiefly distinguishes the work of the Pisan school from contemporary work of French or German craftsmen is, that here the manner of Graeco-Roman art has been felt and partly comprehended. Painting, though more closely connected with Christianity, more perfectly related to conditions of contemporary life, owed strength and vigor in great measure to the same conditions.
During the fifteenth century cla.s.sical influences continued increasingly to modify the practice of the strongest masters. In literature, the effect of the Revival was so decisive as to demand a somewhat closer investigation.
The awakened consciousness of the Italic people showed itself first in the creation of a learned literature, imitating as closely as possible in a dead language the models recovered from ancient Rome. It was not enough to appropriate the matter of the Latin authors. Their form had to be a.s.similated and reproduced. These pioneers in scholarship believed that the vulgar tongue, with its divergent dialects, had ever been and still remained incapable of higher culture. The refined diction of Cicero and Virgil was for them a separate and superior speech, consecrated by infallible precedent, and no less serviceable for modern than it formerly had been for antique usage. Recovering the style of the Augustan age, they thought they should possess an instrument of utterance adapted to their present needs, and correlated to the living language of the people as it had been in the age of Roman greatness. They attacked the easier branches of composition first. Epistolography and rhetoric a.s.sumed the Roman habit. Then the meters of Horace, Ovid, and Virgil were a.n.a.lyzed and copied. In the inevitable compromise between cla.s.sical modes of expression and modern necessities of thought, concessions were always made to the advantage of the former. The Persons of the Trinity, the saints and Martyrs of the Church, pranked themselves in phrases borrowed from an obsolete mythology. Christ figured as a hero. The councils of each petty Commune arrogated the style of Senate and People. _Condottieri_ masqueraded as Scipio, Hannibal, and Fabius Cunctator. Cecco and Tonino a.s.sumed the graceful garb of Lycidas and Thyrsis. So fervid was the sense of national resurgence that these literary conventions imposed on men who ruled the politics of Italy--on statesmen with subtle insight into practical affairs; on generals with egotistic schemes to be developed from the play and counter-play of living interests. When Poliziano ruled the republic of letters, this acclimatization of the Latin cla.s.sics was complete. Innumerable poems, reproducing the epic, elegiac and lyric measures of the Romans, poured from the press. Moralists draped themselves in the Hortensian toga.
Orators fulminated copious floods of Ciceronian rhetoric. Critics aped Quintilian. Historians stuffed their chapters with speeches and descriptions modeled upon Livy. Pastoral and didactic poets made centos from Virgil. The drama flourished under the auspices of Plautus, Terence, and Seneca. Preachers were more scrupulous to turn their sentences in florid style than to clinch a theological argument.
Upon the lips of Popes the G.o.d of Sinai or Calvary was Jupiter Optimus Maximus. Even envoys and emba.s.sadors won causes for their States by paragraphs, citations, perorations in the manner of the ancients.
This humanistic ardor at first effected a division between the lettered and unlettered cla.s.ses. The people clung to their dialects.
Educated folk despised all forms of speech but Latin. It seemed as though the national literature might henceforth follow two separate and divergent courses. But with the cessation of the first enthusiasm for antique culture, the claims of vernacular Italian came to be recognized. No other modern nation had produced masterpieces equal to Dante"s, Petrarch"s and Boccaccio"s. The self-esteem of the Italians could not suffer the exclusion of the Divine Comedy, the _Canzoniere_ and the Decameron from the rank of cla.s.sics. Men of delicate perception, like Alberti and Lorenzo de" Medici, felt that the honors of posterity would fall to the share of those who cultivated and improved their mother tongue. Thus the earlier position of the humanists was recognized as false. Could not their recent acquisitions be carried over to the account and profit of the vernacular? A common Italian language, based upon the Tuscan, but modified for general usage, was now practiced in accordance with the rules and objects of the scholars. Upon the briar of the popular literature were grafted the highly-cultivated roses of the cla.s.sic gardens. It was thus that the masterpieces of _cinque cento_ literature came into being--the _Orlando_ and the comedies of Ariosto, Machiavelli"s histories and Sannazzaro"s _Arcadia_--Ta.s.so"s _Gerusalemme_, and Guarini"s _Pastor Fido_, together with the mult.i.tudinous and multifarious work of lesser craftsmen in prose and verse.
Steeped in cla.s.sical allusion and reminiscence, the form of this new literature was modern; but its spirit was in a true sense Latin. The Italic people had found their proper mode of self-expression, and proclaimed their hereditary affinities to the makers of Roman art. In the history of the Italian Renaissance Greek studies form but an episode. The Platonic school of Florence, the Venetian labors of Aldus, exercised a partial and imperfect influence over Italian culture. They proved more important for Europe at large than for the peninsula, more valuable in their remote than their immediate consequences. With the whole of cla.s.sic literature to choose from, this instinctive preference of Latin ill.u.s.trates the point I am engaged in demonstrating--namely, that in Italy the Revival of Learning was a resurgence of the Italic genius modified and formed by Roman influence. True to their ancestry, the Italians a.s.similated Roman types, and left the Greek aside.
If we pause to consider the qualities of the Roman spirit in art and literature, we shall see in how real a sense the modern people reproduced them and remained within their limits. Compared with the h.e.l.lenic and Teutonic races, the Romans were not myth-making, nor in the sincerest sense poetical. In like manner the Italians are deficient on the side of legend and romance. This defect has been insisted on in the preceding volumes, where the practical and positive quality of Italian poetry, its leaning to realism and abstinence from visionary flights of the imagination, have more than once been pointed out. Roman literature was composite and cultured, rather than simple or spontaneous. The Roman epic was literary; based on antecedent models, and confined within the sphere of polished imitation. The Roman Comedy and Tragedy were copies of the Greek. In these highest departments of art the Roman poets gave new form to foreign matter, and infused their national spirit into works that might be almost ranked with free translations. The same is true of their lyrics. Even the meters in all these species are appropriated. The Italians in like manner invented but little. They borrowed from every source--from the Arthurian and Carolingian romances, from Provencal love-poetry, and lastly in copious quant.i.ties from Roman literature. But they stamped their own genius on the materials adopted, retouched the form, and modified the sentiment, converting all they took to their own genuine uses. In this respect the Italians, though apparently so uncreative, may be called more original than the Romans. Their metrical systems, to begin with--the sonnet, the octave stanza, and _terza rima_--are their own. Their touch upon Teutonic legend is more characteristic than the Roman touch on Greek mythology. Dante and Petrarch deal more freely with Provencal poetry than Horace or Catullus with the lyrics of their predecessors. In the matter of dramatic composition, the Italians stand in much the same relation to the Romans as the Romans to the Greeks; and this may be repeated with reference to elegiac and pastoral poetry, and some minor species. The Italic race, in its later as in its earlier development, seems here, also, satisfied with form-giving and delicacy of execution.
If we turn to the indigenous and characteristic qualities of Roman literary genius, we find these reappearing with the force of spontaneity among the Italians. First of all may be reckoned the strong love of country-life which lends undying freshness to Catullus, Horace, and the poetical episodes of Lucretius. This is a no less marked feature of Italian literature. The very best poetry of the humanists is that which deals with villa-life among the Tuscan hills, beside the bay of Naples, or on the sh.o.r.es of Garda. The purest pa.s.sages in the _Novelle_, the least intolerable descriptions in the treatises of the essayists, are those which celebrate the joys of field and wood and garden. The most original products of the Italian stage are the _Aminta_ and the _Pastor Fido_, penetrated through and through with a real love of the country--not with any feeling for Nature in her sublimer and wilder aspects, but with the old Saturnian pathos and fresh clinging loveliness of nature made the friend of man and humanized by labor. The tears shed by Alberti over the rich fields of autumn, as he gazed upon them from some Tuscan summit, seem to have fallen like a dew of real emotion upon the driest places of a pastoral literature which is too often conventional.
Resuming the main thread of the argument, it may be said that the Italians also shared the Roman partiality for didactic poetry. The Latin poems of Poliziano, Vida, and Fracastoro, together with the Italian work of Alamanni, Rucellai, and other authors, sufficiently prove this. Nor does it seem to me that we need suppose these essays in a style of inevitable weariness to have been merely formal imitations of the ancients. The delight with which they were first received and even now sometimes are read in Italy, and the high reputation they have won for their authors, show that there is something in the Italian genius sympathetic to their spirit. One department of their Roman heritage was left uncultivated by the Italians. They produced no really great satire; but, on the other hand, that indigenous satiric humor, inclining to caricature and obscenity, which found vent in the fescennine songs of Roman festivals and triumphs, endured without material change through all modifications of the national life. The earliest monuments of the vernacular literature afford instances of its popularity throughout the middle ages. It gave a special quality to the Florentine Carnival; it a.s.sumed high literary form in Lorenzo"s _Canti_ and Berni"s burlesque _Capitoli_; it flourished on the quays of Naples, and sheltered at Rome under the protection of Pasquino.
Leaving pure literature aside, we may trace the Latin ancestry of the Italians in their strong forensic bias. Just as the Forum was the center of Roman, so was the Piazza the center of Italian life. The declamatory emphasis that spoils much Latin prose and verse for Northern ears, sounds throughout Italian literature. Their writers too easily a.s.sume a rhetorical tone, and subst.i.tute sonorousness of verbiage for solid matter or sound feeling. The recitations of the Romans find an a.n.a.logue in the Italian Academies. The colloquial taint of Roman philosophical discussion is repeated in the moral diatribes of the humanists. But with equal justice we might urge that the practical and legal qualities of the Latin race, and its powerful organizing faculty, survived, and found expression in the modern nation. The Italians, as we have already said, were the greatest Churchmen, Statesmen, and Jurists of medieval Europe. They created the Papacy. They formulated the conception of the Empire. They preserved, explained, and taught Roman law. But this element was already worked out and exhausted at the close of the medieval period. We find it in abeyance during the Renaissance. The political vigor, the martial energy, the cohesive force, the indomitable will of the Romans, have clearly deserted their Italian inheritors. There is a ma.s.sive architecture, as of masonry, in Roman writing, which Italian almost always misses.
If it were permissible to venture here upon a somewhat bold hypothesis, we might ask whether the Italic races now displayed themselves as they might have been without the centralizing and controlling genius of Rome? In the history of the Italian peninsula can we regard the ascendancy of Rome as a gigantic episode? Rome bound the various tribes together in a common system, formed one language, and used Italy as the throne of world-wide empire. But Rome"s empire pa.s.sed, and the tribes remained--indelibly stamped, it is true, with her mark, and subsequently modified by a succession of intrusive incidents--yet yielding to the world in a new form a second crop of flowers and fruitage similar to that which they had borne for Rome. It will not do to press these speculations. They suggest themselves when we observe that, what the Italians lacked in the Renaissance was precisely what Rome, or the Latin confederacy, gave to Italy in the ancient days of her supremacy. It is as though the great Saturnian mother, exhausted by the production of Rome and all that Rome implied through Empire and through Papacy for Europe, had little force left but for amenities and subtleties in modern literature. To the masonry of Rome succeeds the filigree work of the _cinque cento_.
There is no mistaking the positive, materialistic, quality possessed by the Italians in common with their Latin ancestors. This, after all is said, const.i.tutes the true note of their art and literature.
Realism, preferring the tangible and concrete to the visionary and abstract, the defined to the indefinite, the sensuous to the ideal, determines the character of their genius in all its manifestations. We find it even in the Divine Comedy. Dante"s pictures appeal to our eyes; his songs of angels and cries of d.a.m.ned souls reach our ears; he makes us shrink with physical loathing from the abominations of Malebolge, and feel upon our foreheads the cool morning wind of Purgatory. His imaginary world can be mapped out; his journey through it has been traced and measured, inch by inch, and hour by hour. The same realism determined the speculation of the Italians, deflecting it from metaphysics to problems of practical life. Again it leavened their religion. We find it in S. Catherine"s visions, in the stigmata of S. Francis, in the miracle of Bolsena. Under its influence the dogmas of the Church a.s.sumed a kind of palpability. It was against Italian sensuousness that the finer spiritual perceptions of the Teutonic races rose in revolt; and the Italians, who had transmitted their own religious forms to Europe, could not understand the point at issue. Feeble or insufficient as we may judge this realism in the regions of pure thought or pious feeling, it was supremely powerful in art. It enabled the Italians so to apprehend the mysteries of the faith, and so to a.s.similate the cla.s.sic myths, as to find for both a form of beauty in sculpture and in painting. Had they inclined more to the abstract or to the visionary, Christian art would have remained impossible. Had they been less simply sensuous, they might perhaps have shrunk from pagan legends, or have failed to touch them with the right sincerity. How ill these legends fared at the hands of contemporary Teutonic artists, is notorious. In the realm of literature the same quality gave to Petrarch"s treatment of chivalrous love a new substantiality. It animated Boccaccio, and through his influence created a literature of fiction, indescribably rich in objective realism and spontaneous pa.s.sion. Ariosto owed to it the incomparable brilliance of his pictures. And, since such sensuousness has perforce its evil side, we find it, in the last resort, no longer clothing unsubstantial thoughts with forms of beauty, lending reality to the poet"s visions, or humanizing the austerities of faith, but frankly and simply subordinating its powers to a debased imagination.
The Italian sensuousness too often degenerates into mere sensuality in the period of our inquiry. Nor is this the only defect of the quality.
When we complain that the Italians are deficient in the highest tragic imagination, that their feeling for nature lacks romance, or that none but their rarest works of art attain sublimity, we are but insisting on the realistic bias which inclined them to things tangible, palpable, experienced, compa.s.sable by the senses. How much of tragedy is due to horror the soul alone can gauge; how much of romance depends upon a sense of mystery and unexplored capacities in natural things; how much of the sublime consists of incorporeal vagueness, need not here be insisted on. The sensuousness of the Italians, simpler and less finely tempered with spiritual substance than that of the Greeks, while it gave them so much of serene beauty and intelligible form, denied them those high and rare touches which the less evenly balanced genius of the Northern races can command at will. The poverty of imaginative suggestion in their lyrical and dramatic poetry has been already indicated. We feel this even in their music. The most adorable melodies, poured forth like nightingale songs in the great schools of the eighteenth century, owe their perfection to purity of outline; their magic depends on a direct appeal to sensibility. There is not in them "more than the ear discovers." They are not, to quote Sir Thomas Browne again, "a hieroglyphical and shadowed lesson of the whole world and creatures of G.o.d." Palestrina and Stradella, Pergolese and Salvator Rosa, move in a region less mystical and pregnant with acc.u.mulated meaning than that which belongs to Bach and Beethoven.
The intellectual medium formed in Italy upon the dissolution of the middle ages was irreligious and indifferent; highly refined and highly cultivated; instinctively aesthetic and superbly gifted, but devoid of moral earnestness or patriotic enthusiasm, of spiritual pa.s.sion or political energy. Society, enslaved, disfranchised, and unwarlike, was composed of peasants and artisans, sleek citizens, effeminated n.o.bles, courtiers and scholars of a hundred types, monks and clergy of manifold variety and almost incalculable mult.i.tude, despots more or less successful in their arts of imposition and seduction, and the countless dependents on the wants and whims and vices of this motley population. Among the last may be reckoned artists of all but the first rank, men of letters, parasites and captains of adventure, courtesans and Abbes, pamphleteers and _bravi_, orators and secretaries. Outside the universities, the factories and the marketplace, there were few callings that could be reckoned honorable or honest, independent or respectable. Over the rest hung the shadow of servitude and corruption, of ecclesiastical depravity and private debauchery, of political stagnation and haughty patronage. Still the qualities of intellectual sagacity, determined volition, and a certain aesthetical good taste, were all but universal. We find them in such works as Cellini"s biography, Lorenzino de" Medici"s apology, and the memoirs of his murderer--to mention only doc.u.ments where the last-named quality might well have been absent. Even the lowest instruments of public or private profligacy maintained an independence face to face with art, and recognized a higher law than their employer"s in the duties imposed upon them by the ideal after which they strove as men of letters, painters or the like. We trace this loyal service and artistic freedom even in Pietro Aretino.
A literature, corresponding to this medium, of necessity arose. It was a literature of form and style, of pleasure and diversion, without intensity of pa.s.sion, earnestness of purpose, or profundity of thought. It could boast no Shakspere, no Pindar, no Dante, no Descartes. The prevailing types which it developed, were idyllic, descriptive, melodramatic, narrative, elegiac, sentimental, burlesque, and licentious. Poliziano, Sannazzaro, Lorenzo de" Medici, Pulci, the writers of Sonnets and _Capitoli_, the novelists and the satirists, are each and all of them related by no superficial tie to Boccaccio.
He is the morning star of this multifarious and brilliant band of artist-authors, until the moment when Ariosto rises above the horizon, and the _cinque cento_ finds adequate expression in the _Orlando Furioso_. In that poem the qualities by which the age is characterized, are concentrated, and the advance in artistic faculty and feeling since the period of the Decameron is manifested. Amid the many writers of the century we seek in vain a true philosopher. We have, instead, to content ourselves with the ethical dissertations of the humanists; with sketches like the _Cortegiano_, the _Galateo_, the _Governo della Famiglia_; with erudite fancies like the speculations of Ficino, or the scholastic triflings of Pico della Mirandola. Yet out of the very indifferentism of the age philosophy will spring.
Pomponazzi formulates the current materialism. It remains for Telesio, Campanella, Bruno, Galileo to found the modern scientific method.
Meanwhile, the political agitations of despotisms and republics alike, and the diplomatic relations of so many petty States, have stimulated observation and developed the powers of a.n.a.lysis. Therefore the most vigorous and virile product of this literature is such work as the _Principe_ and _Discorsi_ of Machiavelli, the _Ricordi_ of Guicciardini, together with the histories and reflective treatises on statecraft published by the statists of their school.
The absence of seriousness in the literature of the golden age is striking to a Northern student. It seems to have been produced for and by men who had lost their ethical and political conscience, and had enthroned an aesthetical conscience in its room. Their religious indifference is deadlier than atheism. Their levity is worse than sarcasm. They fulfill the epigram of Tacitus, who wrote: _corrumpere et corrumpi saeculum vocant_. Yet no one has the vigor to be angry. It is difficult to detect the true note of satire in their criticism of society. Ariosto is playful, Aretino scurrilous, Alamanni peevish, Folengo atrabilious. The purely religious compositions of the period lack simplicity and sincerity. The _Sacre Rappresentazioni_ are sentimental and romantic. The Christian epics of the Latin poets are indescribably frigid. The _Laudi_ are either literary like Lorenzo"s, or hysterical like Benivieni"s praise of Christian madness. The impertinent biographies of Aretino pa.s.s muster for genuinely pious work with Vittoria Colonna. It is only in some heartfelt utterance of the aged Michelangelo, in the holy life of a S. Antonino, or the charity of Luca della Robbia"s mission to young Boscoli, or the fervor of Savonarola"s sermons, that here and there the chord of real religious feeling vibrates. Philosophy entrenches herself, where she is strongest, in negation--in Valla"s negation of any ethical standard superior to sensuous hedonism, in Pomponazzi"s negation of immortality, in Machiavelli"s negation of Providence. So complete an ant.i.thesis to the medieval ground of thought was necessary; and its results for the future of science are incontestable. But at the moment it meant a withdrawal from spiritual interests, an insistance on the material side of human life, which was correlated to religious indifference and social dissolution.
The drama abounds in comedies and masks, of wonderful variety and great artistic beauty. But there is no tragedy worthy of the name. And the tragic element, as distinguished from romance and pathos, is conspicuous by its absence in the novels of the period. Lyrical poets prefer the conscious shams of Petrarchism to any genuine utterance of emotion. The gravity of La Casa"s sonnets, wrenched from an uneasy and unwilling conscience, the sublimity of Michelangelo"s Platonic mysticism, the patriotic indignation of Guidiccioni"s laments for Italy enslaved and sunk in sensual sloth, must rank as luminous exceptions. In the romantic epic, chivalry, the ideal of an earlier age, is turned to gentle ridicule. Honor is sneered at or misunderstood. The absurd, the marvelous, the licentious are mingled in a form of incomparable artistic suavity. Ta.s.so"s graver epic belongs to another epoch. Trissino"s heroic poem is unreadable. Like the tragedies of the scholars, it lacks life and stands in no relation to the spirit of the age.
Over the whole art and literature of the epoch is shed an agreeable light of quietude and acquiescence, a glow of contentment and well-being, which contrasts strangely with the tragic circ.u.mstances of a nation crumbling into an abyss of ruin. It is not precisely the _bourgeois_ felicity of Boccaccio, but a tranquillity that finds choicest expression in the painted idyls of Giorgione and the written idyls of Sannazzaro. Its ultimate ideal is the Golden Age, when no restraints were placed on natural inclination, and no ambition ruffled the spirit rocked in halcyon ease. This prevailing mood of artists and writers was capable of sensuous depth, as in the _Baiae_ of Pontano. It was capable of refined irony, as in the smile of Ariosto. It was capable of broad laughter, as in the farce of Bibbiena. It was capable of tenderness, as in the _Ballate_ of Poliziano. It was capable of cynical licentiousness, as in Aretino"s _Ragionamenti_, and the Florentine _Capitoli_. But it was incapable of tragic pa.s.sion, lyrical rapture, intensity, sublimity, heroism. What ears would there have been in Italy for Marston"s prologue to _Antonio and Mellida_ or for Milton"s definition of the poet"s calling? The men who made this literature and those with whom they lived, for whom they wrote, were well-bred, satisfied with inactivity, open at all pores to pleasure, delighting in the refinements of tact and taste, but at the same time addicted to gross sensuality of word and deed. The world was over for them. The arenas of energy were closed. About the future life they entertained a suave and genial skepticism, a delicate _peut-etre_ of blended affirmation and negation, lightly worn, which did not interrupt the observance of ceremonial piety. They loved their villa, like Flamminio, Ficino, Bembo, all the poets of Benacus. They spent their leisure between a grove of laurels and a study. They met in courtly circles for polite discourse and trifling dissertation, with no influencing pa.s.sion, no speculative enthusiasm, no insight into mysteries deeper than the subtleties of poetry and art. Not one of them, amid the crash and conflict of three nations on their soil, exclaimed in darkness _Imus, imus praecipites!_ When the woes of Italy touched them with a shade of melancholy, they sought relief in pastimes or in study. Cinthio, prefacing his novels with the horrors of the Sack of Rome, Bargagli using Siena"s agony as introduction to his love-romances, are parables of what was happening in the world of fact and feeling. The portrait of Castiglione, clear-browed, sedate, intelligent, humane, expresses the best men of the best moment in that age. The _Aminta_ is their dream-world, modeled on reality. Vida"s apostrophe to _pulcherrima Roma_ utters their sentiment of nationality.
There is a beautiful side to all this. It is the idyllic ideal of life, revealed in t.i.tian"s picture of the _Three Ages of Man_, the ideal which results in golden and consummate art, tranquilized to euthanasia, purged of all purpose more earnest than may be found in melodies played beside a fountain in the fields by boys to listening girls, on flute or viol. For this ideal a great future was in store, when the animating motive of idyllic melody expressed itself in the opera music of the eighteenth century, and Italy gave the last of her imperishable gifts, a new and perfect art of song, to Europe. But there is also an ugly side to all this. The ultimate corruption of the age--in its absence of energy, its avoidance of serious endeavor, its courtly adulation, its ruffianism, servility, cynicism and hypocrisy--is incarnated in Aretino. Here the vices of the Italian Renaissance show their cloven hoofs. Through the orange and laurel bowers, flooded with Tintoretto"s golden sunlight, grins a b.e.s.t.i.a.l all-devouring satyr, a satyr far less innocent or gentle than Greek poets feigned, with a wolf"s jaws as well as a goat"s legs. And in Aretino is already foreshadowed Baffo, the prurient and porcine Caliban of verse, more barbarously b.e.s.t.i.a.l than Venetian Casanova.
Meanwhile amid apparent civility of manner, the violent crimes of a corrupt and servile race were frequent. Poisoning and secret a.s.sa.s.sination, acts of personal vengeance and the employment of hired cut-throats, rendered life unsafe in that idyllic Italy.
The historian of this epoch, though he feels its splendor and would fain bless, finds himself forced to insist upon the darker details of the subject. The triumphal paean of his opening pages ends, too often for his sympathy, in dissonance and wailing echoes. Yet it would be unjust and unscientific to close on any note of lamentation, when the achievements of the eldest-born of Europe"s daughters stand arrayed before him. It has often been said that the Renaissance presents an insoluble problem. Twy-natured and indeterminate, the spirit of the age has been likened to the Sphinx, whose riddle finds no Oedipus.
But this language is at best rhetorical. The anomalies and contradictions of a period to which we owe so much of our spiritual and intellectual force, are due to its transitional character. The middle ages were closed. The modern world was scarcely formed. This interval was chosen for the re-birth of the Italian spirit. On the Italians fell the complicated and perplexing task of modulating from the one phase to the other. And, as I have attempted to explain, the Italians were a peculiar people. They had resisted the Teutonic impact of the medieval past; but they had failed to prepare themselves for the drama of violence and bloodshed which the feudal races played out on the plains of Lombardy. When we say that it was their duty to have formed themselves into a nation like the French, we are criticising their conduct from a modern point of view. Experience proved that their policy of munic.i.p.al independence was a kind of suicide. But the instincts of clanship, slowly trans.m.u.ted through feudal inst.i.tutions into a monarchical system, had from time immemorial been absent in Italy. Rome herself had never gathered the Italian cities into what we call a nation. And when Rome, the world"s head, fell, the munic.i.p.alities of Italy remained, and the Italian people sprang to life again by contact with their irrecoverable past.[587] Then, though the Church swayed Europe from Italian soil, she had nowhere less devoted subjects than in Italy. Proud as the Italians had been of the Empire, proud as they now were of the Church, still neither the Roman Empire nor the Roman Church imposed on the Italian character.
Pondering on the unique circ.u.mstances of this new nation, unorganized like her sisters, conscious of an immense past and a persistent vitality, shrewdly apathetic to the religious enthusiasms of the younger races, yet obliged to temporize and acquiesce and cloak indifference with hypocrisy, we are brought to feel, though we may not fully explain, the inevitableness of many distracting discords in what was still an incomplete phase of national existence.
[Footnote 587: "Roma, caput mundi," is a significant phrase. It marks the defect of Italian nationality as distinguished from cosmopolitan empire.]
As a final consideration, after reviewing the anomalies of Italian society upon the dissolution of the Middle Ages, we are fully justified in maintaining that the race which had produced Machiavelli and Columbus, Campanella and Galileo--that is to say, the firmest pioneers and freest speculators of the dawning modern age--was capable, left but alone, of solving its own moral contradictions by some virile effort. Pioneering energy, speculative boldness, virility of effort (however masked by pedantry and purism, by the urbanities and amenities of polite culture, by the baseness of egotism and the immorality of social decadence), were the deepest notes of the bewildering age which forms our theme. But this freedom from interference, this luck of being left alone, was just what the Italians could never get. The catastrophes of several successive invasions, followed by the petrifying stagnation of political and ecclesiastical tyranny, checked their natural evolution and suspended their intellectual life, before the fruit-time had succeeded to the flower-time of the Renaissance. The magnificent audacity of their impulse fell checked in mid-career. Their achievement might be likened to an arch ascending bravely from two mighty piers, whereon the key stone of completion was not set.
When all her deities were decayed or broken, Italy still worshiped beauty in fine art and literary form. When all her energies seemed paralyzed, she still pursued her intellectual development with unremitting ardor. This is the true greatness of those fifty years of glorious achievement and pitiful humiliation, during which the Italians, like Archimedes in his Syracusan watch-tower, turned deaf ears to combatant and conqueror, intent on problems that involved the future destinies of man. The light of the cla.s.sics had fallen on their pathway at the close of the middle ages. The leading of that light they still pursued, as though they had been consecrated to the service of a G.o.d before unknown in modern Europe. Their first and foremost gift to nations who had scourged and slain them, was a new and radiant conception of humanity. This conception externalized itself in the creation of a common mental atmosphere, in the expression of the modern spirit by fine art and literature, in the diffusion of all that is contained for us in culture. They wrought, thought, painted, carved and built with the antique ideal as a guiding and illuminative principle in view. This principle enabled them to elevate and harmonize, to humanize and beautify the coa.r.s.er elements existing in the world around them. What they sought and clung to in the heritage of the ancients, was the divinity of form--the form that gives grace, loveliness, sublimity to common flesh and blood in art; style to poetry and prose; urbanity to social manners; richness and elegance to reflections upon history and statecraft and the problems of still infantine science. Lastly, whatsoever is implied in the double formula of the discovery of man and of the world--the resuscitation of learning by scholars; the positive study of human motives and action by historians; the new philosophy prepared by speculators of the Southern school; the revival of mathematical and astronomical researches after a sound method; the endeavor to base physical science on experiment and observation; the exploration of the western hemisphere by navigators--all this we owe to the Italians of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
We may allow that their execution of a task so arduous and beneficial was accomplished under conditions of social corruption and political apathy, which somewhat dimmed the l.u.s.ter of their triumph. It may be admitted that they failed, even in their own domains of art and poetry, to realize the highest possible ideals; and we may ascribe this failure partly to their moral feebleness, which contradicts our sense of manhood. Still these are no reasons why we should not pay the homage due to their achievement. The deepest interest in the Italian Renaissance, the warmest recognition of its services to modern Europe, are compatible with a just conviction that the tone of that epoch is not to be imitated. Such imitation would, in point of fact, be not merely anachronistic but impossible. To insist on anything so obvious would be impertinent to common sense, were we not from time to time admonished from the chair of criticism that a new Gospel, founded on the principles of the Renaissance, has been or is being preached in England. Criticism, however, is fallible; and in this matter its mistake is due to the English incapacity for understanding that scientific curiosity may be engaged, without didactic objects, on moral and historical problems. We cannot extract from the Renaissance a body of ethical teaching, an ideal of conduct, or a discipline of manners, applicable to the altered conditions of the nineteenth century. But we can exercise our ingenuity upon the complex questions which it offers; we can satisfy the pa.s.sion of inquiry, which prompts men to examine, a.n.a.lyze, reflect upon, and reappropriate the past. We can attempt to depict the period, as we recover a phase of our own youth by recollection, extenuating nothing, setting nothing down in malice, using the results of our researches for no purposes of propaganda, but aiming, in so far as our capacity sustains us, at the simple truth about it.
For a student animated with this pa.s.sion of curiosity, the Italian Renaissance, independently of any sympathies he may have formed for the Italian people, or any fascination which an age and race so picturesque may exercise, must be a subject worthy of most patient contemplation. As we grow in knowledge, corroborating and confirming those views about the world and man which originated with the new direction given to inquiry in the fifteenth century, we learn with ever stronger certainty, that as there is no interruption in the order of nature, so the history of civilization is continuous and undivided.
In the sequence of events, in the growth of human character, no arbitrary freaks, no flaws of chance, are recognizable. Age succeeds to age; nations rise and perish; new elements are introduced at intervals into the common stock; the drama is not played out with one set of actors. But, in spite of all change, and though we cannot as yet demonstrate the law of evolution in details, we are reasonably convinced that the development of human energy and intellectual consciousness has been carried on without cessation from the earliest times until the present moment, and is destined to unbroken progress through the centuries before us. History, under the influence of this conception, is rapidly ceasing to be the record of external incidents, of isolated moments, or of brilliant episodes in the epic of humanity.