[Footnote 230: Michelangelo Amerighi da Caravaggio (1569-1609).]
[Footnote 231: For the historian of manners in seventeenth-century Italy those pictures have a truly precious value, as they are executed with such pa.s.sion as to raise them above the more careful but more lymphatic transcripts from beer-cellars in Dutch painting.]
A Spaniard, settled at Naples--Giuseppe Ribera, nicknamed Lo Spagnoletto--carried on Caravaggio"s tradition. Spagnoletto surpa.s.sed his master in the brutally realistic expression of physical anguish.
His Prometheus writhing under the beak of the vulture, his disembowelled martyrs and skinless S. Bartholomews, are among the most nauseous products of a masculine nature blessed with robust health. Were they delirious or hysterical, they would be less disgusting. But no; they are merely vigorous and faithful representations of what anybody might have witnessed, when a traitor like Ravaillac or a Lombard _untore_ was being put to death in agony. His firm mental grip on cruelty, and the somber gloom with which he invested these ghastly transcripts from the torture-chamber, prove Ribera true to his Spanish origin. Caravaggio delighted in color, and was indeed a colorist of high rank, considering the times in which he lived. Spagnoletto rejoiced in somber shadows, as though to ill.u.s.trate the striking sonnet I have quoted in another place from Campanella.[232]
[Footnote 232: See above, part I. p. 47.]
This digression upon the Naturalists was needed partly to ill.u.s.trate the nature of the attempted revival of the art of painting at this epoch, and partly to introduce two notable masters of the Bolognese school.
Lionello Spada, a street-arab of Bologna, found his way into the studio of the Caracci, where he made himself a favorite by roguish ways and ready wit. He afterwards joined Caravaggio, and, when he reappeared in Lombardy, he had formed a manner of his own, more resplendent in color and more naturalistic than that of the Caracci, but with less of realism than his Roman teacher"s. If I could afford s.p.a.ce for anecdotical details, the romance of Spada"s life would furnish much entertaining material. But I must press on toward Guercino, who represents in a more famous personality this blending of the Bolognese and Naturalistic styles. Giovanni Frances...o...b..rbieri got his nickname of Il Guercino, or the "Squintling," from an accident which distorted his right eye in babyhood. Born of poor parents, he was apprenticed to indifferent painters in Bologna at an early age, his father agreeing to pay for the boy"s education by a load of grain and a vat of grapes delivered yearly.
Thus Guercino owed far less to academical studies than to his own genius. Being Lodovico Caracci"s junior by thirty-five years, and Annibale"s by thirty, he had ample opportunities for studying the products of their school in Bologna, without joining the Academy. A generation lay between him and the first Eclectics. Nearly the same s.p.a.ce of time separated Guercino from the founder of the Naturalists, and it was universally admitted in his lifetime that he owed to Caravaggio in coloring no less than he derived from the Caracci in sobriety and dignity of conception. These qualities of divergent schools Guercino combined in a manner marked by salient individuality. As a colorist, he approached the Tenebrosi--those lovers of surcharged shadows and darkened hues, whose gloom culminated in Ribera. But we note a fat and b.u.t.tery _impasto_ in Guercino, which distinguishes his work from the drier and more meager manner of the Roman-Neapolitan painters. It is something characteristic of Bologna, a richness which we might flippantly compare to sausage, or a Flemish smoothness, indicating Calvaert"s influence. More than this, Guercino possessed a harmony of tones peculiar to himself, and strongly contrasted with Guido"s silver-gray gradations. Guido"s coloring, at its best, often reminds one of olive branches set against a blue sea and pale horizon in faintly amber morning light. The empurpled indigoes, relieved by smouldering Venetian red, which Guercino loved, suggest thunder-clouds, dispersed, rolling away through dun subdued glare of sunset reflected upward from the west. And this scheme of color, vivid but heavy, luminous but sullen, corresponded to what contemporaries called the Terribilita of Guercino"s conception. Terribleness was a word which came into vogue to describe Michelangelo"s grand manner. It implied audacity of imagination, dashing draughtsmanship, colossal scale, something demonic and decisive in execution.[233] The terrible takes in Guercino"s work far lower flights than in the Sistine Chapel. With Michelangelo it soared like an eagle; with Guercino it flitted like a bat. His brawny saints are ponderous, not awe-inspiring.
[Footnote 233: But the men who used the word failed to perceive that what justified these qualities in Michelangelo"s work was piercing, poignant, spiritual pa.s.sion, of which their age had nothing.]
Yet we feel that the man loved largeness, ma.s.siveness, and volume; that he was preoccupied with intellectual problems; planning deeply, and constructing strongly, under conditions unfavorable to spiritual freedom.
Guercino lived the life of an anchorite, absorbed in studies, unwived, sober, pious, truthful, sincere in his commerce with the world, unaffectedly virtuous, devoted to his art and G.o.d. Some of his pictures bring forcibly before our minds the religious _milieu_ created by the Catholic Revival. I will take the single instance of a large oil-painting in the Bolognese Gallery. It represents the reception of a Duke of Aquitaine into monastic orders by S. Bernard. The knightly quality of the hero is adequately portrayed; his piety is masculine. But an accessory to the main subject of the composition arrests attention. A monk, earnestly pleading, emphatically gesticulating, addresses himself to the task of converting a young squire. Perugino, or even Raphael, would have brought the scene quite otherwise before us. The Duke"s consecration would of course have occupied a commanding place in the picture. But the episodes would have been composed of comely groups or animated portraits. Guercino, obedient to the religious spirit of the Counter-Reformation, compels sympathy with ecclesiastical propaganda.
Guido exercised a powerful influence over his immediate successors.
Guercino felt it when he painted that soulless picture of Abraham and Hagar, in the Brera--the picture which excited Byron"s admiration, which has been praised for its accurate delineation of a teardrop, and which, when all is reckoned, has just nothing of emotion in it but a frigid inhumanity. He competed with Guido in the fresco of the Lodovisi Aurora, a substantial work certainly, yet one that lacks the saving qualities of the Rospigliosi ceiling--grace and geniality of fancy.
In the history of criticism there are few things more perplexing than the vicissitudes of taste and celebrity, whereby the idols of past generations crumble suddenly to dust, while the despised and rejected are lifted to pinnacles of glory. Successive waves of aesthetical preference, following one upon the other with curious rapidity, sweep ancient fortresses of fame from their venerable bas.e.m.e.nts, and raise upon the crests of wordy foam some delicate seash.e.l.l that erewhile lay embedded in oblivious sand. During the last half-century, taste has been more capricious, revolutionary, and apparently anarchical than at any previous epoch. The unity of orthodox opinion has broken up. Critics have sought to display originality by depreciating names famous in former ages, and by exalting minor stars to the rank of luminaries of the first magnitude. A man, yet in middle life, can remember with what reverence engravings after Raphael, the Caracci, and Poussin were treated in his boyhood; how Fra Angelico and Perugino ruled at a somewhat later period; how one set of eloquent writers discovered Blake, another Botticelli, and a third Carpaccio; how Signorelli and Bellini and Mantegna received tardy recognition; and now, of late years, how Tiepolo has bidden fair to obtain the European _grido_. He will also bear in mind that the conditions of his own development--studies in the Elgin marbles, the application of photography to works of art, the publications of the Arundel Society, and that genius of new culture in the air which is more potent than all teaching, rendered for himself each oracular utterance interesting but comparatively unimportant--as it were but talk about truths evident to sight.
Meanwhile, amid this gabble of "sects and schisms," this disputation which makes a simple mind take refuge in the epigram attributed to Swift on Handel and Bononcini,[234] criticism and popular intelligence have been unanimous upon two points, first, in manifesting a general dislike for Italian art after the date of Raphael"s third manner, and a particular dislike for the Bolognese painters; secondly, in an earnest effort to discriminate and exhibit what is sincere and beautiful in works to which our forefathers were unintelligibly irresponsive. A wholesome reaction, in one word, has taken place against academical dogmatism; and the study of art has been based upon appreciably better historical and aesthetical principles.
[Footnote 234: "Strange that such difference should be "Twixt tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee."]
The seeming confusion of the last half-century ought not, therefore, to shake our confidence in the possibility of arriving at stable laws of taste. Radical revolutions, however salutary, cannot be effected without some injustice to ideals of the past and without some ill-grounded enthusiasm for the ideals of the moment. Nor can so wide a region as that of modern European art be explored except by divers pioneers, each bia.s.sed by personal predilections and peculiar sensibilities, each liable to changes of opinion under the excitement of discovery, each followed by a coterie sworn to support their master"s _ipse dixit_.
The chief thing is to obtain a clear conception of the mental atmosphere in which sound criticism has to live and move and have its being. "The form of this world pa.s.ses; and I would fain occupy myself only with that which const.i.tutes abiding relations." So said Goethe; and these words have much the same effect as that admonition of his "to live with steady purpose in the Whole, the Good, the Beautiful." The true critic must divert his mind from what is transient and ephemeral, must fasten upon abiding relations, _bleibende Verhaltnisse_. He notes that one age is cla.s.sical, another romantic; that _this_ swears by Giotto, _that_ by the Caracci. Meanwhile, he resolves to maintain that cla.s.sics and romantics, the Caracci and Giotto, are alike only worthy of regard in so far as they exemplify the qualities which bring art into the sphere of abiding relations. One writer is eloquent for Fra Angelico, another for Rubens; the one has personal sympathy for the Fiesolan monk, the other for the Flemish courtier. Our true critic renounces idiosyncratic whims and partialities, striving to enter with firm purpose into the understanding of universal goodness and beauty. In so far as he finds truth in Angelico and Rubens, will he be appreciative of both.
Aristotle laid it down as an axiom that the ultimate verdict in matters of taste is "what the man of enlightened intelligence would decide." The critic becomes a man of enlightened intelligence, a [Greek: phronimos], by following the line of Goethe"s precepts. In working out self-culture, he will derive a.s.sistance by the way from the commanding philosophical conception of our century. All things with which we are acquainted are in evolutionary process. Everything belonging to human nature is in a state of organic transition--pa.s.sing through necessary phases of birth, growth, decline, and death. Art, in any one of its specific manifestations--Italian painting for example--avoids this law of organic evolution, arrests development at the fairest season of growth, averts the decadence which ends in death, no more than does an oak. The oak, starting from an acorn, nourished by earth, air, light, and water, offers indeed a simpler problem than so complex an organism as Italian painting, developed under conditions of manifold diversity. Yet the dominant law controls both equally.
It is not, however, in evolutions that we must seek the abiding relations spoken of by Goethe. The evolutionary conception does not supply those to students of art, though it unfolds a law which is permanent and of universal application in the world at large. It forces us to dwell on necessary conditions of mutability and transformation. It leads the critic to comprehend the whole, and encourages the habit of scientific tolerance. We are saved by it from uselessly fretting ourselves because of the unG.o.dly and the inevitable; from mourning over the decline of Gothic architecture into Perpendicular aridity and flamboyant feebleness, over the pa.s.sage of the scepter from Sophocles to Euripides or from Ta.s.so to Marino, over the chaos of Mannerism, Eclecticism and Naturalism into which Italian painting plunged from the height of its maturity. This toleration and acceptance of unavoidable change need not imply want of discriminative perception. We can apply the evolutionary canon in all strictness without ignoring that adult manhood is preferable to senile decrepitude, that Pheidias surpa.s.ses the sculptors of Antinous, that one Madonna of Gian Bellini is worth all the pictures of the younger Palma, and that Dossi"s portrait of the Ferrarese jester is better worth having than the whole of Annibale Caracci"s Galleria Farnesina.[235] It will even lead us to select for models those works which bear the mark of adolescence or vigorous maturity, as supplying more fruitful sources for our own artistic education.
[Footnote 235: The great picture by Dosso Dossi, to which I have alluded, is in the Modenese gallery.]
Nevertheless, not in evolution, but in man"s soul, his intellectual and moral nature, must be sought those abiding relations which const.i.tute sound art, and are the test of right aesthetic judgment. These are such as truth, simplicity, sobriety, love, grace, patience, modesty, thoughtfulness, repose, health, vigor, brain-stuff, dignity of imagination, lucidity of vision, purity, and depth of feeling. Wherever the critic finds these--whether it be in Giotto at the dawn or in Guido at the evensong of Italian painting, in Homer or Theocritus at the two extremes of Greek poetry--he will recognize the work as ranking with those things from which the soul draws nourishment. At the same time, he may not neglect the claims of craftsmanship. Each art has its own vehicle of expression, and exacts some innate capacity for the use of that vehicle from the artist. Therefore the critic must be also sufficiently versed in technicalities to give them their due value. It can, however, be laid down, as a general truth, that while immature or awkward workmanship is compatible with aesthetic excellence, technical dexterity, however skillfully applied, has never done anything for a soulless painter.
Criticism, furthermore, implies judgment; and that judgment must be adjusted to the special nature of the thing criticised. Art is different from ethics, from the physical world, from sensuality, however refined.
It will not, therefore, in the long run do for the critic of an art to apply the same rules as the moralist, the naturalist, or the hedonist.
It will not do for him to be contented with edification, or differentiation of species, or demonstrable delightfulness as the test-stone of artistic excellence. All art is a presentation of the inner human being, his thought and feeling, through the medium of beautiful symbols in form, color, and sound. Our verdict must therefore be determined by the amount of thought, the amount of feeling, proper to n.o.ble humanity, which we find adequately expressed in beautiful aesthetic symbols. And the man who shall p.r.o.nounce this verdict is, now as in the days of Aristotle, the man of enlightened intelligence, sound in his own nature and open to ideas. Even his verdict will not be final; for no one is wholly free from partialities due to the age in which he lives, and to his special temperament. Still, a consensus of such verdicts eventually forms that voice of the people which, according to an old proverb, is the voice of G.o.d. Slowly, and after many successive siftings, the c.u.mulative votes of the _phronimoi_ decide. Insurgents against their judgment, in the case of acknowledged masters like Pheidias, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, are doomed to final defeat, because this judgment is really based upon abiding relations between art and human nature.
Our hope with regard to the unity of taste in the future then is, that, all sentimental or academical seekings after the ideal having been abandoned, momentary theories founded upon idiosyncratic or temporary partialities exploded, and nothing accepted but what is solid and positive, the scientific spirit shall make men progressively more and more conscious of those _bleibende Verhaltnisse_, more and more capable of living in the whole; also that, in proportion as we gain a firmer hold upon our own place in the world, we shall come to comprehend with more instinctive cert.i.tude what is simple, natural, and honest, welcoming with gladness all artistic products that exhibit these qualities. The perception of the enlightened man will then be the taste of a healthy person who has made himself acquainted with the laws of evolution in art and in society, and is able to test the excellence of work in any stage, from immaturity to decadence, by discerning what there is of truth, sincerity, and natural vigor in it.
This digression was forced upon me by the difficulty of properly appreciating the Bolognese Eclectics now. What would be the amused astonishment of Sir Joshua Reynolds, if he returned to London at the present moment, and beheld the Dagon of his esteemed Caracci dashed to pieces by the ark of Botticelli--Carpaccio enthroned--Raffaello stigmatized as the stone of stumbling and the origin of evil? Yet Reynolds had as good a right to his opinion as any living master of the brush, or any living masters of language. There is no doubt that the Bolognese painters sufficed for the eighteenth century, whose taste indeed they had created.[236] There is equally no doubt that for the nineteenth they are insufficient.[237] The main business of a critic is to try to answer two questions: first why did the epoch produce such art, and why did it rejoice in it?--secondly, has this art any real worth beyond a doc.u.mentary value for the students of one defined historical period; has it enduring qualities of originality, strength, beauty, and inspiration? To the first of these questions I have already given some answer by showing under what conditions the Caracci reacted against mannerism. In the due consideration of the second we are hampered by the culture of our period, which has strongly prejudiced all minds against the results of that reaction.
[Footnote 236: The pa.s.sage from Lodovico Caracci through Poussin to Reynolds is direct and unbroken. "Poussin," says Lanzi, "ranked Domenichino directly next to Raffaello." _History of Painting in Italy_, Engl. Tr. vol. iii. p. 84.]
[Footnote 237: Perhaps a generation will yet arise which shall take the Caracci and their scholars into favor, even as people of refinement in our own days find a charm in patches, powder, perukes, sedan-chairs, patchouli, and other lumber from the age despised by Keats. I remember visiting a n.o.ble English lady at her country seat. We drank tea in her room, decorated by a fashionable "Queen Anne" artist. She told us that the quaintly pretty furniture of the last century which adorned it had recently been brought down from the attic, whither her fore bears had consigned it as tasteless--Gillow in their minds superseding Chippendale.]
The painting of the Eclectics was not spontaneous art. It was art mechanically revived during a period of critical hesitancy and declining enthusiasms. It was produced at Bologna, "la dotta" or "la gra.s.sa," by Bolognese craftsmen. This is worth remembering; for except Guido Guinicelli and Francesco Raibolini, no natives of Bologna were eminently gifted for the arts. And Bologna was the city famous for her ponderous learning, famous also for the good cheer of her table, neither erudition nor savory meats being essential to the artist"s temperament. The painting which emerged there at the close of the sixteenth century embodied religion and culture, both of a base alloy. The Christianity of the age was not nave, simple, sincere, and popular, like that of the thirteenth century; but hysterical, dogmatic, hypocritical, and sacerdotal. It was not Christianity indeed, but Catholicism galvanized by terror into reactionary movement. The culture of the age was on the wane. Men had long lost their first clean perception of cla.s.sical literature, and the motives of the mediaeval past were exhausted.
Therefore, though the Eclectics went on painting the old subjects, they painted all alike with frigid superficiality. If we examine the lists of pictures turned out by the Caracci and Guercino, we shall find a pretty equal quant.i.ty of saints and Susannas, Judiths and Cleopatras, Davids and Bacchuses, Jehovahs and Jupiters, anchorites and Ba.s.sarids, Faiths and Fortunes, cherubs and Cupids. Artistically, all are on the same dead level of inspiration. Nothing new or vital, fanciful or imaginative, has been breathed into antique mythology. What has been added to religious expression is repellent. Extravagantly ideal in ecstatic Magdalens and Maries, extravagantly realistic in martyrdoms and torments, extravagantly harsh in dogmatic mysteries and the ecclesiastical parade of power, extravagantly soft in sentimental tenderness and tearful piety, this new religious element, the element of the Inquisition, the Tridentine Council, and the Jesuits, contradicts the true gospel of Christ. The painting which embodies it belongs to a spirit at strife with what was vital and progressive in the modern world. It is therefore naturally abhorrent to us now; nor can it be appreciated except by those who yearn for the triumph of ultramontane principles.
If we turn from the intellectual content of this art to its external manifestation, we shall find similar reasons for its failure to delight or satisfy. The ambition of the Caracci was to combine in one the salient qualities of earlier masters. This ambition doomed their style to the sterility of hybrids. Moreover, in selecting, they omitted just those features which had given grace and character to their models. The subst.i.tution of generic types for portraiture, the avoidance of individuality, the contempt for what is simple and natural in details, deprived their work of attractiveness and suggestion. It is noticeable that they never painted flowers. While studying t.i.tian"s landscapes, they omitted the iris and the caper-blossom and the columbine which star the gra.s.s beneath Ariadne"s feet. The lessons of the rocks and chestnut-trees of his S. Jeromes Solitude were lost on them. They began the false system of depicting ideal foliage and ideal precipices--that is to say, trees which are not trees, and cliffs which cannot be distinguished from cork or stucco. In like manner, the clothes wherewith they clad their personages were not of brocade or satin or broadcloth, but of that empty lie called drapery. The purpled silks of t.i.tian"s Lilac Lady, in the Pitti, the embroidered hems of Boccaccini da Cremona, the crimson velvet of Raphael"s Joanna of Aragon, Veronese"s cloth of silver and shot taffety, are replaced by one monotonous nondescript stuff, differently dyed in dull or glaring colors, but always shoddy.
Characteristic costumes have disappeared. We shall not find in any of their Ma.s.sacres of the Innocents a soldier like Bonifazio"s Dall"Armi.
In lieu of gems with flashing facets, or of quaint jewels from the Oreficeria, they adorn their kings and princesses with nothing less elevated than polished gold and ropes of pearls. After the same fashion, furniture, utensils, houses, animals, birds, weapons, are idealized--stripped, that is to say, of what in these things is specific and vital.
It would be incorrect to say that there are no exceptions in Eclectic painting to this evil system. Yet the sweeping truth remains that the Caracci returned, not to what was best in their predecessors, but to what was dangerous and misleading.
The "grand style," in Sir Joshua"s sense of that phrase, denoting style which eliminates specific and characteristic qualities from objects, replacing them by so-called "ideal" generalities, had already made its appearance in Raphael, Correggio, and Buonarroti We even find it in Da Vinci"s Last Supper. Yet in Raphael it comes attended with divine grace; in Correggio with faun-like radiancy of gladness; in Buonarroti with Sinaitic sublimity; in Da Vinci with penetrative force of psychological characterization. The Caracci and their followers, with a few exceptions--Guido at his best being the notablest--brought nothing of these saving virtues to the pseudo-grand style.
It was this delusion regarding n.o.bility and elevation in style which betrayed so genial a painter as Reynolds into his appreciation of the Bolognese masters. He admired them; but he admired t.i.tian, Raphael, Correggio, and Buonarroti more. And he admired the Eclectics because they developed the perilous part of the great Italian tradition. Just as Coleridge recommended young students of dramatic verse to found their style at first on Ma.s.singer rather than on Shakespeare, so Reynolds thought that the Caracci were sound models for beginners in the science of idealization. Shakespeare and Michelangelo are inimitable; Ma.s.singer and the Caracci exhibit the one thing needful to be learned, upon a scale not wholly unattainable by industry and talent. That was the line of argument; and, granted that the pseudo-grand style is a _sine qua non_ of painting, Reynolds"s position was logical.[238]
[Footnote 238: It is only because I am an Englishman, writing a popular book for English folk, that I thus spend time in noticing the opinions of Joshua Reynolds. Addressing a European audience in this year grace, I should not have thought of eddying about his obsolete doctrine.]
The criticism and the art-practice of this century have combined to shake our faith in the grand style. The spirit of the Romantic movement, penetrating poetry first, then manifesting itself in the reflective writings of Rio and Lord Lindsay, Ruskin and Gautier, producing the English landscape-painters and pre-Raphaelites, the French Realists and Impressionists, has shifted the center of gravity in taste. Science, too, contributes its quota. Histories of painting, like Kugler"s, and Crowe and Cavalcaselle"s, composed in an impartial and searching spirit of investigation, place students at a point of view removed from prejudice and academical canons of perfection. Only here and there, under special reactionary influences, as in the Dusseldorf and Munich schools of religious purists, has anything approaching to the eighteenth-century "grand style" delusion reappeared.
Why, therefore, the Eclectics are at present pining in the shade of neglect is now sufficiently apparent. We dislike their religious sentiments. We repudiate their false and unimaginative ideality. We recognize their touch on antique mythology to be cold and lifeless.
Superficial imitations of Niobe and the Belvedere Apollo have no attraction for a generation educated by the marbles of the Parthenon.
Dull reproductions of Raphael"s manner at his worst cannot delight men satiated with Raphael"s manner at his best. Whether the whirligig of time will bring about a revenge for the Eclectics yet remains to be seen. Taste is so capricious, or rather the conditions which create taste are so complex and inscrutable, that even this, which now seems impossible, may happen in the future. But a modest prediction can be hazarded that nothing short of the subst.i.tution of Catholicism for science and of Jesuitry for truth in the European mind will work a general revolution in their favor.
CHAPTER XIV.
CONCLUSION.
The main Events of European History--Italy in the Renaissance--Germany and Reformation--Catholic Reaction--Its Antagonism to Renaissance and Reformation--Profound Ident.i.ty of Renaissance and Reformation--Place of Italy in European Civilization--Want of Sympathy between Latin and Teutonic Races--Relation of Rome to Italy--Macaulay on the Roman Church--On Protestantism--Early Decline of Renaissance Enthusiasms--Italy"s Present and Future.
I.
The four main events of European history since the death of Christ are the decline of Graeco-Roman civilization, the triumph of Christianity as a new humanizing agency, the intrusion of Teutonic and Slavonic tribes into the comity of nations, and the construction of the modern world of thought by Renaissance and Reformation.
As seems to be inevitable in the progress of our species, each of these changes involved losses, compensated by final gains; for humanity moves like a glacier, plastically, but with alternating phases of advance and retreat, obeying laws of fracture and regelation.
It would thus be easy to deplore the collapse of that mighty and beneficent organism which we call the Roman Empire. Yet without this collapse how could the Catholic Church have supplied inspiration to peoples gifted with fresh faculties, endowed with insight differing from that of Greeks and Romans?
It is tempting to lament the extinction of arts letters, and elaborated habits of civility, which followed the barbarian invasions. Yet without such extinction, how can we imagine to ourselves the growth of those new arts, original literatures, and varied modes of social culture, to which we give the names of mediaeval, chivalrous, or feudal?
It is obvious that we can quarrel with the Renaissance for having put an end to purely Christian arts and letters by imposing a kind of pagan mannerism on the spontaneous products of the later mediaeval genius. But without this reversion to the remaining models of antique culture, how could the European races have become conscious of historical continuity; how could the corrupt system of Papal domination have been broken by Reform; how, finally, could Science, the vital principle of our present civilization, have been evolved?
In all these instances it appears that the old order must yield place to the new, not only because the new is destined to incorporate and supersede it, but also because the old has become unfruitful. Thus, the Roman Empire, having discharged its organizing function, was decrepit, and cla.s.sical civilization, after exhibiting its strength in season, was decaying when the Latin priesthood and the barbarians entered that closed garden of antiquity, and trampled it beneath their feet.
Mediaeval religion and modes of thought, in like manner, were at the point of ossifying, when Humanism intervened to twine the threads of past and present into strands that should be strong as cables for the furtherance of future energy.
It is incontestable that the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, each of them on different grounds antagonistic to the Renaissance, appear to have r.e.t.a.r.ded that emanc.i.p.ation of the reason, begun by Humanism, which is still in progress. Nevertheless, the strife of Protestantism and Catholicism was needed for preserving moral and religious elements which might have been too lightly dropped, and for working these into the staple of the modern consciousness. The process of the last three centuries, attended as it has been by serious drawbacks to the Spanish and Italian peoples, and by a lamentable waste of vigor to the Teutonic nations, has yet resulted in a permeation of the modern compost with the leaven of Christianity. Unchecked, it is probable that the Renaissance would have swept away much that was valuable and deserved to be permanent. Nor, without the flux and reflux of contending principles by which Europe was agitated in the Counter-Reformation period, could the equipoise of reciprocally attracting and repelling States, which const.i.tutes the modern as different from the ancient or the mediaeval groundwork of political existence, have been so efficiently established.