John Addington Symonds

General Survey—The Part played in the Revival by the Chief Cities—Preoccupation with Scholarship in spite of War and Conquest—Place of the Humanists in Society—Distributors of Praise and Blame—Flattery and Libels—Comparison with the Sophists—The Form preferred to the Matter of Literature—Ideal of Culture as an end in itself—Suspicion of Zealous Churchmen—Intrusion of Humanism into the Church—Irreligion of the Humanists—Gyraldi's 'Progymnasma'—Ariosto—Bohemian Life—Personal Immorality—Want of Fixed Principles—Professional Vanity—Literary Pride—Estimate of Humanistic Literature—Study of Style—Influence of Cicero—Valla's 'ElegantiÆ'—Stylistic Puerilities—Value attached to Rhetoric—'Oratore'—Moral Essays—Epistolography—Historics—Critical and Antiquarian Studies—Large Appreciation of Antiquity—Liberal Spirit—Poggio and Jerome of Prague—Humanistic Type of Education—Its Diffusion through Europe—Future Prospects—Decay of Learning in Italy.

In tracing the history of the Revival, we have seen how the impulse, first communicated by Petrarch, was continued by Boccaccio and his immediate successors. We have watched the enthusiasm for antiquity strike root in Florence, spread to Rome, and penetrate the Courts of Italy. One city after another receives the light and hands it on, until the whole cycle of study has been traversed and the vigour of the nation is exhausted. Florence discovers manuscripts, founds libraries, learns Greek, and leads the movement of the fifteenth century. Naples criticises; Rome translates; Mantua and Ferrara form a system of education; Venice commits the literature of the classics to the press. By the combined and successive activity of the chief Italian centres, not only is the culture of antiquity regained; it is also appropriated in all its various branches, discussed and illustrated, placed beyond the reach of accident, and delivered over in its integrity to Europe. The work thus performed by the Italians was begun in peace; but it had to be continued under the pressure of wars and national disasters unparalleled in the history of any other modern people. Not for a single moment did the students relax their energy. In the midst of foreign armies, deafened by the roar of cannon and the tumult of sacked towns, exiled from their homes, robbed of their books, deprived of their subsistence, they advanced to their end with the irresistible obstinacy of insects. The drums and tramplings of successive conquests and invasions by four warlike nations—Frenchmen, Spaniards, Germans, Swiss—could not disturb them. Drop by drop, Italy was being drained of blood; from the first the only question was which of her assailants should possess the beauty of her corpse. Yet the student, intent upon his manuscripts, paid but little heed. So non-existent was the sense of nationality in Italy that the Italians did not know they were being slowly murdered. When the agony was over, and the ruin was accomplished, they congratulated themselves on being still the depositaries of polite literature. Nations that are nations, seek to inspire fear, or at least respect. The Italians were contented with admiration, and looked confidently to the world for gratitude. The task of two toilsome, glorious centuries had been accomplished. The chasm between Rome and the Renaissance was bridged over, and a plain way was built for the progressive human spirit. Italy, downtrodden in the mire of blood and ruins, should still lead the van and teach the peoples. It was a sublime delusion, the last phase of an impulse so powerful in its origin that to prophesy an ending was impossible. Yet how delusive was the expectation is proved by the immediate history of Italy, enslaved and decadent, outstripped by the nations she had taught, and scorned by the world that owed her veneration.

The humanists, who were the organ of this intellectual movement, formed, as we have seen, a literary commonwealth, diffused through all the Courts and cities of Italy. As the secretaries of Popes and princes, as the chancellors of republics, as orators on all occasions of public and private ceremony, they occupied important posts of influence, and had the opportunity of leavening society with their opinions. Furthermore, we have learned to know them in their capacity of professors at the universities, of house-tutors in the service of noblemen, and of authors. Closely connected among themselves by their feuds no less than by their friendships, and working to one common end of scholarship, it was inevitable that these men, after the enthusiasm for antiquity had once become the fashion, should take the lead and mould the genius of the nation. Their epistles, invectives, treatises, and panegyrics, formed the study of an audience that embraced all cultivated minds in Italy. Thus the current literature of humanism played the same part in the fifteenth century as journalism in the nineteenth, and the humanists had the same kind of coherence in relation to the public as the quatriÈme État of modern times. The respect they inspired as the arbiters of praise and blame, was only equalled by their vast pretensions. Eugenius IV., living at the period of their highest influence, is reported to have said that they were as much to be feared for their malice as to be loved for their learning. While they claimed the power of conferring an immortality of honour or dishonour, no one dared to call their credit with posterity in question. Nothing seemed more dreadful than the fate reserved for Paul II. in the pages of Platina; and even so robust a ruler as Francesco Sforza sought to buy the praises of Filelfo. Flattery in all its branches, fulsome and delicate, wholesale and allusive, was developed by them as an art whereby to gain their living. The official history of this period is rendered almost worthless by its sustained note of panegyrical laudation. Our ears are deafened with the eulogies of petty patrons transformed into MÆcenases, of carpet knights compared to Leonidas, of tyrants equalled with Augustus, and of generals who never looked on bloodshed tricked out as Hannibals or Scipios. As a pendant to panegyric, the art of abuse reached its climax in the invectives whereby the scholars sought to hand their comrades down to all time 'immortally immerded,' or to vilify the public enemies of their employers. As in the case of praise, so also in the case of blame, it is impossible to attach importance to the writings of the humanists. Their vaulting ambition to depreciate each other overleaped itself. All their literature of defamation serves now only to throw light on the general impurity of an age in which such monstrous charges carried weight. Unluckily, this double vice of humanism struck deep roots into Italian literature. Without the scholars of the fifteenth century, it is hardly possible that such a brigand as Pietro Aretino, who levied black mail from princes at the point of his venomous quill, or such an unprincipled biographer as Paolo Giovio, who boasted that he wrote with a golden or a silver pen, as pleased him best, could have existed. Bullying and fawning tainted the very source of history, and a false ideal of the writer's function was established by the practice of men like Poggio.

It is obvious and easy to compare the humanists of the Renaissance with the sophists of antiquity. Whether we think of the rivals of Socrates at Athens, or of the Greek rhetoricians of the Roman period,[508] the parallel is tolerably close. From certain points of view the Italian scholars remind us of the former class; from others, again, they recall the latter. The essence of sophism is the substitution of semblance for reality, indifference to truth provided a fair show be made, combined with verbal ingenuity and practice in the art of exposition. The sophist feels no need of forming opinions on a sound basis, or of adhering to principles. Regarding thought as the subject-matter of literary treatment, he is chiefly concerned with giving it a fair and plausible investiture in language. Instead of recognising that he must live up to the standard he professes, he takes delight in expressing with force the contrary of what he acts. The discord between his philosophy and his conduct awakes no shame in him, because it is the highest triumph of his art to persuade by eloquence and to dazzle by rhetoric. Phrases and sentences supply the place of feelings and convictions. Sonorous cadences and harmonies of language are always ready to conceal the want of substance in his matter or the flimsiness of his argument. At the same time the sophist's enthusiasm for a certain form of culture, and his belief in the sophistic method, may be genuine.

The literature of the Revival is full of such sophism. Men who lived loose lives, were never tired of repeating the commonplaces of the Ciceronian ethics, praising simplicity and self-control with the pen they used for reproducing the scandals of Martial, mingling impudent demands for money and flatteries of debauched despots with panegyrics of PÆtus Thrasea and eulogies of Cincinnatus. Conversely, students of eminent sobriety, like Guarino da Verona, thought it no harm to welcome Beccadelli's 'Hermaphroditus' with admiration; while the excellent Nicholas V. spent nine days in perusing the filthy satires of Filelfo. It was enough that the form was elegant, according to their standards of taste, the Latinity copious and sound:—the subject-matter raised no scruples.

This vice of regarding only the exterior of literature produced a fatal weakness in the dissertations of the age. If a humanist wanted to moralise the mutability of fortune or the disadvantages of matrimony, he did not take the trouble to think, or the pains to borrow illustrations from his own experience. He strung together quotations and classical instances, expending his labour on the polish of the style, and fancying he had proved something by piquancy displayed in handling old material. When he undertook history, the same fault was apparent. Instead of seeking to set forth the real conditions of his native city, to describe its political vicissitudes and constitutional development, or to paint the characters of its great men, he prepared imaginary speeches and avoided topics incapable of expression in pure Latin. The result was that whole libraries of ethical disquisitions and historical treatises, bequeathed with proud confidence by their authors to the admiration of posterity, are now reposing in unhonoured dust, ransacked at rare intervals by weary students with restless fingers in search of such meagre scraps of information as even a humanist could not succeed in excluding.

The humanists resembled the sophists again in their profession to teach wisdom for pay. What philosophy was for the early Greeks, classic culture was for Italy in the Renaissance; and this the scholars sold. Antiquity lay before them like an open book. From their seat among the learned they doled out the new lore of life to eager pupils. And as the more sober-minded of the Athenians regarded the educational practice of the sophists with suspicion, so the humanists came to be dreaded as the corrupters of youth. The peculiar turn they gave to mental training, by diverting attention from patriotic duties to literary pleasures, by denationalising the interests of students, and by distracting serious thought from affairs of the present to interests of the past, tended to confirm the political debility of the Italians; nor can it be doubted that the substitution of Pagan for Christian ideals intensified the demoralisation of the age. Many arguments used by Aristophanes and Xenophon might be repeated against these sophists of the Renaissance.[509]

On this point it is worth observing that, though humanism took the Papal Court by storm and installed itself in pomp and pride within the Vatican, the lower clergy and the leaders of religious revivals, in no mere spirit of blind prejudice, but with solid force of argument, denounced it. S. Bernardino and Savonarola were only two among many who preached against the humanists from the pulpit. And yet, while we admit that the influences of the Revival injured morality, and gave a cosmopolitan direction to energies that ought to have been concentrated on the preservation of national existence, we are unable to join with these ecclesiastical antagonists in their crusade. Humanism was a necessary moment in the evolution of the modern world; and whatever were its errors, however weakening it may have been to Italy, this phase had to be passed through, this nation had to suffer for the general good.

The intrusion of the humanists into the Papal Curia was a victory of the purely secular spirit. It is remarkable how very few scholars took orders except with a view of holding minor benefices. They remained virtual laymen, drawing the emoluments of their cures at a distance. If Filelfo, after the death of his second wife, proposed to enter the Church, he did so because in his enormous vanity he hoped to gain the scarlet hat, and thought this worth the sacrifice of independence. The only great monastic litteratus was Ambrogio, General of the Camaldolese Order. Maffeo Vegio is the single instance I can remember of a poet-philologer who assumed the cowl. These statements, it will be understood, refer chiefly to the second or aggressive period of the Revival. Classic erudition was so common in the fourth that to be without a humanistic tincture was, even among churchmen, the exception rather than the rule. In the age of Leo, moreover, the humanists as a class had ceased to exist, merged in the general culture of the nation. Their successors were for the most part cardinals and bishops, elevated to high rank for literary merit. This change, however, really indicated the complete triumph of an ideal that for a moment had succeeded in paganising the Papacy, and substituting its own standard of excellence for ecclesiastical tradition.

This external separation between the humanists and the Church corresponded to their deep internal irreligiousness. If contemporary testimony be needed to support this assertion, I may quote freely from Lilius Gyraldus, Battista Mantovano, and Ariosto, not to mention the invectives that record so vast a mass of almost incredible licentiousness. A rhetorical treatise, addressed to Gian Francesco Pico by Lilius Gyraldus, himself an eminent professor at Ferrara, acquaints us with the opinion formed in Italy, after a century's experience, of the vices and discordant lives of scholars.[510] 'I call God and men to witness,' he writes, 'whether it be possible to find men more affected by immoderate disturbances of soul, by such emotions as the Greeks called p???, or by such desires as they named ??a?, more easily influenced, driven about, and drawn in all directions. No class of human beings are more subject to anger, more puffed up with vanity, more arrogant, more insolent, more proud, conceited, idle-minded, inconsequent, opinionated, changeable, obstinate; some of them ready to believe the most incredible nonsense, others sceptical about notorious truths, some full of doubt and suspicion, others void of reasonable circumspection. None are of a less free spirit, and that for the very reason I have touched before, because they think themselves so far more powerful. They all of them, indeed, pretend to omniscience, fancy themselves superior to everything, and rate themselves as gods, while we unlearned little men are made of clay and mud, as they maintain.' Having for some space discoursed concerning their mad ways of life, Gyraldus proceeds to arraign the humanists in detail for vicious passions, want of economy, impiety, gluttony, intemperance, sloth, and incontinence.[511] This invective reads like a paradoxical thesis supported for the sake of novelty by a clever rhetorician; and, indeed, it might pass for such were it not for the confirmation it receives in Ariosto's seventh satire addressed to Pietro Bembo.[512] The poet, anxious to find a tutor for his son, dares not commit the young man to the care of a humanist. His picture of their personal immorality, impiety, pride, and gluttony acquires weight from the well-known tolerance of the satirist, and from his genial parsimony of expression. To cite further testimony from the personal confessions of Pacificus Maximus would hardly strengthen the argument, though students may be referred to his poems for details.[513]

The alternations of fortune to which the humanists were exposed—living at one time in the lap of luxury, caressed and petted; then cast forth to wander in almost total indigence, neglected and derided—encouraged a Bohemian recklessness injurious to good manners. Their frequent change of place told upon their character in the same way, by exposing them to fresh temptations and withdrawing them from censure. They had no country but the dreamland of antiquity, no laws beyond the law of taste and inclination. They acknowledged no authority superior to their own exalted judgment; they bowed to no tribunal but that of posterity and the past. Thus they lived within their own conceits, outside of custom and opinion; nor was the world, at any rate before the period of their downfall, scrupulous to count their errors or correct their vices.

Far more important, however, than these circumstances was their passion for a Pagan ideal. The study of the classics and the effort to assimilate the spirit of the ancients, undermined their Christianity without substituting the religion or the ethics of the old world. They ceased to fear God; but they did not acquire either the self-restraint of the Greek or the patriotic virtues of the Roman. Thus exposed without defence or safeguard, they adopted the perilous attitude of men whose regulative principle was literary taste, who had left the ground of faith and popular convention for the shoals and shallows of an irrecoverable past. On this sea they wandered, with no guidance but the promptings of undisciplined self. It is not, therefore, a marvel that, while professing Stoicism, they wallowed in sensuality, openly affected the worst habits of Pagan society, and devoted their ingenuity to the explanation of foulness that might have been passed by in silence. Licentiousness became a special branch of humanistic literature. Under the thin mask of humane refinement leered the untamed savage; and an age that boasted not unreasonably of its mental progress, was at the same time notorious for the vices that disgrace mankind. These disorders of the scholars, hidden for a time beneath a learned language, ended by contaminating the genius of the nation. The vernacular Capitoli of Florence say plainly what Beccadelli, Poggio, and Bembo piqued themselves on veiling.

Another notable defect of the humanists, equally inseparable from the position they assumed in Italy, was their personal and professional vanity. Battista Mantovano, writing on the calamities of the age in which he lived, reckons them among the most eminent examples of pride in his catalogue of the deadly sins. Regarding themselves as resuscitators of a glorious past and founders of a new civility, they were not satisfied with asserting their real merits in the sphere of scholarship. They went further, and claimed to rank as sages, political philosophers, writers of deathless histories, and singers of immortal verse. The most miserable poetasters got crowned with laurels. The most trivial thinkers passed verdict upon statecraft. Mistaking mere cultivation for genius, they believed that, because they had perused the authors of antiquity and could imitate Ovid at a respectful distance, their fame would endure for all ages. On the strength of this confidence they gave themselves inconceivable airs, looking down from the height of their attainment on the profane crowd. To understand that, after all, antiquity was a school wherein to train the modern intellect for genuine production, was not given to this epoch of discovery. Posterity has sadly belied their expectations. Of all their treatises and commentaries, poems and translations, how few are now remembered; how rarely are their names upon the lips of even professed students! The debt of gratitude we owe them is indeed great, and should be amply paid by our respectful memory of all they wrought for us with labour in the field of learning. Yet Filelfo would turn with passionate disappointment in his grave, if he could know that men of wider scope and sounder erudition appreciate his writings solely as shed leaves that fertilised the soil of literature.

Before turning, as is natural at this point, to form an estimate of the humanists in their capacity of authors, it will be right briefly to qualify the condemnation passed upon their characters. Taken as a class, they deserve the hardest words that have been said of them. Yet it must not be forgotten that they numbered in their ranks such men as Ambrogio Traversari, Tommaso da Sarzana, Guarino, Jacopo Antiquari, Vittorino da Feltre, Pomponius LÆtus, Ficino, Pico, Fabio Calvi, and Aldus Manutius. The bare enumeration of these names will suffice for those who have read the preceding chapters. Piety, sobriety of morals, self-devotion to public interests, the purest literary enthusiasm, the most lofty aspirations, fairness of judgment, and generosity of feeling distinguish these men, and some others who might be mentioned, from the majority of their fellows. Nor, again, is it fair to charge the humanists alone with vices common to their age. The picture I ventured to draw of Papal and despotic manners in a previous volume, shows that a too strict standard cannot be applied to scholars, holding less responsible positions than their patrons, and professing a far looser code of conduct. Much, too, of their inordinate vanity may be ascribed to the infatuation of the people. Such scenes as the reception of the supposed author of 'Hermaphroditus' in Vicenza were enough to turn the heads of even stronger men.[514]

It is difficult to appraise humanistic literature at a just value, seeing that by far the larger mass of it, after serving a purpose of temporary utility, is now forgotten. Not itself, but its effect, is what we have to estimate; and the ultimate product of the whole movement was the creation of a new capacity for cultivation. To have restored to Europe the knowledge of the classics, and to have recovered the style of the ancients, so as to use Latin prose and verse with freedom at a time when Latin formed an universal medium of culture, is the first real merit of the humanists. Nothing can rob them of this glory; however much we may be forced to feel that their critical labours have been superseded, that their dissertations are dull, that their poems at the worst fall far below the level of an Oxford prize exercise, and at the best supply a decent appendix to the 'Corpus Poetarum.' Nor can we defraud them of the fame of having striven to realise Petrarch's ideal.[515] That ideal, only partially attained at any single point, developed in one direction by Milton, in another by Goethe, still guides, and will long guide, the efforts of the modern intellect.

The most salient characteristic of this literature was study of style. The beginners of the humanistic movement were conscious that what separated them more than anything else from their Roman ancestors, was want of elegance in diction. They used the same language; but they used it clumsily. They could think the same thoughts, but they had lost the art of expressing them with propriety. To restore style was therefore a prime object. Exaggerating its importance, they neglected the matter for the form, and ended by producing a literature of imitation. The ideal they proposed in composition included limpidity of language, simplicity in the structure of sentences however lengthy, choiceness of phrase, and a copious vocabulary. To be intelligible was the first requisite; to be attractive the second. Having mastered elementary difficulties, they proceeded to fix the rules for decorative writing. Cicero had said that nothing was so ugly or so common but that rhetoric could lend it charm. This unfortunate dictum, implying that style, as separate from matter, is valuable in and for itself, led the Italians astray. To form commonplace books of phrases culled from the 'Tusculans' and the 'Orations,' to choose some trivial theme for treatment, and to make it the occasion for verbal display, became their business. In the coteries of Rome and Florence scholars measured one another by their ingenuity—in other words, by their aptness for producing Ciceronian and Virgilian centos. Few indeed, like Pico, raised their voices against such trifling, or protested that what a man thought and felt was at least as important as his power of clothing it in rhetoric.

The appearance of Valla's 'ElegantiÆ' marked an epoch in the evolution of this stylistic art. It reached its climax in the work of Bembo. What the humanists intended, they achieved. Purity and perspicuity of language were made conditions of all literature that claimed attention; nor is it, perhaps, too much to say that Racine, Pascal, and Voltaire owe something of their magic to the training of these worn-out pedagogues. Yet the immediate effect in Italy, when Machiavelli's vigour had passed out of the nation, and the stylistic tradition survived, was deplorable. Nothing strikes a northern student of the post-Renaissance authors more than the empty smoothness of their writing, their faculty of saying nothing with a vast expenditure of phrase, their dread of homely details, and the triviality of the subjects they chose for illustration. When a man of wit like Annibale Caro could rise to praise the nose of the president before a learned academy in periods of this ineptitude—'Naso perfetto, naso principale, naso divino, naso che benedetto sia fra tutti i nasi; e benedetta sia quella mamma che vi fece cosÌ nasuto, e benedette tutte quelle cose che voi annusate!'[516]—we trace no more than a burlesque of humanistic seeking after style. It must, however, be admitted that it is not easy for a less artistic nation to do the Italians justice in this respect. They derived an Æsthetic pleasure from refinements of speech and subtle flavours of expression, while they remained no less conscious than we are that the workmanship surpassed the matter. The proper analogue to their rhetoric may be found in the exquisite but too unmeaning arabesques in marble and in wood, which belong to Cinque Cento architecture. Viewed as the playthings of skilled artists, these are not without their value; and we are apt, perhaps, unduly to depreciate them, because we lack the sense for their particular form of beauty.

If the most marked feature of humanistic literature was the creation of a Latin style, the supreme dictators were Cicero in prose and Virgil in verse. That Cicero should have fascinated the Italians in an age when art was dominant, when richness of decoration, rhetorical fluency, and pomp of phrase appealed to the liveliest instincts of a splendour-loving, sensitive, declamatory race, is natural. The Renaissance found exactly what it wanted in the manner of the most obviously eloquent of Latin authors, himself a rhetorician among philosophers, an orator among statesmen, the weakness of whose character was akin to that which lay at the root of fifteenth-century society. To be the 'apes of Cicero,' in all the branches of literature he had cultivated, was regarded by the humanists as a religious duty.[517] Though they had no place in the senate, the pulpit, or the law court, they were fain to imitate his oratory. Therefore public addresses to ambassadors, to magistrates on assuming office, and to Popes on their election; epithalamial and funeral discourses; panegyrics and congratulations—sounded far and wide through Italy. The fifteenth century was the golden age of speechification. A man was measured by the amount of fluent Latinity he could pour forth; copiousness of quotations secured applause; and readiness to answer on the spur of the moment in smooth Ciceronian phrases, was reckoned among the qualities that led to posts of trust in Church and State. On the other hand, a failure of words on any ceremonial occasion passed for one of the great calamities of life. The common name for an envoy, oratore, sufficiently indicates the public importance attached to rhetoric. It formed a necessary part of the parade which the Renaissance loved, and, more than that, a part of its diplomatic machinery. To compose orations that could never be recited was a fashionable exercise; and since the 'Verrines' and the 'Philippics' existed, no occasion was lost for reproducing something of their spirit in the invectives whereof so much has been already said. The emptiness of all this oratory, separated from the solid concerns of life, and void of actual value, tended to increase the sophistic character of literature. Eloquence, which ought to owe its force to passionate emotion or to gravity of meaning, degenerated into a mere play of words; and to such an extent was verbal cleverness over-estimated, that a scholar could ascribe the fame of Julius CÆsar to his 'Commentaries' rather than his victories.[518] It does not seem to have occurred to him that Pompey would have been glad if CÆsar had always wielded his pen, and that Brutus would hardly have stabbed a friendly man of letters. When we read a genuine humanistic speech, we find that it is principally composed of trite tales and citations. To play upon the texts of antiquity, as a pianist upon the keys of his instrument, was no small part of eloquence; and the music sounded pleasant in ears greedy of the very titles of old writings. Vespasiano mentions that Carlo Aretino owed his early fame at Florence to one lecture, introducing references to all the classic authors.

The style affected for moral dissertation was in like manner Ciceronian. The dialogue in particular became fashionable; and since it was dangerous to introduce matter unsuited to Tully's phrases, these disquisitions are usually devoid of local colouring and contemporary interest. Few have such value as attaches to the opening of Poggio's essay on Fortune, to Valeriano's treatise on the misfortunes of the learned, or to Gyraldi's attack upon the humanists.

Another important branch of literature, modelled upon Ciceronian masterpieces, was letter-writing. The epistolography of the humanists might form a separate branch of study, if we cared to trace its history through several stages, and to sift the stores at our disposal. Petrarch, after discovering the familiar letters of the Roman orator, first gave an impulse to this kind of composition. In his old age he tells how he was laughed at in his youth for assuming the Latin style of thou together with the Roman form of superscription.[519] I have already touched upon the currency it gained through the practice of Coluccio Salutato and the teaching of Gasparino da Barzizza.[520] In course of time books of formulÆ and polite letter-writers were compiled, enabling novices to adopt the Ciceronian mannerism with safety.[521] The Papal Curia sanctioned a set of precedents for the guidance of its secretaries, while the epistles of eminent chancellors served as models for the despatches of republican governments.

The private letters of scholars were useful in keeping up communication between the several centres of culture in Italy. From these sources too we now derive much interesting information respecting the social life of the humanists. They seem to have avoided political, theological, and practical topics, cultivating a style of urbane compliment, exchanging opinions about books, asking small favours, acknowledging obligations, recommending friends to favourable notice, occasionally describing their mode of life, discussing the qualities of their patrons with cautious reserve, but seeking above all things to display grace of diction and elegant humour rather than erudition. The fact that these Latin epistles were invariably intended for circulation and ultimate publication, renders it useless to seek for insight from them into strictly private matters.[522] For the historian the most valuable collections of Renaissance letters are composed in Italian, and are not usually the work of scholars, but of agents, spies, and envoys. Compared with the reports of the Venetian ambassadors, the correspondence of the humanists is unimportant. In addition to familiar letters, it not unfrequently happened, however, that epistles upon topics of public interest were indited by students. Intended by their diffusion to affect opinion, and addressed to influential friends or patrons, these compositions assumed the form of pamphlets. Of this kind were the letters on the Eastern question sent by Filelfo to Charles VII. of France, to the Emperor, to Matthias Corvinus, to the Dukes of Burgundy and Urbino, and to the Doge of Venice. The immortality expected by the humanists from their epistles, has hardly fallen to their lot; though much of Poliziano's, Pico's, Antiquari's, and Piccolomini's correspondence is still delightful and instructive reading. The masses extant in MS. exceed what has been printed; while the printed volumes, with some rare exceptions, among which may be mentioned Poliziano's letter to Antiquari on the death of Lorenzo, are only used by students.[523]

Since Cicero had left no specimen of history, the humanists were driven to follow other masters in this branch of literature. Livy was the author of their predilection. CÆsar supplied them with a model for the composition of commentaries, and Sallust for concise monographs. Suetonius was followed in such minute studies of character as Decembrio's 'Life of Filippo Maria Visconti.' I do not find that Tacitus had any thoroughgoing imitators; the magniloquence of rhetoric, rather than the pungency of sarcasm, suited the taste of the age. The faults of the humanistic histories have been already pointed out.[524]

The services of the humanists, as commentators, translators, critics of texts, compilers of grammars and dictionaries of all kinds, collectors of miscellaneous information, and writers on antiquities, still remain to be remembered. Their industry in this field was quite different from the labour they devoted to the perfecting of style. Whatever we may think of them as men of letters, we are bound to give their erudition almost unqualified praise. Not, indeed, that their learning any more than their literature was final. It too has been superseded; but it formed the basis of a sounder method, and rendered the attainment of more certain knowledge possible. It is not too much to say that modern culture, so far as it is derived from antiquity, owes everything to the indefatigable energy of the humanists. Before the age of printing, scholars had to store their memories with encyclopÆdic information, while the very want of a critical method, by preventing them from exactly discerning the good and the bad, enabled them to take a broader and more comprehensive view of classical literature than is now at any rate common. Antiquity as a whole—not the authors merely of the Attic age or the Augustan—claimed their admiration; and though they devoted special study to Cicero and Virgil for the purposes of style, they eagerly accepted every Greek or Latin composition from the earliest to the latest. To this omnivorous appetite of the elder scholars we are perhaps indebted for the preservation of many fragments which a more delicate taste would have rejected. Certainly we owe to them the conception of the classics in their totality, as forming the proper source of culture for the human race. The purism of Vida and Bembo, though it sprang from more refined perceptions, was in some respects a retrogression from the wide and liberal erudition of their predecessors. Discipleship under Virgil may make a versifier; but he who would fain comprehend the Latin genius must know the poets of Rome from Ennius to Claudian.

Finally we have to render the tribute due to the humanists for their diffusion of a liberal spirit. Sustained by the enthusiasm of antiquity, they first ventured to take a standpoint outside catholicity; and though they made but bad use of this spiritual freedom, inclining to levity and godlessness instead of fighting the battle of the reason, yet their large and human survey of the world was in itself invigorating. Poggio at the Council of Constance regarded Jerome of Prague not as a heretic, not as a fanatic, but as a Stoic. In other words, he was capable of divesting his mind of temporary associations and conventional prejudices, and of discerning the true character of the man who suffered heroically for his opinions. This instance illustrates the general tone and temper of the humanists. Their study of antiquity freed them from the scholastic pedantries of theologians, and from the professional conceits of jurists and physicians. There is nothing great and noble in human nature that might not, we fancy, have grown and thriven under their direction, if the circumstances of Italy had been more favourable to high aspirations. As it was, the light was early quenched and clouded by base vapours of a sensual, enslaved, and priest-corrupted society. The vital force of the Revival passed into the Reformation; the humanists, degraded and demoralised, were superseded. Still it was they who created the new atmosphere of culture, wherein whatever is luminous in art, literature, science, criticism, and religion has since flourished. Though we may perceive that they obeyed a false authority—that of the classics, and worshipped a false idol—style, yet modern liberty must render them the meed of thanks for this. When we consider that before the sixteenth century had closed, they had imbued the whole Italian nation with their views, forming a new literature, directing every kind of mental activity, and producing a new social tone, and furthermore that Italy in the sixteenth century impressed her spirit on the rest of Europe, we have a right to hail the humanists as the schoolmasters of modern civilisation.

As schoolmasters in a stricter sense of the term, it is not easy to exaggerate the influence exercised by Italian students. They first conceived and framed the education that has now prevailed through Europe for four centuries, moulding the youth of divers nations by one common discipline, and establishing an intellectual concord for all peoples. In spite of changes in government and creed, in spite of differences caused by race and language, we have maintained an uniformity of culture through the simultaneous prosecution of classic studies on the lines laid down for teachers by the scholars of the fifteenth century. The system of our universities and public schools is in truth no other than that devised by Vittorino and Guarino. Thus humanism in modern Europe has continued the work performed during the Middle Ages by the Church, uniting in one confederation of spiritual activity nations widely separated by all that tends to keep the human families apart.

Until quite recently in England, the litterÆ humaniores were accepted as the soundest training for careers in Church and State, for the learned professions, and for the private duties of gentlemen. If the old ideal is yielding at last to theories of a wider education based on science and on modern languages, that is due partly to the extension of useful knowledge, and partly to the absorption of classic literature into the modern consciousness. The sum of what a cultivated man should know, in order to maintain a place among the pioneers of progress, is so vast, that learners, distracted by a variety of subjects, resent the expenditure of precious time on Greek and Latin. Teachers, on the other hand, through long familiarity with humane studies, have fallen into the languor of routine. Besides, as knowledge in each new department increases, the necessity of specialising with a view to adopting a professional career, makes itself continually felt with greater urgency. It may therefore be plausibly argued that we have outgrown the conditions of humanism, and that a new stage in the history of education has been reached. Have not the ancients done as much for us as they can do? Are not our minds permeated with their thoughts? Do not the masterpieces of modern literature hold in solution the best that can be got from them for future uses?

These questions can perhaps be met by the counter-question whether the arts and letters of the Greeks and Romans will not always hold their own, not only in the formation of pure taste, but also in the discipline of character and the training of the intelligence. Just as well might we cease to study the sacred books of the Jews, because we have incorporated their ethics into our conscience, and possess their religion in our liturgy. No transmission of a spirit at second or third hand can be the same as its immediate contact; nor can we afford, however full our mental life may be, to lose the vivid sense of what men were and what they wrought in ages far removed from us, especially when those men were our superiors in certain spheres. Again, it may be doubted whether we should understand the masterpieces of modern literature, when we came to be separated from the sources of their inspiration. If Olympus connoted less than Asgard, or Hercules were no more familiar to our minds than Rustem, or the horses of the Sun stood at the same distance from us as the cows of Indra—if, in fact, we abandoned Greek as much as we have abandoned Scandinavian, Persian, and Sanskrit mythology, would not some of the most brilliant images of our own poets fade into leaden greyness, like clouds that have lost the flush of living light upon them?

It is therefore not improbable that for many years to come the higher culture of the race will still be grounded upon humanism: true though it be that the first enthusiasm for antiquity shall never be restored, nor the classics yield that vital nourishment they offered in the spring-time of the modern era. For average students, who have no special vocation for literature and no Æesthetic tastes, it may well happen that new methods of teaching the classics will have to be invented. Why should they not be read in English versions, and the time expended upon Greek and Latin grammar be thus saved? The practice of Greek and Latin versification has been virtually doomed already; nor is there any reason why Latin prose should form a necessary part of education in an age that has ceased to publish its thoughts in a now completely dead language. Our actual relation to the ancients, again, justifies some change. We know far more about them now than in the period of the Renaissance; but they are no longer all in all for civilised humanity, eager to reconstitute the realm of thought, and find its nobler self anew in the image of a glorious past, reconquered and inalienable. The very culture created by the study of antiquity through the last four centuries stands between them and our apprehension, so that they seem at the same moment more distinct from us and more a part of our familiar selves.

When we seek the causes which produced the decay of learning in Italy about the middle of the sixteenth century, we are first led to observe that the type of scholarship inaugurated by Petrarch had been fully developed. Nothing new remained to be worked out upon the lines laid down by him. Meanwhile the forces of the nation, both creative and receptive, were exhausted in the old fields of humanism. The reading public had been glutted with epistles, invectives, poems, orations, histories of antiquities, and disquisitions of all kinds. The matter of the ancient literatures had been absorbed, if superficially, at least entirely, and their forms had been reproduced with wearisome reiteration. The Paganism that had so long ruled as a fashion, was now passing out of vogue, because of its inadequacy to meet the deeper wants and satisfy the aspirations of the modern world. The humanists, moreover, as a class, had fallen into disrepute through faults and vices whereof enough has been already said. Nothing short of the new impulse which a new genius, equal at least in power to Petrarch, might have communicated, could have given a fresh direction to the declining enthusiasm for antiquity. But for this display of energy the Italians were not prepared. As in the ascent of some high peak, the traveller, after surmounting pine woods and Alpine pastures, comes upon bare grassy slopes that form an intermediate region between the basements of the mountain and the snowfields overhead, so the humanists had accomplished the first stage of learning. But it requires a fresh start and the employment of other faculties to scale the final heights; and for this the force was wanting. Erasmus, at the opening of the century, had, indeed, initiated a second age of scholarship. The more exact methods of criticism and comparison were already about to be instituted by the French, the Germans, and the Dutch. It was too much, however, to expect that the Italians, who had expended their vigour in recovering the classics and reviving a passion for knowledge, should compete upon the ground of modern erudition with these fresh and untried races.

What they might have done, if circumstances had been less unfavourable, and if the way of progress had been free before them, cannot be conjectured. As it was, all things contributed to the decline of intellectual energy in Italy. The distracting wars of half a century told more heavily upon the literati, who depended for their very existence upon the liberality of patrons, than on any other section of the people. What miseries they endured in Lombardy may be gathered from the prefaces and epistles of Aldus Manutius; while the blow inflicted on them by the sack of Rome is vividly described by Valeriano.[525] When comparative peace was restored, liberty had been extinguished. Florence, the stronghold of liberal learning, was enslaved. Scholarship no less than art suffered from the loss of political independence. Rome, terror-stricken by the Reformation, turned with rage against the very studies she had helped to stimulate. The engines of the Inquisition, wielded with all the mercilessness of panic by men who had the sombre cruelty of Spain to back them up, destroyed the germs of life in science and philosophy.

To some extent, again, the Italian scholars had prepared their own suicide by tending more and more to subtleties of taste and affectations of refinement. The purism of the sixteenth century was itself a sort of etiolation, and the puerilities of the academies distracted even able men from serious studies. It was one of the inevitable drawbacks of humanism that the new culture separated men of letters from the nation. Dante and the wool-carders of the fourteenth century understood each other; there was then no thick veil of erudition between the teacher and the taught. But neither Bembo nor Pomponazzi had anything to say that could be comprehended by the common folk. Therefore scholarship was left in mournful isolation; suspected, when it passed from trifles to grave speculations, by the Church; viewed with indifference by the people; unsustained by any sympathy, and, what was worse, without a programme or a watchword. The thinkers, whose biography belongs to the history of the Counter-Reformation in Italy, were all solitary men, voices crying in the wilderness with none to listen, bound together by no common bond, unnoticed by the nation, extinguished singly on the scaffold by an ever-watchful league of tyrants spiritual and political.

Before the end of the sixteenth century Greek had almost ceased to be studied in Italy. This was the sign of intellectual death. All that was virile in humanism fled beyond the Alps. This transference of intellectual supremacy from Italy to Germany was speedily accomplished. 'When I was a boy,' said Erasmus,[526] 'sound letters had begun to revive among the Italians; but by reason of the printer's art being as yet undiscovered or known to few, no books had reached us, and in the deep tranquillity of dulness there reigned a set of men who taught in all our towns the most illiterate learning. Rodolph Agricola was the first to bring to us from Italy some breath of a superior culture.' Again, he says of Italy, 'In that land, where even the very walls are both more learned and more eloquent than men with us; so that what here seems beautifully said, and elegant and full of charm, cannot be held for aught but clumsy, stupid, and uncultivated there.' Less than half a century after Erasmus had gained the right to hold the balance thus between the nations of the North and South—that is, in 1540 or thereabouts—Paolo Giovio, at the close of his 'Elogia Literaria,' while speaking of the Germans, felt obliged to confess that 'not only Latin letters, to our disgrace, but Greek and Hebrew also have passed into their territory by a fatal simultaneous migration.'

Thus Italy, after receiving the lamp of learning from the dying hands of Hellas, in the days of her own freedom, now, in the time of her adversity and ruin, gave it to the nations of the North. Her work was ended. Three centuries of increasing decrepitude, within our recent memory at length most happily surmounted, were before her. Can history, we wonder, furnish a spectacle more pathetic than that of the protagonist of spiritual liberty falling uneasily asleep beneath the footstool of the Spaniard and the churchman, while the races who had trampled her to death went on rejoicing in the light and culture she had won by centuries of toil? This is the tragic aspect of the subject which has occupied us through the present volume. At the conclusion of the whole matter it is, however, more profitable to remember, not the intellectual death of Italy, but what she wrought in that bright period of her vigour. She was the divinely appointed birthplace of the modern spirit, the workshop of knowledge for all Europe, our mistress in the arts and sciences, the Alma Mater of our student years, the well-spring of mental freedom and activity after ages of stagnation. If greater philosophers have since been produced by Germany and France and England, greater scholars, greater men of science, greater poets even, and greater pioneers of progress in the lands divined by Christopher Columbus beyond the seas—this must not blind us to the truth that at the very outset of the era in which we live and play our parts, Italy embraced all philosophy, all scholarship, all science, all art, all discovery, alone. Such is the Lampadephoria, or torch-race, of the nations. Greece stretches forth her hand to Italy; Italy consigns the sacred fire to Northern Europe; the people of the North pass on the flame to America, to India, and the Australasian isles.