THE REVIVAL OF LEARNING IN ITALY At this point the Revival of Learning intervened to determine the course of the Renaissance. Mediaeval students possessed a considerable portion of the Latin classics, though Greek had be come in the fullest sense of the phrase a dead language. But what they retained of ancient literature they could not comprehend in the right spirit. Between them and the text of poet or historian hung a veil of mysticism, a vapour of misapprehension. The odour of unsanctity clung around those relics of the pagan past. Men bred in the cloister and the lecture-room of the logicians, trained in scholastic disputations, versed in allegorical interpreta tions of the plainest words and most apparent facts, could not find the key which might unlock those stores of wisdom and of beauty. Petrarch first opened a new method in scholarship, and revealed what we denote as humanism. In his teaching lay the twofold discovery of man and of the world. For humanism, which was the vital element in the Revival of Learning, consists mainly of a just perception of the dignity of man as a rational, volitional and sentient being, born upon this earth with a right to use it and enjoy it. Humanism implied the rejection of those visions of a future and imagined state of souls as the only absolute reality, which had fascinated the imagination of the middle ages. It in volved a vivid recognition of the goodliness of man and nature, displayed in the great monuments of human power recovered from the past. It stimulated the curiosity of latent sensibilities, pro voked fresh inquisition into the groundwork of existence and strengthened man's self-esteem by knowledge of what men had thought and felt and done in ages when Christianity was not. It roused a desire to reappropriate the whole abandoned provinces of mundane energy, and a hope to emulate antiquity in works of living loveliness and vigour. The Italians of the i4th century, more precocious than the other European races, were ripe for this emancipation of enslaved intelligence. In the classics they found the food which was required to nourish the new spirit ; and a variety of circumstances among which must be reckoned the pride of a nation boasting of its descent from the Populus Romanus, rendered them apt to fling aside the obstacles that had impeded the free action of the mind through many centuries. Petrarch not only set his countrymen upon the right method of studying the Latin classics, but he also divined the importance of recovering a knowledge of Greek literature. To this task Boccaccio addressed himself ; and he was followed by numerous Italian enthusiasts, who visited Byzantium before its fall as the sacred city of a new revelation. The next step was to collect mss., to hunt out, copy
and preserve the precious relics of the past. In this work of ac cumulation Guarino and Filelfo, Aurispa and Poggio, took the chief part, aided by the wealth of Italian patricians, merchant princes and despots, who were inspired by the sacred thirst for learning. Learning was then no mere pursuit of a special and re cluse class. It was fashionable and it was passionate, pervading all society with the fervour of romance. For a generation nursed in decadent scholasticism and stereotyped theological formulae it was the fountain of renascent youth, beauty and freedom, the shape in which the Helen of art and poetry appeared to the rav ished eyes of mediaeval Faustus. It was the resurrection of the mightiest spirits of the past. "I go," said Cyriac of Ancona, the indefatigable though uncritical explorer of antiquities, "I go to awake the dead!" This was the enthusiasm, this the vitalizing faith, which made the work of scholarship in the i 5th century so highly strung and ardent. The men who followed it knew that they were restoring humanity to its birthright after the expatria tion of ten centuries. They were instinctively aware that the ef fort was for liberty of action, thought and conscience in the fu ture. This conviction made young men leave their loves and pleasures, grave men quit their counting-houses, churchmen desert their missals, to crowd the lecture-rooms of philologers and rhet oricians. When Greek had been acquired, mss. accumulated, li braries and museums formed, came the age of printers and ex positors. Aldus Manutius in Italy, Froben in Basel, the Etiennes in Paris, committed to the press what the investigators had re covered. Nor were there wanting men who dedicated their powers to Hebrew and Oriental erudition, laying, together with the Gre cians, a basis for those Biblical studies which advanced the Ref ormation. Meanwhile the languages of Greece and Rome had been so thoroughly appropriated that a final race of scholars, headed by Politian, Pontano, Valla, handled once again in verse and prose both antique dialects, and thrilled the ears of Europe with new , made pagan melodies. The Church itself at this epoch lent its in fluence to the prevalent enthusiasm. Nicholas V. and Leo X., not to mention intervening popes who showed themselves tolerant of humanistic culture, were heroes of the classical revival. Scholar ship became the surest path of advancement to ecclesiastical and political honours. Italy was one great school of the new learning at the moment when the German, French and Spanish nations were invited to her feast.