The Revival of Learning in Italy

Art, Letters, and the Drama.

Speaking strictly, England borrowed little in the region of the arts from other nations, and developed still less that was original. What is called Jacobean architecture marks indeed an interesting stage in the transition from the Gothic style. But, compared with Italian, French, Spanish, German and Flemish work of a like period, it is both timid and dry. Sculpture was represented in London for a brief space by Torrigiani ; painting by Holbein and Antonio More ; music by Italians and Frenchmen of the Chapel Royal. But no Englishman rose to European eminence in these departments. With literature the case was very different. Wyat and Surrey began by engrafting the forms and graces of Italian poetry upon the native stock. They introduced the sonnet and blank verse. Sidney followed with the sestine and terza rima and with various experiments in classic metres, none of which took root on English soil. The translators handled the octave stanza. Marlowe gave new vigour to the couplet. The first period of the English Renais sance was one of imitation and assimilation. Academies after the Italian type were founded. Tragedies in the style of Seneca, rivalling Italian and French dramas of the epoch, were produced. Attempts to Latinize ancestral rhythms, similar to those which had failed in Italy and France, were made. Tentative essays in criticisms and dissertations on the art of poetry abounded. It seemed as though the Renaissance ran a risk of being throttled in its cradle by superfluity of foreign and pedantic nutriment. But the natural vigour of the English genius resisted influences alien to itself, and showed a robust capacity for digesting the varied diet offered to it. As there was nothing despotic in the temper of the ruling classes, nothing oppressive in English cul ture, the literature of that age evolved itself freely from the peo ple. It was under these conditions that Spenser gave his romantic epic to the world, a poem which derived its allegory from the middle ages, its decorative richness from the Italian Renaissance, its sweetness, purity, harmony and imaginative splendour from the most poetic nation of the modern world. Under the same conditions, the Elizabethan drama, which in its totality is the real exponent of the English Renaissance, came into existence. This drama very early freed itself from the pseudo-classic man nerism which imposed on taste in Italy and France. Depicting feudalism in the vivid colours of an age at war with feudal in stitutions, breathing into antique histories the breath of actual life, embracing the romance of Italy and Spain, the mysteries of German legend, the fictions of poetic fancy and the facts of daily life, humours of the moment and abstractions of philosophical speculation, in one homogeneous amalgam instinct with intense vitality, this extraordinary birth of time, with Shakespeare for the master of all ages, left a monument of the Renaissance unrivalled for pure creative power by any other product of that epoch. To complete the sketch, we must set Bacon, the expositor of modern scientific method, beside Spenser and Shakespeare, as the third representative of the Renaissance in England. Nor should Raleigh, Drake, Hawkins, the semi-buccaneer explorers of the ocean, be omitted. They, following the lead of Portuguese and Spaniards, combating the Counter-Reformation on the seas, opened for England her career of colonization and plantation. All this while the political policy of Tudors and Stuarts tended towards mo narchial absolutism, while the Reformation in England, modified by contact with the Low Countries during their struggles, was narrowing into strict reactionary intolerance. Puritanism indi cated a revolt of the religious conscience of the nation against the arts and manners of the Renaissance, against the encroach ments of belligerent Catholicism, against the corrupt and Italian ated court of James I., against the absolutist pretensions of his son Charles. In its final manifestation during the Commonwealth, Puritanism won a transient victory over the mundane forces of both Reformation and Renaissance, as these had taken shape in England. It also secured the eventual triumph of consti tutional independence. Milton, the greatest humanistic poet of the English race, lent his pen and moral energies during the best years of his life to securing that principle on which mod ern political systems at present rest. Thus the geographical isola tion of England, and the comparatively late adoption by the English of matured Italian and German influences, give peculiar complexity to the phenomena of Reformation and Renaissance simultaneously developed on our island. The period of our his tory between 1536 and 1642 shows how difficult it is to separate these two factors in the re-birth of Europe, both of which con tributed so powerfully to the formation of modern English na tionality.

It has been impossible to avoid an air of superficiality and the repetition of facts known to every schoolboy in this sketch of so complicated a subject as the Renaissance—embracing many nations, a great variety of topics, and an indefinite period of time. Yet no other treatment was possible upon the lines laid down at the outset, where it was explained why the term Renaissance cannot now be confined to the Revival of Learning and the effect of antique studies upon literary and artistic ideals. The purpose of this article has been to show that, while the Renaissance im plied a new way of regarding the material world and human na ture, a new conception of man's destiny and duties on this planet, a new culture and new intellectual perceptions penetrating every sphere of thought and energy, it also involved new reciprocal re lations between the members of the European group of nations. The Renaissance closed the middle ages and opened the modern era—not merely because the mental and moral ideas which then sprang into activity and owed their force in large measure to the revival of classical learning were opposed to mediaeval modes of thinking and feeling, but also because the political and interna tional relations specific to it as an age were at variance with fundamental theories of the past. Instead of empire and church, the sun and moon of the mediaeval system, a federation of peo ples, separate in type, and divergent in interests, yet bound together by common tendencies, common culture and common efforts came into existence. For obedience to central authority was substituted balance of power. Henceforth the hegemony of Europe attached to no crown, imperial or papal, but to the na tion which was capable of winning it, in the spiritual region by mental ascendancy, and in the temporal by force.

That this is the right way of regarding the subject appears from the events of the first two decades of the 16th century, those years in which the humanistic revival attained its highest point in Italy. Luther published his thesis in 1517, 64 years of ter the fall of Constantinople, 23 years of ter the expedition of Charles VIII. to Naples, ten years before the sack of Rome, at a moment when France, Spain and England had felt the influ ences of Italian culture but feebly. From that date forward two parties wrestled for supremacy in Europe, to which may be given the familiar names of Liberalism and Conservatism, the party of progress and the party of established institutions. The triumph of the former was most signal among the Teutonic peo ples. The Latin races championed by Spain and supported by the papacy fought the battle of the latter, and succeeded for a time in rolling back the tide of revolutionary conquest. Meanwhile that liberal culture which had been created for Europe by the Italians before the contest of the Reformation began continued to spread, although it was stifled in Italy and Spain, retarded in France and the Low Countries, well-nigh extirpated by wars in Germany and diverted from its course in England by the counter movement of Puritanism. The autos da fe of Seville and Madrid, the flames to which Bruno, ,Dolet and Paleario were flung, the dungeon of Campanella and the seclusion of Galileo, the massacre of St. Bartholomew and the faggots of Smithfield, the desolated plains of Germany and the cruelties of Alva in the Netherlands, disillusioned Europe of those golden dreams which had arisen in the earlier days of humanism, and which had been so pleasantly indulged by Rabelais. In truth the Renaissance was ruled by no Astraea redux but rather by a severe spirit which brought no peace but a sword, reminding men of sternest duties, testing what of moral force and tenacity was in them, compelling them to strike for the old order or the new, suffering no lukewarm halting be tween two opinions. That, in spite of retardation and retrogres sion, the old order of ideas should have yielded to the new all over Europe—that science should have won firm standing-ground and political liberty should have struggled through those birth throes of its origin—was in the nature of things. Had this not been, the Renaissance or re-birth of Europe would be a term without a meaning. (J. A. S.) While Symonds' article on the Renaissance, originally con tributed to the 9th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica re mains the classical exposition of a certain view of the subject, more recent research has brought out other aspects of the matter. It is noteworthy, however, that in some important points the very latest investigators have returned to Symonds' conception of the Renaissance, from which historians of the generation imme diately following him had departed.