The Revival of Learning in Italy

It will be well to describe briefly, but in detail, what this meet ing of the modern with the ancient mind effected over the whole field of intellectual interests. In doing so, we must be careful to remember that the study of the classics did but give a special im pulse to pent-up energies which were bound in one way or another to assert their independence. Without the Revival of Learning the direction of those forces would have been different ; but that novel intuition into the nature of the world and man which con stitutes what we describe as Renaissance must have emerged. As the facts, however, stand before us, it is impossible to dissociate the rejection of the other world as the sole reality, the joyous acceptance of this world as a place to live in and act in, the con viction that "the proper study of mankind is man," from human ism. Humanism as it actually appeared in Italy was positive in its conception of the problems to be solved, pagan in its contempt for mediaeval mysticism, invigorated for sensuous enjoyment by contact with antiquity, yet holding in itself the germ of new reli gious aspirations, profounder science and sterner probings of the mysteries of life than had been attempted even by the ancients. The operation of this humanistic spirit has now to be traced.

Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Villani.

It is obvious that Italian literature owed little at the outset to the Revival of Learn ing. The Divine Comedy, the Canzoniere and the Decameron were works of monumental art, deriving neither form nor inspira tion immediately from the classics but applying the originality of Italian genius to matter drawn from previous mediaeval sources. Dante showed both in his epic poem and in his lyrics that he had not abandoned the sphere of contemporary thought. Allegory and theology, the vision and the symbol, still determine the form of masterpieces which for perfection of workmanship and for eman cipated force of intellect rank among the highest products of the human mind. Yet they are not mediaeval in the same sense as the song of Roland or the Arthurian cycle. They proved that, though Italy came late into the realm of literature, her action was des tined to be decisive and alterative by the introduction of a new spirit, a firmer and more positive grasp on life and art. These qualities she owed to her material prosperity, to her freedom from feudalism, to her secularized church, her commercial nobility, her political independence in a federation of small states. Petrarch and Boccaccio, though they both held the mediaeval doctrine that lit erature should teach some abstruse truth beneath a veil of fiction, differed from Dante in this, that their poetry and prose in the vernacular abandoned both allegory and symbol. In their prac tice they ignored their theory; Petrarch's lyrics continue the Provençal tradition as it had been reformed in Tuscany, with a subtler and more modern analysis of emotion, a purer and more chastened style than his masters could boast ; Boccaccio's tales, in like manner, continue the tradition of the fabliaux, raising that literary species to the rank of finished art, enriching it with humour and strengthening its substance by keen insight into all varieties of character. The Canzoniere and the Decameron dis tinguish themselves from mediaeval literature, not by any return to classical precedents, but by free self-conscious handling of human nature. So much had to be premised in order to make it clear in what relation humanism stood to the Renaissance since the Italian work of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio is sufficient to indicate the re-birth of the spirit after ages of apparent deadness. Had the Revival of Learning not intervened, it is probable that the vigorous efforts of these writers alone would have inaugurated a new age of European culture. Yet, while noting this reservation of judgment it must also be remarked that all three felt them selves under some peculiar obligation to the classics. Dante, me diaeval as his temper seems to us, chose Virgil for his guide, and ascribed his mastery of style to the study of Virgilian poetry. Petrarch and Boccaccio were, as we have seen, the pioneers of the new learning. They held their writings in the vernacular cheap, and initiated that contempt for the mother tongue which was a note of the earlier Renaissance. Giovanni Villani, the first chronicler who used Italian for the compilation of a methodical history, tells us how he was impelled to write by musing on the ruins of Rome, and thinking of the vanished greatness of the Latin race. We have, therefore, to recognize that the four greatest writers of the 14th century, while the Revival of Learning was yet in its cradle, each after his own fashion acknowledged the vivifying touch upon his spirit of the antique genius. They

seem to have been conscious that they could not give the desired impulse to modern literature and art without contact with the classics; and, in spite of the splendour of their achievements in Italian, they found no immediate followers upon that path.

Scholarship and Literature.

The fascination of pure study was so powerful, the Italians at that epoch were so eager to re cover the past, that during the 15th century we have before our eyes the spectacle of this great nation deviating from the course of development begun in poetry by Dante and Petrarch, in prose by Boccaccio and Villani, into the channels of scholarship and antiquarian research. The language of the Canzoniere and Decam eron was abandoned for revived Latin and discovered Greek. Ac quisition supplanted invention ; imitation of classical authors sup pressed originality of style. The energies of the Italian people were devoted to transcribing the codices, settling texts, translat ing Greek books into Latin, compiling grammars, commentaries, encyclopaedias, dictionaries, epitomes and ephemerides. During this century the best histories—Bruni's and Poggio's annals of Florence, for example—were composed in Latin after the manner of Livy. The best dissertations, Landino's Camaldunenses, Valla's De V oluptate, were laboured imitations of Cicero's Tusculans. The best verse, Pontano's elegies, Politian's hexameters, were, in like manner Latin ; public orations upon ceremonial occasions were delivered in the Latin tongue; correspondence, official and fa miliar, was carried on in the same language; even the fabliaux re ceived, in Poggio's Facetiae, a dress of elegant Latinity. The no ticeable barrenness of Italian literature at this period is referable to the fact that men of genius and talent devoted themselves to erudition and struggled to express their thoughts and feelings in a speech which was not natural. Yet they were engaged in a work of incalculable importance. At the close of the century the knowl edge of Greece and Rome had been reappropriated and placed beyond the possibility of destruction; the chasm between the old and new world had been bridged ; mediaeval modes of thinking and discussing been superseded ; the staple of education, the common culture which has brought all Europe into intellectual agreement, was already in existence. Humanism was now an ac tuality. Owing to the uncritical veneration for antiquity which then prevailed, it had received a strong tincture of pedantry. Its professors, in their revolt against the middle ages, made light of Christianity and paraded paganism. What was even worse from an artistic point of view, they had contracted puerilities of style, vanities of rhetoric, stupidities of wearisome citation. Still, at the opening of the 16th century, it became manifest what fruits of noble quality the Revival of Letters was about to bring forth for modern literature. Two great scholars, Lorenzo de'Medici and Politian, had already returned to the practice of Italian poetry. Their work is the first absolutely modern work—modern in the sense of having absorbed the stores of classic learning and repro duced those treasures in forms of simple, natural, native beauty. Boiardo occupies a similar position by the fusion of classic my thology with chivalrous romance in his Orlando Innamorato. But the victor's laurels were reserved for Ariosto whose Orlando Furioso is the purest and most perfect extant example of Renais sance poetry. It was not merely in what they had acquired and assimilated from the classics that these poets showed the trans formation effected in the fields of literature by humanism. The whole method and spirit of the mediaeval art had been aban doned. That of the cinque cento is positive, defined, mundane. The deity, if deity there be, that rules in it, is beauty. Interest is confined to the actions, passions, sufferings and joys of human life, to its pathetic, tragic, humorous and sentimental incidents. Of the state of souls beyond the grave we hear and are supposed to care nothing. In the drama the pedantry of the Revival which had not injured romantic literature made itself perniciously felt. Rules were collected from Horace and Aristotle. Seneca was chosen as the model of tragedy; Plautus and Terence supplied the groundwork of comedy. Thus in the plays of Rucellai, Trissino, Sperone and other tragic poets, the nobler elements of humanism, considered as a revelation of the world and man, obtained no free development. Even the comedies of the best authors are too ob servant of Latin precedents, although some pieces of Machiavelli, Ariosto, Aretino, Cecchi and Gelli are admirable for vivid delinea tion of contemporary manners.