The Revival of Learning in Italy

The Reformation.

The French Renaissance, so rich on the side of arts and letters, was hardly less rich on the side of classical studies. The Revival of Learning has a noble muster-roll of names in France : Turnebus, the patriarch of Hellenistic studies, the Etiennes of Paris, equalling in numbers, industry and learning their Venetian rivals ; the two Scaligers ; impassioned Dolet ; elo quent Muret ; learned Cujas; terrible Calvin ; Ramus, the intrepid antagonist of Aristotle ; De Thou and De Beze ; ponderous Casau bon ; brilliant young Saumaise. The distinguishing characteristics of French humanism are vivid intelligence, critical audacity and polemical acumen, perspicuity of exposition, learning directed in its applications by logical sense rather than by artistic ideals of taste. Some of the names just mentioned remind us that in France, as in Germany and Holland, the Reformation was closely con nected with the revival of learning. Humanism has never been in the narrow sense of that term Protestant ; still less has it been strictly Catholic. In Italy it fostered a temper of mind decidedly averse to theological speculation and religious earnestness. In Holland and Germany with Erasmus, Reuchlin and Melanchthon it developed types of character, urbane, reflective, pointedly or gently critical, which left to themselves would not have plunged the north of Europe into the whirlpool of belligerent reform. Yet none the less was the new learning, through the open spirit of inquiry it nourished, its vindication of the private reason, its en thusiasm for republican antiquity, and its proud assertion of the rights of human independence, linked by a strong and subtle chain to that turbid revolt of the individual consciousness against spir itual despotism draped in fallacies and throned upon abuses. To this rebellion we give the name of Reformation. But while the necessities of antagonism to papal Rome made it assume at first the form of narrow and sectarian opposition, it marked in fact a vital struggle of the intellect towards truth and freedom, involving future results of scepticism and rationalistic audacity from which its earlier champions would have shrunk. It marked, moreover, in the condition of armed resistance against established authority which was forced upon it by the Counter-Reformation, a firm re solve to assert political liberty, leading in the course of time to a revolution with which the rebellious spirit of the Revival was sympathetic. This being the relation of humanism in general to reform, French learning in particular displayed such innovating boldness as threw many of its most conspicuous professors into the camp at war with Rome. Calvin, a French student of Picard origin, created the type of Protestantism to which the majority of French Huguenots adhered. This too was a moment at which philosophical seclusion was hardly possible. In a nation so tumul tuously agitated one side or the other had to be adopted. Those of the French humanists who did not proclaim Huguenot opinions found themselves obliged with Muret to lend their talents to the Counter-Reformation, or to suffer persecution for heterodoxy like Dolet. The Church, terrified and infuriated by the progress of reform, suspected learning on its own account. To be an eminent scholar was to be accused of immorality, heresy and atheism in a single indictment ; and the defence of weaker minds lay in join ing the Jesuits as Heinsius was fain to do. France had already absorbed the earlier Renaissance in an Italianizing spirit before the Reformation made itself felt as a political actuality. This fact, together with the strong Italian bias of the Valois, serves to explain in some degree the reason why the Counter-Reformation entailed those fierce entangled civil wars, massacres of St. Bar tholomew, murders of the Guises, regicides, treasons and empoi sonments, that terminated with the compromise of Henry IV. It is no part of the present subject to analyse the political, religious and social interests of that struggle. The upshot was the triumph of the Counter-Reformation, and the establishment of its prin ciple, absolutism, as the basis of French government. It was a French king who, when the nation had been reduced to order, uttered the famous word of absolutism, "L'Etat, c'est The Renaissance in the Low Countries, as elsewhere, had its brilliant age of arts and letters. During the middle ages the wealthy free towns of Flanders flourished under conditions not dissimilar to those of the Italian republics. They raised miracles of architectural beauty, which were modified in the isth and 16th centuries by characteristic elements of the new style. The Van Eycks, followed by Memling, Metsys, Mabuse, Lucas van Leyden, struck out a new path in the revival of painting and taught Europe the secret of oil-colouring. But it was reserved for the 17th cen tury to witness the flower and fruit time of this powerful art in the work of Porbus, Rubens and Vandyck, in the Dutch schools of landscape and home-life, and in the unique masterpieces of Rembrandt. We have a right to connect this later period with the Renaissance, because the distracted state of the Netherlands during the i6th century suspended, while it could not extinguish, their aesthetic development. The various schools of the 17th century, moreover, are animated with the Renaissance spirit no less surely than the Florentine school of the i 5th or the Venetian of the i6th. The animal vigour and carnal enjoyment of Rubens, the refined Italianizing beauty of Vandyck, the mystery of light and gloom on Rembrandt's panels, the love of nature in Ruysdael, Cuyp and Van Hooghe, with their luminously misty skies, silvery daylight and broad expanse of landscape, the interest in common life displayed by Ter Borch, Van Steen, Douw, Ostade and Teniers, the instinct for the beauty of animals in Potter, the vast sea spaces of Vanderveldt, the grasp on reality, the acute intuition into character in portraits, the scientific study of the world and man, the robust sympathy with natural appetites, which distin guish the whole art of the Low Countries, are a direct emanation from the Renaissance.

The vernacular in the Netherlands profited at first but little by the impulse which raised Italian, Spanish, French and English to the rank of classic languages. But humanism, first of all in its protagonist Erasmus, afterwards in the long list of critical scholars and editors, Lipsius, Heinsius and Grotius, in the printers, Elzevir and Plantin, developed itself from the centre of the Leyden uni versity with massive energy, and proved that it was still a motive force of intellectual progress. In the fields of classical learning the students of the Low Countries broke new ground chiefly by methodical collection, classification and comprehensive criticism of previously accumulated stores. Their works were solid and sub stantial edifices, forming the substratum for future scholarship. In addition to this they brought a philosophy and scientific thor oughness to bear on studies which had been pursued in a more literary spirit. It would, however, be uncritical to pursue this subject further; for the encyclopaedic labours of the Dutch philologers belong to a period when the Renaissance was over past. For the same reason it is inadmissible to do more than men tion the name of Spinoza here.

The Netherlands became the battlefield of Reformation and Counter-Reformation in even a stricter sense than France. Here the antagonistic principles were plainly posed in the course of struggle against foreign despotism. The conflict ended in the as sertion of political independence, as opposed to absolute dominion. Europe in large measure owes the modern ideal of political liberty to that spirit of stubborn resistance which broke the power of Spain. Recent history, and, in particular, the history of democracy, claims for its province the several stages whereby this principle was developed in England and America, and its outburst in the frenzy of the French Revolution. It is enough here to have alluded to the part played by the Low Countries in the genesis of a motive force which may be described as the last manifestation of the Renaissance striving after self-emancipation.

The insular position of England combined with the nature of the English has allowed the country to feel the vibration of Euro pean movements later and with less of shock than the continental nations. Before a wave of progress has reached its shores there has been the opportunity of watching it as spectators, and of considering how to receive it. Revolutions have passed from the tumultuous stages of their origin into some settled and recognizable state before we have been called upon to cope with them. It was thus that England took the influences of the Renaissance and Reformation simultaneously, and almost at the same time found herself engaged in that struggle with the Coun ter-Reformation which, crowned by the defeat of the Spanish Armada, stimulated the sense of nationality and developed the naval forces of the race. Both Renaissance and Reformation had been anticipated by at least a century in England. Chaucer's poetry, which owed so much to Italian examples, gave an early foretaste of the former. Wycliffe's teaching was a vital moment in the latter. But the French wars, the Wars of the Roses and the persecution of the Lollards deferred the coming of the new age; and the year 1536, when Henry VIII. passed the Act of Supremacy through parliament, may be fixed as the date when England en tered definitely upon a career of intellectual development abreast with the foremost nations of the continent. The circumstances just now insisted on explain the specific character of the English Renaissance. The Reformation had been adopted by consent of the king, lords and commons; and this change in the state religion, though it was not confirmed without reaction, agitation and blood shed, cost the nation comparatively little disturbance. Humanism, before it affected the bulk of the English people, had already permeated Italian and French literature. Classical erudition had been adapted to the needs of modern thought. The hard work of collecting, printing, annotating and translating Greek and Latin authors had been accomplished. The masterpieces of antiquity had been interpreted and made intelligible. Much of the learning popularized by the poets and dramatists was derived at second hand from modern literature. This does not mean that England was deficient in ripe and sound scholars. More, Colet, Ascham, Cheke, Camden were men whose familiarity with the classics was both intimate and easy. Public schools and universities con formed to the modern methods of study; nor were there wanting opportunities for youths of humble origin to obtain an education which placed them on a level with Italian scholars. The single case of Ben Jonson sufficiently proves this. Yet learning did not at this epoch become a marked speciality in England. There was no class corresponding to the humanists. It should also be re membered that the best works of Italian literature were introduced into Great Britain together with the classics. Phaer's Virgil, Chap man's Homer, Harrington's Orlando, Marlowe's Hero and Leander, Fairfax's Jerusalem Delivered, North's Plutarch, Hoby's Courtier —to mention only a few examples—placed English readers simul taneously in possession of the most eminent and representative works of Greece, Rome and Italy. At the same time Spanish in fluences reached them through the imitators of Guevara and the dramatists; French influences in the versions of romances; Ger man influences in popular translations of the Faust legend, Eulenspiegel, and similar productions. The authorized versions of the Bible had also been recently given to the people—so that al most at the same period of time England obtained in the ver nacular an extensive library of ancient and modern authors. This was a privilege enjoyed in like measure by no other nation. It sufficiently accounts for the richness and variety of Elizabethan literature, and for the enthusiasm with which the English language was cultivated.