The treatiseDe Incantationepresents the same antithesis between Peripatetic science and Christian faith. Pomponazzi composed it at the instance of a physician, his friend, who begged him to offer an explanation of some apparently supernatural phenomena. It is, in fact, an essay upon demons and miracles. As a philosopher, Pomponazzi stoutly rejects both. The order of nature cannot be interrupted. Angels and devils only exist in the popular imagination. Miracles are but imperfectly comprehended manifestations of natural forces, which the vulgar ascribe to the intervention of God or spirits.[570]Each religion has its own miracles and its own saints, to whom the common folk attribute supernatural power.[571]But Moses, Mahomet and Christ stand upon the same level; the thaumaturgists of every creed are equally unable to alter the universal order.[572]Credulity and ignorance ascribe to all of them faculties they cannot possess. Having, as a philosopher, expressed these revolutionary ideas, as a Christian, he briefly and summarily states his belief in all that he has just denied.[573]
Basing his argument upon the ground of reason, which, for him, was no other than the Aristotelian doctrine of the Cosmos, Pomponazzi recognizes noagency that interrupts the sequence of cause and effect in nature. But the astral intelligences are realities, and their operation has been as clearly ascertained as that of any other natural force. Therefore Pomponazzi refers to the planets many extraordinary exhibitions of apparently abnormal power, conceding upon this point as much as could have been desired by the most superstitious of his contemporaries. Not only are the lives of men subject to planetary influence; but all human institutions rise, flourish and decay in obedience to the same superior laws. Even religions have their day of inevitable decline, and Christianity is no exception to the general rule. At the present moment, says Pomponazzi, we may discern signs of approaching dissolution in the fabric of our creed.[574]He is careful to add, as usual, that he holds this doctrine as a philosopher; but that, as a Christian, he believes in the permanence of revealed religion. Faith and reason could not be brought into more glaring antagonism, nor is it possible to affirm contradictory propositions with less attempt at reconciliation. Pomponazzi seems determined to act out by anticipation Pascal's axiom,Il faut être Pyrrhonniste accompli et Chrétien soumis. What the real state of his mind was, and whether the antithesis which seems to us so untenable, did not present itself to him as an anomaly, hardly admits of explanation. A similar unresolved discord may be traced in nearly all the thinkers of this epoch.
It remains to mention one more treatise of Pomponazzi, the Book on Fate. Here he raises the question of human freedom face to face with God andthe unbroken order of the Universe. The conclusions at which he arrives are vacillating and unsatisfactory; nor is there much in his method of handling this ancient problem to arrest attention. The essay, however, contains one sentence which deserves to be recorded. "A very Prometheus," he says, "is the philosopher. Seeking to penetrate the secret things of God, he is consumed with ceaseless cares and cogitations; he forgets to thirst, to hunger, to eat, to sleep, to spit; he is derided of all men, and held for a fool and sacrilegious person; he is persecuted by inquisitors; he becomes a gazing-stock to the common folk. These, then, are the gains of the philosophers; these are their guerdons."[575]Not only were these words spoken from the man's own heart, smarting under the attacks to which his treatise on the soul had exposed him; but they were in a profound sense prophetic. While reading them, we think of Campanella's lifelong imprisonment and sevenfold tortures; of Bruno's death by fire, and Vanini's tongue torn out before his execution; of Galileo's recantation and disgrace; of Carnesecchi, Paleario and Montalcino burned or strangled. A whole procession of Italian martyrs to free thought and bold avowal of opinion passes before our eyes.
Reviewing Pomponazzi's work, we find that, though he occupied for the most part the modest place of a commentator and expositor, he valiantly asserted the rights of reason face to face with ecclesiastical authority. Under the ægis of the formulasalvâ fide, he attacked the popular belief, disputed the fiatsof Church Councils, denied miracles, rejected supernatural causes, and proclaimed that science must be based upon the axiom of an unalterable permanence in the order of the universe. The controversy which his treatise on immortality inflamed in Italy, popularized the two conceptions of God's immanence in nature and of the evolution of the human soul from corporeal organs. In other words it struck a powerful blow at transcendental, extra-mundane speculation, and prepared the way for sounder physical investigations. The positive spirit appeared in Pomponazzi, never thenceforward to be set at rest until the cycle of modern scientific illumination shall be accomplished.
The deep impression produced by this controversy on the mind of the Italians, may be illustrated by a little story. Pomponazzi's disciple, Simone Porzio, when invited to lecture at Pisa, opened Aristotle's meteorological treatises at the commencement of his course. The assembly, composed of students and people of the town, who had assembled, as was then the custom, to gaze upon the new professor and to judge his manner,[576]cried in a loud voice: "Quid de animâ?Speak to us about the soul!" He had to close his book, and take up theDe Animâ. This Porzio frankly professed his belief that the human soul differed in no essential point from the soul of a lion or a plant, and that those who thought otherwise, were prompted by a generous pity for our mean estate.[577]Materialism of the purest water became fashionable and expressed itself in pithy sentences, which, though devoid of historical accuracy, sufficiently paint the temper of the folk who gave them currency. Of this type is the apocryphal epitaph of Cesare Cremonini, one of the latest of the Italian peripateticians. He died in 1631, and on his grave was said to have been written at his own requestHic jacet Cremoninus totus. To the same Cremonini is ascribed the Jesuitical mottoForis ut moris, intus ut libet, which may be regarded as a cynical version of Pomponazzi's oft-repeated protestation of belief in dogmas he had demonstrated contrary to reason.[578]Had it been possible for the Church to continue her tolerance of Leo's age, or had the Counter-Reformation taken a direction less inimical to free inquiry, the studied hypocrisy of this epigram, so painfully characteristic of the age that gave it birth, might have been avoided. The men who uttered it and acted by it, were the same of whom Milton spoke inAreopagitica: "I have sat among their learned men (for that honor I had), and been counted happy to be born in such a place of philosophic freedom as they supposed England was, while themselves did nothing but bemoan the servile condition into which learning amongst them was brought; that this was it which had damped the glory of Italian wits; that nothing had been written now these many years but flattery and fustian."
Central and Northern Italy performed the first twostages of Renaissance thought. Florence, true to the destiny which made her artful and form-giving, attempted to restore Platonic philosophy in accordance with the conditions determined by the middle ages. Bologna, gifted with a personality no less substantial, adhered to scholastic traditions, but accommodated their rigid subject-matter to the spirit breathed upon them by more liberal scholarship. It remained for the South of Italy to complete the work, and to supply the fulcrum needed for the first true effort of modern science. Hitherto, whether at Florence or Bologna, philosophy had recognized authority. Discarding the yoke of the Church, both Platonists and Aristotelians recognized masters, whose words they were contented to interpret. Reason dared not declare herself, except beneath the mask of some great teacher—Plato or Plotinus, Aristotle or Alexander or Averroes. The school of Cosenza cut itself adrift from authority, ecclesiastical or classical. This is the import of the first sonnet in Campanella's series, preserved for us by the fortunate mediation of his disciple, the German with the Italianized patronymic, Tobia Adami:[579]
Campanella calls the students of truth back to Nature from the "secondary schools" of the philosophers, Plato, Aristotle, Thomas of Aquino, or Averroes; who imposed upon their reason by the word "authority." In his fifth sonnet he enforces the same theme:[580]
Tyrants, hypocrites and sophists—that is to say, the triple band of State and Church oppressors, of interested ecclesiastics, and of subtle logicians—have drawn their threefold veil between the human intelligence and the universe, from which alone, as their proper home andmilieu, men must derive the knowledge that belongs to them. Campanella, with the sincerity of one to whom the truth is dearer than his own reputation, yields thespolia opimaof this latest victory over the strongholds of authority to his master—the masterwhom he never knew in life, but over whose bier he wept and prayed in secret, hiding the fire of modern freedom and modern science beneath the black cowl of a Dominican friar:[581]
In these verses, the saint and queen proclaimed by Campanella is Nature. During the middle ages truth had seemed to descend as by a sort of inspiration upon man from an extra-mundane God. During the first and second periods of the Renaissance the human intellect repudiated this transcendentalism, but yielded itself, a willing victim, to the authority of books, Plato or Aristotle, and their commentators. Now the mind of man stands face to face with nature, and knows that there, and there alone, is inspiration. The great Baconian secret, the Interrogation of Nature, has been revealed. It is now acknowledged on all sides that not what Telesio or Campanella, or their famous disciple, Bacon, achieved in actual discovery, was noteworthy. But the spirit communicated from Telesio and Campanella to Bacon, is the spirit of modern science. Meanwhile, another native of South Italy,Giordano Bruno, proclaimed the immanence of God in the world, the identification of the universe with God in thought, the impossibility of escaping from God in nature, because nature, realizing God for the human soul, is divine. The central conception of the third age of Italian thought, underlying the apparently divergent systems of Campanella and Bruno—the conception, namely, of a real and indestructible correlation between the human spirit and the actual universe, and the consequent reliance of the human consciousness upon its own testimony in the search for truth—contained the germ of all that has, in very various regions, been subsequently achieved by French, Dutch, English, and German speculators. Telesio and Campanella, long before Bacon, founded empirical science. Campanella and Bruno, long before Descartes, established the principle of idealistic philosophy in the self-conscious thinking faculty of man. The sensualism of Telesio, the spiritualism of Bruno, and Campanella's dualism, foreshadow all possible sects of empiricists, rationalists and eclectics, which have since divided the field of modern speculation. It is easy enough now to look down either from the height of full-blown transcendental metaphysics or from the more modest eminence of solid physical science upon the intellectual abortions generated by this potent conception in its earliest fusion with medieval theology. Yet it is impossible to neglect the negative importance of the work effected by men who declared their independence of ecclesiastical and classical authority in an age when the Church and antiquity contended for the empire of the human reason. Still less possible is it to deny the place of Galileo,Descartes, Bacon, Spinoza, among the offspring begotten of the movement which Pomponazzi, Telesio, Campanella and Bruno inaugurated and developed.
Thus, therefore, by the substitution of human for revealed authority; by the suggestion of new and real topics of inquiry, and finally by the repudiation of all authority except that of nature's ascertained laws; by the rending of all veils between the human reason and the universe, the Italian philosophers of the Renaissance effected for Europe the transition from the middle ages to the modern era.
What is the link of connection between Machiavelli and Pomponazzi, the two leaders of Italian thought at the height of the Renaissance? It may be expressed in one formula—a vivid sense of man and the world as they are; or, in other words, positivism. Machiavelli dispenses with Providence, smiles incredulously at Fortune, explains all social and historical problems by reference to the will and thought of men in action. He studies human nature as he finds it, not as it ought to be according to some ideal standard. Pomponazzi shatters transcendentalism at a blow. He proves that there is no convincing argument for immortality. He demonstrates that the end of man is to be found in conduct. He treats religions without exception as transitory institutions, subject to the universal laws of birth and corruption, useful to society in their day of vigor, but destined to succeed each other with the waxing and the waning of the influences that control our globe and all that it contains. On this point Machiavelli and Pomponazzi are in complete accord. Both of them interpret the spirit of their century.
As Machiavellism existed in Italian politics before Machiavelli theorized it, so materialism leavened society before Pomponazzi gave it the consistency of demonstration. The middle ages with their political and theological idealism were at an end. Machiavelli and Pomponazzi contemporaneously philosophized the realism on which science was destined to be founded. They were the deicides of elder faiths; the hierophants of a new revelation, as yet but dimly apprehended; the Columbus and Vespucci of an intellectual hemisphere which it remained for their posterity to colonize. The conditions of public and private life in the Italian cities—the decline of religious feeling, the corruption of morality, the paganizing tendencies of humanism, the extinction of political activity, the decay of freedom, the survival of the Church and Commune when their work was ended—rendered any such movement as that of the German Reformation wholly impossible. The people lacked the spiritual stuff for it. We have seen that it was chiefly men like Berni and Folengo who gave open utterance to Lutheran opinions; and from sources like those no pure or vivifying waters could be drawn. Italy's work lay in another direction. Those very conditions which unfitted her for a religious revival, enabled her to perform her true mission. It was no slight achievement to have set up the pillars of Hercules for transcendentalism, and at the same time to have discovered the continent of positive science. For the fruits and recognition of her labors she has had to wait. Her history since the date of Machiavelli's death has been obscure until the middle of this century, and in the race of the nations she has been leftbehind.[582]But the perturbation of the intellectual current caused by the Reformation is now nearly over, and the spirit of modern science still finds itself in harmony with that of the Italian thinkers who gave it earliest expression.
Retrospect—Meaning of the Renaissance—Modern Science and Democracy—The Preparation of an Intellectual Medium for Europe—The Precocity of Italy—Servitude and Corruption—Antiquity and Art—The Italian Provinces—Florence—Lombardy and Venice—The March of Ancona, Urbino, Umbria—Perugia—Rome—Sicily and Naples—Italian Ethnology—Italian Independence on the Empire and the Church—Persistence of the Old Italic Stocks—The New Nation—Its Relation to the Old—The Revival of Learning was a National Movement—Its Effect on Art—On Literature—Resumption of the Latin Language—Affinities between the Latin and Italian Genius—Renascence of Italian Literature combined with Humanism—Greek Studies comparatively Uninfluential—The Modern Italians inherited Roman Qualities—Roman Defects—Elimination of Roman Satire—Decay of Roman Vigor—Italian Realism—Positivism—Sensuousness—Want of Mystery, Suggestion, Romance—The Intellectual Atmosphere—A Literature of Form and Diversion—Absence of Commanding Genius—Lack of Earnestness—Lack of Piety—Materialism and Negation—Idyllic Beauty—The Men of the Golden Age—The Cult of Form—Italy's Gifts to Europe—The Renaissance is not to be Imitated—Its Importance in Human Development—Feudalism, Renaissance, Reformation, Revolution.
Retrospect—Meaning of the Renaissance—Modern Science and Democracy—The Preparation of an Intellectual Medium for Europe—The Precocity of Italy—Servitude and Corruption—Antiquity and Art—The Italian Provinces—Florence—Lombardy and Venice—The March of Ancona, Urbino, Umbria—Perugia—Rome—Sicily and Naples—Italian Ethnology—Italian Independence on the Empire and the Church—Persistence of the Old Italic Stocks—The New Nation—Its Relation to the Old—The Revival of Learning was a National Movement—Its Effect on Art—On Literature—Resumption of the Latin Language—Affinities between the Latin and Italian Genius—Renascence of Italian Literature combined with Humanism—Greek Studies comparatively Uninfluential—The Modern Italians inherited Roman Qualities—Roman Defects—Elimination of Roman Satire—Decay of Roman Vigor—Italian Realism—Positivism—Sensuousness—Want of Mystery, Suggestion, Romance—The Intellectual Atmosphere—A Literature of Form and Diversion—Absence of Commanding Genius—Lack of Earnestness—Lack of Piety—Materialism and Negation—Idyllic Beauty—The Men of the Golden Age—The Cult of Form—Italy's Gifts to Europe—The Renaissance is not to be Imitated—Its Importance in Human Development—Feudalism, Renaissance, Reformation, Revolution.
Atthe end of a long journey it is natural to review the stages of the way that has been traversed. We resume the impressions made upon our mind, and extract that element of generality from recollection, which the rapid succession of scenes, incidents and interests denied to the experience of travel. In like manner, those who have been engaged in some historical inquiry, after examining each province of the subject separately, seek a vantage-ground of contemplation, whence the conclusions they have reached can be surveyed in their relation to each other.
What we call, for want of a better name, the Renaissance, was a period of transition from the middle ages to the first phase of modern life. It was a step which had to be made, at unequal distances of time and under varying influences, by all the peoples of the European community. Its accomplishment brought the several members of that community into international relationship, and formed a confederation of reciprocally balanced powers out of the Occidental races who shared the inheritance of imperial Rome. At the commencement of this period, the modern nations acquired consistency and fixity of type. Mutually repelled by the principle of nationality, which made of each a separate organism, obeying its own laws of growth according to peculiarities of climate, blood and social institutions, they were at the same time drawn and knit together by a common bond of intellectual activities and interests. The creation of this international consciousness or spirit, which, after the lapse of four centuries, justifies us in regarding the past history of Europe as the history of a single family, and encourages us to expect from the future a still closer interaction of the Western nations, can be ascribed in a great measure to the Renaissance. One distinctive feature of that epoch was, reaction against the main forces of the middle ages. And since reaction implies a vivid principle of vitality, we find, in the further progress of this movement, the new ideas of democracy and science counterposed to feudalism and the Church. So vast a revolution as the reconstruction of society upon new bases, could not beeffected by any simple or continuously progressive process. The nations educated by the Church and disciplined by feudalism, could not pass into a new phase of being without checks, hesitations, retrogressions, hindrances innumerable. Nor was it to be expected that the advance of each member in the European community should proceed upon an exactly similar method, or with equally felicitous results. It was inevitable that both feudalism and the Church should long remain in liquidation, resisting the impact of skepticism inherent in the Reformation; opposing stubborn resistance to republican energy liberated by the Revolution; crystallizing the counter-movement of the modern spirit at one point in monarchical absolutism, at another in Protestant establishments; receding from this rebellious province to fortify and garrison that loyal stronghold; tolerating no compromise here, and there achieving a temporary triumph by transaction with the steadily-advancing forces ranged against them. The battle even now is being waged with varying success over the wide field of Europe; and whatever may be our conviction as to the ultimate issue of the struggle, it is impossible to foresee a definite end, or to assign even probable limits to the extent and the duration of the conflict.
Although we may hold the opinion that science and democracy constitute the fundamental points in modern as distinguished from medieval history, it would be paradoxical to assert that they emerged into prominence during the initial stage of the Renaissance. A common intellectual atmosphere had first to be prepared for Europe. The sense of human freedom had to beacquired by studies and discoveries which made man master of himself and of the world around him. His attention had to be diverted from the life beyond the grave to his life upon this planet. The culture, which formed the great achievement of the Italian Renaissance and which was diffused through Europe, uniting men of all races and all creeds in speculative and literary activity, evoking sympathies and stimulating antagonisms upon vital questions of universal import, was necessary for the evolution of the modern world as we now know it. In many senses we have already transcended the original conditions of that culture. But we owe to it our spiritual solidarity, our feeling of intellectual identity, our habit of pouring convergent contributions from divers quarters into the stock of indestructible experience.
Quickened to livelier consciousness by contact with the masterpieces of antiquity, in the dawn of that new age, the reason rapidly engaged in exploratory expeditions. Both human nature and the material universe presented themselves with altered aspect to thought and senses, which had lain dormant during centuries of incubation. At first, like the blind man of the miracle, the awakening intelligence saw confusedly. It is easy with our clearer vision to despise the hybrid fancies of a time when things old and new were so romantically blent—"the men as trees, walking," of that inexperienced intuition, the childish science and the scarce-fledged criticism of discoverers, who, while they reached forth to the future, still retained the hold of custom and long reverence on the past. A note of imperfection, vacillation, tentative endeavor, can be traced in all the productions of the Renaissance—everywhere, in fact, but in the fine arts, where a simpler insight and more unimpeded faculties were exercised at that period than the last three centuries have boasted. In another important department the men of that age proved themselves more than merely precocious and immature. The humanistic system of mental training has survived with little alteration to the present day, and still forms the basis of what is called a liberal education.
This transition from the middle ages to the modern era, which we designate by the metaphor of Renascence or new birth, made itself first powerfully felt in Italy. Of all the European nations, the Italians alone can boast of a great and uninterrupted history, extending over the twenty-five centuries which are known to us by tolerably trustworthy records. They first gave the civilization of republican and imperial Rome to the Western world. They formed the Latin Church, and extended the organization of ecclesiastical Rome to European Christendom. This was their double work in what we call the ancient and medieval periods. At the close of the latter, they inaugurated the age of culture, science and associated intellectual endeavor, in which we are now living. In Italy the people preserved unbroken memories of their classical past; and, as we have seen throughout these volumes, the point of departure for modern reconstruction was a renewed and vital interest in antiquity. Here, too, the characteristic institutions of feudalism had taken but slight hold, while the secularization of the Papacy had undermined the spiritual prestige of the Church. Thus the forces to be overcome were feebler in Italy thanelsewhere, while the current of fresh energy was stronger.
The conditions under which the Italians performed their task in the Renaissance were such as seem at first sight unfavorable to any great achievement. Yet it is probable that, the end in view being the stimulation of mental activity, no better circumstances than they enjoyed could have been provided. Owing to a series of adverse accidents, and owing also to their own instinctive preference for local institutions, they failed to attain the coherence and the centralized organization which are necessary to a nation as we understand that word. Their dismemberment among rival communities proved a fatal source of political and military weakness, but it developed all their intellectual energies by competition to the utmost.
At the middle of the fifteenth century their communes had lost political liberty, and were ruled by despots. Martial spirit declined. Wars were carried on by mercenaries; and the people found itself in a state of practical disarmament, when the neighboring nations quarreled for the prize of those rich provinces. At the same time society underwent a rapid moral deterioration. When Machiavelli called Italy "the corruption of the world," he did not speak rhetorically. An impure and worldly clergy; an irreligious, though superstitious, laity; a self-indulgent and materialistic middle class; an idle aristocracy, excluded from politics and unused to arms; a public given up to pleasure and money-getting; a multitude of scholars, devoted to trifles, and vitiated by studies which clashed with the ideals of Christianity—from such elements in thenation proceeded a widely-spread and ever-increasing degeneracy. Public energy, exhausted by the civil wars and debilitated by the arts of the tyrants, sank deep and deeper into the lassitude of acquiescent lethargy. Religion expired in laughter, irony and license. Domestic simplicity yielded to vice, whereof the records are precise and unmistakable. The virile virtues disappeared. What survived of courage assumed the forms of ruffianism, ferocity and treasonable daring. Still, simultaneously with this decline in all the moral qualities which constitute a powerful people, the Italians brought their arts and some departments of their literature to a perfection that can only be paralleled by ancient Greece. The anomaly implied in this statement is striking; but it is revealed to us by evidence too overwhelming to be rejected. We must be careful not to insist on any causal link of connection between the moral and intellectual conditions of Italian society at this epoch. Still we are forced to admit that servitude and corruption are the commanding features of the age in which Italy for the third time in her history won and held the hegemony of the world. In politics, in religion, in ethics, she seemed to have been left devoid of guiding principles; and tragic interest is added to the climax of her greatness by the long series of disasters, culminating in Spanish enslavement and ecclesiastical tyranny, which proved her internal rottenness and put an end to her unrivaled intellectual triumphs.
It has been my object in this work to review the part played by the Italians at the beginning of modern history, subjecting each department of their activity toseparate examination. In the first of the five volumes I described the social and political conditions under which the renascence of the race took place. In the second I treated of that retrogressive movement toward antiquity, which constitutes the most important factor in the problem offered by that age. The third volume was devoted to the Fine Arts, wherein the main originality of modern Italy emerged. It was through art that the creative instincts of the people found their true and adequate channel of expression. Paramount over all other manifestations of the epoch, fundamental beneath all, penetrative to the core of all, is the artistic impulse. The slowly self-consolidating life of a great kingdom, concentrating all elements of national existence by the centripetal force of organic unity, was wanting. Commonwealths and despotisms, representing a more imperfect stage of political growth, achieved completion and decayed. But art survived this disintegration of the medieval fabric; and in art the Italians found the cohesion denied them as a nation. While speaking thus of art, it is necessary to give a wide extension to that word. It must be understood to include literature. Nor, in the case of Italy, does this imply an undue strain upon its meaning. The last two volumes of my work have been devoted to the stages whereby vernacular literature absorbed into itself the elements of scholarship, and gave form to the predominating thoughts and feelings of the people. This process of form-giving was controlled, more or less consciously throughout, by the artistic instincts of which I have been speaking. Thus we are justified in regarding the literary masterpieces of the sixteenthcentury as the fullest and most representative expression of the Italian temperament at the climax of its growth. The literature of the golden age implies humanism, implies painting. It will be seen that the logic of the whole subject necessitated the reservation of this department for final treatment, and justified a more minute investigation than had been accorded to the rest.
It is not only possible but right to speak of Italy collectively when we review her work in the Renaissance. Yet it should not be forgotten that Italy at this time was a federation, presenting upon a miniature scale the same diversities in her component parts as the nations of Europe do now. If for this reason alone, we may profitably survey the different shares claimed by her several communities in the general achievement.
At the beginning of such a review, we cannot fail to be struck with the predominance of Florence. The superiority of the Tuscans was threefold. In the first place, they determined the development of art in all its branches. In the second place, they gave a language to Italy, which, without obliterating the local dialects, superseded them in literature when the right moment for intellectual community arrived. That moment, in the third place, was rendered possible by the humanistic movement, which began at Florence. The humanists prepared the needful literary medium by introducing classical studies into every town of the peninsula. Without this discipline, Tuscan could not so speedily have produced Italian, or have been so readily accepted by North and South. It may, indeed, be affirmed without exaggeration that, prior to the close of the fifteenth century, what we call the Italian genius was, in truth, the genius of Florence.
What the Lombards and Venetians produced in fine art and literature was of a later birth.[583]Yet the novelists of Lombardy, the Latin lyrists of Garda, the school of romantic and dramatic poets at Ferrara, the group of sculptors and painters assembled in Milan by the Sforza dynasty, the maccaronic Muse of Mantua, the unrivaled magnificence of painting at Venice, the transient splendor of the Parmese masters, the wit of Modena, the learning of the princes of Mirandola and Carpi, must be catalogued among the most brilliant and characteristic manifestations of Italian genius. In pure literature Venice contributed but little, though she sent forth a dictator, Pietro Bembo, to rule the republic of letters at the moment when the scepter was about to pass from Florence. Her place, as the home of Aldo's Greek press, and as the refuge for adventurers like Aretino and Folengo, when the rest of Italy was yielding to reactionary despotism, has to be commemorated. Of the northern universities, Padua preserved the tradition of physical studies, and Bologna that of legal erudition, onward from the middle ages. Both became headquarters of materialistic philosophy in the sixteenth century. The school of Vicenza had flourished in humane letters at the commencement of the epoch. But it declined early; while that of Ferrara, on the contrary, succeeded to the honors of Florence and Pisa. Genoa was almostexcluded from the current of Italian culture. Her sumptuous palaces and churches, her sensual unsympathetic painting, belong to the last days of Italian energy. Her few great scholars owed their fame to correspondence and connection with the students of more favored districts.
From Romagna, the Marches of Ancona, and the Umbrian cities, more captains of adventure than men of letters or artists swelled the muster-roll of Italian worthies. We must not, however, forget the unique place which Urbino, with its refined society, pure Court, and concourse of accomplished men and women, occupies in the history of Italian civilization. The position of Perugia, again, is not a little singular. Situated upon the borders of Tuscany and Umbria, sharing something of the spirit of both districts, overshadowed by Papal Rome, yet harboring such broods ofbravias the Baglioni, conferring a tyranny on Braccio and the honor of her name on Pietro Vannucci, this city offers a succession of picturesque and perplexing contradictions. Perugia was the center of the most religious school of painting which flourished in the fifteenth century, and also the cradle of the religious drama. For the student of Italian psychology, very much of serious moment is contained in this statement.
Rome continued to be rather cosmopolitan than Italian. The power, wealth, and prestige of the Popes made their court a center; and men who settled in the Eternal City, caught something of its greatness. There is, however, no reason to recapitulate the benefits conferred by ecclesiastical patronage at various times onfine arts, scholarship, and literature. Rather must it be borne in mind that the Romans who advanced Italian culture, were singularly few. The work of Rome was done almost exclusively by aliens, drawn for the most part from Tuscany and Lombardy.
After Frederick II.'s brilliant reign, the Sicilians shared but little in the intellectual activity of the nation. That this was not due to want of capacity in the people, seems proved by their aptitude for poetry first shown at Frederick's Court, and next by the unrivaled richness of their dialectical literature, both popular and cultivated. Whether the semi-feudalism which oppressed the Southern provinces, checked the free expansion of mental faculty, admits of question. But it is certainly remarkable that, during the Renaissance, the wide districts of the Regno produced so little. Antonio Beccadelli was, indeed, a native of Palermo; but Pontano owned Cerreto for his birthplace. Valla claimed to be a Roman, and Sannazzaro traced his ancestry through Piacenza into Spain. These are the four greatest names of the period when Naples formed a literary center under the Aragonese dynasty. We have already seen that Naples, though not prolific of native genius, gave specific tone of warmth and liberty to literature. This may be ascribed partly to the free manners, bordering on license, of the South, and partly to the permanent jealousy subsisting between the Kingdom and the Papacy. TheNovellaproduced humorous pictures of society at Florence, facetiæ in Rome, but bitter satires on the clergy at Naples. The scandals of the Church provoked the frigid animosity of Florentines like Machiavelli andGuicciardini; in Naples they led to Valla's ponderous critique and Sannazzaro's envenomed epigrams. The sensuousness of Poliziano assumed voluptuous fervor in Pontano's lyrics. Lastly, the Platonic mysticism of Florence, and the Peripatetic materialism of Bologna ended in the new philosophy of the Calabrian school. This crowning contribution of the south to Italy, this special glory of the sixteenth century, came less from Naples than from minor cities of Calabria. Telesio of Cosenza, Bruno of Nola, Campanella of Stilo, showed that something of the old Greek speculative genius—the spirit of Parmenides and Pythagoras—still lingered round the shores of Magna Græcia. Just as the Hellenic colonists at Elea and Tarentum anticipated the dawn of Attic philosophy, so did those robust and innovating thinkers shoot the arrows of their speculation forward at the mark of modern science.
It is tempting to pass from this review of the Italian provinces to meditations on a further problem. How far may the qualities of each district have endured from remote antiquity? To what extent may they have determined the specific character of Italian production in the modern age? Did the population of Calabria, we ponder, really inherit philosophical capacity from their Greek ancestors? Dare we connect the Tuscan aptitude for art with that mysterious race who built their cities on Etrurian hill-tops? Can the primitive ethnology of the Ligurian and Iapygian stocks be used to explain the silence of the Genoese Riviera and the Apulian champaign? Is a Teutonic strain discernible in the gross humor of the Mantuan Muse, or in the ballads of Montferrat? It would be easy to multiplythese questions. But the whole subject of national development is still too obscure to admit of satisfactory answers.[584]All we can affirm without liability to error, amounts to this; that Rome never completely fused the divers races of the Italian peninsula, nor obliterated their characteristic differences. After the dissolution of her empire, we find the Italian provinces presenting local types in language, manners, sentiments, and intellectual proclivities. It is not unreasonable, therefore, to conjecture that certain of these differences sprang from the persistence of ethnological qualities, and others from the infusion of fresh blood from without.
The decisive fact of Italian history in all its branches at this epoch is the resurgence of the Latin, or shall we rather say, of the Italic spirit? The national consciousness survived, though dimly, through the middle ages; nor had the people suffered shipwreck in the break-up of the Roman power. This was due in no small measure to the fact that the Empire was the creation of this people, and that consequently they were in a sense superior to its fall. Roman civilization, Roman organization, Roman institutions, Roman law, were the products of the Italiangenius; and when the Roman State declined, the home province suffered a less thorough-going transformation than, to take an instance, either Gaul or Spain. It would be paradoxical to maintain that the imperial despotism exercised a more controlling authority over the outlying provinces than over Italy proper. Yet something of this kind might be advanced, when we reflect upon the self-indulgent majesty of Rome herself; upon the sovereign privileges accorded to the chief Italian cities; upon the prosperity and vastness of Mediolanum, Aquileia and Ravenna. Local ties and local institutions kept a lasting hold upon the ancient no less than the medieval Italian; and long after Rome became thecolluvies omnium gentiumso bitterly described by Juvenal, the country towns, especially in the valley of the Po, retained a vigorous personality. In this respect the relation in which men of state and letters, like the Plinies, stood on one side to the capital and on the other to their birthplace, is both interesting and instructive. The citizens of the provincialmunicipiagloried in the might of Rome. Rome was for them the fulcrum of a lever which set the habitable globe in movement at their touch. Still the Empire existed for the world, while each Italian city claimed the duty and affection of its own inhabitants. When Rome failed, the cosmopolitan authority of the Empire was extended to the Church, or, rather, fell into abeyance between the Church and the resuscitated Empire. Just as themunicipiaflourished beneath the shadow of old Rome, so now the Communes grew beneath the Church and the new Empire. These two creations of the earlier middle ages, thoughformulated and legalized in Italy, weighed less heavily there than on some other parts of Europe. The Italians resisted imperial authority, and preserved their own local independence. The Northern Emperors were never really strong below the Alps except on sufferance and by the aid of faction. In like manner the Italian burghers tolerated ecclesiastical despotism only in so far as they found it convenient to do so. In spite of Gothic, Lombard, Frankish and German attempts at solidification, the cities succeeded in asserting their autonomy. The Italic stock absorbed the several foreign elements that mingled with it. Vernacular Latin, surviving the decay of literature, repelling the influence of alien dialects, prevailed and was the language of the people.
Notwithstanding this persistence of the antique type, the Italian nation, between the ages of Constantine and Frederick Barbarossa, was intellectually and actually remade. It was not a new nation like the English, French or Germans; for its life had continued without cessation on the same soil from a period antecedent to the birth of Rome. It had no fund of myth and legend, embodying its memories in popular epical poetry. Instead of Siegfried, Arthur or Roland, it looked back to the Virgilian Æneas.[585]Still it underwent, together with the rest of Europe, the transformation from Paganism to Christianity. It felt the influences of feudalism, while repelling them with obstinate and finally victorious jealousy. It owed something to chivalry, though the instincts of the race were rather practical and positive than romantic. It suffered the eclipse of antique culture, and borrowed from its conquerors a tincture of their style in art and literature. When these new Italians found a voice, they spoke in tones which lacked the ring of Roman eloquence. The massy fabric of the Roman syntax was dismembered. And yet their speech had more affinity to Roman style than that of any Northern people. The greatest jurists, ecclesiastics and statesmen of the middle ages, the interpreters of Roman law, the fabricators of solid theological edifices, the founders of the Catholic Church, the champions of the Imperial idea, were Italians, proving by their grasp of practical affairs and by the positive turn they gave to speculative inquiries, a participation in the ancient Latin Spirit.[586]Even when it is least classical, the medieval work of the Italian genius betrays this ancestry—in Lombard no less than in Tuscan architecture, in the monumental structure of the Divine Comedy, in the comprehensive digest of theSumma, in the rejection of sentimentalism from the tradition of Provençal poetry, in Petrarch's conception of scholarship, in the sensuous realism of Boccaccio.
The Revival of Learning was the acquisition of complete self-consciousness by this new race, which still retained so much of its old temperament. Ill at ease among the customs and ideals of Teutonic tribes; stubbornly refusing to merge their local independencein a kingdom; struggling against feudalism; accepting Chivalry and Gothic architecture as exotics; without national legends; without crusading enthusiasms; the Italians were scarcely themselves until they regained the right use of their energies by contact with the classics. This makes the Revival of Learning a national, a patriotic, a dramatic movement. This gives life and passion to a process which in any other country, upon any other soil, might have possessed but little more than antiquarian interest. This, and this alone, explains the extraordinary fervor with which the Italians threw themselves into the search, abandoning the new-gained laurels of their modern tongue, absorbing the intellectual faculties of at least three generations in the labor of erudition, and emerging from the libraries of the humanists with a fresh sense of national unity. At the same moment, and by the same series of discoveries, they found themselves and found for Europe the civilization of the modern world.
It is only by remembering that the Italic races, clogged by the ruins of the Roman Empire, and tardily receptive of Teutonic influences, resumed their natural activity and recognized their vocation in the Revival of Learning, that we can comprehend the radical revolution effected in all departments of thought by this event. In Architecture, the Gothic style, which had been adopted as it were with repugnance and imperfectly assimilated, was at once abandoned. Brunelleschi, Alberti, Bramante, San Gallo, Michelangelo, Palladio, strove, one and all, to effect a right adjustment of the antique style to modern requirements. Foreign elsewhere, the so-called Palladian manner isat home and national in Italy. Sculpture, even earlier than architecture, took and followed the same hint. What chiefly distinguishes the work of the Pisan school from contemporary work of French or German craftsmen is, that here the manner of Græco-Roman art has been felt and partly comprehended. Painting, though more closely connected with Christianity, more perfectly related to conditions of contemporary life, owed strength and vigor in great measure to the same conditions. During the fifteenth century classical influences continued increasingly to modify the practice of the strongest masters. In literature, the effect of the Revival was so decisive as to demand a somewhat closer investigation.
The awakened consciousness of the Italic people showed itself first in the creation of a learned literature, imitating as closely as possible in a dead language the models recovered from ancient Rome. It was not enough to appropriate the matter of the Latin authors. Their form had to be assimilated and reproduced. These pioneers in scholarship believed that the vulgar tongue, with its divergent dialects, had ever been and still remained incapable of higher culture. The refined diction of Cicero and Virgil was for them a separate and superior speech, consecrated by infallible precedent, and no less serviceable for modern than it formerly had been for antique usage. Recovering the style of the Augustan age, they thought they should possess an instrument of utterance adapted to their present needs, and correlated to the living language of the people as it had been in the age of Roman greatness. They attacked the easier branches of composition first. Epistolography and rhetoric assumed the Roman habit. Then the meters of Horace, Ovid, and Virgil were analyzed and copied. In the inevitable compromise between classical modes of expression and modern necessities of thought, concessions were always made to the advantage of the former. The Persons of the Trinity, the saints and Martyrs of the Church, pranked themselves in phrases borrowed from an obsolete mythology. Christ figured as a hero. The councils of each petty Commune arrogated the style of Senate and People.Condottierimasqueraded as Scipio, Hannibal, and Fabius Cunctator. Cecco and Tonino assumed the graceful garb of Lycidas and Thyrsis. So fervid was the sense of national resurgence that these literary conventions imposed on men who ruled the politics of Italy—on statesmen with subtle insight into practical affairs; on generals with egotistic schemes to be developed from the play and counter-play of living interests. When Poliziano ruled the republic of letters, this acclimatization of the Latin classics was complete. Innumerable poems, reproducing the epic, elegiac and lyric measures of the Romans, poured from the press. Moralists draped themselves in the Hortensian toga. Orators fulminated copious floods of Ciceronian rhetoric. Critics aped Quintilian. Historians stuffed their chapters with speeches and descriptions modeled upon Livy. Pastoral and didactic poets made centos from Virgil. The drama flourished under the auspices of Plautus, Terence, and Seneca. Preachers were more scrupulous to turn their sentences in florid style than to clinch a theological argument. Upon the lips of Popes theGod of Sinai or Calvary was Jupiter Optimus Maximus. Even envoys and embassadors won causes for their States by paragraphs, citations, perorations in the manner of the ancients.
This humanistic ardor at first effected a division between the lettered and unlettered classes. The people clung to their dialects. Educated folk despised all forms of speech but Latin. It seemed as though the national literature might henceforth follow two separate and divergent courses. But with the cessation of the first enthusiasm for antique culture, the claims of vernacular Italian came to be recognized. No other modern nation had produced masterpieces equal to Dante's, Petrarch's and Boccaccio's. The self-esteem of the Italians could not suffer the exclusion of the Divine Comedy, theCanzoniereand the Decameron from the rank of classics. Men of delicate perception, like Alberti and Lorenzo de' Medici, felt that the honors of posterity would fall to the share of those who cultivated and improved their mother tongue. Thus the earlier position of the humanists was recognized as false. Could not their recent acquisitions be carried over to the account and profit of the vernacular? A common Italian language, based upon the Tuscan, but modified for general usage, was now practiced in accordance with the rules and objects of the scholars. Upon the briar of the popular literature were grafted the highly-cultivated roses of the classic gardens. It was thus that the masterpieces ofcinque centoliterature came into being—theOrlandoand the comedies of Ariosto, Machiavelli's histories and Sannazzaro'sArcadia—Tasso'sGerusalemme, and Guarini'sPastor Fido, together with the multitudinous and multifarious work of lesser craftsmen in prose and verse.
Steeped in classical allusion and reminiscence, the form of this new literature was modern; but its spirit was in a true sense Latin. The Italic people had found their proper mode of self-expression, and proclaimed their hereditary affinities to the makers of Roman art. In the history of the Italian Renaissance Greek studies form but an episode. The Platonic school of Florence, the Venetian labors of Aldus, exercised a partial and imperfect influence over Italian culture. They proved more important for Europe at large than for the peninsula, more valuable in their remote than their immediate consequences. With the whole of classic literature to choose from, this instinctive preference of Latin illustrates the point I am engaged in demonstrating—namely, that in Italy the Revival of Learning was a resurgence of the Italic genius modified and formed by Roman influence. True to their ancestry, the Italians assimilated Roman types, and left the Greek aside.
If we pause to consider the qualities of the Roman spirit in art and literature, we shall see in how real a sense the modern people reproduced them and remained within their limits. Compared with the Hellenic and Teutonic races, the Romans were not myth-making, nor in the sincerest sense poetical. In like manner the Italians are deficient on the side of legend and romance. This defect has been insisted on in the preceding volumes, where the practical and positive quality of Italian poetry, its leaning to realism and abstinencefrom visionary flights of the imagination, have more than once been pointed out. Roman literature was composite and cultured, rather than simple or spontaneous. The Roman epic was literary; based on antecedent models, and confined within the sphere of polished imitation. The Roman Comedy and Tragedy were copies of the Greek. In these highest departments of art the Roman poets gave new form to foreign matter, and infused their national spirit into works that might be almost ranked with free translations. The same is true of their lyrics. Even the meters in all these species are appropriated. The Italians in like manner invented but little. They borrowed from every source—from the Arthurian and Carolingian romances, from Provençal love-poetry, and lastly in copious quantities from Roman literature. But they stamped their own genius on the materials adopted, retouched the form, and modified the sentiment, converting all they took to their own genuine uses. In this respect the Italians, though apparently so uncreative, may be called more original than the Romans. Their metrical systems, to begin with—the sonnet, the octave stanza, andterza rima—are their own. Their touch upon Teutonic legend is more characteristic than the Roman touch on Greek mythology. Dante and Petrarch deal more freely with Provençal poetry than Horace or Catullus with the lyrics of their predecessors. In the matter of dramatic composition, the Italians stand in much the same relation to the Romans as the Romans to the Greeks; and this may be repeated with reference to elegiac and pastoral poetry, and some minor species. The Italic race, inits later as in its earlier development, seems here, also, satisfied with form-giving and delicacy of execution.
If we turn to the indigenous and characteristic qualities of Roman literary genius, we find these reappearing with the force of spontaneity among the Italians. First of all may be reckoned the strong love of country-life which lends undying freshness to Catullus, Horace, and the poetical episodes of Lucretius. This is a no less marked feature of Italian literature. The very best poetry of the humanists is that which deals with villa-life among the Tuscan hills, beside the bay of Naples, or on the shores of Garda. The purest passages in theNovelle, the least intolerable descriptions in the treatises of the essayists, are those which celebrate the joys of field and wood and garden. The most original products of the Italian stage are theAmintaand thePastor Fido, penetrated through and through with a real love of the country—not with any feeling for Nature in her sublimer and wilder aspects, but with the old Saturnian pathos and fresh clinging loveliness of nature made the friend of man and humanized by labor. The tears shed by Alberti over the rich fields of autumn, as he gazed upon them from some Tuscan summit, seem to have fallen like a dew of real emotion upon the driest places of a pastoral literature which is too often conventional.
Resuming the main thread of the argument, it may be said that the Italians also shared the Roman partiality for didactic poetry. The Latin poems of Poliziano, Vida, and Fracastoro, together with the Italian work of Alamanni, Rucellai, and other authors,sufficiently prove this. Nor does it seem to me that we need suppose these essays in a style of inevitable weariness to have been merely formal imitations of the ancients. The delight with which they were first received and even now sometimes are read in Italy, and the high reputation they have won for their authors, show that there is something in the Italian genius sympathetic to their spirit. One department of their Roman heritage was left uncultivated by the Italians. They produced no really great satire; but, on the other hand, that indigenous satiric humor, inclining to caricature and obscenity, which found vent in the fescennine songs of Roman festivals and triumphs, endured without material change through all modifications of the national life. The earliest monuments of the vernacular literature afford instances of its popularity throughout the middle ages. It gave a special quality to the Florentine Carnival; it assumed high literary form in Lorenzo'sCantiand Berni's burlesqueCapitoli; it flourished on the quays of Naples, and sheltered at Rome under the protection of Pasquino.
Leaving pure literature aside, we may trace the Latin ancestry of the Italians in their strong forensic bias. Just as the Forum was the center of Roman, so was the Piazza the center of Italian life. The declamatory emphasis that spoils much Latin prose and verse for Northern ears, sounds throughout Italian literature. Their writers too easily assume a rhetorical tone, and substitute sonorousness of verbiage for solid matter or sound feeling. The recitations of the Romans find an analogue in the Italian Academies. The colloquial taint of Roman philosophical discussion is repeated inthe moral diatribes of the humanists. But with equal justice we might urge that the practical and legal qualities of the Latin race, and its powerful organizing faculty, survived, and found expression in the modern nation. The Italians, as we have already said, were the greatest Churchmen, Statesmen, and Jurists of medieval Europe. They created the Papacy. They formulated the conception of the Empire. They preserved, explained, and taught Roman law. But this element was already worked out and exhausted at the close of the medieval period. We find it in abeyance during the Renaissance. The political vigor, the martial energy, the cohesive force, the indomitable will of the Romans, have clearly deserted their Italian inheritors. There is a massive architecture, as of masonry, in Roman writing, which Italian almost always misses.
If it were permissible to venture here upon a somewhat bold hypothesis, we might ask whether the Italic races now displayed themselves as they might have been without the centralizing and controlling genius of Rome? In the history of the Italian peninsula can we regard the ascendancy of Rome as a gigantic episode? Rome bound the various tribes together in a common system, formed one language, and used Italy as the throne of world-wide empire. But Rome's empire passed, and the tribes remained—indelibly stamped, it is true, with her mark, and subsequently modified by a succession of intrusive incidents—yet yielding to the world in a new form a second crop of flowers and fruitage similar to that which they had borne for Rome. It will not do to press these speculations. They suggest themselves when we observe that, what the Italianslacked in the Renaissance was precisely what Rome, or the Latin confederacy, gave to Italy in the ancient days of her supremacy. It is as though the great Saturnian mother, exhausted by the production of Rome and all that Rome implied through Empire and through Papacy for Europe, had little force left but for amenities and subtleties in modern literature. To the masonry of Rome succeeds the filigree work of thecinque cento.
There is no mistaking the positive, materialistic, quality possessed by the Italians in common with their Latin ancestors. This, after all is said, constitutes the true note of their art and literature. Realism, preferring the tangible and concrete to the visionary and abstract, the defined to the indefinite, the sensuous to the ideal, determines the character of their genius in all its manifestations. We find it even in the Divine Comedy. Dante's pictures appeal to our eyes; his songs of angels and cries of damned souls reach our ears; he makes us shrink with physical loathing from the abominations of Malebolge, and feel upon our foreheads the cool morning wind of Purgatory. His imaginary world can be mapped out; his journey through it has been traced and measured, inch by inch, and hour by hour. The same realism determined the speculation of the Italians, deflecting it from metaphysics to problems of practical life. Again it leavened their religion. We find it in S. Catherine's visions, in the stigmata of S. Francis, in the miracle of Bolsena. Under its influence the dogmas of the Church assumed a kind of palpability. It was against Italian sensuousness that the finer spiritual perceptions of the Teutonicraces rose in revolt; and the Italians, who had transmitted their own religious forms to Europe, could not understand the point at issue. Feeble or insufficient as we may judge this realism in the regions of pure thought or pious feeling, it was supremely powerful in art. It enabled the Italians so to apprehend the mysteries of the faith, and so to assimilate the classic myths, as to find for both a form of beauty in sculpture and in painting. Had they inclined more to the abstract or to the visionary, Christian art would have remained impossible. Had they been less simply sensuous, they might perhaps have shrunk from pagan legends, or have failed to touch them with the right sincerity. How ill these legends fared at the hands of contemporary Teutonic artists, is notorious. In the realm of literature the same quality gave to Petrarch's treatment of chivalrous love a new substantiality. It animated Boccaccio, and through his influence created a literature of fiction, indescribably rich in objective realism and spontaneous passion. Ariosto owed to it the incomparable brilliance of his pictures. And, since such sensuousness has perforce its evil side, we find it, in the last resort, no longer clothing unsubstantial thoughts with forms of beauty, lending reality to the poet's visions, or humanizing the austerities of faith, but frankly and simply subordinating its powers to a debased imagination. The Italian sensuousness too often degenerates into mere sensuality in the period of our inquiry. Nor is this the only defect of the quality. When we complain that the Italians are deficient in the highest tragic imagination, that their feeling for nature lacks romance, or that none but theirrarest works of art attain sublimity, we are but insisting on the realistic bias which inclined them to things tangible, palpable, experienced, compassable by the senses. How much of tragedy is due to horror the soul alone can gauge; how much of romance depends upon a sense of mystery and unexplored capacities in natural things; how much of the sublime consists of incorporeal vagueness, need not here be insisted on. The sensuousness of the Italians, simpler and less finely tempered with spiritual substance than that of the Greeks, while it gave them so much of serene beauty and intelligible form, denied them those high and rare touches which the less evenly balanced genius of the Northern races can command at will. The poverty of imaginative suggestion in their lyrical and dramatic poetry has been already indicated. We feel this even in their music. The most adorable melodies, poured forth like nightingale songs in the great schools of the eighteenth century, owe their perfection to purity of outline; their magic depends on a direct appeal to sensibility. There is not in them "more than the ear discovers." They are not, to quote Sir Thomas Browne again, "a hieroglyphical and shadowed lesson of the whole world and creatures of God." Palestrina and Stradella, Pergolese and Salvator Rosa, move in a region less mystical and pregnant with accumulated meaning than that which belongs to Bach and Beethoven.
The intellectual medium formed in Italy upon the dissolution of the middle ages was irreligious and indifferent; highly refined and highly cultivated; instinctively æsthetic and superbly gifted, but devoid of moralearnestness or patriotic enthusiasm, of spiritual passion or political energy. Society, enslaved, disfranchised, and unwarlike, was composed of peasants and artisans, sleek citizens, effeminated nobles, courtiers and scholars of a hundred types, monks and clergy of manifold variety and almost incalculable multitude, despots more or less successful in their arts of imposition and seduction, and the countless dependents on the wants and whims and vices of this motley population. Among the last may be reckoned artists of all but the first rank, men of letters, parasites and captains of adventure, courtesans and Abbés, pamphleteers andbravi, orators and secretaries. Outside the universities, the factories and the marketplace, there were few callings that could be reckoned honorable or honest, independent or respectable. Over the rest hung the shadow of servitude and corruption, of ecclesiastical depravity and private debauchery, of political stagnation and haughty patronage. Still the qualities of intellectual sagacity, determined volition, and a certain æsthetical good taste, were all but universal. We find them in such works as Cellini's biography, Lorenzino de' Medici's apology, and the memoirs of his murderer—to mention only documents where the last-named quality might well have been absent. Even the lowest instruments of public or private profligacy maintained an independence face to face with art, and recognized a higher law than their employer's in the duties imposed upon them by the ideal after which they strove as men of letters, painters or the like. We trace this loyal service and artistic freedom even in Pietro Aretino.
A literature, corresponding to this medium, of necessity arose. It was a literature of form and style, of pleasure and diversion, without intensity of passion, earnestness of purpose, or profundity of thought. It could boast no Shakspere, no Pindar, no Dante, no Descartes. The prevailing types which it developed, were idyllic, descriptive, melodramatic, narrative, elegiac, sentimental, burlesque, and licentious. Poliziano, Sannazzaro, Lorenzo de' Medici, Pulci, the writers of Sonnets andCapitoli, the novelists and the satirists, are each and all of them related by no superficial tie to Boccaccio. He is the morning star of this multifarious and brilliant band of artist-authors, until the moment when Ariosto rises above the horizon, and thecinque centofinds adequate expression in theOrlando Furioso. In that poem the qualities by which the age is characterized, are concentrated, and the advance in artistic faculty and feeling since the period of the Decameron is manifested. Amid the many writers of the century we seek in vain a true philosopher. We have, instead, to content ourselves with the ethical dissertations of the humanists; with sketches like theCortegiano, theGalateo, theGoverno della Famiglia; with erudite fancies like the speculations of Ficino, or the scholastic triflings of Pico della Mirandola. Yet out of the very indifferentism of the age philosophy will spring. Pomponazzi formulates the current materialism. It remains for Telesio, Campanella, Bruno, Galileo to found the modern scientific method. Meanwhile, the political agitations of despotisms and republics alike, and the diplomatic relations of so many petty States, have stimulated observation and developed the powersof analysis. Therefore the most vigorous and virile product of this literature is such work as thePrincipeandDiscorsiof Machiavelli, theRicordiof Guicciardini, together with the histories and reflective treatises on statecraft published by the statists of their school.
The absence of seriousness in the literature of the golden age is striking to a Northern student. It seems to have been produced for and by men who had lost their ethical and political conscience, and had enthroned an æsthetical conscience in its room. Their religious indifference is deadlier than atheism. Their levity is worse than sarcasm. They fulfill the epigram of Tacitus, who wrote:corrumpere et corrumpi sæculum vocant. Yet no one has the vigor to be angry. It is difficult to detect the true note of satire in their criticism of society. Ariosto is playful, Aretino scurrilous, Alamanni peevish, Folengo atrabilious. The purely religious compositions of the period lack simplicity and sincerity. TheSacre Rappresentazioniare sentimental and romantic. The Christian epics of the Latin poets are indescribably frigid. TheLaudiare either literary like Lorenzo's, or hysterical like Benivieni's praise of Christian madness. The impertinent biographies of Aretino pass muster for genuinely pious work with Vittoria Colonna. It is only in some heartfelt utterance of the aged Michelangelo, in the holy life of a S. Antonino, or the charity of Luca della Robbia's mission to young Boscoli, or the fervor of Savonarola's sermons, that here and there the chord of real religious feeling vibrates. Philosophy entrenches herself, where she is strongest, in negation—in Valla's negation of any ethical standardsuperior to sensuous hedonism, in Pomponazzi's negation of immortality, in Machiavelli's negation of Providence. So complete an antithesis to the medieval ground of thought was necessary; and its results for the future of science are incontestable. But at the moment it meant a withdrawal from spiritual interests, an insistance on the material side of human life, which was correlated to religious indifference and social dissolution.
The drama abounds in comedies and masks, of wonderful variety and great artistic beauty. But there is no tragedy worthy of the name. And the tragic element, as distinguished from romance and pathos, is conspicuous by its absence in the novels of the period. Lyrical poets prefer the conscious shams of Petrarchism to any genuine utterance of emotion. The gravity of La Casa's sonnets, wrenched from an uneasy and unwilling conscience, the sublimity of Michelangelo's Platonic mysticism, the patriotic indignation of Guidiccioni's laments for Italy enslaved and sunk in sensual sloth, must rank as luminous exceptions. In the romantic epic, chivalry, the ideal of an earlier age, is turned to gentle ridicule. Honor is sneered at or misunderstood. The absurd, the marvelous, the licentious are mingled in a form of incomparable artistic suavity. Tasso's graver epic belongs to another epoch. Trissino's heroic poem is unreadable. Like the tragedies of the scholars, it lacks life and stands in no relation to the spirit of the age.