CHAPTER XIRENAISSANCE
There is a learned cartoonist in our land who takes pleasure in asking himself, what do billiard-balls and cross-word puzzles and bull-fiddles and boiled shirts and door-mats think of this world?
But what I would like to know is the exact psychological reaction of the men who are ordered to handle the big modern siege guns. During the war a great many people performed a great many strange tasks, but was there ever a more absurd job than firing dicke Berthas?
All other soldiers knew more or less what they were doing.
A flying man could judge by the rapidly spreading red glow whether he had hit the gas factory or not.
The submarine commander could return after a couple of hours to judge by the abundance of flotsam in how far he had been successful.
The poor devil in his dug-out had the satisfaction of realizing that by his mere continued presence in a particular trench he was at least holding his own.
Even the artillerist, working his field-piece upon an invisible object, could take down the telephone and could ask his colleague, hidden in a dead tree seven miles away, whether the doomed church tower was showing signs of deterioration or whether he should try again at a different angle.
But the brotherhood of the big guns lived in a strange and unreal world of their own. Even with the assistanceof a couple of full-fledged professors of ballistics, they were unable to foretell what fate awaited those projectiles which they shot so blithely into space. Their shells might actually hit the object for which they were destined. They might land in the midst of a powder factory or in the heart of a fortress. But then again they might strike a church or an orphan asylum or they might bury themselves peacefully in a river or in a gravel pit without doing any harm whatsoever.
Authors, it seems to me, have much in common with the siege-gunners. They too handle a sort of heavy artillery. Their literary missiles may start a revolution or a conflagration in the most unlikely spots. But more often they are just poor duds and lie harmless in a nearby field until they are used for scrap iron or converted into an umbrella-stand or a flower pot.
Surely there never was a period in history when so much rag-pulp was consumed within so short a space as the era commonly known as the Renaissance.
Every Tomasso, Ricardo and Enrico of the Italian peninsula, every Doctor Thomasius, Professor Ricardus and Dominus Heinrich of the great Teuton plain rushed into print with at least a dozen duodecimos. Not to mention the Tomassinos who wrote pretty little sonnets in imitation of the Greeks, the Ricardinos who reeled off odes after the best pattern of their Roman grandfathers, and the countless lovers of coins, statuary, images, pictures, manuscripts and ancient armor who for almost three centuries kept themselves busy classifying, ordering, tabulating, listing, filing and codifying what they had just dug out of the ancestral ruins and who then published their collections in countless folios illuminated with the most beautiful of copper engravings and the most ponderous of wood-cuts.
This great intellectual curiosity was very lucrative for the Frobens and the Alduses and the Etiennes and the other new firms of printers who were making a fortune out of the invention which had ruined Gutenberg, but otherwise the literary output of the Renaissance did not very greatly affect the state of that world in which the authors of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries happened to find themselves. The distinction of having contributed something new was restricted to only a very few heroes of the quill and they were like our friends of the big guns. They rarely discovered during their own lifetime in how far they had been successful and how much damage their writings had actually done. But first and last they managed to demolish a great many of the obstacles which stood in the way of progress. And they deserve our everlasting gratitude for the thoroughness with which they cleaned up a lot of rubbish which otherwise would continue to clutter our intellectual front yard.
Strictly speaking, however, the Renaissance was not primarily a forward-looking movement. It turned its back in disgust upon the recent past, called the works of its immediate predecessors “barbaric” (or “Gothic” in the language of the country where the Goths had enjoyed the same reputation as the Huns), and concentrated its main interest upon those arts which seem to be pervaded with that curious substance known as the “classical spirit.”
If nevertheless the Renaissance struck a mighty blow for the liberty of conscience and for tolerance and for a better world in general, it was done in spite of the men who were considered the leaders of the new movement.
Long before the days of which we are now speaking, there had been people who had questioned the rights of a Roman bishop to dictate to Bohemian peasants and to English yeomenin what language they should say their prayers, in what spirit they should study the words of Jesus, how much they should pay for an indulgence, what books they should read and how they should bring up their children. And all of them had been crushed by the strength of that super-state, the power of which they had undertaken to defy. Even when they had acted as champions and representatives of a national cause, they had failed.
The smoldering ashes of great John Huss, thrown ignominiously into the river Rhine, were a warning to all the world that the Papal Monarchy still ruled supreme.
The corpse of Wycliffe, burned by the public executioner, told the humble peasants of Leicestershire that councils and Popes could reach beyond the grave.
Frontal attacks, evidently, were impossible.
The mighty fortress of tradition, builded slowly and carefully during fifteen centuries of unlimited power, could not be taken by assault. The scandals which had taken place within these hallowed enclosures; the wars between three rival Popes, each claiming to be the legitimate and exclusive heir to the chair of Holy Peter; the utter corruption of the courts of Rome and Avignon, where laws were made for the purpose of being broken by those who were willing to pay for such favors; the utter demoralization of monastic life; the venality of those who used the recently increased horrors of purgatory as an excuse to blackmail poor parents into paying large sums of money for the benefit of their dead children; all these things, although widely known, never really threatened the safety of the Church.
But the chance shots fired at random by certain men and women who were not at all interested in ecclesiastical matters, who had no particular grievance against either pope orbishop, these caused the damage which finally made the old edifice collapse.
What the “thin, pale man” from Prague had failed to accomplish with his high ideals of Christian virtue was brought about by a motley crowd of private citizens who had no other ambition than to live and die (preferably at a ripe old age) as loyal patrons of all the good things of this world and faithful sons of the Mother Church.
They came from all the seven corners of Europe. They represented every sort of profession and they would have been very angry, had an historian told them what they were doing.
For instance, take the case of Marco Polo.
We know him as a mighty traveler, a man who had seen such wondrous sights that his neighbors, accustomed to the smaller scale of their western cities, called him “Million Dollar Marc” and laughed uproariously when he told them of golden thrones as high as a tower and of granite walls that would stretch all the way from the Baltic to the Black Sea.
All the same, the shriveled little fellow played a most important rôle in the history of progress. He was not much of a writer. He shared the prejudice of his class and his age against the literary profession. A gentleman (even a Venetian gentleman who was supposed to be familiar with double-entry bookkeeping) handled a sword and not a goose-quill. Hence the unwillingness of Messire Marco to turn author. But the fortunes of war carried him into a Genoese prison. And there, to while away the tedious hours of his confinement, he told a poor scribbler, who happened to share his cell, the strange story of his life. In this roundabout way the people of Europe learned many things about this world which they had never known before. For althoughPolo was a simple-minded fellow who firmly believed that one of the mountains he had seen in Asia Minor had been moved a couple of miles by a pious saint who wanted to show the heathen “what true faith could do,” and who swallowed all the stories about people without heads and chickens with three legs which were so popular in his day, his report did more to upset the geographical theories of the Church than anything that had appeared during the previous twelve hundred years.
Polo, of course, lived and died a faithful son of the Church. He would have been terribly upset if any one had compared him with his near-contemporary, the famous Roger Bacon, who was an out and out scientist and paid for his intellectual curiosity with ten years of enforced literary idleness and fourteen years of prison.
And yet of the two he was by far the more dangerous.
For whereas only one person in a hundred thousand could follow Bacon when he went chasing rainbows, and spun those fine evolutionary theories which threatened to upset all the ideas held sacred in his own time, every citizen who had been taught his ABCs could learn from Polo that the world was full of a number of things the existence of which the authors of the Old Testament had never even suspected.
I do not mean to imply that the publication of a single book caused that rebellion against scriptural authority which was to occur before the world could gain a modicum of freedom. Popular enlightenment is ever the result of centuries of painstaking preparation. But the plain and straightforward accounts of the explorers and the navigators and the travelers, understandable to all the people, did a great deal to bring about that spirit of scepticism which characterizes the latter half of the Renaissance and which allowed people to say and write things which only a fewyears before would have brought them into contact with the agents of the Inquisition.
Take that strange story to which the friends of Boccaccio listened on the first day of their agreeable exile from Florence. All religious systems, so it told, were probably equally true and equally false. But if this were true, and they were all equally true and false, then how could people be condemned to the gallows for ideas which could neither be proven nor contradicted?
Read the even stranger adventures of a famous scholar like Lorenzo Valla. He died as a highly respectable member of the government of the Roman Church. Yet in the pursuit of his Latin studies he had incontrovertibly proven that the famous donation of “Rome and Italy and all the provinces of the West,” which Constantine the Great was supposed to have made to Pope Sylvester (and upon which the Popes had ever since based their claims to be regarded as super-lords of all Europe), was nothing but a clumsy fraud, perpetrated hundreds of years after the death of the Emperor by an obscure official of the papal chancery.
Or to return to more practical questions, what were faithful Christians, carefully reared in the ideas of Saint Augustine who had taught that a belief in the presence of people on the other side of the earth was both blasphemous and heretical, since such poor creatures would not be able to see the second coming of Christ and therefore had no reason to exist, what indeed were the good people of the year 1499 to think of this doctrine when Vasco da Gama returned from his first voyage to the Indies and described the populous kingdoms which he had found on the other side of this planet?
What were these same simple folk, who had always been told that our world was a flat dial and that Jerusalem wasthe center of the universe, what were they to believe when the little “Vittoria” returned from her voyage around the globe and when the geography of the Old Testament was shown to contain some rather serious errors?
I repeat what I have said before. The Renaissance was not an era of conscious scientific endeavor. In spiritual matters it often showed a most regrettable lack of real interest. Everything during these three hundred years was dominated by a desire for beauty and entertainment. Even the Popes, who fulminated loudest against the iniquitous doctrines of some of their subjects, were only too happy to invite those self-same rebels for dinner if they happened to be good conversationalists and knew something about printing or architecture. And eager zealots for virtue, like Savonarola, ran quite as great a risk of losing their lives as the bright young agnostics who in poetry and prose attacked the fundaments of the Christian faith with a great deal more violence than good taste.
But throughout all these manifestations of a new interest in the business of living, there undoubtedly ran a severe undercurrent of discontent with the existing order of society and the restrictions put upon the development of human reason by the claims of an all-powerful Church.
Between the days of Boccaccio and those of Erasmus, there is an interval of almost two centuries. During these two centuries, the copyist and the printer never enjoyed an idle moment. And outside of the books published by the Church herself, it would be difficult to find an important piece of work which did not contain some indirect reference to the sad plight into which the world had fallen when the ancient civilizations of Greece and Rome had been superseded by the anarchy of the barbarian invaders andwestern society was placed under the tutelage of ignorant monks.
The contemporaries of Machiavelli and Lorenzo de’ Medici were not particularly interested in ethics. They were practical men who made the best of a practical world. Outwardly they remained at peace with the Church because it was a powerful and far-reaching organization which was capable of doing them great harm and they never consciously took part in any of the several attempts at reform or questioned the institutions under which they lived.
But their insatiable curiosity concerning old facts, their continual search after new emotions, the very instability of their restless minds, caused a world which had been brought up in the conviction “We know” to ask the question “Do we really know?”
And that is a greater claim to the gratitude of all future generations than the collected sonnets of Petrarch or the assembled works of Raffael.