Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/399

Rh RENAISSANCE 381 manifest. It had recovered from the confusion conse- quent upon the dissolution of the ancient Roman empire. The Teutonic tribes had been Christianized, civilized, and assimilated to the previously Latinized races over whom they exercised the authority of conquerors. Compara- tive tranquillity and material comfort had succeeded to discord and rough living. Modern nationalities, defined as separate factors in a common system, were ready to cooperate upon the basis of European federation. The ideas of universal monarchy and of indivisible Christendom, incorporated in the Holy Roman Empire and the Roman Church, had so far lost their hold that scope was offered for the introduction of new theories both of state and church which would have seemed visionary or impious to the mediaeval mind. It is therefore obvious that some term, wider than Revival of Learning, descriptive of the change which began to pass over Europe in the 14th and 15th centuries, has to b^ adopted. That of Renaissance, Rinascimento, or Renascence is sufficient for the purpose, though we have to guard against the tyranny of what is after all a metaphor. "We must not suffer it to lead us into rhetoric about the deadness and the darkness of the Middle Ages, or hamper our inquiry with preconceived assumptions that the re-birth in question was in any true sense a return to the irrecoverable pagan past. Nor must we imagine that there was any abrupt break with the Middle Ages. On the contrary, the Renaissance was rather the last stage of the Middle Ages, emerging from ecclesiastical and feudal despotism, developing what was original in mediaeval ideas by the light of classic arts and letters, holding in itself the promise of the modern world. It was therefore a period and a process of transition, fusion, preparation, tentative endeavour. And just at this point the real importance of the revival of learning may be indicated. That rediscovery of the classic past restored the confidence in their own faculties to men striving after spiritual freedom ; revealed the continuity of history and the identity of human nature in spite of diverse creeds and different customs ; held up for emula- tion master-works of literature, philosophy, and art; provoked inquiry ; encouraged criticism ; shattered the Humanism, a word which will often recur in the ensuing paragraphs, denotes a specific bias which the forces liberated in the Renaissance took from contact with the ancient world, the particular form assumed by human self-esteem at that epoch, the ideal of life and civilization evolved by the modern nations. It indicates the endeavour of man to reconstitute himself as a free being, not as the thrall of theological despotism, and the peculiar assistance he derived in this effort from Greek and Roman literature, the litterse, humaniores, letters leaning rather to the side of man than of divinity. It is now apparent in what sense the Renaissance has i( iat - to be treated in this article. It will be considered as implying a comprehensive movement of the European intellect and will toward self-emancipation, toward re- assertion of the natural rights of the reason and the senses, toward the conquest of this planet as a place of human occupation, and toward the formation of regula- tive theories both for states and individuals differing from those of mediaeval times. The revival of learning will be treated as a decisive factor in this process of evolution on a new plan. To exclude the Reformation and the Counter- Reformation wholly from the survey is impossible, as will appear more plainly in the sequel. These terms indicate moments in the whole process of modern history which were opposed, each to the other, and both to the Renais- sance ; and it is needful to bear in mind that they have, scientifically speaking, a quite separate existence. Yet if the history of Europe in the 16th century of our era came to be written with the brevity with which we write the history of Europe in the 6th century B.C., it would be difficult at the distance of time implied by that supposition to dis- tinguish the Italian movement of the Renaissance in its origin from the German movement of the Reformation. Both would be seen to have a common starting-point in the reaction against long dominant idfeas which were becoming obsolete, and also in the excitation of faculties which had during the same period been accumulating energy. The Renaissance, if we try to regard it as a period, Chrono- was essentially the transition from one historical stage to logical another. It cannot therefore be confined within strict l imits - chronological limits. This indecision inherent in the nature of a process which involved neither a political revolution nor the promulgation of a new religious creed, but was a gradual metamorphosis of the intellectual and moral state of Europe, is further augmented by the different epochs at which the several nations were prepared to bear their share in it. England, for example, was still feudal and mediaeval when Italy had socially and mentally entered on the modern stadium. A brother of the Black Prince banqueted with Petrarch in the palace of Galeazzo Visconti. That is to say, the founder of Italian humanism, the representative of Italian despotic state-craft, and the companion of Froissart's heroes met together at a marriage feast. The memories which these names evoke prove how impossible it is to fix boundaries in time for a movement which in 1368 had reached nearly the same point in Italy as it afterwards attained at the close of the 16th century in England. The Renaissance must indeed be viewed mainly as an internal process whereby spiritual energies latent in the Middle Ages were developed into actuality and formed a mental habit for the modern world. The pro- cess began in Italy, and gradually extended to the utmost bounds of Europe, producing similar results in every nation, and establishing a common civilization. There is one date, however, which may be remembered The date with advantage as the starting-point in time of the 1453. Renaissance, after the departure from the Middle Ages had been definitely and consciously made by the Italians. This is the year 1453, when Constantinople, chosen for his capital by the first Christian emperor of Rome, fell into the hands of the Turk. One of the survivals of the old world, the shadow of what had been the Eastern empire, now passed suddenly away. Almost at the same date that visionary revival of the Western empire, which had imposed for six centuries upon the imagination of mediaeval Europe, hampering Italy and impeding the consolidation of Germany, ceased to reckon among political actualities ; while its more robust rival, the Roman Church, seemed likely to sink into the rank of a petty Italian principality. Three lights of mediaeval Christendom, the Eastern empire, the Holy Roman empire, and the papacy, at this point of time severally suffered extinction, mortal enfeeblement, and profound internal transformation. It was demonstrated by the destruction of the Eastern and the dotage of the Western empire, and by the new papal policy which Nicholas V. inaugurated, that the old order of society was about to be superseded. Nothing remained to check those centrifugal forces in state and church which substituted a confederation of rival European powers for the earlier ideal of universal monarchy, and separate religious constitutions for the previous Catholic unity. At the same time the new learning introduced by the earlier humanists awakened free thought, encouraged curiosity, and prepared the best minds of Europe for speculative audacities from which the schoolmen would have shrunk, and which soon expressed themselves in acts of cosmopolitan importance. The new learning had been
 * narrow mental barriers imposed by mediaeval orthodoxy.