Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/402

Rh 384 RENAISSANCE ftaly rival of Learnin' It is just at this point that the Revival of Learning inter- vened to determine the course of the Renaissance. Medi- jeval students possessed a considerable portion of the Latin ' classics, though Greek had become in the fullest sense of the phrase a dead language. But what they retained of ancient literature they could not comprehend in the right spirit. Between them and the text of poet or historian hung a veil of mysticism, a vapour of misapprehension. The odour of unsanctity clung around those relics of the pagan past. Men bred in the cloister and the lecture- room of the logicians, trained in scholastic disputations, versed in allegorical interpretations of the plainest words and most apparent facts, could not find the key which might unlock those stores of wisdom and of beauty. Petrarch first opened a new method in scholarship, and re- vealed what we denote as humanism. In his teaching lay the twofold discovery of man and of the world. For human- ism, which was the vital element in the Revival of Learning, consists mainly of a just perception of the dignity of man as a rational, volitional, and sentient being, born upon this earth with a right to use it and enjoy it. Humanism implied the rejection of those visions of a future and imagined state of souls as the only absolute reality, which had fascinated the imagination of the Middle Ages. It involved a vivid recognition of the goodliness of man and nature, displayed in the great monuments of human power recovered from the past. It stimulated the curiosity of latent sensibilities, provoked fresh inquisition into the groundwork of existence, and strengthened man's self- esteem by knowledge of what men had thought and felt and done in ages when Christianity was not. It roused a desire to reappropriate the whole abandoned provinces of mundane energy, and a hope to emulate antiquity in works of living loveliness and vigour. The Italians of the 14th century, more precocious than the other European races, were ripe for this emancipation of enslaved intelligence. In the classics they found the food which was required to nourish the new spirit ; and a variety of circum- stances, among which must be reckoned the pride of a nation boasting of its descent from the Populus Romanus, rendered them apt to fling aside the obstacles that had impeded the free action of the mind through many cen- turies. Petrarch not only set his countrymen upon the right method of studying the Latin classics, but he also divined the importance of recovering a knowledge of Greek literature. To this task Boccaccio addressed himself ; and he was followed by numerous Italian enthusiasts, who visited Byzantium before its fall as the sacred city of a new revelation. The next step was to collect MSS., to hunt out, copy, and preserve the precious relics of the past. In this work of accumulation Guarino and Filelfo, Aurispa and Poggio, took the chief part, aided by the wealth of Italian patricians, merchant-princes, and despots, who were inspired by the sacred thirst for learning. Learning was then no mere pursuit of a special and recluse class. It was fashionable and it was passionate, pervading all society with the fervour of romance. For a generation nursed in decadent scholasticism and stereotyped theological formulse it was the fountain of renascent youth, beauty, and freedom, the shape in which the Helen of art and poetry appeared to the ravished eyes of mediaeval Faustus. It was the resurrection of the mightiest spirits of the past. " I go," said Cyriac of Ancona, the indefatigable though uncritical explorer of antiquities, "I go to awake the dead ! " This was the enthusiasm, this the vitalizing faith, which made the work of scholarship in the 15th century so highly strung and ardent. The men who followed it knew that they were restoring humanity to its birthright after the expatriation of ten centuries. They were instinc- tively aware that the effort was for liberty of action, thought, and conscience in the future. This conviction made young men leave their loves and pleasures, grave men quit their counting-houses, churchmen desert their missals, to crowd the lecture rooms of philologers and rhetoricians. When Greek had been acquired, MSS. accumulated, libraries and museums formed, came the age of printers and expositors. Aldus Manutius in Italy, Froben in Basel, the Etiennes in Paris, committed to the press what the investigators had recovered. Nor were there wanting at the same time men who dedicated their powers to Hebrew and Oriental erudition, laying, together with the Grecians, a basis for those Biblical studies which advanced the Reformation. Meanwhile the languages of Greece and Rome had been so thoroughly appropriated that a final race of scholars, headed by Politian, Pontano, Valla, handled once again in verse and prose both antique dialects, and thrilled the ears of Europe with new-made pagan melodies. The church itself at this epoch lent its influence to the prevalent enthusiasm. Nicholas 'V. and Leo X., not to mention intervening popes who showed themselves tolerant of humanistic culture, were heroes of the classical revival. Scholarship became the surest path of advancement to ecclesiastical and political honours. Italy was one great school of the new learning at the moment when the Ger- man, French, and Spanish nations were invited to her feast. It will be well to describe briefly, but in detail, what this meeting of the modern with the ancient mind effected over the whole field of intellectual interests. In doing so, we must be careful to remember that the study of the classics did but give a special impulse to pent-up energies which were bound in one way or another to assert their independence. Without the Revival of Learning the direc- tion of those forces would have been different ; but that novel intuition into the nature of the world and man which constitutes what we describe as Renaissance must have emerged. As the facts, however, stand before us, it is impossible to dissociate the rejection of the other world as the sole reality, the joyous acceptance of this world as a place to live and act in, the conviction that " the proper study of mankind is man," from humanism. Humanism, as it actually appeared in Italy, was positive in its con- ception of the problems to be solved, pagan in its con- tempt for mediaeval mysticism, invigorated for sensuous enjoyment by contact with antiquity, yet holding in itself the germ of new religious aspirations, profounder science, and sterner probings of the mysteries of life than had been attempted even by the ancients. The operation of this humanistic spirit has now to be traced. It is obvious that Italian literature owed little at the outset to the revival of learning. The Divine Comedy, the Canzoniere, and the Decameron were works of monu- mental art, deriving neither form nor inspiration imme- diately from the classics, but applying the originality of Italian genius to matter drawn from previous mediaeval sources. Dante showed both in his epic poem and in his lyrics that he had not abandoned the sphere of contem- porary thought. Allegory and theology, the vision and the symbol, still determine the form of masterpieces which for perfection of workmanship and for emancipated force of in- tellect rank among the highest products of the human mind. Yet they are not mediaeval in the same sense as the song of Roland or the Arthurian cycle. They proved that, though Italy came late into the realm of literature, her action was destined to be decisive and alterative by the introduction of a new spirit, a firmer and more positive grasp on life and art. These qualities she owed to her material prosperity, to her freedom from feudalism, to her secularized church, her commercial nobility, her political independence in a federation of small states. Petrarch Natv, Itali; lllllll,
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