Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/403

Rh RENAISSANCE 385 and Boccaccio, though they both held the mediaeval doctrine that literature should teach some abstruse truth beneath a veil of fiction, differed from Dante in this that their poetry and prose in the vernacular abandoned both alle- gory and symbol. In their practice they ignored their theory. Petrarch's lyrics continue the Provengal tradition as it had been reformed in Tuscany, with a subtler and more modern analysis of emotion, a purer and more chastened style, than his masters could boast. Boccaccio's tales, in like manner, continue the tradition of the fabliaux, raising that literary species to the rank of finished art, enriching it with humour, and strengthening its substance by keen insight into all varieties of character. The Canzoniere and the Decameron distinguish themselves from mediaeval literature, not by any return to classical precedents, but by free self-conscious handling of human nature. So much had to be premised in order to make it clear in what relation humanism stood to the Renais- sance, since the Italian work of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio is sufficient to indicate the re-birth of the spirit after ages of apparent deadness. Had the Revival of Learning not intervened it is probable that the vigorous efforts of these writers alone would have inaugurated a new age of European culture. Yet, while noting this reserva- tion of judgment, it must also be remarked that all three felt themselves under some peculiar obligation to the classics. Dante, mediaeval as his temper seems to us, chose Virgil for his guide, and ascribed his mastery of style to the study of Virgilian poetry. Petrarch and Boccaccio were, as we have seen, the pioneers of the new learning. They held their writings in the vernacular cheap, and initiated that contempt for the mother tongue which was a note of the earlier Renaissance. It may further be observed that Giovanni Villani, the first chronicler who used Italian for the compilation of a methodical history, tells us how he was impelled to write by musing on the ruins of Rome and thinking of the vanished greatness of the Latin face. We have therefore to recognize this fact that the four greatest writers of the 14th century, while the Revival of Learning was yet in its cradle, each after his own fashion acknowledged the vivifying touch upon their spirit of the antique genius. They seem to have been conscious that they could not give the desired impulse to modern literature and art without contact with the classics; and, in spite of the splendour of their achievements in Italian, they found no immediate followers upon that path. The fascination of pure study was so powerful, the ' Italians at that epoch were so eager to recover the past, j that during the 15th century we have before our eyes ij n ,i the spectacle of this great nation deviating from the course ei of development begun in poetry by Dante and Petrarch, in rf prose by Boccaccio and Villani, into the channels of scholar- ship and antiquarian research. The language of the Canzoniere and Decameron was abandoned for revived Latin and discovered Greek. Acquisition supplanted invention ; imitation of classical authors suppressed originality of style. The energies of the Italian people were devoted to transcribing codices, settling texts, translating Greek books into Latin, compiling grammars, commentaries, encyclopaedias, dictionaries, epitomes, and ephemerides. During this century the best histories Bruno's and Poggio's annals of Florence, for example were composed in Latin after the manner of Livy. The best dissertations, Landino's Camaldunenses, Valla's De Voluptate, were laboured imitations of Cicero's Tusculans. The best verses, Pontano's elegies, Politian's hexameters, were in like manner Latin ; public orations upon ceremonial occasions were delivered in the Latin tongue ; correspondence, official and familiar, was carried on in the same language ; even the fabliaux received, in Poggio's Faceting a dress of elegant Latinity. The noticeable barrenness of Italian literature at this period is referable to the fact that men of genius and talent devoted themselves to erudition and struggled to express their thoughts and feelings in a speech which was not natural. Yet they were engaged in a work of incalculable importance. At the close of the century the knowledge of Greece and Rome had been reappro- priated and placed beyond the possibility of destruction ; the chasm between the old and new world had been bridged ; mediaeval modes of thinking and discussing had been superseded; the staple of education, the common culture which has brought all Europe into intellectual agreement, was already in existence. Humanism was now an actuality. Owing to the uncritical veneration for antiquity which then prevailed, it had received a strong tincture of pedantry. Its professors, in their revolt against the Middle Ages, made light of Christianity and paraded paganism. What was even worse from an artistic point of view, they had contracted puerilities of style, vanities of rhetoric, stupidities of wearisome citation. Still, at the opening of the 16th century, it became manifest what fruits of noble quality the Revival of Letters was about to bring forth for modern literature. Two great scholars, Lorenzo de' Medici and Politian, had already returned to the practice of Italian poetry. Their work is the first absolutely modern work, modern in the sense of having absorbed the stores of classic learning and reproduced those treasures in forms of simple, natural, native beauty. Boiardo occupies a similar position by the fusion of classic mythology with chivalrous romance in his Orlando Innamorato. But the victor's laurels were reserved for Ariosto, whose Orlando Furioso is the purest and most perfect extant example of Renaissance poetry. It was not merely in what they had acquired and assimilated from the classics that these poets showed the transformation effected in the field of literature by humanism. The whole method and spirit of mediaeval art had been abandoned. That of the Cinque Cento is positive, defined, mundane. The deity, if deity there be, that rules in it, is beauty. Interest is confined to the actions, passions, sufferings, and joys of human life, to its pathetic, tragic, humorous, and sentimental incidents. Of the state of souls beyond the grave we hear and are supposed to care nothing. In the drama the pedantry of the Revival, which had not injured romantic literature, made itself perniciously felt. Rules were collected from Horace and Aristotle. Seneca was chosen as the model of tragedy; Plautus and Terence supplied the groundwork of comedy. Thus in the plays of Rucellai, Trissino, Sperone, and other tragic poets, the nobler elements of humanism, considered as a revelation of the world and man, obtained no free development. Even the comedies of the best authors are too observant of Latin precedents, although some pieces of Machiavelli, Ariosto, Aretino, Cecchi, and Gelli are admirable for vivid delinea- tion of contemporary manners. The relation of the plastic arts to the revival of learning to the is similar to that which has been sketched in the case of fine ar *s ; poetry. Cimabue started with work which owed nothing directly to antiquity. At about the same time Niccola Pisano studied the style of sculpture in fragments of Greeco- Roman marbles. His manner influenced Giotto, who set painting on a forward path. Fortunately for the unim- peded expansion of Italian art, little was brought to light of antique workmanship during the 14th and 15th centuries. The classical stimulus came to painters, sculptors, and architects chiefly through literature. There- fore there was narrow scope for imitation, and the right spirit of humanism displayed itself in a passionate study of perspective, nature, and the nude. Yet we find in the writings of Ghiberti and Alberti, we notice in the master- XX. - 49