Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/406

Rh ;;ss RENAISSANCE new conception of human life, the new interest in the material universe, the new method of education, and the new manners, which we have seen to be inseparable from Italian humanism. Under these forms of intellectual enlightenment and polite culture the renascence of the human spirit had appeared in Italy, where it was more than elsewhere connected with the study of classical antiquity. But that audacious exploratory energy which formed the motive force of the Renaissance as distinguished from the Revival of Learning took, as we shall see, very different directions in the several nations who now were sending the flower of their youth to study at the feet of Italian rhetoricians. The Renaissance ran its course in Italy with strange indifference to consequences. The five great powers, held in equilibrium by Lorenzo de' Medici, dreamed that the peninsula could be maintained in statu quo by diplomacy. The church saw no danger in encouraging a pseudo- pagan ideal of life, violating its own principle of existence by assuming the policy of an aggrandizing secular state, and outraging Christendom openly by its acts and utterances. Society at large was hardly aware that an intellectual force of stupendous magnitude and incalculable explosive power had been created by the new learning. Why should not established institutions proceed upon the customary and convenient methods of routine, while the delights of existence were augmented, manners polished, arts developed, and a golden age of epicurean ease made decent by a state religion which no one cared to break with because no one was left to regard it seriously ? This was the attitude of the Italians when the Renaissance, which they had initiated as a thing of beauty, began to operate as a thing of power beyond the Alps. Revival Germany was already provided with universities, seven >f Learn- of which had been founded between 1348 and 1409. > in In these haunts of learning the new studies took root 3 ' after the year 1440, chiefly through the influence of tra- velling professors, Peter Luder and Samuel Karoch. German scholars made their way to Lombard and Tuscan lecture-rooms, bringing back the methods of the humanists. Greek, Latin, and Hebrew erudition soon found itself at home on Teutonic soil. Like Italian men of letters, these pioneers of humanism gave a classic turn to their patronymics; unfamiliar names, Crotus Rubeanus and Pierius Graecus, Capnion and Lupambulus Ganymedes, CEcolampadius and Melanchthon, resounded on the Rhine. A few of the German princes, among whom Maximilian, the prince cardinal Albert of Mainz, Frederick the Wise of Saxony, and Eberhard of Wiirtemberg deserve mention, exercised a not insignificant influence on letters by the foundation of new universities and the patronage of learned men. The cities of Strasburg, Nuremberg, Augs- burg, Basel, became centres of learned coteries, which gathered round scholars like Wimpheling, Brant, Peutinger, Schedel, and Pirckheimer, artists like Diirer and Holbein, printers of the eminence of Froben. Academies in imitation of Italian institutions came into existence, the two most conspicuous, named after the Rhine and Danube, holding their headquarters respectively at Heidelberg and Vienna. Crowned poets, of whom the most eminent was Conrad Celtes Protucius (Pickel !), emulated the fame of Politian and Pontano. Yet, though the Renaissance was thus widely communicated to the centres of German intelligence, it displayed a different character from that which it assumed in Italy. Gothic art, which was indi- genous in Germany, yielded but little to southern influ- ences. Such work as that of Diirer, Vischer, Cranach, Schongauer, Holbein, consummate as it was in technical excellence, did not assume Italian forms of loveliness, did not display the paganism of the Latin races. The modi- fication of Gothic architecture by pseudo-Roman elements of style was incomplete. What Germany afterwards took of the Palladian manner was destined to reach it on a circuitous route from France. In like manner the IH-W learning failed to penetrate all classes of society with the rapidity of its expansion in Italy, nor was the new ideal of life and customs so easily substituted for the mediaeval. The- German aristocracy, as ^Eneas Sylvius had noticed, remained for the most part barbarous, addicted to gross pleasures, contemptuous of culture. The German dialects were too rough to receive that artistic elabora- tion under antique influences which had been so facile in Tuscany. The doctors of the universities were too wedded to their antiquated manuals and methods, too satisfied with dulness, too proud of titles and diplomas, too anxious to preserve ecclesiastical discipline and to repress mental activity, for a genial spirit of human- ism to spread freely. Not in Cologne or Tubingen but in Padua and Florence did 'the German pioneers of the Renaissance acquire their sense of liberal studies. And when they returned home they found themselves encumbered with stupidities, jealousies, and rancours. Moreover, the temper of these more enlightened men was itself opposed to Italian indifference and immor- ality; it was pugnacious and polemical, eager to beat down the arrogance of monks and theologians rather than to pursue an ideal of sesthetical self-culture. To a student of the origins of German humanism it is clear that something very different from the Renaissance of Lorenzo de' Medici and Leo X. was in preparation from the first upon Teutonic soil. Far less plastic and forni- loving than the Italian, the German intelligence was more penetrative, earnest, disputative, occupied with sub- stantial problems. Starting with theological criticism, proceeding to the stage of solid studies in the three learned languages, German humanism occupied the atten- tion of a widely scattered sect of erudite scholars ; but it did not arouse the interest of the whole nation until it was forced into a violently militant attitude by Pfefferkorn's attack on Reuchlin. That attempt to extinguish honest thought prepared the Reformation ; and humanism after 1518 was absorbed in politico-religious warfare. The point of contact between humanism and the Reforma- Rel tion in Germany has to be insisted on ; for it is just here h" that the relation of the Reformation to the Renaissance in *? general makes itself apparent. As the Renaissance had Re) its precursory movements in the mediaeval period, so the tioi German Reformation was preceded by Wickliffe and Huss, by the discontents of the Great Schism, and by the councils of Constance and Basel. These two main streams of modern progress had been proceeding upon different tracks to diverse issues, but they touched in the studies stimulated by the Revival, and they had a common origin in the struggle of the spirit after self-emancipation. Johann Reuchlin, who entered the lecture-room of Argyro- poulos at Rome in 1482, Erasmus of Rotterdam, who once dwelt at Venice as the house guest of the Aldi, applied their critical knowledge of Hebrew and of Greek to the elucidation and diffusion of the Bible. To the Germans, as to all nations of that epoch, the Bible came as a new book, because they now read it for the first time with eyes opened by humanism. The touch of the new spirit which had evolved literature, art, and culture in Italy sufficed in Germany to recreate Christianity. This new spirit in Italy emancipated human intelligence by the classics ; in Germany it emancipated the human conscience by the Bible. The indignation excited by Leo X.'s sale of indulgences, the moral rage stirred in Northern hearts by papal abominations in Rome, were external causes which precipitated the schism between Teutonic ami m