Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/410

Rh 392 RENAISSANCE would have shrunk. It marked, moreover, in the con- dition of armed resistance against established authority which was forced upon it by the Counter-Reformation, a firm resolve to assert political liberty, leading in the course of time to a revolution with which the rebellious spirit of the Revival was sympathetic. This being the rela- tion of humanism in general to reform, French learning in particular displayed such innovating boldness as threw many of its most conspicuous professors into the camp at war with Rome. Calvin, a French student of Picard origin, created the type of Protestantism to which the majority of French Huguenots adhered. This too was a moment at which philosophical seclusion was hardly possible. In a nation so turnultuously agitated one side or the other had to be adopted. Those of the French humanists who did not proclaim Huguenot opinions, found themselves obliged with Muretus to lend their talents to the Counter-Reforma- tion, or to suffer persecution for heterodoxy, like Dolet. The church, terrified and infuriated by the progress of reform, suspected learning on its own account. To be an eminent scholar was to be accused of immorality, heresy, and atheism in a single indictment ; and the defence of weaker minds lay in joining the Jesuits, as Heinsius was fain to do. France had already absorbed the earlier Re- naissance in an Italianizing spirit before the Reformation made itself felt as a political actuality. This fact, together with the strong Italian bias of the Valois, serves to explain in some degree the reason why the Counter-Reformation entailed those fierce entangled civil wars, massacres of St Bartholomew, murders of the Guises, regicides, treasons, and empoisonments that terminated with the compromise of Henry IV. It is no part of the present subject to analyse the political, religious, and social interests of that struggle. The upshot was the triumph of the Counter-Reformation, and the establishment of its principle, absolutism, as the basis of French government. It was a French king who, when the nation had been reduced to order, uttered the famous word of absolutism, " L'Etat, c'est moi." he The Renaissance in the Low Countries, as elsewhere, had tether- its brilliant age of arts and letters. During the Middle "Usmish ^ es *^ e wea l tn y f ree fc o w ns of Flanders flourished under nd ' conditions not dissimilar to those of the Italian republics.. )utch They raised miracles of architectural beauty, which were lainting. modified in the 15th and 16th centuries by characteristic elements of the new style. The Van Eycks, followed by Memling, Metsys, Mabuse, Lucas van Leyden, struck out a new path in the revival of painting and taught Europe the secret of oil-colouring. But it was reserved for the 17th century to witness the flower and fruit time of this powerful art in the work of Porbus, Rubens, and Vandyck, in the Dutch schools of landscape and home-life, and in the unique masterpieces of Rembrandt. We have a right to connect this later period with the Renaissance, because the distracted state of the Netherlands during the 16th century suspended, while it could not extinguish, their aesthetic development. The various schools of the 17th century, moreover, are animated with the Renaissance spirit no less surely than the Florentine school of the 15th or the Venetian of the 16th. The animal vigour and carnal enjoyment of Rubens, the refined Italianizing beauty of Vandyck, the mystery of light and gloom on Rembrandt's panels, the love of nature in Ruysdael, Cuyp, and Van Hooghe, with their luminously misty skies, silvery daylight, and broad expanse of landscape, the interest in common life displayed by Terburg, Van Steen, Douw, Ostade, and Teniers, the instinct for the beauty of animals in Potter, the vast sea spaces of Vanderveldt, the grasp on reality, the acute intuition into character in portraits, the scientific study of the world and man, the robust sympathy with natural appetites, which distinguish the whole art of the Low Countries, are a direct emanation from the Renaissance. The vernacular in the Netherlands profited at first but Fi era little by the impulse which raised Italian, Spanish, and French, and English to the rank of classic languages. Dutcl But humanism, first of all in its protagonist Erasmus, *? afterwards in the long list of critical scholars and editors, Lipsius, Heinsius, and Grotius, in the printers Elzevir and Plantin, developed itself from the centre of the Leyden university with massive energy, and proved that it was still a motive force of intellectual progress. In the fields of classical learning the students of the Low Countries broke new ground chiefly by methodical collection, classi- fication, and comprehensive criticism of previously accumu- lated stores. Their works were solid and substantial edifices, forming the substratum for future scholarship. In addition to this they brought philosophy and scientific thoroughness to bear on studies which had been pursued in a more literary spirit. It would, iiowever, be uncritical to pursue this subject further ; for the encyclopaedic labours of the Dutch philologers belong to a period when the Re- naissance was overpast. For the same reason it is inadmis- sible to do more than mention the name of Spinoza here. The Netherlands became the battlefield of Reformation Dut< and Counter-Reformation in even a stricter sense than wars France. Here the antagonistic principles were plainly m ' posed in the course of a struggle against foreign despotism. The conflict ended in the assertion of political independence as opposed to absolute dominion. Europe in large measure owes the modern ideal of political liberty to that spirit of stubborn resistance which broke the power of Spain. Recent history, and in particular the history of democracy, claims for its province the several stages whereby this principle was developed in England and America, and its outburst in the frenzy of the French Revolution. It is enough here to have alluded to the part played by the Low Countries in the genesis of a motive force which may be described as the last manifestation of the Renaissance striving after self -emancipation. The insular position of England, combined with the Eng 1 nature of the English people, has allowed us to feel the in t vibration of European movements later and with less of * shock than any of the Continental nations. Before a wave of progress has reached our shores we have had the opportunity of watching it as spectators, and of consider- ing how we shall receive it. Revolutions have passed from the tumultuous stages of their origin into some settled and recognizable state before we have been called upon to cope with them. It was thus that England took the influences of the Renaissance and Reformation simul- taneously, and almost at the same time found herself engaged in that struggle with the Counter-Reformation which, crowned by the defeat of the Spanish Armada, stimulated the sense of nationality and developed the naval forces of the race. Both Renaissance and Reforma- tion had been anticipated by at least a century in England. Chaucer's poetry, which owed so much to Italian examples, gave an early foretaste of the former. Wickliffe's teaching was a vital moment in the latter. But the French wars, the Wars of the Roses, and the persecution of the Lollards deferred the coming of the new age; and the year 1536, when Henry VIII. passed the Act of Supremacy through Parliament, may be fixed as the date when England entered definitively upon a career of intellectual develop- ment abreast with the foremost nations of the Continent. The circumstances just now insisted on explain the specific character of the English Renaissance. The Reformation had been adopted by consent of the king, lords, and commons ; and this change in the state religion, though it was not confirmed without reaction, agitation, and blood- per