Page:The Oxford book of Italian verse.djvu/13

INTRODUCTION influenced, but certainly not inspired, by the Divine Comedy, and the various disciples of Petrarch merely prove the unapproachable excellence of the Canzoniere. The poet gives place to the humanist, and when the humanist becomes a poet, his songs, in spite of all their delicate charm, have a note of conscious art and a profusion of ornament which give the reader a premonition of the horrors of stucco and tinsel that belong to the seventeenth century.

The Italian humanists of the Quattrocento were the pioneers of modern European culture, and their work, accomplished at a time when France, Germany, and England were only beginning to emerge into the new light, bore fruit in a civilization as brilliant as it was unhappily brief. The capture of Constantinople by the Turks sent a crowd of Greek scholars to Italy, and the ‘uneasy memories’, in Symonds’ phrase, of Greece and Rome which had haunted the Middle Ages became marvellous reality. The world ceased to be a sombre antechamber of Heaven or Hell; man was no longer merely one of God's silly sheep, but an individual heir of ages of culture, free of will, aroused at last from the long nightmare of priestly or tyrannical authority; and his life, instead of being a narrow prison, became an intellectual adventure in which all his faculties were free to range. The Renaissance was no mere enthusiasm for coins and inscriptions; it was the reawakening of the curiosity of a world.

With this new enthusiasm came scepticism—a distrust of the Church which had darkened counsel for so long, clutching the key of knowledge as tightly as the keys 13