It was not only by the Italian dukes and princes that Petrarch was cherished; the Popes—Benedict XII., Clement VI., and Urban V.—all testified their sense of his merit, and enriched him with many benefices, and Urban is said to have been somewhat influenced in his determination to revisit Rome by the arguments of the poet. For whilst Petrarch allowed his pen the most unwarrantable freedoms in censuring the conduct of the papal court, he had nothing more at heart than the restoration of the Popes to their ancient capital, and on this point he shared the sentiments of Dante. Neither were the middle and lower classes at all behind their betters in the enthusiasm with which they regarded the great scholar. A certain grammar-master who had grown half-blind and wholly crippled, hearing that Petrarch was at Naples, determined to go thither to see him, and made his son carry him there on his shoulders. By the time they arrived the poet had departed for Rome. However, the old man declared himself ready to journey to the Indies if he could only come up with the object of his search, so they took the road to Rome; again too late, they proceeded to Parma, and there, to the inexpressible consolation of the venerable grammarian, he saw “his Petrarch,” and causing his son to lift him up, he reverently kissed the head that had conceived so many noble thoughts, and the hand that had written so much good Latin.[277] In one of his familiar epistles, Petrarch relates the story of a certain goldsmith of Bergamo who, having exchanged the pursuits of trade for those of literature, was possessed with such a passing great admiration of the author of the “Rime,” that he declared he should not die content unless he were once suffered to receive him in his house. Petrarch gave him that satisfaction but the delight of the goldsmith was so excessive, that his servants feared he would go mad with joy, and his guest had some difficulty in freeing himself from his troublesome attendance. Petrarch affected to treat these demonstrations of popular homage with studied contempt, but whilst he talked and wrote of the charms of solitude, it was evident that he was not a little intoxicated with the vapours of gratified vanity. Whatever pains he took to express his indifference to the world, he lost no opportunity of letting his friends know that the world was not indifferent to him. “Whenever I leave my house,” he wrote from Milan, “a thing that happens very rarely, I bow right and left, and stop to speak to no one. I am more esteemed here than I deserve, and far more than suits my taste for quiet. Not only do the prince and his court love and honour me, but the people respect me far beyond my merits, and love me without so much as seeing me, for I rarely appear in public.” His letters are filled with passages of this kind, which sufficiently betray that the would-be philosopher, who had written long treatises on the Solitary Life, and on Contempt of the World, was secretly devoured by a hungry egotism. His notions of the joys of Solitude attained to nothing more sublime than lying under a tree with a book in one’s hand, and no one would have been less pleased than he, if his admirers had taken him at his word and ceased to pester him. Yet the homage of the world had no power to soothe the restlessness that devoured him, and in the midst of all his outward successes, fortune failed not to deal him many a cruel blow. The great plague of 1348, which desolated all Europe, and which was so powerfully described by the pen of Bocaccio, carried off Laura de Sade among its first victims, and Petrarch recorded his sorrow on the blank leaves of his Virgil. Other losses followed, and in the midst of these private griefs, Petrarch, who had given his confidence to the celebrated Rienzi and had dedicated a noble sonnet to one whom he fondly trusted would have been the restorer of his country’s greatness, felt the fall of the great Tribune as a personal misfortune. “Some,” he exclaimed, “can still rejoice in riches, some in intellect, and some in health; but for me, I see not what anything in the world can henceforth give me, save tears.” A sad avowal for the greatest scholar of his age, but a scholar whose character, whatever may be said of his genius, was utterly hollow and superficial. The mere man of letters—and whatever may have been his sincere regret for the graver irregularities of his youth,—we must add, the unworthy ecclesiastic, ever sensible in the midst of his literary triumphs of a want and a weariness, is a poor exchange indeed, with all his erudition, for the race of Christian scholars with whom we have hitherto been engaged. His last residence was fixed at Arqua, near Padua; and there, on the 18th of July 1374, he was found dead in his study, with his head leaning on an open book. He had been struck by epilepsy, and so, as has been said, passed from the quiet of his library to the quiet of the grave. He had been the first to inaugurate a vast intellectual revolution, and the restoration of classical studies, begun by him, was carried on in the following century by Poggio and his contemporaries. For Italy, at least, the age of mediæval darkness, had passed away for ever, and with it passed away also not a few of the old Christian traditions of thought, art, and taste. The mind of the coming generations was to be formed on pagan models, and from this time, as Hallam remarks, it became the main, if not the exclusive, object of an educated man, to write Latin correctly, to understand the allusions of the best classic authors, and to learn at least the rudiments of Greek. That the revived taste for ancient letters did eventually bring about a certain anti-Christian reaction in art and literature cannot be denied; and the character of many of those who became distinguished among the leaders of the Renaissance was such as scarcely entitled them to be numbered among “Christian Scholars.” Yet it would be most unfair to include under any sweeping censure all those who originated, or took part in, the classical revival, or to suppose that the movement was exclusively favoured by an irreligious party. The Augustinian friars and the Camaldolese monks of Florence were among the first encouragers of the new studies; and one of the earliest institutions of the nature of a literary academy, was that established in the Augustinian convent of the Holy Spirit at Florence. This convent adjoined the house where Giannozzo Manetti, then a mere boy, resided; and he contrived to make a door through the partition wall, by means of which he was able to enter the convent whenever he liked, and attend the conferences on literary subjects held among the brethren; the subjects of which were every day posted up in some conspicuous part of the cloister. Among the Camaldolese the same studies were introduced even before the death of Petrarch, and the monks of St. Mary of the Angels had among them men like Zenobio Tantino, who corresponded with all the literati of the day in poetical epistles. So heartily did they take part in the literary movements of their times that Ambrose Traversari, of whom Roscoe says that he had the best pretensions of any man of his age to the character of a polite scholar, was exclusively given up by his superiors to learned pursuits for the space of thirty years. Some, indeed, were to be found who dreaded the possible effects of reviving the study of Gentile writers, and it was scruples such as these which drew forth a graceful reply from Coluccio Salutati, the friend of Petrarch and the learned chancellor of Florence, whose achievements as a Latin poet won him the laurel wreath which was placed, not on his brow, but on his coffin, and whose unblemished life secured him a yet nobler reward in the friendship of St. Antoninus of Florence. He justly protested against the narrowness of supposing that a man could not be walking in the ways of God because he read the poets, and argued that in literature, as in all besides, we may find God, because all Truth and all Beauty is from Him, and to Him alone are they to be referred. That the restoration of good models, those same models which, as the historian Socrates informs us,[278] had been studied by Christians from the very first centuries of the Church for the sake of grace of elocution and the culture of the mind, was in itself lawful and desirable, does not appear a point requiring proof. Nevertheless, it is evident that the revolution effected in the studies of Christendom by the introduction of this new element, was one which demanded very powerful safeguards both on the side of faith and morals; and falling, as it did, under the direction of a race of captious and greedy professors, it resulted at last in grievous excesses which threatened little short of an extinction of Christian ideas altogether.
Already we begin to see the tide of learning dividing its waters into two streams, running in contrary directions. The close of the fourteenth century was illustrated, it is true, by a crowd of saintly men, who endeavoured to establish schools of sacred art and literature in the convents which they established or reformed. At Fiesole, St. Antoninus of Florence passed through his noviciate, in company with Beato Angelico, whilst, contemporary with them were St. Bernardine of Sienna, and St. John Capestran, the two Franciscan apostles, the former of whom drew half the Florentine grammar-masters to listen to his eloquence, while the latter terrified the fashionable ladies who thronged to his sermons into sacrificing their perfumes, dice, and false hair, of which he had the satisfaction of making several bonfires. An attentive study of the monuments, as well as of the literary history of the times, will, however, reveal significant tokens of the existence of a very different element from that which appears in the paintings of Angelico. It is remarkable that he formed no school, and found none to inherit his ideas. After his time, Christian art, the faithful exponent of the popular mind, daily lost something of the chaste severity of former times; there was a growing disposition in favour of more florid ornamentation in architecture, of a freer naturalism in painting, and of a capricious effeminacy even in sacred music, which destroyed the solemn religious character of the ancient chant. This latter abuse was severely reprehended by Pope John XXII. in his Bull, entitled Docta Sanctorum, wherein he complains of the innovations introduced by “certain disciples of a new school, who, employing their whole attention in marking time, endeavour, by new notes, to express airs of their own invention to the prejudice of the ancient chants.” In this, as in everything else, the mischief was chiefly effected by the professors, who were gradually assuming a sort of dictatorship in literature and the arts, and who, whether they lectured, sang, or painted, sought as their main object, not the solid instruction of their hearers, or the symbolism of divine truths, but merely the display of their own talents.
The literary movement did not at first extend itself very rapidly beyond the Alps, and in France particularly many circumstances combined to check for a time the progress of letters. King Charles V. had indeed a taste for the sciences, and founded a royal library at the Louvre containing 900 volumes, and forming what his accomplished biographer, Christine de Pisa, calls “une belle assemblée de notables livres moult bien escripts, et richement adornés.” She was the daughter of his Venetian astronomer, the authoress of fifteen volumes in prose and verse, and was, as Tiraboschi affirms, well acquainted with Greek. The king, however, found few among his courtiers to share his learned tastes. The knights and nobles who fought at Creçy piqued themselves on their ignorance of letters as a sign of their gentle blood, and it is no uncommon thing to find a formula like the following attached to public deeds of the fourteenth century:—“Lequel a déclaré ne savoir signer, attendu sa qualité de gentilhomme.” Eustache Deschamps, who wrote during the reigns of John and Charles V., bitterly complains of the ignorance of the upper classes as contrasted with those of an earlier generation. Formerly, he says, nobles studied the liberal arts until their twentieth year, before receiving knighthood; now they begin their education on horseback, abandon learning to men of meaner birth, and give themselves up to gaming and profligacy. He praises the older days of chivalry, when knights loved truth, virtue, and loyal love, and were not ashamed of being thought clerks, “car meilleur temps fut le temps ancien.” Alain Chartier, another writer of the same period, makes similar complaints. “Gentlemen live now,” he says, “as if they were only made to eat and drink; and everywhere you hear the ridiculous saying that it is unbecoming for a nobleman to know how to read and write. It used not so to be in the days when men held an ignorant king to be a crowned ass.” Nor are the accounts of the actual state of the University of Paris much more satisfactory. The schools were filled with teachers who introduced both philosophical and theological errors, and the Latinity of the Parisians is said to have been worse than that of their English neighbours. Discipline too was beginning to flag, and in 1366 the Faculty of Arts had to publish a decree of reformation, from which it appears that the regents had begun to open their schools at a later hour, and to introduce the hitherto unknown luxury of benches in place of the time-honoured bundles of straw. With the exception of a few great names, such as those of Gerson and Nicholas Oresme, this period is a dreary and barren one in the literary annals of France. And the sterility of her schools at this precise epoch is a remarkable and significant fact. It was exactly the period when the peculiar political doctrines of the Paris doctors appeared to have won their triumph. Adapting the principles of the old imperial jurisprudence to the circumstances of Christian Europe, if they did not actually identify the offices of Emperor and Pontiff, they yet put forth doctrines which virtually implied a species of royal supremacy. Gerson’s teaching on the same subject, if less absolute, was not more orthodox, and tended to make men regard the Pontifical dignity as a human thing which could be legislated for according to principles of human policy. National vanity came in to swell the pretensions of the Parisian doctors. France was the centre of Christendom, and the heart of France was the University. “Not Rome, but France,” said Nicholas Oresme, in his oration to Urban V., “is the country beloved by God. Charlemagne transplanted the liberal sciences from Rome to Paris, whose doctors may be compared to the stars of the firmament and the voice of many thunders; and on that holy soil, therefore, and not at Rome, ought the Pope to reside.” This sort of eloquence was continually reproduced in the treatises on the temporal and spiritual powers which poured forth from the pens of the Paris legists, who were the first to adhere to the Antipope, Clement VII., thus involving France in the guilt of the Great Schism, and whose influence, fifty years later, at the Schismatical Council of Basle, obtained the pretended deposition of Eugenius IV., and the election of another Antipope, Felix V. Nay, so thoroughly was the University of Paris in love with schism, that when, in 1438, King Charles VIII. ordered all his subjects to acknowledge the authority of Eugenius, she alone refused to obey: the Antipope had been a creature of her own fabrication, and she obstinately clung to his fortunes.
On schools which had thus deliberately cut themselves off from the source of benediction the blessing of fertility could not rest.[279] No dew fell on them, and it was as if the clouds had been commanded that they should rain no rain upon them. Moreover, the frightful wars that desolated France for 150 years were adverse to the spread of letters. In them even Protestant historians have recognised the marked and terrible retribution of sacrilegious crime. The long struggle between Philip le Bel and Pope Boniface VIII. terminated, in 1303, in what seemed the complete triumph of the Crown. Not only had Philip firmly asserted the independence of the temporal power, but to secure his victory he had calumniated the Vicar of Christ by accusing him before all Europe as a sorcerer, a heretic, an infidel, and a simonist. His two infamous satellites, William de Nogaret and Sciarra Colonna, had entered Anagni with the banner of France displayed, crying aloud, “Death to the Pope, and long live the King of France!” They seized the venerable old man of eighty-six, as he sat awaiting them, with passive courage, on his throne, with the cross in his hand and the tiara on his brow, and treated him with indignities which hastened, if they did not actually cause, his death. And then the seat of the Popes was transferred from Rome to Avignon, a calamitous event which weakened their independent power, and eventually plunged the Church into schism. Respect for the authority of the Sovereign Pontiff declined apace in the schools of France, and it became fashionable for her lawyers and doctors to discuss the question how far that authority extended, and to affix limits to it of their own devising. All this was doubtless a great victory, and seemed to be something very like the triumph of the secular over the spiritual power. But it was a triumph terribly avenged. At the time when these fancied successes crowned the daring policy of Philip le Bel, he was in the flower of his age, surrounded by his three sons, all inheritors of their father’s beauty, and promising to carry on the glories of his race to distant generations. But the King, in the forty-seventh year of his age, was killed by a wild boar; his sons, one by one, followed each other, heirless, to the tomb; at one and the same time the disgraceful crimes of their three wives were published to the world; and the crown passed from his family—and to whom? To the son of Charles de Valois, the friend and captain-general of Boniface VIII., who had refused to take part in his brother’s crimes, and always remained loyal to the injured Pontiff. But this was not all. A daughter of Philip le Bel still survived, the she-wolf of France, who, after dyeing her hands in the blood of her husband, King Edward II. of England, left to her son, Edward III., those fatal claims which brought upon France the outpouring of the cup of vengeance. Those golden fleurs-de-lys, which Dante had beheld borne in triumph through the gates of Anagni, were rolled and trampled in the dust for a century and a half by English descendants of that very king who had fondly thought to establish his royal power on the humiliation of the Vicar of Christ. France was brought to the very lowest abyss of ignominy, and had to witness the coronation in her capital of an English conqueror, who quartered those same dishonoured lilies on his shield. What more need be said? History teaches many lessons, but there is one which she repeats through all ages with unvarying fidelity. It is vain for the kings of the earth to stand up against the Lord and against His Christ. It is idle for them in their mad presumption to dash themselves against the Rock of Peter; for “whoso falls on that Rock shall be broken, but on whomsoever it shall fall, it shall grind him to powder.”
CHAPTER XVIII.
ENGLISH EDUCATION IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY.
A.D. 1300 TO 1400.