Germany was quick to absorb Italian erudition. Hebrew, Greek, and Latin scholars, rivalling those of Italy, became numerous in German universities and in the free cities of Nüremburg, Augsburg, Basel, and Strassburg. But even students who attended the universities of Italy escaped the Pagan influence. They returned to a homeland which was not strewn with classic remains, and whose traditions were still deeply rooted in mediævalism and expressed in the Gothic spirit. It was the same with the artists. For example, the art of Schongauer, Dürer, Holbein, and Cranach is untouched by that sense of beauty which their Italian contemporaries had evolved from classic influence. Moreover, the German mind was more penetrating, earnest, argumentative than the Italian, more occupied with substantial than with abstract problems. The German temperament also was more combative; incapable of the Italian cynical toleration and at once deeper and narrower in its character.
Consequently the German erudition began to apply itself to concrete problems, such as theological criticism and the absolute authority claimed by the Church. The Bible was opened up to the Germans as a new book. As the Classics had served to emancipate the Italian intellect and will, so the Bible emancipated the German conscience. “The touch of the new spirit which in Italy had evolved literature, art, and culture, sufficed in Germany to recreate Christianity.” The sale of Indulgences by Leo X and Luther’s protest but served to set the spark to the explosion, which, long in preparation, split Teutonic and Latin Christianity, and involved Western Europe for two centuries in politico-religious strife.
For gradually it had become recognised that the new “heresy” threatened the authority alike of monarchical government and the Papacy. Orthodoxy and absolutism were the two sides of the same shield. The Church had begun to realise that there was as much danger to its authority in the Pagan revival of the Italian Renaissance as in Protestantism. Both papal and imperial authority were threatened. Accordingly, Pope Clement VII and Emperor Charles V entered into a compact at Bologna in 1530, to maintain in its integrity the Catholic Faith. Thus began the Counter-Reformation, which reformed many of the abuses that had crept into the Church and renewed the fervour of the Catholic religion, but on the other hand, arrayed the forces of conservatism against the march of progress.
SPANISH RENAISSANCE
It was in Spain that the Counter-Reformation was most zealous. Although the influence of the Italian Renaissance had reached her, she had rejected its pagan aspects. On the one hand, her rulers jealously guarded their title of “Catholic Majesty.” On the other hand, the released energies of the country had been largely directed to the commercial conquests, opened up by the discovery of America, which encouraged that self-reliance and absorption in self that were characteristic of the Spanish temperament. Spaniards had upheld the Faith in their long contest with the Saracen intruders and still considered themselves the Champions of Christendom. Meanwhile, the intellectual activity inspired by the Renaissance gave them renewed belief in themselves and established them in their interest in the affairs of their own life.
Typical alike of the Spanish race and of the effect upon it of the Renaissance is the “Don Quixote” of Cervantes, whom Symonds ranks with Ariosto, Rabelais, and Shakespeare as the four supreme literary exponents of the Renaissance. For each of these caught the spirit of the Renaissance when it was at the first freshness of its vigour in their respective countries and, instead of using it to imitate the past, captured its imagination into the vernacular of his own language, making it a most flexible and vital medium for the expression of the spirit of his own time and country. In Cervantes’ case the racial humour punctured with ridicule the affectations into which the old order of Chivalry had degenerated.
That the new attitude toward life which it indirectly advocated, failed to be realised by the Spaniards may be attributed to two causes. One is the Counter-Reformation which rallied the forces of reactionism and the other, the easily gotten wealth that poured into the country from the New World. The one, associated with Monarchical absolutism, destroyed political progress, while the other swamped initiative and the vigorous handling of life, resulting in both moral and economical decadence.
Yet the inherent raciness of the Spanish people could not be entirely suppressed. It declared itself especially in the prolific, versatile, truly national drama of Lope de Vega and Calderon, which pictured the life of the people with a variety and richness that have been surpassed only by Shakespeare. Moreover, after an apprenticeship of the Spanish painters to the works of Raphael and other Italians, the seventeenth century produced the greatest of all naturalistic painters in the person of Velasquez. Nevertheless, despite certain brilliant exceptions, it was the tragedy of Spain that at the moment, when her Renaissance was approaching fulfilment, it was strangled.
FRENCH RENAISSANCE
Very different was the part played by France. Her native genius had to some extent anticipated the spirit of Humanism, so she embraced the learning and culture of the Renaissance eagerly but with discrimination. She utilised both, not in the way of imitation, but as enrichment to her own self-expression; and, finally, as Italy declined, assumed the leadership of European culture.