The Renaissance: A Thesis
How unsatisfactory are those explanations of the Renaissance which give as its cause the breaking up of the restrictive intellectual canons of the Middle Ages—as if a mere negation could explain such a unique creative era! What has here to be discovered is how freedom and the capacity for freedom should have appeared at the same moment. Perhaps the Middle Ages have now been sufficiently reviled by the admirers of the Renaissance; perhaps that event owed more than we are willing to acknowledge to the centuries of mediæval repression and discipline. During these centuries the human spirit had been confined in the granite channel cut for it by mediæval Christianity, a channel of which even the mouth was stopped. In the fifteenth century the stream swept away every obstacle and leapt forth, a brilliant cascade, scattering almost pagan warmth and light. The fall of Constantinople and the other circumstances usually given as the explanation of this outburst were only its occasion; the cause lay much deeper, in the long storing up, conserving and strengthening of human powers. The freedom of which the Renaissance was an expression was more, then, than the simple removal of restriction. It was a freedom not political or moral, but vital; a positive enhancement if the natural power of man, who could now do things which hitherto he could not do—an event in the history, not merely of society, but of Man. Accordingly, the "freedom of the individual," so dear to some moderns, does not teach us much here. It was not because freedom was given to them that men now created: the freedom was claimed because they now possessed more power, could do more, and had, therefore, the right to a larger sphere of freedom. The more naturally free—that is, individually powerful—a people become, the more they will demand and obtain of "individual freedom"; but it is perhaps inexpedient to offer to a people individually weak any more freedom than they can use. They are still at the disciplinary stage; they are preparing for their renaissance; and to the student of human culture the periods of preparation, of unproductiveness, are more worthy of consideration than the productive periods. For in the future we must prepare for our eras of fruition, and not leave them, as in the past, to pure chance.
At the Renaissance, however, it was not even individual freedom in the modern democratic sense that was claimed and allowed; it was at the most the freedom of certain individuals, the naturally free, the powerful. Not until a later time was this claim to be universalized by the unconditional theorists, the generalizers sans distinction, the egalitarians. The French Revolution was the Renaissance rationalized and popularized.
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The Unproductive Periods
Without the Middle Ages the Renaissance would have been impossible; the one, therefore, was as necessary as the other; and our reprobation of the former for its comparative sterility is entirely without justification. If we happen to be living in an unproductive age, it is our misfortune, then; but we are not entitled, in contemplating this age, to the luxury of condemnation, reproof or scorn. What we may demand of any period now is that it should be a period either of preparation or of fruition. So the present era is, after all, deserving of condemnation, but only because it is not an era of preparation—not for any other reason.
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Duties of the Unproductive
The history of culture is the history of long ages of unproductiveness broken by short eras of production; but unproductiveness is the rule. The men born in barren periods have not, then, the right to bewail their lot: we have not that right. But what is of the first importance, for the sake of culture, is to find out what are the duties proper to men in a sterile age. Certainly their duty it is not to produce whether they are productive or not; that can only result in abortions and painful caricatures: does not contemporary literature demonstrate it? The work that is born out of the poverty of the artist is, as Nietzsche pointed out, decadent work, and debases the spectator, lowers his vitality.
What, then, are the tasks of a writer in an unproductive age? To live sparely and conserve strength? To make discipline more rigid? To preserve and fortify the tradition of culture? To render more accessible the sources from which creative literature draws its life, so that the next generation may be better placed? To observe vigilantly the signs of today—and not only of today? It may be so; but, also, when necessary, to throw these prudent and preservative tasks to the winds and spend his last ounce of strength in battling with the demons who make a productive era forever impossible. Yes, this last duty is for us today—the most important. And, we may depend, it is the creators—those who produce what they should not—who will fight most bitterly on the opposite side.