Westward empire

by Elias Lyman Magoon

By a rare phenomenon, these three creative and predominant minds were produced in the same country, in the same age, and their grandest works were executed in the same city. Each of them was so tempered as to adapt the timely triad to widely different and yet equally important purposes. These supreme lights, however, did not shine alone, but each was accompanied by subordinate planets and satellites, which, as they received their effulgence from the supreme luminary, so were they gradually eclipsed, until they disappeared in the distance of age. The three patriarchs of literature in the cycle of Leo X., thus rapidly glanced at, turned the attention of their countrymen from the bewilderments of romance to more substantial worth. Dantè, with the energies of a Titan, threw out great masses of thought; and the lyrical finish of Petrarch, with the garrulous graces of Boccaccio opened other quarries of attractive material. The two last mentioned both died in 1374.

The beginning of the fifteenth century witnessed great ardor for antiquity. A prouder sense of nationality had seized upon the popular heart, and there was a growing ambition to emulate the past and improve the future. Petrarch fired the general enthusiasm for antique monuments, and Rienzi eloquently revived patriotic associations connected therewith. Each leading city became a new Athens, and the revived age could boast its historians, poets, and orators. Naples, Rome, Venice, Bologna, and Florence, vied with each other, not in arms, but in the splendid triumphs of genius. Books were multiplied by numerous expert copyists at Bologna and Milan; while Florence, under the auspices of the Medici, became the great metropolis of original productions. The middle of this century formed the culminating point of classical enthusiasm, and marked an age of great mental enlargement in every department of literature. Hallam, referring to the intellectual pope Nicholas V., in contrast with his famous predecessor Gregory I., who denounced ancient learning, says: "These eminent men, like Michael Angelo's figures of Night and Morning, seem to stand at the two gates of the middle ages, emblems and heralds of the mind's long sleep, and of its awakening."

But the greatest glory of this period was the invention of printing, which will be more particularly noticed under another head. The influence given to the restoration of letters was not suspended by the death of Cosmo de Medici, which occurred in 1464. His wealth and influence over Florence then devolved on his grandson Lorenzo, who employed his great resources in the most distinguished patronage of literature and art. His intimate personal friend, Luigi Pulci, was a leading poet of the modern school, and published the first edition of his Morgante Maggiore at Venice, in 1481. None of the honor attached to the invention of printing belongs to Italy, but it is to be noted how the practical use of that sublime art began on the eastern edge of the peninsula it was destined to revolutionize. The famous Florentine ecclesiastic Poggio, devoted himself particularly to the collection of choice manuscripts, and his exertions were crowned with great success. Fifty years so employed attested the value of his perseverance and sagacity. Politian also contributed much to the glory of this epoch.

Paul II. bestowed special favor upon his countrymen, the Venetians, and this is supposed to have induced the acute and provident Lorenzo to attempt the establishment of the chief ecclesiastical power, also, in his own family. Giovanni de Medici was early destined to the church, and produced those important effects upon Europe and the world which were so conspicuous in his pontificate. Leo X. became pope in 1513. In his patronage of literature, he was the worthy successor of Nicholas V., and began by placing men of letters in the most honorable stations of his court. The great poets of that century, Ariosto, Sanazzaro, the Tassos, Rucellai, Guarini, and the rest, produced their works during his reign. Under his auspices, the great libraries of the age were immensely enriched, and more than one hundred professors in a single university were restored to their alienated revenues. Through the agency of the apostolical secretary, Beroaldo, the first five books of the Annals of Tacitus were published, which had lately been found in a German monastery. Chigi, a private Roman, gave to the world good editions of Pindar and Theocritus in 1515 and 1516; and, under the direction of Lascaris, Leo created an academy expressly for the study of Greek, in which a press was established, where the sciolists of Homer were printed in 1517.

As an Italian prince, and as a Roman pontiff, Leo X. has been accused of indulging an unprincipled policy and vulgar epicurism. It is affirmed that Ariosto received from him nothing beyond fair promises and a kiss; that his table was usually crowded with base and impudent buffoons, and that he did not hesitate to profane Petrarch's laurel and the Capitol by a mock coronation of his laughing-stocks, Querno and Baraballo. But, as a contrast to these defects, it should be remembered that he called round his throne Bembo and Sadoleto, and fostered innumerable men of talent with a liberality which can not fail to elicit the praise of posterity. If the pope hunted, and hawked, and caroused, it was in keeping with the universal moral indifference in the East and South, that ominous calm before the tempest which preceded the mighty reformation of every thing not intrinsically a sham. To the sagacious historian it is not strange that musical retainers were magnificently recompensed, one made an archbishop, and another archdeacon; and that parasitical poets like Berni and Molza, were rewarded by Leo, while his great countryman, Machiavelli, was treated with neglect. It is a significant fact that during the fearful crisis when all the remoter nations of Europe stood aghast at the growing influence of Luther, the jocular pontiff and his secularized ministers found genial amusement in witnessing the representation of farces which exposed the hollow mummeries of priestcraft.

During the first half of the sixteenth century, the study of ancient literature was uniformly progressive in Germany, France, and England; during the succeeding fifty years much greater excellence was attained. Thanks to the patronage of Francis I., the University of Paris at this time stood in the front rank of philological pursuits. In England the cause of learning was greatly promoted at the accession of Elizabeth to the throne, when the universities began to revive. Not only was good Latin often heard on the banks of the Isis and the Cam, but the sovereign herself and her erudite professors could address each other in classic Greek. From ancient poets, historians, and orators, the new race of scholars derived the principles not only of equal justice, but of equal privileges, and learned to reverence free republics, to abhor tyranny, and sympathize with a Brutus or Timoleon. The Adages of Erasmus created almost mutinous indignation against great national wrongs, and a later period witnessed still better results for the popular good.

The effect which was produced by the mixture of the two great races of men, the southern and the northern, is seen in the epical writings of the respective nations. The poem of the Cid was to Spain what the Divina Comedia was to Italy. In the fifteenth century Portuguese literature arose, and, after a brief but beautiful career, expired in the swan-like cry of the Lusiad. Torquato Tasso, the great Italian cotemporary, published his Jerusalem Delivered the year after the death of Camoens.

To the other famous names of Lope de Vega and Calderon, that of Cervantes will ever stand associated with distinguished honor in the annals of Spanish literature. He was born in 1549. While yet young, he was captured by a Barbary corsair, and remained five years and a half in slavery. Maimed and friendless, he returned to Spain, and in 1584, began to publish his influential works. The leading purpose of Cervantes was to exhibit the abuse of the books of chivalry, and to overwhelm with ridicule those romances which are the creations of a diseased imagination, in which attempt he was completely successful. The romances of chivalry ended with Don Quixote; and this was appropriately accomplished at the time when, and in the place where, Columbus was fitted by Providence to reveal that New World which had been kept hid until the time for raising the curtain of a sublimer age. At least one author was now born who believed that "a titled nobility is the most undisputed progeny of barbarism," and that its very existence proves it to be inimical to all the interests of the people. The badges of the former are, idleness, vanity, and luxury; those of the latter are, labor, pride, and necessity. The son of misfortune and wrong, who had been ransomed from vassalage at the expense of a mother's life-toil and the dowry of his sisters, was the fitting instrument to strike the knell of hereditary feudalism, and confront those brazen lords to whom alone Cervantes could do justice.

What Petrarch began in Italy during the fourteenth century was carried on by the fifteenth with unabated activity. The recovery of lost classics and the revival of philology occupied many leading minds. The discovery of an unknown manuscript, says Tiraboschi, was regarded almost as the conquest of a kingdom. Indeed, so zealously did the scholars of this era trim the lamp of ancient sepulchres, that they in a measure overlooked the splendor of their native language. But a keen susceptibility to beauty of form, with the power of expressing it, was manifested to an extraordinary degree at the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth centuries. It was an epoch when the fortress erected by a baron, and the annotation written by a philologist on the margin of his author, were alike characterized by a severe and chaste beauty. Under the liberal and discriminating patronage of Julius II. and Leo X., a vivid appreciation of antique literature, philosophy, and art, became an absorbing passion, and spread in all directions. Referring to the Guicciardini and Machiavelli of that time, Macaulay says: "To collect books and antiques, to found professorships, to patronize men of learning, became almost universal fashions among the great. The spirit of literary research allied itself to that of commercial enterprise; every place to which the merchant princes of Florence extended their gigantic traffic, from the bazaars of the Tigris to the monasteries of the Clyde, was ransacked for medals and manuscripts." A new blood circulated in the veins of Christian nations, and the new inventions which arose created murmurs of revolutions, and foretokened the dawn of a public opinion. The silent subterranean working of the masses engendered the marvelous changes which soon transpired over the whole brightened face of humanity. Whether our attention is fixed on the political or religious history, on the literary progress, the jurisprudence, or the artistic excellence of the age, no century is loftier, richer, or more instructive for modern society than the sixteenth, none more exuberant with life and ennobling advancement. All that has since been perfected in the realm of literature then received much of its primary form and spirit.

From the auspicious hour when the Nibelungen became the Iliad of the North, Germany and France were perpetually progressive. Successive developments of life suffered decay, but no vital principle can ever be annihilated; superannuated forms perish inevitably, but in order only to reproduce a higher type of perpetuated excellence. When inferior nations and tribes disappear after having done the work of precursors, a more useful race is certain immediately to appear, and transmit the torch of divine effulgence which, in the sublime career appointed to be run, had dropped, by superseded hands. There is no death except into a higher life. The last language formed in Europe was the aggregated wealth of all linguistic treasures before accumulated, and is destined eventually to control, if not to absorb every other. All mediævalism blossomed for the West, and the English vernacular was its maturest fruit.