There is a curious pathos in the attempt of every vigorous outgrowth of human endeavour to disown the prior activity which gave it birth. The ancient fable of the chick and the egg-shell is of perennial meaning and pertinence. Militant Christianity marched forward wholly unconscious of its own vast debt to the very paganism upon which it thrust itself in holy war. The novel fervour of asceticism had extinguished science before the end of the third century, art in the sixth and seventh, and the Greek language by the ninth. But the transition of Italy from paganism to Christianity was not a substitution of wholly new ideals for old. It was the gradual absorption of all the permanent elements in pagan culture into a religion of which the germ only was brought from the Hebrew world, and which owed most of its strength and much of its weakness to the rich and heterogeneous soil in which it was planted. The extravagances of mediæval Christianity—its austere intolerance and contempt of the natural and obvious, its demand, in the first strenuous tension of novelty and triumph, for the subjective and the transcendental life—breaking up, when the strain was relaxed, into a hard formalism of thought and practice—these were but the inevitable reaction from the grossness of a degenerate paganism whose vital force was spent. The immense lapse of time occupied by the transition from paganism to Christianity, as Mr. Bernard Bosanquet ably points out in dealing with the issues of that change, gave room for as many secondary waves of action and reaction within itself as did the movement of the Renaissance which succeeded it. “From the first distinct breach in naïve or natural paganism to the assumption of a definitely doctrinal and orthodox form of Christianity, there is an interval which cannot be reckoned at less than seven hundred years, from the death of Socrates to the triumph of Christianity under Constantine. So far from being a new thing, contrasting with the degradation of the pagan world, the establishment of Christianity was the issue of the advance of that world during four centuries, and it was not thoroughly completed until, in a further development of five centuries, it had adopted from paganism the germs of almost all permanently valuable elements that the latter contained.... The Dark Ages are not a proof that the great classical culture had lost its power for human welfare; they prove only how long a discipline was needed by the mass of humanity before it could appreciate more than the first stammering misapprehension of its great inheritance.”[[2]]
The dawn, then, of the Renaissance in Italy, was the waking of the mediæval world to the sense of this lost inheritance, yet to be regained; this hidden dower of beauty and gladness, and of strong and abundant life. The old message of the Galilean Christ had to be re-translated, as it has to-day: “I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly,”—not a one-sided life, not a spiritual life at the cost of the body, any more than a bodily life at the cost of the soul, but a life robust, many-sided, catholic; harmonized at all points with what is good and sweet and fair in the physical world as well as what is high and pure and noble in the life within. And that message led men back to the great first principles of conduct and consciousness, till they were confronted afresh with the want of equipoise between physical instinct and moral law which is the root-problem of human history. The struggle for existence in the animal world rises in humanity from a physical to a moral sphere, and passes into a struggle for life.
“History,” says Buckle, “is a record of tendencies, not of events.” The first tendency of the people thus waking, as we have said, to the sense of their own birthright and heritage, partook rather of the first of these two impulses. It was a revolt against the spiritual exclusiveness of the monastic ideal, and a recoil upon Nature,—especially upon the apotheosis and worship of Nature already achieved for them in the Hellenic world. The imperious demands of the physical life, so long starved and neglected, drove men back upon external things; slowly to re-discover, through outward and visible realities, the deeper meanings of which they were in search. The end of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth century saw a new turn of the current of feeling towards liberty and expansion of the whole life of man. The painters set themselves to humanize religion; to bring it into relation with the vital interests of the so-called secular sphere. And as the fine arts became emancipated from sacerdotal control, the spirit of free culture spread into other departments of intellectual activity. In the next century, the revival of learning followed upon the emancipation of art. Literature, religion, painting and sculpture, were infused with the same spirit of experiment and research. Art was brought into touch with scholarship, and scholarship in its turn graced and dignified by art. The essence of romance lies in its utter fidelity to immediate and present life. Its concern is with particular instances, not with abstractions and generalities. Romance is primarily analytic and experimental; classicism, synthetic and positive. Romance is inductive, classicism deductive in its reasoning. Herein romance—deemed for the most part antagonistic to reason and science, approaches more nearly to the scientific spirit than any canons of classic art. Its root and base is in that patient observation of actual things, that sure simplicity and directness of vision, which is the narrow way to knowledge. Hence comes the realism of romance,—the realism both of the early Renaissance and of its later maturity. A dominant characteristic (for instance) of Michaelangelo—the greatest and most fascinating personality of the whole Renaissance period—was, as his latest biographer, Mr. John Addington Symonds, has pointed out, that “he invariably preferred the particular to the universal, the critical moment of an action to suggestions of the possibilities of action.” This feature of the highest Renaissance work, though it seem at first sight to disprove the general theory of romance as the meditative, contrasted with the classic or dramatic form of art, is really consonant with it, since one example of one action is more analytic and reflective in quality than the suggestion of action generally. Our assertion, then, that the first manifestation of the break-up of the monastic system was a return to Nature as revealed and worshipped in the Hellenic ideal, must be qualified by a recognition of another tendency modifying and chastening the first.
The second tendency was towards the reconciliation of the superb naturalism of Grecian art with the Christian spirit of self-discipline and heroic denial. It was an effort after that ultimate balance and harmony prophesied (to bring a modern instance) in Ibsen’s “Third Kingdom;” the kingdom in which the realism of the flesh and the idealism of the spirit shall be blended into one perfect humanity. “It was a movement,” to quote again from Mr. J.A. Symonds, “towards that further point outside both Paganism and mediæval Christianity, at which the classical ideal of a temperate and joyous natural life shall be restored to the conscience educated by the gospel.” The vision of this union was the inspiration of Pre-Raphaelite art. It quickened the hands of the painters to great tasks; it stirred the scholars to a new energy of labour and of hope. The poets, interpreting its meaning for the life of a future Italy, began to speak one to another across the mediæval gloom, as waking birds call and answer, while it is yet dark, with a sure instinct prophetic of the dawn.
Thus the unruffled calm and dignity of Hellenism was troubled, in its re-birth, with a sense of moral conflict and perplexity unknown to the ancient world. A peculiar mysticism resulted upon literature from that revival of the Platonic spirit which was initiated by Pico della Mirandola and his successors in metaphysical thought. Throughout the Pre-Raphaelite epoch, from Cimabue (124O) to Perugino, the master of Raphael (1446), the impulse of naturalism is seen adjusting itself, through much crudeness of expression, through many blunders, solecisms of taste, errors of selection, to the great spiritual passion of Christianity which was still warm at the heart of the thinking world. There is, especially in early Renaissance work, an effect as of divided aims, or of methods long habituated to the old ideal and brought suddenly into the service of the new,—like Heine’s “decayed gods, who, to maintain themselves after the fall of paganism, took employment under the new religion.” The physical loveliness of the saints and angels of Botticelli and Fra Angelico—the last of the purely “religious” painters, in the common acceptance of the word—is hardly congruous with the loftiness of their themes, and almost belies the spiritual intensity and rapture of thought which Botticelli, in later life, drew largely from the influence of Savonarola, and infused increasingly into his own work. Giotto, the pride of the Florentine school and the dominant genius of the fourteenth century, was no less profoundly religious than these; but in the final roll of art he ranks rather as the first great Nature-painter than as one of a distinctly Christian lineage. Taken, like David, from the sheepfold, he brought into art a breezy, pastoral air, and painted before a wide horizon under an open sky. Fra Lippo Lippi added to that wholesome strength and sanity of sight an even clearer perception of natural beauty and grace. The glories of the physical realm, in landscape, in the power of men and in the loveliness of women, were handled now with a growing boldness which outran the delicate timidity that had restrained it in the shadow of the Church. And with the enlargement of intellectual range there came a steady increase of technical power. The skill of choice, of selectiveness in art, of composition, draughtsmanship, colouring,—in a word, the science of expression, was brought to bear upon the ready message waiting for the perfecting of its vehicles. The adaptation of language to thought, which was the task of the fifteenth century, was achieved by the immediate predecessors of Raphael in a measure unequalled in the history of the modern world. And that such an adjustment should resolve itself, as it did, into a fresh conflict between the forces momentarily reconciled, proves, not that the success of the effort was spurious, but rather that the struggle between thought and language in art is but one manifestation of the eternal striving of the Spirit with the imperfect medium of the flesh.
But this rare consummation of harmony between the erstwhile conflicting principles of classicism and romance, though reaching its highest point in Leonardo and Michaelangelo, achieved in the Venetian school a technical effect which appealed even more strongly to the æsthetic passion re-born in Rossetti and his friends, as they looked back across the ages in their search for example and light. In Giorgione, the creator of idyllic genre painting in the fourteenth century, and in Titian, of whom Rossetti himself was in due course the natural successor, they found all the mystic sensuousness of the new Paganism in a setting which, to adapt a well-worn phrase, revealed instead of concealing the soul within. Here, at least, was the apotheosis of colour, which is itself a characteristic quality of all romantic revivals: wherefore painting has always been specifically the romantic medium in art, while the classic temper finds in sculpture its most congenial sphere. Classicism invariably compromises with the tints of nature; it resolves the ever-varying hues of earth and sky into the formula of the spectroscope; it tends, in its purest and noblest phases, towards marble and the statuesque. Here was the perfection of artistic language, as Ruskin would call it; the delight in strong and full utterance for its own sake, wherein lurks the perennial danger of greatness in technique. With all its glow and glory of natural life, the Venetian school was primarily decorative in character, and therefore merged the more readily into the gradual substitution of form for matter, the general deterioration of naturalism into sensuality, which overtook Italian art after the decadence of Raphael.
Together with the more robust conception of the physical life which supervened in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, there came a change, partial indeed, but progressive, in the ideals of womanhood. The Madonnas of Botticelli were instinct with a warmth and sensitiveness unknown before in Christian art. If they were immaculate, their perfectness was that of a God-possest humanity rather than of a humanized Godhead. Their faces shine with natural pity and awe and tenderness and love,—the love of the true Mater Dolorosa, sad with
“The burden of the mystery,
... the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world.”