"La formule qui définit le mieux Pétrarque est celle qui le désigne comme "le premier homme moderne." Par la direction de sa pensée, il échappe presque entièrement à l'influence de son siècle et de son milieu, ce qui est sans doute la marque la moins contestable du génie."—PIERRE DE NOLHAC.
History is the memory of mankind; it far outruns the narrow range of our own personal recollections and enables us to participate consciously in a process of change so impressive in its vast length and complexity as to reduce the experiences of our own generation to a mere incident. It makes it possible for us to see not only how to-day is growing out of yesterday, and this year out of last, but how the nineteenth century prepared the way for the twentieth, the eighteen for the nineteenth, and so on, back and back to the very beginnings of man's lineage. No one of us has precisely the same experiences two days in succession, and yet amid the most considerable vicissitudes of life we always carry over from day to day and year to year a great part of our habits and convictions,—which constitute what others call our character. The life of a people, although much more stable than that of most of its members, is always slowly and irrevocably altering; it is in the main a perpetuation of the old but always possesses some element of the new, since the individuals who compose a nation, as well as the conditions under which they live, are always changing.
The historian should reckon with both the old and the new in tracing man's past; he must show not only how things have changed but how they have remained the same. The mass of hoary tradition and ancient custom which enters so generously into every stage of civilisation, no matter how progressive, often, however, escapes his observation. Successful historians are men of letters who have something of the poet, the dramatist or the story-teller in them, and in order to construct a narrative which has any chance of appealing to their readers they are forced, following the example of the playwright, to divide the past into periods, like the scenes in a play, and assign to each a dominant motive. In doing this they are tempted greatly to exaggerate the exceptional and novel. Moreover, since the historian can include in his story but a very small part of the multitudinous experiences of mankind during the period with which he is dealing, he inevitably selects what will fit into a coherent narrative and neglects all the rest; he must introduce order where there is essential confusion, lucidity where there is obscurity, and discover simplicity where their is inextricable complexity.
As a result of this highly artificial nature of the historian's work—of which he himself is usually unconscious—historical legends arise, which by reason of their dramatic character and their plausible simplicity are eagerly and widely accepted, and only reluctantly abandoned when some of the vast number of facts which have been neglected in their formation are given an opportunity to assert themselves. The pretty myth of the common origin and gradual dispersion of all those peoples whose language belongs to the Indo-European group has been dissipated by recollecting that a common language does not necessarily imply a common racial origin. The legend that Luther first translated the Bible into German vanishes before a list of the numerous editions of German Bibles printed during the fifty years previous to his undertaking. The publication of Napoleon's letters add too many facts to permit one longer to accept what Thiers and John S. C. Abbott say of him. A similar fate awaits the Renaissance; that, too, has assumed the form of a myth, which is threatened by a consideration of certain obvious facts which its authors innocently, but none the less fatally, overlooked.
As this word is used in histories of literature, art, and philosophy, it implies a freeing of man's mind from the shackles of the Middle Ages; he discovers himself and the world in all its beauty and interest; he shakes off religious dependence and becomes self-reliant; he casts aside the cowl and goes forth joyfully into the sunlight. This awakening has been attributed to a revived interest in the neglected works of the classical authors. They were potent, it has been assumed, to bring new life into a paralysed world, so soon as they become the object of passionate study and emulation. It was they, it has been claimed, that dispelled the gloomy superstition of the Dark Ages and aroused a buoyant spirit of Hellenism which enabled men to soar above the fruitless subtleties of Scholastic Theology.
This conception of the Renaissance is much more recent in origin than is usually supposed; it is scarcely more than fifty years old, and finds its first clear presentation in the well-known Civilisation of the Renaissance, which the Basel professor, Jacob Burckhardt, published in 1860. Fifteen years later John Addington Symonds began to issue his stately series of volumes on The Renaissance in Italy. The charm of his style served to popularise the conception of a distinctive period during which Europe awoke from its winter sleep and developed those traits of character which we deem essentially modern. For a generation or more the Renaissance has been the theme of innumerable popular books and lectures and has constituted a recognised "epoch" in manuals of historical instruction.
That it is a convenient term no one will deny! The civilisation of the Italian city states in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and early sixteenth centuries, from Dante to Machiavelli, from Giotto to Raphael, presents so much of rich delight that we ought to have a suitable name for it all. In this sense the expression, Renaissance, will probably continue to be used; but it is safe to predict that as we gain fuller insight into the conditions which preceded and followed this period it will be ranked much lower than hitherto as a time of decisive progress in human knowledge and ideals. Neither Burckhardt nor Symonds were cognisant of the extraordinary achievements of what they called vaguely the Middle Ages. And both of them were so classical-minded as to have but an inadequate appreciation of how slight were the intellectual changes of the Renaissance compared with those that developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the results of which make the world in which we live what it is.