INDEX[579]

BOOK IV
RENAISSANCE CRITICISM

“Le materie da scienza, o da arte, o da istoria comprese, possano esser convenevoli soggetti a poesia, e a poemi, pure che poeticamente sieno trattate.”—Patrizzi.

CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTORY—ERASMUS.

THE CRITICAL STARTING-POINT OF THE RENAISSANCE—INFLUENCES AT WORK: GENERAL—PARTICULAR—WEAKNESS OF VERNACULARS—RECOVERY OF ANCIENT CRITICISM—NECESSITY OF DEFENCE AGAINST PURITANISM—THE LINE OF CRITICISM RESULTANT—NOT NECESSARILY ANTI-MEDIÆVAL, BUT CLASSICAL AND ANTI-PURITAN—ERASMUS—THE ‘CICERONIANUS'—THE ‘COLLOQUIES’—THE ‘LETTERS’—DISTRIBUTION OF THE BOOK.

We saw, in the second section of the Interchapter which served as Conclusion to the first volume of this work, to what a point The Critical starting-point of the Renaissance. the Middle Ages had brought the materials and the methods of Literary Criticism, and what the new age with its combined opportunities might have done. We also endeavoured to indicate generally, and so to speak, proleptically, what it did not do. It is now time to examine what it did: and in the course of the examination to develop the reasons, the character, and the consequences, both of its commission and of its abstention.[[1]]

If no period has ever been more guilty of that too usual injustice to predecessors which we noted, it is fair to acknowledge that none had greater temptations to such injustice. The breach between the Classical and the Dark Ages had been almost astonishingly gradual—so gradual that it has needed no great hardiness of paradox to enable men to deny that there was any breach at all. On the other hand, though the breach at the Renaissance[[2]] is capable of being, and has sometimes been, much exaggerated; though it was preceded by a considerable transition period, and though mediæval characteristics survived it long and far, yet the turning over of the new leaf is again incontestable, and was as necessary in the order of thought as it is certain in the sequence of fact.

It is not much more than a hundred years since the French Revolution, a single event in one department only of things Influences at work: General. actual, was sufficient to precipitate a change which is only less—which some would hold likely to be not less—than the change at the beginning of the Dark Ages, and the change at the end of the Middle. At the Renaissance, not one but three or four such events, in as many different departments, brought their shock to bear upon the life and mind of Europe. The final disappearance of the Eastern Empire, and the apparent—perhaps, indeed, a little more than apparent—danger of a wide and considerable barbarian invasion of even Western Europe, with the balancing of this after a sort a little later by the extinction of the Moorish power in Spain, coincided, as regards politics, with a general tendency throughout Europe towards the change of feudal into centralised monarchy. The determination (resulting no doubt from no single cause, and taking effect after long preparation) of direct, practical, and extensive study to the Classics, especially to Greek, affected not merely literature, but almost everything of which literature treats. The invention of printing enormously facilitated, not merely the study but, the diffusion and propagation of ideas and patterns. The discovery of America, and of the sea-route to the East, excited that spirit of exploration and adventure which, once aroused, is sure not to limit itself to the material world. And, lastly, the long-threatened and at last realised protest against the corruptions of the Christian Church, and the domination of the Pope, unsettled, directly or indirectly, every convention, every compromise, every accepted doctrine. In fact, to use the words of one of the greatest of English writers,[[3]] in what is perhaps his most brilliant passage, “in the fabric of habit which they had so laboriously built for themselves, men could remain no longer.”