HISTORY OF ANCIENT LITERATURE IN EUROPE FROM 1520 TO 1550.
Classical Taste of the Italians—Ciceronians—Erasmus attacks them—Writings on Roman Antiquity—Learning in France—Commentaries of Budæus—Progress of Learning in Spain, Germany, England—State of Cambridge and Oxford—Advance of Learning still slow—Encyclopædic Works.
Superiority of Italy in taste. 1. Italy, the genial soil where the literature of antiquity had been first cultivated, still retained her superiority in the fine perception of its beauties, and in the power of retracing them by spirited imitation. It was the land of taste and sensibility; never surely more so than in the age of Raffaelle as well as Ariosto. Far from the clownish ignorance so long predominant in the transalpine aristocracy, the nobles of Italy, accustomed to a city life, and to social festivity, more than to war or the chase, were always conspicuous for their patronage, and, what is more important than mere patronage, their critical skill in matters of art and elegant learning. Among the ecclesiastical order this was naturally still more frequent. If the successors of Leo X. did not attain so splendid a name, they were perhaps, after the short reign of Adrian VI., which, if we may believe the Italian writers, seemed to threaten an absolute return of barbarism,[627] not less munificent or sedulous in encouraging polite and useful letters. The first part indeed of this period of thirty years was very adverse to the progress of learning; especially in that disastrous hour when the lawless mercenaries of Bourbon’s army were led on to the sack of Rome. In this, and in other calamities of the same kind, it happened that universities and literary academies were broken up, that libraries were destroyed or dispersed. That of Sadolet, having been with difficulty saved in the pillage of Rome, was dispersed, in consequence of shipwreck during its transport to France.[628] A better æra commenced with the pacification of Italy in 1531. The subsequent wars were either transient, or partial in their effects. The very extinction of all hope for civil freedom, which characterised the new period, turned the intellectual energies of an acute and ardent people towards those tranquil pursuits, which their rulers would both permit and encourage.
[627] Valerianus, in his treatise De Infelicitate Litteratorum, a melancholy series of unfortunate authors, in the manner, though not quite with the spirit and interest, of M. D’Israeli, speaks of Adrian VI. as of another Paul II. in hatred of literature. Ecce adest musarum et eloquentiæ, totiusque nitoris hostis acerrimus, qui literatis omnibus inimicitias minitatur, quoniam, ut ipse dictitabat, Terentiani essent, quos cum odisse atque etiam persequi cœpisset, voluntarium alii exilium, alias atque alias alii latebras quærentes, tamdiu latuere, quoad Dei beneficio, altero imperii anno decessit, qui si aliquanto diutius vixissit, Gotica illa tempora adversus bonas literas videbatur suscitaturus. Lib. ii. p. 34. It is but fair to add, that Erasmus ascribes to Adrian the protection of letters in the Low Countries. Vix nostra phalanx sustinuisset hostium conjurationem, ni Adrianus tum Cardinalis, postea Romanus pontifex, hoc edidisset oraculum: Bonus literas non damno, hæreses et schismata damno. Epist. Mclxxvi. There is not indeed much in this; but the Biographie Universelle (Suppl. art. Busleiden) informs us that this pope was compelled to interfere in order to remove the impediments to the foundation of Busleiden’s Collegium Trilingue at Louvain. It is well known that Adrian VI. was inclined to reform some abuses in the church; enough to set the Italians against him. See his life, in Bayle, Note D.
[628] Cum enim direptis rebus cæteris, libri soli superstites ab hostium injuria intacti, in navim conjecti, ad Galliæ littus jam pervecti essent, incidit in vectores, et in ipsos familiares meos pestilentia. Quo metu ii permoti, quorum ad littora navis appulsa fuerat, onera in terram exponi non permisere. Ita asportati sunt in alienas et ignotas terras; exceptisque voluminibus paucis, quæ deportavi mecum huc proficiscens, mei reliqui illi tot labores quos impenderamus, Græcis præsertim codicibus conquirendis undique et colligendis, mei tanti sumptus meæ curæ, omnes iterum jam ad nihilum reciderunt. Sadolet. Epist. lib. i. p. 23. (Colon. 1554.)]
Admiration of Antiquity. 2. The real excellence of the ancients in literature as well as art gave rise to an enthusiastic and exclusive admiration of antiquity, not unusual indeed in other parts of Europe, but in Italy a sort of national pride which all partook. They went back to the memory of past ages for consolation in their declining fortunes, and conquered their barbarian masters of the north in imagination with Cæsar and Marius. Everything that reminded them of the slow decay of Rome, sometimes even their religion itself, sounded ill in their fastidious ears. Nothing was so much at heart with the Italian scholars, as to write a Latin style, not only free from barbarism, but conformable to the standard of what is sometimes called the Augustan age, that is of the period from Cicero to Augustus. Several of them affected to be exclusively Ciceronian.
Sadolet. 3. Sadolet, one of the apostolic secretaries under Leo X. and Clement VII., and raised afterwards to the purple by Paul III., stood in as high a rank as any for purity of language without affectation, though he seems to have been reckoned of the Ciceronian school. Except his epistles, however, none of Sadolet’s works are now read, or even appear to have been very conspicuous in his own age; though Corniani has given an analysis of a treatise on education.[629] |Bembo.| A greater name, in point of general literary reputation, was Peter Bembo, a noble Venetian, secretary with Sadolet to Leo, and raised, like him, to the dignity of a cardinal by Paul III. Bembo was known in Latin and in Italian literature; and in each language both as a prose writer and a poet. We shall thus have to regard four claims he prefers to a niche in the temple of fame, and we shall find none of them ungrounded. In pure Latin style he was not perhaps superior to Sadolet, but would not have yielded to any competitor in Europe. It has been told, in proof of Bembo’s scrupulous care to give his compositions the utmost finish, that he kept forty portfolios, into which every sheet entered successively, and was only taken out to undergo his corrections, before it entered into the next limbo of this purgatory. Though this may not be quite true, it is but an exaggeration of the laborious diligence by which he must often have reduced his sense to feebleness and vacuity. He was one of those exclusive Ciceronians who, keenly feeling the beauties of their master’s eloquence, and aware of the corruption which after the age of Augustus came rapidly over the purity of style, rejected with scrupulous care not only every word or phrase which could not be justified by the practice of what was called the golden age, but even insisted on that of Cicero himself, as the only model they thought absolutely perfect. Paulus Manutius, one of the most rigorous, though of the most eminent among these, would not employ the words of Cicero’s correspondents, though as highly accomplished and polite as himself. This fastidiousness was of course highly inconvenient in a language constantly applicable to the daily occurrences of life in epistles or in narration, and it has driven Bembo, according to one of his severest critics, into strange affectation and circuity in his Venetian history. It produced also, what was very offensive to the more serious reader, and is otherwise frigid and tasteless, an adaptation of heathen phrases to the usages and even the characters of Christianity.[630] It has been remarked also, that in his great solicitude about the choice of words, he was indifferent enough to the value of his meaning; a very common failing of elegant scholars, when they write in a foreign language. But if some praise is due, as surely it is, to the art of reviving that consummate grace and richness which enchants every successive generation in the periods of Cicero, we must place Bembo, had we nothing more than this to say of him, among the ornaments of literature in the sixteenth century.
[629] Niceron says of Sadolet’s Epistles, which form a very thick volume: Il y a plusieurs choses dignes d’être remarquées dans les lettres de Sadolet; mais elles sont quelquefois trop diffuses, et par conséquent ennuyeuses à lire. I concur in this: yet it may be added, that the epistles of Cicero would sometimes be tedious, if we took as little interest in their subjects as we commonly do in those of Sadolet. His style is uniformly pure and good; but he is less fastidious than Bembo, and does not use circuity to avoid a theological expression. They are much more interesting, at least, than the ordinary Latin letters of his contemporaries, such as those of Paulus Manutius. A uniform goodness of heart, and love of right, prevail in the epistles of Sadolet. His desire of ecclesiastical reformation in respect of morals has caused him to be suspected of a bias towards protestantism, and a letter he wrote to Melanchthon, which that learned man did not answer, has been brought in corroboration of this; but the general tenor of his letters refutes this surmise. His theology, which was wholly semi-pelagian, must have led him to look with disgust on the Lutheran school (Epist. l. iii. p. 121, and l. ix. p. 410); and after Paul III. bestowed on him the purple, he became a staunch friend of the court of Rome, though never losing his wish to see a reform of its abuses. This will be admitted by every one who takes the trouble to run over Sadolet’s epistles.
[630] This affectation had begun in the preceding century, and was carried by Campano in his Life of Braccio di Montone to as great an extreme as by Bembo, or any Ciceronian of his age. Bayle (Bembus, Note B.) gives some odd instances of it in the latter. Notwithstanding his laborious scrupulosity as to language, Bembo is reproached by Lipsius, and others of a more advanced stage of critical knowledge, with many faults of Latin, especially in his letters. Ibid. Sturm says of the letters of Bembo: Ejus epistolæ scriptæ mihi magis quam missæ esse videntur. Indicia sunt hominis otiosi et imitatoris speciem magis rerum quam res ipsas consectantis. Ascham, Epist. cccxci.
Ciceronianus of Erasmus. 4. The tone which Bembo and others of that school were studiously giving to ancient literature, provoked one of the most celebrated works of Erasmus, the dialogues entitled Ciceronianus. The primary aim of these was to ridicule the fastidious purity of that sort of writers, who would not use a case or tense for which they could not find authority in the works of Cicero. A whole winter’s night, they thought, was well spent in composing a single sentence; but even then it was to be revised over and over again. Hence they wrote little except elaborated epistles. One of their rules, he tells us, was never to speak Latin, if they could help it, which must have seemed extraordinary in an age when it was the common language of scholars from different countries. It is certain, indeed, that the practice cannot be favourable to very pure Latinity.