III. (a) The case of Venice has to be explained in respect of its special conditions. Venice was from the first partly aloof from ordinary Italian life by reason of its situation and its long Byzantine connections. It was further an aristocratic republic of the old Roman type, its patrician class developing as a caste of commanders and administrators; and its foreign possessions, added to in every century, reinforced this tendency.[584] The early usage of civic trading, carried on by means of fleets owned by the State, was habitually turned to the gain of the ruling minority. The use of the fleets was generally granted to monopoly companies, who paid no duties, while private persons did; the middle classes in general being allowed to trade only under burdensome restrictions.[585] Here were conditions contrary in effect to those of the progressive days of Greece. Contrasted with Florence, the Italian Athens, Venice has even been likened to Sparta by a modern Italian.[586] It has been more justly compared, however,[587] with Rhodes, which, unlike Sparta, was primarily a commercial and a maritime power; and where, as in Venice, the rich merchants patronised the arts rather than letters. From the first Venice achieved its wealth by an energetically prosecuted trade, with no basis of landed property to set up a leisured class. In such a city the necessarily high standards of living,[588] as well as the prevailing habit and tradition, would keep men of the middle class away from literature;[589] and only men of the middle class like Dante, or leisured officials like Poggio and Boccaccio and Machiavelli, are found to do important literary work even in Florence. Hence the small share of Venice in the structure of Italian literature.
The same explanation partly holds good of art. Venice, however, at length gave the needed economic furtherance; and men of other communities could there find a market, as did Greek sculptors in imperial Rome. Obviously a despot could not have evoked artists of Venetian birth any more than did the Republic, save by driving men out of commerce. But it is in Venice, where wealth and the republican form lasted longest, that we find almost the last of the great artists—Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese. After these the Caracci, Guido, and many others gravitate to Rome, where the reorganised Church regains some riches with power. We are to remember, too, that the aristocratic rulers saw to the food supply of the whole Republic by a special promotion of agriculture in its possessions, particularly in Candia; besides carefully making treaties which secured its access to the grain markets of Sicily, Egypt, and North Africa.[590] Here again we have to recognise a form of civic self-preserving resource special in origin to republics, though afterwards exploited by autocracies, as earlier in the case of imperial Rome.
The fact that Venice did maintain great artists after the artistic arrest of Tuscany and Lombardy, is part of the proof that, as above contended (p. 221), it was papal and Spanish misrule rather than the change in the channels of trade that impoverished Italy in the sixteenth century. Venice could still prosper by her manufactures when her commerce was partly checked, because the volume of European trade went on increasing. As Hallam notes: "We are apt to fall into a vulgar error in supposing that Venice was crushed, or even materially affected [phrase slightly modified in footnote], as a commercial city, by the discoveries of the Portuguese. She was in fact more opulent, as her buildings themselves may prove, in the sixteenth century than in any preceding age. The French trade from Marseilles to the Levant, which began later to flourish, was what impoverished Venice rather than that of Portugal with the East Indies." As the treatise of Antonio Serra shows (1613), Venice was rich when Spanish Naples was poor (Introduction to the Literature of Europe, ed. 1872, iii, 165, 166).
(b) As regards Genoa, the explanation is similar. That republic resembled Venice in that it was from the beginning a city apart from the rest of Italy, devoted to foreign commerce, and absorbed in the management of distant possessions or trade colonies. When we compare the intellectual history of two such States with that of Florence, which was not less but more republican in its government, it becomes clear that it was not republicanism that limited culture in the maritime cities. Rather we must recognise that their development is analogous with that of England in the eighteenth century, when the growth of commerce, of foreign possessions, and of naval power seems to have turned the general energies, hitherto in large proportion intellectually employed, predominantly towards practical and administrative employment.[591] The case of Florence is the test for the whole problem. Its pre-eminence in art and letters alike is to be explained through (1) its being in constant touch with all the elements of Italian and other European culture; and (2) its having no direct maritime interests and no foreign possessions.[592]
IV. With the patronage of the princes of Ferrara, history associates the poetry of Ariosto and Tasso, though as a matter of fact the Orlando Furioso seems to have been written before Ariosto entered the ducal service. But even if that and the Gerusalemme be wholly credited to the principle of monarchism, it only needs to weigh the two works against those which were brought forth in the atmosphere of the free cities in order to see how little mere princely pay can avail for power and originality in literature where the princely rule thwarts the great instincts of personality. Ariosto and Tasso are charming melodists; and as such they have had an influence on European literature; but they have waned in distinction age by age, while earlier and later names have waxed. And all the while, what is delightful in them is clearly enough the outcome of the still manifold Italian culture in which they grew, though it may be that the influence of a court would do more to foster sheer melody than would the storm and stress of the life of a Republic.
Sismondi (Républiques italiennes, iv, 416-18), admits the encouragement given to men of letters by despots like Can' Grande, and the frequent presence of poets at the courts. But he rightly insists that the faculty of imagination itself visibly dwindled when intellectual freedom was gone. It is interesting to note how Montaigne, writing within a century of the production of the Orlando Furioso, is struck by its want of sustained imaginative flight in comparison with Virgil (Essais, B. ii, 10; éd. Firmin-Didot, vol. i, p. 432). Compare the estimate of Cantù, Storia degli Italiani, cap. 142, ed. pop. x, 180-86.
In fine, we can rightly say with Mr. Symonds himself that the history of the Renaissance is not the history of arts, or of sciences, or even of nations. It is the history of the attainment of self-conscious freedom by the human spirit manifested in the European races.[593] And this process, surely, was not accomplished at the courts of the despots. Nor can it well be disputed, finally, that the Spanish domination was the visible and final check to intellectual progress on the side of imaginative literature, at a time when there was every prospect of a great development of Italian drama. "It was the Inquisitors and Spaniards who cowed the Italian spirit."[594]
Equally clear is it that the republican life evolved an amount of expansive commercial energy which at that period could not possibly have taken place under a tyrant. The efforts by which Florence developed her trade and power—efforts made possible by the mere union of self-interest among the commercial class—will compare with any process of monarchic imperialism in respect of mere persistency and success. Faced by the jealous enmity of Pisa, their natural port, and suffering from the trade burdens laid on them by the maritime States while they lacked a marine, the Florentines actually opened up trade communication with China when shut out from Egypt by the Venetians; traded through the port of Talamone when the Pisans barred their traffic; took Provençal and Neapolitan galleys in their pay when the Pisans and Genoese tried to close Talamone; and, after becoming masters of Pisa in 1406, not only established a well-ordered marine, but induced Genoa to sell to them the port of Leghorn. They could not, indeed, successfully compete with the Genoese and Venetians till the fall of the Greek Empire; but thereafter they contrived to obtain abundant concessions from the Turks, while the Genoese were driven out of the Levant. Commercial egoism, in fact, enabled them to tread the path of "empire" even as emperors had done long before them; and they hastened to the stage of political collapse on the old military road, spending on one war of two years, against Visconti, a sum equal to £15,000,000 at the present time; and in the twenty-nine years of struggle against Pisa (1377-1406) a sum equal to £58,000,000.[595] Thus they developed a capitalistic class, undermined in the old way the spirit of equity which is the cement of societies, and prepared their own subjection to a capitalist over-lord. But that is only another way of saying that the period of expansive energy preceded the age of the tyrant, wise or unwise.
When all is said, however, there can be no gainsaying of the judgment that the strifes of the republics were the frustration of their culture; and it matters little whether or not we set down the inveteracy of the strifes to the final scantiness and ill-distribution of the culture. Neither republics nor princes seem ever to have aimed at its diffusion. The latter, in common with the richer ecclesiastics, did undoubtedly promote the recovery of the literature of antiquity; but where the republics had failed to see any need for systematic popular tuition[596] the princes naturally did not dream of it. It would be a fallacy, however, to suppose that, given the then state of knowledge and of political forces, any system of public schooling could have saved Italian liberty. No class had the science that could solve the problem which pressed on all. The increase and culmination of social and political evil in Renaissance Italy was an outcome of more forces than could be checked by any expedient known to the thought of the time. It must never be forgotten that the very dividedness of the cities, by maximising energy, had been visibly a cause of their growth in riches;[597] and that, though peace could have fostered that when once it had been attained, anything like a federation which should secure to the satisfaction of each their conflicting commercial interests was an enormously difficult conception. It would be a bad fallacy, again, to suppose that there was lacking to the Italians of the Renaissance a kind of insight or judgment found in other peoples of the same period. There is no trace of any such estimate in that age; and we who look back upon it are rather set marvelling at the intense and luminous play of Italian intelligence, keen as that of Redskins on the trail, so far as the realisation of the self-expressive and self-assertive appetites could go. The tragedy of the decadence, here as in the case of Rome, is measured by the play of power from which men and States fall away; for the forces which next came to the top stand for no mental superiority. The problem, in fact, was definitely beyond the grasp of the age. It remains to realise this by a survey of the process of decline from self-government to despotism.