Finally we have to render the tribute due to the humanists for their diffusion of a liberal spirit. Sustained by the enthusiasm of antiquity, they first ventured to take a standpoint outside catholicity; and though they made but bad use of this spiritual freedom, inclining to levity and godlessness instead of fighting the battle of the reason, yet their large and human survey of the world was in itself invigorating. Poggio at the Council of Constance regarded Jerome of Prague not as a heretic, not as a fanatic, but as a Stoic. In other words, he was capable of divesting his mind of temporary associations and conventional prejudices, and of discerning the true character of the man who suffered heroically for his opinions. This instance illustrates the general tone and temper of the humanists. Their study of antiquity freed them from the scholastic pedantries of theologians, and from the professional conceits of jurists and physicians. There is nothing great and noble in human nature that might not, we fancy, have grown and thriven under their direction, if the circumstances of Italy had been more favourable to high aspirations. As it was, the light was early quenched and clouded by base vapours of a sensual, enslaved, and priest-corrupted society. The vital force of the Revival passed into the Reformation; the humanists, degraded and demoralised, were superseded. Still it was they who created the new atmosphere of culture, wherein whatever is luminous in art, literature, science, criticism, and religion has since flourished. Though we may perceive that they obeyed a false authority—that of the classics, and worshipped a false idol—style, yet modern liberty must render them the meed of thanks for this. When we consider that before the sixteenth century had closed, they had imbued the whole Italian nation with their views, forming a new literature, directing every kind of mental activity, and producing a new social tone, and furthermore that Italy in the sixteenth century impressed her spirit on the rest of Europe, we have a right to hail the humanists as the schoolmasters of modern civilisation.
As schoolmasters in a stricter sense of the term, it is not easy to exaggerate the influence exercised by Italian students. They first conceived and framed the education that has now prevailed through Europe for four centuries, moulding the youth of divers nations by one common discipline, and establishing an intellectual concord for all peoples. In spite of changes in government and creed, in spite of differences caused by race and language, we have maintained an uniformity of culture through the simultaneous prosecution of classic studies on the lines laid down for teachers by the scholars of the fifteenth century. The system of our universities and public schools is in truth no other than that devised by Vittorino and Guarino. Thus humanism in modern Europe has continued the work performed during the Middle Ages by the Church, uniting in one confederation of spiritual activity nations widely separated by all that tends to keep the human families apart.
Until quite recently in England, the litteræ humaniores were accepted as the soundest training for careers in Church and State, for the learned professions, and for the private duties of gentlemen. If the old ideal is yielding at last to theories of a wider education based on science and on modern languages, that is due partly to the extension of useful knowledge, and partly to the absorption of classic literature into the modern consciousness. The sum of what a cultivated man should know, in order to maintain a place among the pioneers of progress, is so vast, that learners, distracted by a variety of subjects, resent the expenditure of precious time on Greek and Latin. Teachers, on the other hand, through long familiarity with humane studies, have fallen into the languor of routine. Besides, as knowledge in each new department increases, the necessity of specialising with a view to adopting a professional career, makes itself continually felt with greater urgency. It may therefore be plausibly argued that we have outgrown the conditions of humanism, and that a new stage in the history of education has been reached. Have not the ancients done as much for us as they can do? Are not our minds permeated with their thoughts? Do not the masterpieces of modern literature hold in solution the best that can be got from them for future uses?
These questions can perhaps be met by the counter-question whether the arts and letters of the Greeks and Romans will not always hold their own, not only in the formation of pure taste, but also in the discipline of character and the training of the intelligence. Just as well might we cease to study the sacred books of the Jews, because we have incorporated their ethics into our conscience, and possess their religion in our liturgy. No transmission of a spirit at second or third hand can be the same as its immediate contact; nor can we afford, however full our mental life may be, to lose the vivid sense of what men were and what they wrought in ages far removed from us, especially when those men were our superiors in certain spheres. Again, it may be doubted whether we should understand the masterpieces of modern literature, when we came to be separated from the sources of their inspiration. If Olympus connoted less than Asgard, or Hercules were no more familiar to our minds than Rustem, or the horses of the Sun stood at the same distance from us as the cows of Indra—if, in fact, we abandoned Greek as much as we have abandoned Scandinavian, Persian, and Sanskrit mythology, would not some of the most brilliant images of our own poets fade into leaden greyness, like clouds that have lost the flush of living light upon them?
It is therefore not improbable that for many years to come the higher culture of the race will still be grounded upon humanism: true though it be that the first enthusiasm for antiquity shall never be restored, nor the classics yield that vital nourishment they offered in the spring-time of the modern era. For average students, who have no special vocation for literature and no æesthetic tastes, it may well happen that new methods of teaching the classics will have to be invented. Why should they not be read in English versions, and the time expended upon Greek and Latin grammar be thus saved? The practice of Greek and Latin versification has been virtually doomed already; nor is there any reason why Latin prose should form a necessary part of education in an age that has ceased to publish its thoughts in a now completely dead language. Our actual relation to the ancients, again, justifies some change. We know far more about them now than in the period of the Renaissance; but they are no longer all in all for civilised humanity, eager to reconstitute the realm of thought, and find its nobler self anew in the image of a glorious past, reconquered and inalienable. The very culture created by the study of antiquity through the last four centuries stands between them and our apprehension, so that they seem at the same moment more distinct from us and more a part of our familiar selves.
When we seek the causes which produced the decay of learning in Italy about the middle of the sixteenth century, we are first led to observe that the type of scholarship inaugurated by Petrarch had been fully developed. Nothing new remained to be worked out upon the lines laid down by him. Meanwhile the forces of the nation, both creative and receptive, were exhausted in the old fields of humanism. The reading public had been glutted with epistles, invectives, poems, orations, histories of antiquities, and disquisitions of all kinds. The matter of the ancient literatures had been absorbed, if superficially, at least entirely, and their forms had been reproduced with wearisome reiteration. The Paganism that had so long ruled as a fashion, was now passing out of vogue, because of its inadequacy to meet the deeper wants and satisfy the aspirations of the modern world. The humanists, moreover, as a class, had fallen into disrepute through faults and vices whereof enough has been already said. Nothing short of the new impulse which a new genius, equal at least in power to Petrarch, might have communicated, could have given a fresh direction to the declining enthusiasm for antiquity. But for this display of energy the Italians were not prepared. As in the ascent of some high peak, the traveller, after surmounting pine woods and Alpine pastures, comes upon bare grassy slopes that form an intermediate region between the basements of the mountain and the snowfields overhead, so the humanists had accomplished the first stage of learning. But it requires a fresh start and the employment of other faculties to scale the final heights; and for this the force was wanting. Erasmus, at the opening of the century, had, indeed, initiated a second age of scholarship. The more exact methods of criticism and comparison were already about to be instituted by the French, the Germans, and the Dutch. It was too much, however, to expect that the Italians, who had expended their vigour in recovering the classics and reviving a passion for knowledge, should compete upon the ground of modern erudition with these fresh and untried races.
What they might have done, if circumstances had been less unfavourable, and if the way of progress had been free before them, cannot be conjectured. As it was, all things contributed to the decline of intellectual energy in Italy. The distracting wars of half a century told more heavily upon the literati, who depended for their very existence upon the liberality of patrons, than on any other section of the people. What miseries they endured in Lombardy may be gathered from the prefaces and epistles of Aldus Manutius; while the blow inflicted on them by the sack of Rome is vividly described by Valeriano.[525] When comparative peace was restored, liberty had been extinguished. Florence, the stronghold of liberal learning, was enslaved. Scholarship no less than art suffered from the loss of political independence. Rome, terror-stricken by the Reformation, turned with rage against the very studies she had helped to stimulate. The engines of the Inquisition, wielded with all the mercilessness of panic by men who had the sombre cruelty of Spain to back them up, destroyed the germs of life in science and philosophy.
To some extent, again, the Italian scholars had prepared their own suicide by tending more and more to subtleties of taste and affectations of refinement. The purism of the sixteenth century was itself a sort of etiolation, and the puerilities of the academies distracted even able men from serious studies. It was one of the inevitable drawbacks of humanism that the new culture separated men of letters from the nation. Dante and the wool-carders of the fourteenth century understood each other; there was then no thick veil of erudition between the teacher and the taught. But neither Bembo nor Pomponazzi had anything to say that could be comprehended by the common folk. Therefore scholarship was left in mournful isolation; suspected, when it passed from trifles to grave speculations, by the Church; viewed with indifference by the people; unsustained by any sympathy, and, what was worse, without a programme or a watchword. The thinkers, whose biography belongs to the history of the Counter-Reformation in Italy, were all solitary men, voices crying in the wilderness with none to listen, bound together by no common bond, unnoticed by the nation, extinguished singly on the scaffold by an ever-watchful league of tyrants spiritual and political.
Before the end of the sixteenth century Greek had almost ceased to be studied in Italy. This was the sign of intellectual death. All that was virile in humanism fled beyond the Alps. This transference of intellectual supremacy from Italy to Germany was speedily accomplished. 'When I was a boy,' said Erasmus,[526] 'sound letters had begun to revive among the Italians; but by reason of the printer's art being as yet undiscovered or known to few, no books had reached us, and in the deep tranquillity of dulness there reigned a set of men who taught in all our towns the most illiterate learning. Rodolph Agricola was the first to bring to us from Italy some breath of a superior culture.' Again, he says of Italy, 'In that land, where even the very walls are both more learned and more eloquent than men with us; so that what here seems beautifully said, and elegant and full of charm, cannot be held for aught but clumsy, stupid, and uncultivated there.' Less than half a century after Erasmus had gained the right to hold the balance thus between the nations of the North and South—that is, in 1540 or thereabouts—Paolo Giovio, at the close of his 'Elogia Literaria,' while speaking of the Germans, felt obliged to confess that 'not only Latin letters, to our disgrace, but Greek and Hebrew also have passed into their territory by a fatal simultaneous migration.'
Thus Italy, after receiving the lamp of learning from the dying hands of Hellas, in the days of her own freedom, now, in the time of her adversity and ruin, gave it to the nations of the North. Her work was ended. Three centuries of increasing decrepitude, within our recent memory at length most happily surmounted, were before her. Can history, we wonder, furnish a spectacle more pathetic than that of the protagonist of spiritual liberty falling uneasily asleep beneath the footstool of the Spaniard and the churchman, while the races who had trampled her to death went on rejoicing in the light and culture she had won by centuries of toil? This is the tragic aspect of the subject which has occupied us through the present volume. At the conclusion of the whole matter it is, however, more profitable to remember, not the intellectual death of Italy, but what she wrought in that bright period of her vigour. She was the divinely appointed birthplace of the modern spirit, the workshop of knowledge for all Europe, our mistress in the arts and sciences, the Alma Mater of our student years, the well-spring of mental freedom and activity after ages of stagnation. If greater philosophers have since been produced by Germany and France and England, greater scholars, greater men of science, greater poets even, and greater pioneers of progress in the lands divined by Christopher Columbus beyond the seas—this must not blind us to the truth that at the very outset of the era in which we live and play our parts, Italy embraced all philosophy, all scholarship, all science, all art, all discovery, alone. Such is the Lampadephoria, or torch-race, of the nations. Greece stretches forth her hand to Italy; Italy consigns the sacred fire to Northern Europe; the people of the North pass on the flame to America, to India, and the Australasian isles.