A literature, corresponding to this medium, of necessity arose. It was a literature of form and style, of pleasure and diversion, without intensity of passion, earnestness of purpose, or profundity of thought. It could boast no Shakspere, no Pindar, no Dante, no Descartes. The prevailing types which it developed, were idyllic, descriptive, melodramatic, narrative, elegiac, sentimental, burlesque, and licentious. Poliziano, Sannazzaro, Lorenzo de' Medici, Pulci, the writers of Sonnets and Capitoli, the novelists and the satirists, are each and all of them related by no superficial tie to Boccaccio. He is the morning star of this multifarious and brilliant band of artist-authors, until the moment when Ariosto rises above the horizon, and the cinque cento finds adequate expression in the Orlando Furioso. In that poem the qualities by which the age is characterized, are concentrated, and the advance in artistic faculty and feeling since the period of the Decameron is manifested. Amid the many writers of the century we seek in vain a true philosopher. We have, instead, to content ourselves with the ethical dissertations of the humanists; with sketches like the Cortegiano, the Galateo, the Governo della Famiglia; with erudite fancies like the speculations of Ficino, or the scholastic triflings of Pico della Mirandola. Yet out of the very indifferentism of the age philosophy will spring. Pomponazzi formulates the current materialism. It remains for Telesio, Campanella, Bruno, Galileo to found the modern scientific method. Meanwhile, the political agitations of despotisms and republics alike, and the diplomatic relations of so many petty States, have stimulated observation and developed the powers of analysis. Therefore the most vigorous and virile product of this literature is such work as the Principe and Discorsi of Machiavelli, the Ricordi of Guicciardini, together with the histories and reflective treatises on statecraft published by the statists of their school.
The absence of seriousness in the literature of the golden age is striking to a Northern student. It seems to have been produced for and by men who had lost their ethical and political conscience, and had enthroned an æsthetical conscience in its room. Their religious indifference is deadlier than atheism. Their levity is worse than sarcasm. They fulfill the epigram of Tacitus, who wrote: corrumpere et corrumpi sæculum vocant. Yet no one has the vigor to be angry. It is difficult to detect the true note of satire in their criticism of society. Ariosto is playful, Aretino scurrilous, Alamanni peevish, Folengo atrabilious. The purely religious compositions of the period lack simplicity and sincerity. The Sacre Rappresentazioni are sentimental and romantic. The Christian epics of the Latin poets are indescribably frigid. The Laudi are either literary like Lorenzo's, or hysterical like Benivieni's praise of Christian madness. The impertinent biographies of Aretino pass muster for genuinely pious work with Vittoria Colonna. It is only in some heartfelt utterance of the aged Michelangelo, in the holy life of a S. Antonino, or the charity of Luca della Robbia's mission to young Boscoli, or the fervor of Savonarola's sermons, that here and there the chord of real religious feeling vibrates. Philosophy entrenches herself, where she is strongest, in negation—in Valla's negation of any ethical standard superior to sensuous hedonism, in Pomponazzi's negation of immortality, in Machiavelli's negation of Providence. So complete an antithesis to the medieval ground of thought was necessary; and its results for the future of science are incontestable. But at the moment it meant a withdrawal from spiritual interests, an insistance on the material side of human life, which was correlated to religious indifference and social dissolution.
The drama abounds in comedies and masks, of wonderful variety and great artistic beauty. But there is no tragedy worthy of the name. And the tragic element, as distinguished from romance and pathos, is conspicuous by its absence in the novels of the period. Lyrical poets prefer the conscious shams of Petrarchism to any genuine utterance of emotion. The gravity of La Casa's sonnets, wrenched from an uneasy and unwilling conscience, the sublimity of Michelangelo's Platonic mysticism, the patriotic indignation of Guidiccioni's laments for Italy enslaved and sunk in sensual sloth, must rank as luminous exceptions. In the romantic epic, chivalry, the ideal of an earlier age, is turned to gentle ridicule. Honor is sneered at or misunderstood. The absurd, the marvelous, the licentious are mingled in a form of incomparable artistic suavity. Tasso's graver epic belongs to another epoch. Trissino's heroic poem is unreadable. Like the tragedies of the scholars, it lacks life and stands in no relation to the spirit of the age.
Over the whole art and literature of the epoch is shed an agreeable light of quietude and acquiescence, a glow of contentment and well-being, which contrasts strangely with the tragic circumstances of a nation crumbling into an abyss of ruin. It is not precisely the bourgeois felicity of Boccaccio, but a tranquillity that finds choicest expression in the painted idyls of Giorgione and the written idyls of Sannazzaro. Its ultimate ideal is the Golden Age, when no restraints were placed on natural inclination, and no ambition ruffled the spirit rocked in halcyon ease. This prevailing mood of artists and writers was capable of sensuous depth, as in the Baiæ of Pontano. It was capable of refined irony, as in the smile of Ariosto. It was capable of broad laughter, as in the farce of Bibbiena. It was capable of tenderness, as in the Ballate of Poliziano. It was capable of cynical licentiousness, as in Aretino's Ragionamenti, and the Florentine Capitoli. But it was incapable of tragic passion, lyrical rapture, intensity, sublimity, heroism. What ears would there have been in Italy for Marston's prologue to Antonio and Mellida or for Milton's definition of the poet's calling? The men who made this literature and those with whom they lived, for whom they wrote, were well-bred, satisfied with inactivity, open at all pores to pleasure, delighting in the refinements of tact and taste, but at the same time addicted to gross sensuality of word and deed. The world was over for them. The arenas of energy were closed. About the future life they entertained a suave and genial skepticism, a delicate peut-être of blended affirmation and negation, lightly worn, which did not interrupt the observance of ceremonial piety. They loved their villa, like Flamminio, Ficino, Bembo, all the poets of Benacus. They spent their leisure between a grove of laurels and a study. They met in courtly circles for polite discourse and trifling dissertation, with no influencing passion, no speculative enthusiasm, no insight into mysteries deeper than the subtleties of poetry and art. Not one of them, amid the crash and conflict of three nations on their soil, exclaimed in darkness Imus, imus præcipites! When the woes of Italy touched them with a shade of melancholy, they sought relief in pastimes or in study. Cinthio, prefacing his novels with the horrors of the Sack of Rome, Bargagli using Siena's agony as introduction to his love-romances, are parables of what was happening in the world of fact and feeling. The portrait of Castiglione, clear-browed, sedate, intelligent, humane, expresses the best men of the best moment in that age. The Aminta is their dream-world, modeled on reality. Vida's apostrophe to pulcherrima Roma utters their sentiment of nationality.
There is a beautiful side to all this. It is the idyllic ideal of life, revealed in Titian's picture of the Three Ages of Man, the ideal which results in golden and consummate art, tranquilized to euthanasia, purged of all purpose more earnest than may be found in melodies played beside a fountain in the fields by boys to listening girls, on flute or viol. For this ideal a great future was in store, when the animating motive of idyllic melody expressed itself in the opera music of the eighteenth century, and Italy gave the last of her imperishable gifts, a new and perfect art of song, to Europe. But there is also an ugly side to all this. The ultimate corruption of the age—in its absence of energy, its avoidance of serious endeavor, its courtly adulation, its ruffianism, servility, cynicism and hypocrisy—is incarnated in Aretino. Here the vices of the Italian Renaissance show their cloven hoofs. Through the orange and laurel bowers, flooded with Tintoretto's golden sunlight, grins a bestial all-devouring satyr, a satyr far less innocent or gentle than Greek poets feigned, with a wolf's jaws as well as a goat's legs. And in Aretino is already foreshadowed Baffo, the prurient and porcine Caliban of verse, more barbarously bestial than Venetian Casanova. Meanwhile amid apparent civility of manner, the violent crimes of a corrupt and servile race were frequent. Poisoning and secret assassination, acts of personal vengeance and the employment of hired cut-throats, rendered life unsafe in that idyllic Italy.
The historian of this epoch, though he feels its splendor and would fain bless, finds himself forced to insist upon the darker details of the subject. The triumphal pæan of his opening pages ends, too often for his sympathy, in dissonance and wailing echoes. Yet it would be unjust and unscientific to close on any note of lamentation, when the achievements of the eldest-born of Europe's daughters stand arrayed before him. It has often been said that the Renaissance presents an insoluble problem. Twy-natured and indeterminate, the spirit of the age has been likened to the Sphinx, whose riddle finds no Œdipus. But this language is at best rhetorical. The anomalies and contradictions of a period to which we owe so much of our spiritual and intellectual force, are due to its transitional character. The middle ages were closed. The modern world was scarcely formed. This interval was chosen for the re-birth of the Italian spirit. On the Italians fell the complicated and perplexing task of modulating from the one phase to the other. And, as I have attempted to explain, the Italians were a peculiar people. They had resisted the Teutonic impact of the medieval past; but they had failed to prepare themselves for the drama of violence and bloodshed which the feudal races played out on the plains of Lombardy. When we say that it was their duty to have formed themselves into a nation like the French, we are criticising their conduct from a modern point of view. Experience proved that their policy of municipal independence was a kind of suicide. But the instincts of clanship, slowly transmuted through feudal institutions into a monarchical system, had from time immemorial been absent in Italy. Rome herself had never gathered the Italian cities into what we call a nation. And when Rome, the world's head, fell, the municipalities of Italy remained, and the Italian people sprang to life again by contact with their irrecoverable past.[587] Then, though the Church swayed Europe from Italian soil, she had nowhere less devoted subjects than in Italy. Proud as the Italians had been of the Empire, proud as they now were of the Church, still neither the Roman Empire nor the Roman Church imposed on the Italian character. Pondering on the unique circumstances of this new nation, unorganized like her sisters, conscious of an immense past and a persistent vitality, shrewdly apathetic to the religious enthusiasms of the younger races, yet obliged to temporize and acquiesce and cloak indifference with hypocrisy, we are brought to feel, though we may not fully explain, the inevitableness of many distracting discords in what was still an incomplete phase of national existence.
As a final consideration, after reviewing the anomalies of Italian society upon the dissolution of the Middle Ages, we are fully justified in maintaining that the race which had produced Machiavelli and Columbus, Campanella and Galileo—that is to say, the firmest pioneers and freest speculators of the dawning modern age—was capable, left but alone, of solving its own moral contradictions by some virile effort. Pioneering energy, speculative boldness, virility of effort (however masked by pedantry and purism, by the urbanities and amenities of polite culture, by the baseness of egotism and the immorality of social decadence), were the deepest notes of the bewildering age which forms our theme. But this freedom from interference, this luck of being left alone, was just what the Italians could never get. The catastrophes of several successive invasions, followed by the petrifying stagnation of political and ecclesiastical tyranny, checked their natural evolution and suspended their intellectual life, before the fruit-time had succeeded to the flower-time of the Renaissance. The magnificent audacity of their impulse fell checked in mid-career. Their achievement might be likened to an arch ascending bravely from two mighty piers, whereon the key stone of completion was not set.
When all her deities were decayed or broken, Italy still worshiped beauty in fine art and literary form. When all her energies seemed paralyzed, she still pursued her intellectual development with unremitting ardor. This is the true greatness of those fifty years of glorious achievement and pitiful humiliation, during which the Italians, like Archimedes in his Syracusan watch-tower, turned deaf ears to combatant and conqueror, intent on problems that involved the future destinies of man. The light of the classics had fallen on their pathway at the close of the middle ages. The leading of that light they still pursued, as though they had been consecrated to the service of a god before unknown in modern Europe. Their first and foremost gift to nations who had scourged and slain them, was a new and radiant conception of humanity. This conception externalized itself in the creation of a common mental atmosphere, in the expression of the modern spirit by fine art and literature, in the diffusion of all that is contained for us in culture. They wrought, thought, painted, carved and built with the antique ideal as a guiding and illuminative principle in view. This principle enabled them to elevate and harmonize, to humanize and beautify the coarser elements existing in the world around them. What they sought and clung to in the heritage of the ancients, was the divinity of form—the form that gives grace, loveliness, sublimity to common flesh and blood in art; style to poetry and prose; urbanity to social manners; richness and elegance to reflections upon history and statecraft and the problems of still infantine science. Lastly, whatsoever is implied in the double formula of the discovery of man and of the world—the resuscitation of learning by scholars; the positive study of human motives and action by historians; the new philosophy prepared by speculators of the Southern school; the revival of mathematical and astronomical researches after a sound method; the endeavor to base physical science on experiment and observation; the exploration of the western hemisphere by navigators—all this we owe to the Italians of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
We may allow that their execution of a task so arduous and beneficial was accomplished under conditions of social corruption and political apathy, which somewhat dimmed the luster of their triumph. It may be admitted that they failed, even in their own domains of art and poetry, to realize the highest possible ideals; and we may ascribe this failure partly to their moral feebleness, which contradicts our sense of manhood. Still these are no reasons why we should not pay the homage due to their achievement. The deepest interest in the Italian Renaissance, the warmest recognition of its services to modern Europe, are compatible with a just conviction that the tone of that epoch is not to be imitated. Such imitation would, in point of fact, be not merely anachronistic but impossible. To insist on anything so obvious would be impertinent to common sense, were we not from time to time admonished from the chair of criticism that a new Gospel, founded on the principles of the Renaissance, has been or is being preached in England. Criticism, however, is fallible; and in this matter its mistake is due to the English incapacity for understanding that scientific curiosity may be engaged, without didactic objects, on moral and historical problems. We cannot extract from the Renaissance a body of ethical teaching, an ideal of conduct, or a discipline of manners, applicable to the altered conditions of the nineteenth century. But we can exercise our ingenuity upon the complex questions which it offers; we can satisfy the passion of inquiry, which prompts men to examine, analyze, reflect upon, and reappropriate the past. We can attempt to depict the period, as we recover a phase of our own youth by recollection, extenuating nothing, setting nothing down in malice, using the results of our researches for no purposes of propaganda, but aiming, in so far as our capacity sustains us, at the simple truth about it.
For a student animated with this passion of curiosity, the Italian Renaissance, independently of any sympathies he may have formed for the Italian people, or any fascination which an age and race so picturesque may exercise, must be a subject worthy of most patient contemplation. As we grow in knowledge, corroborating and confirming those views about the world and man which originated with the new direction given to inquiry in the fifteenth century, we learn with ever stronger certainty, that as there is no interruption in the order of nature, so the history of civilization is continuous and undivided. In the sequence of events, in the growth of human character, no arbitrary freaks, no flaws of chance, are recognizable. Age succeeds to age; nations rise and perish; new elements are introduced at intervals into the common stock; the drama is not played out with one set of actors. But, in spite of all change, and though we cannot as yet demonstrate the law of evolution in details, we are reasonably convinced that the development of human energy and intellectual consciousness has been carried on without cessation from the earliest times until the present moment, and is destined to unbroken progress through the centuries before us. History, under the influence of this conception, is rapidly ceasing to be the record of external incidents, of isolated moments, or of brilliant episodes in the epic of humanity. We have learned to look upon it as the biography of man. To trace the continuity of civilization through the labyrinths of chance and error and suspended energy, apparent to a superficial glance or partial knowledge, but on closer observation and a wider sweep of vision found to disappear, is the highest aim of the historian. The germ of this new notion of man's life upon our planet was contained in the cardinal intuition of the Renaissance, when the ancient and the modern worlds were recognized as one. It assumed the dignity of organized speculation in the German philosophies of history, and in the positive philosophy of Auguste Comte. It has received its most powerful corroboration from recent physical discoveries, and has acquired firmer consistency in the Darwinian speculation. Whether we approach the problem from a theological, a positive, or a purely scientific point of view, the force of the hypothesis remains unaltered. We are obliged to think of civilized humanity as one.