The period that marked high water in the estimation of the classics, also saw the turn of the tide. In all countries the vernacular crowded the classics ever backward from the field. The conscious cultivation of the modern tongues was marked by the publication of new dictionaries and by various works such as John Bale's history of English literature, written itself, to be sure, in Latin. The finest work of the kind was {579} Joachim du Bellay's Défence et Illustration de la langue française published in 1549 as part of a concerted effort to raise French as a vehicle of poetry and prose to a level with the classics. This was done partly by borrowing from Latin. One of the characteristic words of the sixteenth century, "patrie," was thus formally introduced.
SECTION 2. HISTORY
For the examination of the interests and temper of a given era, hardly any better gauge can be found than the history it produced. In the period under consideration there were two great schools, or currents, of historiography, the humanistic, sprung from the Renaissance, and church history, the child of the Reformation.
[Sidenote: Humanistic school of historiography]
The devotees of the first illustrate most aptly what has just been said about the influence of the classics. Their supreme interest was style, generally Latin. To clothe a chronicle in the toga of Livy's periods, to deck it out with the rhetoric of Sallust and to stitch on a few antitheses and epigrams in the manner of Tacitus, seemed to them the height of art. Their choice of matter was as characteristic as their manner, in that their interest was exclusively political and aristocratic. Save the doings of courts and camps, the political intrigues of governments and the results of battles, together with the virtues and vices of the rulers, they saw little in history. What the people thought, felt and suffered, was beyond their purview. Nor did most of them have much interest in art, science or literature, or even in religion. When George Buchanan, a man in the thick of the Scottish Reformation, who drafted the Book of Articles, came to write the history of his own time, he was so obsessed with the desire to imitate the ancient Romans that he hardly mentioned the {580} religious controversy at all. One sarcasm on the priests who thought the New Testament was written by Luther, and demanded their good Old Testament back again, two brief allusions to Knox, and a few other passing references are all of the Reformation that comes into a bulky volume dealing with the reigns of James V and Mary Stuart. His interest in political liberty, his conception of the struggle as one between tyranny and freedom, might appear modern were it not so plainly rooted in antique soil.
The prevailing vice of the humanists—to see in the story of a people nothing but a political lesson—is carried to its extreme by Machiavelli. [Sidenote: Machiavelli] Writing with all the charm that conquers time, this theorist altered facts to suit his thesis to the point of composing historical romances. His Life of Castruccio is as fictitious and as didactic as Xenophon's Cyropaedia; his Commentary on Livy is as much a treatise on politics as is The Prince; the History of Florence is but slightly hampered by the events.
[Sidenote: Guicciardini]
If Guicciardini's interest in politics is not less exclusive than that of his compatriot, he is vastly superior as a historian to the older man in that, whereas Machiavelli deduced history a priori from theory, Guicciardini had a real desire to follow the inductive method of deriving his theory from an accurate mastery of the facts. With superb analytical reasoning he presents his data, marshals them and draws from them the conclusions they will bear. The limitation that vitiates many of his deductions is his taking into account only low and selfish motives. Before idealists he stands helpless; he leaves the reader uncertain whether Savonarola was a prophet or an extremely astute politician.
[Sidenote: Jovius]
The advance that Paul Jovius marks over the Florentines lies in the appeal that he made to the {581} interests of the general public. History had hitherto been written for the greater glory of a patron or at most of a city; Jovius saw that the most generous patron of genius must henceforth be the average reader. It is true that he despised the public for whom he wrote, stuffing them with silly anecdotes. Both as the first great interviewer and reporter for the history of his own times, and in paying homage to Mrs. Grundy by assuming an air of virtue not natural to him, he anticipated the modern journalist.