George Haven Putnam

“ It was the aim of Aldus, as he himself expressed it, to rescue from oblivion the words of the classic writers, the monuments of human intellect. He writes in 1490: “I have resolved to devote my life to the cause of scholarship. I have chosen in place of a life of ease and freedom, an anxious and toilsome career. A man has higher responsibilities than the seeking of his own enjoyment; he should devote himself to honourable labour. Living that is a mere existence can be left to men who are content to be animals. ”

“ The scriptoria of the monasteries rendered the service formerly given by the copyists of the book-shops or of the country houses, while their armaria, or book-chests, had to fill the place of the destroyed or scattered libraries of the Roman cities or the Roman villas. The work of the scribes was now directed not by an Augustus, a Mæcenas, or an Atticus, but by a Cassiodorus, a Benedict, or a Gregory, and the incentive to literary labour was no longer the laurel crown of the circus, the favours of a patron, or the honoraria of the publishers, but the glory of God and the service of the Church. ”

“ It was in Carpi that Aldus developed the scheme of utilising his scholarly knowledge and connections for the printing of Latin and Greek classics. The plan was a bold one for a young scholar without capital. Printing and publishing constituted a practically untried field of business, not merely for Aldus but for Italy. Everything had to be created or developed; knowledge of the art of printing and of all the technicalities of book-manufacturing; fonts of type, Roman and Greek; a force of type-setters and pressmen and a staff of skilled revisers and proof-readers ”

“ The difference between the production each year of a few hundred copies of religious or classical works by the laborious toil of the monks or the university scribes, works which could at best benefit only the limited circle of readers who were within reach either of the monasteries or of the universities, and a world-wide distribution, as well of the great books of the earlier times which belonged to the world’s literature as of the current thoughts of the contemporary generation, was a difference, not of degree, but of kind. ”

“ I can but think that the historians of literature and the students of the social and political conditions on which literary production is so largely dependent, have failed to do full justice to men like Aldus, the Estiennes, Froben, Koberger, and Plantin, who fought so sturdily against the pretensions of pope, bishop, or monarch to stand between the printing-press and the people and to decide what should and what should not be printed. ”

“ If it be true, as a writer no less sober in his philosophy than eloquent in his language has lately asserted, that except the blind forces of nature, nothing moves in this world which is not Greek in its origin, we are justified in regarding the point of contact between the Greek teacher Chrysoloras and his Florentine pupils as one of the most momentous crises in the history of civilisation. Indirectly the Italian intellect had hitherto felt Hellenic influence through Latin literature. ”

“ I think, with Maitland, that, according to the evidence on record, for books such as those given above as typical examples, the written production during the century selected would probably have exceeded the number of copies of the same books turned out by the printing-presses during the eighteenth century. We must recall to ourselves that for a term of six or seven centuries, writing was a business, and was also a religious duty; an occupation taken up by choice and pursued with a degree of zeal, persistence, and enthusiasm for which in the present day there is no parallel. ”

“ It required, however, the revolution of 1789 to establish the principle that the business of producing and distributing books could secure its legitimate development only when freed from censorship restrictions and regulations, and that it was a business the control of which belonged properly not to the university, the Courts of Parliament, or the Crown, but to the people themselves.
Considering the scarcity and the costliness of books in the Middle Ages, it is somewhat surprising that the work of instruction rested so directly upon books, that is, depended upon the mastery of a text. ”

“ It was in the monasteries that were preserved such fragments of the classic literature as had escaped the general devastation of Italy; and it was to the labours of the monks of the West, and particularly to the labours of the monks of S. Benedict, that was due the preservation for the Middle Ages and for succeeding generations of the remembrance and the influence of the literature of classic times. For a period of more than six centuries, the safety of the literary heritage of Europe, one may say of the world, depended upon the scribes of a few dozen scattered monasteries. ”

“ THE first revival of the long slumbering trade in manuscripts took place in Italy, the cradle of the universities. Although after the breaking down of the old civilisation of the Western Empire, Italy had suffered more through invasions and devastations than any other country of Europe, it had nevertheless succeeded in preserving a certain continuity of cultivation and some remnants of learning or germs of intellectual life, from which germs there came again into growth an intellectual development for Europe. ”

“ Here, on the one hand, were the vast armies of monks, whom both the unsettled state of the times and the religious ideas of the age were driving irresistibly into the cloister; and who, when immured there with only theology to occupy their minds, became, as the great cities of the East knew only too well, preachers of discord and mad fanaticism. Here, on the other hand, were the accumulated stores of two thousand years of literature, sacred and profane, the writings of Hebrew prophets, Greek philosophers, Latin rhetoricians, [24] perishing for want of men with leisure to transcribe them. ”

“ No longer could the scribe omit Greek quotations from his Latin text with the dogged snarl of obtuse self-satisfaction, Græca sunt, ergo non legenda. The motto had rather to be changed into a cry of warning for ecclesiastical authority upon the verge of dissolution, Græca sunt, ergo periculosa; since the reawakening faith in human reason, the reawakening belief in the dignity of man, the desire for [327] beauty, the liberty, audacity, and passion of the Renaissance, received from Greek studies their strongest and most vital impulse. ”

“ At the critical moment when the Eastern Empire was being shattered by the Turks, and when the other European nations were as yet unfit for culture, Italy saved the Arts and Sciences of Greece and Rome, and interpreted the spirit of the classics. ”

“ The Genoese seaman and discoverer opens new realms to our knowledge and imagination, leads Europe from the narrow restrictions of the Middle Ages out into the vast space of Western oceans, and in adding to the material realms controlled by civilisation, widens still more largely the range of its thought and fancy. The Reformer of Wittenberg, in breaking the bonds which had chained the spirits of his fellow-men and in securing for them again their rights as individual Christians, conquers for them a spiritual realm and brings them into renewed relations with their Creator. ”

“ The vitality of the people was so exuberant, its productive force so enormous, that notwithstanding the frightful waste caused by war and pestilence, its energies were still sufficient for some of the greatest of artistic creations, for active and scholarly work in the new learning and literature, and for a sharp competition for the leadership of the world’s commerce and industries. A typical example of the life and strife of the time is afforded by Milan, the capital of Lombardy. ”

“ The history of the Renaissance [321] literature in Italy is the history of self-development into the channels of scholarship and antiquarian research. The language created by Dante as a thing of power, polished by Petrarch as a thing of beauty, trained by Boccaccio as the instrument of melodious prose, was abandoned even by the Tuscans in the fifteenth century for revived Latin and newly discovered Greek. Patient acquisition took the place of proud inventiveness; laborious imitation of classical authors suppressed originality of style. ”

“ For six centuries the book-trade of Paris and of France, whether it consisted in the production of manuscripts for the exclusive use of members of the university, or of printed books for the enlightenment of the general public, had been obliged to do its work under the hampering and burdensome regulations and restrictions of a varying series of authorities. ”

“ It was a disadvantage for carrying on scholarly publishing undertakings in Venice, that the city possessed no university, a disadvantage that was only partly offset by the proximity of Padua, which early in the fifteenth century had come under Venetian rule. A university would of course have been of service to a publisher like Aldus, not only in supplying a home market for his books, but in placing at his disposal scholarly assistants whose services could be utilised in editing the texts and in supervising their type-setting. ”

“ The history of any representative printer-publisher whose career belonged to the earlier stages of the business of making and selling books, would have value in throwing light on the extent of the difficulties and obstacles to be overcome and on the nature of the methods adopted; the career of Aldus possesses, however, not merely such typical value but a distinctive and individual interest, as well because of the personality of the man as on the ground of the exceptional importance, for his own community and for future generations, of the service rendered by him. ”

“ He reads slowly and clearly at a measured rate while all the others, seated at their desks, take down his words; thus perhaps a score of copies are made at once. Alcuin’s observant eye watches each in turn and his correcting hand points out the mistakes in orthography and punctuation. The master of Charles the Great, in that true humility that is the charm of his whole behaviour, makes himself the writing-master of his monks, stooping to the drudgery of faithfully and gently correcting many puerile mistakes, and all for the love of studies and for the love of Christ. ”

“ It was inevitable therefore, that, with the generations succeeding the discovery of printing, there should be a decrease in the influence and in the relative importance for the community of the universities. With the establishment of secondary schools, the training of the boys was cared for to better purpose elsewhere; and with the increasing circulation of printed books, it became possible for men to come into relations with literature in other places than in the lecture room. The universities were no longer the sole depositories of learning or the sole sources of intellectual activity. ”

“ The Church of Rome felt itself at this time sufficiently secure in its control of the minds of men to be prepared to utilise to full advantage all methods for distributing its doctrinal literature, and to have no dread as to these same means being used for the scattering of heretical teachings. The popes of the time, largely influenced by the spirit of the Renaissance, gave a cordial welcome to the revival of scholarly interests and to the printing-press as an important means for furthering the general education and the intellectual development of the community. ”

“ Single names can be mentioned, such as Victorius or Sigonius in Italy, Mursius or Vulcanius in the Low Countries, who were distinguished representatives of ‘learning,’ but in Bulæus, Turnebus, Lambrinus, Scaliger, Casaubon, and Saumaise, France produced a constellation of humanists whose fame justly eclipsed that of all their contemporaries.
If we ask why Italy did not continue to be the centre of the humanist movement, which she had so brilliantly inaugurated, the answer is that the intelligence was crushed by the reviviscence of ecclesiastical ideas. ”

“ The universities also, on the other hand, attracted to their membership very many students of mature age, who came sometimes for special purposes, but more frequently because it was only in the university towns that circles of scholars could be found, that books were available, and that any large measure of intellectual activity was to be experienced. As Savigny puts it: “The universities were, during the Middle Ages, practically the only places where men could study or could exercise their minds with any degree of freedom.” ”

“ In the Low Countries, on the other hand, particularly in such centres as Ghent, Antwerp, and Bruges, there came into existence, during the first half of the fifteenth century, an active and intelligently conducted business in the production of books both of a scholarly and of a popular character, the sale of which was made very largely among the citizens, outside of the university circles. One reason why the trade in books found a larger development in Belgium than in Germany, was the greater wealth of the trading class in the Low Countries. ”

“ An important reason for the very large membership of the universities of the Middle Ages as compared with their successors of to-day, is to be found in the fact that they undertook to supply not only the higher education which belongs to the present university curriculum, but also the training now furnished by the gymnasia or High Schools, which were at that time not in existence. We find, therefore, in their membership, thousands of students who were little more than boys either in their years or in their mental development. ”

“ After the destruction of the Gothic kingdom of Italy, [17] it was with these monasteries that rested the intellectual future of Europe. Mankind was, for the time at least, to be directed and influenced, not so much by royal chancellors or prætorian guards, as by the monks preaching from their cells and by the monastic scribes distributing the world’s literature from the scriptorium. ”