John Addington Symonds

“ In all the literary work which has been mentioned, the originality and freshness of the French genius are no less conspicuous than its saturation with the new learning and with Italian studies. But the greatest name of the epoch, the name which is synonymous with the Renaissance in France, has yet to be uttered. That, of course, is Rabelais. His incommensurable and indescribable masterpiece of mingled humour, wisdom, satire, erudition, indecency, profundity, levity, imagination, realism, reflects the whole age in its mirror of hyper-Aristophanic farce. ”

“ Poliziano was great as a scholar, as a professor, as a critic, and as a Latin poet at an age when the classics were still studied with the passion of assimilative curiosity, and not with the scientific industry of a later period. He was the representative hero of that age of scholarship in which students drew their ideal of life from antiquity and fondly dreamed that they might so restore the past as to compete with the classics in production and bequeath a golden age of resuscitated paganism to the modern world. Yet he was even greater as an Italian poet. ”

“ Depicting feudalism in the vivid colours of an age at war with feudal institutions, breathing into antique histories the breath of actual life, embracing the romance of Italy and Spain, the mysteries-of German legend, the hctions of poetit fancy and the facts of daily life, humours of the moment and abstractions of philosophical speculation, in one homogeneous amalgam instinct with intense vitality, this extraordinary birth of time, with Shakespeare for the master of all ages, left a monument of the Renaissance unrivalled for pure creative power by any other product of that epoch. ”

“ All the resources of a copious and unclean Latin vocabulary were employed to degrade the objects of his satire; and every crime of which humanity is capable was ascribed to them without discrimination. In Filelfo and Valla Poggio found his match, and Italy was amused for years with the spectacle of their indecent combats. To dwell upon such literary infamies would be below the dignity of the historian, were it not that these habits of the early Italian humanists imposed a fashion upon Europe which extended to the later age of Scaliger's contentions with Scioppius and Milton's with Salmasius. ”

“ We must not suffer it to lead us into rhetoric about the deadness and the darkness of the middle ages, or hamper our inquiry with preconceived assumptions that the re-birth in question was in any true sense a return to the irrecoverable pagan past. Nor must we imagine that there was any abrupt break with the middle ages. On the contrary, the Renaissance was rather the last stage of the middle ages, emerging from ecclesiastical and feudal despotism, developing what was original in medieval ideas by the light of classic arts and letters, holding in itself the promise of the modern world. ”

“ The truth is that the Reformation was the Teutonic Renaissance. It was the emancipation of the reason on a line neglected by the Italians, more important indeed in its political consequences, more weighty in its bearing on rationalistic developments than the Italian Renaissance, but none the less an outcome of the same ground-influences. We have already in this century reached a point at which, in spite of stubborn Protestant dogmatism and bitter Catholic reaction, we can perceive how the ultimate affranchisement of man will be the work of both. ”

“ Erminia seeking refuge in the shepherd's hut — these lovely pagan women, so touching in their sorrows, so romantic in their adventures, so tender in their emotions, rivet our attention, while we skip the battles, religious ceremonies, conclaves and stratagems of the campaign. The truth is that Tasso's great invention as an artist was the poetry of sentiment. Sentiment, not sentimentality, gives value to what is immortal in the Gerusalemme. It was a new thing in the 16th century, something concordant with a growing feeling for woman and with the ascendant art of music. ”

“ It was rather the right touch on life, the right feeling for human independence, the right way of approaching the materials of philosophy, religion, scholarship and literature, that failed. The courage that is born of knowledge, the calm strength begotten by a positive attitude of mind, face to face with the dominant over-shadowing Sphinx of theology, were lacking. We may fairly say that natural and untaught people had more of the just intuition that was needed than learned folk trained in the schools. ”

“ In the taverns and low places of amusement haunted by those lettered songsters, on the open road and in the forests trodden by their vagrant feet, the deities of Greece and Rome were not in exile, but at home within the hearts of living men. Thus, while Christendom was still preoccupied with the Crusades, two main forces of the Renaissance, naturalism and enthusiasm for antique modes of feeling, already brought their latent potency to light, prematurely indeed and precociously, yet with a promise that was destined to be kept. ”

“ The Reformation, inspired by the same energy of resuscitated life as the Renaissance, assisted by the same engines of the printing-press and paper, using the same apparatus of scholarship, criticism, literary skill, being in truth another manifestation of the same world-movement under a diverse form, now posed itself as an irreconcilable antagonist to Renaissance Italy. It would be difficult to draw any comparison between German and Italian humanists to the disparagement of the former. ”

“ We have therefore to recognize that the four greatest writers of the 14th century, while the Revival of Learning was yet in its cradle, each after his own fashion acknowledged the vivifying touch upon their spirit of the antique genius. They seem to have been conscious that they could not give the desired impulse to modern literature and art without contact with the classics; and, in spite of the splendour of their achievements in Italian, they found no immediate followers upon that path. ”

“ The open-air enjoyments of the wood, the field, the dance upon the village green, are sung with juvenile lightheartedness. No grave note, warning us that the pleasures of this earth are fleeting, that the visible world is but a symbol of the invisible, that human life is a probation for the life beyond, interrupts the tinkling music as of castanets and tripping feet which gives a novel charm to these unique relics of the 13th century. Goliardic poetry is further curious as showing how the classics even at that early period were a fountain-head of pagan inspiration. ”

“ At the age of thirty-one the Gerusalemme, as we have it, was accomplished. The world too was already ringing with the music of Aminta. More than this Tasso had not to give to literature. But those succeeding years of derangement, exile, imprisonment, poverty and hope deferred endear the man to us. Elegiac and querulous as he must always appear, we yet love Tasso better because he suffered through nearly a quarter of a century of slow decline and unexplained misfortune. ”

“ The Revival of Learning must be regarded as a function of that vital energy, an organ of that mental evolution, which brought into existence the modern world, with its new conceptions of philosophy and religion, its reawakened arts and sciences, its firmer grasp on the realities of human nature and the world, its manifold inventions and discoveries, its altered
political systems, its expansive and progressive forces. Important as the Revival of Learning undoubtedly was, there are essential factors in the complex called the Renaissance with which it can but remotely be connected. ”

“ To the Germans, as to all nations of that epoch, the Bible came as a new book, because they now read it for the first time with eyes opened by humanism. The touch of the new spirit which had evolved literature, art and culture in Italy sufficed in Germany to recreate Christianity. This new spirit in Italy emancipated human intelligence by the classics; in Germany it emancipated the human conscience by the Bible. ”

“ But the victor's laurels were reserved for Ariosto, whose Orlando Furioso is the purest and most perfect extant example of Renaissance poetry. It was not merely in what they had acquired and assimilated from the classics that these poets showed the transformation effected in the field of literature by humanism. The whole method and spirit of medieval art had been abandoned. That of the Cinque Cento is positive, defined, mundane. The deity, if deity there be, that rules in it, is beauty. ”

“ Humanism, as it actually appeared in Italy, was positive in its conception of the problems to be solved, pagan in its contempt for medieval mysticism, invigorated for sensuous enjoyment by contact with antiquity, yet holding in itself the germ of new religious aspirations, profounder science and sterner probings of the mysteries of life than had been attempted even by the ancients. The operation of this humanistic spirit has now to be traced.
It is obvious that Italian literature owed little, at the outset to the Revival of Learning. ”

“ Petrarch first opened a new method in scholarship, and revealed what we denote as humanism. In his teaching lay the twofold discovery of man and of the world. For humanism, which was the vital element in the Revival of Learning, consists mainly of a just perception of the dignity of man as a. rational, volitional and sentient being, born upon this earth with a right to use it and enjoy it. Humanism implied the rejection of those visions of a future and imagined state of souls as the only absolute reality, which had fascinated the imagination of the middle ages. ”

“ In truth the Renaissance was ruled by no Astraea redux, but rather by a severe spirit which brought no peace but a sword, reminding men of sternest duties, testing what of moral force and tenacity was in them, compelling them to strike for the old order or the new, suffering no lukewarm halting between two opinions. ”

“ The complex onward effort of the modern nations, expressing itself in Italy as Renaissance, in Germany as Reformation, had aroused the forces of conservatism. The four main instruments of the reaction were the papacy, which had done so much by its sympathy with the revival to promote the humanistic spirit it now dreaded, the strength of Spain, and two Spanish institutions planted on Roman soil-the Inquisition and the Order of Jesus. ”

“ The Renaissance closed the middle ages and opened the modern era,—not merely because the mental and moral ideas which then sprang into activity and owed their force in large measure to the revival of classical learning were opposed to medieval modes of thinking and feeling, but also because the political and international relations specific to it as an age were at variance with fundamental theories of the past. ”

“ It is difficult to combine in one view the several aspects presented to us by this many-sided man of literary genius. At a period when humanism took the lead in forming Italian character and giving tone to European culture, he climbed with facility to the height of achievement in all the branches of scholarship which were then most seriously prized—in varied knowledge of ancient authors, in critical capacity, in rhetorical and poetical exuberance. This was enough at that epoch to direct the attention of all the learned men of Europe on Poliziano. ”

“ What has come to be called a classical education was the immediate product of the Italian Renaissance. The universities of Bologna, Padua and Salerno had been famous through the middle ages for the study of law, physics and medicine; and during the 15th and 16th centuries the first two still enjoyed celebrity in these faculties. But at this period no lecture-rooms were so crowded as those in which professors of antique literature and language read passages from the poets and orators, taught Greek, and commented upon the systems of philosophers. ”

“ He appears before us as the dictator of Italian culture in a double capacity—as the man who most perfectly expressed the Italian conception of humanism, and brought erudition into accord with the pursuit of noble and harmonious form, and also as the man whose vernacular compositions were more significant than any others of the great revolution in favour of Italian poetry which culminated in Ariosto. Beyond the sphere of pure scholarship and pure literature Poliziano did not venture. ”

“ They had an immediate, a lasting and a wide renown, encouraging the scholars of the next century and a half to throw their occasional discoveries in the field of scholarship into a form at once so attractive and so instructive. Poliziano was not, however, contented with these simply professorial and scholastic compositions. Nature had endowed him with literary and poetic gifts of the highest order. These he devoted to the composition of Latin and Greek verses, which count among the best of those produced by men of modern times in rivalry with ancient authors. ”

“ To a student of the origins of German humanism it is clear that something very different from the Renaissance of Lorenzo de’ Medici and Leo X. was in preparation from the first upon Teutonic soil. Far less plastic and form-loving than the Italian, the German intelligence was more penetrative, earnest, disputative, occupied with substantial problems. Starting with theological criticism, proceed in to the stage of solid studies in the three learned languages, German humanism occupied the attention of a widely scattered sect of erudite scholars ”

“ Essentially a poet of impulse and instinct, he was hampered in production by his own rules.
The five years between 1565 and 1570 seem to have been the happiest of Tasso’s life, although his father’s death in 1569 caused his affectionate nature profound pain. Young, handsome, accomplished in all the exercises of a well-bred gentleman, accustomed to the society of the great and learned, illustrious by his published works in verse and prose, he became the idol of the most brilliant court in Italy. ”