John Addington Symonds

“ She turned, and stayed the car; he storms and calls on all the gods for Lorenzo, mixing tears with prayers, and sorrow with his tears, while sorrow suggests words of wilder freedom. Death laughed; remembering her old grudge, when Orpheus made his way to hell, she cried, "Lo, he too seeks to abrogate our laws, and lays his hand upon my rights!" Nor more delay; she struck the poet while he wept, and broke his heart-strings in the middle of his sighs. Alas! thus wast thou taken from us, ravished by harsh fate, Politian, master of the Italian lyre!' ”

“ Poetry and rhetoric he regarded not merely as the fine arts of literature, but as two chief instruments whereby the man of genius arrives at self-expression, perpetuates the qualities of his own soul, and impresses his character upon the age. Since this realisation of the individual in a high and puissant work of art appeared to him the noblest aim of man on earth, it followed that the inspired speech of the poet and the eloquence of the orator became for Petrarch the summit of ambition, the two-peaked Parnassus he struggled through his lifetime to ascend. ”

“ For us its finest flights of rhetoric have lost their charm, and its best turns of phrase their point. So impossible is it that the fashionable style of one age should retain its magic for posterity, unless it be truly classical in form, or weighted with sound thought, or animated with high inspiration. Just these qualities were missed by Poggio and his compeers. Setting no more serious aim before them than the imitation of Livy and Cicero, Seneca and Cæsar, they fell far short of their originals; nor had they matter to make up for their defect of elegance. ”

“ Nations that are nations, seek to inspire fear, or at least respect. The Italians were contented with admiration, and looked confidently to the world for gratitude. The task of two toilsome, glorious centuries had been accomplished. The chasm between Rome and the Renaissance was bridged over, and a plain way was built for the progressive human spirit. Italy, downtrodden in the mire of blood and ruins, should still lead the van and teach the peoples. It was a sublime delusion, the last phase of an impulse so powerful in its origin that to prophesy an ending was impossible. ”

“ Plato, worshipped as an unknown god, whose rising would dispel the mists of scholastic theology, was upon the lips of every student. Men were thirsting for the philosophy that had the charm of poetry, that delighted the imagination while it fortified the understanding, and that lent its glamour to the dreams and yearnings of a youthful age. What they wanted, Gemistos possessed in abundance. From the treasures of a memory stored with Platonic, Pythagorean, and Alexandrian mysticism he poured forth copious streams of indiscriminate erudition. ”

“ Posterity has sadly belied their expectations. Of all their treatises and commentaries, poems and translations, how few are now remembered; how rarely are their names upon the lips of even professed students! The debt of gratitude we owe them is indeed great, and should be amply paid by our respectful memory of all they wrought for us with labour in the field of learning. Yet Filelfo would turn with passionate disappointment in his grave, if he could know that men of wider scope and sounder erudition appreciate his writings solely as shed leaves that fertilised the soil of literature. ”

“ Hence the single-hearted devotion to the literature of Greece and Rome that marks the whole Renaissance era. Hence the watchword of that age, the Litteræ Humaniores. Hence the passion for antiquity, possessing thoughtful men, and substituting a new authority for the traditions of the Church. Hence the so-called Paganism of centuries bent upon absorbing and assimilating a spirit no less life-giving from their point of view than Christianity itself. Hence the persistent effort of philosophers to find the meeting-point of two divergent inspirations. ”

“ Yet I knew not how to describe the activity of the press in Italy better than by concentrating attention upon the greatest publisher who ever lived. Aldo Manuzio was no mere bookseller or printer. His learning won the hearty praises of ripe scholars, nor did any student of the age express more nobly and with fuller conviction his deep sense of the dignity conferred by learning on the soul of man. [366] That he was amiable in private life is proved by the intimate relations he maintained with humanists, than whom even poets are not a more irritable race of men. ”

“ We have watched the enthusiasm for antiquity strike root in Florence, spread to Rome, and penetrate the Courts of Italy. One city after another receives the light and hands it on, until the whole cycle of study has been traversed and the vigour of the nation is exhausted. Florence discovers manuscripts, founds libraries, learns Greek, and leads the movement of the fifteenth century. Naples criticises; Rome translates; Mantua and Ferrara form a system of education; Venice commits the literature of the classics to the press. ”

“ An apologist may always plead that Lorenzo was the epitome of his nation's most distinguished qualities, that the versatility of the Renaissance found in him its fullest incarnation. It was the duty of Italy in the fifteenth century not to establish religious or constitutional liberty, but to resuscitate culture. Before the disastrous wars of invasion had begun, it might well have seemed even to patriots as though Florence needed a Mæcenas more than a Camillus. ”

“ The intellectual and moral milieu created by multitudes of self-centred, cultivated personalities was necessary for the evolution of that spirit of intelligence, subtle, penetrative, and elastic, that formed the motive force of the Renaissance. The work achieved by Italy for the world in that age was less the work of a nation than that of men of power, less the collective and spontaneous triumph of a puissant people than the aggregate of individual efforts animated by one soul of free activity, a common striving after fame. ”

“ Surely the physical qualities of a race change with the changes in their thought and feeling. The beauty of Tasso is more feminine and melancholy than that of Ariosto, in whom the liberal genius of the Renaissance was yet alive. Among the scowling swordsmen of the seventeenth century you cannot find a face like Giorgione's Gattamelata; [5] the nobles who bear themselves so proudly on the canvases of Vandyck at Genoa lack the urbanity of Raphael's Castiglione; Moroni's black-robed students are more pinched and withered than the Pico of the Uffizzi. ”

“ It is difficult to appraise humanistic literature at a just value, seeing that by far the larger mass of it, after serving a purpose of temporary utility, is now forgotten. Not itself, but its effect, is what we have to estimate; and the ultimate product of the whole movement was the creation of a new capacity for cultivation. To have restored to Europe the knowledge of the classics, and to have recovered the style of the ancients, so as to use Latin prose and verse with freedom at a time when Latin formed an universal medium of culture, is the first real merit of the humanists. ”

“ Petrarch, who exceeded Dante in the thirst for literary honour, turned from the men of his generation to converse in long epistles with the buried saints of Latin culture. For men of less ambition it was enough to feel that they could raise their souls through study to communion with the stately spirits of antiquity, passing like Machiavelli from trivial affairs into their closet, where they donned their reading robes and shook hands across the centuries with Cicero or Livy. ”

“ Antiquity as a whole—not the authors merely of the Attic age or the Augustan—claimed their admiration; and though they devoted special study to Cicero and Virgil for the purposes of style, they eagerly accepted every Greek or Latin composition from the earliest to the latest. To this omnivorous appetite of the elder scholars we are perhaps indebted for the preservation of many fragments which a more delicate taste would have rejected. Certainly we owe to them the conception of the classics in their totality, as forming the proper source of culture for the human race. ”

“ The humanists resembled the sophists again in their profession to teach wisdom for pay. What philosophy was for the early Greeks, classic culture was for Italy in the Renaissance; and this the scholars sold. Antiquity lay before them like an open book. From their seat among the learned they doled out the new lore of life to eager pupils. And as the more sober-minded of the Athenians regarded the educational practice of the sophists with suspicion, so the humanists came to be dreaded as the corrupters of youth. ”

“ I shall have failed to convey a right notion of the tendencies of humanism, if I have not shown that the Italians were seeking not merely to acquire a knowledge of ancient literature, but also to effect a resuscitation of antiquity in their own writings. Regarding themselves as the heirs of Rome, separated from the brilliant period of Latin civilisation by ten centuries of ignorance, they strove with all their might to seize the thread of culture at the very point where the poets of the Silver Age had dropped it. ”

“ Foremost among these may be reckoned his vanity, his eagerness to grasp the poet's crown, his appetite for flattery, his restless change from place to place in search of new admirers, his self-complacent garrulity. This vanity was perhaps inseparable from the position he assumed upon the threshold of the modern world. It was hardly possible that the prophet of a new phase of culture should not look down with contempt upon the uneducated masses, and believe that learning raised a man into a demigod. Study of the classics taught him to despise his age and yearn for immortality ”

“ His vision of the restored Republic seemed for a moment destined to become reality. The Romans placed the power of life and death, of revenues and armies, in the hands of the seer, who had stirred them by his rhetoric. Rienzi took rank among the potentates of Italy. Even the Papal Court acknowledged him.
What followed proved the political incapacity of the new dictator, his want of critical insight into the ideal he had set before himself. There is something both pathetic and ridiculous in the vanity displayed by this barber's son exalted to a place among the princes. ”

“ 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? ”

“ What was the use of making this life refined and agreeable by study, when it formed but an insignificant prelude to an eternity wherein mere mundane learning would be valueless? Why raise questions about man's condition on this earth, when the creeds had to be defined and expounded, when the nature of God and the relation of the human soul to its Creator had to be established? ”

“ Until quite late in the Renaissance so much survived of feudal customs even in Italy that riding, the handling of the lance and sword, and all athletic exercises formed a part of education no less indispensable than mental training. Great cities had open places set apart for tournaments and games; in Tuscan burghs the palio was run on feast days, and May mornings saw the prentice lads of Florence tilting beneath the smiles of girls who danced at nightfall on the square of Santa Trinità. Bloody battles in the streets were frequent. The least provocation caused a man to draw his dagger. ”

“ Neopagan scholarship added, therefore, lustre to the Papal Court, as one among the many splendours of that worldly period which raised the See of-158- Rome to eminence above the States of Italy. The light it shed, however, had no vital heat. Learning was always an article of artificial luxury at Rome, not, as at Florence, part of the nation's life; and when the gilded pomp of Leo dwindled down to Clement's abject misery and utter ruin, it was found that such encouragement as Popes had given to literature had been a source of weakness and decay. ”