French Renaissance

“ MEANING OF THE RENAISSANCE LATER PERIOD OF THE MIDDLE AGES The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, covering the later period of the Middle Ages, are commonly known as those of the Renaissance. This French word means Rebirth or Revival. It is a convenient term for all the changes in society, law, and government, in science, philosophy, and religion, in literature and art which gradually transformed medieval civilization into that of modern times. ”

“ Alien then from any wild, political passion, or from the harsh voice of a rude people in revolt, as our English Renaissance must seem, in its passionate cult of pure beauty, its flawless devotion to form, its exclusive and sensitive nature, it is to the French Revolution that we must look for the most primary factor of its production, the first condition of its birth: that great Revolution of which we are all the children, though the voices of some of us be often loud against it ”

“ I have no space to follow this remarkable demonstration of how history repeats itself in the youth; how he grows dismal at twenty- [21] three to represent the end of Mediævalism, brightens because the Renaissance is coming, darkens again with the disputes of the later Reformation, broadens placidly through the thirties as the rational eighteenth century, till at last, about forty-three, he gives a great yell and begins to burn the house down, as a symbol of the French Revolution. ”

“ RENAISSANCE In England there is not to be found the same awakening and change in art at the opening of the sixteenth century which is encountered in France, and is known to us as the Renaissance. This revival of art reached the English at second hand, having been transmitted to them through the French. ”

“ FRENCH SCHOOL. XVIth CENTURY.
(Comp. Dürer's title to Plutarch, 1513, and St. Ambrosius, 1520.)
THE RENAISSANCE.
What was at first an inspiriting, imaginative, and refining influence in art became finally a destructive force. The youthful spirit of the early Renaissance became clouded and oppressed, and finally crushed with a weight of pompous pedantry and affectation. The natural development of a living style in art became arrested, and authority, and an endeavour to imitate the antique, took its place. ”

“ The reason for this superiority on the part of France, for the fact that the Renaissance produced there more abiding and more far-reaching results, may be ascribed partly to the natural law that precocious and rapid growths are always less hardy than later and more gradual ones, partly to the character of the French nation, to its being at once more intellectual and less imaginative than the Italian, and therefore more influenced by the spirit of free inquiry than by the worship of beauty ”

“ But the intense admiration of the severe beauties of classical literature, which was the dominant literary note of the Renaissance, translated itself in their active minds into a determination to make, if it were possible, French itself more able to emulate the triumphs of Greek and of Latin. ”

“ In this great upheaval that was characterised by a demand for unrestricted liberty of investigation, a return to the study of nature and of the natural sciences, the rise and development of national literatures, and the appearance of a new school of art, the Humanist movement or the revival of the study of the classics, the /literae humaniores/, played the fundamental part. In more senses than one it may be called the Age of the Renaissance. ”

“ But in the House Beautiful the saints too have their place; and the student of the Renaissance has this advantage over the student of the emancipation of the human mind in the Reformation, or the French Revolution, that in tracing the footsteps of humanity to higher levels, he is not beset at every turn by the inflexibilities and antagonisms of some well-recognised controversy, with rigidly defined opposites, exhausting the intelligence and limiting one's sympathies. ”

“ Just before the outbreak of the French Revolution it{269} is no exaggeration to say that there were in France alone enough tapestries to carpet a road from Paris to Arras; of course, many were of the Gobelins type and comparatively valueless as art, but every château, every cathedral and monastery, almost every church had its sets of “arras,” and these were of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; the curious products of the Renaissance were confined to kings, princes, great nobles, and to their respective palaces. ”

“ It was the religious wars of the end of the century which brought French collecting to a stop. Constant strife and persecution discouraged the last artists of the Renaissance, ruined many a noble family, and scattered the contents of their palaces. ”

“ Yet when we examine the works of the Renaissance, after the system had become more manageable and acclimated under later Italian and French hands, we cannot but admire the skill with which the lightest fancies and the most various expressions of human contrivance were reconciled to the formal rules and proportions of the Roman orders. ”

“ The middle of the sixteenth century in France is thus marked by a curious blend of those two distinct movements in human history which we call the Renaissance and the Reformation, and the blend is nowhere more picturesque than in the life of Robert Estienne. ”

“ The anterior and less glorious Renaissance, the Renaissance within the limits of the Middle Age itself, a revival which came to a stop and could not successfully develop itself, but which has yet left profound traces in our spirit and our literature,--this revival belongs chiefly to France. France, then, may well serve as a typical country wherein to trace the mediæval growth of intellect and learning ”

“ It is thus we revert across comparative barrenness to the Renaissance, beyond which, and hidden, lie the earlier glories of Etruria and Græco-Italy. As we turn to France the sun is in front of us, striking full upon a height still cloud-capt and unrevealed, and bathing the intervening undulating landscape in the fulness of its undimmed splendor. With France the present sheds lustre, life, and light upon a long past beginning with pre-Roman Gallia, and extending through Roman domination, the darkness of the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance to the present time. ”

“ They still felt the impulse of the wonderful awakening of culture from, its barbaric sleep of centuries which men call the Renaissance; they were own children of the mighty stirring of Europe's conscience which we call the Reformation; and they and their children were to be prime actors in laying the foundations of human liberty in a new century and a new land. ”

“ And as the scientific spirit or the socialistic spirit can give to the permanent instincts of the world a new zest, so the Renaissance passion for self-expansion and for education gave to the old road a new mirage. ”

“ This is not the place to repeat the charming story of the Renaissance, that movement which marks the transition from the Middle Ages to the Modern World, or to dwell on the spirit of the time which witnessed the liberation of reason and gave rise to that passionate recognition of humanity—that escape, "at first hesitating and then triumphant, from a circumscribed life of ecclesiastical tradition into "joyous freedom and unfettered spontaneity." ”

“ But much of the darkness of what are more fitly called the Middle Ages is due to the dimness of vision of those who have baptized the period with a forbidding name, and if we called the Renaissance an age of light, is it not because we are dazzled by mere glamour? After all, the Renaissance was the offspring of the Middle Ages, and a child must frequently bear the burdens of its parents. ”

“ What is called the Renaissance in France is thus not so much the introduction of a wholly new taste ready-made from Italy, but rather the finest and subtlest phase of the middle age itself, its last fleeting splendour and temperate Saint Martin's summer. ”

“ The Renaissance, a noble and vividly European thing, was much older than the Reformation, which was its perversion and corruption. The doors upon modern knowledge had been opened before the soul, which was to enter them, had been cut off from its fellows. ”

“ I call it our English Renaissance because it is indeed a sort of new birth of the spirit of man, like the great Italian Renaissance of the fifteenth century, in its desire for a more gracious and comely way of life, its passion for physical beauty, its exclusive attention to form, its seeking for new subjects for poetry, new forms of art, new intellectual and imaginative enjoyments: and I call it our romantic movement because it is our most recent expression of beauty. ”

“ One cannot fix a term to day or night, and the theory of the Renaissance as a kind of tropical dawn—a sudden passage to light from darkness—is not to be considered. The Renaissance was, and was the result of, a numerous and various series of events which followed and accompanied one another from the fourteenth to the beginning of the sixteenth centuries. First and most immediate in its influence on art and literature and thought, was the rediscovery of the ancient literatures. ”

“ Since, however, we have come to view the Renaissance in its larger aspects as far more than a classical revival, its relations to the Middle Ages are seen to have been much more intimate and important than was once supposed. ”

“ The individuality that had been developed by the institutions and the intellectual life of the Middle Ages was vastly different from that which was produced by the influences of the Renaissance, and it was in many ways more excellent. ”

“ Through the instrumentality of art, and of all the ideas which art introduced into daily life, the Renaissance wrought for the modern world a real resurrection of the body. ... It was scholarship which revealed to men the wealth of their own minds, the dignity of human thought, the value of human speculation, the importance of human life regarded as a thing apart from religious rules and dogmas. ... The Renaissance opened to the whole reading public the treasure-houses of Greek and Latin literature. At the same time the Bible in its original tongues was rediscovered. ”

“ They are more prosperous, they live in better houses, their children go to better schools, their cities are more beautiful than before, their firearms have made them the equal of their old enemies, the robber-barons, who for centuries have levied such heavy taxes upon their trade. So much for the chief actors in the Reformation.
Now let us see what the Renaissance has done to Europe, and then you will understand how the revival of learning and art was bound to be followed by a revival of religious interests. The Renaissance began in Italy. From there it spread to France. ”

“ By the term Renaissance, or new birth, is indicated a natural movement, not to be explained by this or that characteristic, but to be accepted as an effort of humanity for which at length the time had come, and in the onward progress of which we still participate. The history of the Renaissance is not the history of arts, or of sciences, or of literature, or even of nations. It is the history of the attainment of self-conscious freedom by the human spirit manifested in the European races. It is no mere political mutation, no new fashion of art, no restoration of classical standards of taste. ”

“ The point, however, which I want to make is this—the Middle Ages and especially the thirteenth century were not a time when the world stood entirely still. Among the younger generation, there was life, there was enthusiasm, and there was a restless if somewhat bashful asking of questions. And out of this turmoil grew the Renaissance. ”

“ The Renaissance stands not only for a revival of ancient forms in architecture, sculpture, and painting, but for a vast awakening in all departments of human enterprise, and the final abandonment of mediævalism with all its crude and crabbed methods and ways of thought. ”

“ The Renaissance had for its object the development of great personalities. The perfect freedom of the temperament in matters of art, the perfect freedom of the intellect in intellectual matters, the full development of the individual, were the things it aimed at. ”

“ This prediction, which opens a truly appalling prospect for civilisation, might be less terrible if the Church were to open its arms to a new Renaissance, and become once more, as in the beginning of the modern period, the home of learning and the patroness of the arts. ”

“ The history of art has suffered as much as any history by trenchant and absolute divisions. Pagan and Christian art are sometimes harshly opposed, and the Renaissance is represented as a fashion which set in at a definite period. That is the superficial view: the deeper view is that which preserves the identity of European culture. ”

“ But the human spirit could not be forever held in bondage, and, after almost a millennium of repression and uniformity, various factors that had accumulated within the Middle Ages produced an intellectual awakening the Renaissance, that we know as the ‘Renaissance.’ Its vitality lasted during the fifteenth century in Italy and to the close of the sixteenth in the Northern countries, but by the dawn of the seventeenth century it had everywhere degenerated into a dry and mechanical study of the classics. ”

“ The word Renaissance, indeed, is now generally used to denote not merely that revival of classical antiquity which took place in the fifteenth century, and to which the word was first applied, but a whole complex movement, of which that revival of classical antiquity was but one element or symptom. ”

“ Too recent to appear picturesque, the Middle Ages were, to the pioneers of the new era, out of date and old-fashioned, terms far more injurious than the most violent word-war of the preachers. Filled with the new wine of the Renaissance, these youthful enthusiasts formed the nucleus of that phalanx of life-loving, [Pg 259] exuberant personalities who, throwing all their energies into the glorification of liberty, fame, pleasure, and earthly beauty, gave us subsequently the Elizabethan age. ”