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From The New Review. THE RENAISSANCE IN ITS BROADER

ASPECTS.

BY JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS.

WE are wont to attach two different meanings to the term Renaissance. We employ it to indicate a well-known but indefinite period of time, and also to indicate the mental and moral development of the European nations during that period. On the one hand it denotes the transition from mediæval to modern times; on the other it denotes the intellectual change involved in that transition. The word, by its etymology, takes for granted that this transition was a return to life from a state of deadness. On the special significance of the metaphor Renaissance I mean to dwell at some length further on.

Revival of Learning, that is, to renewed interest in classical literature, renewed curiosity about the texts of ancient authors, works of ancient art, histories of ancient peoples; all of which resulted in a sense of historical continuity, in a return to confidence about the destinies of the human race, in a more intelligent study of mankind and of the world we live in.

There is certainly an idea of progress in the term Renaissance. Like all things that are merely ours and mortal, antique civilization came to an end. It is an error to suppose that arts, letters, and civil life were extinguished by the Goths and Vandals. What really happened was that those fruits of the spirit, which were so vigorous in Greece, so lusty in Rome, gradually withered up. The science of history warns us to be The power of thinking lucidly diminwary in trying to impose chronological ished; the power of verbal expression limitations upon the main stages of dwindled; social and political instituhuman evolution. In a certain sense tions decayed; old and new religions we can talk of ancient and modern his- struggled together in the death of rites, tory, of the Middle Ages and the the birth of dogmas. The Græco-RoRenaissance; just as, in writing a biog-man culture, which spread like a veneer raphy, we can use such terms as boyhood, manhood, and old age. We know, however, that it is a legal fiction to assume that a man becomes adult at the age of twenty-one; we also know that we cannot say when the Middle Ages ended and the Renaissance began. The Renaissance was the final phase of the Middle Ages; it was also the first phase of the modern period. Being by its essence a transition, its beginning and its ending defy definition.

over the whole Latin empire, shrivelled by the laws of natural declension. Explain it how we will, the law of decline and ultimate extinction holds good for great things and small alike, for things spiritual and things material, in this universe of which man forms a part. While antique culture was expiring, the so-called barbarian races, the Celtic and Teutonic tribes of northern Europe, were forming themselves into separate aggregations, indefinite and fluctuating at first, but tending always towards organic unity, until the nationalities of Europe emerged into something like distinctness. Towards the close of the Middle Ages it was possible to speak of England, Spain, France, Germany, and Italy, as several factors. At the same time the mediæval institutions of the Papacy and the Holy Ros

It is easier to define what the nature of the changes wrought during this period of transition really was. The metaphor of re-birth contained in the word Renaissance implies that Europe began a new stage of vivid life, shaking off the torpor which benumbed the human mind when classical civilization decayed. It means that the nations, led by the Italians, entered upon a fresh stage of en-man Empire maintained an ideal of ergy, implying fuller consciousness and a freer exercise of faculties than had belonged to them during the Middle Ages. In a more restricted sense, it means that this resuscitation was due in a large measure to what is called the

European unity, obscuring the hard facts of national autonomy and preparing for that intellectual federation which the Renaissance secured.

Speaking broadly, then, the work performed during the Middle Ages was the

creation of new nationalities, with new him to write his "Chronicle; " Petrarch languages, new political and other reli- made a saint of Cicero, a friend of gious conceptions, and a new system of Varro; Boccaccio attempted to revive international relations. In other words, the study of Greek literature. But this the proper milieu for a new civilization was not all. They assimilated the was prepared. Whenever and wher- spirit of the ancients. First among ever this reconstructive process became modern men, they aimed at making self-conscious, there and then we per- monumental work in literature, work ceive an effort to revive culture. This with clear thoughts, definite form, oreffort is always connected with a rever-ganic cohesion, marked individuality. sion to the classic past, a return to pagan Mediæval as may be the tone and conpositivism, a rebellion against ecclesi- tents of the "Divine Comedy," it is astical tradition. It is strongly marked classical in its perfection of self-conin Carl the Great's attempt to restore scious art. The same may be said about the Western Empire and a Roman type Petrarch's "Canzoniere," where the of education. It is felt in the court and psychology of love, treated diffusely castle life of Provence, in Frederick and spontaneously by the Provençal, is II.'s dream of urbane and mundane wrought into a piece of studied selfcivility, in the songs of the Goliardi and analysis. The same may be said about the lyrics of the Minnesingers. But Boccaccio's "Decamerone," where the though the milieu was being gradually narrative and romances of previous formed, it took long before any one na- centuries are transmuted by a magic tion gained sufficient wealth and ease, wand into a single "Comédie Husufficient knowledge of its mental aims, maine." The same may be said about to start Europe upon that process which Villani's "Chronicle," which is the first we call the Renaissance. At one time specimen of European history, as disit appeared as though the performance tinguished from the annals of some of this task might devolve on southern convent or the life of some saint. In France. But the Church extirpated each and all of these works the free Provençal heresy, and the culture of spirit of man, the shaping intellect of Provence expired in the flames which the individual artist, is born again beswallowed up her martyrs. The Sicilian neath the ribs of medieval death. court of Frederick II. was the inheritor of Provençal culture; and here the ideal of secular, as opposed to ecclesiastical, civility struck deep roots. When this ideal was transplanted to the University of Bologna and the city of Florence the destinies of the Renaissance, of the rebirth of civilization, were secured.

That reversion to the classical tradition which I have indicated as a sign of all the earlier efforts after the Renaissance, and which is usually known as the revival of learning, now took place in earnest. The four greatest Italian writers of the fourteenth century, Dante, Villani, Petrarch, Boccaccio, all stood in a double and peculiar relation to the ancients. With more or less of conscious impulse they interrogated the classic Græco-Roman oracles. Dante chose Virgil for his guide; Villani declared that the ruins of Rome inspired

Italy was the soil upon which the Renaissance, or the rebirth of civilization in altered forms, had to be accomplished. The Italians owed their primacy among the nations to the peculiar condition under which they flourished in the Middle Ages. Separated from the Eastern Empire, except by a few weak links, Italy had not shared the decrepitude of Byzantium. She joined the sisterhood of Occidental nations by subjection to the yoke of Ostrogoths and Lombards; yet Italy never submitted wholly to the feudal system, and remained comparatively untouched by the spirit of chivalry. The Italians were therefore ready to revive the positive and plastic genius of the antique world. They had another advantage in the fact that Rome remained the head seat of Western Christendom. It was the Papal see; and when that phantom of the empire

reappeared, Rome became the city of ing into planets, nomadic races not yet Cæsar's coronation, and Italy the garden settled. Former schools of historians of his domain. To their papal and talked about the Dark Ages, and deimperial overlords the Italians owed no plored the barbarism of the Middle Ages. debt of gratitude for good government These were schools trained in the new and wholesome discipline. What they learning, schools which still existed in practically gained by growing up under the transitional period of the Renaisthis dual headship was municipal inde- sance, schools which had not properly pendence, the restless, combative, com- merged into the science of the modern mercial life of Lombard and Tuscan world. We know now that the Middle communes. Their political indepen- Ages were turbulently, energetically dence and material prosperity rendered vital, engaged in the development of them precocious in the struggle after organisms. When the day arrived for higher intellectual conditions of exist- those organisms, the modern nations ence. They possessed special opportu- with their languages, to clothe themnities for reuniting with antiquity. On selves with culture as a garment, to Italian soil the connection with the coalesce in common intellectual sympaRoman past was still unbroken. The thies, to superadd the enjoyments of language retained more than any other the spirit upon the necessities of social of the Latin speech. The cities bore integration, then the hour for the Rehigh sounding names of former great-naissance had struck. And then the ness. The land was adorned with eldest of the European nations, the one majestic monuments of classical archi- which, in spite of all change, kept neartecture. Under the cloak of Teutonic est to the past, was bound to take the customs, the Italians remained Roman foremost part in that re-welding of the in their sympathies. newer to the older stock of mind, that reconstitution of humanity self-conscious as a vital integer, which is the

with. A common medium of communication was needed, and that was found in Latin.

the Renaissance a proper milieu was formed in Italy. That milieu enabled the modern nations to link their new life with the old life of past ages, and to found a solid basis for the mental progress of our race.

It is clear, I think now, why that peculiar hybrid of history which we term the Renaissance, that blend be- main outcome of the period we deal tween Paganism and Christianity, that reversion of western Europe to the Mediterranean basin for the stimulation of its spiritual forces, could not have At last-and this seems to me the been produced on any ground more most important fact in the history of propitious to its growth than the Italian peninsula. The Renaissance had to take place. Every step in evolution is inevitable. It needed what we may call an Eurasian milieu a mixed race for its development. This was found in the Italians. As the Hebrews were called and chosen for one service in the ancient world, the Greeks for another, so in like manner were the Italians, in the fourteenth century, summoned and selected to create the mental condition under which everybody of our blood and breed is living now.

It was just at this point that the revival of learning intervened, and determined the course of the Renaissance. Mediæval students possessed and handled a considerable portion of the Latin classics, although Greek had become a dead language for the Western nations. But these students had no real insight The medieval genius did not lack into antique literature. Between their audacity or vigor. It was powerfully minds and the text of poet or historian constructive; sometimes volcanic in there hung veils of mysticism and vapor rebellion; sometimes lawless in brute of misapprehension. Petrarch first impulse. It had the qualities which opened a new method in scholarship, belong to organisms in the process of and revealed what we denote by huevolution - nebulous masses condens-manism. Petrarch's services to modern