In Boccaccio we have a great man of the Renaissance, but a representative of its later and less pure spirit. "Petrarch, in his search after culture, laid stress not only on form and external beauty, but on spiritual truth and grandeur as the foundation. Boccaccio left out the latter element. An admirer of beauty and grace alone, and for themselves, he paved the way for the sensuality of later times." Of these two men, the first represented the prime, the second the decline, of this first great period, this age of enthusiasm, of desire for, and belief in culture.) The second great period of the Renaissance is that of the acquisition and systematisation of knowledge, of the discovery of manuscripts, of the foundation of libraries. Nicholas V. founds the Vatican Library in 1453, Cosmo de Medici begins the Medicean collection: it is the age of men who, like Poggio Braccolini, ransack all the cities and convents in Europe for manuscripts; of those men, the real heroes of the period, the teachers of Greek, who in the fifteenth century escaped from Constantinople, and began the worship of manuscripts, of the text of Homer, of Plato, of Aristotle. Printing presses were established at Florence, Venice, Bâle, Lyons, and Paris. Virgil was printed in 1470, Homer in 1488, Aristotle in 1498, Plato in 1513. Then comes the third age, marked both in England and Europe by the name of Erasmus. Then began that critical assimilation of the material collected, the first-fruits of which are seen in the Florentine Academy; but then also culminated in Italy that degeneration which was hinted at in the work of Boccaccio. The spirituality so strong in the personality and writings of Petrarch became absent in the thought and individuality of the majority of men who represent this phase of the Renaissance: belief in man becomes arrogance, the desire to develop and exercise the faculties becomes self-indulgence: the worship of form, the appreciation of external beauty, overpowers everything else: "an affectionate study," says Bacon, "of eloquence and copie of speech began to flourish. This grew speedily to an excess; for men began to hunt more after words than matter: more after the choiceness of the phrase, and the round and clean composition of the sentence, and the sweet falling of the clauses, and the varying and illustration of their words with tropes and figures, than after the weight of matter, worth of subject, soundness of argument, life of invention, depth of judgment. Then grew the flowing and watery vein of Osorius, the Portugal bishop, to be in price. Then did Sturmius spend such infinite and curious pains upon Cicero the orator, and Hermogenes the rhetorician, besides his own book of Periods and Imitation and the like. Then did Car of Cambridge and Ascham with their lectures and writings almost deify Cicero and Demosthenes, and allure all young men that were studious unto that delicate and polished kind of learning. Then did Erasmus take occasion to make the scoffing echo, Decem annos consumpsi in legendo Cicerone; and the echo answered in Greek, One (Asine).... In sum, the whole inclination of those times was rather towards copie than weight." And Erasmus, fearing its worldly tendency, goes so far as to mistrust the introduction of scholarship into the north. "One scruple still besets my mind, lest under the cloak of revived literature, Paganism should strive to raise its head, there being among Christian men, who, while they recognise the name of Christ, breathe in their hearts the spirit of the Gentiles." Italy in this later and degenerate phase, as well as in its earlier, influenced England. In its purer and earlier stage it was the prophet of antique culture, and of a new and vigorous ideal which gave glory and interest to life: in its later stage, when its culture, its admiration for external form, was modified by no spiritual element, by no ideal of truth, by no sense of the dignity and responsibility of man,—when the spirit of Christianity had vanished and left a philosophy pagan and Machiavellian in its tendencies, it became feared and abhorred by English thinkers. Socially it was considered the ruin of Englishmen,-"an Italianated Englishman is the devil incarnate:" politically it was discredited in English eyes, as being represented by Machiavelli, who, if not the monster of ingenious crime, the impersonation of subtle villainy as conceived by Elizabethan dramatists, yet carried frankly to an immoral extreme in politics the pagan ethics of self-interest. England came into direct contact with Italy as early as the middle of the fourteenth century. Three of Chaucer's diplomatic missions, in 1372, 1374, and 1378, took him to Italy, and we know how much stimulus and material he received from his admiration and knowledge of the works of the first great Italians of the Renaissance, Men like Duke Humphrey of Gloucester made libraries and brought over Italian scholars into England to translate Greek works; Henry VI. and Edward IV. were both of them cultivated men, and interested in literature. In England there were a few scholars like John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, who had won fame in the schools of Italy. Both in Chaucer and in Wyclif, we can see the stirrings of that twofold movement, the first faint anticipation of the great movement of the sixteenth century. But the absorbing interest of a troubled national life, the absence of leisure, prevented that activity of speculative and imaginative thought, of which the result is literature. The Wars of the Roses, the quiet of exhaustion in the reign of Henry VII., when the new monarchy was gathering up its strength to begin its career of despotism, delayed the literary movement, till it came coincident with the Reformation. The final throwing off of Papal authority did not indeed happen till 1534, but long before that, signs of the movement marked by the statutes of Præmunire and Provisors, spiritually quickened by the teaching of Wyclif, and especially by the teaching of the New Learning, had shown itself. Henry VIII., actuated only by caprice and personal motives, accomplished what had really been for some time desired by the instinct of the nation; political circumstances alone had delayed the event, and thus it happened that a legal movement which upset old-established religious institutions, which quickened religious energy and demanded religious speculation, came exactly at the same time as a movement in the direction of wider culture, wider intellectual freedom, a movement led by Italy, with its now fully-developed ideals of humanism. And to this coincidence may be partly due the moral and religious character of the Renaissance in England,—a character which distinguishes it specially from that of Italy, where humanism eventually became paganism in its most degenerate and self-indulgent form. In England religious enthusiasm mingled with literary enthusiasm: man was not left after the destruction of the religion and the ideals of the Middle Ages to satisfy his spiritual cravings with culture alone. In some of the men who represent this period in England,-in Spenser, in Sidney, in More, and in Ascham,— religious and literary enthusiasm meet and blend. Shakespeare has the deep moral sense which gives dignity and proportion to his view of life, enabling him to shape it to artistic purposes: one of the greatest of the Elizabethans was Hooker, with his fervent religious enthusiasm; and even to the end of the period, even in its decline, we have a touch of spirituality; in the obscure conceits of the so-called metaphysical school, in the religious poems of Herbert and Crashaw, in the nobility of feeling of some of the cavalier poets, and in the respect shown for morality by the dramatists of the degenerate Elizabethan stage, by Beaumont and Fletcher, even by Webster and Ford. But the coincidence of these two movements must not count alone as the cause: for deep down in the Teutonic nature lies that want of contentment with the actual life, that craving for a serious solution of the problems of life and death, which a spiritual belief can alone satisfy. "Their climate is damp," says M. Taine, "hence arises a grand melancholy, and then the religious idea of duty." But climate cannot altogether explain the religious tendencies of the English Renaissance, the causes which prevented the English from reacting so strongly against the influences of the Middle Ages, as to seek, like the Italians, to find in knowledge and culture alone, food for the soul and guidance for human conduct: for the origin and history of the whole race must be studied in all its details, if the complete nature of this movement, as of that of any movement in the life of a nation, is to be thoroughly understood. It is enough for the purposes of literature to study, as typical of this great movement in its two aspects, the School of the New Learning. It is truly representative of the Renaissance in its broader sense, because it combined a deep religious enthusiasm, not yet, however, at variance with established doctrine, but fighting only against degenerate custom,—with a profound belief in and reverence for the classics. It was its protest against abuses, its criticism of custom, social, political, educational, and religious, that destroyed the crushing weight of medieval authority in its earnestness and interest in these matters, it showed that it held things of this world to be of importance. In relieving human life from the weight of ascetic theory and practice, in supplying, through the classics, new intellectual food, it allowed the national mind to work freely: it prepared the way for that originality, for that burst of art of Elizabethan times, which was the expression of its great and healthy vitality. CHAPTER II. THE RENAISSANCE IN ENGLAND-BEGINNINGS OF THOUGHT- PART I.-Its Work in Religion. COLET, John, b. 1466, educated at Magdalene College, Oxford; studied afterwards in Paris and Italy; 1504 made Doctor of Divinity; 1505 Dean of St. Paul's; 1510 founded St. Paul's School; d. 1519. ERASMUS, Desiderius, b. 1467 at Rotterdam, d. 1536. THE School of the New Learning is as different from the humanistic school of Italy, as it is different from the school of reformers, who began the religious revolution known as the Reformation. It differed from the Italian school in being deeply, profoundly religious to Colet and Grocyn Greek was valuable because it was the key by which to unlock the mysteries of the New Testament; . it had little in common with the Calvinistic school, because it passed with lightness and vagueness over those questions of original sin and freewill-the chief problems which engrossed the attention of this school, and which it dogmatically claimed to solve. The school of the New Learning was too literary, too largely human to seek refuge in one dogma in order to refute another; its work was perhaps more destructive than constructive in its tendency; it did more in destroying prejudices, in attacking abuses, in clearing the way for the next step in progress, than in framing the creeds which were to supersede the old ones. Its great men were influential, not because, like Luther, they were the formulators of new beliefs, new dogmas, but because they were large and liberal minded, because their teachings and their writings bore the impress of admirable and powerful individuality. Their teaching was calculated to rouse energy and inspire thought, though it might be wanting in the definiteness and dogmatism which distinguished the teaching of the Reformers, and made it intelligible and helpful to that larger mass of man |