CHAPTER III

OF THE ITALY INTO WHICH THE RENAISSANCE CAME

OUT of the vast confusion and tangle of the end of the Middle Ages rises this Renaissance-an era not over easy exactly to define. If by the Middle Ages we mean the period which follows the breaking up of the Roman Empire by the invasion of the Germanic barbarian hordes from the north, and the forming, out of these barbarian peoples, of the great nationalities that we now call Europe, then let us grasp the main ideas which constitute mediævalism. First of all, the modern nations-the French, English, Spanish, and the like-only became conscious of their unity at the end of the Middle Ages. Christendom in the Middle Ages was a single state under two great heads, the Pope and the Emperor. And Christendom was in practice a huge Feudal system, founded on the tenure of the land and on military service, whereby each class had rights and duties to the other-industry had small place in it-and the code of conduct consisted in the fantastic and romantic rules and customs called Chivalry. This Chivalry was as universal as Christianity, and so little national was it, that a French or Italian knight were more akin, and had more in common, than they had with the citizen or peasant of their own land. Then, the individual was not the social unit, which was rather a corporation, either of the manor, or the municipal body, or the guild-the individual had no outlet for his activities outside these. Then, it was an age of ignorance.[40] The clergy alone were learned, and that learning was severely restricted as to what it uttered forth. Not that the clergy withheld education ; printing was unknown ; and the small literature produced was written in Latin on parchments. The learned themselves were therefore grossly given up to superstition.

The Renaissance saw the whole fabric of the Middle Ages come to an end-it set a file to cut the fetters from liberty of thought and liberty of inquiry. It dawned in the twelve-hundreds, and shed its light over the thirteen-hundreds and fourteen-hundreds, and reached its fulness in the fifteen-hundreds in the wide upheaval of a vast religious struggle. It saw the decay of the Empire and of the Papacy-and with them went the whole tradition, laws, and habits of the Middle Ages. It saw the growth of nationalities. It witnessed the rise of national literatures and national churches. It beheld the rise of industry breaking up feudalism and chivalry, and the assailing of aristocratic and ecclesiastical power by the people. It was racked by the fierce wars of monarchies which founded themselves upon the support of the people, even if, except in England, the monarchs kicked away that support as soon as they had established their power. It was an age of inventions and discoveries-the compass and the astrolabe led the sea-dogs to mighty adventure upon the great waters, so that the keels thrashed out a new water-way to India, and man's daring found a new world across the terrors of the Atlantic, thereby changing the trade-routes of the universe. The discovery of gunpowder blew not only the picturesque armour to pieces but upset the whole art of war, and overthrew the whole system on which feudalism was built- changing the whole form of society, that had heretofore been founded on military service. Printing spread literature [41] and knowledge across the land. Copernicus overthrew the whole belief in the position of the earth, and brought down the vast structure of superstition with a crash. And mighty as was the upheaval, its chief source of inspiration was in its revival of letters and the utterance of its awakening energies in the so-called re-birth of Art.

The recovery of ancient literature fired the ambition of man, arising from the long sleep of the Middle Ages, to desire for individual liberty. Man began to look upon himself as man-Humanism became a god. He read his new needs in the achievements of republican Rome and ancient Greece. Italy, by her position in the waters of the Mediterranean, became the mart of commerce. Her citizens grew to prodigious wealth. And, what is far too much overlooked, she received from the East, through Arabia and Persia, the vast teachings of the great Eastern thought.

The Church, having its seat in their very midst, by very contact with the Italian peoples, had not the dread terror for them that its commands and threats held for more distant peoples. No man is a hero to his own valet. The thunders that frightened the Emperor Lewis of Bavaria into submission had no terrors for an Italian prince. The legates that bore the papal bull of excommunication to Bernabo Visconti had to eat the parchment and swallow the leaden seal ! But the Pontiffs, so far from checking the new learning and the antique thought, encouraged it and gloried in it. On the other hand, the same familiarity with the Papacy which prevented the Italians from being overawed by the Papal fulminations made them so used to the abuses of the Papal court which set in, that they were not scandalised by them, and took no part in flinging off the yoke, as did the northern peoples. The Popes, also, had added temporal [42] splendour to their spiritual supremacy, and vied with the great Italian princes in the splendour of their courts and churches and palaces. They became eager patrons of the Renaissance, thereby, unwitting of it, adding force to the movement that was to overthrow the wide authority of Rome over Christendom-just as the nobles of France were, later, to play with philosophy that had popular rights and liberty for its very essence, and, together with the French monarchy, aided the revolt of Britain's American colonists, thereby creating the French Revolution.

Dante stands in the twilight of the Middle Ages, uttering the first new national literature. Dante was essentially of the Middle Ages ; he clung to its faith and its ideals. But by his example he almost set foot on the threshold of the new era. Petrarch, following after, sets the fashion of the sonnet, and his song is passionate with the antique love of liberty and the significance of man as man, which makes him the first of the so-called Humanists. But there wrought side by side with Petrarch a far more significant genius in letters, Boccaccio of the immortal tales of the Decameron. From that garden where the youths and maidens sat and listened to him, whilst he turned their thoughts from the Black Plague that raged through the city, Boccaccio brought the spirit of antique Greece into Italy, and from Italy it spread across the face of the world-for he uttered there a contempt of superstition and a joy of life that meant death to the sombre spirit of the Middle Ages. In far England Chaucer caught the refrain, and brought to birth the Canterbury Tales. Thus the fashion for the ancient literature and works of art grew into a vogue ; and it so chanced that a worthy and somewhat ambitious usurer and banker of Florence, of a house to grow famous as the de' Medici, gathered the learned and the poets and painters and [43] architects and sculptors about him, and made the City of the Lilies to blossom with the supreme art of the Italian Renaissance, so that her fame lives throughout the ages.

The early fourteen-hundreds saw the collections of works of antique literature and art pouring into the land ; the end of the fourteen-hundreds saw men reading and studying them, and forthwith they got to interpreting them and applying them to the problems of their own age. Italy and the world beyond Italy broke asunder. Italy was filled with destructive criticism. Lorenzo Valla attacked the title-deeds of the Popes to worldly power, and the whole church system. Destructive criticism led to the denials of pure negation-and, as ever with mere denial, licence and lack of ideals arose in the land. Beyond Italy, the love of Freedom led to constructive ideals, and created the Reformation. But both the leaders of the Reformation in the north, and the leaders of the chaos in Italy, once established, grew alarmed for themselves, and hurriedly turned against the very spirit of liberty that had created them ; they steeped themselves in a bitter and black Puritanism. Protestantism became extreme, and turned to a Puritanism bitterly opposed to Humanism. Savonarola, the guiding spirit of Catholic Puritanism, as fiercely assailed Humanism. So Florence saw that fantastic festival when the youths and maidens of the city brought out their pictures and jewels and personal decorations, their precious books, and priceless works of art, and flung them into the public bonfires ; just as the English and Dutch Puritans denounced art as the mere love of beauty and carnal pleasure, and, though they had founded their faith in freedom of thought and of soul and of worship, were soon raising as cast-iron a dogma and setting up a State-church as violently intolerant as that against which they had revolted themselves, to become as bitter persecutors [44] as their persecutors. But, spite of this reaction, the Renaissance had added a forward step to man's empire of liberty of mind, of act, of body and of soul. The school arose in every city, whereby became wedded the discipline of the free mind and the conscience of the individual man.