MR. SYMONDS'S RENAISSANCE IN ITALY.*
Tuts is a learned and a thoughtful book. The learning is that of real and large familiarity not only with the great Italian historians, poets, and philosophers, but also with that minor and more or less fugitive literature which, in each generation, puts on record the details of the habits of life and ways of thinking and acting of the ordinary men of that day. And all this Mr. Symonds gives us, not in the old Dryasdust fashion, nor yet so as to prove and illustrate some grand and well-rounded theory of the progress of the world and its civilisation, through those inevitable three • Renaissance in Italy; the Age of the Despots. By John Addington Symonds. London: Smith, Elder, and Co. 1875. stages which, Cerberus-like, still meet the student at the portals of many a history. lie follows that newer and better method of Comparative History which, while it states the facts as they took place, and whether they do or do not fit as neatly into their places as one could wish, at the same time throws on them the light of the histories of other nations living and acting in other times, yet under conditions more or less resembling those now treated of. The analogies and resemblances may be com- plete, or they may diminish till they pass into absolute diversity ; but all resemblances and differences alike throw light on the actual subject, if we do not attempt to make them exhibit any theory of our own. And this readiness to compare and illustrate by comparison, but not to theorise, is the more important, in an author who undertakes such a subject as that before us, because his temptation to theorise is so much greater than that of the ordinary historian. It is not, as M. Guizot said of his History of Civilisation, the history of events properly so called which is to occupy such a writer, but "he has to search for the general, hidden fact under all the outer facts which envelop it." And this general, hidden fact in the volume before us is the Renaissance in Italy, which Mr. Symonds thus describes :— "The word 'Renaissance 'has of late years received a more extended significance than that which is implied in our English equivalent,—the Revival of Learning. We use it to denote the whole transition from the Middle Ages to the Modern World ; and though it is possible to assign certain limits to the period during which this transition took place, we cannot fix on any dates so positively as to say,—between this year and that the movement was accomplished. To do so would be like trying to name the days on which spring in any particular season began and ended. Yet we speak of spring as different from winter and from summer. The truth is, that in many senses we are still in mid-Renaissance. The evolution has not been completed. The new life is our own, and is pro- gressive. As in the transformation-scene of some pantomime, so here the waning and waxing shapes are mingled ; the now forms, at first shadowy and filmy. gain upon the old ; and now both blend ; and now the old scene fades into the background ; still who shall say whether the new scene be finally set up ? In like manner, we cannot refer the whole phenomena of the Renaissance to any one cause or circumstance, or limit them within the field of any one department of human know- ledge. If we ask the students of art what they mean by the Renaiss- ance, they will reply that it was the revolution effected in architecture, painting, and sculpture by the recovery of antique monuments. Students of literature, philosophy, and theology see in the Renaissance that dis- covery of manuscripts, that passion for antiquity, that progress in philosophy and criticism, which led to a correct knowledge of the classics, to a fresh taste in poetry, to new systems of thought, to more accurate analysis, and finally to the Lutheran schism and the emancipation of the conscience. Men of science will discourse about the discovery of the solar system by Copernicus and Galileo, the anatomy of Vesaline, and Harvey's theory of the circulation of the blood. The organisation of a truly scientific method is the point which interests them most in the Renaissance. The political historian, again, has his own answer to the question,—the extinction of feudalism, the development of the great nationalities of Europe, the growth of monarchy, the limitation of the ecclesiastical authority, and the erection of the Papacy into an Italian kingdom. and in the last place, the gradual emergence of that sense of popular freedom which exploded in the Revolution,—these are the aspects of the movement which engross his attention. Jurists will describe the dissolution of legal fictions based upon the false decretals, the acquisition of a true text of the Roman Code, and the attempt to in- troduce a rational method into the theou of modern jurisprudence, as well as to commence the study of international law. Men whose at- tention has been turned to the history of discoveries and inventions will relate the exploration of America and the East, or will point to the benefits conferred upon the world by the arts of printing and engraving, by the compass and the telescope, by paper and by gunpowder ; and will insist that at the moment of the Renaissance all these instruments of mechanical utility started into existence, to aid the dissolution of what was rotten and must perish, to strengthen and perpetuate the new, and useful, and life-giving. Yet neither any one of these answers taken separately, nor indeed all of them together, will offer a solution of the problem. 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 Euro- pean races. It is no mere political mutation, no new fashion of art, no restoration of classical standards of taste. The arts and the inventions, the knowledge and the books which suddenly became vital at the time of the Renaissance, had long lain neglected on the shores of_ that Dead Sea which we call the Middle Ages. It was not their discovery which caused the Renaissance. But it was the intellectual energy, the spontaneous burst of intelligence, which enabled mankind at that moment to make use of them. The force then generated still continues, vital and expansive, in the spirit of the modern world.. . . . Renaiss-
ance, Reformation, and Revolution are not separate things, capable of being isolated; they are moments in the history of the human race which we find it convenient to name ; while history itself is one and continuous, so that our utmost endeavours to regard some portion of it independently of the rest will be defeated."
To help his readers to reach, or at least to aspire to, the height of this great argument, is then the purpose of Mr. Symonds's book. But it is only the first of several steps. "The Age of the Despots," which in fact includes a good deal about the Re-
publics, and especially about Florence the greatest of them all, is to be followed by a corresponding treatment of the Fine Arts, of the Revival of Learning, and of Italian Literature. The subjects run into one another, just as do the periods to which they all and each belong. And while Mr. Symonds takes the two dates of 1453 and 1527—of the fall of Constantinople and the sack of Rome—as the limits of the culmination of the Italian Renaiss-
ance, and so gets a central point for his work, he has continually to go back to the previous centuries, and so to connect the new life with the old in the manner indicated in the extract we have just given. The present volume, then, is historical, and shows us the political and social conditions in and out of which Italy and then the rest of Europe awoke to new life. Yet it is not, as we have said, a history proper, but rather a light by which to read all Italian histories ; and though it does contain an array of the facts such as only a master of Italian history could have brought out, the reader must bear in mind this distinction, or he will, we suspect, often find himself inclined to regret that the author had less frequently assumed his—the reader's—knowledge, instead of his ignorance of this or that "well-known" event in history. The
reviewer, like the judge at assizes, is assumed to know every- thing by virtue of his office ; but as the final cause of books is to be—not reviewed but—read, we believe that the really studious reader is best satisfied when his ignorance, and not his knowledge,
is most largely assumed by an author.
Italy, like Germany, has only been able in our own times to bring about for itself that national unity which England, France, and Spain were able to obtain in the fifteenth century. The tendency and the struggle for such a result were there, but they only produced the small despotisms, whether papal, ducal, or oligarchical, into which Italy at last settled down. Mr. Symonds, like Mr. Grote, has rightly adopted the name of "despot" as the proper English equivalent—etymology notwithstanding—of the classical "tyrant :" if they were oftenest violent and cruel usurpers, they were sometimes mild and beneficent, and so not tyrants in the popular sense, though they wanted the divinity which seemed to hedge the kingship of classical, as of mediwval times. By a de- tailed history of Milan, and of the dynasties of Visconti and Sforza, during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Mr. Symonds illustrates all the chief characteristics of the evil forms of Italian despotism; and the good, in a sketch of the Good Duke Frederick of Urbino, and an abstract of Baldassare Castiglione's treatise on the life and duties of the courtier. Then he shows us Florence, with its burgher life, so simple and so sturdy in its better self, yet so habitually degenerating into narrow and malignant faction ; its love of art and letters ; its religious and political revival under the influence of Savonarola ; and its final fall under the power of the Medici, as selfish in their politics as they were refined and magnificent in their tastes : and he draws a striking comparison between Florence and Venice on the one hand and Athens and Sparta on the other, while careful to point out the differences as well as the resemblances. From the politi- cal and the social morality of Florence, and of Italy generally, he passes to an interesting examination of the Florentine historians and their morality, with a whole chapter on Machiavelli's treatise of the "Prince." He gives in detail the evidences of intellectual power, political sagacity, and scientific accuracy with which these writers handle alike the events and the spirit of history, so far as mere intellect could attain ; but he refuses to join with Hegel, or Macaulay, or any others, in attempting to evade or qualify at all the proofs of the divorce which the historians, like the statesmen of the sixteenth century, had effected between intellect and con- science, to the exclusion of the latter. The following passage will tempt the reader to turn to the book from which it is taken, and thence to the originals, which it describes with such lucid eloquence :—
"Having traced the development of historical research and political philosophy in Florence from the year 1300 to the fall of the Republic, it remains to speak of the two greatest masters of practical and theo- retical statecraft,—Francesco Guicciardini and Niccolo Machiavelli. These two writers combine all the distinctive qualities of the Florentine historiographers in the most eminent perfection. At the same time, they are not merely as authors, but also as men, mirrors of the times in which they both played prominent parts. In their biographies and in their works we trace the spirit of an age devoid of moral sensibility, penetrative in analysis, but deficient in faith, hope, enthusiasm, and stability of character. The dry light of the intellect determined their judgment of men as well as their theories of government. At the same time, the sordid conditions of existence to which they were sub- jected as the servants of corrupt states, or the instruments of wily princes—diplomatists intent upon the plans of kings like Ferdinand, or adventurers like Cesare Borgia, privy councillors of such Popes as Clement VII. and such tyrants as Alessandro de' Medici—distorted their philosophy and blunted their instincts. For the student of the sixteenth century they remain riddles, the solution of which is difficulty because by no strain of the imagination is it easy to place ourselves in their- position. One-half of their written utterances seems to be at variance- with the other half. Their actions often contradict their most brilliant and emphatic precepts; while contemporaries disagree about their pri- vate character and public conduct. All this confusion, through which it is now perhaps impossible to discern what either Guicciardini or Machiavelli really was, and what they really felt and thought, is due to the anomaly of consummate ability and unrivalled knowledge of the world existing without religious or political faith in an age of the utmost depravity of public and private morals. No criticism could be more stringent upon the contemporary disorganisation of society in Italy than is the silent witness of these men, sublimely great in all mental qualities, but helplessly adrift upon a sea of contradictions and of doubts, ignorant of the real nature of mankind in spite of all their science, because they leave both goodness and beauty out of their cal- culations."
Mr. Symonds, throughout this volume, gives ample proof that he has not exaggerated the wickedness of the times of which he takes these men as the types as well as the chroniclers. Yet he recognises—more, we sometimes think, than he admits to him- self—that there was a soul of goodness still surviving in the midst of all the evil. Why should Machiavelli say that though it is not only unnecessary but sometimes inexpedient that a ruler should be merciful, loyal, humane, just, and religious, it is
essential that he should seem to possess all these qualities, and especially the last—unless they were still living powers in the hearts of men ? How could there have been those religious revivals of which that of Savonarola was the chief, unless men had still consciences which could be awakened? And how, as Mr. Symonds beautifully and justly remarks, could the great
artists have felt, and thought, and fashioned as they did, unless. their mothers and friends, in the cottages and workshops in which
so many of them were born and educated, had been pure and pious, and of a race not wholly depraved? For Savonarola and his work ; for the Popes of the Renaissance; and for Charles VIII._ of France, and his wild march through Italy, with all its conse-
quences, we have left ourselves no space. But all are fully and ably treated of by Mr. Symonds in this first portion of what we may justly say is already an important contributioh to the history of Italy and of Europe, as we require history to be written now- a-days ; and which will be still more so, when it is finished with the same mastery of the rest of the subject as is shown in the- present volume.
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