SYMONDS'S "CATHOLIC REACTION."*

Ix former volumes of this work, Mr. Symonds narrated the history of the rise and progress of the Italian Renaissance. In -the concluding volumes, he describes its assassination by the two bad angels of Rome, the Holy Office and the Jesuits; for no less -strong word would accurately express his view of the work of the Catholic Reaction. The fertile Italian brain, having accomplished great things in the realm of letters and art, was about to invade the fields of metaphysical and scientific speculation, and to complete the intellectual pro- cess commenced by Humanism, when the Catholic re- actionaries stepped in and put a forcible stop to mental freedom and to progress. The sombre Catholic Revival does not attract Mr. Symonds, and it was not to be expected that it would. We have no desire to become its apologist. It was at best a languid, second-rate movement, and the evil tendencies, latent from the beginning, soon obtained the upper hand ; but some of those who promoted it were animated by genuine religions motives, and others had, at all events, respectable social aims in view. Mr. Symonds has altogether failed to catch, or at all events to bring into visibility, the religions side of the • Renaissance in Italy: The Catholic Reaction. By John A.ddington Symonds. vole. London : Smith, Elder and Co 11326. Catholic Revival. Of its victims and of its plotters he says much ; but of its saints be says almost nothing. Had he given

a biography of Carlo Borromeo such as he has given of men who have far less claim to represent the Catholic Revival, he would have let his readers see that there was a soul of goodness in the movement. As it appears in his pages, its success cannot be explained on the recognised principles of

religious history. All the actors appear as confederates in a nefarious plot against freedom and enlightenment. Hierarchies,

however, do not gain their power by plotting a religion, or a revival of religion, as men plot a burglary, but by manipulating for selfish ends genuine religious impulses, and by making use of the character and the labours of disinterestedly religious men. Although we think that Mr. Symonds does not sufficiently recognise the underlying religious motive of the Catholic Revival, which was a feeble protest of the Italian conscience against the intellectual one-sidedness and moral levity of the Renais- sance, we find ourselves in substantial agreement with him as to the evil course it ran in its three main currents. The Tridentine Council which had been called together to reform the Church and to reunite divided Christendom, was fashioned by an adroit and worldly-minded Pope into an instru- ment for augmenting the power of the Papacy ; and the relations which that Pope managed to establish between Rome and the Sovereigns of Europe were for centuries one of the main causes of the enslavement of the peoples. And the iron decrees of the Council are still one chief reason of the divorce between intelli- gence and piety among the Latin races. The war against books carried on by the Congregation of the Index, although provoked by the infamies and lubricities of the Press, proved to be a dagger to assassinate letters, as Aonio Paleario predicted it would be. The early Jesuits had many personal virtues, and

their services to civilisation were not unimportant. There must have been something more than a vast passion for power,— there must have been a passion for the service of God, as they understood it, in the hearts of the men who submitted to the ordeal of the Exerdtia, and who went to the ends of the earth to fulfil what they deemed to be the bidding of Heaven. In

education, they substituted the observant, patient schoolmaster, who sought to understand and to attract his pupils, for the brutal pedant, with his blind and harsh methods. Patience and self-effacement such as these labours require are not found in men who have no high enthusiasm, and who are without moral virtues. Mr. Symonds does not deny that the Order improved educational methods, but he passes a very unfavourable judgment on its general intellectual influence on the mind of Europe :—

"Ignatius attained his object. Obedience—blind, servile, un- questioning, unscrupulous—became the distinguishing feature of the Jesuits. But he condemned his Order to mediocrity. No really great man in any department of human knowledge or activity has arisen in the Company of Jesus. In course of time it became obvious to any one of independent character and original intellect that their ranks were not the place for him. And if youths of real eminence entered it before they perceived this truth, their spirit was crushed. The machine was powerful enough for good or evil ; but it remained an aggregate of individual inferiorities. Its merit and its perfection lay in this, that so complex an instrument could be moved by a single finger of the General in Rome. He consistently employed its delicate system of wheels and pulleys for the aggrandisement of the Order in the first place, in the second place for the control of the Catholic Church, and always for the subjugation and cretinisation of Europe."

Orders are not founded to rear great, in the sense of original, men, who for the most part must do their pioneer work in solitariness ; but to unite ordinary men in the service of recog- nised and useful ideas. It is not so easy to turn the edge of the second half of the indictment. The Jesuits placed illuminated intelligences and vast prudential resources at the service of a power which perforce represented ideas whiciPthe world had outgrown. They were prevented by the servile atti- tude they took up from examining those ideas in a spirit of candour, or of setting them aside. They were therefore driven by the necessities of their position to the use of subterfuges and of explanations which explained away what was troublesome ; and the fatal habit of forcing belief acquired in the intellectual sphere followed them into the moral sphere, and they became not only casuists, but conspirators against the peace of families and nations.

As in the former volumes, Mr. Symonds writes history chiefly by means of typical narratives and selected bio- graphies. The stories of "The Lady of Monza" and of " Lucrezia Buonvisi" give a most vivid but most unpleasant picture of the corruption in Italian life. A more disagree.

able criminal class cannot be conceived than these high-born men and women, whose beauty and graces of manner only enhance our sense of their utter baseness. The most daring of sensational novelists would not venture to invent the crimes which were committed by high-born, and often cultivated men and women, in the decadence of the Renaissance. Among Mr. Symonds's biographies, that of Giordano Bruno deserves special notice. The Dons of Oxford thought Bruno a common Italian charlatan when he made a stay among them. And no wonder. Bruno was a man of loose morals, and he had all the mendacity and boastfulness of the ordinary mountebank ; but he had a powerful intellect, and a quality of splendid courage in defending the speculative views which his intellect had grasped. Mr. Symonds terms him the scape- goat of the spirit in the world's wilderness ; and he affirms that the Neapolitan monk whom the Holy Office burned at Rome in the jubilee year 1600, had obtained per saltum a prospect over the whole domain of knowledge subsequently traversed by rationalism in metaphysics, theology, and ethics. He promises to return to Bruno, and to prove by citations from his writings that he was the precursor of Spinoza and Leibnitz, of Hegel and of the modern theory of evolution. Perhaps he was. But that which is a merit in the eyes of Mr. Symonds is not a merit in ours. The precursor of Spinoza and Hegel did but anticipate a philosophy of magnificent error, and as for the philosophy of evolution, anticipations of it in the sixteenth century are apt to be very dim affairs indeed. A very different character was Era Paolo Sarpi, the subject of another biography. Mr. Symonds claims for him an English character, and says we might call him an English Whig. For eighteen years Sarpi'guided the State of Venice with all the vigilance of Cecil, and with all the disinterestedness of William the Silent. The aim of his policy was to oppose the encroach. ments of Rome upon civil government. He resisted Rome not only by his policy, but with his pen, and carried on a ceaseless con- troversial war against its claims and against the principles of the Jesuits. At a time when controversy was chiefly personal abuse supplemented by the dagger, Sarpi preserved a moderate and reasonable tone, and produced an effect chiefly by the knowledge and acuteness which be brought to bear upon the controversy. Mr. Symonds calls him a Macaulay of finer edge, and a Dean Stanley of more vigorous build. He was neither a Protestant nor a Freethinker, but a Catholic and a monk. He believed, however, that the State, equally with the Church, existed jure divino, and that the persistent attempts of Rome to usurp secular prerogatives were deforming the Church, and weakening its proper power. Had Venice retained its pristine vigour, Sarpi might have altered the course of European history ; but he could not succeed with the help of degenerate and indifferent allies, and he knew it ; but neither the dagger—stilus _Romance curice—which always threatened him, nor the presentiment of certain failure, daunted his constant spirit, and he continued to the last to oppose the encroachments of Rome and the anti-social arts of the Jesuits. Mr. Symonds calls him a Christian Stoic, whose religions faith consisted in a devotion to those great truths of natural religion and ethics which the Jesuits were disposed altogether to set aside as too weak for the jaded consciences of men. The closing scene in the life of the great monk is thus described :—

"The very last words he uttered, frequently repeated, bat scarcely intelligible, were : 'Bak) Perpetua: May Venice last for ever ! This was the dying prayer of the man who had consecrated his best faculties to the service of his country. But before he passed away into that half-slumber which precedes death, he made confession to his accustomed spiritual father, received the Eucharist and Extreme Unction, and bade farewell to the superior of the Servites, in the

following sentence Go ye to rest, and I will return to God, from whom I came.' These words have a deep significance for those who would fain understand the soul of Sarpi. When in his lifetime he spoke of the Church, it was always as the Church of God.' When he relegated his own anxieties for the welfare of society to a superior power, it was not to Mary, as Jesuits advised, nor even to Christ, but invariably to the Providence of God. Sarpi, we have the right to assume, lived and died a sincere believer in the God who orders and disposes of the universe ; and this God, identical in fact though not in form, with Bruno's, he worshipped through such symbols of ceremony and religion as had been adopted by him in youth. An intellect so clear of insight as this, knew that God is a spirit, and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.' He knew that neither on this mountain nor yet in Jerusalem,' neither in Protestant com- munities nor yet in Rome, was the authentic God made tangible ; but that a loyal human being, created in God's image, could serve him and adore him with life-worship under any of the spiritual shapes which mortal frailty has fashioned for its needs."

The chapter on the Italian poets is full of interest. The story

of Tasso's life is told with much moderation and good sense Tasso was not a lunatic in the ordinary sense of the word ; but he was so morbidly sensitive, and at times 80 ungovernable, that the gentle restraint to which he was subjected was probably as wise as it was kindly meant. Mr. Symonds is sensible of the poetic weaknesses of Tasso, who was often superficial, conventional, and self-conscious ; but he recognises that a new power entered into literature, which afterwards passed into music, in the liquid melody of Tasso's verse. Sehnsucht, he writes, the soul of modern sentiment, the inner core of modern music, made its entrance into the sphere of art with Tasso. The chapter on the less-known poets, Guarini Marino and Chiabrera, is one of interest. Marino is now forgotten ; but he was famous in his day, and he was the laureate of courts and cities. His genius was undoubted, rich, and varied ; but he wanted what all true artists must have,— moderation and reverence, not only for God, but for humanity. Mr. Symonds terms him a drunken helot of genius, and holds him up as an instance of the dependence of art upon moralised and humane motives, without which a poet will certainly be forgotten, whatever his powers.

In the concluding chapter the author indulges in a vein of philosophical reflection which appears to us curiously out of harmony with the general spirit of his work. As a historian, he is ready enough to champion or to condemn movements ; but on. assuming the philosophic habit, he assures us that it is as foolish to waste declamatory tears over historical movements as over- the movements of a glacier. These take place in obedience to immutable, although unwritten, laws. We cannot assent to this- view of history. We believe that its course is committed to the generations of men in a real and not merely in an illusory sense. Faith, courage, and hopefulness often give a favourable direction to events which, in a generation of poorer spirit would have been disasters. There is, of course, an over-ruling power, and there are laws which the human will cannot control. Move, ments originally due to perverseness and pusillanimity have sometimes had excellent issues in the long result; but would not these issues have been more excellent, and more speedily beneficent, had the generation been wiser and better amid which they arose ? To see nothing in history except the operation of laws such as govern the material universe, is to rob it of its highest prerogative and of its crowning interest.

In conclusion, we would express our satisfaction that Mr. Symonds has been able to complete his great work. In a time of small books and of fugitive writings, he has steadily adhered to his self-imposed task, and has given to the public seven goodly-sized volumes on the Italian Renaissance. Little as we agree with his general view of Humanism, we must admit that his book will not only continue to be consulted by students, but will attract many who are not professed students. The author brings great learning to his task, and has read all that a historian ought to have read ; but he wears his learning lightly, and every subject which he treats becomes interesting and luminous in the light of a vivid intelligence and of a ready pictorial imagination. His writings will never give occasion to the com- plaint that modern histories are dull.