BOOKS.

MR. SYMONDS'S RENAISSANCE IN ITALY.*

(FIRST NOTICE.]

Wm gave an account of the first volume of this learned and

thoughtful book when it appeared two years since. Mr. Symonds now adds two more volumes, on the Revival of Learning, and the Fine-Arts, to that first one, entitled the Age of the Despots ; and promises us, in conclusion, another on Italian Literature. By

a perverseness of the publishers, which we protest against, while feeling that we protest against that before which the gods them- selves are powerless, the title-pages and bindings omit all in- dication that these are successive volumes of one book. But let not the vexed reader be deterred by this wrong-doing of the publishers from possessing himself of what the author

has done so well. In the volume on the "Revival of Learn- ing," Mr. Symonds is as familiar with what the Italian• scholars of the Renaissance wrote as he is with the Greek and Roman authors whose works were then brought again to life, so•

that he is able to tell us alike what the men of the Renaissance tried to do, what they did, and what they failed of doing, in that

revival of ancient learning. His impartiality, too, is not less valu- able to the studious reader than his learning. We might have feared from some passages in his " Studies of the Greek Poets" that he would sympathise too much with the classical temper of

the Renaissance, and too little with what the Church had done and was still doing for Christendom, but this is not so, We can- not quite say that his ideal of the future of humanity and of the relation which Christianity will eventually bear to that of all other

religions is our own, but Mr. Symonds does everywhere in these volumes fully recognise the new elements and conditions of humanity which the Christian Church had, through the middle-.

ages, been developing and establishing throughout Europe ; and while he describes with exhaustive learning the endeavours of

the " humanists" of the Renaissance not only to revive Pagan•

literature, but to treat Pagan morals as the proper substitute for Christianity, his interest and his sympathies are rather with their " humanism " in as far as it could be assimilated and incorporated with the old Christian humanity, without superseding it, but only helping to expand it to fuller proportions.

As we cannot follow Mr. Symonds without constant use of the words " humanist " and " humanism," we will begin with his. own definition of it :—

" The essence of Humanism consisted in anew and vital perception of the dignity of man as a rational being, apart from theological deter- minations, and in the further perception that classical literature alone displayed human nature in the plenitude of intellectual and moral free- dom. It was partly a reaction against ecclesiastical despotism, partly the attempt to find the point of unity for all that had been thought and done by man, within the mind restored to consciousness of its own Sove- reign faculty."

Powerful as was the influence of Dante upon succeeding genera- tions, he does not, says Mr. Symonds, belong strictly to the his- tory of the Revival of Learning. In raising the intellectual energy of the middle-ages to its culmination, he made the way for that revival not only possible, but ready ; but it is to Tetrarch that

Italy and the world owe the revival itself. For Petrarch was not only the Italian poet who lives as such in the memory of millions, but besides this must be con- sidered "as the apostle of scholarship, the inaugurator of the humanistic impulse of the fifteenth century ;" and " to have fore- seen a whole new phase of European culture, to have interpreted its spirit, and determined by his own activity the course it should pursue, is in truth a higher title to fame than the composition of

even the most perfect sonnet." This " humanism," this love of classical literature for its own sake, the intuitive conviction that it

was good in itself, was the precursor, and not, as is often popularly supposed, the consequence of the emigration of Greek scholars and Greek books to Italy, in consequence of the taking of Con- stantinople by the Turks. "Petrarch died in 1574 ; the Greek Empire was destroyed in 1453. Between these dates Italy recovered the Greek classics, but whether the Italians would have undertaken this labour if no Tetrarch had preached the attractiveness of liberal studies, or if no school of dia- ciples had been formed by him in Florence, remains snore than doubtful." Tetrarch, stirred by the spirit within him, and not by any external influence, began the revival of this " human" interest in classical literature by the study of Cicero and Virgil,. while Greek remained practically unknown to him. Mr. Symonds

" Renaissance in Italy: the Revival of Learning. Renaissance in Baty: the Fine- Arts. By John Addington Symonds. London: Smith, Elder, and Co.

gives us in detail a very interesting account of the rise and pro- gress of this Latin culture under Petrarch and his disciples, and then proceeds to relate bow Florence, the real centre of intellectual life in Italy, was able, in the year 1396, to induce Chrysoloras, who enjoyed the fame of being the most accomplished and eloquent Hellenist of his age, to fill the Greek chair in the University. And thenceforward, the " humanising " power of Greek literature became no less direct than that of Latin upon the Italian intellect.

Thus began that great outburst of human self-consciousness all over Italy, which took what now seems to us the singular form of an attempt to revive the Greek and Latin heathenism of antiquity as the effective substitute for Christianity. The cruel- est and most vicious rulers in Church and State became the en- thusiastic patrons of the new learning ; universities were founded, the monasteries of all Europe were searched for forgotten codices, which were then carefully transcribed to form new libraries. Poggio, in his laborious visitations to the Northern monasteries, discovered and transcribed, among other Latins, Lucretius, Quinc- tilian, Silius Italicus, Vitruvius, and Columella, and some of the Letters and Orations of Cicero. "In exploring foreign con- vents, where he suspected that ancient authors might be buried, he spared neither trouble nor expense. No severity of winter cold, no snow, no length of journey, no roughness of roads, prevented him from bringing the monuments of litera- ture to light,' wrote Francesco Barbaro. Nor did he recoil from theft, if theft seemed necessary to secure a precious codex. In a letter to Ambrogius, he relates his negotia- tions with a monk for the fraudulent abduction of an Ammianus and a Livy from a convent library in Hersfeld." Other scholars devoted no less energy to the collection of Greek manuscripts, and as the libraries of Byzantium were thus searched for nearly half-a-century before the fall of Constantinople, there is good reason, says Mr. Symonds, to believe that the greater part of Attic and Alexandrian literature known to the later Greeks was transferred to Italy, and the loss of those master-pieces of antiquity which we still deplore is to be attributed not to the violence of the Turk, but to the ignorant apathy and neglect of previous genera- tions of the Greeks themselves. The successive discoveries of Latin and Greek authors fed, indeed, but had not created, this enthusiasm of humanity, which now spread itself all over Italy in the revival of learning, as it did in the like revival of art by aid of the classical sculpture, of which Mr. Symonds's next volume treats. In a series of sketches which, for their life and individuality, as well as for the way in which they are worked into a complete picture of the whole age, its -politics, and its faith, reminds us of the like treatment of the history of philosophy, by Mr. Maurice, Mr. Symonds describes the successive periods of " humanism," from its rise with Petrarch till, before the end of the sixteenth century, " all that was virile in humanism fled beyond the Alps," and "the transfer of intellectual supremacy from Italy to Germany " was accomplished. Just as in our own days men of science, physical or mental, are working out their own problems from their own premises, here pushing into the lowest depths of agnosticism, and here rising to heights on which they find themselves on the same ground with the old Christian faith in its noblest and truest forms, so in this outburst of " humanism " there was every possible difference of result in the universal demand for classical scholarship, and for a life modelled on that' of the Greeks and Romans ; and we see a Beccadelli or Aretino sinking into a worse than bestial animalism, and a Pico della Mirandola or a Ficino rising through the study of Plato to true nobleness of thought and life, and life-long effort to find the true meeting-point of the new culture and the old faith,—a nobleness of which Mr. Symonds, after quoting a fine passage from Pico's 'Oration on the Dignity of Man, which we have not space to give, says :- "Out of thoughts like these, if Italy could only have been free, if her society could have been uncorrupted, if her Church could have returned to the essential truths of Christianity, might have sprung, as from a seed, the noblest growth of human science, But Dis (Weer visan est. The prologue to this history of culture—the long account taken of selfish tyrants, vicious clergy, and incapable republics in ray Age of the Despots —is intended to make it clear why the conditions under which the Revival began in Italy rendered its accomplishment imperfect."

Here, as always, Mr. Symonds shows that he is no mere scholar in his mode of handling his subject. With a rare familiarity with the works of the Italians themselves, as well as with their classical models, his learning never overpowers his political sense. He showed this, when he made the first volume of this work a political sketch of the period of which he was about to treat in its aspects of learning, art, and literature. It appears everywhere through the volume now before us, and not least in his eloquent con- clusion :—

" Thus Italy, after receiving the lamp of learning from the dying hands of Hellas, in the days of her own freedom, now in the time of her adversity and ruin gave it to the nations of the North. Her work was ended. Three centuries of increasing decrepitude, within our recent memory at length most happily surmounted, were before her. Can history, we wonder, furnish a spectacle more pathetic than that of the protagonist of spiritual liberty falling uneasily asleep beneath the footstool of the Spaniard and the churchman, while the races who had trampled her to death went on rejoicing in the light and culture she had won by centuries of toil ? This is the tragic aspect of the subject, which has occupied us through the present volume. At the conclusion of the whole matter it is, however, more profitable to remember, not the intellectual death of Italy, but what she wrought in that bright period of her vigour. She was the divinely-appointed birth-place of the modern [spirit, the work- shop of knowledge for all Europe, our mistress in the arts and sciences, the Alma Mater of our student years, the well-spring of mental freedom and activity after ages of stagnation. If greater philosophers have been produced by Germany and France and England, greater scholars, greater men of science, greater poets even, and greater pioneers of pro- gress in the lands divined by Christopher Columbus beyond the seas, this must not blind us to the truth that at the very outset of the era in which we live and play our parts, Italy embraced all philosophy, all scholarship, all science, all art, all discovery, alone. Such is the Lampa- dephoria, or torch-race, of the nations. Greece stretches forth her hand to Italy ; Italy consigns the sacred fire to Northern Europe ; the people of the North pass on the flame to America, to India, and the Australian isles."