BOOKS.
THE DAWN OF THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE.*
Ir is one of the sorrows of growing up that the world (tenses to appear arranged in the neat parcels beloved of childhood. Onco the physical world was divided into the Torrid, Temperate, and Arctic zones ; history (with an insularity that further neatened and simplified matters) into water-tight compartments labelled Ancient Britons, The Norman Conquest, The Armada, Oliver Cromwell, George III., and Modern Times. The actors in the drama were (1) Good, (2) Bad. And there you were—free to go and read The Arabian Nights. But as the seeker after knowledge travelled " further from the East " he found that the once tidy picture shifted and changed. Countries, periods, and individuals emerged that would by no means be fitted in, and the student realized with a certain melancholy the truth that the more you know the less can you generalize. Of nothing is this truer than of that elusive thing we call " The Renaissance." It is like a cloud-picture. At the first glance we see plainly the vision of palaces and gardens, amorini and dolphins, frescoed colonnades, ladies walking in cloth-of-gold, painters and sculptors in the act• goldsmiths hammer in hand, and domes and cities rising out of the ruins of the old.world. It seems distinct, alive, and individual, unlike what preceded it or was to come. But dare to look closely, the picture has no " edges." You cannot say where it begins, or when it was that it faded and changed. If you look long enough, you may turn away doubting whether it ever existed—only, on looking back, to see it still flaming and lighting all the sky.
. Mr. Tilley has made a wonderfully minute study of the early Renaissance in France, and there is little room in his careful volume for easy generalities. Nominally only concerning himself with France, he has been obliged, because of its lack of "edges," to devote a good deal of space to the " movement " in Italy, and to refer frequently to its influence in the Low Countries. Wo are taken back historically too to the mediaeval world from which it grew. In no art, and in no branch of learning, is the spirit of the new learning to be ignored :-
" It seems to me that to trace the beginnings of the French Renaissance, and to lay a sure and firm foundation_for the study of it as an organic movement affecting the whole life and thought of the nation, a wide and thorough survey of the ground must be made. There must be an investigation of the first manifestations of the Renaissance spirit, not only in humanism and literature. but in architecture, sculpture, painting, and every form of art."
Mr. Tilley is extremely thorough, and the plan of the book, though the reader may find it involves a certain amount of repetition, makes it ari.ideal book of reference. It is in three main divisions. The first is principally concerned with the histories[ I • The Dawn of the French Renaissance. By Arthur Tilley, Y.A. Cambridge : at *be University Press. (25s. ;ICU framework and with the relations between France and Italy, the second with the Renaissance in letters, separate chapters being devoted to the study of Latin, the study of Greek, and French poetry and prose. The third part deals with the figurative arts and with architecture, the latter section being subdivided into the architecture of chdteaux, municipal buildings, h6te18, and ecclesiastical buildings. Each of these chapters is again more or less subdivided geographically. For it must be remembered that France was by no means homogeneous during the reigns of Louis XI., Charles VIII., and Louis XII. There were within it half-a-dozen minor States, each with its own traditions and
mental habits :- " The existence of these semi-independent States . . . had at once a retarding and an accelerating effect on the Renaissance. On the one hand their patriotic attachment to their local privileges and institutions tended to foster a conservative spirit, and to check the diffusion of new ideas and of new forms of art ; on the other, the courts of their princes formed centres of culture and patronage for artists and men of letters."
But it was to the expedition of Charles VIIL, who entered one great Italian city after another in short-lived triumph, and to the French occupation of Milan, that France owed her first real acquaintance with the Renaissance spirit. For though she after- wards made the flame her own, Gallicizing it completely, it was Italy—that glorious volcano of the arts and sciences—that first set her alight. We have said that Mr. Tilley prefers carefully sifted facts to generalizations, but his view as to her adaptations of the Italian spirit is briefly that they were such as one would expect from a Northern people. If the flame lost in heat, it gained in purity. The leaders of the new learning remained pious Christians, nor did they jostle and fight for Royal patronage with the naïve frankness of the Italian scholars. Troubled waters were not so plentiful, nor were their wits demoralized by the spectacle of a perpetual political " catch-as-catch can." In architecture the French were extremely conservative, and clung long to the Gothic forms, which had been so easily ousted in Italy. For Italy " remembered always the august abode " of the Caesars :- "Gothic architecture never took real root in Italy, because its spirit was wholly alien to the Italian temperament. Its soaring character, its suggestions of awe and mystery, its symbolism, its humour, its love of diversity, all these qualities made no appeal to the Italian, who thought of nothing but space, proportion, and order."
Unlike the French and English, they never had the mediaeval love of the family joke—the Gothic humour that delighted in the surplice-clad fox at his preaching, or invaded the most aspiring Cathedral facade with the comic relief of the gargoyle ; a devil " complete with " horns, tail, and three-pronged fork, or some wildly grimacing old lady. But if France to some extent " moralized " the Old, she will rise to yet greater heights in the New Renaissance which Mr. Tilley believes will sweep over the world :— " Unless one has misread the signs of the times, we are nearing the dawn of a greater Renaissance than that which is the subject of these pages—greater, because, while the Old Renaissance was chiefly intellectual in character, and its chief work was the emancipation of human intelligence from the chains of worn-out tradition and authority, the New Renaissance will be largely of the spirit. It will not be a sudden rebirth, it will not bring with it the millennium, there will be delays and hesitations and backsliciings ; but it will surely come, and will bring with it the fruits of love and righteousness and peace."
May the New Renaissance, spreading far beyond the furthest limits of the world that Leonardo or Erasmus dreamed of, be worthy its great setting ! May their shades, gazing down from Parnassus, hail the men of the new world- " Our partners in the torch race, Though nearer to the goal " !
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