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MR. SYMONDS has completed the task which he began ten years ago, and the sixth and seventh volumes of his " Renaissance in Italy bring us down to the period of decay, when the vigor of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had exhausted itself, and there was no longer strength to bring forth new ideas.

what causes have been at work to produce the result.

The causes are of different sorts. The

invention of printing, for instance, created public opinion and introduced a new and incalculable factor into politics and religion. The Copernican system invaded theology, and altered the relations of heaven and earth. The discovery of the uses of steam mechanically changed the powers and with them the wants and habits of the human race. These and many other such causes make old methods of thought impossible, by disturbing or destroying the old conditions of thought. Their action may be quickened or retarded by rulers and institutions, but cannot be created or destroyed by them.

It is
a period of blight, dulness, and tyranny,
enlightened only by the genius of a few
poets, artists, and men of science. The
spirit of Erasmus was gone to rest, but
the spirit of Charles V. still lived and
worked. The taint of Jesuitism had in-
fected faith and letters, the leaden mantle
of Spanish rule bowed Italy to the ground.
The men who raised their voices against
dulness became the prey of the Inquisi-
tion. Sarpi only escaped, as did Erasmus,
by his wits and the protection of the great;
Giordano Bruno perished at the stake;
Tasso sang at the bidding of the Church.
It is a time of decadence. But the title
of these volumes suggests, that side by
side with decadence there was a revival;
and it is this revival which will be the
principal subject of the following pages.
It is easy to talk of "tendencies" and
"movements," but such abstractions must
rest on facts. A generation belongs to a
renaissance or a decadence because of
the influence of certain facts. If men in
general, or the members of some particu-
lar community, think that Latin or Greek
is to be studied, that military glory is the
greatest aim of a nation, that heresy is
pestilent, or that the Old Testament is the
groundwork of morality, we shall find a
tendency to found schools and universi-as
ties, to make wars of conquest, to set up
inquisitions, or to drag national antipa-
thies into matters of religion. That men
do think thus or thus is the result of the
thoughts of previous generations; and it
is the object of the historian to investigate

1. Renaissance in Italy. The Catholic Reaction.
In two parts. By John Addington Symonds. Lon-
don, 1886.

2. La Contre-révolution religieuse au XVIe siècle. Par Martin Philippson, Professeur à l'Université de Bruxelles. Paris and Brussels, 1884.

But what is true generally may not hold in a particular instance or at a particular time. A country or a generation, whilst slowly obeying the great tides of thought, is blown transverse by many cross winds. The change of institutions educates or diseducates men to think. And governments have power to change institutions. They can proscribe books, can send people to church or to prison, can tune pulpits, schools, and universities, and compel the young to learn by a certain rule. They may succeed as Philip II. succeeded in Spain, or fail as he failed in the Netherlands; but, in either case, the course of thought is diverted from its natural channels for a time. It was not for nothing that, when the ancient house of thought had been ruined by the pagan revival of the fifteenth century, the workers set to build it up again were not saints and sages, but hard-headed popes, worldly. wise Jesuits, and bigoted princes. It is

"the people love to have it." The Italians were weary of a revival which made neither this life nor the next more secure. They had learned no new rule of No Luther or life from the humanists. Knox had given them the Bible, and religion was to them synonymous with Catholicism. They turned for guidance to the practical men of their time, and found them, as usual, opposed to innovation. It was "easier and safer and more pleasant to live in obedience than to be at their own disposing." So said the voice of the

saints; and the sinners were not disin- | type. Learning was confined within the clined to agree, in an age when Philip II. narrow bounds of trivium and quadriv. and his like were ready to enforce obedi- ium; theology was taught according to ence by the rack and the stake. So the the rule of Aristotle and Aquinas. In first age of the Renaissance came to an England Gothic churches and colleges end and the reaction began. The Italians were being built to enshrine the piety and of 1550 and onwards had come to the learning of ancient tradition. St. Alban's, conclusion that salvation was more easily | St. Edmund's, and Glastonbury, still sent attainable under the teaching of the Cath- their mitred abbots to sit in Parliament at olic Church than by the methods of phil- Westminster. The barons had not begun osophers; they had not had enough expe- to destroy their own power by the Wars rience of freedom to be willing to risk of the Roses. Chivalry was still alive, much for it; they lapsed into obedience, and crusades were dreamed of. In Italy if not contentment; and the result is what the dome of Brunelleschi had risen by the is termed a decadence. side of Giotto's tower, as a beacon of coming change; but Lionardo, Michael Angelo, Raphael, Leo X., Bembo, were unborn, and Fra Angelico was painting his divine frescoes in the full spirit of the Middle Ages.

The period is one of special interest, for it is the first century of modern history. We have been warned lately not to fix arbitrary dates for "ancient," "mediæval," and "modern" history. The warning is not without reason. Historians are A century later, all was changed. The apt to docket periods as if a new genera- Turkish Empire had supplanted the Bytion of men spontaneously came into exist-zantine Empire. Europe was divided ence, and were not the children of their amongst five or six great kingdoms, subfathers. But there have been facts in the ject to despotic monarchs. The religion, history of the world which have so marked the science, the learning, the politics, the an epoch, that everything which has fol- jurisprudence, the architecture, the paintlowed is different from what went before; ing, the music, of the mediæval age had and the facts which combined to bring ceased to exist. Latin was transformed about the complex phenomenon which is and Greek reborn. Schoolmen had given called the Renaissance, were such that place to humanists. More than half the there is a greater interval between the nations had revolted from Rome. The age which followed and that which pre- monasteries were turned into barns or ceded than is to be found elsewhere, fallen into ruin. Monks and friars "with except at similar stopping-places which all their trumpery" had been cast out. occur here and there on the highroad of The Church of Rome itself had been history. purged and chastened. The oceans had If we compare the state of the world in revealed the continents and islands of the 1450 and in 1550, we shall see that a cen- New World, and brave explorers were sailtury separates two states of society far ing "from pole to pole traversing each more widely different from each other colure" in search of gold and empire. than those which precede or which follow. The arts of war and peace were changed; In a word we may say, that in 1450 the the old lines of trade, the old roads to world was medieval, and in 1550 modern. Rome, were no more. Gothic gloom and In 1450 the Palæologi reigned at Con- glory had passed away forever, and the stantinople, the English in France, the world was full of the new splendors of Moors in Granada. Knights in armor | Renaissance art. But the greatest change rode down rabbles of half-armed peasants, of all was in the thoughts of men. Where and cannon had not superseded archery. Europe was full of castles held by petty sovereigns. The king of France was little more than the most powerful of a dozen independent princes. The cities of Italy were held by despots of the medieval

men had assented they questioned, where they had obeyed they rebelled. Liberty of thought had been born, the mother of political and personal liberty, the forerunner of equality and downfall of privilege. The old age of the world had gone by,

the new age in which we still live was single exception of Tasso) writers of elefounded.

We will lay down no arbitrary or fantastical dates; but assuredly, if there is any meaning in the words mediæval and modern, the present and the future had their birth at no other period than this, and Italy was their birthplace.

But the soil of Italy was exhausted; a time of languor succeeded to a time of productive energy, and the historian of

gant verse and members of academies. All was now deliberate, conscious, and artificial; principles of composition ruled every work of art, and criticism had taken the place of invention. Except in the regions of music and science, Italy had nothing new to give the world. She had become the school of taste, and had ceased to be the home of invention.

A period of decadence — and the pres

the Renaissance finishes his task by re-ent age needs the warning—may be de cording a period of decadence a painful fined as one in which taste is made the task, but not without its compensations; standard rather than originality, and the for though Italy now ceases to be the rules of taste are ascertained and stated. guiding light of Europe, her work has The decadence of Greece expressed itself been done among the nations, and in their in gems and the anthology; that of Rome, turn France, England, and Germany hand in rhetoric; that of the Middle Ages in on the torch, and the warmth and radiance quibbles and niceties of philosophy; what survive still, and are reflected in the Italy seems important is form, rather than subof our own days. stance. On the other hand, such epochs At that time, as must indeed always be are periods of repose, during which rethe case, the human intellect was more sults are summarized and rules laid down. fully awake in some countries than in oth- We cannot say that the formulation of ers. In our own island, as is usually the Catholic dogma in the thirteenth century case, the change from the former state of was a waste of time, nor that of Protestant society had come late. Scotland was but dogma in England and Germany in the now emerging from feudal darkness into sixteenth, nor that of the rules of archithe sudden and wonderful change of which tecture, painting, and poetry, at the same the Reformation was one of the principal time. To establish rules is to save the factors a change which stamped her time of later explorers; a codification of national character at once and perma- results must always be of some value to nently with the impress of progress. The those who follow. It will instruct more Elizabethan literature and the growth of than it hampers the original geniuses; on Puritanism, and the spirit of enterprise the other hand, by putting technical corand national pride which mark that great rectness within the reach of the industriepoch, were in their full vigor at a timeous it gives an advantage to second and when France was weakened by civil war third-rate artists which nature has not and religious discord, and was becoming granted them. A hundred Trissotins are fit to undergo the severe discipline of born to one Molière, and it may someRichelieu; when Spain was showing all times even happen that the bird of Jove is the signs of that impotence from which turned into a tame eagle. Pope, great as she has never revived; when Germany he was, would have been a greater poet if was distracted by religious and local dis- he had lived a century earlier, or two genputes, the gloomy prelude of the Thirty erations later. But Dryden could break Years' War. Italy was changed from her through the trammels of rule, and Cowley condition during the fifteenth century. and Gray were helped, not hindered, by She had tried the greatest experiments obeying academic form. A great age of which the world had seen in art and liter-art is always revolutionary at the outset. ature, and the age of grand creations had passed. She was no more to astonish the world with new marvels. To scholars had succeeded stylists, to original painters men of the schools, to poets (with the

Phidias and Æschylus were sinners againt convention as much as Cimabue and Dante, as Turner and Byron. Yet convention is not the same thing as pedantry; a school of art or philosophy may have its