Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 | Page 4

great Masque, so here the waning and the waxing shapes are mingled;
the new 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 knowledge. If we ask the
students of art what they mean by the Renaissance, 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 discovery of manuscripts, that
passion for antiquity, that progress in philology 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 Vesalius, and Harvey's theory
of the circulation of the blood. The origination 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
introduce a rational method into the theory of modern jurisprudence, as
well as to commence the study of international law. Men whose
attention 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 European 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 the 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
outburst 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.
How was it, then, that at a certain period, about fourteen centuries after
Christ, to speak roughly, the intellect of the Western races awoke as it
were from slumber and began once more to be active? That is a
question which we can but imperfectly answer. The mystery of organic
life defeats analysis; whether the subject of our inquiry be a germ-cell,
or a phenomenon so complex as the commencement of a new religion,
or the origination of a new disease, or a new phase in civilization, it is
alike impossible to do more than to state the conditions under which the
fresh growth begins, and to point out what are its manifestations. In
doing so, moreover, we must be careful not to be carried away by
words of our own making. Renaissance, 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;