Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 | Page 7

its own fashion. With Petrarch the same genius
reached forth across the gulf of darkness, resuming the tradition of a
splendid past. With Boccaccio the same genius proclaimed the beauty
of the world, the goodliness of youth and strength and love and life,
unterrified by hell, unappalled by the shadow of impending death.
It was now, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, when Italy had
lost indeed the heroic spirit which we admire in her Communes of the
thirteenth, but had gained instead ease, wealth, magnificence, and that
repose which springs from long prosperity, that the new age at last
began. Europe was, as it were, a fallow field, beneath which lay buried
the civilization of the old world. Behind stretched the centuries of
mediævalism, intellectually barren and inert. Of the future there were
as yet but faint foreshadowings. Meanwhile, the force of the nations
who were destined to achieve the coming transformation was

unexhausted; their physical and mental faculties were unimpaired. No
ages of enervating luxury, of intellectual endeavor, of life artificially
preserved or ingeniously prolonged, had sapped the fiber of the men
who were about to inaugurate the modern world. Severely nurtured,
unused to delicate living, these giants of the Renaissance were like
boys in their capacity for endurance, their inordinate appetite for
enjoyment. No generations, hungry, sickly, effete, critical, disillusioned,
trod them down. Ennui and the fatigue that springs from skepticism, the
despair of thwarted effort, were unknown. Their fresh and unperverted
senses rendered them keenly alive to what was beautiful and natural.
They yearned for magnificence, and instinctively comprehended
splendor. At the same time the period of satiety was still far off.
Everything seemed possible to their young energy; nor had a single
pleasure palled upon their appetite. Born, as it were, at the moment
when desires and faculties are evenly balanced, when the perceptions
are not blunted nor the senses cloyed, opening their eyes for the first
time on a world of wonder, these men of the Renaissance enjoyed what
we may term the first transcendent springtide of the modern world.
Nothing is more remarkable than the fullness of the life that throbbed in
them. Natures rich in all capacities and endowed with every kind of
sensibility were frequent. Nor was there any limit to the play of
personality in action. We may apply to them what Mr. Browning has
written of Sordello's temperament:--
A footfall there Suffices to upturn to the warm air Half germinating
spices, mere decay Produces richer life, and day by day New pollen on
the lily-petal grows, And still more labyrinthine buds the rose.
During the Middle Ages man had lived enveloped in a cowl. He had
not seen the beauty of the world or had seen it only to cross himself,
and turn aside and tell his beads and pray. Like S. Bernard traveling
along the shores of the Lake Leman, and noticing neither the azure of
the waters, nor the luxuriance of the vines, nor the radiance of the
mountains with their robe of sun and snow, but bending a
thought-burdened forehead over the neck of his mule; even like this
monk, humanity had passed, a careful pilgrim, intent on the terrors of
sin, death, and judgment, along the highways of the world, and had
scarcely known that they were sightworthy, or that life is a blessing.
Beauty is a snare, pleasure a sin, the world a fleeting show, man fallen

and lost, death the only certainty, judgment inevitable, hell everlasting,
heaven hard to win; ignorance is acceptable to God as a proof of faith
and submission; abstinence and mortification are the only safe rules of
life: these were the fixed ideas of the ascetic mediæval Church. The
Renaissance shattered and destroyed them, rending the thick veil which
they had drawn between the mind of man and the outer world, and
flashing the light of reality upon the darkened places of his own nature.
For the mystic teaching of the Church was substituted culture in the
classical humanities; a new ideal was established, whereby man strove
to make himself the monarch of the globe on which it is his privilege as
well as destiny to live. The Renaissance was the liberation of the reason
from a dungeon, the double discovery of the outer and the inner world.
An external event determined the direction which this outburst of the
spirit of freedom should take. This was the contact of the modern with
the ancient mind which followed upon what is called the Revival of
Learning. The fall of the Greek Empire in 1453, while it signalized the
extinction of the old order, gave an impulse to the now accumulated
forces of the new. A belief in the identity of the human spirit under all
previous manifestations and in its uninterrupted