Chapter I: Literature (2)

But the greatest glory of this period was the invention of printing, which will be more particularly noticed under another head. The influence given to the restoration of letters was not suspended by the death of Cosmo de Medici, which occurred in 1464. His wealth and influence over Florence then devolved on his grandson Lorenzo, who employed his great resources in the most distinguished patronage of literature and art. His intimate personal friend, Luigi Pulci, was a leading poet of the modern school, and published the first edition of his Morgante Maggiore at Venice, in 1481. None of the honor attached to the invention of printing belongs to Italy, but it is to be noted how the practical use of that sublime art began on the eastern edge of the peninsula it was destined to revolutionize. The famous Florentine ecclesiastic Poggio, devoted himself particularly to the collection of choice manuscripts, and his exertions were crowned with great success. Fifty years so employed attested the value of his perseverance and sagacity. Politian also contributed much to the glory of this epoch.

Paul II. bestowed special favor upon his countrymen, the Venetians, and this is supposed to have induced the acute and provident Lorenzo to attempt the establishment of the chief ecclesiastical power, also, in his own family. Giovanni de Medici was early destined to the church, and produced those important effects upon Europe and the world which were so conspicuous in his pontificate. Leo X. became pope in 1513. In his patronage of literature, he was the worthy successor of Nicholas V., and began by placing men of letters in the most honorable stations of his court. The great poets of that century, Ariosto, Sanazzaro, the Tassos, Rucellai, Guarini, and the rest, produced their works during his reign. Under his auspices, the great libraries of the age were immensely enriched, and more than one hundred professors in a single university were restored to their alienated revenues. Through the agency of the apostolical secretary, Beroaldo, the first five books of the Annals of Tacitus were published, which had lately been found in a German monastery. Chigi, a private Roman, gave to the world good editions of Pindar and Theocritus in 1515 and 1516; and, under the direction of Lascaris, Leo created an academy expressly for the study of Greek, in which a press was established, where the sciolists of Homer were printed in 1517.

As an Italian prince, and as a Roman pontiff, Leo X. has been accused of indulging an unprincipled policy and vulgar epicurism. It is affirmed that Ariosto received from him nothing beyond fair promises and a kiss; that his table was usually crowded with base and impudent buffoons, and that he did not hesitate to profane Petrarch's laurel and the Capitol by a mock coronation of his laughing-stocks, Querno and Baraballo. But, as a contrast to these defects, it should be remembered that he called round his throne Bembo and Sadoleto, and fostered innumerable men of talent with a liberality which can not fail to elicit the praise of posterity. If the pope hunted, and hawked, and caroused, it was in keeping with the universal moral indifference in the East and South, that ominous calm before the tempest which preceded the mighty reformation of every thing not intrinsically a sham. To the sagacious historian it is not strange that musical retainers were magnificently recompensed, one made an archbishop, and another archdeacon; and that parasitical poets like Berni and Molza, were rewarded by Leo, while his great countryman, Machiavelli, was treated with neglect. It is a significant fact that during the fearful crisis when all the remoter nations of Europe stood aghast at the growing influence of Luther, the jocular pontiff and his secularized ministers found genial amusement in witnessing the representation of farces which exposed the hollow mummeries of priestcraft.

During the first half of the sixteenth century, the study of ancient literature was uniformly progressive in Germany, France, and England; during the succeeding fifty years much greater excellence was attained. Thanks to the patronage of Francis I., the University of Paris at this time stood in the front rank of philological pursuits. In England the cause of learning was greatly promoted at the accession of Elizabeth to the throne, when the universities began to revive. Not only was good Latin often heard on the banks of the Isis and the Cam, but the sovereign herself and her erudite professors could address each other in classic Greek. From ancient poets, historians, and orators, the new race of scholars derived the principles not only of equal justice, but of equal privileges, and learned to reverence free republics, to abhor tyranny, and sympathize with a Brutus or Timoleon. The Adages of Erasmus created almost mutinous indignation against great national wrongs, and a later period witnessed still better results for the popular good.

The effect which was produced by the mixture of the two great races of men, the southern and the northern, is seen in the epical writings of the respective nations. The poem of the Cid was to Spain what the Divina Comedia was to Italy. In the fifteenth century Portuguese literature arose, and, after a brief but beautiful career, expired in the swan-like cry of the Lusiad. Torquato Tasso, the great Italian cotemporary, published his Jerusalem Delivered the year after the death of Camoens.

To the other famous names of Lope de Vega and Calderon, that of Cervantes will ever stand associated with distinguished honor in the annals of Spanish literature. He was born in 1549. While yet young, he was captured by a Barbary corsair, and remained five years and a half in slavery. Maimed and friendless, he returned to Spain, and in 1584, began to publish his influential works. The leading purpose of Cervantes was to exhibit the abuse of the books of chivalry, and to overwhelm with ridicule those romances which are the creations of a diseased imagination, in which attempt he was completely successful. The romances of chivalry ended with Don Quixote; and this was appropriately accomplished at the time when, and in the place where, Columbus was fitted by Providence to reveal that New World which had been kept hid until the time for raising the curtain of a sublimer age. At least one author was now born who believed that "a titled nobility is the most undisputed progeny of barbarism," and that its very existence proves it to be inimical to all the interests of the people. The badges of the former are, idleness, vanity, and luxury; those of the latter are, labor, pride, and necessity. The son of misfortune and wrong, who had been ransomed from vassalage at the expense of a mother's life-toil and the dowry of his sisters, was the fitting instrument to strike the knell of hereditary feudalism, and confront those brazen lords to whom alone Cervantes could do justice.

What Petrarch began in Italy during the fourteenth century was carried on by the fifteenth with unabated activity. The recovery of lost classics and the revival of philology occupied many leading minds. The discovery of an unknown manuscript, says Tiraboschi, was regarded almost as the conquest of a kingdom. Indeed, so zealously did the scholars of this era trim the lamp of ancient sepulchres, that they in a measure overlooked the splendor of their native language. But a keen susceptibility to beauty of form, with the power of expressing it, was manifested to an extraordinary degree at the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth centuries. It was an epoch when the fortress erected by a baron, and the annotation written by a philologist on the margin of his author, were alike characterized by a severe and chaste beauty. Under the liberal and discriminating patronage of Julius II. and Leo X., a vivid appreciation of antique literature, philosophy, and art, became an absorbing passion, and spread in all directions. Referring to the Guicciardini and Machiavelli of that time, Macaulay says: "To collect books and antiques, to found professorships, to patronize men of learning, became almost universal fashions among the great. The spirit of literary research allied itself to that of commercial enterprise; every place to which the merchant princes of Florence extended their gigantic traffic, from the bazaars of the Tigris to the monasteries of the Clyde, was ransacked for medals and manuscripts." A new blood circulated in the veins of Christian nations, and the new inventions which arose created murmurs of revolutions, and foretokened the dawn of a public opinion. The silent subterranean working of the masses engendered the marvelous changes which soon transpired over the whole brightened face of humanity. Whether our attention is fixed on the political or religious history, on the literary progress, the jurisprudence, or the artistic excellence of the age, no century is loftier, richer, or more instructive for modern society than the sixteenth, none more exuberant with life and ennobling advancement. All that has since been perfected in the realm of literature then received much of its primary form and spirit.

From the auspicious hour when the Nibelungen became the Iliad of the North, Germany and France were perpetually progressive. Successive developments of life suffered decay, but no vital principle can ever be annihilated; superannuated forms perish inevitably, but in order only to reproduce a higher type of perpetuated excellence. When inferior nations and tribes disappear after having done the work of precursors, a more useful race is certain immediately to appear, and transmit the torch of divine effulgence which, in the sublime career appointed to be run, had dropped, by superseded hands. There is no death except into a higher life. The last language formed in Europe was the aggregated wealth of all linguistic treasures before accumulated, and is destined eventually to control, if not to absorb every other. All mediævalism blossomed for the West, and the English vernacular was its maturest fruit.

Like the great and distinct periods of history under Pericles and Augustus, a certain adequate and cotemporaneous expression pervaded the whole age of Leo X. Its successive steps were marked by the papal domination of the beginning of the middle ages; the universal feudal system; the period of universities springing up everywhere; the periods of art; the periods of Abelard and scholastic philosophy; the rising of free cities all over Europe; the ardor of maritime discovery and enthusiasm for "cosmography;" the period of monasteries and Protestantism. Each in succession ruled with supreme power, so long as it possessed the chief life. For example, at the needful time, feudalism was a vital organization; and so long as this remained genuine and spontaneous, it was the true and living expression of man's necessities. But when the feudal system was transferred from the field to the court, where the pen of the lawyer supplanted the sword of the knight, and a piece of parchment became more powerful than warlike pennons, the life of feudalism was gone, and nothing remained but a clattering skeleton amid its dead formalities. Systems die, but beneath their surface there is an immortality which can not suffer diminution of any kind, but must eternally _evolve_. Each system has a separate idea to exemplify, and the grand truth inculcated by all these successive lessons remains, when each petty teacher has disappeared.

Let us briefly recapitulate the historic facts connected with the last and best of literatures, the English. The Anglo-Saxons, originally the fiercest nation of the predatory North, had become an unwarlike nation, and quite degenerate. The venerated relics of their civilization existed, but the soul was nearly gone, and a mental torpidity pervaded the entire country. Canute roused the people for a moment, but they soon sank into stolid indifference again. Then was needed the Norman conquest to shake the whole fabric to its base, and infuse a vigorous spirit through all classes of the community. That mightiest people beyond the channel came over at exactly the right time, and brought all the best continental elements with them. The influence of the Norman conquest on the language of England has been compared to an inundation, which at first submerges the landscape beneath its turbid billows, but which at last subsiding, leaves behind it the germs of fresh beauty and augmented wealth. The ancestors of this new people had been fierce pirates, but they became the chief revivers of literature, and the grand promoters of the peaceful arts. It is a notable fact, that Lanfranc, their prime leader in this noble enterprise, was a Lombard, and that his people had been the most barbarous of all the Gothic invaders. Yet among them literary studies were first revived in Italy, the most celebrated schools were established, and the most enterprising citizens were formed into the most cultivated states. From them, and their cities, Pisa and Pavia, learning was planted, under Charlemagne, in France, and replanted both there and in England, under Lanfranc, once an obscure schoolmaster at Bec, in Normandy, and after the conquest Archbishop of Canterbury.

The seeds of knowledge, thus timely sown, yielded in due time an abundant harvest. Literary pursuits soon became a source of distinction and preferment. All ranks caught the flame; and on the diffusion of vernacular letters, intelligence no longer dwelt within the cells of a cloister or the walls of a school, but adorned the chamber of the lady, the hall of the baron, and the court of the prince. Intelligence glorified the warrior's iron mail and trophied lance abroad; while at home, domestic solicitudes were assuaged, and gentle virtues ennobled, by the laudable ambition to learn both to read and write. After the twelfth century in England, ignorance became discreditable, the mark of a barbarous origin and a degraded taste. Itinerant minstrels had for a long time been the instruments of poetry, but the offices of composer and musician were now separated. Special attention was given to that form of literature, so popular in the streets and at the festival, in the study, and in the cloister, while its measured syllables were made the vehicle of better strains than those which exhilarated at the banquet or corrupted the populace. As we have above stated, the English language was of the latest formation, and was partially developed in the thirteenth century through some metrical poems. Henry II., who was himself a great proficient in history, encouraged and rewarded its popular writers, who were also fostered by his queen Eleanora, a troubadour by birth. At the accession of Henry III., still brighter rays beamed forth upon the western isle. His reign connected England with Jerusalem, whither the crusading armies still went; with Constantinople, whose exiled emperor sought his support; with the south of Italy, by the intercourse of himself and his clergy with the pope, and by the crowds of emigrants whom the pontiff poured upon British soil; with the north of Italy, where he sent knights to assist the emperor against Milan; with Armenia, whose friars came for a refuge from the Tartars; with Germany, whose emperor married his sister; with Provence and Savoy, from which both he and his brother had their wives; with Spain, where his son was knighted and wedded; with France, which he visited with much pomp; with its southern regions, Guienne and Poitou, which he retained; and with the countries on the Rhine, where his brother went to obtain the empire.

No language can better express the facts of the case in point, than the following review by Macaulay: "The history of England is emphatically the history of progress. It is the history of a constant movement of the public mind, which produced a constant change in the institutions of a great society. We see that society, at the beginning of the twelfth century, in a state more miserable than the state in which the most degraded nations of the East now are. We see it subjected to the tyranny of a handful of armed foreigners. We see a strong distinction of caste, separating the victorious Norman from the vanquished Saxon. We see the great body of the population in a state of personal slavery. We see the most debasing and cruel superstition exercising boundless dominion over the most elevated and benevolent minds. We see the multitude sunk in brutal ignorance, and the studious few engaged in acquiring what did deserve the name of knowledge. In the course of seven centuries this wretched and degraded race have become the greatest and most highly civilized people that ever the world saw; have spread their dominion over every quarter of the globe; have scattered the seeds of mighty empires and republics over vast continents of which no dim intimation had ever reached Ptolemy or Strabo; have created a maritime power which would annihilate, in a quarter of an hour, the navies of Tyre, Athens, Carthage, Venice, and Genoa, together; have carried the science of healing, the means of locomotion, and correspondence, every mechanical art, every manufacture, every thing that promotes the convenience of life, to a perfection which our ancestors would have thought magical; have produced a literature abounding with works not inferior to the noblest which Greece has bequeathed to us; have discovered the laws which regulate the motions of the heavenly bodies; have speculated with exquisite subtlety on the operations of the human mind; have been the acknowledged leaders of the human race in the career of human improvement."

The period so eloquently sketched in the above extract extends from the culminating point whence high civilization, in the age of Leo X., descended on the western edge of Europe, and passed the broad Atlantic, to pour all its accumulated beams into the auspicious orient of a New World. As it respects moral force, and originality of genius, neither the age of Pericles, nor that of Augustus, could be compared with the evening glories of that age which was adorned by such names as Chaucer and Spenser, Sidney and Raleigh, Bacon and Milton. These and many others possessed not merely great talents and accomplishments, but vast compass and reach of understanding, minds truly creative and original. They made great and substantial additions to the treasures of general knowledge, and fortified human faculties, while they augmented the facilities for human happiness to an unparalleled extent. Geoffrey Chaucer, born in 1328, was coeval with Wickliffe, with whom it has been said that he studied at Oxford. He saw the reigns of three British kings, had conversed with Petrarch at Padua, was a shining light through a protracted life, and died in the first year of the fifteenth century, "the father of English poetry."

At a later and much brighter epoch, Edmund Spenser, born 1553, shone without a rival. Much of his language has become antiquated, but is yet beautiful in its quaintness, and, like the moss and festooned ivy on some dilapidated castle, covers his antique phrases with romantic and venerable associations. Schlegel regarded the chivalrous poem of Spenser, the Fairy Queen, as presenting the completest view of the spirit of romance which yet lingered in England among the subjects of Elizabeth. He undoubtedly was a perfect master of the picturesque, and in his lyrics breathed the tenderness of the Italian Idyll, redolent of all the perfume of the Troubadours. Chaucer was more like the German poets of the sixteenth century; but Spenser seemed to have imbibed at earlier fountains of inspiration, and gave a final expression to the tender and melodious poesy of the olden time.

John Milton, born 1608, leaned more to the opposite ideal of his native language, and beyond the power of any other writer expressed the full majesty of the old classic element. Spenser was charmingly Teutonic; but Milton was more at home in the Latin part of his mighty vernacular. While each of this glorious trio spoke in a dialect peculiar to himself, they all alike were intense and devoted lovers of nature. Chaucer sparkles with the dew of morning. Spenser lies bathed in the sylvan shade. Milton glows with orient light. One might almost fancy that he had gazed himself blind, and had then been raised to the sky, and there stood and waited, like "blind Orion hungering for the morn." So abundantly had he stored his mind with visions of natural beauty, that, when all without became dark, he was still most rich in his inward treasure, and "ceased not to wander where the muses haunt clear spring, or shady grove, or sunny hill."

We have reserved another name, the greatest of them all, for the concluding item in this comprehensive sketch of literature during the age of Leo X. The position of the notice we give him is appropriate, since he garnered all anterior wisdom and genius into himself, to be bodied forth in diversified forms of consummate worth. William Shakspeare was born in 1564, twelve years after Walter Raleigh, and thirty-five before Oliver Cromwell. He was twenty-four years old when the first newspaper was published, and should be regarded as the truest exponent of the romantic cycle he came fully to comprehend, exhaust, and terminate.

In a much higher sense than Francis Bacon, William Shakspeare was the historian of humanity, and great prophet of human progress. Bunsen regards his "Histories" as the only modern epos, in its true sense, a poetical relation to the eternal order manifested in national developments. They are the Romanic "Divina Commedia," the Spanish "Cid," and the Germanic "Nibelungen" united and dramatized. A new and sublimer act was about to open on the vast stage of Providence, and dramatic literature was the fitting organ of the epos in an age teeming with energetic life, and ripe for the sublimest realities. The "myriad-minded" artist appeared in his serene sphere, to show how society, as it moves under divine guidance, illustrates moral truths more accurately, completely, and strikingly, than any dissertation could reveal it. In his portraitures it is difficult to decide which is more remarkable, the fidelity of abstract ideas to nature, or the vivid imaginativeness of conception by which the highest truth is announced. Living greatness and intellectual power coalesce in both imaginary characters and actual scenes, as the consummate style of Leonardo da Vinci, or Michael Angelo resulted from the blending of spiritual feeling with natural forms. He stood like a magician above the world, penetrating at a glance the profoundest depths, mysteries, and perplexities of human nature, and having power at will to summon into open day all the foulest as well as fairest working of human passion. With masterly sagacity, he used the whole world of man, past, present, and to come, instinctively anticipating what he was not permitted actually to behold. Some have daringly intimated that Shakspeare, like Dantè, was a solitary comet which, having traversed the constellation of the ancient firmament, returns to the feet of the Deity, and says to him like the thunder, "Here am I." Not so. Dantè appeared in an age of darkness, comparatively. The compass had then scarcely enabled the mariner to steer through the familiar expanse of the Mediterranean. America and the passage to India by the Cape of Good Hope were yet undiscovered. The feudal system still pressed with all the weight of its darkness upon enslaved Europe. The inventor of gunpowder had not changed the whole system of war, nor had the introduction of printing created a complete metamorphosis in society at large. But when in western England the mother of Shakspeare gave birth to her obscure son, the age of regeneration and reformation had already dawned, that age in which the principal discoveries of modern times were accomplished, the true system of the universe ascertained, the heavens and the earth explored, the sciences cultivated, and the practical arts carried to a pitch of perfection which they had never before attained. Great deeds were done, and great men constituted colonies which repaired to the woods of New England to sow the seeds of a fertile independence, and establish the empire of universal amelioration.

All nature ministers to Shakspeare, as gladly as a mother to her child, while he "glances from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven." Whether he wishes to depict Romeo's love, or Hamlet's philosophy, or Miranda's innocence, or Perdita's simplicity, or Rosalind's playfulness, or the sports of the Fairies, or Timon's misanthropy, or Macbeth's desolating ambition, or Lear's heart-rending frenzy--he has only to ask, and she vouchsafes every feeling and every passion with which he desires to actuate and invest his inimitable creations.

For six centuries, millions of readers, in and out of the church, had fed on religious romance, which had continually depreciated in merit, when John Bunyan was born, 1628, to gather up every remnant of excellence which had ever been expressed under that type; and having re-issued the essence of it all most divinely refined, he terminated legendary literature forever. With the same providential intent, in the same year that Michael Angelo died, William Shakspeare was born, and having perfected to the last degree every element which had accumulated during the lapsing of thirty centuries, romantic literature ended with the closing of his grave. Mid-way between Shakspeare and Bunyan, Milton lost his eyes; and Poetry, Freedom, and Religion, at the same time lost theirs for a season. But, behold! The splendors which fade along the western sky of the old world already foretoken the rising of a brighter day over the new.