Nevertheless, though these great economic movements were retarded, they could not be wholly arrested. Capitalism has gradually overcome the medieval obstacles; it has swept away local exclusiveness, and has been the means of developing large economic areas. A revolution has taken place in business practice, and the breaking down of commercial restrictions is a change which has affected the traders in all lands. Industry has become capitalistic, and the whole foundation of trading relations and commercial morality has been altered so as to open indefinite possibilities to every merchant. Civic has given place to national economic life. At the commencement of the seventeenth century neither Germany nor Italy had become true nations, but in the course of time the European peoples have come to conform more and more to the larger type of organisation that had already arisen in England and in France.
CHAPTER XVI. THE CLASSICAL RENAISSANCE, by Richard Jebb
THE Renaissance, in the largest sense of the term, is the whole process of transition in Europe from the medieval to the modern order. The Revival of Learning, by which is meant more especially the resuscitated knowledge of classical antiquity, is the most potent and characteristic of the forces which operated in the Renaissance. That revival has two aspects. In one, it is the recovery of a lost culture; in another, of even higher and wider significance, it is the renewed diffusion of a liberal spirit which for centuries had been dead or sleeping. The conception which dominated the Middle Ages was that of the Universal Empire and the Universal Church. A gradual decadence of that idea, from the second half of the thirteenth century to the end of the fifteenth, was the clearest outward sign that a great change was beginning to pass over the world. From the twelfth century onwards there was a new stirring of minds, a growing desire of light; and the first large result was the Scholastic Philosophy. That was an attempt to codify all existing knowledge under certain laws and formulas, and so to reconcile it logically with the one Truth; just as all rights are referable to the one Right, that is, to certain general principles of justice. No revolt was implied there, no break with the reigning tendencies of thought. The direct aim of the Schoolmen was not, indeed, to bind all knowledge to the rock of St Peter; but the truth which they took as their standard was that to which the Church had given her sanction. In the middle of the fourteenth century, when Scholasticism was already waning, another intellectual movement set in. This was Humanism, born in Italy of a new feeling for the past greatness of Rome. And now the barriers so long imposed on the exercise of the reason were broken down; not all at once, but by degrees. It was recognised that there had been a time when men had used all their faculties of mind and imagination without fear or reproof; not restricted to certain paths or bound by formulas, but freely seeking for knowledge in every field of speculation, and for beauty in all the realms of fancy. Those men had bequeathed to posterity a literature different in quality and range from anything that had been written for a thousand years. They had left, too, works of architecture such that even the mutilated remains had been regarded by legend as the work of supernatural beings whom heathen poets had constrained by spells. The pagan view was now once more proclaimed, that man was made, not only to toil and suffer, but to enjoy. And naturally enough, in the first reaction from a more ascetic ideal, the lower side of ancient life obscured, with many men, its better aspects. It was thus that Humanism first appeared, bringing a claim for the mental freedom of man, and for the full development of his being. But, in order to see the point of departure, it is necessary to trace in outline the general course of literary tradition in Europe from the fifth century to the fourteenth.
The fall of the Western Empire in the fifth century was followed by a rapid decline of education and of general culture. The later ages of classical antiquity, if comparatively poor in the higher kind of literary genius, were still familiar with the best writers of Greece and Rome, and continued to be prolific in work inspired by good models. They also retained the traditions of that civilisation and social life out of which the classical literature had arisen. But the barbarian invaders of Italy and Gaul were strangers to that civilisation; they brought with them a life in which the ancient culture found no place. The schools of the Roman Empire were swept away, or died out. Such education as survived was preserved by the Church, and was almost wholly confined to ecclesiastics. Monasteries had begun to multiply in the West from the close of the fourth century. Their schools, and those attached to cathedrals, alone tempered the reign of ignorance. The level of the monastic schools was the higher. In the cathedral schools the training was usually restricted to such rudiments of knowledge as were indispensable for the secular clergy, viz., reading, writing, arithmetic, and elementary music. But even in the monastic schools the course was usually meagre and narrow. The superior education of the age was chiefly based on a few jejune text-books, compilations and abridgments from older sources. One of these was the treatise of the African rhetorician, Martianus Capella (flor. c. 420), on the Septem Artes Liberales,—grammar, logic, rhetoric, music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. The form is allegorical; Mercury weds Philology, and at their nuptials assigns the Arts to her as handmaids. Capella was, however, regarded with disfavour by those Christian teachers who rigorously proscribed pagan literature; and his book, though it remained an authority down to the Renaissance, was not everywhere admitted. Thus it is absent from Alcuin’s catalogue (made c. 770) of the library at York, a fairly representative collection of the books which then were most read. The Seven Arts had been distributed, so early as the fifth century, into the trivium, consisting of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, and the quad-rivium, comprising the other four. Grammar was taught by excerpts from Donatus or Priscian; rhetoric, often with the aid of extracts from Cicero’s De Inventiane and Topica, or the treatise Ad Herennium. For the trivium generally a favourite text-book was Cassiodorus (d. 568), De Artibus et Disciplinis Liberalium Artium. For the quadrivium, and for the more advanced logic, the standard manuals were the treatises of Boetius (d. 524), which included some Latin transcripts from parts of Aristotle’s Organon. Boetius, “the last of the Romans,” was, indeed, an author of cardinal importance in the higher education of the earlier Middle Ages. Another standard work was an encyclopaedia of arts and sciences by Isidore, Bishop of Seville (d. 636), containing a mass of information in every recognised branch of knowledge (Originum s, Etymologiarum libri XX). It is characteristic of education in the Middle Ages that compendia of this poor kind had largely superseded their own classical sources in the ordinary use of the schools. Note should be taken also of the persistent tendency to look for allegorical and mystic senses beneath the literal meaning of a passage. This tendency dates at least from the teaching of Cassian (flor. c. 400), one of the chief founders of Western monachism. It was applied first to the Scriptures, and thence transferred to other books, with an influence which did much to vitiate the medieval study of literature.
The period from c. 500 to the latter part of the eighth century was that during which the general level of knowledge in Europe was probably lowest. Gregory of Tours (d. 595) could declare that “the study of letters” had “perished.” Nearly two hundred years later Charles the Great re-echoed the complaint, and sought a remedy. Yet, even in those centuries, there were places of comparative light. Chief among these, on the Continent, were the Benedictine houses. It was in 528 that the Abbey of Monte Cassino was founded by St Benedict. His rule, formulated in 529, provided for regular study. Thenceforth his Order, wherever established, was a powerful agency in the maintenance of knowledge. To the Benedictines is largely due the survival of the Latin classics; indeed, it would be difficult to overrate their services as guardians of books in the darkest age of Europe. In Germany the Benedictine Abbey of Fulda, founded by St Boniface (d. 755), was pre-eminent during the ninth century as a.home of literary studies. Meanwhile the condition of letters in the British Islands was somewhat better than that which prevailed on the Continent. This was conspicuously the case in Ireland, the stronghold of Celtic monachism, which was independent of Benedictine influences. The Irish monasteries, many of which arose before 500, were prosperous. They were devoted to learning, derived partly from a monastic community, the once-famous Insulani, planted (c. 400) by St Honoratus in the isle near Cannes which bears his name; and they had the unique distinction of witnessing to an affinity between the Celtic and the Hellenic spirit. Alone among the religious houses of the West in that age, they fostered the study of the Greek Fathers. Ireland sent forth not a few of the scholars and missionaries whose names shine most clearly through the gloom of those centuries; St Columba (d. 597), who made lona a centre of light for northern