It is not without real reason that these Hellenic parallels confront us in the study of Italian Renaissance. Florence borrowed her light from Athens, as the moon shines with rays reflected from the sun. The Revival was the silver age of that old golden age of Greece. In a literal, not a merely metaphorical sense, the fifteenth century witnessed a new birth of the classic spirit. And what, let us ask ourselves, since here at last is the burning point of our inquiry, what was the true note of this spirit, in so far as its recovery concerned the Italian race? Superficial observers will speak of the Paganism of the Renaissance, its unblushing license, its worldliness, its self-satisfied sensuality, as though that were all, as though these qualities were not inherent in human nature, ready at any moment to emerge when the strain of nobler enthusiasm is relaxed, or the self-preservative instincts of society are enfeebled. There is indeed a truth in this rough and ready answer, which requires to be stated on the threshold. The contact of the modern with the ancient world did encourage a profligate and godless mode of living in men who preferred Petronius to S. Paul, and yearned less after Galilee than Corinth. The humanists were distinguished even above the Roman clergy for open disorder in their lives. They developed filthy speaking as a special branch of rhetoric, and professed the science of recondite and obsolete obscenity. It was just this fashion of the learned classes that made Erasmus mistrust the importation of scholarship into the North. 'One scruple still besets my mind,' he wrote, 'lest under the cloak of revived literature Paganism should strive to raise its head, there being among Christians men who, while they recognise the name of Christ, breathe in their hearts the spirit of the Gentiles.' Christianity, especially in Italy, where the spectacle of the Holy See inspired disgust, had been prostituted to the vilest service by the Church.[10] Faith was associated with folly, superstition, ignorance, intolerance, and cruelty. The manners of the clergy were in flagrant discord with the Gospel, and Antichrist found fitter incarnation in Roderigo Borgia than in Nero. While the essence of religion was thus sacrificed by its professors, there appeared upon the horizon of the modern world, like some bright blazing star, the ideal of that Pagan civilisation against which in its decadence the ascendant force of Christianity had striven. It was not unnatural that a reaction in favour of Paganism, now that the Church had been found wanting, should ensue, or that the passions of humanity should justify their self-indulgence by appealing to the precedents of Greece and Rome. Good and bad were mingled in the classical tradition. Vices, loathsome enough in a Pope who had instituted the censure of the press, seemed venial when combined with the manliness of Hadrian or the refined charm of Catullus. Sin itself lost half its evil coming from the new-found Holy Land of culture. Still this so-called Paganism of the Renaissance, real as it was, had but a superficial connection with classical studies. The corruption of the Church and the political degeneracy of the commonwealths had quite as much to do with it as the return to heathen standards. Nor could the Renaissance have been the great world-historical era it truly was, if such demoralisation had been a part and parcel of its essence. Crimes and vices are not the hotbed of arts and literature: lustful priests and cruel despots were not necessary to the painting of Raphael or the poetry of Ariosto. The faults of the Italians in the age of the Renaissance were neither productive of their high achievements, nor conversely were they generated by the motion of the intellect toward antique forms of culture. The historian notes synchronisms, whereof he is not bound to prove the interdependence, and between which he may feel there is no causal link.
It does not, moreover, appear that the demoralisation of Italian society, however this may have been brought about, produced either physical or intellectual degeneration in the people. Commercial prosperity, indeed, had rendered them inferior in brute strength to their semi-barbarous neighbours; while the cosmopolitan interests of culture had destroyed the energy of national instincts. But it would be wrong to charge their neopaganism alone with results whereof the causes were so complex.
Meanwhile, what gave its deep importance to the classical revival, was the emancipation of the reason, consequent upon the discovery that the best gifts of the spirit had been enjoyed by the nations of antiquity. An ideal of existence distinct from that imposed upon the Middle Ages by the Church, was revealed in all its secular attractiveness. Fresh value was given to the desires and aims, enjoyments and activities of man, considered as a noble member of the universal life, and not as a diseased excrescence on the world he helped to spoil. Instead of the cloistral service of the 'Imitatio Christi,' that conception of communion, through knowledge, with God manifested in His works and in the soul of man, which forms the indestructible religion of science and the reason, was already generated. The intellect, after lying spell-bound during a long night, when thoughts were as dreams and movement as somnambulism, resumed its activity, interrogated nature, and enjoyed the pleasures of unimpeded energy. Without ceasing to be Christians (for the moral principles of Christianity are the inalienable possession of the human race), the men of the Revival dared once again to exercise their thought as boldly as the Greeks and Romans had done before them. More than this, they were now able, as it were, by the resuscitation of a lost faculty, to do so freely and clear-sightedly. The touch upon them of the classic spirit was like the finger of a deity giving life to the dead.
That more and nobler use was not made of the new light which dawned upon the world in the Revival; that the humanists abandoned the high standpoint of Petrarch for a lower and more literary level; that society assimilated the Hedonism more readily than the Stoicism of the ancients; that scholars occupied themselves with the form rather than the matter of the classics; that all these shortcomings in their several degrees prevented the Italians from leading the intellectual movement of the sixteenth century in religion and philosophy, as they had previously led the mind of Europe in discovery and literature—is deeply to be lamented by those who are jealous for their honour. For the rest, no words can be found more worthy to express their high conception of man, regarded as a free yet responsible personality, sent into the world to mould his own nature, and by this power of self-determination severed from both brutes and angels, than the following passage from Pico della Mirandola's 'Oration on the Dignity of Man.' It combines antique liberty of thought with Christian faith in a style distinctive of the Renaissance at its best; nor is its note of mediæval cosmology uncharacteristic of an age that divined as yet more than it firmly grasped the realities of modern science. Here, if anywhere, may be hailed the Epiphany of the modern spirit, contraposing God and man in a relation inconceivable to the ancients, unapprehended in its fulness by the Middle Ages. 'Then the Supreme Maker decreed that unto Man, on whom He could bestow nought singular, should belong in common whatsoever had been given, to His other creatures. Therefore He took man, made in His own individual image, and having placed him in the centre of the world, spake to him thus: "Neither a fixed abode, nor a form in thine own likeness, nor any gift peculiar to thyself alone, have we given thee, O Adam, in order that what abode, what likeness, what gifts thou shalt choose, may be thine to have and to possess. The nature allotted to all other creatures, within laws appointed by ourselves, restrains them. Thou, restrained by no narrow bounds, according to thy own free will, in whose power I have placed thee, shalt define thy nature for thyself. I have set thee midmost the world, that thence thou mightest the more conveniently survey whatsoever is in the world. Nor have we made thee either heavenly or earthly, mortal or immortal, to the end that thou, being, as it were, thy own free maker and moulder, shouldst fashion thyself in what form may like thee best. Thou shalt have power to decline unto the lower or brute creatures. Thou shalt have power to be reborn unto the higher, or divine, according to the sentence of thy intellect." Thus to Man, at his birth, the Father gave seeds of all variety and germs of every form of life.'
Out of thoughts like these, if Italy could only have been free, if her society could have been uncorrupted, if her Church could have returned to the essential truths of Christianity, might have sprung, as from a seed, the noblest growth of human science. But dis aliter visum est. The prologue to this history of culture—the long account taken of selfish tyrants, vicious clergy, and incapable republics, in my 'Age of the Despots'—is