Studies of the Renaissance

ÆSTHETIC criticism, according to Mr. Walter H. Pater, must be a personal, subjective matter. The student must realize all the primary data for himself, or not at all. He must pass through the alembic of his mind the pleasurable sensations produced in him by “ all works of art and the fairer forms of nature and human life,” analyzing them and reducing them to their elements. In this way, it is true that the phenomena of “ the solemn sixteenth century ” cannot be studied too much, since each analysis must bring forth a different result, and each result must show a different phase of truth.

Miss Violet Paget, an Englishwoman living in Italy, who writes under the pseudonym of Vernon Lee, is an apt pupil in this school of analytic criticism. She finds herself wandering about the streets of some quaint Tuscan town, entering the dim aisles of some mediæval church, turning over the leaves of some musty volume, ransacking the treasures of some old curiosity shop, and to her imaginative mind the life of the dead past lives again : she sees the architect superintending the slowly-rising marble pile, the sculptor busy over tomb and statue, the painter filling the canvas or the tempered wall with glowing forms, the poet singing his immortal lays to listening ladies dressed in rich brocades. This concrete vision is a gift, but she does not concern herself wholly with what she sees: she goes deeper, and seeks for the causes of the civilization which lives again. She tries to explain the life and character of an epoch producing the men whose works she sees. She recreates abstractions existing in her own mind.

The collection of essays ¹ containing her studies of the antique and the mediæval in the Renaissance she names Euphorion, after the marvelous child of Faust and Helena. Every reader of the second part of Faust is at liberty to interpret the Helena episode as he pleases. Faust to one represents the Romantic spirit in literature, Helena the Classic, and Euphorion is the poet Byron. To another, Euphorion, still concrete, is Goethe himself. Goethe, to whom full vision had not been vouchsafed, saw thus symbolized the century in which he lived. “ Euphorion,” says Carlyle, “ is the offspring of Northern character wedded to Grecian culture.” Vernon Lee reads the allegory to suit herself, and her quick intuition furnishes an explanation fertile in results. “In this strange Faustus, made up of so many and conflicting instincts ; in this old man with ever-budding and ever-nipped feelings of youthfulness, muddling the hardwon secrets of nature in search after impossibilities ; in him so all-sided and yet so willfully narrowed, so restlessly active yet so often palsied and apathetic ; in this Faustus, who has labored so much and succeeded in so little, feeling himself at the end, when he has summed up all his studies, as foolish as before,— which of us has not learned to recognize the impersonated Middle Ages?” Helena, of course, is the spirit of antiquity, called to life again by Fate’s necromancy ; “ a simulacrum of a thing long dead, yet with such continuing semblance of life — nay, with all life’s real powers — that she seems the real, vital, living one, and Faustus yonder, thing as he is of the present, little better than a spectre.” And Euphorion is the Renaissance, “a child of the Middle Ages, taking life and reality from them, but born of and curiously nurtured by the spirit of Antiquity.”

A sentence from Carlyle’s essay on the Helena applies with strange accuracy to Vernon Lee’s book, it is an admirable makeshift criticism: “ It is indeed a graceful, emblematic dance,” he says, “ this little life of Euphorion, full of meanings and half-meanings: the history of poetry ; traits of individual poets ; the Troubadours; the three Italians ; glimpses of all things; full vision of nothing.” Vernon Lee herself expressly disclaims full vision. She has no desire to make “ an encyclopædic atlas ” of the complex civilization of the Renaissance, and she declares that all the incompleteness, irrelevancy, and unsatisfactoriness of her book, as well as the pleasure or instruction which it can afford, are due to the fact that she has followed the bent of her own curiosity and fancy, and studied as much or as little as she pleased. Her essays, she says, “are mere impressions developed by means of study : not merely currents of thought and feeling which I have singled out from the multifold life of the Renaissance, but currents of thought and feeling in myself which have found and swept along with them certain items of Renaissance lore.”

Not counting the Introduction and Epilogue, which together form a rather eloquent apology for her treatment of the subject, Euphorion contains seven essays, each complete in itself, but forming a whole through unity of purpose. “ Each of these studies of mine,” she says, “brings its own lesson, artistic or ethical, important or unimportant; its lesson of seeking certainty in our moral opinions, beauty in all, and, whatever our forms of art, spirituality in our love.” She shows how the brilliant civilization of Italy, already doomed to death by inward rottenness, was made the common property of Europe through “ the fatal sixteenth-century mistake” of inviting the French to settle the petty quarrels of princes and commonwealths; and how the stupid, rapacious ruffians, who came in iconoclastic wantonness with Charles VIII., carried back with them “ the seeds of the ages of Elizabeth, of Louis XIV., and of Goethe.”

She contrasts the hateful life of the serfs of feudal Europe with the gay, independent peasantry of Italy, reconstructed from the specimens of out-door poetry which have come down to us, especially in the works of Lorenzo dei Medici, “ the flippant, egotistic artist and despot, whose love of nature broke the long spell of the Middle Ages.” She explains the point at issue between the art born of antiquity and the art born of the Middle Ages, — the art of Mantegna and the art of Fra Angelico; showing how the antique perfected but did not corrupt the art of the Renaissance. She points out the distinction between the ideal portrait art of the ancients and the realism of the school of Giotto, so often horrible, yet so wonderfully perfect. She traces the influence on Boiardo and Ariosto, Tasso and our English Spencer, of “ the old, consistent, grandly tragic tale of the mysterious incests and revenges of the race of demi-gods,” as told in the Eddas and retold in the Niebelungenlied; of the adulterous, fantastic legends of Arthur and the Round Table; and of the hazy, feudal cycle of Charlemagne and his Paladins, — and in spite of his crudeness she gives the palm to Boiardo, the least known of all the four. She takes the love of Dante for Beatrice as the text for a sermon on the strange phenomenon of mediæval love, which she does not hesitate to call adultery.

“ Personal impression,” she says, “ has led me, perhaps, sometimes away from the direct road ; but had it not beckoned me to follow, I should most likely have simply not stirred. Pleasant impression and painful, as I have said; and sometimes the painful has been more efficacious than the other. I do not know whether the interest which I have always taken in the old squabble of real and ideal has enabled me to make at all clearer the different characteristics of painting and sculpture in Renaissance portraiture, the relation of the art of Raphael to the art of Velasquez and the art of Whistler. I can scarcely judge whether the pleasure which I owe to the crowding together, the moving about, in my fancy of the heroes and wizards and hippogriffs of the old tale of Oberon and Ogier, the association with the knights and ladies of Boiardo and Ariosto of this or that figure out of a fresco of Pinturicchio, or a picture by Dosso, has made it easier or more difficult for me to sum up the history of mediæval romance in Renaissance Italy; nor whether the recollection of certain Tuscan farms, the wellknown scent of the sun-dried fennel and mint under the vine-trellis, the droning song of the contadino ploughing or pruning unseen in the valley, the snatches of peasants’ rhymes, the outlines of peasants’ faces, — things all these of our own time, of yesterday or to-day, — whether all this, running in my mind like so many scribbly illustrations and annotations along the margin of Lorenzo dei Medici’s poems, has made my studies of rustic poetry more clear or more confused.” At any rate, Vernon Lee makes charming use of modern Italy to illustrate the Italy of the Renaissance, and almost every page brings up, like vivid illustrations, the life and scenery which make Italy so dear to its lovers.

But what seems to impress Vernon Lee more than aught else in the Renaissance is its immorality. It possessed, she says, the germs of every modern thing: the habit of equality before the law, civic organization, industry and commerce developed to immense and superb proportions, science, literature, and art, and, above all, consciousness of freedom and of unlimited powers. But this self-cognizance, which was the source of all its achievements, brought a terrible penalty, — “ the loss of all moral standard, of all fixed public feeling.” Such moral chaos is always the accompaniment of revolution. “ In the eighteenth century,” says Vernon Lee, “ France plays the same part that was played in the fifteenth by Italy : again we meet the rebellion against all that has been consecrated by time and belief, the toleration of evil, the praise of the abominable, in the midst of the search for the good.”

It is this moral anomaly which weighs like a nightmare on Vernon Lee’s mind.

“ This much I know as a certainty,” she says : “ that never should I have tried to unravel the causes of the Renaissance’s horrible anomaly of improvement and degradation, had not that anomaly returned to make me wretched with its loathsome mixture of good and evil ; its detestable alternative of endurance of vile solidarities in the souls of our intellectual forefathers, or of unjust turning away from the men and the times whose moral degradation paid the price of our moral dignity.” She does not excuse or make light of the immorality of the Renaissance, but with pitying wonder she shows how inevitable it was, since “ it was not a formal rebellion against God, but a natural evolution of the modern world.”

Curiously enough, this horrible wickedness is not to be found in the writings of the Italians. Both poetry and prose are, as Vernon Lee points out, essentially light and quiet and well regulated, sane and reasonable, completely deficient in every tragic element. The art is absolutely stainless, full of vigorous, serene beauty, pure and lovely life. One must seek in the Elizabethan dramatists, Webster, Tourneur, and Marston, and above all in Ford, the reflection of the lurid crimes which fill Italian history. One of the most striking of Vernon Lee’s essays is devoted to this astonishing contrast. “ In all the works of our Elizabethans,” she says, “ we see not only the assimilated intellectual wealth of Italy, but we see the deep impression, the indelible picture in the memory, of Italy itself; the positive, unallegorical, essentially secular mode of thought; the unascetic, æsthetic, eminently human mode of feeling ; the artistic desire of clear and harmonious form ; the innumerable tendencies and habits which sever the Elizabethans so completely from the Middle Ages, and bring them so near at once to ourselves and to the ancients, making them at once antique and modern, in opposition to mediæval.” But, most of all, the crimes of Italy haunted the imagination of the English. “To these men, ardent and serious even in their profligacy, imaginative even in their Puritanism, all sucking avidly at this newly found Italian civilization, the wickedness of Italy was more than morbidly attractive or morbidly appalling ; it was imaginatively and psychologically fascinating.” And while the real Italy was, if anything, worse than it was painted, filled with murder and incest and crimes too horrible to mention, the very criminals were genial, polished, popular gentlemen and scholars. “ The great criminals of the Renaissance,” says Vernon Lee, — “ traitors and murderers like Lodovico Sforza, incestuous parricides like Gianpaolo Baglioni, committers of every iniquity under heaven like Cæsar Borgia, — move through the scene of Renaissance history, as shown by its writers, great and small, quietly, serenely, triumphantly ; with gracious and magnanimous bearing; applauded, admired, or at least endured.”

We have seen whence arose this moral rottenness, which was the more deadly because those contaminated were blind to its presence. The Renaissance was not a period, but a condition. In Northern Europe it was confined to the few towns which had shaken off the choking traditions of feudalism. In Italy it was almost universal. Ike growth of free towns, mercantile commonwealths, and democratic principalities involved the failure of feudalism ; and Italy was modern before it was ripe, like a child educated beyond its years, and liberated from the wholesome restraint of school. Vernon Lee has shown the causes and effects of this abnormal state with a master hand.

Her essays are full of fruitful suggestions, and throw a new light on Renaissance literature and art. They are intensely feminine, not only in their display of quick intuition, but also in their style. The style is always florid, and often positively bad ; she affects long and involved sentences, overweighted with ideas and thoughts, and rococo with affectations. But she has so much to say that is new and original, and her heart is so thoroughly in her work that one easily forgives her style, and remembers only what she teaches and suggests.