indispensable than mental training. Great cities had open places set apart for tournaments and games; in Tuscan burghs the palio was run on feast days, and May mornings saw the prentice lads of Florence tilting beneath the smiles of girls who danced at nightfall on the square of Santa Trinità. Bloody battles in the streets were frequent. The least provocation caused a man to draw his dagger. Combats a steccato chiuso were among the pastimes to which a Pope might lend his countenance. Skill in swordsmanship was therefore a necessity. For the rest, we learn from Castiglione that the perfect gentleman was bound to be an accomplished dancer, a bold rider, a skilled wrestler, a swift runner, to shoot well at the mark, to hurl the javelin and the quoit with grace, and to play at tennis and pallone. In addition he ought to affect some one athletic exercise in such perfection as to beat professors of the same on their own ground. Cesare Borgia took pride in felling an ox at a single blow, and exhibited his marksman's cunning by shooting condemned criminals in a courtyard of the Vatican.
That such men should have devoted their energies to intellectual culture at a time when English nobles could barely read or write, and when the chivalry of France regarded learning with disdain, was a proof of their rich natural endowments. Nor was the determination of the race to scholarship in any sense an accident. Throughout the length and breadth of Italy, memories of ancient greatness spurred her children on to emulation. Ghosts of Roman patriots and poets seemed hovering round their graves, and calling on posterity to give them life again. If we cannot bring back Greece and Rome, at least let us make Florence a second Athens, and restore the Muses to Ausonian vales. That was the cry. It was while gazing on the ruins of Rome that Villani felt impelled to write his chronicle. Pavia honoured Boethius like a saint. Mantua struck coins with the head of Virgil, and Naples pointed out his tomb. Padua boasted of Livy, and Como of the Plinies. 'Sulmona,' cried Boccaccio, 'mourns because she holds not Ovid's dust; and Parma is glad that Cassius rests within her walls.' Such reverence for the great men of antiquity endured throughout the Middle Ages, creating myths that swayed the fancy, and forming in the popular consciousness a presentiment of the approaching age. There is something pathetic in the survival of old Roman titles, in the freak of the legend-making imagination that gave to Orlando the style of Roman senator, in the outburst of enthusiasm for Rienzi when he called himself Tribunus Populi Romani. With the Renaissance itself this affection for the past became a passion. Pius II. amnestied the people of Arpino because they were fellow-citizens of Cicero. Alfonso of Naples received as a most precious gift from Venice a bone supposed to be the leg of Livy. All the patricians of Italy invented classical pedigrees; and even Paul II., because he was called Barbo, claimed descent from the Ahenobarbi. Such instances might be multiplied indefinitely. It is, however, more to the purpose here to notice that in Italy this adoration of the antique world was common to all classes; not students alone, but the people at large regarded the dead grandeur of the classic age as their especial heritage. To resuscitate that buried glory, and to reunite themselves with the past, was the earnest aim of the Italians as a nation. A conviction prevailed that the modern world could never be so radiant as the old. This found its expression in the saying that Rome's chief ornaments were her ruins; in the belief that Julia's corpse, discovered in the Appian Way, surpassed all living maidens; in Matarazzo's observation that Astorre Baglioni's body was worthy of an ancient Roman. In their admiration for antiquity, scholars were blind to the specific glories of the modern genius. Lionardo Bruni, for example, exclaimed that 'the ancient Greeks by far excelled us Italians in humanity and gentleness of heart.' Yet what Greek poem can be compared for tenderness with Dante's 'Vita Nuova,' with the 'Canzoniere' of Petrarch, or with the tale of Griselda in Boccaccio? Gentilezza di cuore was the most characteristic product of chivalry, and the fourth Æneid is the only classic masterpiece of pure romantic pathos. This humility of discipleship was not, however, strong enough to check emulation. On the contrary, the yearning towards antiquity acted like a potent stimulus on personal endeavour, generating an acute desire for fame, a burning aspiration to be numbered with the mighty men of old. When Virgil introduced Dante to the company of Homer and his peers, the rank of sesto tra cotanto senno rewarded him for all his labour in the rhyme that made him thin through half a lifetime. Petrarch, who exceeded Dante in the thirst for literary honour, turned from the men of his generation to converse in long epistles with the buried saints of Latin culture. For men of less ambition it was enough to feel that they could raise their souls through study to communion with the stately spirits of antiquity, passing like Machiavelli from trivial affairs into their closet, where they donned their reading robes and shook hands across the centuries with Cicero or Livy. It was the universal object of the humanists to gain a consciousness of self distinguished from the vulgar herd, and to achieve this by joining the great company of bards and sages, whose glory could not perish.
Whoever felt within himself the stirring of the spirit under any form, sought earnestly for fame; and in this way a new social atmosphere, unknown to the nations of the Middle Ages, was formed in Italy. A large and liberal acceptance, recognising ability of all kinds, irrespective of rank or piety or martial prowess, displaced the narrower judgments of the Church and feudalism. Giotto, the peasant's son, ranked higher in esteem than Cimabue, the Florentine citizen, because his work of art was worthier. Petrarch had his place in no official capacity, but as an honoured equal, at the marriage feasts of princes. Poliziano corresponded with kings, promising immortality as a more than regal favour. Pomponius Lætus could afford to repel the advances of the Sanseverini, feeling that erudition ranked him higher than his princely kinsmen. It was not wealth or policy alone that raised the Medici among the Despots so far above the Baglioni of Perugia or the Petrucci of Siena. They owed this distinction rather to their comprehension of the craving of their age for culture. Thus though birth commanded respect for its own sake, a new standard of eminence had been established, and personal merit was the passport which carried the meanest into the most illustrious company. Men of all conditions and all qualifications met upon the common ground of intellectual intercourse. The subjects they discussed may be gathered from the introductions to Firenzuola's novels, from Bembo's 'Asolani' and Castiglione's 'Cortegiano,' from Guicciardini's 'Dialogue on Florence,' or from the 'Camaldolese Discourses' of Landino. Society of this kind existed nowhere else in Europe. To Italy belongs the proud priority of having invented the art of polite conversation, and anticipated the French salon after an original and urbane fashion of her own.
Under these conditions a genuine cultus of intellect sprang up in Italy. Princes and people shared a common impulse to worship the mental superiority of men who had no claim to notice but their genius. It was in the spirit of this hero-worship that the terrible Gismondo Pandolfo Malatesta transferred to Rimini the bones of Pletho, and wrote his impassioned epitaph upon the sarcophagus outside Alberti's church. The biographies of the humanists abound in stories of singular honours paid to men of parts, not only by princes who rejoiced in their society, but also by cities receiving them with public acclamation. And, as it often happens that a parody reveals the nature of the art it travesties, such light is thrown upon our subject by the vile Pietro Aretino, who, because he was a man of talent and unscrupulous in its employment, held kings and potentates beneath his satyr's hoof. It is not, however, needful to go thus far afield for instances. Some lines of our own poet Webster exactly describe the Catholicity of the Renaissance, which first obtained in Italy for men of marked abilities, and afterwards to some extent prevailed at large in Europe:—
| Virtue is ever sowing of her seeds: In the trenches for the soldier; in the wakeful study For the scholar; in the furrows of the sea For men of our profession: of all which Arise and spring up honour. |
The virtue here described bears the Italian sense of virtù, the Latin virtus, the Greek ἀρετή, that which makes a man. It might display itself in a thousand ways; but all alike brought honour, and honour every man was bound to seek. The standard whereby the Italians judged this virtue was æsthetical rather than moral. They were too dazzled by brilliant achievement to test it in the crucible of ethics. This is the true key to Machiavelli's critique of Castruccio Castracane, Gianpaolo Baglioni, Cesare Borgia, and Piero Soderini. In common with his race, he was fascinated by character, and attached undue importance to the force that made men seek success even through crime.
The thirst for glory and the worship of ability stimulated the Italians, earlier than any other nation, to commemorate what seemed to them noteworthy in their own lives and in those of their contemporaries.