work as that of Dürer, Vischer, Cranach, Schongauer, Holbein, consummate as it was in technical excellence, did not assume Italian forms of loveliness, did not display the paganism of the Latin races. The modification of Gothic architecture by pseudo-Roman elements of style was incomplete. What Germany afterwards 'took of the Palladian manner was destined to reach it on a circuitous route from France. In like manner the new learning failed to penetrate all classes of society with the rapidity of its expansion in Italy, nor was the new ideal of life and customs so easily substituted for the medieval. The German aristocracy, as Aeneas Sylvius had noticed, remained for the most part barbarous, addicted to gross pleasures, contemptuous of culture. The German dialects were too rough to receive that artistic elaboration under antique influences which had been so facile in Tuscany. The doctors of the universities were too wedded to their antiquated manuals and methods, too satisfied with dullness, too proud of titles and diplomas, too anxious to preserve ecclesiastical discipline and to repress mental activity, for a genial spirit of humanism to spread freely. Not in Cologne or Tübingen but in Padua and Florence did the German pioneers of the Renaissance acquire their sense of liberal studies. And when they returned home they found themselves encumbered with stupidities, jealousies and rancours. Moreover, the temper of these more enlightened men was itself opposed to Italian indifference and immorality; it was pugnacious and polemical, eager to beat down the arrogance of monks and theologians rather than to pursue an ideal of aesthetical self-culture. To a student of the origins of German humanism it is clear that something very different from the Renaissance of Lorenzo de’ Medici and Leo X. was in preparation from the first upon Teutonic soil. Far less plastic and form-loving than the Italian, the German intelligence was more penetrative, earnest, disputative, occupied with substantial problems. Starting with theological criticism, proceed in to the stage of solid studies in the three learned languages, German humanism occupied the attention of a widely scattered sect of erudite scholars; but it did not arouse the interest of the whole nation until it was forced into a violently militant attitude by Pfefferkorn’s attack on Reuchlin, That attempt to extinguish honest thought prepared the Reformation; and humanism after 1518 was absorbed in politico-religious warfare.
The point of contact between humanism and the Reformation in Germany has to be insisted on; for it is just here that the relation of the Reformation to the Renaissance in general makes itself apparent. As the Renaissance had its precursory movements in the medieval period, so the German Reformation was preceded by Wickliffe and Huss, by theRelation of humanism to the German Reformation. discontents of the Great Schism and by the councils of Constance and Basel. These two main streams of modern progress had been proceeding upon different tracks to diverse issues, but they touched in the studies stimulated by the Revival, and they had a common origin in the struggle of the spirit after self-emancipation. Johann Reuchlin, who entered the lecture-room of Argyropoulos at Rome in 1482, Erasmus of Rotterdam, who once dwelt at Venice as the house guest of the Aldi, applied their critical knowledge of Hebrew and of Greek to the elucidation and diffusion of 'the Bible. To the Germans, as to all nations of that epoch, the Bible came as a new book, because they now read it for the first time with eyes opened by humanism. The touch of the new spirit which had evolved literature, art and culture in Italy sufficed in Germany to recreate Christianity. This new spirit in Italy emancipated human intelligence by the classics; in Germany it emancipated the human conscience by the Bible. The indignation excited by Leo X.’s sale of indulgences, the moral rage stirred in Northern hearts by papal abominations in Rome, were external causes which precipitated the schism between Teutonic and Latin Christianity. The Reformation, inspired by the same energy of resuscitated life as the Renaissance, assisted by the same engines of the printing-press and paper, using the same apparatus of scholarship, criticism, literary skill, being in truth another manifestation of the same world-movement under a diverse form, now posed itself as an irreconcilable antagonist to Renaissance Italy. It would be difficult to draw any comparison between German and Italian humanists to the disparagement of the former. Reuchlin was no less learned than Pico; Melanchthon no less humane than Ficino; Erasmus no less witty, and far more trenchant, than Petrarch; Ulrich von Hutten no less humorous than Folengo; Paracelsus no less fantastically learned than Cardano. But the cause in which German intellect and will were enlisted was so different that it is difficult not to make a formal separation between that movement which evolved culture in Italy and that which restored religion in Germany, establishing the freedom of intelligence in the one sphere and the freedom of the conscience in the other. The truth is that the Reformation was the Teutonic Renaissance. It was the emancipation of the reason on a line neglected by the Italians, more important indeed in its political consequences, more weighty in its bearing on rationalistic developments than the Italian Renaissance, but none the less an outcome of the same ground-influences. We have already in this century reached a point at which, in spite of stubborn Protestant dogmatism and bitter Catholic reaction, we can perceive how the ultimate affranchisement of man will be the work of both.
The German Reformation was incapable of propagating itself in Italy, chiefly for the reason that the intellectual forces which it represented and employed had already found specific outlet in that country. It was not in the nature of the Italians, sceptical and paganized by the Revival, to be keenly interested about questions which seemed to revive The Catholic revival in Italy. the scholastic disputes of the middle ages. It was not in their external conditions, suffering as they were from invasions, enthralled by despots, to use the Reformation as a lever for political revolution. Yet when a tumultuary army of so-called Lutherans sacked Rome in 1527 no sober thinker doubted that a new agent had appeared in Europe which would alter the destinies of the peninsula. The Renaissance was virtually closed, so far as it concerned Italy, when Clement VII. and Charles V. struck their compact at Bologna in 1530. This compact proclaimed the principle of monarchical abso utism, supported by papal authority, itself monarchic ally absolute, which influenced Europe until the outbreak of the Revolution. A reaction immediately set in both against the Renaissance and the Reformation. The council of Trent, opened in 1545 and closed in 1563, decreed a formal purgation of the church, affirmed the fundamental doctrines of Catholicism, strengthened the papal supremacy, and inaugurated that movement of resistance which is known as the Counter-Reformation. The complex onward effort of the modern nations, expressing itself in Italy as Renaissance, in Germany as Reformation, had aroused the forces of conservatism. The four main instruments of the reaction were the papacy, which had done so much by its sympathy with the revival to promote the humanistic spirit it now dreaded, the strength of Spain, and two Spanish institutions planted on Roman soil-the Inquisition and the Order of Jesus. The principle contended for and established by this reaction was absolutism as opposed to freedom-monarchical absolutism, papal absolutism, the suppression of energies liberated by the Renaissance and the Reformation. The partial triumph of this principle was secure, inasmuch as the majority of established powers in church and state felt threatened by the revolutionary opinions afloat in Europe. Renaissance and Reformation were, moreover, already at strife. Both, too, were spiritual and elastic tendencies toward progress, ideals rather than solid organisms.
The part played by Spain in this period of history was determined in large measure by external circumstance. The Spaniards became one nation by the conquest of Granada and the union of the crowns of Castile and Aragon. The war of national aggrandizement, being in its nature a crusade, inflamed the religious enthusiasm of the people. It Spain in the Renaissance period—arts and letters. was followed by the expulsion of Jews and Moors, and by the establishment of the Inquisition on a solid basis, with powers formidable to the freedom of all Spaniards from the peasant to the throne. These facts explain the decisive action of the Spanish nation on the side of Catholic conservatism, and help us to understand why their brilliant achievements in the field of culture during the 16th century were speedily followed by stagnation. It will be well, in dealing with the Renaissance in Spain, to touch first upon the arts and literature, and then to consider those qualities of character in action whereby the nation most distinguished itself from the rest of Europe, Architecture in Spain, emerging from the Gothic stage, developed an Early Renaissance style of bewildering richness by adopting elements of Arabic and Moorish decoration. Sculpture exhibited realistic vigour of indubitable native stamp; and the minor plastic crafts were cultivated with success on lines of striking originality. Painting grew from a homely stock, until the work of Velazquez showed that Spanish masters in this branch were fully abreast of their Italian compeers and contemporaries. To dwell here upon the Italianizing versifiers, moralists and pastoral romancers who attempted to refine the vernacular of the Romancero would be superfluous. They are mainly noticeable as proving that certain coteries in Spain were willing to accept the Italian Renaissance. But the real force of the people was not in this courtly literary style. It expressed itself at last in the monumental work of Don Quixote, which places Cervantes beside Rabelais, Ariosto and Shakespeare as one of the four supreme exponents of the Renaissance. The affectations of decadent chivalry disappeared before its humour; the lineaments of a noble nation, animated by the youth of modern Europe emerging from the middle ages, were portrayed in its enduring pictures of human experience. The Spanish drama, meanwhile, untrammelled by those false canons of, pseudo-classic taste which fettered the theatre in Italy and afterwards in France, rose to an eminence in the hands of Lope de Vega and Calderon which only the English, and the English only in the masterpieces of three or four playwrights, can rival. Camoens, in the Lusiad, if we may here group Portugal with Spain, was the first modern poet to compose an epic on a purely modern theme, vying with Virgil, but not bending to pedantic rules, and breathing the spirit of the age of heroic adventures and almost fabulous discoveries into his melodious numbers. What has chiefly to be noted regarding the achievements of the Spanish race in arts and letters at this epoch is their potent national originality. The revival of learning produced in Spain no slavish imitation as it did in Italy, no formal humanism, and, it may be added, very little of fruitful scholarship. The Renaissance here, as in England.
