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The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry

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"And the king caused the two chests of stone to be brought in the
which the bodies of Amis and Amile lay; and Amile was carried
to the church of Saint Peter, and Amis to the church of Saint
Oseige; and the other corpses were buried, some in one place and
some in the other. But lo! next morning, the body of Amile in his
coffin was found lying in the church of Saint Oseige, beside the
coffin of Amis his comrade. Behold then this wondrous amity,
which by death could not be dissevered!

"This miracle God did, who gave to His disciples power to
remove mountains. And by reason of this miracle the king and
queen remained in that place for a space of thirty days, and
performed the offices of the dead who were slain, and honoured
the said churches with great [29] gifts. And the bishop ordained
many clerks to serve in the church of Saint Oseige, and
commanded them that they should guard duly, with great
devotion, the bodies of the two companions, Amis and Amile."

1872.

NOTES

16. *Recently, Aucassin and Nicolette has been edited and
translated into English, with much graceful scholarship, by Mr. F.
W. Bourdillon. Still more recently we have had a translation--a
poet's translation--from the ingenious and versatile pen of Mr.
Andrew Lang. The reader should consult also the chapter on
"The Out-door Poetry," in Vernon Lee's most interesting
Euphorion; being Studies of the Antique and Mediaeval in the
Renaissance, a work abounding in knowledge and insight on the
subjects of which it treats.

26. *Parage, peerage:--which came to signify all that ambitious
youth affected most on the outside of life, in that old world of the
Troubadours, with whom this term is of frequent recurrence.
Return.


PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA

[30] NO account of the Renaissance can be complete without
some notice of the attempt made by certain Italian scholars of the
fifteenth century to reconcile Christianity with the religion of
ancient Greece. To reconcile forms of sentiment which at first
sight seem incompatible, to adjust the various products of the
human mind to one another in one many-sided type of intellectual
culture, to give humanity, for heart and imagination to feed upon,
as much as it could possibly receive, belonged to the generous
instincts of that age. An earlier and simpler generation had seen
in the gods of Greece so many malignant spirits, the defeated but
still living centres of the religion of darkness, struggling, not
always in vain, against the kingdom of light. Little by little, as
the natural charm of pagan story reasserted itself over minds
emerging out of barbarism, the religious significance which had
once belonged to it was lost sight of, and it came to be regarded
as the subject of a purely artistic or poetical treatment. But it was
inevitable that from time to time minds should [31] arise, deeply
enough impressed by its beauty and power to ask themselves
whether the religion of Greece was indeed a rival of the religion
of Christ; for the older gods had rehabilitated themselves, and
men's allegiance was divided. And the fifteenth century was an
impassioned age, so ardent and serious in its pursuit of art that it
consecrated everything with which art had to do as a religious
object. The restored Greek literature had made it familiar, at
least in Plato, with a style of expression concerning the earlier
gods, which had about it something of the warmth and unction of
a Christian hymn. It was too familiar with such language to
regard mythology as a mere story; and it was too serious to play
with a religion.

"Let me briefly remind the reader"--says Heine, in the Gods in
Exile, an essay full of that strange blending of sentiment which is
characteristic of the traditions of the middle age concerning the
pagan religions--"how the gods of the older world, at the time of
the definite triumph of Christianity, that is, in the third century,
fell into painful embarrassments, which greatly resembled certain
tragical situations of their earlier life. They now found
themselves beset by the same troublesome necessities to which
they had once before been exposed during the primitive ages, in
that revolutionary epoch when the Titans broke out of the custody
of Orcus, and, piling Pelion on Ossa, scaled [32] Olympus.
Unfortunate gods! They had then to take flight ignominiously,
and hide themselves among us here on earth, under all sorts of
disguises. The larger number betook themselves to Egypt, where
for greater security they assumed the forms of animals, as is
generally known. Just in the same way, they had to take flight
again, and seek entertainment in remote hiding-places, when
those iconoclastic zealots, the black brood of monks, broke down
all the temples, and pursued the gods with fire and curses. Many
of these unfortunate emigrants, now entirely deprived of shelter
and ambrosia, must needs take to vulgar handicrafts, as a means
of earning their bread. Under these circumstances, many whose
sacred groves had been confiscated, let themselves out for hire as
wood-cutters in Germany, and were forced to drink beer instead
of nectar. Apollo seems to have been content to take service
under graziers, and as he had once kept the cows of Admetus, so
he lived now as a shepherd in Lower Austria. Here, however,
having become suspected on account of his beautiful singing, he
was recognised by a learned monk as one of the old pagan gods,
and handed over to the spiritual tribunal. On the rack he
confessed that he was the god Apollo; and before his execution
he begged that he might be suffered to play once more upon the
lyre, and to sing a song. And he played so touchingly, and sang
with such magic, and was withal so [33] beautiful in form and
feature, that all the women wept, and many of them were so
deeply impressed that they shortly afterwards fell sick. Some
time afterwards the people wished to drag him from the grave
again, that a stake might be driven through his body, in the belief
that he had been a vampire, and that the sick women would by
this means recover. But they found the grave empty."

The Renaissance of the fifteenth century was, in many things,
great rather by what it designed than by what it achieved. Much
which it aspired to do, and did but imperfectly or mistakenly, was
accomplished in what is called the éclaircissement of the
eighteenth century, or in our own generation; and what really
belongs to the revival of the fifteenth century is but the leading
instinct, the curiosity, the initiatory idea. It is so with this very
question of the reconciliation of the religion of antiquity with the
religion of Christ. A modern scholar occupied by this problem
might observe that all religions may be regarded as natural
products, that, at least in their origin, their growth, and decay,
they have common laws, and are not to be isolated from the other
movements of the human mind in the periods in which they
respectively prevailed; that they arise spontaneously out of the
human mind, as expressions of the varying phases of its
sentiment concerning the unseen world; that every intellectual
product must be judged from the point of [34] view of the age
and the people in which it was produced. He might go on to
observe that each has contributed something to the development
of the religious sense, and ranging them as so many stages in the
gradual education of the human mind, justify the existence of
each. The basis of the reconciliation of the religions of the world
would thus be the inexhaustible activity and creativeness of the
human mind itself, in which all religions alike have their root,
and in which all alike are reconciled; just as the fancies of
childhood and the thoughts of old age meet and are laid to rest, in
the experience of the individual.

Far different was the method followed by the scholars of the
fifteenth century. They lacked the very rudiments of the historic
sense, which, by an imaginative act, throws itself back into a
world unlike one's own, and estimates every intellectual creation
in its connexion with the age from which it proceeded. They had
no idea of development, of the differences of ages, of the process
by which our race has been "educated." In their attempts to
reconcile the religions of the world, they were thus thrown back
upon the quicksand of allegorical interpretation. The religions of
the world were to be reconciled, not as successive stages in a
regular development of the religious sense, but as subsisting side
by side, and substantially in agreement with one another. And
here the first necessity was to misrepresent the language, the
conceptions, the sentiments, it was [35] proposed to compare and
reconcile. Plato and Homer must be made to speak agreeably to
Moses. Set side by side, the mere surfaces could never unite in
any harmony of design. Therefore one must go below the
surface, and bring up the supposed secondary, or still more
remote meaning,--that diviner signification held in reserve, in
recessu divinius aliquid, latent in some stray touch of Homer, or
figure of speech in the books of Moses.

And yet as a curiosity of the human mind, a "madhouse-cell," if
you will, into which we may peep for a moment, and see it at
work weaving strange fancies, the allegorical interpretation of the
fifteenth century has its interest. With its strange web of
imagery, its quaint conceits, its unexpected combinations and
subtle moralising, it is an element in the local colour of a great
age. It illustrates also the faith of that age in all oracles, its desire
to hear all voices, its generous belief that nothing which had ever
interested the human mind could wholly lose its vitality. It is the
counterpart, though certainly the feebler counterpart, of that
practical truce and reconciliation of the gods of Greece with the
Christian religion, which is seen in the art of the time. And it is
for his share in this work, and because his own story is a sort of
analogue or visible equivalent to the expression of this purpose in
his writings, that something of a general interest still belongs to
the name of Pico della Mirandola, [36] whose life, written by his
nephew Francis, seemed worthy, for some touch of sweetness in
it, to be translated out of the original Latin by Sir Thomas More,
that great lover of Italian culture, among whose works the life of
Pico, Earl of Mirandola, and a great lord of Italy, as he calls
him, may still be read, in its quaint, antiquated English.

Marsilio Ficino has told us how Pico came to Florence. It was
the very day--some day probably in the year 1482--on which
Ficino had finished his famous translation of Plato into Latin, the
work to which he had been dedicated from childhood by Cosmo
de' Medici, in furtherance of his desire to resuscitate the
knowledge of Plato among his fellow-citizens. Florence indeed,
as M. Renan has pointed out, had always had an affinity for the
mystic and dreamy philosophy of Plato, while the colder and
more practical philosophy of Aristotle had flourished in Padua,
and other cities of the north; and the Florentines, though they
knew perhaps very little about him, had had the name of the
great idealist often on their lips. To increase this knowledge,
Cosmo had founded the Platonic academy, with periodical
discussions at the Villa Careggi. The fall of Constantinople in
1453, and the council in 1438 for the reconciliation of the Greek
and Latin Churches, had brought to Florence many a needy
Greek scholar. And now the work was completed, the door of the
mystical temple lay open to all who could construe Latin, and the
[37] scholar rested from his labour; when there was introduced
into his study, where a lamp burned continually before the bust of
Plato, as other men burned lamps before their favourite saints, a
young man fresh from a journey, "of feature and shape seemly
and beauteous, of stature goodly and high, of flesh tender and
soft, his visage lovely and fair, his colour white, intermingled
with comely reds, his eyes grey, and quick of look, his teeth
white and even, his hair yellow and abundant," and trimmed with
more than the usual artifice of the time.

It is thus that Sir Thomas More translates the words of the
biographer of Pico, who, even in outward form and appearance,
seems an image of that inward harmony and completeness, of
which he is so perfect an example. The word mystic has been
usually derived from a Greek word which signifies to shut, as if
one shut one's lips brooding on what cannot be uttered; but the
Platonists themselves derive it rather from the act of shutting the
eyes, that one may see the more, inwardly. Perhaps the eyes of
the mystic Ficino, now long past the midway of life, had come to
be thus half-closed; but when a young man, not unlike the
archangel Raphael, as the Florentines of that age depicted him in
his wonderful walk with Tobit, or Mercury, as he might have
appeared in a painting by Sandro Botticelli or Piero di Cosimo,
entered his chamber, he seems to have thought there was
something not wholly earthly about [38] him; at least, he ever
afterwards believed that it was not without the co-operation of the
stars that the stranger had arrived on that day. For it happened
that they fell into a conversation, deeper and more intimate than
men usually fall into at first sight. During this conversation
Ficino formed the design of devoting his remaining years to the
translation of Plotinus, that new Plato, in whom the mystical
element in the Platonic philosophy had been worked out to the
utmost limit of vision and ecstasy; and it is in dedicating this
translation to Lorenzo de' Medici that Ficino has recorded these
incidents.

It was after many wanderings, wanderings of the intellect as well
as physical journeys, that Pico came to rest at Florence. Born in
1463, he was then about twenty years old. He was called
Giovanni at baptism, Pico, like all his ancestors, from Picus,
nephew of the Emperor Constantine, from whom they claimed to
be descended, and Mirandola from the place of his birth, a little
town afterwards part of the duchy of Modena, of which small
territory his family had long been the feudal lords. Pico was the
youngest of the family, and his mother, delighting in his
wonderful memory, sent him at the age of fourteen to the famous
school of law at Bologna. From the first, indeed, she seems to
have had some presentiment of his future fame, for, with a faith
in omens characteristic of her time, she believed [39] that a
strange circumstance had happened at the time of Pico's birth--
the appearance of a circular flame which suddenly vanished
away, on the wall of the chamber where she lay. He remained
two years at Bologna; and then, with an inexhaustible, unrivalled
thirst for knowledge, the strange, confused, uncritical learning of
that age, passed through the principal schools of Italy and France,
penetrating, as he thought, into the secrets of all ancient
philosophies, and many Eastern languages. And with this flood
of erudition came the generous hope, so often disabused, of
reconciling the philosophers with one another, and all alike with
the Church. At last he came to Rome. There, like some knight-
errant of philosophy, he offered to defend nine hundred bold
paradoxes, drawn from the most opposite sources, against all
comers. But the pontifical court was led to suspect the orthodoxy
of some of these propositions, and even the reading of the book
which contained them was forbidden by the Pope. It was not
until 1493 that Pico was finally absolved, by a brief of Alexander
the Sixth. Ten years before that date he had arrived at Florence;
an early instance of those who, after following the vain hope of
an impossible reconciliation from system to system, have at last
fallen back unsatisfied on the simplicities of their childhood's
belief.

The oration which Pico composed for the opening of this
philosophical tournament still [40] remains; its subject is the
dignity of human nature, the greatness of man. In common with
nearly all medieval speculation, much of Pico's writing has this
for its drift; and in common also with it, Pico's theory of that
dignity is founded on a misconception of the place in nature both
of the earth and of man. For Pico the earth is the centre of the
universe: and around it, as a fixed and motionless point, the sun
and moon and stars revolve, like diligent servants or ministers.
And in the midst of all is placed man, nodus et vinculum mundi,
the bond or copula of the world, and the "interpreter of nature":
that famous expression of Bacon's really belongs to Pico. Tritum
est in scholis, he says, esse hominem minorem mundum, in quo
mixtum ex elementis corpus et spiritus coelestis et plantarum
anima vegetalis et brutorum sensus et ratio et angelica mens et
Dei similitudo conspicitur:--"It is a commonplace of the schools
that man is a little world, in which we may discern a body
mingled of earthy elements, and ethereal breath, and the
vegetable life of plants, and the senses of the lower animals, and
reason, and the intelligence of angels, and a likeness to God."

A commonplace of the schools! But perhaps it had some new
significance and authority, when men heard one like Pico
reiterate it; and, false as its basis was, the theory had its use. For
this high dignity of man, thus bringing the dust under his feet into
sensible communion with the [41] thoughts and affections of the
angels, was supposed to belong to him, not as renewed by a
religious system, but by his own natural right. The proclamation
of it was a counterpoise to the increasing tendency of medieval
religion to depreciate man's nature, to sacrifice this or that
element in it, to make it ashamed of itself, to keep the degrading
or painful accidents of it always in view. It helped man onward
to that reassertion of himself, that rehabilitation of human nature,
the body, the senses, the heart, the intelligence, which the
Renaissance fulfils. And yet to read a page of one of Pico's
forgotten books is like a glance into one of those ancient
sepulchres, upon which the wanderer in classical lands has
sometimes stumbled, with the old disused ornaments and
furniture of a world wholly unlike ours still fresh in them. That
whole conception of nature is so different from our own. For
Pico the world is a limited place, bounded by actual crystal walls,
and a material firmament; it is like a painted toy, like that map or
system of the world, held, as a great target or shield, in the hands
of the creative Logos, by whom the Father made all things, in one
of the earlier frescoes of the Campo Santo at Pisa. How different
from this childish dream is our own conception of nature, with its
unlimited space, its innumerable suns, and the earth but a mote in
the beam; how different the strange new awe, or superstition,
with which it fills our minds! "The silence of those infinite
spaces," [42] says Pascal, contemplating a starlight night, the
silence of those infinite spaces terrifies me": Le silence éternel de
ces espaces infinis m'effraie.

He was already almost wearied out when he came to Florence.
He had loved much and been beloved by women, "wandering
over the crooked hills of delicious pleasure"; but their reign over
him was over, and long before Savonarola's famous "bonfire of
vanities," he had destroyed those love-songs in the vulgar tongue,
which would have been so great a relief to us, after the scholastic
prolixity of his Latin writings. It was in another spirit that he
composed a Platonic commentary, the only work of his in Italian
which has come down to us, on the "Song of Divine Love"--
secondo la mente ed opinione dei Platonici--"according to the
mind and opinion of the Platonists," by his friend Hieronymo
Beniveni, in which, with an ambitious array of every sort of
learning, and a profusion of imagery borrowed indifferently from
the astrologers, the Cabala, and Homer, and Scripture, and
Dionysius the Areopagite, he attempts to define the stages by
which the soul passes from the earthly to the unseen beauty. A
change indeed had passed over him, as if the chilling touch of the
abstract and disembodied beauty Platonists profess to long for
were already upon him. Some sense of this, perhaps, coupled
with that over-brightness which in the popular imagination
always betokens an early [43] death, made Camilla Rucellai, one
of those prophetic women whom the preaching of Savonarola had
raised up in Florence, declare, seeing him for the first time, that
he would depart in the time of lilies--prematurely, that is, like the
field-flowers which are withered by the scorching sun almost as
soon as they are sprung up. He now wrote down those thoughts
on the religious life which Sir Thomas More turned into English,
and which another English translator thought worthy to be added
to the books of the Imitation. "It is not hard to know God,
provided one will not force oneself to define Him":--has been
thought a great saying of Joubert's. "Love God," Pico writes to
Angelo Politian, "we rather may, than either know Him, or by
speech utter Him. And yet had men liefer by knowledge never
find that which they seek, than by love possess that thing, which
also without love were in vain found."

Yet he who had this fine touch for spiritual things did not--and in
this is the enduring interest of his story--even after his
conversion, forget the old gods. He is one of the last who
seriously and sincerely entertained the claim on men's faith of the
pagan religions; he is anxious to ascertain the true significance of
the obscurest legend, the lightest tradition concerning them.
With many thoughts and many influences which led him in that
direction, [44] he did not become a monk; only he became
gentle and patient in disputation; retaining "somewhat of the old
plenty, in dainty viand and silver vessel," he gave over the
greater part of his property to his friend, the mystical poet
Beniveni, to be spent by him in works of charity, chiefly in the
sweet charity of providing marriage-dowries for the peasant girls
of Florence. His end came in 1494, when, amid the prayers and
sacraments of Savonarola, he died of fever, on the very day on
which Charles the Eighth entered Florence, the seventeenth of
November, yet in the time of lilies--the lilies of the shield of
France, as the people now said, remembering Camilla's
prophecy. He was buried in the conventual church of Saint
Mark, in the hood and white frock of the Dominican order.

It is because the life of Pico, thus lying down to rest in the
Dominican habit, yet amid thoughts of the older gods, himself
like one of those comely divinities, reconciled indeed to the new
religion, but still with a tenderness for the earlier life, and
desirous literally to "bind the ages each to each by natural piety"-
-it is because this life is so perfect a parallel to the attempt made
in his writings to reconcile Christianity with the ideas of
paganism, that Pico, in spite of the scholastic character of those
writings, is really interesting. Thus, in the Heptaplus, or
Discourse on the Seven Days of the Creation, he endeavours to
reconcile the [45] accounts which pagan philosophy had given of
the origin of the world with the account given in the books of
Moses--the Timaeus of Plato with the book of Genesis. The
Heptaplus is dedicated to Lorenzo the Magnificent, whose
interest, the preface tells us, in the secret wisdom of Moses is
well known. If Moses seems in his writings simple and even
popular, rather than either a philosopher or a theologian, that is
because it was an institution with the ancient philosophers, either
not to speak of divine things at all, or to speak of them
dissemblingly: hence their doctrines were called mysteries.
Taught by them, Pythagoras became so great a "master of
silence," and wrote almost nothing, thus hiding the words of God
in his heart, and speaking wisdom only among the perfect. In
explaining the harmony between Plato and Moses, Pico lays hold
on every sort of figure and analogy, on the double meanings of
words, the symbols of the Jewish ritual, the secondary meanings
of obscure stories in the later Greek mythologists. Everywhere
there is an unbroken system of correspondences. Every object in
the terrestrial world is an analogue, a symbol or counterpart, of
some higher reality in the starry heavens, and this again of some
law of the angelic life in the world beyond the stars. There is the
element of fire in the material world; the sun is the fire of heaven;
and in the super-celestial world there is the fire of [46] the
seraphic intelligence. "But behold how they differ! The
elementary fire burns, the heavenly fire vivifies, the super-
celestial fire loves." In this way, every natural object, every
combination of natural forces, every accident in the lives of men,
is filled with higher meanings. Omens, prophecies, supernatural
coincidences, accompany Pico himself all through life. There are
oracles in every tree and mountain-top, and a significance in
every accidental combination of the events of life.

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