University of Minnesota Press Chapter Title The Cult.docx

University of Minnesota Press
Chapter Title: The Cultural Renaissance
Chapter Author(s): GLEB STRUVE
Book Title: Russia Under the Last Tsar
Book Editor(s): THEOFANIS GEORGE STAVROU
Published by: University of Minnesota Press. (1969)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.cttttdh0.12
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GLEB S T R U V E
The Cultural Renaissance
IN S P E A K I N G of Russian literature of the first decade and
a half of the present century, it has become usual to refer to the
Silver Age. I do not know who was the first to use this
appellation,
on whom the blame for launching it falls, but it came to be used
even by some leading representatives of that very literature —
for
example, by the late Sergei Makovskii, the founder and editor
of
that important and excellent periodical, Apollon,1 and even by
the
last great poet of that age, Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966).
I regard this usage as very unfortunate and never tire of
pointing
this out when I deal with this period of Russian literature in my
lectures and writing. I greatly prefer the designation of the late
Prince Dmitry Svyatopolk-Mirsky (D. S. Mirsky), who also be-
longed himself to this period — namely, "the Second Golden
Age
of Russian Poetry."2 This description certainly fits the poetry of
1 One of Makovskii's books about this period is even entitled
Na Parnase
Serebrianogo Veka (On the Parnassus of the Silver Age),
Miinchen, 1962.

2 Mirsky wrote: "Apart from everything else, in spite of their
limitations
and mannerism, the Symbolists combined great talent with
conscious crafts-
manship, and this makes their place so big in Russian literary
history. One
may dislike their style, but one cannot fail to recognize that
they revived
Russian poetry from a hopeless state of prostration and that
their age
was a second golden age of verse inferior only to the first
golden age of
Russian poetry —the age of Pushkin." (Contemporary Russian
Literature,
1881-1925, ed. Francis J. Whitfield (London: Routledge, 1926),
p. 183; or,
A History of Russian Literature, ed. Francis J. Whitfield (rev.
ed.; New
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G L E B S T R U V E
this period: between the first Golden Age, the age of Pushkin,
for
which this term is generally accepted, and the beginning of the
new
century, there were some remarkable individual poets (Tiutchev,
Fet, Nekrasov), but there was no such all-round florescence of
poetry, no such poetic epanouissement, as was to be witnessed
in

the first decade of this century.3 One modern Russian literary
scholar and critic, Boris Eichenbaum, used the poetic revival at
the beginning of the twentieth century in support and
illustration
of his theory of cyclical development of Russian literature: the
Golden Age of Russian poetry gave way to the great age of the
Russian novel, and the latter, after a short interval, was
followed by
a period during which poetry once more came to the fore. The
cycle repeated itself after approximately a hundred years.
It is true that at the beginning of this new age in Russian litera-
ture the terms decadence and decadentism (dekadentstvo) were
frequently applied to the new trends in literature and arts by
their
detractors, and sometimes accepted by their practitioners; that
they
are still in common use among Soviet literary scholars and
critics;
and that some independent Western scholars of modern Russian
literature also cling to them when they wish to draw a
distinction
(a rather arbitrary one) between those whom they designate as
"Decadents" (dekadenty) and those whom they describe as
"Sym-
bolists." But although it is true that there were, in the literature
of
those days, certain elements and aspects that could be character-
ized as "decadent," it is quite wrong to use that term as a
general
description of the period. And though "the Second Golden Age"
can be quite legitimately applied to the poetry of this period, for
an overall description of it I should prefer such a term as
Renais-
sance. It was indeed a Russian cultural renaissance,
encompassing

all the areas of cultural and spiritual life — arts, letters,
philosophy,
York: Knopf, 1959), p. 432. A newly revised edition of A
History of Rus-
sian Literature was published in 1968 (London: Routledge).)
8 It is also significant that of the three just-named great poets,
who came
in between, the first two were neglected and largely
unrecognized by their
contemporaries, and had to be "resurrected" later by the
Modernists or by
their immediate precursors, such as Vladimir Soloviev, and
Nekrasov's fame
and popularity rested during his lifetime not on what was best
and genuine
in his poetry but on its sociopolitical message.
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G L E B S T R U V E
religious, social, and political thought; a period of great
richness,
variety, and vitality.4
The beginnings of Russian Modernism in arts and letters are to
be sought in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Both
Rus-

sian and foreign influences were at work in shaping it and deter-
mining its course.
As early as 1890, Konstantin Leontiev (1831-1891), a remark-
able Russian thinker, who has more than once been described as
a Russian Nietzsche and whom some regard — with much less
justi-
fication, I think — as a precursor of Fascism, wrote a
controversial
but stimulating essay on Tolstoi and his novels.5 In this essay
he
announced the demise of the dominant "realist" school in
Russian
literature. He saw that school as something "quite intolerable in
some respects." One of its great weaknesses appeared to him to
be its harping on minute, "superfluous" details, whether they be
physical or psychological. He referred to them as "flyspecks"
and
said that by way of natural reaction one could prefer almost
any-
thing, so long as it was different, to this prevalent brand of
Russian
imaginative literature. He named such disparate works as
Byron's
Childe Harold and Zhukovskii's "Undine," the Lives of Saints
and
Voltaire's philosophical contes, Tiutchev's metaphysical poetry
and Barbier's fiery revolutionary iambs, Victor Hugo and
Goethe,
4 The term "Golden Age" was also used without hesitation, in
speaking
of this period, by a critic who in many ways stood much closer
than the
Modernists to the nineteenth-century intelligentsia, R. V.
Ivanov-Razumnik.

He used it in an article signed "Ippolit Udushiev" (a personage
mentioned
in Griboedov's Gore ot uma — Woe from Wit) in the collection
of essays Sov-
remennaia literatura (Contemporary Literature) (Leningrad,
1925), p. 161.
For Ivanov-Razumnik, when he wrote, the Second Golden Age
was already
over, and the Silver Age, the period of decline, had begun. In
general, this
pseudonymous article of his is full of interesting thoughts and
observations.
5 This essay, the posthumous separate edition (1911) of which
has been
out of print for many years, has been reprinted in this country:
Analiz,
stif i veianie. O romanakh gr. L. N. Tolstogo (Analysis, Style,
and Atmos-
phere. On the Novels of Count L. N. Tolstoi), with an essay on
Leontiev by
Vasilii Rozanov and an introductory piece by Donald Fanger,
Brown Uni-
versity Slavic Reprint No. 3 (Providence, R.I.: Brown
University Press,
1965). This edition contains a short chapter at the beginning
which was
cut out from the original publication in Russkii Vestnik and was
not repro-
duced in the 1911 edition. It was first published in Grazhdanin,
Nos. 157
and 158 (1890), and then incorporated in the article in Vol. VIII
of
Leontiev's Collected Works (Moscow, 1912).
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Calderon and Corneille, George Sand's novels and Monk
Parfentii's
Legends of the Holy Land, Horace's Odes and Manon Lescaut,
the
tragedies of Sophocles and the childlike epic songs of the
modern
Greeks.6 Leontiev traced the initial stage of this Russian
"flyspeck"
realism to Gogol; the Tolstoi of his major novels appeared to
Leontiev to be the writer in whom it had reached its point of
saturation and who himself, with the instinct of a genius, had
turned
away from it and sought new paths: hence, the new manner,
intentionally bare and simple, of his stories for the people. It
speaks
very much for Leontiev's fairness and objectivity that, guided
by
purely artistic considerations, he saw those stories of Tolstoi's
as
superior to his great novels, as a step forward and away from
the
dead tradition: for the religious and moral views underlying
those
stories, Leontiev could not possibly have any use.
Leontiev himself, although he also wrote some fiction, can
hardly be regarded as a forerunner of any specific trends in

modern
Russian literature (and because of his "reactionary" world view,
his influence during his lifetime was confined to a narrow circle
of
admirers), but he did, in that essay, voice a reaction against
"real-
ism" that was soon to spread far and wide. What is more, under-
lying his general outlook, his religious, sociopolitical, and
historio-
sophic ideas, there was a deeply rooted aestheticism, which was
to
become an important factor in shaping the destinies of modern
Rus-
sian literature. His aristocratic individualism (as expressed, for
instance, in his bitingly satirical essay "The Average European
as
the Means and End of Universal Progress") was also a sign of
the times. There is no doubt that hi his essay on Tolstoi he had
put his ringer on the focal point of the malaise which was then
affecting Russian literature. Barely a decade had passed since it
had completed a great and brilliant cycle of its development —
the
great age of the Russian novel, of social and psychological
realism,
had come to an end with the deaths of Dostoevsky (1881) and of
Turgenev (1883), and the voluntary (albeit partial and
temporary)
withdrawal of Tolstoi from art (1879-1880).
Two years after Leontiev's essay (published in 1891), the
general
6 Ibid., p. 14.
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crisis in Russian literature was analyzed in greater detail, and in
the light of incipient Modernism, by Dmitrii Merezhkovskii
(1865-
1941) in his celebrated essay "On the Causes of Decline and the
New Trends in Russian Literature" (1893). This essay is some-
times treated as the manifesto of Russian Symbolism. I think
this is
a mistake.7 Nevertheless, its symptomatic significance was very
great. Merezhkovskii became one of the harbingers of that
revolt
which was soon to spread to a large section of the Russian
intelli-
gentsia. It was, above all, a revolt against the traditional values
of
that intelligentsia as they had become crystallized in the 1860's
and
18 70's —against its positivism, against its tendency to
subordinate
art to social utility and to look upon it as a service to the
people.
It was a revolt in the name of individualism, of aestheticism, of
religious and philosophical idealism. Speaking of the first timid
manifestations of these new trends in the last decade of the
nine-
teenth century, D. S. Mirsky wrote: "Aestheticism substituted
beauty for duty, and individualism emancipated the individual
from
all social obligations. The two tendencies, which went hand in
hand, proved a great civilizing force and changed the whole

face
of Russian civilization between 1900 and 1910, bringing about
the
great renascence of Russian art and poetry, which marked that
decade." 8
What was the background of that renaissance and what were its
sources? The last decade of the nineteenth century in Russia —
that
century which the great modern Russian poet Alexander Blok
described in his autobiographical and at the same time historical
poem "Vozmezdie" (Retribution) as "iron and truly cruel" — i s
usually thought of as a period of dark reaction, of stagnation, of
bezvremen'e (an untranslatable Russian word, particularly
associ-
ated with the futility and frustration which permeate Chekhov's
stories and plays). But this is only one side of the medal. It was
at the same time a period of political, social, and artistic fer-
mentation; of great and heated controversies. It saw the birth of
7 See a discussion of this point in Ralph E. Matlaw, "The
Manifesto of
Russian Symbolism," The Slavic and East European Journal,
XV, No. 3
(Fall 1957), 177-191.
8 Contemporary Russian Literature, pp. 151-152.
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G L E B S T R U V E
the organized Social Democratic Party in Russia, the violent
debate
on a number of general and topical issues between the Marxists
and
the populists (narodniki). The end of the century saw also the
first
defections from the Marxist camp into that of Neo-Kantian
ideal-
ism, personified in such men as Peter Struve, Nicholas
Berdiaev,
Sergei Bulgakov, and Simon Frank, all of whom were later to
play
a prominent part in the Russian religious-philosophical revival
and
all of whom also ended their lives as exiles under the Soviet
regime.
A significant landmark in this movement was the publication of
a collection of essays, entitled Problems of Idealism (1902), to
which all the above-named men contributed. A much later but
direct sequel of it was the volume Vekhi (Landmarks, or
Signposts,
1909) in which seven authors (described by some of their critics
as
"the seven penitents") joined forces and subjected to a critical
analysis some of the fundamental premises of the outlook of the
Russian intelligentsia: its positivism and utilitarianism, as well
as
its political maximalism. Simon Frank, for example, opposed
the
ideal of "religious humanism" to the "nihilistic moralism" of the
traditional intelligentsia mentality, and Bulgakov, who was then
al-
ready a practicing Orthodox believer and was later to be

ordained
as a priest, contrasted the Christian saintly ideal with the ideal
of
revolutionary heroism. This volume of highly sophisticated
polit-
ical-philosophical essays rapidly became a bestseller and went
within one year through several printings — a success
unprecedented
in the history of Russian letters. The volume also led to a
heated
controversy with the champions of the intelligentsia's
traditional
mentality and values. The volume was attacked both by the
extreme
Left (some of the most venomous attacks on it were made, and
continued to be made for years, by Lenin) and by the tradition-
bound Liberals.9
An important role in fin-de-siecle thought was played by Vladi-
mir Soloviev (1853-1900), who combined the religious-mystical
approach (with strong eschatological overtones) with political
Lib-
9 Of the seven authors of Vekhi, four (Berdiaev, Bulgakov,
Frank, and
Struve) had been contributors to Problems of Idealism.
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eralism, and to whom Russian religious-philosophical revival of
the
early twentieth century was very much indebted.
In the same period fall the pioneering efforts of such writers as
Vasilii Rozanov (1856-1919), Akim Volynskii (pseudonym of
A. L. Flekser, 1863-1926), Sergei Andreevskii (1847-1920), and
others, to reappraise the heritage of Russian literature, to re-
evaluate the reputations of many a writer to whom the dominant
social-utilitarian criticism of the nineteenth century had affixed
this
or that label, with a plus or a minus sign. Rozanov's penetrating
studies of Gogol and Dostoevsky; Volynskii's books on
Dostoevsky
and Leskov and his outspoken debunking of such idols of the
nineteenth-century intelligentsia as Belinskii, Chernyshevskii,
and
Pisarev, parallel with the emphasis laid on such an
unfashionable
literary critic as Apollon Grigoriev (all this in Volynskii's
volume
Russian Critics); Andreevskii's rediscovery of such a major poet
of
the Pushkin period as Baratynskii; Soloviev's famous essays on
Tiutchev and Fet — all these were important stages in the
rapidly
proceeding unfreezing of the Russian minds. This work of re-
evaluation of the literary reputations of the past was to be con-
tinued later by the leading poets of Russian Symbolism
(Briusov,
Zinaida Hippius, Blok, and others).
There were parallel developments in visual arts — a reaction
against the pedestrian realism of the dominant peredvizhniki
group,10 and the programmatic or illustrative art with a social

mes-
sage, went hand in hand with the growing interest in the
contem-
porary movements in Western European art — in particular, the
English Pre-Raphaelites and the French Impressionists and their
offshoots. At the very end of the century, this desire to renovate
Russian art and to put it abreast of Western movements found
its
vehicle in the magazine Mir Iskusstva (The World of Art),
founded
in 1898 by Sergei Diaghilev, of future Ballets Russes fame.
Diaghi-
lev gathered round him a group of talented young artists who
later formed the World of Art group and did much to
revolutionize
both Russian art and Russian art criticism — men like
Alexander
Benois, Konstantin Somov, Eugene Lanceray, Nicholas Roerich,
10From Peredvizhnye vystavki (Ambulant Exhibitions).
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Mstislav Dobuzhinskii, and others. These men were also
responsi-
ble for a new approach to the past legacy of Russian art, for
"dis-
covering" the hitherto neglected world of the Russian icon (the

work done in this respect by the art historian Igor Grabar and by
the critic Paul Muratov was particularly important, but much
credit also goes to the wealthy collectors from the old merchant
families, such as Ostroukhov, Riabushinskii, and others) and for
reassessing the little-known art of the Russian eighteenth
century.
Some of the leading artists of this new school, like Benois and
Somov, were clearly influenced by this eighteenth-century art
and
also drew upon it for their subject matter, whereas others, like
Roerich, were to some extent influenced by the Russian icon
paint-
ing and drew upon Russian folklore and Oriental motifs.
The World of Art combined interest in arts with that in
literature
and stood in the vanguard of modern literary movement. The
close alliance between literature and fine arts became a
hallmark
of Russian periodicals at this time, and the World of Art
tradition
was carried on by such publications as Vesy (The Scales, 1904-
1909), Zolotoe Runo (The Golden Fleece, 1906-1909), Apollon
(Apollo, 1909-1917), and the short-lived Sofia (1914). It is also
characteristic of all these periodicals, devoted to both arts and
letters, that they followed closely all the latest trends and move-
ments in Western Europe and were at the same time concerned
with propagandizing Russian art, both old and modern, in the
West. Both Vesy and Apollon had regular Western
collaborators.
In the drama and the theater new paths were also blazed from
the 1890's on. In 1898, the Moscow Art Theatre, founded by
Konstantin Stanislavsky, today one of the best-known names in
the history of the modern theater, initiated with his Sea Gull a
series of Chekhov productions, which were to bring it its fame

(only three years earlier, The Sea Gull had met with complete
fiasco on the traditional stage in St. Petersburg). Chekhov, who
in
his dramatic innovations was to some extent influenced by con-
temporary European drama (by Ibsen and Maeterlinck, in
particu-
lar), became in turn important in influencing the drama outside
Russia, especially in Anglo-Saxon countries. So did, too, some
of
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the principles that underlay the theatrical work of Stanislavsky's
Art Theatre. For its part, the Moscow Art Theatre familiarized
Russian audiences with such playwrights as Ibsen, Hamsun,
Haupt-
mann, and Maeterlinck. Soon, however, the Stanislavsky's
theater
itself came to be looked upon by many people as old-fashioned.
Its
presentation of Chekhov's "atmospheric" plays in the slice-of-
life
manner and hi a minor key was the last word in the "de-theatral-
ization" and "de-conventionalization" of the theater. A reaction
against this trend came from different sides and at different
levels:
Leonid Andreev's symbolical-romantic melodramas (The Life of
Man, Anathema, and so forth); Gorky's attempts (as in Lower

Depths) to infuse a broader social meaning and a breath of
optimism
into the Chekhovian drama; Fedor Sologub's and Zinaida
Hippius's
endeavors to combine symbolism and realism; Blok's essays in
lyri-
cal drama (The Puppet Show and The Stranger, with their
superb
romantic irony) and in verse tragedy (The Rose and the Cross)-,
Innokentii Annenskii's and Viacheslav Ivanov's revival of
ancient
Greek myths (in Annenskii's case, with a strong modern flavor).
All
this took place in the drama, at the same time as, in the theater,
Meyerhold and especially Nicholas Evreinov were turning to ex-
periments that were based on principles diametrically opposed
to
that of Chekhov's and Stanislavsky's de-conventionalization of
the
theater — namely, the "theatralization" of life. All this can be
seen as an attempt to lead the Russian theater out of the
Chekhov-
ian impasse. Two outstanding theatrical directors who were
later
to play an important part in the early post-Revolutionary period,
Vsevolod Meyerhold and Alexander Tairov, came to assert the
principle of the primacy of the theatrical director not only over
the actors (Stanislavsky had also asserted this, although he com-
bined it with the important role assigned to the actors' ensemble
as distinct from individual actors), but also over the author.
Hence,
the liberties which Meyerhold was to take later with the plays of
such classical writers as Gogol and Ostrovskii.
In poetry, the period before 1912 was dominated by Symbolism.
Just as French Symbolism had been a reaction against

Parnassian-
ism and Naturalism, so its Russian namesake (which owed much
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G L E B STRUVE
of its inspiration to French Symbolism) was a reaction against
civic-minded Realism. An anticipation of it will be found in
Merezhkovskii's book of poems, significantly entitled Simvoly
(Symbols, 1892). In his previously mentioned essay of 1893,
Merezhkovskii referred to the French Symbolists. Somewhat
earlier
they had been the subject of a special article by Mme Zinaida
Vengerov in Vestnik Evropy. From this article the average
Russian
reader (Vestnik Evropy was a widely read Liberal monthly)
learned
about the whole modern movement in French literature. But the
beginnings of Russian Symbolism as a literary school in its own
right date from 1894-1895 when Valerii Briusov (1873-1924),
who was then twenty-one, and his friend A. Miropolskii-Lang
published three slender volumes under the title Russian
Symbolists.
They contained some original verse and prose, and translations
from
Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Maeterlinck. There was very little, if
any-
thing, of intrinsic value in these little volumes of avant-garde
writ-

ings (the only author to make subsequently a name for himself
was Briusov), but their appearance was symptomatic. The
defini-
tions of Symbolism and its intent, which Briusov gave in the
first
two issues, were derived directly from Mallarme: "The object of
Symbolism is to hypnotize as it were the reader by a series of
juxtaposed images, to evoke in him a certain mood . . .*'; "The
purpose of poetry is not 'objective description,' but 'sugges-
tion' . . ."; "The poet conveys a series of images . . . [which are]
to be looked upon as signposts along an invisible road, open to
the
imagination of the reader. It follows then that Symbolism can be
described as ... poetry of allusions"; and so forth. Primacy of
intuition over reason, a refusal to accept a reality which is but a
distortion of the real but unattainable world —these
fundamental
tenets were accepted by the young Russian disciples of Verlaine
and
Mallarme and became the common stock of the new movement.
The mission of the poet was seen in the revealing, beyond the
realm of senses, of the world of higher reality. De realibus ad
realiora was the slogan proclaimed later by one of the principal
theoreticians of Russian Symbolism, Viacheslav Ivanov (1866-
1949).
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Another leading representative of early Russian Symbolism,
Kon-
stantin Balmont (1867-1942), said that whereas the Realists
were
tied to concrete reality beyond which they saw nothing, the
Sym-
bolists were cut off from it and saw hi it only their dream —
"They
look at life through a window." Balmont also developed his
philos-
ophy of the moment, "momentalism": "Moments are always
unique.
The life I live is too quick, and I know no one who loves
moments
so much as I do ... I yield myself to the moment," he wrote in
a preface to one of the most characteristic volumes of his verse,
Goryashchie zdaniia (Burning Edifices, 1904). This cult of the
moment, this glorification of a fleeting, momentary experience,
is
the keynote of much of Balmont's prerevolutionary poetry.
Another Symbolist poet, Zinaida Hippius (1869-1945), the
wife of Merezhkovskii, who sought inspiration in the poetry of
Baratynskii and Tiutchev rather than in the French Symbolists,
compared poetry to prayers. Andrei Bely (pseudonym of Boris
Bugaev, 1880-1934), who became toward 1910 one of the
princi-
pal theoretical exponents of Symbolism, wrote: "All art is sym-
bolic, whether recent, old, or future. What is then the
significance
of modern Symbolism? What new message did it bring us?
None.
The school of Symbolism merely reduces to a unity the
statements
of artists and poets to the effect that the meaning of beauty is in
the artistic image and not in the emotion which that image

arouses
in us; and certainly not in the rational interpretation of that
image.
A symbol cannot be reduced either to emotions or to discursive
concepts; it is what it is."
If of French Symbolism it has been said that "Du point de vue
technique . . . le symbolisme a tente et r6ussi Faffranchissement
du vers frangais — sous toutes ses formes," with regard to
Russian
Symbolism one should speak not so much of the "emancipation"
of the Russian verse as of the simultaneous restoration of
pristine
standards (those of the Golden Age) and complete renovation.
The complexity and richness of the poetic world of Symbolism
defy
a brief analysis. Such poets as Balmont, Briusov, Sologub,
Viaches-
lav Ivanov, Zinaida Hippius, Innokentii Annenskii (whose full
stat-
ure as a poet became clear only after his death and who, of all
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the poets of this period, stood closest to some of their French
mas-
ters), Baltrushaitis, Blok, and Bely, represented different facets
of

Symbolism. Not all of them were equally indebted to the
French.
This debt was particularly obvious in the case of Annenskii and
Briusov, both of whom translated Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Mal-
larme (Annenskii also translated Laforgue and some lesser poets
of that period; Briusov came to be strongly influenced by Ver-
haeren). It was less so in the case of Sologub, although he also
paid tribute to the French Symbolists by translating them.
Balmont
was much more eclectic — his favorite poets were Shelley and
Edgar
Allen Poe, and he also did a great deal of translating from
Spanish.
(Poe and Baudelaire, like Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy and
Scho-
penhauer's ideas on music, meant much to nearly all the Russian
Symbolists. Baudelaire's "Correspondances," with its "forest of
symbols" and the notion of synesthesia, became a kind of credo
for them). Zinaida Hippius owed much more, as has been men-
tioned before, to her Russian masters, Tiutchev and Baratynskii
—
the former came to be regarded by all the Symbolists as their
fore-
runner, a kind of Symbolist avant la lettre.11 As for Alexander
Blok
and Andrei Bely, they owed much more to another Symbolist
avant la lettre (even though he had headed the chorus of those
who
derided and parodied Briusov's first experiments in a new man-
ner) — namely, Vladimir Soloviev and his mystical philosophy
—
as did also Viacheslav Ivanov (but in his case there was also a
par-
ticularly strong influence of Nietzsche). Blok also had affinities
with
some earlier Russian poets in the Romantic tradition — in

particu-
lar with Zhukovskii, Lermontov, Fet, and Polonskii — and both
he and Bely, at one stage of their poetic development, were very
much inspired by the Russian accents of some of Nekrasov's
"civic"
poetry. In the case of Blok especially, but also of Bely and
Ivanov,
German influences played a greater part than the French.
Generally speaking, it soon became possible to distinguish be-
tween two main currents in Russian Symbolism: the purely aes-
thetic, represented by Briusov and Balmont, which depended
much
uSee, for example, V. Ivanov, "Zavety simvolizma," Apollon,
No. 8
(1910), pp. 5-9.
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G L E B S T R U V E
more on foreign models and was concerned above all with
formal,
technical, prosodic innovations; and the metaphysical or
religious
one, represented by Blok, Bely, and Ivanov, and to some extent
Zinaida Hippius (Sologub occupied a place apart). Blok, Bely,
and
Ivanov have come to be described often as the "younger

Symbol-
ists" (Blok and Bely were actually younger; Ivanov, who was
older
than Briusov, made his entry into Russian literature much later).
This metaphysical current in Russian Symbolism aspired to be
something more than a literary school. Its principal exponents,
Bely and Ivanov (Blok was not much of a theoretician, and in
any
case soon came to differ with the other two), spoke of "a new
con-
sciousness," of "mythmaking," of the "theurgical meaning of
poetry." The inner crisis in Russian Symbolism came to a head
in 1910 when Blok and Ivanov, on the one hand, and Briusov,
on
the other, engaged in a controversy in the newly founded
"Academy
of Verse." For Blok, Symbolism at this point was really a thing
of
the past, and he was soon to desert it and to wander away in a
frantic search for closer ties with real life. Symbolism's
aloofness
from life, its engrossment in abstract profundities, began to
frighten
him. "Back to the soul, not only to 'man,' but to 'the whole man'
—
with his spirit, soul, and body, with the everydayness — three
times
so," he wrote in his diary in 1911.12 And again, in 1912, "What
we need is reality, there is nothing more terrifying in the world
than mysticism."13 Ivanov also began to speak of "realistic
sym-
bolism," though what he meant by it was not the same thing and
was not dictated by that craving for real life by which Blok was
actuated. Bely alone stuck obstinately to his guns, as may be
seen

from the numerous articles contributed by him in 1912 to the
new
periodical, Trudy i Dni (Works and Days), founded by him and
Ivanov and in which Blok took but little part.14 For Bely, Blok
had even become a traitor to the common cause.
12 Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow-Leningrad, 1963), Vol. VII, p.
79 (entry
dated October 30).
MIbid., p. 134 (entry dated March 19).
"This periodical, founded for the explicit purpose of defending
and
preaching "true" Symbolism, had a short life. Bely published in
it a number
of important articles, some under his own name, others under
the pseudonym
Cunctator.
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At the same time the stronghold of Symbolism came to be
attacked from outside. In 1910, one of the talented poets who
had
remained on the periphery of the Symbolist movement, Mikhail
Kuzmin (1875-1936), published in Apotton an article entitled
"Prekrasnaia iasnost" ("Beautiful Clarity"). It called upon his

fel-
low writers to come down to earth from the nebulous
metaphysical
heights of Symbolism. Two years later, two younger poets,
Nicho-
las Gumilev (1886-1921) and Sergei Gorodetskii (b. 1884),
launched a new movement to which they gave the name of
Acmeism
(from the Greek word akme, meaning "high point"). Gumilev,
who had been a disciple of Briusov and of the French
Parnassians,
became the theoretician and the maitre d'ecole of the new group.
The principal tenets of Acmeism were stated by Gumilev and
Gorodetskii in two separate articles published in the first issue
of
Apollon for 1913.15 Gorodetskii's association with the
movement
was more or less accidental, but Gumilev's article came to be
looked
upon as the manifesto of the new school. To the Symbolists'
empha-
sis on the hidden, associative, musical elements in poetry
(Verlaine's
"De la musique avant tout chose"), the Acmeists opposed the
elements of sense and logic in the art of words. To Ivanov's and
Bely's inclination to view the poet as a prophet, a mythmaker,
and to stress his passive, mediumistic nature, Gumilev opposed
the conception of the poet as a skilled, conscious craftsman; the
literary organization founded by him and his consorts was
accord-
ingly named "Poets' Guild" (Tsekh Poetov). Up to a point, the
movement can be seen as part of the general European trend
toward
neoclassicism, which in France was associated with Jean
Moreas,
himself a leading ex-Symbolist, and in England with T. E.

Hulme.
Although it is highly doubtful whether Gumilev was at that time
familiar with the ideas and writings of Hulme, or even knew his
name (later he was to display some interest in him), he must
have
known the name and the work of Moreas; and though we have
no direct evidence of it at present, it is quite likely that the two
13 Gumilev's article was entitled "Nasledie simvolizma i
akmeizm"
("Acmeism and the Heritage of Symbolism"). It was published
in Apollon,
No. 1 (1913), and reprinted posthumously in Pis'ma o russkoi
poezii (Petro-
grad, 1923), pp. 37-42.
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G L E B STRUVE
met in 1908, when Gumilev spent about a year in Paris and was
a frequent visitor to the Closerie des Lilas. The name of Moreas
was not mentioned in Gumilev's "manifesto," and there was no
reference in it to the ecole romane or to the neoclassical
reaction
against Symbolism in France. In fact, the four names of writers
invoked by Gumilev as those of the "masters" to look up to were
quite different and had nothing to do with modern
neoclassicism:
Frangois Villon, Rabelais, Shakespeare, and Theophile Gautier,

of
whom Gumilev was a great admirer and whose Emaux and
Camees
he translated into Russian. One can say perhaps that Acmeism
lacked both real unity and firm theoretical foundations (verbal
lucidity, craftsmanship, manliness, and zest for life were among
the tenets its exponents advocated), but that it had some
neoclas-
sical characteristics is beyond doubt. It was later to have a
number
of camp followers and to exercise considerable influence on the
developments in Russian poetry after 1917, but its true
adherents
before the Revolution were very few. They included, however,
two
major poets whose poetry, in the opinion of most people, is of
greater value than that of Gumilev himself:16 Gumilev's first
wife,
Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966), and Osip Mandelstam (1891-
1938). Both poets with sharply defined poetic individualities,
they
could hardly be described as Gumilev's followers, but their
poetry
certainly represented, in different ways, some essential aspects
of
Acmeism as understood and formulated by Gumilev. Both grew
in stature as poets after the Revolution, despite the extremely
un-
favorable outward conditions and the vicissitudes of their
personal
life. Akhmatova survived all her ordeals and continued to write
(though there were periods when she could not publish her
poetry),
but Mandelstam ended his life tragically in a concentration
camp.

Another movement that arose in opposition to Symbolism, but
was also largely its own offspring, was Futurism. It was a
movement
parallel to, but hi many ways different from, the Italian
Futurism
16 In evaluating Gumilev as a poet it is necessary, however, to
take into
account the fact that his life was cut short at the age of 35,
when he was
executed for alleged participation in a counterrevolutionary
conspiracy. His
last volume of poetry, Ognennyi stolp (Pillar of Fire), published
a month
or so after his death, bore witness to his remarkably rapid
growth as a poet.
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G L E B S T R U V E
of Marinetti. Its very beginnings in Russia were in 1909. By
1912 it
was represented by a number of small groups and coteries,
bearing
such names as Ego-Futurists, Cubo-Futurists, Centrifuga, and
The Mezzanine of Poetry. Of these, the Cubo-Futurists came to
play
the most important role. As the name implies, they wanted to
stress then: connection with Cubism in painting —the book of

Gleizes and Metzenger on Cubism became one of their bedside
books. Some of their experiments with words and verse led
some
students of Futurism to speak of their "verse Cubism," although
the analogy seems rather remote and arbitrary.
The Cubo-Futurists were led by two poets who were also
painters — David Burliuk (b. 1882) and Vladimir Maiakovskii
(1894-1930). Burliuk made his home after the Revolution in
New
York and became better known as a painter, even though he
con-
tinued to write poetry in Russian and to preach Futurism. He is
still alive, as is Alexei Kruchenykh (b. 1886), one of the early
Russian Futurists still living in Russia. It was Maiakovskii,
how-
ever, who became the acknowledged leader of Russian avant-
garde
poetry. Connected with them was also Velimir Khlebnikov
(1885-
1922), sometimes described as the Russian Rimbaud, the most
original of the Futurists, and in the opinion of some people, a
true
poetic genius.
The Futurists proclaimed the absolute autonomy of art, its com-
plete independence from life. In one of their early publications,
they declared that, apart from its starting point which is to be
seen
in the creative impulse, poetry has nothing to do with the
external
world and is in no way coordinated with it. They saw their
mission
in "unshackling" words, in freeing them from subservience to
meaning, and thus reaching through to "direct perception."
Their

slogan was the "word per se" or "self-valuable word"
(samovitoe
slovo). They propounded and tried to practice a new, universal
language, which they dubbed trans-sense (zaumny jazyk, zauiri
—
Professor Chyzhevskyi has suggested as its best equivalent the
word metalogical). In a way, this approach had already been
antici-
pated by the Symbolists, among whom Andrei Bely especially
had
freely indulged in coining words. The influence of Mallarme is
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G L E B S T R U V E
equally apparent. Burliuk spoke of both the Russian and the
French Symbolists, as well as the French poetes maudits, as the
Futurists' masters, naming specifically Baudelaire, Rimbaud,
Tris-
tan Corbiere, and Jules Laforgue. But the Futurists said that
whereas the Symbolists had tried both in theory and in practice
to deepen the inner meaning of words, and saw the latter as im-
portant not per se, but because they were an expression of a
symbol,
of the world, of existence, of the "soul of things," or of the
mystical
other world; they, the Futurists, regarded the form of words,
their
appearance, their sound as more important than their actual or

po-
tential meaning. Or, as Professor Markov put it, the "flesh" of
the
poetic word was more important than its "spirit."17 What
mattered
to them was not some new symbols, but a new organization of
words.
If words can be seen as tonic or graphic material, then they can
be
"stretched," or divided, or created anew. Hence the cult of form,
the intoxication with words, and all sorts of verbal experiments,
particularly in the work of Kruchenykh.
Maiakovskii, however, who was to become the post-Revolu-
tionary leader of Russian Futurism — a t least so long as it was
tolerated by the Party — was never particularly interested in
pure
verbal experimentation for its own sake; he never indulged in
the
extremes of "wordmaking" (slovotvorchestvo), contenting
himself
with all sorts of "shifts" (sdvigi) in the language — phonetic,
mor-
phological, semantic, rhythmical. His principal innovations
were
in the realm of prosody: he tended to substitute pure tonic verse
for the traditional syllabotonic pattern of Russian classical
poetry;
in this he had some predecessors among the Symbolist poets (in
their use of the so-called dol'niki), but he adopted much more
revolutionary procedures, went far beyond his predecessors, and
in his accentual verse created a truly new instrument.
Characteristic
for Maiakovskii was also the deliberate "de-poetization" of
vocab-
ulary and imagery and the use of vulgarisms and colloquialisms,

though alongside these he also used archaisms and Church-
Slavonicisms, often for contrasting or satirical effects.
"Vladimir Markov, "The Province of Russian Futurism," The
Slavic
and East European Journal, VIII, No. 4 (Winter 1964), 403.
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Although the Italian Futurism of Marinetti had a distinctly
urbanistic flavor, the same cannot be said of Russian Futurism
as a whole. Two of its prominent representatives, Khlebnikov
and
Vasilii Kamenskii (1884-1961), had even a strong anti-urban
bias. In Khlebnikov's poetry and in his historiosophic
conception,
there were elements of Utopian romanticism, and he had very
strong
anti-Western and pro-Asiatic leanings. His verbal experiments,
unlike those of some other Futurists, were closely related to his
philological studies and his interest in the history of the Russian
language and in linguistics in general. His neologisms were
often
rooted in the linguistic soil of the Russian language.
Maiakovskii,
on the other hand, was in this respect closer to Western
Futurism.
In his poetry urban motifs played an important part even before

the Revolution, but his urbanism was of a social rather than a
technological character, and even before 1917 his poetry had a
clearly revolutionary orientation. For Maiakovskii the art of the
future, of which all the Futurists spoke, was closely bound up
with
the coming sociopolitical upheaval, and in his person the
alliance
between the Bolshevik Revolution and Futurism came as some-
thing quite natural in the first post-Revolutionary years.
If I have spoken so far mainly of poetry, it is because this
period was indeed dominated by poetry to quite an unusual
extent,
and because it was in poetry above all that new paths were
blazed,
first by the Symbolists and then by their successors.
But the period was also rich in prose fiction. Here, however, the
scene was not monopolized, or even completely dominated, by
the
innovators. Much of the new prose fiction, which was to depart
from the earlier tradition, came in fact from the poets who
played
an important part in the Symbolist movement: the historical-
phil-
osophical novels of Merezhkovskii; the novels and stories by
Briu-
sov and Sologub (including the latter's Melkii bes (The Petty
Demon, 1907), which Mirsky describes as the best Russian
novel
since Dostoevsky); and the remarkable novels of Andrei Bely
(who
is sometimes seen as a predecessor of James Joyce), especially
his
Petersburg (1913), with their close ties with his poetry (this is
even

more true of his earlier prose works, which he designated "sym-
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phonies" and which in their diction and technique of writing
stand
on the borderline between poetry and prose).
But along with this Symbolist production in prose fiction, a
num-
ber of writers continued, mostly in the realm of the short story
(though there were also some novels), the nineteenth-century
"realistic" tradition. It is enough to name Gorky (1868-1936),
Bunin (1870-1953), Kuprin (1870-1938), Shmeliev (1873-1950),
and Boris Zaitsev (b. 1882). At the same time, some of the
younger
writers attempted to renovate this tradition, to instill new blood
into it, and earned for themselves the name of Neo-Realists. The
foremost among them were Alexei Remizov (1877-1957) and
Alexei N. Tolstoi (1882-1945), and among the still younger
ones
Eugene Zamiatin (1884-1937), most of whose work belongs,
however, to the early post-Revolutionary period. It was
Zamiatin
who, speaking of his work and of that of some of his masters,
gave
a good definition of Neo-Realism as distinct both from old-fash-
ioned Realism and from Symbolism: the Neo-Realists can be

seen
as the link between the prerevolutionary literature and much of
what was best and most original in the Soviet literature of the
1920's. Remizov certainly exercised a great influence on many
young Soviet writers, but so did also Andrei Bely. In general,
one
can say that both Symbolism and Neo-Realism had a great
seminal
significance for the so-called Soviet literature until the advent
(or
the imposition) of "Socialist Realism," just as post-
Revolutionary
poetry before 1930 developed as an extension and an offshoot of
the poetic schools of the prerevolutionary Second Golden Age.
Let me repeat: the literary scene in Russia between 1890 and
1914 was characterized by great richness and variety (and this
was
also true of the other arts). There was an abundance of
periodicals
of high quality, both literary-artistic and general, in the purely
and
uniquely Russian tradition of the tolstye zhurnaly ("fat"
monthly
reviews), representing a wide range of viewpoints in politics as
well as in arts — f r o m the Liberal (and after 1910, Liberal-
Con-
servative) Russkaia Mysl edited by my father, P. B. Struve, on
the
right, carrying on the tradition of Landmarks and at the same
time
opening its pages to all that was best in new literature (Blok,
Briu-
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G L E B S T R U V E
sov, Sologub, Akhmatova, Gumilev, and Viacheslav Ivanov
were
all among its regular contributors); through the highly
respectable
Vestnik Evropy, orthodox Liberal in politics and stodgily con-
servative in artistic matters; through the populist Russkoe
Bogat-
stvo, artistically speaking just as conservative; and down to the
social-democratically oriented Sovremennyi Mir, a little more
lively
and modem on the literary side. A little later, two new "fat"
monthly reviews made their appearance, both of them tending
to-
ward the Left in politics and favorable to Modernism in the arts.
One
was Zavety, which stood close to the Socialist-Revolutionary
Party
and the literary policies of which were inspired by the well-
known
critic Ivanov-Razumnik (1878-1945); the other was Severnye
Zapiski, vaguely Radical (but nonparty) from the political point
of
view and of very high literary quality, competing with Russkaia
My si' in attracting some of the best poets and prose writers of
that
time.
In speaking of the literary scene during this period, one cannot

leave out the high level of much of its literary criticism and
literary
scholarship. Some younger Soviet scholars owe a great debt of
gratitude to some of the surviving representatives of that period.
And the relatively high level of Soviet literary criticism in the
1920's
and early 1930's is an inheritance of the same period. Unfortu-
nately, much of the literary scholarship and literary criticism of
that period remains taboo; little of it is reprinted and is there-
fore inaccessible to the present-day Soviet reader. The critical
tradi-
tion of the Second Golden Age had to be carried on by the
Russians
in exile, but this could be done only on a very reduced scale and
was doomed to a speedy end.
It is almost as bad with the imaginative literature of the
Symbol-
ist era. True, the prestige of Blok stands very high, and there
have
been two complete editions of his works, the latest, in eight
volumes,
published between 1960 and 1964,18 and a great number of
"selected" editions. This is due largely, if not entirely, to the
fact
that Blok was one of the few major writers to welcome the
October
18 An unnumbered ninth volume was added to this edition in
1965; it
contains Blok's "Notebooks."
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G L E B S T R U V E
Revolution of 1917 (his subsequent bitter disillusionment with
it
is glossed over by his Soviet biographers and students of his
work).
The same is true of Briusov, though not quite to the same extent
even though Briusov's "acceptance" of the Bolshevik Revolution
was much more thorough. But the situation is quite different
with
most of the other writers of the Symbolist and post-Symbolist
pe-
riod. Sologub's novel The Petty Demon was reissued, after a
long
interval, in 1933. It was next published in 1958 somewhere in
Siberia, with a cautionary note from the publishers to the effect
that the novel, which "shows masterfully the rotting of the bour-
geois-gentry society," will be read by Soviet readers as "a docu-
ment and monument of that capitalist order of things, at which,
as V. I. Lenin said, our grandchildren will look as at some
oddity."
None of his other novels have been reissued since before the
Revolution, and none of his poetry since 1936.
Andrei Bely's Petersburg was last published in 1935. His other
prerevolutionary novel, The Silver Dove, was never reissued in
Russia after 1917. A small volume of his poetry appeared in the
late 1930's and soon went out of print. And it was only in 1966
that Bely was granted the honor of being included in the "large
series" of the collection known as "The Poet's Library." Writers
like Merezhkovskii, Viacheslav Ivanov, Zinaida Hippius,
Remizov,

Balmont, Kuzmin, Gumilev, and several others are virtually un-
known to the general public in the Soviet Union. It is true that
some
of their poetry is included in some recent anthologies used as
col-
lege textbooks, but the selections are onesided, unsatisfactory,
and
incomplete, as are all the references to them in various histories
of literature, encyclopedias, and other reference works.19
Even today, in the post-Stalin period, when so much of the old
19 Particularly disgraceful in this respect is the last volume of
the ten-
volume History of Russian Literature (Istoriia russkoi liter
atury), pub-
lished under the auspices of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.
This volume
appeared in 1954, a year after Stalin's death, and still reflects
all the charac-
teristics of the Stalinist age. It covers the period 1890-1917.
The chapter
on Symbolism, Acmeism, and Futurism, entitled "Poetry of
Bourgeois
Decadence" (pp. 764—799) (from which are excluded Briusov,
Blok, Maia-
kovskii, treated separately in earlier chapters), is divided among
five authors,
all of them known for their other studies in the literature of this
period:
A. Volkov, V. Orlov, N. Stepanov, A. Fedorov, and I. Eventov.
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G L E B STRUVE
cultural tradition has been, or is being, restored, the great
cultural
wealth of the modern Russian Renaissance is neglected or
dismissed
with hostility and contempt (usually accompanied and supported
by "telling" quotations from Lenin), and Russian culture,
including
literature, is all the poorer for this break in continuity. There is,
however, much encouraging evidence that the younger
generation
in the Soviet Union is taking an ever greater interest in this
period,
which official Soviet historians have either crossed out of
history
or are studiously distorting, and particularly in its literature and
thought. And one constantly hears of literary works of this
period
circulating privately and clandestinely.
IN OCTOBER 1966, when the text of this lecture was being
prepared for the press, the Soviet journal Voprosy Literatury
(Problems of Literature) published an article by the well-known
literary scholar Vladimir N. Orlov, author of a book on
Alexander
Blok and of several others, entitled "On the Threshold of Two
Epochs (From the History of Russian Poetry at the Beginning of
Our Century)." This article represents an abridged version of
Orlov's introduction to the forthcoming volume in the "small
series"
of the Poet's Library, to be called Poets of the Early XX Cen-

tury. Orlov discusses Russian Symbolism and its significance in
general (with numerous references to Gorky's opinions of it)
and then devotes separate sections to five individual poets,
repre-
senting in the main the post-Symbolist period: Maximilian
Volo-
shin (1877-1932), Kuzmin, Gumilev, Mandelstam, and Khodase-
vich (1886-1939). It is clear from the text that all these poets
will
be included in the volume for which Orlov has written this
intro-
duction. For most of them, this will mean a literary resurrection
after a period of long neglect and oblivion. A statement on page
124
of Orlov's article suggests that among other poets to be included
in the volume will be Balmont, Sologub, Annenskii, and
Viacheslav
Ivanov.
The following passage is characteristic of Orlov's approach to
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G L E B S T R U V E
the literature of the period under discussion. After quoting some
sentences from Blok's introduction to his poem "Retribution,"
Orlov writes: "The period of reaction, to use Blok's formula,
'devastated the minds.' It left a visible imprint on the work of
most

of the Symbolists and their immediate successors — Voloshin,
Kuz-
min, Gumilev, Mandelstam, and Khodasevich, who withdrew
from
great themes and burning questions into aestheticism,
mannerism,
exoticism, passeism, bookishness, into the dark recesses of their
own minds. All of them bore witness to being astonishingly
blind
and deaf to the tragic, dreadful, and comforting things that were
happening at that decisive moment in Russia and in the whole
world. Of course, one should not paint the epoch all with one
paint.
Speaking of Russian poetry alone, we must not forget that it
was
precisely in those years, which lie between the two revolutions,
that were written the third volume of Blok's lyrical poetry,
Andrei
Bely's Ashes, the best poetry of Bunin, and that in those years
Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, and Pasternak came out with their first
books, that Khlebnikov was writing, that Maiakovskii and
Esenin
made their appearance . . . But those are the high peaks."
Acmeism is dismissed by Orlov as a current that was "not only
cachectic but in fact a sham one." Gumilev's manifesto is
described
as "highfalutin" and "snooty," and is compared to a mountain
that
gave birth to a mouse, the mouse being poetry that was "thin,
petty,
extraordinarily pretentious" and "affected by a terrible disease
—
an atrophy of all sense of time." Since Orlov does not specify
what
poetry and by what poets he has in mind, the reader has to

deduce
that he is speaking of the work of such poets as Akhmatova,
Gumilev, and Mandelstam (all of them leading Acmeists),
although
later, despite some reservations, he has some very different
things
to say even about Gumilev and Mandelstam.20
^Voprosy Literatury, No. 10 (1966), pp. 123-124.
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University of Minnesota Press
Chapter Title: Seeing the Renaissance Whole
Book Title: History and the Social Web
Book Subtitle: A Collection of Essays
Published by: University of Minnesota Press. (1955)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctttsssr.10
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2020 02:34:53 UTC
8
Seeing the Renaissance Whole
i. WOULD be hard to find in any language a word more
fully freighted with optimism than the term "Renaissance."
Heaven
alone holds more. To be born again, presumably with the oppor-
tunity to avoid all unpleasant experiences of a previous
existence,
to enjoy once more and to the full the springtime of youth and
then as middle age creeps on to revel in the highest intellectual
and aesthetic pleasures that the world has ever known—all this
and

more is implied in the word. And this is the term that has been
applied to a period of European history variously defined but
bounded roughly by the three centuries from 1300, the year
when
Dante made his imaginary journey through the afterworld, to the
day when Shakespeare died, or, if you like, a bit later to the day
of Milton's death after 1600 A.D.
This choice of name for the period is not the historian's; indeed
he finds himself embarrassed by its use, for reasons that I have
explained elsewhere.* But the rest of the literate world will not
be dissuaded from the use of so neat and appealing a label, and
the historian, not always finding it convenient to explain his ob-
jections, is forced to conform.
The historian, whose professional task it is to deal with the
whole recorded past, usually works alone in restoring that
record.
Not so for this period. Here he finds scholars and dilettantes of
* In the paper entitled "The New Learning."
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I
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so many fields of learning and cultural interests working upon
his materials that he is almost crowded out by the throng and

truly has trouble gaming a hearing—or even a reading. It is, I
be-
lieve, correct to say that more has been written about this period
by persons who are not professional historians than by the his-
torians themselves.
Consider the accounts of this period with which you are fa-
miliar. Most of you will readily recall the several volumes by
John Addington Symonds, a literary critic. Perhaps as many of
you will know the profoundly analytical work of Jacob Burck-
hardt, an art critic. Some of you, too, will have read the two
vol-
umes by Henry Osborn Taylor, originally a classical scholar
who
became something of a historian. He was so anxious to avoid
the
use of the term "Renaissance" that he entitled his work Thought
and Expression in i6th Century Italy—a. far worse misnomer,
for
his two volumes deal chiefly with the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries. And of course you will recall those beautiful essays
on
the Renaissance by scholars of English literature.
It is natural for workers in any field as they gain success and
prosperity in their chosen occupation to develop an avocational
interest in its beginnings. Thus the artist, particularly the
painter,
follows his interest back to Giotto, with whom, Vasari tells him,
modern painting began. The classical scholar looking for the
earliest traces of a secular interest in his profession is led back
to
Petrarch, who with no undue modesty proclaimed himself the
discoverer of the secular values of classical studies and thereby
won for himself the title of "Father of Humanism." And the pro-
fessor of modern literature seeking the origin of his profession

is
carried back inevitably to Boccaccio, who as far as I can
discover
was probably the first to occupy a university chair in contempo-
rary literature when Florence appointed him to lecture upon the
Divine Comedy of Dante. The political scientist, though his tra-
ditional interests carry him back to Plato and Aristotle, finds
many of his more modern ideas generated in this period by Mar-
silio of Padua, Machiavelli, and Grotius; the economist finds
the
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origin of modern capitalism here; and the historian sees the
birth
of his critical scholarship in Lorenzo Valla.
Likewise, the scientist comes to include among his forebears
Fracastoro in the study of contagious diseases, Vesalius in
anato-
my, Fabricius in embryology, Harvey in physiology, Copernicus
in astronomy, Georgius Agricola in geology and metallurgy, Je-
rome Cardan in higher algebra, Gesner in botany and zoology as
well as library science, Paracelsus in chemistry and pharmacy,
and
Pare in surgery. Technologists have come to regard Leonardo da
Vinci as their patron saint, and philosophers have found the be-
ginnings of modern lay interest in philosophy in the Platonic

Academy of Florence.
I cannot possibly have enumerated all the professions and voca-
tions that have developed a curiosity about this period of
history,
but I have surely named enough to indicate how thoroughly the
historian finds himself crowded, if not indeed crowded out, by
all this competing attention.
In passing, I should like to point out one striking feature of this
listing of interests. They are all lay interests—and thus
underline
one essential characteristic of the Renaissance: it was the period
when the laity became largely literate.
The historian's first reaction to so much competition is one of
annoyance. And this annoyance is heightened by the fact that
though the interest of these collateral professions is directed by
their own vocational concerns, all of them have had sufficient
experience of life to feel justified in interpreting the whole
society
of the period. But each interprets the period from his own point
of reference. For Burckhardt every activity of these centuries
was art-inspired; he sees art even in the way they perpetrated
their murders. Symonds, of course, is at his best in the appraisal
of literary developments, but he does not hesitate to include in
his monumental treatment also politics and religion, fields with
which he was but ill-acquainted. We could continue the roll, re-
vealing a host of similar distortions—which leads us inevitably
to
recall the fable of the five blind men of India and their conclu-
sions about the nature of the elephant.
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I can illustrate the reaction of the historian by a personal ex-
perience. Teaching at the University of California at Los
Angeles
one summer, I received an invitation to attend a two-day confer-
ence on the Renaissance at the Huntington Library, which I was
most happy to accept. I looked forward to enjoying a renewal of
my acquaintance with familiar characters, events, and achieve-
ments. I also hoped to hear new research and fresh points of
view
ably presented, and this I did. But as the conference progressed
I was puzzled by the fact that I heard almost no mention of the
names most familiar to me. Session followed session without a
word, as far as I recall, about the many old friends whom I had
grown to know in Italy in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and even
six-
teenth centuries.
Could this be a conference, I kept wondering, on the Renais-
sance? Reverting to the simile of the blind men and the
elephant,
I didn't know which part of the elephant they were fingering,
but it certainly was not the whole animal. My bewilderment was
allayed somewhat when I learned that this was a conference of
scholars in English literature.
I described my feelings to Louis B. Wright, the director of the
Huntington Library in immediate charge of the conference, in-
sisting that even a discussion limited to the English Renaissance
could not properly omit some reference to Italy. There was

Thomas Linacre, court physician to Henry VII and Henry VIII,
John Caius, court physician successively to Edward VI, Mary,
and Elizabeth, and William Harvey at the end of the century, all
of whom had taken their medical degrees at the University of
Padua. These were the most distinguished physicians in England
and their combined careers covered the whole of the sixteenth
century. Such persistent connection between England and Italy
in this vital area could only betoken a much wider cultural asso-
ciation.
Whether Dr. Wright was more sympathetic or amused I never
knew, but he invited me to write him a letter on the subject
which he published as a brief article entitled "Padua in the Eng-
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lish Renaissance." Fortunately I was able to summon
Shakespeare
to my aid with this quotation from The Taming of the Shrew.
To see fair Padua, nursery of the arts
. . . for I have Pisa left
And am to Padua come, as he that leaves
A shallow plash to plunge him in the deep
And with satiety seeks to quench his thirst.
A hasty search failed to reveal any other university, even Ox-

ford or Cambridge, to which Shakespeare accorded such high
praise. Apparently for him Padua was the highest center of Brit-
ish education in his time.
The historian's irritation at what seems to him the unwarranted
presumptions of his colleagues in other fields is not without re-
taliation from those colleagues. When I was asked to participate
in the Spencer Trask lectures on the meaning of the humanities
at Princeton, I followed the natural approach of the historian in
my assignment, "History and the Humanities." * Following
along
chronologically from antiquity to the Renaissance, I tried to
point
out that the interest in classical literature had never entirely
ceased
and that when circumstances favored there were definite out-
bursts of interest in the classics, notably in the eighth, tenth,
elev-
enth, and twelfth centuries. In that perspective the humanistic
activities of the Renaissance were merely wider and possibly
deeper than in the earlier periods, owing primarily to the
increased
literacy of the laity.
This notion of a continuous flow of cultural interest, swelling
at times, shrinking at other times, but always existing in some
amount, proved to be most distasteful to Professor Panofsky,
who
had given the lecture on art. When our papers were published
he added a footnote to his, protesting this notion of mine. Ap-
parently his view was that each period developed a certain
culture
of its own like a beautiful globe which was broken when the
period ended, leaving only a pleasant memory of its existence.
The idea that the cultural urge is persistent and universal and
that

* Parts of this lecture have been incorporated into two of the
papers in
this collection: "The New Learning" and "The Social Web."
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its achievements at any given period are necessarily limited by
the materials and tools available at the time is not acceptable to
Panofsky, for whom everything in society is subordinate or
pend-
ant to the artistic style of the period, e.g., Byzantine,
Romanesque,
Gothic, Renaissance.
The historian's obligation to try to comprehend society whole
existed even before the psychologists invented their "gestalt" or
"configuration" concept, and he must adhere to it no matter how
much the amateur enthusiasts may resent it.
One summer the department of English at the University of
Minnesota sponsored an institute on the Renaissance and invited
me to lead one of the round-table discussions. In such company
I felt privileged to indulge in a bit of literary license. I conjured
up a possible scene at the dinner table of Lorenzo the
Magnificent
about the year 1490, add or subtract a year or two.

It was Lorenzo's regular practice when at home to dine quite
informally with family, friends, and privileged visitors. The
guests
took their places to right and left of him in the order of their
arrival. If ever the partaking of food could be characterized as
accompanied by "a feast of reason and a flow of soul" it would
be at those dinners. The emphasis was never on the food, which
was always wholesome and tasty but seldom lavish.
The reason would be supplied on my imaginary occasion by
the group who constituted the nucleus of the Platonic Academy:
the saintly Ficino, the colorfully handsome and brilliant Pico,
and
the scholarly, if unhandsome, Poliziano. The banter would be
furnished by those two arch humorists, Franco and Pulci. The
company would include Lorenzo's children, then teen age—
young
Giovanni, later Pope Leo X, already assured a cardinal's hat,
and
his natural cousin Giulio, the later Clement VII—and young Mi-
chelangelo, then fifteen. It would also include Botticelli, who
re-
ceived the inspiration for his Neo-Platonic or Ovidian paintings
here; "Arrigo the German," the leading musical composer; and
Pier Leone, the family physician. Medici agents who might have
happened to be in town and among the privileged guests at this
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time would be Thomas Linacre of England and Johann Reuchlin
of Germany, possibly also John Colet of England.
Lorenzo himself, master of ceremonies, would move the con-
versation from grave to gay and vice versa. After a brief
exchange
of the day's latest news, he would probably turn to a discussion
of the summum bonum or some other topic of Platonic thought;
then as that became too heavy, he would give the signal to the
humorous pair and Franco, the straight man, would submit to
the
outrageous insults of Pulci or Pulci would embark upon another
episode in the career of his fancied giant, Morgante. In the
latter
event the others might join in the fun by suggesting supplemen-
tary adventures in this favorite satire of the feudal nobility by
the bourgeoisie.
Then the conversation might again take a more serious tone,
the language changing from Italian to Latin to suit the theme.
Everyone was welcome to participate and certainly Linacre
would,
for the favorable impression he made upon young Giovanni at
this time led to a lifelong friendship of great value to Linacre's
friends when Giovanni had become pope.
After the feast was ended the regular guests, even Ficino, would
reach for their musical instruments, and all, including the
servants,
would join in singing. The songs might be those which Lorenzo
himself had composed, alone or in collaboration with Poliziano
and which Arrigo the German had set to music. Lorenzo, despite
his squeaky falsetto voice, would insist on joining in if he did
not,
indeed, lead the singing.

The company might then repair, as it did on special occasions,
to the Church of San Lorenzo or to the cathedral, to listen to
Squarcialupi playing his favorite tunes.
This scene symbolizes for me the Renaissance at its best. Rep-
resented in it were politics, business, the Church, learning, art,
literature, and music, as well as gracious living. Together these
representatives of the time were satisfying the cultural urge at
almost its highest level. There was no pretense here but sincere
enjoyment of the intellectual and artistic best. That the level
was
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so high merely reflects the greater experience, ability,
cultivation,
and taste of the participants.
It is interesting to speculate as to how much of this scene the
historian, left to his own devices, would have described or
appre-
ciated. He would have caught the political implications
certainly,
probably too the ecclesiastical, and possibly the economic, but
he would most certainly have missed the rest. It is doubtful that
he would have attempted to describe the scene at all. That he is
now able to do so he owes largely if not entirely to his

colleagues
in all other fields who have become amateur historians in quest
of the modern beginnings of their separate vocations. Much as
he
may complain about what seems to him a clutter of errors that
their unwarranted interpretations of society leave in their wake
for him to clean up, he owes them more thanks than blame.
With-
out their help he could not possibly view the society of the
Renaissance as nearly whole as he now does.
I must admit that the historian too has been guilty of errors.
Take, for example, the commonly held notion that after Petrarch
had gained prominence about 1350 Italian vernacular literature
ceased, not to reappear for a hundred and fifty years. True, Boc-
caccio stopped writing in the vernacular then and Dante, of
course, had been dead some thirty years. But Petrarch and the
humanists who followed him did not kill the vernacular, even
though Leonardo Bruni about 1400 thought Dante's Divine
Com-
edy so good that it should be translated into Latin.
Italy in Dante's time had no literary vernacular. Its popular
language consisted then of purely local dialects which varied
one
from the other as widely as those of Cornwall from Yorkshire or
Gascon from Picard. Dante traveling through the north of Italy
and Boccaccio living so much in the south of the peninsula had
each broadened his native Tuscan dialect by additions from the
others. So potentially these two were the parents of the Italian
lit-
erary vernacular.
The historian treating of these two figures dismisses them at the
time of their deaths, Dante in 1 3 2 1 and Boccaccio in 1375,
and

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does not refer to them again—as though their influence was
ended
with their demise!
Actually Dante had little influence in his own lifetime, earning
scarcely enough to keep body and soul together. And Boccaccio
did not do much better. It would be much more accurate to say
that their work had only just begun when they died. But does
any textbook in history mention the fact that by 1400 all the
greater universities in Italy were offering courses on Dante and
the Italian vernacular? Or that by 1500 virtually every literate
Italian had read and many illiterate Italians had heard at least a
portion of the writings of these two men? Without this
education
in the vernacular through a century and a half by Dante, Boc-
caccio, and even Petrach, the great outburst of literary
production
in Italian at the end of the fifteenth century and the beginning
of
the 16th represented by Pulci, Castiglione, Machiavelli,
Guicciar-
dini, Tasso, and Ariosto would have been impossible.
The historian has become guilty of another fault too. The body
of literature for this period has become so vast and the interest

in
special phases so great that he has tended to specialize in
certain
aspects of social activity. Thus we now have specialists in
economic
history, in social history, in the history of science, even in the
history of medicine, and more recently in intellectual history.
The
natural tendency of all scholarship to focus its attention upon
the
newest developments in its fields has led even historians to
distort
their treatment of the period until they are becoming guilty of
the same errors for which they have hitherto blamed the
enthusi-
astic amateurs of other fields. We are back to the blind Indians
and the elephant again. In some more recent symposiums on the
Renaissance the discussion has been so concentrated upon its
pure-
ly intellectual aspects as to convey the impression that the
period
was one of sheer disembodied intellect.
Actually the period was one of full-blooded, full-bodied social
activity. Let me review briefly the salient points in its develop-
ment.
The birth of the Renaissance can be localized in northern Italy,
north of the Papal States—in Tuscany and Lombardy with their
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two pendants, Venice and Genoa. This region was peculiarly
ripe
for unusual cultural development. It lay across the great trunk
lines of luxury commerce from the eastern Mediterranean to
western Europe. Venice and Genoa had been the chief carriers
of this commerce for several centuries, the rest of the region
hav-
ing developed industrially to take over much of the luxury
manu-
facture. Until the fourteenth century, however, their excess
prof-
its had been drained off to satisfy the needs of the two rival
con-
trolling powers, the papacy and the Empire. When the war
between those two powers ended, the Empire had been rendered
impotent, and by 1305 the papacy had been virtually captured
by France. The Babylonian Captivity which followed removed
the papacy to Avignon and minimized its influence in Italy.
The towns' profits from their trade and manufacture were now
in their own control if they could find some way to maintain
law
and order themselves. The only organization they possessed was
economic. Fortunately for them, warfare had changed and mer-
cenary troops had superseded feudal levies. The businessmen
who
controlled the economic organization of the towns in this region
were thus able to engage the necessary soldiery to keep order.
They had to learn the art of government. Accustomed to operate
by their wits instead of brawn, they turned to the study of past
experience for guidance and the legal profession gained new
status.

Though there were innumerable separate and rival city centers
aspiring to dominance in 1300, the situation in northern Italy
had
become fairly stabilized a century later, with Florence, Milan,
and Venice, all commercial states, dominating the region.
During the same while, the condition of the rest of Europe was
contributing to increase the well-being of Italy. Germany, which
had been broken by the struggle with the papacy, was to remain
hopelessly divided for centuries. France, the most powerful
state
in Europe, soon became involved in a century-long struggle
with
England, which had become almost as powerful. Spain was
divided
among several warring states. Thus there was not only no
danger
of invasion from outside for nearly two centuries, but, even
more
important, those regions, having to use their surplus energies
for
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wars, became increasingly dependent upon Italy for their com-
mercial, industrial, and financial needs. Northern Italy was thus
to enjoy a degree of economic prosperity such as it had never
before experienced.

The utilization of the proceeds of all this swollen prosperity
became a real problem, to be solved as such problems often are,
fortunately—in the satisfaction of the cultural urge. And,
lacking
the modern outlets for the spending of surplus wealth all over
the
world, these people had to spend it in their home towns.
Individual fortunes at first were not large. The surplus profits
were collective rather than individual and were devoted to satis-
fying the cultural needs of the community as a whole. That
meant
civic improvements, public buildings, including of course
churches
and hospitals as well as city halls and gaols. Florence, for
example,
had embarked upon its building program by 1300. The Palazzo
Vecchio, the Cathedral, the church dormitories for the two great
orders of friars, Santa Maria Novella and Santa Croce, as well
as
the comprehensive city wall, were all projected before Dante
left Florence. Other towns followed suit and the leaders of the
mercenary troops, become petty despots in small territories bor-
dering the big three, did likewise.
Large buildings were then not built in a month or a year. Santa
Maria del Fiore, whose foundations were laid in Dante's time,
did
not receive its final touch, Verrochio's lantern, until 1475,
nearly
two centuries later. So northern Italy had embarked upon a
build-
ing program that was to be continuous and expanding for more
than two hundred years. Craftsmen builders, architects, painters,
sculptors, and jewelers were to vie with each other for

contracts,
each generation seeking to excel its predecessors. The story of
Renaissance Italian art is told in this building program.
The intellectual atmosphere in which this lay culture developed
was one of extraordinary freedom. First, not only did the long
absence of the papacy from Italy lead to a relaxation of papal
con-
trol over that region, but because the Italians resented that ab-
sence it invited practically unlimited criticism of ecclesiastical
authority and weakened the moral restraints that might
otherwise
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have prevailed. Second, the great merchant princes who ruled in
northern Italy were accustomed to dealing with people of varied
faiths, Greek, Hebrew, and Moslem as well as Roman, and with
such tolerance did practically nothing to restrain the freedom of
thought and expression, which sometimes amounted to
outrageous
license. One can follow this development through the writings
of
Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Poggio, Lorenzo Valla, and
Becadelli
—not to mention Machiavelli.
In such an atmosphere, free of traditional restraints, self-expres-

sion and experimentation, though sometimes abused, flourished
mightily. Individual initiative and enterprise were stimulated by
the great rewards in both fame and fortune. As an instance, in
the
realm of politics it became possible for a hillbilly, Muzio Atten-
dolo, nicknamed Sforza, to start his son on the road to
establish-
ing a ruling dynasty whose descendants have been prominent in
Italian affairs down to our own time.
Even in warfare the emphasis was upon brains not brawn. Mili-
tary commanders, the condottieri, were businessmen first and
stu-
dents of tactics and strategy next. They sold their services to the
merchant princes who ruled the greater city-states. Though there
were individual instances of ferocious cruelty, these seldom in-
volved more than a few individuals and the greatest destruction
recorded destroyed only one small town. The merchant rulers
had no desire to kill their customers and the wars in which they
engaged were primarily to safeguard their trade routes and en-
sure an adequate food supply, almost never for motives of
power
politics. They preferred diplomacy to force in achieving their
ends.
Indeed it may almost be said that they invented diplomacy.
Few modern states with all their advantages of speedy
communi-
cation have devised a more efficient foreign intelligence than
did
Venice during this period. The ideal diplomats described by
Machiavelli and Castiglione are still models today. Undisturbed
by outside pressures the masterminds of Italy preferred their
sepa-
rate city-states and transformed Italy into a microcosm of inter-
national relations, an experimental laboratory of such relations

from which emerged the concept both of mercantilism and of
the
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balance of power, which the larger nations of modern Europe
were to practice down to our time. Nor can one find many
states-
men of modern times who have handled the problem of public
relations more effectively than did Cosimo de Medici, the "pater
patriae" of Florence from 1434 to 1464.
In activities other than political, individual initiative and en-
terprise were equally encouraged and successful. It was this
invi-
tation that led the craftsmen-artists to discover or invent one
technique after another in the effort to portray on a flat surface
the perfect representation of nature, human and otherwise. It
was
the same invitation that led the humanists to discover bit by bit
the principles of literary composition which could be applied to
any language, not only to Latin. And Leonardo da Vinci was
only
one of many who were contriving models of machines that
arouse
the admiration of technologists today. Indeed Leonardo's own
designs were largely modifications of ideas already either in use
or described.

Historians of science have not been friendly to the first two
centuries of the Renaissance. Scholars, Lynn Thorndike particu-
larly, though with some support from George Sarton, blame the
period for diverting its best minds from science to humanism
and
art, and Thorndike goes so far as to consider humanism con-
sciously opposed to science.
I cannot share that view, first because those two hundred years
produced notable progress in some fields of science, especially
in
medicine, where Carpi's edition of Mondino advanced the
knowl-
edge of anatomy to the very threshold of Vesalius, and
Fracastoro
certainly moved the knowledge of contagious diseases to a new
high plateau. But even more am I reluctant to accept
Thorndike's
view because both humanism and art were during these
centuries
fashioning the essential tools without which the striking
scientific
advance of the sixteenth century would have been impossible.
Art
contributed accurate observation and the means of precise
record-
ing of such observations. The cumulative efforts of the
craftsmen-
artists to portray human emotion had led them to a close study
not
only of the surface expression of emotion but also of the
muscles be-
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neath the skin and the bodily organs which operated those mus-
cles. Scholarly artists like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo
actually performed more dissections than did 99 per cent of the
medical students of the time. The humanists in their effort to re-
cover all the writings of antiquity were editing and translating
the scientific works of the ancient Greeks, thus making
available
to their contemporaries the Greek discoveries in mathematics,
astronomy, and other sciences as well as medicine.
I have dealt with medieval developments in medicine in another
paper * and so here shall say only this: It is now evident that
the
hoary old notion so long perpetuated in our textbooks—namely,
that before Vesalius the medical profession had relied wholly
upon the authority of Galen—is entirely wrong. Western Europe
during the Middle Ages knew very little of Galen. It was not
until the sixteenth century that the voluminous writings of this
ancient authority were available to medical men.
Only a fraction of scientific knowledge can be transmitted by
words alone. Illustrations are absolutely essential to
understanding
in science. Therefore, not until this combination of tools, the
fruit
of two centuries of antecedent labor by craftsmen-artists and
humanists, was available could science make the strides that it
did in the sixteenth century. Without that antecedent labor the

achievements of Vesalius in anatomy, Copernicus in astronomy,
Georgius Agricola in geology and metallurgy, Gesner in botany
and zoology, even Cardan in higher algebra would have been
impossible.
As we reach the sixteenth century the names I mention are no
longer exclusively Italian. Times have changed. The great coun-
tries of Europe—France, England, and Spain—have all regained
internal unity and peace. Thanks to the enterprise of the earlier
Renaissance, new worlds and new trade routes have been dis-
covered. The Atlantic now rivals the Mediterranean as a main
artery of commerce, and the rest of Europe has ceased to be
eco-
nomically dependent upon Italy.
* Published in this collection under the title, "The Rebirth of
the Medi-
cal Profession."
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More than that, the failure of the Italians to achieve politi-
cal unity, together with the alluring achievements in nearly all
branches of culture which the Italian Renaissance had accumu-
lated, rendered Italy a most tempting field for the imperial am-
bitions of these power-minded neighbors. From 1494 on, Italy
was a battlefield in the fierce rivalry of France and Spain, and
by

1530 virtually the whole peninsula except the maritime state of
Venice was politically dependent upon outside powers.
England and the Low Countries, less war-involved than France
and Spain, were the first to profit from these changed circum-
stances. Peace and prosperity and the increased leisure they af-
forded enabled these regions to embark upon the fuller
satisfaction
of their own cultural urge. How?
So strong has been the feeling of nationalism in modern times
that even scholars have been led to view their fields of learning
with national bias. I have already spoken of the conference on
the English Renaissance at the Huntington. Similarly Batifol has
written the history of the French Renaissance as a purely
sixteenth-
and seventeenth-century French development, and scholars of
other countries have been guilty of the same myopia. Laudable
as the sentiment of national patriotism may be, it scarcely
justifies
such gross distortion of fact.
The Europe of the sixteenth century did not surfer from such
strong nationalistic predisposition. It greatly admired the
achieve-
ments of the Italian Renaissance, with many of which it was
acquainted, thanks to the printing press. Business agents and
cul-
tivated refugees from now war-torn Italy were welcomed in all
these countries. France and Spain, having appropriated so much
of Italy, also appropriated some of its artists and scholars,
carry-
ing them back to the conquerors' homelands.
In none of these countries did people repeat the slow painful
process of acquiring the various techniques of painting or the

various principles of literature; they gladly accepted the full
com-
plement of both as the Italians had worked them out. Thus
artists
like Diirer, Holbein, and Rubens did not start where Giotto had
left off but rather where Michelangelo, Titian, Tintoretto, and
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Veronese were. Nor were Erasmus, Linacre, Vives, and Me-
lanchthon limited as Petrarch had been, to a few Latin classics;
they all had access to the whole range of recovered classical lit-
erature as Poliziano and Bembo ,did. Indeed, Erasmus as a
school-
boy had already so thoroughly mastered the De Elegantiis of
Lorenzo Valla with its full exposition of the principles of com-
position and style that his teachers asked him to prepare a
compen-
dium of it for his classmates.
No, one can only conclude that the other countries of Europe
entered upon the Renaissance at the point reached by the
Italians.
They adopted the Italian ideal of the cultivated gentleman de-
scribed by Castiglione in The Courtier, as witness the rapidity
with which that work was translated into all the leading literary
vernaculars as well as into the more universal Latin.

In addition to all this, the rest of Europe continued to go
directly to Italy for vital instruction throughout the sixteenth
century. Venice, now the only autonomous portion of Italy, had
graciously accepted the role of residuary legatee of Italian Ren-
aissance culture. It had two universities within its orbit, its state
university of Padua and its satellite university of Ferrara, and to
these it welcomed scholars not only from Italy itself but also
from the rest of Europe, even Protestant Europe. Padua held a
position of recognized intellectual leadership throughout the
cen-
tury such as few universities have ever attained. The galaxy of
its students and teachers included Linacre, Fracastoro, Vesalius,
Fallopius, Cardan, Copernicus, Georgius Agricola, John Caius,
Fabricius, William Harvey, and Galileo.
To the artists Venice could offer Titian, Tintoretto, and Vero-
nese, all long-lived, and the young Greek who received his
train-
ing there and practiced his art in Spain under the name El
Greco.
In literature it had, of course, Cardinal Bembo but also some
claim
to Tasso and Ariosto. And the Venetian printing establishment
of
Aldus Manutius was the great center for the editing and
translat-
ing of the Greek classics.
All Europe in the sixteenth century gladly acknowledged its in-
debtedness to the Italian Renaissance, past and current, as
Shake-
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2020 02:34:53 UTC

The Long Road Back
speare did for England. All shared in the advance that was made
in
this century, so that it may actually be wrong, as it certainly is
mis-
leading, to speak of a French, a Spanish, an English, or an
Italian
Renaissance, for they were all part of the same development.
This whole paper is only a summary, but if I were to list the
chief points I have tried to establish in the course of it, they
would be these: First, this period from 1300 to 1600, thanks to
the wide interest it has aroused, is the most thoroughly studied
period in all history. Second, because of the varied approaches
that have been made to it, the Renaissance affords our best
oppor-
tunity to view society whole, to see the interplay and interrela-
tion of nearly all man's activities. For society, like the
individual,
is a complex of many interests—political, economic, social,
intel-
lectual, artistic, and religious—each affected by the others.
Third,
the Renaissance reveals more clearly than any other period that
no activity of society can be explained in terms of itself alone,
and that no one activity, be it economic, political, or religious,
can
safely be accepted as always the most important.
Take, for example, such an incident as the building of the
Certaldo at Pavia, generally acknowledged to be one of the

archi-
tectural triumphs of the Italian Renaissance. It was built at the
command of Gian Galeazzo Visconti, ruler of Milan. His wife,
fearful of her impending childbirth, had requested him to erect
this monastery for the Carthusian monks in the event of her
death. She survived, but he carried through her request anyway,
as a mark of gratitude. He was by virtue of his political position
able to command the financial resources to engage the best
artistic
talent available to construct this religious edifice.
This incident involves political, economic, social, artistic, and
religious elements, and I doubt that we could all agree as to
which
of these elements was the most important. But need we do so?
Why not just recognize that all these factors played a part in the
episode?
Finally, one of the essential characteristics of the Renaissance
is the appearance of a strong lay interest in the promotion of
cul-
tural activities. It is the period when the laity became literate
and
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when they added their eager energies to that of the clergy, the
traditional custodians and promoters of culture.

For all these reasons the Renaissance will long remain the
model
for the study of all periods. It reveals so clearly the social web
that is the proper subject of history.
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2020 02:34:53 UTC
This page intentionally left blank
2020 02:34:53 UTC
South Atlantic Modern Language Association
Renaissance Conference
Author(s): Rhea Thomas Workman
Source: South Atlantic Bulletin, Vol. 25, No. 1 (May, 1959), pp.
9-11
Published by: South Atlantic Modern Language Association
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3198441
Accessed: 25-03-2020 08:17 UTC

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