A History of English Literature

applications. Scientific investigation was almost entirely stifled, and
progress was impossible. The whole field of religion and knowledge had
become largely stagnant under an arbitrary despotism.
To the minds which were being paralyzed under this system, Greek literature
brought the inspiration for which they longed. For it was the literature of
a great and brilliant people who, far from attempting to make a divorce
within man's nature, had aimed to 'see life steadily and see it whole,'
who, giving free play to all their powers, had found in pleasure and beauty
some of the most essential constructive forces, and had embodied beauty in
works of literature and art where the significance of the whole spiritual
life was more splendidly suggested than in the achievements of any, or
almost any, other period. The enthusiasm, therefore, with which the
Italians turned to the study of Greek literature and Greek life was
boundless, and it constantly found fresh nourishment. Every year restored
from forgotten recesses of libraries or from the ruins of Roman villas
another Greek author or volume or work of art, and those which had never
been lost were reinterpreted with much deeper insight. Aristotle was again
vitalized, and Plato's noble idealistic philosophy was once more
appreciatively studied and understood. In the light of this new revelation
Latin literature, also, which had never ceased to be almost superstitiously
studied, took on a far greater human significance. Vergil and Cicero were
regarded no longer as mysterious prophets from a dimly imagined past, but
as real men of flesh and blood, speaking out of experiences remote in time
from the present but no less humanly real. The word 'human,' indeed, became
the chosen motto of the Renaissance scholars; 'humanists' was the title
which they applied to themselves as to men for whom 'nothing human was
without appeal.' New creative enthusiasm, also, and magnificent actual new
creation, followed the discovery of the old treasures, creation in
literature and all the arts; culminating particularly in the early
sixteenth century in the greatest group of painters whom any country has
ever seen, Lionardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Michelangelo. In Italy, to be
sure, the light of the Renaissance had its palpable shadow; in breaking
away from the medieval bondage into the unhesitating enjoyment of all
pleasure, the humanists too often overleaped all restraints and plunged
into wild excess, often into mere sensuality. Hence the Italian Renaissance
is commonly called Pagan, and hence when young English nobles began to
travel to Italy to drink at the fountain head of the new inspiration
moralists at home protested with much reason against the ideas and habits
which many of them brought back with their new clothes and flaunted as
evidences of intellectual emancipation. History, however, shows no great
progressive movement unaccompanied by exaggerations and extravagances.
The Renaissance, penetrating northward, past first from Italy to France,
but as early as the middle of the fifteenth century English students were
frequenting the Italian universities. Soon the study of Greek was
introduced into England, also, first at Oxford; and it was cultivated with
such good results that when, early in the sixteenth century, the great
Dutch student and reformer, Erasmus, unable through poverty to reach Italy,
came to Oxford instead, he found there a group of accomplished scholars and
gentlemen whose instruction and hospitable companionship aroused his
unbounded delight. One member of this group was the fine-spirited John
Colet, later Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in London, who was to bring new
life into the secondary education of English boys by the establishment of
St. Paul's Grammar School, based on the principle of kindness in place of
the merciless severity of the traditional English system.
Great as was the stimulus of literary culture, it was only one of several
influences that made up the Renaissance. While Greek was speaking so