The Cambridge Modern History. R. Nisbet Bain
outside the sphere of his operations. The agricultural system on the Continent in general was highly stereotyped. In Germany and Hungary serfdom remained; in Spain, France, and Italy vestiges of natural economy survived. Such a reorganisation of the population as would have produced better results presented great difficulties; while the introduction of improved methods often involved an outlay of capital and a diminished rate of return. The small proprietary and cultivating peasantry were destitute of the means of introducing improvements, even if the value of the change had been apparent. Some public works for the benefit of agriculture were undertaken by the Crown both in Prance and Spain; but it was only in Holland where there was a plethora of capital, and in England where the trade of the farmer was encouraged, that private capitalists became interested in the improvement of the soil. There was, as a consequence, little alteration in the condition of the rural population, and the first changes which occurred with the gradual introduction of capitalism were often for the worse. It was left for the social and political revolutions of the last hundred years to sweep away the system which had been previously left untouched by economic progress.
These were the general conditions that determined the ultimate distribution of the treasure which was brought from the New World. Transferred in the sixteenth century, partly in response to military requirements, partly by successful depredation, and partly by mere smuggling, this treasure sooner or later found its way into the hands of agents of commerce, who desired to use it as capital and who employed it in the places and avocations where they had most reason to expect a large profit. The actual return depended partly on social, partly on physical conditions; but the results that followed were curious and unequal, for while some of the more backward countries moved rapidly forward, making huge strides in wealth and material prosperity, whole classes in every community and large districts of continental Europe remained almost stationary, untouched and unaffected by the march of progress.
Nevertheless, though these great economic movements were retarded, they could not be wholly arrested. Capitalism has gradually overcome the medieval obstacles; it has swept away local exclusiveness, and has been the means of developing large economic areas. A revolution has taken place in business practice, and the breaking down of commercial restrictions is a change which has affected the traders in all lands. Industry has become capitalistic, and the whole foundation of trading relations and commercial morality has been altered so as to open indefinite possibilities to every merchant. Civic has given place to national economic life. At the commencement of the seventeenth century neither Germany nor Italy had become true nations, but in the course of time the European peoples have come to conform more and more to the larger type of organisation that had already arisen in England and in France.
CHAPTER XVI. THE CLASSICAL RENAISSANCE, by Richard Jebb
THE Renaissance, in the largest sense of the term, is the whole process of transition in Europe from the medieval to the modern order. The Revival of Learning, by which is meant more especially the resuscitated knowledge of classical antiquity, is the most potent and characteristic of the forces which operated in the Renaissance. That revival has two aspects. In one, it is the recovery of a lost culture; in another, of even higher and wider significance, it is the renewed diffusion of a liberal spirit which for centuries had been dead or sleeping. The conception which dominated the Middle Ages was that of the Universal Empire and the Universal Church. A gradual decadence of that idea, from the second half of the thirteenth century to the end of the fifteenth, was the clearest outward sign that a great change was beginning to pass over the world. From the twelfth century onwards there was a new stirring of minds, a growing desire of light; and the first large result was the Scholastic Philosophy. That was an attempt to codify all existing knowledge under certain laws and formulas, and so to reconcile it logically with the one Truth; just as all rights are referable to the one Right, that is, to certain general principles of justice. No revolt was implied there, no break with the reigning tendencies of thought. The direct aim of the Schoolmen was not, indeed, to bind all knowledge to the rock of St Peter; but the truth which they took as their standard was that to which the Church had given her sanction. In the middle of the fourteenth century, when Scholasticism was already waning, another intellectual movement set in. This was Humanism, born in Italy of a new feeling for the past greatness of Rome. And now the barriers so long imposed on the exercise of the reason were broken down; not all at once, but by degrees. It was recognised that there had been a time when men had used all their faculties of mind and imagination without fear or reproof; not restricted to certain paths or bound by formulas, but freely seeking for knowledge in every field of speculation, and for beauty in all the realms of fancy. Those men had bequeathed to posterity a literature different in quality and range from anything that had been written for a thousand years. They had left, too, works of architecture such that even the mutilated remains had been regarded by legend as the work of supernatural beings whom heathen poets had constrained by spells. The pagan view was now once more proclaimed, that man was made, not only to toil and suffer, but to enjoy. And naturally enough, in the first reaction from a more ascetic ideal, the lower side of ancient life obscured, with many men, its better aspects. It was thus that Humanism first appeared, bringing a claim for the mental freedom of man, and for the full development of his being. But, in order to see the point of departure, it is necessary to trace in outline the general course of literary tradition in Europe from the fifth century to the fourteenth.
The fall of the Western Empire in the fifth century was followed by a rapid decline of education and of general culture. The later ages of classical antiquity, if comparatively poor in the higher kind of literary genius, were still familiar with the best writers of Greece and Rome, and continued to be prolific in work inspired by good models. They also retained the traditions of that civilisation and social life out of which the classical literature had arisen. But the barbarian invaders of Italy and Gaul were strangers to that civilisation; they brought with them a life in which the ancient culture found no place. The schools of the Roman Empire were swept away, or died out. Such education as survived was preserved by the Church, and was almost wholly confined to ecclesiastics. Monasteries had begun to multiply in the West from the close of the fourth century. Their schools, and those attached to cathedrals, alone tempered the reign of ignorance. The level of the monastic schools was the higher. In the cathedral schools the training was usually restricted to such rudiments of knowledge as were indispensable for the secular clergy, viz., reading, writing, arithmetic, and elementary music. But even in the monastic schools the course was usually meagre and narrow. The superior education of the age was chiefly based on a few jejune text-books, compilations and abridgments from older sources. One of these was the treatise of the African rhetorician, Martianus Capella (flor. c. 420), on the Septem Artes Liberales,—grammar, logic, rhetoric, music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. The form is allegorical; Mercury weds Philology, and at their nuptials assigns the Arts to her as handmaids. Capella was, however, regarded with disfavour by those Christian teachers who rigorously proscribed pagan literature; and his book, though it remained an authority down to the Renaissance, was not everywhere admitted. Thus it is absent from Alcuin’s catalogue (made c. 770) of the library at York, a fairly representative collection of the books which then were most read. The Seven Arts had been distributed, so early as the fifth century, into the trivium, consisting of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, and the quad-rivium, comprising the other four. Grammar was taught by excerpts from Donatus or Priscian; rhetoric, often with the aid of extracts from Cicero’s De Inventiane and Topica, or the treatise Ad Herennium. For the trivium generally a favourite text-book was Cassiodorus (d. 568), De Artibus et Disciplinis Liberalium Artium. For the quadrivium, and for the more advanced logic, the standard manuals were the treatises of Boetius (d. 524), which included some Latin transcripts from parts of Aristotle’s Organon. Boetius, “the last of the Romans,” was, indeed, an author of cardinal importance in the higher education of the earlier Middle Ages. Another standard work was an encyclopaedia of arts and sciences by Isidore, Bishop of Seville (d. 636), containing a mass of information in every recognised branch of knowledge (Originum s, Etymologiarum libri XX). It is characteristic of education in the Middle Ages that compendia of this poor kind had largely superseded their own classical sources in the ordinary use of the schools. Note should be taken also of the persistent tendency to look for allegorical and mystic senses beneath the literal meaning of a passage. This tendency dates at least from the teaching of Cassian (flor. c. 400), one of the chief founders of Western monachism. It was