MR. SYMONDS’ HISTORY OF THE RENAISSANCE

(Pall Mall Gazette, November 10, 1886.)

Mr. Symonds has at last finished his history of the Italian Renaissance.  The two volumes just published deal with the intellectual and moral conditions in Italy during the seventy years of the sixteenth century which followed the coronation of Charles the Fifth at Bologna, an era to which Mr. Symonds gives the name of the Catholic Reaction, and they contain a most interesting and valuable account of the position of Spain in the Italian peninsula, the conduct of the Tridentine Council, the specific organisation of the Holy Office and the Company of Jesus, and the state of society upon which those forces were brought to bear.  In his previous volumes Mr. Symonds had regarded the past rather as a picture to be painted than as a problem to be solved.  In these two last volumes, however, he shows a clearer appreciation of the office of history.  The art of the picturesque chronicler is completed by something like the science of the true historian, the critical spirit begins to manifest itself, and life is not treated as a mere spectacle, but the laws of its evolution and progress are investigated also.  We admit that the desire to represent life at all costs under dramatic conditions still accompanies Mr. Symonds, and that he hardly realises that what seems romance to us was harsh reality to those who were engaged in it.  Like most dramatists, also, he is more interested in the psychological exceptions than in the general rule.  He has something of Shakespeare’s sovereign contempt of the masses.  The people stir him very little, but he is fascinated by great personalities.  Yet it is only fair to remember that the age itself was one of exaggerated individualism and that literature had not yet become a mouthpiece for the utterances of humanity.  Men appreciated the aristocracy of intellect, but with the democracy of suffering they had no sympathy.  The cry from the brickfields had still to be heard.  Mr. Symonds’ style, too, has much improved.  Here and there, it is true, we come across traces of the old manner, as in the apocalyptic vision of the seven devils that entered Italy with the Spaniard, and the description of the Inquisition as a Belial-Moloch, a ’hideous idol whose face was blackened with soot from burning human flesh.’  Such a sentence, also, as ’over the Dead Sea of social putrefaction floated the sickening oil of Jesuitical hypocrisy,’ reminds us that rhetoric has not yet lost its charms for Mr. Symonds.  Still, on the whole, the style shows far more reserve, balance and sobriety, than can be found in the earlier volumes where violent antithesis forms the predominant characteristic, and accuracy is often sacrificed to an adjective.