PART I. CHAP. V. suspicion of heresy, but was undeniably exposed to the charge of licentiousness. Compromise accordingly appears to have been desired by neither party; and canonists and civilians offered as hostile a front as the logicians. Bologna, jealous on behalf of that special learning to which she owed her fame, shut her gates in the face of the new comers. On the one side the cry was 'No surrender,' on the other, No quarter.' The Humanists attack the civilians. university of Pavia. The civil law was not, it is true, the weakest point in the prevailing culture, but the absorbing attention given to the study constituted it a central position which the assailants seemed bound at almost any cost to carry, and it was consequently selected for their most energetic attack. It was the predominant school not only at Bologna but also Valla at the at Padua and at Pavia; and when Valla received his appointment to the chair of rhetoric in the last-named university, he soon found that his own readiness for the battle was for once fully equalled by that of his opponents. His previous utterances had not failed to attract the attention of the civilians. The mercenary spirit in which they pursued their calling had, as we have already seen, been sharply commented on by Poggio; but the criticisms of Valla in his Elegantia,the foremost production of the age in the field of Latin philology, had wounded their pride much more sensibly. In pursuance of the general assertion which he had therein maintained,—that the want of an accurate knowledge of the Latin tongue obscured the true meaning of the writers of antiquity to students in every department of learning,—he had proceeded to compare the style of the ancient commentators on the Pandects with that of the more modern school, represented by Accursius, Cinus, Baldus, and Bartolus (the most highly esteemed commentators in his own day), and had pointed out how deplorably the latter fell short of the lucid diction and terseness of expression of the former. Most probably even Valla, notwithstanding his dauntless and fiery nature, would not have cared to revive the controversy in the very heart of such a stronghold of the civil law; but he was not suffered to remain at peace. A jurist of some PART I. instituted by jurist be He tween Cicero and Bartolus. attack on Bartolus. eminence in the same city proceeded to inveigh against the CHAP. V. Humanists in a manner which could not be left unnoticed. As Valla had called in question the merits of Cinus, the Comparison deity of the civilians, the jurist retorted by calling in question an eminent the merits of Cicero, the deity of the rhetoricians. assumed the most irritating of all attitudes, the attitude of calm unquestionable superiority. To argument he did not condescend, but he laid it down as beyond dispute that the efforts of the greatest rhetorician could not compare with those of an average jurist. The most unimportant treatise to be found in the literature of the civil law,-for example that by Bartolus, entitled De Insigniis et Armis,— was, he asserted, of far greater value than the most admired production of the Roman orator. All the rhetoricians set style above matter and preferred the foliage to the fruit; Cicero was but an empty-headed babbler.' Incensed beyond measure, Valla hastened to borrow of his friend Cato Sacco Valla's a copy of this precious treatise by Bartolus, and falling upon it tooth and nail, composed, in a single night, a furious diatribe which he subsequently circulated far and wide. 'Ye gods!' he exclaims, after a merciless exhibition of the triviality of thought and barbarous diction exhibited in the dissertation of the defunct jurist, 'what folly, what puerility, what inanity is here! One would think that the book had been written by an ass rather than a man!' In his wrath he turns upon the whole body of commentators, until he seems to threaten even the awful majesty of Justinian. As to the existing representatives of the study, he avers that there are scarcely any who are not completely worthless and despicable. They are nearly always ignorant of all other branches of a liberal education. They know nothing of that precision and refinement of diction on which the ancient jurists had bestowed such labour, and which must in turn be apprehended by the reader before the treatises of those writers can become really intelligible. Their poverty of thought, their triviality of treatment are such, that he cannot refrain from commiserating the study they profess, since it seems equally unable to attract professors of any merit and PART I. CHAP. V. to rid itself of those who at present prey upon it. The upshot of the controversy, if such it can be called, appears to have been, that Valla narrowly escaped being torn in pieces by the students of the civil law at Pavia1. It is evident that had the whole struggle been waged after the manner of Valla and his antagonist it would have been as interminable as the controversy concerning universals. Style versus matter is to a great extent a question of taste, and so long as men by reading Bartolus could qualify themselves for a lucrative profession, Bartolus would continue to be read. No one had ever called the genuineness of the Pandects in question, and the great weapon of the Humanists, the art of criticism, was consequently here unavailable. It was however far otherwise when they brought their artillery to 'bear upon more vulnerable points, and when once they had succeeded in convincing the educated few that reason and even logic were on their side, they had gained an advantage which told in their favour along the line of battle. While accordingly Valla attacked with but little success the abstract merits of the civilian commentators, the effect produced when he laid bare that most impudent of all forgeries, the Donation of Constantine,—or that most feeble of all myths,-the joint parentage of the Poggio and Symbolum,-was unmistakeable. The popular belief in the canon law was not less severely shaken by the criticisms of Poggio, and from the same able pen there had also proceeded the first exposure of the fictitious character of the Decretals and of the sordid motives that had given rise to the whole of this literature. The scholar could not conceal his derision when he found the contemporaries of Tacitus and Quintilian cited as speaking the barbarous Latin of the twelfth century, and popes, who lived two centuries before Jerome was born, quoting from the Vulgate. In short, Poggio denounced the work of Gratian as that of a forger, and declared that the chief result of his labours and those of his successors had been to afford facilities for squabbling over ecclesiastical benefices". the canonists. PART L. The opposi northern far more difference. But strenuous as was the opposition offered by the Italian CHAP. V. universities, it was of short duration when compared with that encountered in the universities of France and Germany. tion in the Politian, long before his death, must have felt himself master universities of the field; while Erasmus, who about the same time was persevering. seeking to gain a knowledge of Greek at Paris, found the Scotists fiercely denouncing all polite learning as incom- Causes of this patible with the mysteries of the schools, and seems even to have been fain to imitate their barbarous Latinity in order to escape molestation'; and Melanchthon, half a century later, was exposed to the full brunt of the ancient prejudice at Wittenberg. Of this difference the less impulsive character of the northern nations, their inferiority at this period in refined culture of every kind, and the absence of that direct contact with the learning of Constantinople which operated so powerfully in Italy, will suggest themselves as obvious explanations. But not less potent than these was Difference in perhaps the different constitution of the respective uni- tion of the versities. In the short outline given in our first chapter universities of the universities of Paris and Bologna, it will have been noticed that while the constitution of the latter was democratic that of the former was oligarchical, and just as the Italian universities had been modelled on Bologna, so those of the Transalpine nations had nearly all been modelled on that of Paris. Hence, as we should naturally expect, there prevailed in the latter centres of learning a strongly conservative feeling a feeling which was again more or less intense in proportion as each university had acquired a special reputation as a seat of theological learning, and imagined that that reputation would be endangered by the introduction of studies either entirely pagan or partially heretical. the constitu respective offers a further ex planation of the fact. the Human But as in Italy, so in Germany and in England, the Victories of successive victories of the Humanists produced an impression ists. which could not be withstood. One by one the strongholds of medieval, culture and the idols of medieval credulity fell before them. Grocyn, mounting the pulpit at St. Paul's Cathedral, to confess with deep humiliation, that the same 1 Letter to Thomas Grey, Opera, 111 77. PART I. CHAP. V. long-revered treatise by Dionysius, the genuineness of which he had in his first lecture so vehemently asserted, he was unable on honest scrutiny to defend,-Colet, turning his earnest searching gaze on Erasmus as they sat communing at Oxford, and disburthening himself of the conviction that had long been growing up within, that the decisions of Aquinas were characterised by both arrogance and presumption,-Erasmus, in his study at Queens' College, exposing the countless errors of the Vulgate and revolting from the Augustinian despotism,-William Tyndal at Cologne, setting aside the commentaries of Nicholas de Lyra, with the customary interpretations moral, anagogical, and allegorical, and affirming that Scripture has but one meaning, the obvious, literal sense,-were each but indications of the revolution that was going on in every department of study, in every province of thought, as scholasticism tottered to its fall. |